Category Archives: Reader

Austinatious Christmas

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This Christmas, I’ve felt like the monstrously obese restaurant patron Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983). However it’s not food that I’ve been feasting on, rather too many TV adaptations of literary classics. In one day I consumed three Jane Austin classics on the trot. Now the very mention of marriage makes me nauseous. I didn’t enjoy Emma (1996) as it was too OTT and Americanised. But it could always be worse: Imagine ITV8 buying up the rights and casting Paris Hilton as the devious matchmaker seeking out her wedded BFF. I loved Mansfield Park (1999) not because it’s more complex than Austin’s other books but because the lead character is called Fanny Price and so I spent most of the film imagining tabloid headlines for the various scenes. Becoming Jane (2007) completed my Austin hat trick, explaining why she craved the happy ending in literature that was missing from her own life.

After this Austintatious indulgence I moved on to the latest interpretation of Dickens classic Great Expectations which ran for three consecutive nights from the 27th December. So far there have been over 400 films and TV series based on his work but this one seemed to cause particular offence, largely due to the casting. This time around Gillian Anderson joined Florence Reed (1934), Martita Hunt (1946), Maxine Audley (1967), Margaret Leighton (1974), Joan Hickson (1981), Jean Simmons (1989), Anne Bancroft (1998), Charlotte Rampling (1999) in the role of Miss Havisham. No doubt her recent outing in The Crimson Petal and the White (2011) and her previous incarnation as Dana Scully gave Anderson the spooky edge for the role. But the Beeb missed a trick here because Rebekah Brooks would have been perfect – bitter, betrayed, manipulative and wealthy. But it was the casting of Estella that surprised me. Estella is a ‘breaker of men’s hearts’, something which Izzy Meikle-Small is not. Having said that, when they cast the ‘suitably attractive’ Gwyneth Paltrow as Estelle in Alfonso Cuaron’s 1988 version, she was made too likeable so I guess you just can’t win.

Great Expectations has a long history on the screen, with at least one version produced every decade. The first version was as a silent film in 1917 staring Jack Pickford and directed by Robert G. Vignola. It has since resulted in serials of varying lengths, a West End musical in 1975 staring Sir John Mills, and an animated children’s version in 1983. However, each time something has caused offence to the pedants. Goodness knows what they’ll make of David Nicholls version later this year which comes with a new ending: Helen Bonham Carter – who plays Miss Havisham – turns into a monkey. Honest.

There’s been so many adaptations now that I honestly can’t remember what’s in the book and what’s been invented on screen. But it’s still a win-win situation for literature as the hype has increased book sales. There are currently three different editions of Great Expectations in the top ten of the Accelerators chart, published by Wordsworth, the BBC and Penguin.

Book of the Year: The Tiger’s Wife

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My book of the year is The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht. The minute I read it I predicted it would win the Orange Prize and eagerly made it my opening selection for Book Group back in February. As so much of my reading is dictated by reviews, I tend to only buy novels by debut authors as my way of supporting them. The Tiger’s Wife is now my all time favourite debut. So thank you Jonathan Safran Foer Everything is illuminated (2002) for topping my personal charts for the past eight years.  

So, why this book? It’s quite simply a work of immense beauty and imagination that weaves together folklore, allegories and eccentric characters against the backdrop of a young doctor’s search to discover more about her beloved and recently deceased grandfather. It’s also about a nation’s history, mythologising Yugoslavia in a similar way to Salman Rushdie’s exploration of India in Midnight’s Children. Better still, it’s half the size of Rushdie’s tome. The structure is a little bit like a Russian Doll, with a story inside a story inside a story so that you’re a little unsure what is real and what is made up and where it will all end.

Tracing a family’s experience of war from the Nazi invasion of World War II to the more recent Serbian conflict, there are lots of stories that need to be told. ‘Culture is a whole way of conflict’ wrote Stuart Hall, adapting Raymond Williams’ famous observation. We make sense of the world through these conflicting ideas and so superstition, myth and fact all combine to paint a complex, textured picture of the Balklands. There is no single truth that fits all, particularly in the surreal and irrational world of war. Here stories take on magical qualities. They are ageless. They transcend life and death. They live on through people, transforming each time according to the personality and emphasis of the speaker.

What makes this book such a beautiful read is it’s not just another aftermath of war story. It pulls the reader right inside and asks them what story they want to believe in much the same way that Yann Martel did with The Life of Pi. One particularly striking image was a description of animals eating their offspring in a zoo, locked in as the bombs rained down across the city. Although this may have been a metaphor for Yugoslavia turning in upon itself it was also a powerful reminder of how many marginalised voices go unheard, all of whom are equal in their pain. And of course it’s far easier to rationalise death through abstractions, and perhaps the best way.

Quite remarkably the author is only twenty-five. I can only imagine that she has some very interesting relatives that she wisely took the time to listen to. Now I’ll try and remember that when I visit my ninety-two-year-old grandma over Christmas.