Bamboo

by William Boyd

  Transforming a novel into a series brings about two fundamental changes, one challenging, the second often wonderfully exciting. First of all, when you move from the page to the screen, you move from a world of almost total liberty—where anything is allowed and anything can be achieved—to a world of boundaries, of peripheries, of no-go areas. In this world we have schedules, budgets, problems of availability, issues of length and timing. But, more dramatically than that, we find ourselves in a world where there is basically only one point of view—that of the camera and its lens. As a novelist who writes for the screen (large and small), I have to say this is the greatest change you encounter. In a novel you can spend the entire time effortlessly occupying the subconscious of one or as many characters as you like. On screen, however, it is astonishingly difficult to be subjective for any length of time. Armadillo is a novel where we are provided almost total access to the thoughts and dreams and fantasies of the central character, Lorimer Black. To reproduce that subjectivity on screen, to get to know Lorimer as well as we do in the novel, required special efforts—and very special acting.

  This is the second feature of the film transformation, and one that often provides the happiest bonus—casting. As a reader of a novel you are in effect a one-man or one-woman casting director. You, the reader, flesh out the character on the page; you can imagine what he or she looks like, sounds like and so on. And it’s an intensely private process: each reader will have their own version. But once the film is cast, however, that specificity disappears—the look becomes universal. James Frain is for ever “Lorimer Black,” Catherine McCormack will be the eternal “Flavia Ma-linverno,” Stephen Rae is “George Hogg” and so on.

  For the writer this particular identification is not, as some might feel, a source of worry. In fact it is one of the wonderful pleasures of seeing your work turned into a film or series to witness the word made flesh in this way. A TV series is drama but it is also photography and to see these creatures of your imagination as living, breathing human beings can be a magical experience.

  Having adapted several novels for the screen (including three of my own) it seems to me that film and television adaptations of novels are handicapped by certain misguided expectations—more so than adaptations that occur in any other art form. Commentators too seem to have no real, practical idea of what is involved in turning prose fiction into filmed drama. I think the problem arises from the assumption that the processes of filmmaking are in some way close to novel writing, whereas in fact, as I’ve tried to show, the two forms are quite distinct—as distinct as a radio play is from a stage play, or a stage play from an opera. No one, for example, goes to see Verdi’s Falstaff and then comes home to read Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and then berates Verdi for the audacious changes he has made. Similarly, no one in his right mind would say that Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd is better than Herman Melville’s. You might as well say an apple is a better fruit than an orange. Yet such comparisons and judgements are routinely and unthinkingly made when a novel is filmed.

  I think, however, there is some instinctive understanding of this fundamental alteration that occurs in book-to-film adaptation—for why else would people, having seen and enjoyed the film or the TV series, want to read the novel? All adaptations actively encourage readings of the original source not because people want to see what’s been changed or left out but because the aesthetic pleasures involved are entirely different. The pleasures you derive from seeing, for example, the film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are quite different from those prompted by reading Ken Kesey’s novel. And we don’t need to rank those respective pleasures in a notional hierarchy—each has its own validity. The house of fiction has many windows, Henry James said, and that applies to all the seven arts: we want to keep as many open as possible. And, having taken Armadillo apart, brick by brick, timber by timber (with the help of a few old friends), and then (with the help of dozens of new friends) put it back together again, I can say that the transformed house stands proudly on its re-landscaped plot. The lights are on, people are wandering from room to room, I can hear laughter and conversation. I like my new house very much indeed. Come on in.

  2001

  The Screenwriter’s Lot

  Last week in Hollywood a small but significant victory was won by screenwriters. In the course of their negotiations with the Studios the Writers’ Guild gained a provision that affected the credits in the “end-titles” of a film. Hitherto the last three titles you see on every film have always gone—WRITER, then PRODUCER, then DIRECTOR. As a result of the new deal with the Studios they will now read—PRODUCER, WRITER, DIRECTOR. From being “Shmucks with Underwoods” we now officially rank second to the director in the creative pecking order.

  There is a conspiracy theory bandied about amongst screenwriters that runs along these lines. The writer—the script—is so vitally important, is so crucial in the making of a film that if writers had artistic and industrial influence commensurate with that importance then they would effectively be running the show. So, keep the writers down at all costs, pay them peanuts, set them against each other, denigrate their creative role, grant others the title of “auteur,” anything, anything to prevent them realizing that the real power lies in their hands.

  Paranoia? Well, a year or so ago, Robert King, a screenwriter in Hollywood, had the bright idea of analysing the Fall/Christmas Movie Preview in the Los Angeles Times. Of the 114 movies cited in the preview the screenwriters were credited six times. The directors were mentioned 114 times. King also studied six months of film reviews in the Los Angeles Times and discovered the following fascinating statistics. Where a film received a bad review the screenwriters were blamed 61 percent of the time; directors only 21 percent of the time. Where a film was deemed a success, however, screenwriters were praised 33 percent of the time, directors received the plaudits 45 percent of the time. Bad movies, the conclusion would appear to be, are the results of bad scripts—brickbats to the screenwriter. A good film, however, is down to the director.

  When the Oscar nominations were announced this year a deal of British attention was focused, naturally enough, on Four Weddings and a Funeral. I did my own straw poll, á la Robert King, of how the nominations were covered on the news that evening. Now, the one and only and undisputable begetter of Four Weddings is the screenwriter, Richard Curtis. It was his idea, he invented the story, he created the characters long before his fellow collaborators came together to make the finished film. And quite rightly Richard Curtis was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. However, this fact was not mentioned on any of the early or late evening news coverage on BBC or ITV. It did not make it on to the Teletext or Ceefax list of nominations. Here was a great British success story, trumpeted and bruited abroad for months, for which its creator had received the ultimate accolade. Anyone interested? News at Ten, Trevor MacDonald, saw the day’s sole mention of Curtis’s achievement. Amidst all the Forrest Gump fanfares and Hugh Grant’s bitter disappointment some editor at ITN had finally decided it was worth reporting. Four Weddings was “also nominated in the category of Best Original Screenplay.” Were we to hear the writer’s name? No. As far as my researches revealed the name of the man who created the most successful British film ever, never even rated a mention on the day he was nominated for an Oscar.

  Am I overreacting? A little. This is standard stuff, and screenwriters are wryly and reluctantly accustomed to this level of routine neglect. But it is symptomatic of a wider attitude, it seems to me, and that is why writers everywhere, in whatever medium, can derive a little satisfaction from the Writers’ Guild’s negotiating savvy last week. Shortly after the day of the Oscar nominations I went into one of London’s best bookshops to buy a published screenplay. In the film section I read the sign on the bookshelf. SCREENPLAYS LISTED A-Z UNDER DIRECTOR. There is more work to be done.

  1993

  Brideshead Revisited (1)

  “This novel,” Evelyn Waugh
said about Brideshead Revisited, “lost me such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and led me into the unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers.” It’s not difficult to understand the novel’s abiding popularity: nostalgia for a vanished era, deep sentimentality, saccharine romance among aristocratic types—many of the ingredients of the contemporary best-seller. It’s Waugh’s best-known book, but in many respects it’s his worst, and problems arise when it’s seen in the context of his work as a whole. How could Evelyn Waugh, one of the great English novelists of this century, write this sort of rubbish?

  The languor of Youth—how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth—all save this—come and go with us through life.

  How also could he construct such a broken-backed plot; labour so clumsily with the techniques of first-person narration; abandon an excellent leading character for one of the most lifeless heroines in modern fiction?

  Waugh himself, when he came to revise the book in 1959, was not unaware of its deficiencies, and the preface he wrote for the new edition represents an unmistakable demotion. The Magnum Opus, as it was known in the writing, becomes just a souvenir of the Second World War. But Brideshead Revisited can’t be dismissed as an aberration. It’s too large a book and its central position in Waugh’s career means it can’t be ignored.

  Waugh’s novels divide themselves fairly neatly into two groups. On the one hand there are the comedies—with their naive or roguish protagonists—such as Decline and Fall, Scoop, Black Mischief and The Loved One. On the other are A Handful of Dust, Work Suspended, Brideshead Revisited, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and The Sword of Honour trilogy. It’s on this last category of novels that Waugh’s status as a major novelist rests. They all contain examples of his comic genius but they are supplemented by an element which is best, though simply, described as autobiographical.

  Waugh drew heavily on events in his own life to furnish himself with the necessary raw material for his fiction. In almost all his novels, even the most outrageously comic, this transposition can be detected with little effort—a procedure considerably aided by the publication of his letters and diaries. The egregious Captain Grimes in Decline and Fall is a faithful portrait of a master at the prep school where Waugh taught. The bizarre evangelist Mrs Melrose Ape in Vile Bodies is Amy Semple McPherson. Scoop is a thinly fictionalized version of his travel book Remote People. Most famously, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a case history of his own paranoia. And so on. The image of Waugh as a beleaguered Tory squire tends to obscure the modernity of his fictional approach. In almost all cases the fiction remains very close to the source.

  This is not to deprecate Waugh’s genuine imagination or great talent. All novelists—all realistic novelists—make the same transference, but some rely on it more heavily than others. In Waugh’s case, it seems to me, there is less pure invention than we might normally have supposed. The kind of world he described in his fiction wasn’t one he had to experience imaginatively: its elements lay dispersed all around him.

  If this premise is acceptable it allows a more precise idea of the kind of novelist Waugh was (he is not like Dickens, for example) and it also makes a reading of Brideshead Revisited a little easier to achieve.

  To summarize as briefly as possible, the novel consists of a sustained recollection on the part of the narrator, Captain Charles Ryder. It opens during the Second World War. Charles’s battalion is billeted in the grounds of Brideshead Castle and his arrival there prompts a long reconsideration of the relationships he enjoyed with its one-time occupants—the aristocratic, Catholic Flyte family—during the 1920s.

  At Oxford Charles meets and is taken up by the dreamily eccentric Lord Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the family. Charles is soon introduced to its other members and spends increasing amounts of his time at Brideshead. He is utterly captivated both by Sebastian and by the house itself. But, as Charles is drawn closer into the family, he and Sebastian drift apart. Sebastian evolves into a self-destructive alcoholic, finds life at home impossible and moves abroad.

  Some years later, Charles—now a successful artist—meets Sebastian’s sister Julia again while on a transatlantic liner. They soon become lovers and plan to marry. This course of action is impeded because they both have to divorce their respective partners and also because of the return to England of Julia’s father Lord Marchmain. Lord Marchmain had scandalized society by openly taking a mistress and had abandoned his wife, family and religion to live abroad in self-imposed exile. He returns home to die, still a resolute apostate. The climax of the novel is a death-bed scene where, at the very last moment, Lord Marchmain acknowledges his faith. This gesture compels Julia to remain true to hers also, and she refuses to live with or marry Charles—even though Lord Marchmain had altered his will to leave Brideshead to them both. Charles accepts her decision and they part for ever.

  The novel’s epilogue sees Charles wandering through the deserted and decrepit Brideshead contemplating the past. He is a sad and melancholy man but the experience has provided him with a faith of his own and, it’s strongly implied, he has converted to Catholicism.

  The novel, Waugh said in a letter to Nancy Mitford, “is all about God.” This is only part of the truth. The events in Waugh’s life which made an appearance in his fiction were treated with an unremitting honesty, as Gilbert Pinfold makes abundantly clear. This is also true of the theme of betrayal and the faithless wife in A Handful of Dust, and his experience of war in the excellent and often underrated Sword of Honour. Brideshead belongs to this line of Waugh’s fiction but it’s the one book where the area of personal revelation and exploration is obscured by the unsatisfactory “story” surrounding it. The lingering over meals and wine, the implausible destinies of most of the characters, the meandering sprawl of the narrative are distractions and obfuscations. Beneath this Waugh’s real intentions can with some effort be made out. To put it crudely, Brideshead Revisited is not, as he would have it, about “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely related characters”; it’s about, first, the nature of a love that can exist between two young men and, second, the particular character of Waugh’s own religious faith.

  The first part of Brideshead Revisited is an evocation of Oxford in the twenties and of a class of friendship which would now be recognized as homosexual. Waugh clouds the issue but the homosexual references are so numerous that only a wilful stubbornness could ignore their implication. When Charles’s relationship with Sebastian ends, the love interest is sustained in the person of Julia. However, although her similarity to Sebastian is continually stressed, the description of Charles’s love affair with her is almost wholly lifeless. It’s the character of Sebastian which attracts our interest, but his exit from the novel is clumsily abrupt and his ultimate fate—as a tame drunk in a monastery somewhere—is a feeble stab at plausibility.

  After the Sebastian-Charles relationship the second theme of the novel engages Waugh’s remaining serious attention. As the family prepares for Lord Marchmain’s death, Charles systematically attacks, with devastating rationality, the tenets of the Catholic faith. To the agnostic or atheist reader—perhaps to the non-Catholic reader—everything about the book’s conclusion is maddeningly unsatisfying. And Waugh encourages this reaction with grim perversity. The reader is cajoled into condemning the Flyte family’s destructive faith. We cannot understand and must deplore Lord Marchmain’s death-bed recantation. We find it impossible to comprehend the reasons why Julia rejects Charles and we earnestly hope Charles will curse her for an ignorant fool. Finally, it becomes inconceivable that—at the novel’s end—Charles too should adopt their faith. But Waugh has no wish to provide a comforting or remotely rational explanation for his faith. It does not partake of reason or logic. Its sustaining power would be of no account if it did. It functions, for him at least, as the most severe and
uncompromising of challenges, and it’s this aspect that Waugh so ruthlessly illustrates in the final pages.

  This disharmony between the two themes of the novel and much of the narrative which is meant to reveal them may be one way of explaining the many dissatisfactions arising from this curious novel. Essentially it comes down to this: Waugh fudges the issue on the first theme and takes up the second halfway through the book, encumbered by having to work through a narrative in which he has only a superficial interest.

  A television adaptation, I surmised, might seize the opportunity of focusing the emphasis on these subtextual obsessions. To a very limited extent this has been attempted.

  I’ve seen the first five episodes—six hours—of Granada’s forthcoming adaptation of the novel. It is scrupulously faithful to the original. John Mortimer’s script uses Waugh’s own dialogue and vocabulary at every opportunity. Even the “feel” of the novel has been maintained through the extensive use of voiceover narration.

  These episodes cover the relationship between Charles and Sebastian and take in their Oxford careers, a visit to Lord Marchmain in Venice, and several holidays at Brideshead. One of the defects of the novel, and where television actually improves on the original, is in the character of Charles. In the book his personality is—frankly—dull and boring. It’s hard to imagine why someone as intriguing as Sebastian should want to have anything to do with him. On film we have Jeremy Irons as Charles, fleshing out the “I” figure admirably. At least we can see why Sebastian and the preening aesthete Anthony Blanche (excellently rendered by Nicholas Grace) should be fascinated: simply he’s good-looking and they clearly fancy him. This implication is more heavily emphasized than in the novel but doesn’t move much beyond this. Sebastian puts his arms round Charles’s shoulders but otherwise their affection remains chaste. (Mortimer does get Charles on some occasions to light his cigarette from Sebastian’s. A code?)