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.
