Novels That Shaped Our World

TV programmes about novels feel a bit like knitted raincoats: they might be a great fit and look like they’ve just come from the town’s finest tailor, but you can’t help the feeling that they’ll unravel if anyone goes so far as to wear one in public. Take the BBC’s NovelsThat Shaped Our World, a series of three programmes examining the Anglophone novel from the perspectives of gender, race and class. It was all very worthy, and I enjoyed watching the series, but I’m not sure I learned anything about the novels – the ones that I’ve read or the ones that I haven’t.

How do you convey a novel on TV? I’m not talking about the problems of adaptation: there are many problems with adaptation, but it’s always possible to enjoy a new text without knowing about the old text: Ten Things I Hate About You can be enjoyed (or not) without any knowledge of Taming of the Shrew. A TV programme that doesn’t show something isn’t really doing its job, but how can you show a novel? Clips of actors reading a passage from the novel in an appropriate setting seem to be as close as we can get.

It isn’t very close though, really. It’s an approach that can convey an idea of what the novel sounds like, and along with a summary, perhaps a vague indication of what its like to read it, and the director’s idea of the setting the novel might evoke. But, this approach is never really going to do much more than scratch the surface of the warp and weft of the language, plot and ideas that make reading an immersive experience. I know people who complain if the actor playing a particular character doesn’t look like the character in their imagination. That’s never bothered me, but the actors reading the PG Wodehouse extracts in this programme rankled: it’s just not how I imagine Jeeves and Wooster to look.

On the other hand, perhaps I’m wrong. The novel is, as we all know, dead or dying. TV might not be far behind it. I read on the bus to and from work every day, but almost every other passenger I see is either listening to music, surfing the web or both. There are more of them than there are of me, and for the most part they are young: the future is, to state the obvious, theirs.

Perhaps a TV programme tells us everything we need to know about a novel, without anyone (apart from the programme makers) having to read it. The programme’s main take is that the novel, as a form, tells us what it’s like to be someone else – which seems reasonable insofar as it goes –  but why waste a week of your life reading Trainspotting when you can spend an hour watching a TV programme that covers everything about class and the novel? Another 2 hours, or so, watching the film and you’d probably know as much as you need to know about being an Edinburgh heroin addict, short of actually becoming one (which isn’t something I’d recommend).

As I said at the start of the blog, I enjoyed all three programmes, which might be as much as I’m entitled to expect.

Never been Hip

I’m writing this while listening to Takin Off by Herbie Hancock – on vinyl. I’ve only been buying vinyl since the end of last year. I spent a few months on a temporary promotion, and when it finished, my team of hip twentysomethings bought me The Queen is Dead. I took this as a massive compliment – it beats socks by a whisker – although with hindsight it might have been a way to keep the old bloke happy while they got on with getting to know their new manager. Whatever the reason, I had to buy a record player, which in turn lead to me buying a lot of vinyl.

Buying vinyl has given me the opportunity to wind up fellow fortysomethings who still listen to CDs: I mean, how old hat can you get? A medium that has now been replaced twice (first by downloads and now by vinyl). I am old enough to remember when CDswere invented and for a while they seemed like an unimaginable luxury that only friends with affluent parents could afford, while I was reduced to listening to illegal copies on cassette. I’ve now got hundreds of CDs, sitting in a disorganised pile in a cupboard. I’ve got hundreds of cassettes too, sitting in several even more disorganised piles in the drawers of a sideboard. These drawers could easily be used for storing something more useful, but I probably won’t get rid of the cassettes until I move house (which isn’t on the cards at the moment).

Cassettes are also making a comeback, according to the BBC website. I don’t know how I feel about all of this. When I was young, men in their forties seemed to be set in their ways, scared of anything new, and happy to carry on doing what they’d been doing since the 1950s. People my age seem to find it easier to keep up with things – a Twitter account, a smartphone, a blog, what’s the big deal? – we aren’t scared of anything new because we’re a generation bought up on change; but just as we’re getting complacent, someone comes along and points out that we also don’t need to be scared of anything new because it isn’t new at all.

So, this morning I sat down after breakfast and listened to a moment’s crackle, before the sound of ‘Watermelon Man’ came out of the speakers, and for a few minutes I feel what it would have been like to be cool in 1962. I wasn’t born in 1962, and I’ve never been cool.