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Monday, September 08, 2008
Andrew Davies Interviewed
Laura Carroll writes up Jan Sardi’s interview with Andrew Davies here:
Jan Sardi asked just the right questions of Davies, drawing out his views and feelings about the novels he works with, his sense of exactly what his task is as an adaptor, and the cheerful confidence and aplomb with which he seems to make some extraordinarily difficult calls.
Before becoming a writer Davies taught English in schools and universities, and I got the sense that he still unashamedly thinks in terms of an educational mission – the basic value of opening up unfamiliar books for novice readers matters more to him than preserving all the superficially off-putting and remote dignity of books written hundreds of years ago in disused language.
It was extremely refreshing to hear him acknowledge the value of this unfashionable ideal, and he has done more than anyone alive to keep books like Middlemarch and Bleak House in front of readers. . . .
Asked why he does so many classic novel adaptations rather than modern ones, Davies gave an answer I liked: he simply prefers them. . . . In general, he suggested, modern fiction of the prize-winning, book-clubbing kind is thinly plotted, and airport novels have flimsy characters. The classics have both, and that’s why they have stuck around.
I’ve been OK with Davies’s adaptations most of the time, but I think he has yet to find an ingenious solution to the problem all screenwriters face when working with 19th-century novels: what to do about intrusive narration? In his Middlemarch there’s a short voice-over at the end, but of course that’s hardly enough, and stripped of the narrative commentary, even Middlemarch can seem a little “thinly plotted.” And I don’t think there’s anything in his Bleak House to compensate for the loss of either Esther’s own irritatingly coy voice or the prophetic third-person narrator who takes turns with her:
Then the active and intelligent, who has got into the morning papers as such, comes with his pauper company to Mr Krook’s, and bears off the body of our dear brother here departed, to a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed; while our dear brothers and sisters who hang about official backstairs--would to Heaven they had departed!--are very complacent and agreeable. Into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination, and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring our dear brother here departed, to receive Christian burial. . . .
Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon, or stay too long, by such a place as this! Come, straggling lights into the windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it at least with this dread scene shut out! Come, flame of gas, burning so sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air deposits its witch-ointment slimy to the touch! It is well that you should call to every passer-by, ‘Look here!’
Or the best moment of all, because Dickens slips into iambic pentameter at the last, truly the poetic side of ‘familiar things’:
Dead, your majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day.
Take that, Andrew Davies!
Comments
You’re right about the voice-over, I think. I wonder the extent to which engaging with Davies’ work prompts us to accept the underlying formal premise here, viz. that TV serials are in some sense ‘culturally equivalent’ to the serial-issue novels of the 19th-century. Not sure I do accept that; not for some of these texts leastways. Bleak House was run by the BBC as a several-episode-a-week soap-opera in fancy clothing. Not sure that’s really how that novel works, though. Curiosity Shop maybe ...
PS. A pedant PSes: Oder?
Thanks, Adam: fixed it!
In many ways The Wire (which I’ve finally watched almost all of now--one episode left!) reminds me of a Victorian multi-plot novel, partly because it has thematic and other unities that give it a coherence that isn’t typical of other TV series (which at least to my amateur eye tend too much towards the episodic to compete with something like Bleak House).
I, too, have enjoyed many of Davies’ various adaptations and felt he did well with Middlemarch, notwithstanding the ever-present absence of Eliot’s voice.
The voice over was employed brilliantly in John Mortimer’s 1981 adaptation of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited so it can be done - wonder why he didn’t?
Interestingly, Davies has been creating the screenplay for the forthcoming film of Brideshead Revisited which he apparently intends to write without reference to the novel’s central theme i.e. religious conversion. He said if he did include God ‘He would be the enemy’. Rather at variance with Waugh’s intention, perhaps, but we shall see ...!
In the 1985 BBC version of Bleak House - written by Arthur Hopcraft, who also did the excellent Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - John Jarndyce (Denholm Elliott) turned to the camera to deliver the final lines you quote: as he arrived at “Dying thus around us every day”, the camera froze. leaving him caught in mid-gesture. This worked brilliantly: it seemed as if Jarndyce’s righteous anger was so powerful that it had momentarily jerked him out of fiction into reality. But I doubt you could make that work twice.