Books on Film

I've watched three films in the last three nights, and each one of them was a book first. The typical reaction to good books becoming films is negative; fear mingled with contempt, turned up to panic levels by the tiniest glimmer of hope.

But I'm an optimist. Three bookfilms in a row, so at least one of them will be a success, I thought. But what do you call it when all three are awesome? Most book people hate bookfilms... am I too easily pleased? Please tell me.

Slaughterhouse 5

If I was asked which of my favourite authors was least filmable, I would say Vonnegut, every time. It's not that they couldn't be filmed, but that they would lose too much of what makes them special. None more so than S-5, my default answer to the favourite-book question.

But, despite the complete lack of SO IT GOES and the utter non-existence of the sounds of birds, this 1972 film captures the essense of the book, somehow. They ended it with fireworks on Tralfamadore, but I still loved it.

No Country For Old Men

This is a damn good film. I could watch it a dozen times, I think. It's harsh reality verses fiction, and harsh reality wins every time, and it still manages to be likable. It's sparse and beautiful and hardgoing and doesn't talk much and is hilarious and brutal ignores convention.

I've said all of those things about Cormac's books (apart from it's a damn good film), and so if I had to guess, I'd say this was a pretty accurate adaptation. I'll find out for sure when I get round to reading the damn thing.

Bright Young Things

Stephen Fry adapting Vile Bodies, using almost every great English actor who's young enough -- plus Peter O-flipping-Toole -- and it's still better than I expected. It's sadder than I remember the book being, just as funny, and far more beautiful than I managed to picture it.

The ending drags, or can't decide, or something. Nothing I read or see at the moment stops at the point I think it should stop, so maybe don't take this too seriously.


I honestly think I've covered all the bases: a book I know well, a book I've never read, and one I can't remember too well. Each film is great, in different ways. Seriously, am I too easily pleased? Or have I just got lucky with the adaptations I've picked recently?

What do you think about books on film?

The Loved One

Evelyn Waugh

It's nothing new that Waugh is funny: he's a funny writer, that's almost the point. But this funeral farce is categorically different to his better known work.

It's a love triangle that balances between an embalmer's studio and a low rent pet cemetary; the love notes are the manic grins (or otherwise) prepared on the casket faces of anonymous Loved Ones... for what more tactful way to refer to the clients of a funereal business?

The hero is a poet who seduces a corpse-cosmetician by borrowing heavily from the Oxford Book of English Verse; and who lies about his job at the pet cemetary to avoid the professional snobbbery that his love, an employee of the high-class Whispering Glades, has for it. If I mentioned that he solves his problems by becoming a non-sectarian preacher, you'll probably guess the next thing I'm going to say....

This is a lot like Wodehouse. Really, a lot. I know from reading Donaldson's excellent biography of Wodehouse that Waugh was a friend and huge fan of the man, but that has always surprised me. Because Waugh's comedy is the opposite to Wodehouse's kind, rolling turns and loops. Waugh is barbed, laughing at, cruelly accurate; and serious. Ever so serious, when seen next to Wodehouse.

So The Loved One is something of an anomaly. It doesn't really fit in with Vile Bodies or Put Out More Flags, it's a separate endeavour. It's the missing link between Waugh's own work and the completely different work of Wodehouse that he held in such high esteem. It is, I like to think, a firm, heartfelt, and excellent work of flattery (or a kinder word than that).

This is Waugh gesturing wildly across the canyon, acknowledging the distance between the two writers by trying to imagine it out of existence. It is, frankly, a tribute.

Evil In War

I will get The Unfolding of Language out of the way first. Not only because I read it first, but because I want to concentrate on fiction in this blog as much as possible. That's what I want to write, after all. It's not an entirely worthless exercise, though: as a reader, I don't mark the distinction too heavily.
I read for pleasure, regardless.

Guy Deutscher--The Unfolding of Language

This book is about the mechanisms behind the ongoing evolution of language. First of all, it wasn't the book I hoped it to be: it starts after the interesting stuff has already happened. Deutscher begins from a point where the human mind is developed as it is now, and with a rudimentary language--thing-words and doing-words (not quite the same as nouns and verbs) and some deeply lodged principles already to hand.
It's not the book that looks at how things got to that point, but it is a very good sketch of the next stage along. The three principles of expression, economy and analogy are elegant and all-encompassing, and the whole thing rests on and supports the fact that the human mind seeks patterns. Darwin would be happy.

Deutscher operates the Complete Lack Of Surprise literary principle, and it's a principle I like. It's almost ubiquitous in non-fiction, especially in anything close to evolution.
It goes like this: the reader knows exactly what is going to happen, or what conclusion the author will arrive at, from pretty much the first page. And they know what they will think of it, too. The reason I like this is that it doesn't have to intefere with the enjoyment of the book. It's Suspense vs. Entertainment, and I've always preferred Entertainment.

Part of it is the slowly-revealed but uncontroversial 'how'. But a lot of it is the writing itself: Deutscher, for instance, cannot make a single point that doesn't have a joke, anecdote, or (entertaining) surprise heavily involved in it. Not just tacked on, but as a useful and original way to get from A to B. Everything is approached from a unique angle.
I picked up a few favourite asides along the way. Grot is a new word, for example. Lazy hippies shortened 'grotesque' to 'grotty' in the 60s. And as per, the human mind 'finds' the pattern: as sure as shit is shitty, grotty must be an adjective from grot. It doesn't matter that grot was never a word, symmetry will reign. So now we say grot.
Resent used to mean an emotional recieving of good AND bad things, and it meant them at the same time. I could resent a birthday card as much as a slap. Nice.
Simitic verbs are flipping insane, and hearing how they got that way is honestly like watching a magic trick.

It doesn't matter that I don't know much philology, and already agreed with what this book is meant to convince me of. A succession of excellent details kept me happy.

A minor point: Deutscher buries a great point about literacy vs. word-fusion in the epilogue. It annoys me when people do that! Put it where it matters.

Evelyn Waugh--Put Out More Flags

"But Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happines without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and inperfect, various humanity."

That's what Ambrose Silk says. Imperfect, various humanity shines through this book, but he's the only one to notice it. Limbo is the place, too.
It starts-- and there's no better place to start a story-- at the start of a war. The first year of the war is a lot of waiting around, a curious in-between that is aware of it's own curiosity. We start on the first day of the war, after days which "cannot, without irony, be called the last days of peace," and end as the war "has entered into a new and more glorious phase".
We follow a class of people failing in a range of ways and extents to get to grips with the war. Centrally, cunning loser Basil Seal and clever artist, Ambrose Silk.
Everybody is trying to find their own place in the war. Some people are frustrated in their attempts to lose themselves to it; others are frustrated in their attempts to gain from it; others find it frustratingly easy to get lost in the background.

I always feel the same thing when reading Waugh. Nobody else can evoke the imminent passing of eras, time, people, friends, and entire worlds so effectively. He knows what lasts and what doesn't, and that's what he shows us.
He is completely consistent. Every thing happens at the human scale, rather than the global or the personal. We never get too far into the minds of Basil and Ambrose. We get to like them, but never completely know them, not even by the last page, where we are still learning new things about them.
There's a lot of different human dramas going on here, and Waugh leaves enough room for them all. He never makes more than he needs to of anything: new jobs, joining the army, affairs, scams, alcoholism. They are covered in half-pages and paragraphs, confidently enough to let the implications take care of themselves. Which they do.
Less is more.
He's very clever with dialogue, too. Somehow he only shows what needs to be shown, keeping myriad balls in the air, without a single line being unnatural. It's too clever, in fact, for me to quite see how he does it.

Another minor gripe. I noticed this in a George Orwell novel of a not too dissimilar time the other week, as well: the replacing of certain swear words with -----. It's a product of the time, clearly, but it's really annoying. I don't know how soldiers swore in the 40s, or gypsies in the 30s, so I can't fill in the blank. It's frustrating, especially when Orwell had also gone to a lot of pointless trouble to get the accuracy of speech in the poor people dialogue.