→ January 22, 2008
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Northanger Abbey film.

Now that’s more like it. The new movie version of Austen’s Northanger Abbey was spot-on, very faithful to the original novel with some excellent performances.

The plot of the novel, well preserved in the movie, is the simplest of Austen’s canon. Catherine Mansfield is a teenaged girl living in an English country village who loves to read the Gothic romances popular at the time, and who uses those novels as a substitute for the life experience she lacks. A wealthy couple offers to bring her to Bath with them for a few months, where she meets two suitors, Mr. Tilney and Mr. Thorpe, and becomes fast friends with Mr. Thorpe’s sister, Isabella, who is in love with Catherine’s brother James. One of her suitors is good, and one is bad. There’s a misunderstanding over her relationship with the wealthy couple. And that’s almost all of it. It’s a trifle compared to the character studies of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, but it’s witty and sweet.

This adaptation – I only know of one other, which I haven’t seen – hews quite closely to the plot of the novel, keeping the characters all true to Austen’s writing. Felicity Jones is excellent as Catherine and it doesn’t hurt that she looks like a cuter version of Natalie Portman. Carey Mulligan – also pretty darn cute, and someone had fun with her in wardrobe – was superb as the superficial and often condescending Isabella. And unlike last week’s version of Persuasion, this film allows its scenes to develop rather than rushing us from one spot to the next to try to cram the book into 90 minutes of air time.

Next up: A new take on Mansfield Park, my least favorite Austen novel, due in no small part to its priggish heroine, Fanny Price. There was a 1999 film version starring the underrated Frances O’Connor as Fanny, and while it was a good movie, it was only loosely based on the novel, incorporating some elements from Austen’s own life (using her letters as a basis) and also just flat-out changing some things around. This upcoming version is reported to be more faithful to the text – the screenplay was written by Andrew Davies, who wrote the screenplay for the new Northanger Abbey version and the screenplay for the definitive 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries – which strikes me as a mixed blessing.

Filed Under: DVDs, Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 18, 2008
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More Jane.

I didn’t mean for this to become the all-Jane Austen blog, but I stumbled on this AP article on Andrew Davies, the screenwriter behind the famed 1995 Pride and Prejudice adaptation and behind this Sunday’s new take on Northanger Abbey. For a guy who talks about making changes to novel texts in his adaptations, he’s all the way at the “faithful” end of the continuum of adapters.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ November 30, 2007
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A Handful of Dust.

Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust starts out as another great Waugh black comedy, detailing the gradual decay and eventual end of the marriage between Tony and Brenda Last, an upper-class couple who can barely afford to live on the outsized estate they own, paralleling the end of an era in British society. But the last thirty-odd pages prove a grave disappointment for anyone wrapped up in the plot.

An odd sequence of events puts John Beaver, a social parasite who does the luncheon circuit but has little money of his own, at the Lasts’ house for a weekend, where Brenda, bored with her stale marriage and disconnected emotionally from her son, John Andrew, develops a bizarre obsession with Beaver, eventually conning her husband into getting her a flat in London so she can pursue the affair. She detaches so much from her home life that when her son dies in a freak horse-riding accident and she is told that “John is dead,” she bursts into tears, only to recover when she hears it was “John Andrew,” saying, “Thank God.” A few days later, she insists on a divorce, leading to the novel’s funniest passage, the attempt to create evidence of infidelity to justify the divorce request.

The decline in English morality was a regular theme in Waugh’s work, cropping up here in the ease with which Brenda cheats on her husband and forgets her son, as well as in a few offhand references to other affairs and peccadilloes among their gossiping social set. Waugh’s own marriage had ended badly shortly before he wrote the novel, but he spews almost equal venom at the husband as he does at the faithless wife.

But the novel’s resolution falls flat, working on a metaphorical level but deflating like a balloon with a rusty nail through it on a straight plot level. The end of Tony’s plot line is macabre, but it’s also a bit contradictory – Tony finally grows a pair in his dealings with Brenda, but turns back into a sniveling git once in Brazil, almost a case of character undevelopment – and it’s also more of an infinite loop than an ending. (It’s also oddly similar to Stephen King’s Misery, so much so that it seems improbable that King was unfamiliar with Waugh’s book.) Brenda’s fate is mentioned in passing as we see the Lasts’ cousins taking over the estate, which means that neither of the main characters gets a fully realized conclusion. So while A Handful of Dust works as a comedy, as a novel, it’s short of the mark.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ October 3, 2007
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Never Let Me Go.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is not what it first seems to be. Set up initially as a wistful remembrance of a childhood in boarding schools, with an apparent destination of an adulthood encounter that brings old wounds to the surface, it turns out that it’s a drama of ethics within a romantic tragedy.

And if you want to read this book, I suggest that you stop here and go pick it up. There’s no way I can write about Never Let Me Go without revealing an early, major plot twist, and the experience of reading the novel will be much more enjoyable if you either figure it out (it’s not that hard) or if you come let the big revelation take you by surprise.

It turns out that Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate universe that is very much like our own but for one detail: Human clones are created and raised to adulthood so that their vital organs may be harvested for donations to conventionally-created humans. The three central characters, including the narrator, are all such clones, being raised in one of the few enlightened wards for these human livestock, and the narrator takes us back to their childhood, then adolescence (including the time when they learn their ultimate fate), then to the period of their “donations.”

The novel’s two parts – the dystopic horror story and the romantic tragedy – are perfectly integrated, but they weren’t equally effective. The romantic tragedy fell short for me; Kathy, her moody and often malicious friend Ruth, and the slightly simple but passionate Tommy end up in a sort of love triangle, and we’re to understand that Kathy and Tommy are in love with each other but are kept apart to a degree by Ruth. That feeling never came through in the characters’ words or actions, or even Kathy’s thoughts; she and Tommy are clearly friends, with a bond stronger than that between Tommy and Ruth, who are an actual couple during part of their time in boarding school and their time in the “cottages” where they spend their college-aged years. Kathy’s feelings towards Tommy seem to range from friendship to an almost older sister/younger brother dynamic, but romantic love didn’t come through until the two do become a couple as adults, when Tommy has begun his donations and Kathy is a “carer,” a visiting nurse to donors who will eventually begin her donations after a few years in carer service.

On the other hand, the quasi-morality play which Ishiguro presents to the reader is powerful and disturbing. The clones themselves seem to accept their fate without overtly questioning it – Ruth at one point asks, “It’s what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it?” – yet they show clear signs of humanity as well, falling in love and hoping they can find a way to defer their donation periods to enjoy a brief period with their mates, thinking and dreaming about living normal lives with normal jobs (Ruth dreams of having a routine 9-to-5 office job), and looking for the “possible” from whom they were cloned (much as an adopted or abandoned child might look for his/her biological parents). There are even discussions of whether the clones themselves have “souls” – Ishiguro seems to presume that they do, at least within the story’s context – and we see glimpses of the ethical discussions that go on in the fictional world of how to treat these clones: as people or as livestock (my word, not Ishiguro’s). Ishiguro even presents us with an argument that might sound very familiar to anyone who is squeamish about the idea of meat and poultry coming from the deaths of living creatures when he has one of the school’s teachers explain that people want organs to save the lives of their loved ones so long as they don’t have to know anything about where the organs come from.

It’s an uncomfortable read, but despite the slight failure of the romantic tragedy to capture my interest, it’s a riveting one that you probably won’t be able to put down once you’ve started it. I couldn’t, even though at times I wanted to once I realized that something was seriously amiss in the novel’s world, and that these characters were, by and large, just accepting their fates. It will force you to consider questions you’d rather not try to answer, because to many of them, you won’t find answers you like.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ March 12, 2007
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Scoop: Feather-footed through the plashy fen…

So in a recent chat, I mentioned that I had Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop on my to-be-read shelf, and a reader said something to the effect of, “You HAVE to read Scoop!”

Dear Anonymous Reader:

You were right.

Keith

It’s been a while since I ripped through a classic novel the way I tore through Scoop last week. It is brilliant, hilarious, sublime, a pinpoint satire with an everpresent smirk. It’s the novel I wish I could write.

For those who, like me, were introduced to Waugh by means of the good but serious Brideshead Revisited, here’s a quick synopsis of Scoop: John Boot is trying to land a high-paying, low-work job to escape from a persistent girlfriend. Lord Copper, the head of the tabloid newspaper The Beast, ends up with his request and hires the wrong man, William Boot, as their new foreign correspondent and sends him to cover the brewing civil war in the African nation of Ishmaelia. Misadventures ensure, including a question of whether the civil war brought in the reporters or whether the reporters (especially William) brought on the civil war.

I’m hesitant to say anything more for fear of ruining any of the jokes. It’s a hilarious book, laugh-out-loud funny in many places, and amusing throughout, with shades of Wodehouse in the snarky prose and Molière’s touch for satire, with almost everyone and everything in the book looking like a sendup of someone or something else. My favorite joke in the book involves the Ishmaelian town of Laku, including the origin of its name. You’ll have to read the book to understand why, but you won’t regret the choice, either.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , ,