30 Day Book Challenge: Days 19 & 20 – Best and Worst Books Turned into Films

Posted: May 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 30 Day Book Challenge | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Like most people who like books, I always find it a bit worrying when a book is turned into a film. Reading is a very active pursuit: you use your imagination, become consumed in the characters and the world that, with the help of the author, you’ve created in your brain. Watching films, on the other hand, is passive. It’s all done for you, and you just have to sit back and enjoy somebody else’s ride. Consequently, when you watch the film adaptation of a book you’ve read, you spend a lot of the time thinking, ‘that’s not what he’s supposed to look like’, and ‘that isn’t how it happened at all!’.

There are plenty of times when this has happened to me, and I will talk about one that particularly rankled in a moment, but first, to the other end of the spectrum: a book that I actually liked the adaptation of.

Well, actually a series of books.

I’m cheating again.

The Harry Potter series, both the books and the films, have become massively successful, and not without good reason. JK Rowling created an impressive world of witches, wizards, and assorted other magical folk when she wrote these books. Drawing on many established motifs in teenage literature – absent parents, battles between good and evil, friendship through adversity, growing up – she crafted a narrative that is well thought out, if not particularly well written.

The later books, in particular, are permeated with darkness: the characters become older, and the villainous Voldemort becomes more dangerous; where previously, Hogwarts had sparkled with magical warmth, in the fifth, sixth, and seventh books, the school of witchcraft and wizardry becomes colder and bleaker, eventually ceasing all together to be the safe haven it once was for Harry. The death toll picks up too.

In the films, this darkness and coldness is echoed. Significant budgets, impressive CGI, and a variety of location shooting result in a visually-impressive world on the brink of destruction. Although the early films had charm and humour, it is the quasi-gothic elements from The Order of the Phoenix onwards that make these films more gripping.

The casting is phenomenal too. Not just Harry, Ron, and Hermione, whose young actors have grown into the characters as normal teenagers grow into their own personalities, but the stellar supporting cast – Maggie Smith and Julie Walters to name but two. All of British acting royalty seems to make an appearance in these films, it would seem. With the exception, perhaps, of Dame Judi Dench.

It is not simply the budget, effects, and casting, though, that make this series great. Not even the fact that they are true to the books (significant chunks are edited from some, in fact), but the fact that, just like when Rowling wrote the books, a lot of effort, and time, and detail has been put in: the journey of the characters is immense; the people they come across diverse, and the relationships they build along the way are ones that we feel a part of too. We invest a lot into a series, when we read it, and we grow fond of it, and all that it contains. The same is true of these films. It would take a hard-hearted person not to care about what happens to Harry and his friends.

A book that did not translate nearly so effectively into film is Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. 

I loved this book when I first read it. The characters are interesting, funny, and diverse; the setting is beautiful, and the story is powerful and ambitious. Like in his other books, Louis De Bernieres cleverly ties small occurrences of the lives of individuals into big historical events through a rich tapestry of characters. In this specific case, he weaves the tender love story of Corelli and Pelagia with the horrific events of World War II.

I would say that, because of the way he writes, a book by Louis de Bernieres would always be difficult to make into film; his stories are too vast, and feature too many characters to do the narrative justice. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin proves this. A lot of the book is missed out of the film – most of the parts that don’t feature Pelagia and Corelli, in fact – and much of the tragedy is also diminished (both those historical acts, and the personal tragedies of the characters affected by the war). Ultimately, instead of being vast and detailed like the book, the film is shallow and sparse, glossing over the misery to focus on the love.

And this is where my next problem occurs. In the novel, Pelagia is feisty, Corelli is quirky but charming; in the film, Penelope Cruz is ineffectual, and Nicolas Cage is, well he’s Nicolas bloody Cage. And who the hell thought that he was a good choice for a romantic hero? I adored the character of Corelli in the book, and think it’s frankly shocking that someone who once menacingly uttered the words, ‘put the bunny down!’ was selected for this role. Cage is in no way believable as a charming Italian army officer with a personality that inspires incredible loyalty, and a penchant for mandolin playing. He is in no way believable, either, as the kind of man that – despite being on opposite sides of the occupier/occupied divide – could make a beautiful young woman fall for him.

Basically, he’s just all wrong.

This whole adaptation is all wrong, actually. It fails on so many levels that I honestly worry someone will watch it, and then be put off reading what is really a fantastic book.

Because that would be more of a crime than the casting of Nicolas Cage was.

30 Day Book Challenge: Day Six – A Book That Makes You Sad

Posted: May 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 30 Day Book Challenge | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I have to admit, I’m a bit of a crier. Not in day to day life, mind you – I rarely get emotional about real things – but when it comes to fictional situations, to books and films, I’m all about the waterworks. I like to think this is because I’m empathetic, and have a good imagination, but maybe it’s just because I’m a bit weird, and relate better to characters who aren’t actually real. Either way, the consequence of this is that I’ve cried at a lot of books: at the end of The Amber Spyglass, when Lyra and Will sat on the bench, I shed a little tear; when Oscar went under the fence in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, I sobbed because I knew what was going to happen; and when Harry went into the forest in The Deathly Hallows, I blubbed so much I had to put the book down because I couldn’t see what I was reading.

Having said this, none of those novels were the ones I thought of, when it came to writing this post.

The book that came to mind was Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Whereas with the other books, it’s possible to say, loosely, that I was crying over a loss of innocence, for a time when a young hero or heroine’s bubble of childhood is well and truly burst and the adult world with all its horrors and consequences is firmly thrust upon them, with Ishiguro’s text, I was mourning something else. And, actually, I don’t think I cried at all.

Never Let Me Go is a dystopian novel set in a 1990s Britain that is like ours, but not. For unspecified reasons, a sub-species (for want of a better word) of clones has been created with the sole purpose of, when needed, providing donations (organ, tissue, etc. again, it’s not really dwelt upon) for ‘real’ people. These clones, or Donors, as they’re known, are brought up in quaint boarding schools where they’re taught to look after their precious bodies, and are encouraged to read and to paint, to write poetry and essays; basically, to fill their time until they’re needed.  They exist in a sort of limbo, being of the world, but not part of it.

Within this context, is a love triangle of sorts between three friends who grow up at Hailsham, one of these boarding institutes: Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth. Their relationship stretches from childhood into adulthood, as they move from school toward fulfilling their function in society, and, if you hadn’t worked it out already, it’s not one that ends well.

Surprisingly, though, it wasn’t this, particularly, that made me sad.

For me, the inherent sadness in this book comes from having Kathy as our narrator. It was clever of Ishiguro to choose to write from this perspective, as consequently, much like the characters, the reader is often left in the dark. As Kathy struggles to understand the world she lives in, so do we. Very little is shown to us of the ‘real’ world – instead we see a lot of Hailsham, of the halfway house they move to while waiting their call to become donors, and of Kathy, alone in her car, and this heightens the sense of exclusion. There is one touching moment that surmises this perfectly: when Kathy and Tommy look through the window of a generic office space, and are awed by something which, to us, would be incredibly mundane.

The premise of this novel may sound like Science-Fiction, but it’s really not that kind of novel. The scientific side is, in fact, merely touched upon. Instead, this is a book about human nature. It is a book about repression (both self-imposed and forced), hopelessness, and inevitability. It may touch on the cloning debate, but really that’s only lip service. The idea here is much simpler, and much more haunting: who are we, and what is the point when loss, pain, and failure are unavoidable?

It’s certainly not a happy book, but it’s a powerful one, nonetheless. And, in a way, very real. Which is probably why I didn’t cry.