This post by M.E. Synon is the first in a series about Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln. A counter-argument will be published tomorrow, followed by a comparison of screen and literary adaptations of the last months of Abraham Lincoln's life. Last week in Dublin there was the European premiere of Spielberg’s film on Lincoln. Why Dublin? Because the star Daniel Day-Lewis lives in Ireland and he wanted the premiere as a fundraiser for an Irish charity.
David Mitchell slaps a big hand on his head. ‘I look back at that kid and think, what were you thinking! How dare you, idiot!’ He is talking about his recklessness as a young writer. ‘Yeah I’ll stop it halfway, five times, and start it again. I’ll pretend I’m a Chinese woman living up a mountain.’ He compares it to being a teenager ‘leaping off a 12-foot wall’ without fear. As writers get older, he says, the recklessness subsides, and ‘it needs to be replaced by technique. If you can do that, you’re still in business.’ One of his most madly structured books, Cloud Atlas, has just been made into a film. That’s why we are meeting.
Warning: this is a very January 17th sort of thought. It’s meant to be comforting, though you may well find it the exact opposite. Try it on for size, anyway, and see what you think. (You might want to keep hold of the receipt.) The thought concerns something in The Ghost by Robert Harris. The book is as gripping as any of his works, and as if that wasn’t praise enough it also gave us, via a truly woeful film version, the comedic delights of Ewan McGregor’s London accent. Next to that performance Dick van Dyke becomes Ray Winstone. At one point in the novel the unnamed ghostwriter penning the memoirs of ex-Prime Minister Tony Bl-… sorry, Adam Lang, muses on the act of starting a book: A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities.
I'm conducting an experiment: Life of Pi concerns a basic metaphor about faith, how is that metaphor rendered in print and on screen? I’ve re-read the book. I’ve deliberately (at this stage) not watched Ang Lee’s film; rather, I’ve found a reviewer of the film (Jonathan Kim of the Huffington Post) who has not read the book, and then I've compared notes. Jonathan Kim has derided what he saw, at least from the perspective of the metaphor: 'Life of Pi is more about the nuts and bolts of a teenager surviving at sea and bonding with a tiger than a spiritual quest that asks hard questions about the wisdom, will, and existence of God and why he seems to enjoy inflicting so much suffering and death on unoffending humans.
You cannot have failed to learn that a new film adaptation of Great Expectations has been released today. Publicity for the film is ubiquitous: posters of Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch and Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham adorn the billboards of train stations and the hoardings that overlook thoroughfares. The stars have been interviewed on television and the radio. Even the press has found time to divert its manic attention from Sir Brian Leveson’s clever, clever musings to review the film. The coverage asks the question, do we need another adaptation of Dickens’ well-studied classic? There are plenty of views but few of them bother to consider the novelty of this adaptation (perhaps because the book has not been as closely studied as we assume).
Nicholson Baker is intensely interested. He looks at the world like he has never seen it before, fixating on the mundane and capitalizing upon the strange lacunae which exist between seeing and understanding. In the purist sense, his interest makes him interesting. The Way the World Works is a colourful digest of his essays, conference papers, feature articles, and observations, divided into five main sections: Life (his own, principally), Reading, Libraries and Newspapers, Technology, and War. Well over a decade’s worth of eloquent umming and ahhing is encased in a single volume, a follow-up to his first, The Size of Thoughts.
Screenwriter for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and now promoting his latest film Now Is Good starring Dakota Fanning and Olivia Williams, filmmaker Ol Parker tells us which book is the funniest ever written, when he might find himself in bed with Martin Amis and what he does exactly when his wife, Thandie Newton, is asleep. 1). What are you reading at the moment? I tend to have about fourteen books on the go, keeping at least one under my pillow in the hope of absorbing it osmotically. But a current few are the new James Meek, Heart Broke, Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins, the magnificent 102 Minutes, about the extraordinary feats of heroism in the Twin Towers as they fell, and the genuinely game-changing HHhH. 2). As a child, what did you read under the covers?
A few surprising revelations from this week's esteemed Shelf Lifer, as Roger Moore tells us which literary character he'd sleep with, what he doesn't like doing in his spare time and who would be his author of choice during a year's solitary confinement. His new book, Bond on Bond: The Ultimate Book on 50 Years of Bond Movies, is published by Michael O’Mara Books 1). What are you reading at the moment? The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj by Anne de Courcy 2). As a child, what did you read under the covers? Hotspur, The Wizard and The Rover 3). Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? Goodbye Mister Chips 4). You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose?
How much attention do you pay to the physical descriptions of characters in novels? Interviewed on Five Live recently about her latest book NW, Zadie Smith said that she never really bothers with them, either as a reader or a writer. ‘Descriptions of how people look – how many of them have you read?’ she asked. ‘They go on and on. They never really add much, though. I usually pass over them.’ My initial reaction was: really? They never add much? I haven’t read NW yet, but my mind went back to The Autograph Man, Smith’s second novel. It only struck me halfway through that I didn’t know much, if anything, about the characters’ appearances, even whether they were black or white.
Gone to the Forest is Katie Kitamura's second novel, about a family and the cost of European colonization in an unknown time and place. Tom and his father live on a farm in a country that recalls, at first and most often, J.M Coetzee's South Africa. It is on the brink of civil war. The novel opens with a broadcast by the land's natives, which Tom overhears on a radio that has been left, eerily, on the homestead's verandah. The men's strained relationship is compounded when a sly young woman, Carine, comes to live with them. Their sinister dealings with each other, the other white farmers and servants expose the fissures of a hard and unforgiving society, which threaten to engulf them all. Kitamura writes with fine tension and clipped grace. Her observations are subtle and sharp.
Much has already been written of the breathtaking, brilliant and slightly bonkers Olympics opening ceremony, but there is one more thing to say on a literary note. Just after we were treated to hundreds of dancing doctors and nurses, once the children were all settled down for the night, tucked in under their snazzy illuminated duvets, the camera snuck under one of the duvets to show a little girl, reading a book by torchlight. Reading under the covers was a wonderful part of my childhood, as I'm sure it was for many other book-lovers and the quotation from J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, read aloud by J.K. Rowling, was an apt choice for this moment.
‘It is time for me to chuck in the sponge,’ said Peter O’Toole with characteristic singularity. The 79-year-old has announced his retirement from stage and screen, after a career that will span 56 years: with two films in post-production to be released next year. He goes, he said, ‘dry-eyed and profoundly grateful.’ He will devote his time to finishing a third volume of memoirs, which will record the ‘meat’ of his Hollywood career. The two previous volumes — Loitering with Intent: The Child and Loitering with Intent: The Apprentice — stand largely unread on my bookshelves. I dip into them from time-to-time; they’re that sort of book.
The word ‘reboot’, is the most weaselly term I've heard in film since people started talking about scripts needing ‘edge’ twenty years ago. A reboot is not a remake or a prequel or sequel or any of that cheesy commercial fare; it’s a reboot, a subtly different, very sophisticated, creative endeavour that has been employed to bring an old film to life, usually by making it in 3D. Remember when Sellafield was called Windscale or even Calder Hill? I owe my new career to that horrible word, reboot. I was a screenwriter but recently crossed to writerly shed to become a novelist — or, in deference to the pigeon-holing world in which we live, a ‘young adult historical novelist’.
‘I don’t buy and sell human beings,’ says Rick to the rival club owner hoping to get the pianist Sam. ‘Too bad,’ comes the reply, ‘that’s Casablanca’s leading commodity.’ Desperate men and women pay fortunes to people smugglers or have sex with them. Many are abandoned penniless, trapped and unable to return home, fearful of arrest. Police and cross border agencies monitor known people trafficking routes across the Mediterranean from North Africa. Passports are stolen and doctored, the price for the right papers is extortionate. There is no mercy if you cannot pay the price. Every so often the local police, under pressure from the powerful German authorities, smash a ring of traffickers.
According to the US military, sporting a Casio F-91W wristwatch* is a telling sign that you may be up to no good. Indeed, you may well be a member of al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates. Other things that raise suspicions: satellite phones, bundles of cash, military transceivers and, um, "secret notes". Naturally, this recalls one of the great moments in cinematic history: Now they know we're on to this trick, of course, al-Qaeda will need to find a new supplier. *Surely a word that no longer requires the "wrist" bit?
There is, I confess, little pressing need to post this clip from The Happiest Days of Your Life beyond the fact that a) it is always good to see Alastair Sim in action and b) this thought was triggered by this, entirely unrelated, story* in the Scotsman which quotes the head of Universities Scotland - a chap named Alastair Sim. The Happiest Days of Your Life, you will recall, is a splendid caper during which the exigencies of wartime demand a girls' school be sequestered at a boys' boarding school. Alastair Sim is the much put-upon headmaster and Margaret Rutherford the splendid headmistress. As always, Sim is the real star however.
This is one reason why critics are a good thing.
There's no successor to Elizabeth Taylor. No contemporary actress possesses anything like her fame. That's a consequence of the changing nature of celebrity and the fragmentation of popular culture. The movies got small and so did the stars. But the sensational aspects of the Taylor-Burton saga makes it easy to forget that their celebrity was initially founded upon their brilliance as actors. The work fed a celebrity which would help undermine the validity of the work, and did so right from the beginning in the overblown mess that was Cleopatra. But Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, stagey and overdone itself, remains an extraordinary piece of work: a harrowing, almost grotesque, public-private feud in which real-life and fiction merge in dizzying counterpoint.
The long war between France and the US has its liveliest consequence in the world of film: Hollywood does movies, the French do cinema. In terms of equipment, the Yanks were the pioneers, but France’s Charles Pathé was the first tycoon and — more importantly — George Méliès was the inventor, by accident, of the method of cutting from scene to scene which has become the signal contribution of cinema to narrative. After the invention of talkies, Hollywood pulled out of sight and sound of its panting pursuers, but the French have remained obstinately inventive and creatively resentful: they harbour an abiding sense of having been robbed of an art form which has been degraded by Californian philistines.
Hush: it’s secret When I go to a film, there are certain things I expect: the popcorn only affordable with a small loan; the endless standing up and sitting down as people push past, suddenly sure the film will look better from the row in front; these are a given. What I don’t expect is to be plunged into the film’s set, spending two hours wandering through the real-life version of the world on screen. But that’s what you get when you sign up to Secret Cinema. I booked a ticket to its latest screening, and arrived at the specified time and place without knowing what film I would actually be seeing.
