The film of the book

Novels and short stories have of course provided the inspiration for many films. If you take the first ten of the IMDb's Top 250 films as a measure of popularity, half of them are adaptations of a work of fiction:
1 Shawshank Redemption (Steven King's novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption)
2 The Godfather (Marion Puzo's novel of the same name)
4 The Godfather II (as above)
7 Schindler's List (Thomas Keneally's novel of the same name)
9 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey's novel also of the same name).

Add to this list the many well-known and frequently reincarnated characters from Dracula to James Bond, from Romeo and Juliet to Poirot and the debt of inspiration that the movies owe to fiction writers and dramatists is obvious.

But the result isn't always happy. For one thing, turning several hundred pages of fiction into ninety minutes of screen time generally means some things have to be cut. More irritatingly, when a book that you love - and have imagined and visualised and interpreted as you read it - is reinvented by a team of directors, screenwriters and actors, their version can be very different from your own.

Some novelists are clearly very happy to be part of this, often, as was the case with Mario Puzo, working on the film script, thereby earning for themselves a well-deserved extra pile of dosh. But the relationship is not always a happy one.

Graham Greene was one writer who had a very mixed opinion of the efforts of film makers who adapted his books. He was pleased with the films versions of Brighton Rock and The Third Man, both of which he worked on. He also liked the Hollywood version of This Gun For Hire, which he wasn't involved in. However, when directors changed the plot or the characterisation, he became quite irate, as was the case with early adaptations of The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American. And he first viewed George Cukor's film of Travels With My Aunt when it was broadcast on French TV; he turned after ten minutes.

This year, a new version of Brighton Rock has been filmed, and there are reports that Travels With My Aunt and The Fallen Idol may also be remade. I wonder how he would have rated them.

Short creative writing courses at LSBU

The London South Bank University is running three courses in creative writing, starting in September this year. Follow these three links to find out more about the courses:

Introduction to Creative Writing

Romantic Fiction Writing

Writing Prose - Advanced

The TV Book Club - The Devil's Acre

The seventh episode of the present series of the TV Book Club featured Matthew Plampin's second novel, The Devil's Acre, a novel set around the real attempt by US pistol manufacturer, Samuel Colt, to expand his gun-making business into Britain in the mid-1850s.

Britain at this time was moving towards war with Russia and, seeing this business opportunity, Colt moves into premises in Pimlico, Westminster, down by the Thames, where he plans to make his guns. Pimlico at this time was a warren of squalid slums, rank alleyways and courtyards, and fetid drains, and for its conditions and the crime that they generated the area was known as the Devil's Acre, hence the title of the book. Contributors to this episode of the TV Book Club all commented on the strength of the book's description of the London of the time.

But, as Matthew Plampin makes clear in a video interview, the book also looks at the international arms trade, in which Colt can be seen as an early participant. Colt is depicted as an bearlike, aggressive, amoral figure, driven only by the determination to win business, undeflected by the consequences of this commerce in death. Pimlico was close not only to cheap, exploitable labour but also to the seat of government at Westminster.

Into the plot is also mixed a love affair, as well as a planned political assassination by a group of Irish migrants in revenge for the British govenment's response to the potato famine.

The Devil's Acre is, as Joan Blakewell said during the programme, a tale of adventure, intrigue and murder. "It doesn't go down the path of emotional insight. That's taken for granted." Despite a brief and inevitably tedious discussion of whether it was a 'boy's' book rather than a 'girl's', there seemed to be a consensus of approval among participants in the programme, including the Bookaneers reading group from Blackpool, whether for the historical depiction or the adventure, or both.

The Man Booker long list - a review of The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore

Helen Dunmore's 2001 novel, The Siege, describes the struggle for survival of Russians during the Siege Of Leningrad, an ordeal that lasted 872 days and cost well over six hundred thousand lives through starvation. Principal among the characters of this novel are young sweethearts Andrei and Anna, and her baby brother, Kolya.

The author's latest novel, The Betrayal, finds the characters in the Leningrad of 1952. The couple are now married; Andrei is a hospital paediatrician and Anna an assistant in a children's nursery. Kolya - now that his and Anna's parents are dead - is with Anna and Andrei, a surrogate son for the childless couple. Their circumstances are reasonably comfortable, but their quite life and happiness is threatened by the arrival at the hospital of the dangerously ill ten-year-old son of a high official of the Soviet security apparatus.

Leningrad - and the city is a powerful presence in the book - has recovered from the tragedy of war, but memory of the desperate privations of the siege are still vivid. However, now the greatest danger to ordinary Russians is not a lack of food and fuel, but the arbitrary and often vicious exercise of power by the state bureaucracy. The show trials and other purges murderous are history, but Stalin's paranoid antisemitism finds one final victim. Thus starts the irradication of the baseless, so-called Doctors' Plot.

The Betrayal is an account of ordinary, decent people trying to survive in the particular circumstances of this state which, while laying claim to scientific rigour, is in fact debased, violent and self-serving. Among the many betrayals, large and small, that these circumstances generate, one at least is the betrayal of the efforts and beliefs - however misguided - of those who thought they were working towards a new and better world.

I admit that I have a high regard for those writers, for example Dostoevsky, Orwell, Greene, Coetzee and of course Solzhenitsyn among many others, who illuminate the survival of private individuals in the face of public political forces. Despite the great attention that is paid nowadays by both the news media and fiction to the dangers of crime, political events and the operations of the world's states are I think the greatest inhibition and danger to our happiness and way of life. Helen Dunmore's book tackles this big subject.

Despite the terrible times the novel describes, The Betrayal is ultimately a hopeful book. The efforts, of these individuals at least, to preserve and regenerate outwit the forces of violence and stupidity.

Click here to read an interview in the Scotsman with Helen Dunmore.

A map of the life of Graham Greene

Today's post is a link to a map of the life of Graham Greene. I'd like to start by confessing that this is certainly work in progress, but I hope it will interest people who enjoy the writing of Graham Greene.

He is well known not only for his writing but also for his journeys all over the world. However, unlike many people nowadays who travel as students or during gap years or in their twenties, Graham Greene, who was born in 1904, undertook most of his journeys outside of Europe after the age of fifty. It is true that he went to Liberia and Mexico in the 1930s, travels which are recorded in Journey without Maps and The Lawless Roads. But he made his travels to many of the other places described in his books, including Vietnam, Argentina, Cuba, Haiti, Congo South Africa and Panama, after 1950. Many of the locations that he visited are identified on the map, and more will be added.

Perhaps the stories and locations of many of his novels create the impression that Graham Greene lived the expatriate life of many of his characters. Scobie the passed-over policeman in The Heart of the Matter, Brown the failed hotelier in The Comedians and Fortnum the drunken cuckold in The Honorary Consul spring to mind. Unlike them, however, Graham Greene lived most of his life in England, and only moved to the south of France in late 1965. As you will see, a large number of the tags on the map describe places and events in Britain.

There is a lot still to be done to make the map even approximately representative of Greene's long and active life, and I am sure what is already there could be improved. So I hope that if you come back to the map you'll find something new, and of course if there is anything you would like to add, don't hesitate to post a comment.

Kate Kerrigan at The TV Book Club

The sixth episode of Channel 4's The TV Book Club featured Kate Kerrigan's Ellis Island. Like earlier episodes, this one - which can be viewed at the programme's website - includes a video segment where the author introduces her book.

The novel moves from rural Ireland in the 1900s to New York in the jazz age of the 1920s, and tells the story of Eli Hogan who leaves Ireland to save money in the US so that she can pay for medical treatment for her husband, who has been injured in the war of independence. But in New York, she finds not only cash but also a world of sophistication - lifts, trouser presses, jazz - that is a world away from the simple life back home.

Kate Kerrigan herself describes the book as a love story, but as she says in the video, the book also calls into the question the relationship between money and happiness, money and love.

As several participants in the programme commented, the bones of the story might suggest this is a bit of light romantic fiction. However, all agreed that Ellis Island is more than that. Among the things that appealed to people were the strong sense of place and the description of the time. If anything, several of the programme's readers would have liked more. The overall conclusion of the people in the studio as well as the Guernsey reading group featured this week was that it was a good relaxing read, and more than the simple piece of romantic fiction they had anticipated.

To read more of Kate Kerrigan, visit her website. She has her own blog, kate kerrigan's good room.

If you have read Ellis Island, add your comments below.

The Man Booker Prize long list 2010

The long list for this year's Man Booker Prize has been announced, and I have to admit I've been tardy about getting the news out, since the list was announced last Tuesday. The list is given at the bottom of this post.

The short list will be announced on 7 September, and by that time The Writers' Arms will have provided a review of each of the long-listed books. So drop by from time to time to read the view here and add your comments if you have read any of the books yourself.

Andrew Motion, who is chairing the panel of judges, has emphasised that the 13 books on the long list have been chosen "without reference to the past work of their authors." However, if you have read something that one of these writers has published, why not add your comments in order to create a fertile debate here on this year's list.

You may have noticed an interesting dialogue in yesterday's Observer between Patrick Neate and Robert McCrum on the merits of this year's list. It raises the question of what exactly the Man Booker is for. Feel free to add your thoughts below!

The judges joining Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, for the 2010 Man Booker Prize are Rosie Blau (Literary Editor of the Financial Times), Deborah Bull (Creative Director of the Royal Opera House, dancer, writer and broadcaster), Tom Sutcliffe (journalist, broadcaster and author) and Frances Wilson (biographer and critic).

Here is the long list for 2010. Many of these books are only currently available in hardback, which makes them relatively expensive even with the discounts on offer these days. If you follow the links below and hunt around, you may be able to find out when the paperback editions are due out.

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)

Emma Donoghue, Room (Pan MacMillan - Picador)

Helen Dunmore, The Betrayal (Penguin - Fig Tree)

Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic - Atlantic Books)

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)

Andrea Levy, The Long Song (Headline Publishing Group - Headline Review)

Tom McCarthy, C (Random House - Jonathan Cape)

David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (Hodder & Stoughton - Sceptre)

Lisa Moore, February (Random House - Chatto & Windus)

Paul Murray, Skippy Dies (Penguin - Hamish Hamilton)

Rose Tremain, Trespass (Random House - Chatto & Windus)

Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap
(Grove Atlantic - Tuskar Rock)

Alan Warner, The Stars in the Bright Sky
(Random House - Jonathan Cape)