Why are so many good books turned into bad films? Geoffrey Macnab reports.
The film Never Let Me Go is the latest in a long and very variable line of movie adaptations of the work of the golden generation of young British novelists (YBNs). Their work was anthologised in Granta's 1983 list of British novelists to watch for in the future.
Word
on Never Let Me Go, adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, is positive. Mark Romanek's film version, starring Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield, is a dystopian fable about friends who grow up, in an English boarding school, with an ominous shadow hanging over their lives. Critics have called it "a thing of rare beauty" and "British film at its best". That is very much more upbeat than the responses that have greeted most of the other adaptations of books by the YBNs, class of '83.
Over the last three decades, there have been several movies inspired by novels of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Ian McEwan and co. What is startling is how few of them have been any good and how random the process seems to be as to which books were earmarked for movie adaptation. Some writers have had several movies culled from their fiction. Others have been spurned altogether. The most cinematic books have been ignored while film-makers have made quixotic attempts to bring the least obvious literary projects to screen.
Amis, in particular, has been very badly served by film-makers. The only two big screen adaptations of his work, Damian Harris' version of The Rachel Papers (1989) and William Marsh's version of Dead Babies (2000), were from his earliest novels. Both films were excoriated by critics.
The adaptation of The Rachel Papers, about a precocious young intellectual (Dexter Fletcher) trying to sleep with an older woman before he turns 20, was labelled smug, misogynist, and was compared unfavourably with John Hughes' teen movies in the United States. Meanwhile, in response to Dead Babies, about a debauched weekend in a British country house, Variety argued that Amis didn't work on screen, and that his "unlikeable, self-obsessed dialogue and characters are best left on the printed page".
At least his novels have made it to the cinemas. There have been no films at all of the work of Salman Rushdie, another prominent name on the 1983 Granta list.
The YBN of 1983 whose work has been most frequently adapted for screen is Ian McEwan. It's a measure of McEwan's versatility that his novels have inspired such a wide range of movies: everything from glum, low-budget British psycho-dramas to glossy, studio-backed epics.
McEwan adaptations have changed over the years. The first film versions of his work tended to be morbid and unsettling movies. Andrew Birkin's The Cement Garden (1993) was an effectively claustrophobic drama about adolescent angst, death and incest. Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay for Paul Schrader's version of The Comfort of Strangers (1990), which was considerably enlivened by Christopher Walken in silky, diabolic mode as the American in Venice who preys on a young British couple (Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett.)
The novelist himself wrote the screenplay for the enigmatic spy thriller The Innocent (1993), which was on a far broader canvas than earlier adaptations of his novels. Now, following the success of Atonement (2007), McEwan novels are fawned over by the Hollywood studios. They offer big themes and sweeping narratives. They invariably have an erotic undertow and provide actors with the type of challenging, psychologically nuanced roles that earn award nominations. The next McEwan movie will be On Chesil Beach, directed by Sam Mendes and with Carey Mulligan in the lead.
Julian Barnes is another of the class of 83 whose work British film-makers have largely ignored. Philip Saville's underrated version of Metroland (1997) is the only British film yet made from one of Barnes' novels. Christian Bale plays the 1960s hedonist, intellectual and rebel who ends up in his 30s as a married man, living a very conventional suburban life and yearning for the road not taken.
When British film-makers have ignored certain YBNs, directors from abroad have sometimes stepped into the breach.
In 1996, French director Marion Vernoux made Love, etc, a well-received version of Barnes' 1991 novel Talking It Over. Pat Barker's novel Union Street was made into the Hollywood movie Stanley and Iris (1990). McEwan's short story First Love, Last Rites arrived as a US indie film directed by Jesse Peretz. Restoration, Rose Tremain's novel about a doctor in the court of King Charles II, was made by Miramax into a glossy, big-budget period picture that won acclaim for its production design (if not for its storytelling.) William Boyd's novels Stars and Bars and A Good Man in Africa were both made into films with big-name stars and screenplays from their original author.
The irony is that when successful screen adaptations are made of novels, the books that inspired them are acknowledged only in passing. When Atonement was in the race for awards, Keira Knightley, director Joe Wright and Christopher Hampton (who wrote the screenplay) were much more in the limelight than McEwan. If Never Let Me Go is a success on a similar scale, it's a fair bet that Ishiguro won't be taking the plaudits.
Never Let Me Go screens at the Rialto and the Bridgeway from March 17.
- INDEPENDENT