fiction
Tom Birchenough
The verdict may still be out on the BBC’s lavish unfolding drama, Parade’s End, but it’s already done one thing: to bring the name of its writer, Ford Madox Ford, back from the (relative) oblivion where it has been since his death in 1939 (not least thanks to a script from Tom Stoppard). The novel for which he is best known, The Good Soldier (with its immortal opening line, “this is the saddest story I have ever heard”), has always hovered on various lists of best-ever books, but often rather in the lower ranks. With Who On Earth Was Ford Madox Ford?, a Culture Show Special fronted by Alan Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Andrea Arnold’s starkly naturalistic reboot of Emily Brontë’s masterpiece of 1847 isn’t the first costume drama of the last 20 years to scorn the heritage-culture approach. In 1995, Roger Michell’s Persuasion, one of the best but least fêted of the Jane Austen adaptations, put handheld camerawork, natural lighting and grainy images in the service of the downwardly mobile Elliot clan’s shabby gentility, making poor Anne’s Cinderella plight all the more affecting.Evocatively photographed by Robert Ryan, Wuthering Heights goes much further in its invoking of pathetic fallacy. There are times Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Given the numerous and now pretty tiresome comparisons that pundits and punters alike have drawn between the Hunger Games trilogy and the inexorable Twilight saga, it’s worth taking a moment to imagine how the franchises’ respective heroines might get on if they actually met. One can’t imagine they’d see eye to eye on much.The Hunger Games’ fiercely self-reliant Katniss Everdeen is a 16-year-old with the weight of a broken world on her stoical shoulders, fighting tooth and nail to protect her family from starvation and violent oppression. Twilight’s meek, passively dependent Bella Swan Read more ...
ash.smyth
If you’re one of those readers who likes to believe that a novelist’s work and the life he leads have little or nothing to do with one another, then I trust you were watching last night’s Arena: The Dreams of William Golding.After an upbringing of lower-middle state schooling, immersion in the Classics and archaeology, uncompromising atheism (father) and superstitious eclecticism (mother), eventual Nobel Laureate William Golding was spat out into the world – with a reference from Oxford marked “Not Top Drawer” – chippy, resentful, and deeply susceptible to the wishy-washy of the unconscious. Read more ...
ash.smyth
Mea culpa. I take it all back. Christoph Waltz can act, and like a dream. You know, that dream you have where Tarantino's favourite pantomime Nazi demonstrates his apparently incurable fixation on apple-based desserts, and then Kate Winslet yakks all over his shoes. In fact, in Roman Polanski's oddly flat Carnage, I'd go so far as to say that Waltz is the only one really pulling his weight. It may be, of course, that this is just a side-effect of Yasmina Reza's French play being shipped across the Atlantic; but when Reza's Parisian characters did spite, you got all spitey with them. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since the publication of Sebastian Faulks's World War One-era bestseller Birdsong in 1993, actors and film-makers have been falling over each other to bring a version to the screen. Such names as Joe Wright, Sam Mendes, Ralph Fiennes, Andrew Davies, Eva Green, Rupert Wyatt and Damian Lewis have been connected with a string of abortive efforts, but up to now a short-lived stage version directed by Trevor Nunn has been the only dramatisation to have seen the light of day.All that changes when BBC One's new television adaptation, produced by Working Title Television, hits the small screen on Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Wanted: classic novel, preferably 19th-century but 18th will do, or early 20th. Anything reeking of period before television acceptable, though preferably not too working class. English if poss. Barnaby Rudge need not apply.Is there a crisis in the adaptation industry? Is inspiration running dry? This Christmas a new adaptation of Great Expectations became the fifth – yes, the fifth – version of the work put out by the BBC. In a nanosecond or two the movie will follow with Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham and Mike Newell (Four Weddings, Harry Potter 4) at the helm. No matter that Dickens Read more ...
Jamila Gavin
Someone told me that the highways and byways of England were littered with the bones of little children. It was a shocking statement and of course I asked, “What do you mean?” I was told that abandoned children were a common feature of the past, but that in the 18th century someone called a “Coram Man” used to wander about from village to village and town to town – a bit like a tinker – picking up unwanted children.But who was this Coram Man?” No one seemed to know. With only the name “Coram” to go on, I trawled through the London telephone directory and came across the Coram Foundation in Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Thiruvananthapuram, capital city of the state of Kerala in the far south-west of India, is as crowded with people as its name is with syllables. By mid-November, most of the monsoon rains have passed and the city is bathed in a stiflingly sticky wet heat. The main thoroughfare, Mahatma Gandhi Road - a statue of the great man stands at an intersection garlanded with orange and yellow flowers - is a constant cacophony of traffic. Swarms of black-and-yellow rickshaws buzz like so many bees amid the jumble of modern cars, motorbikes, scooters and 1950s classics. Cracked, worn and non-existent Read more ...
judith.flanders
Well, if you haven’t yet realised that 2012 is Dickens Central, there’s no hope for you. The 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth is still two months away, but Claire Tomalin’s biography has scampered out of the starting gate already, as has Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s more scholarly Becoming Dickens. The Beeb is ready with a Great Expectations film this Christmas, and more adaptations to follow. The Museum of London has a Dickens and London exhibition opening on 9 December. (Full disclosure: I am involved with some/many of these things, and my own book – trumpet tootle – on Dickens and London Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“To my friend Craig.” As all writers must, Gillian Slovo will put her signature to copies of her 2008 novel, Black Orchids, for queues of readers. No other writer will have performed this promotional ritual, only subsequently to discover, as Slovo did, that she had signed a book to the man who murdered her mother.Slovo’s latest play, The Riots, which has won wide acclaim, followed on from her previous commission for the Tricycle Theatre in north London, Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, which she wrote with Victoria Brittan. But she is principally a novelist for our times whose Read more ...
fisun.guner
What a curious curate’s egg Tate Liverpool has pulled out of its hat with Alice in Wonderland. And what a complete rag-bag of minor, uninteresting artists. It starts with a disparate mix of recent works by a few better-knowns – neatly beginning at the end, as it were (Jason Rhoades’s neon-sign euphemisms for the female sex, Luc Tuymans’ dreamy Wonderland), but by the end proper we are left befuddled by the impression that any artist whose work features feeble wordplay, has some passing reference to burgeoning female sexuality, or simply contains a passing reference to a “looking glass” has Read more ...