torsdag 23 februari 2012

Sherlock is Sherlock - but that ain't Professor Moriarty

It may seem unfair of me to gush over the TV series Sherlock when I complained so bitterly of Guy Ritchie's film Sherlock Holmes for taking liberties with the great detective. After all, Sherlock is one of those series that can be said to be "inspired on the characters created by" the author of the original. You can't really call it an adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories at all. The cases may contain many references to the original Conan Doyle stories, but they are essentially new. Also, the series is set in the modern day. This is a far cry from Conan Doyle, surely.

Well, it is and it isn't. Granted, I was predisposed to like Sherlock from the start. The title role is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, whose snooty swot I rooted for in Starter for Ten and vastly preferred to the lightweight hero. The series is created by Doctor Who screenwriter supremo Steven Moffat and by Mark Gatiss, for whom I will always have a soft spot as he wrote the wonderful Doctor Who episode "The Unquiet Dead" where Charles Dickens appeared. Gatiss is a good actor too and plays a fascinatingly chilly Mycroft Holmes in Sherlock. With all these points in its favour, Sherlock would have had to be very bad to disappoint me. But not only is it a well-written, well-acted, pacy crime caper, I do actually think it captures some of that elusive thing, the "spirit of the original". Cumberbatch's Sherlock is recognisably Holmesian, though he is weirder than Conan Doyle's Holmes. The original Sherlock Holmes may have been arrogant and over-fond of logic, but he was not such a social disaster as the Sherlock presented here. All the same, the self-confessed "sociopath" of the TV series, who lives for intellectual kicks and who in spite of his rudeness is essentially kind, bears a great deal more resemblance to the real thing than the scruffy Holmes of Guy Ritchie's film.

What the TV series captures best of all, in my view, is the relationship between Holmes and Watson. It is a deep friendship, largely unaknowledged by Holmes but just as important for him as for Watson. There are no sexual overtones - Watson is constantly annoyed by people getting the wrong idea about him and his friend, which plays havoc with his dating life - but in the end, his tie with Sherlock is stronger than any other and certainly means more to him than his string of girlfriends. This, I believe, is exactly what the Holmes-Watson-relationship was like in Conan Doyle's stories, right down to Watson's unswerving loyalty. The moving final scene in the last episode of the second series not only made me feel quite weepy - it also showed by stark contrast just how cheap Ritchie's ooh-bless-their-pink-little-socks-treatment of the bond between Holmes and Watson was in Sherlock Holmes (and judging by the reviews, the second film is even worse).

Moriarty, though, was a disappointment. Like the latest incarnation of The Master in Doctor Who, Moriarty was not the traditional Count-Dracula-meets-Bond-villain Evil Mastermind but a youngish psychopath. I don't care for psychopaths as villains, but at least John Simm had energy and charisma enough to reconcile me (almost) to The Master's doolalliness. Moriarty in Sherlock was stubbornly uncharismatic, though, and maybe this was the point: a warning to us villain-lovers to stop glamourising extreme wickedness. Fair enough. Nevertheless, there was no resemblance to the "Napoleon of crime" that Conan Doyle created. Most disappointing of all, this Moriarty wasn't a Professor of Mathematics.

I think this feature of Moriarty's is often undervalued. There are criminal masterminds aplenty, and there are villains who are distorted mirror images of the hero aplenty (admittedly, not a few of them are actually inspired by the Holmes-Moriarty setup). But what makes Professor Moriarty stand out is that he is, in fact, a Professor. In Moriarty's interest for Mathematics you have a plausible reason for his intellectual brilliance and for a mindset where abstract problem-solving feels more real than the human grief caused by his crimes. For readers like me, who find equations with more than one unknown entity heavy going, there is also something inherently sinister about someone who is good at Mathematics. Lastly, the dry world of Academe forms a nice contrast to the criminal underworld where Moriarty operates.

Sherlock is by no means the first time someone has disposed of the Maths factor: in John Gardner's Moriarty, the author's version of the character - an unlovely gangster boss - disposes of his blameless elder brother (the Mathematics Professor) and takes his place so as to create a useful alias for himself. This means that Moriarty's adventures can be carried on longer, as the "real" Moriarty is younger than Conan Doyle made out, but at what price? My advice is stop messing about with Moriarty: Conan Doyle knew what he was doing.

onsdag 15 februari 2012

Why Great Expectation's second ending is better than the first

How many times has it been said, most recently by John Sutherland in The Sunday Telegraph, that Dickens's original ending to Great Expectations was far, far better than the one the book ended up with, and that he should never have changed it just to please his sentimental colleague Edward Bulwer Lytton? I believe I've lost count. Well, my advice is, get a copy of the novel where the first ending is included as an appendix and make up your own minds, because it is in fact a bit of a damp squib.

Aside from being naturally suspicious against people who carp at happy endings, I was almost prepared to believe the first-ending-adherents until I read it. After all, it is a problematic idea that Pip and Estella should have some kind of future. Not only has she always been a first-class bitch - and to simply blame it all on Miss Havisham just won't wash: Dickens would never have forgiven one of his male villains, whatever his upbringing, so easily - she never once displays any symptoms of returning Pip's love. When he opens his heart to her, she is puzzled, because she has never felt anything of the kind for him or for anyone else. As for Pip, yes, he's in love with Estella, but not in a way agony aunts would find a solid base for a marriage. It's an infatuation which is at best tiresome and at worst downright harmful. It is Estella who makes Pip feel ashamed of his home and embarrassed by the well-meaning clumsiness of Joe Gargery. It is in large part because of Estella that he is so appalled at finding his benefactor to be Magwitch (who ironically turns out to be the little jumped-up madam's father). His love for her inspires the worst of his behaviour, and when he acts nobly, it's in spite of her, not because of her.

The ideal ending of Great Expectations for me, then, would be one where Pip got over Estella and fell in love with someone who brings out the best in him (and is perhaps a little more glamorous than Biddy). Estella, meanwhile, would not reform, as it isn't in her nature - though as I've pledged myself against cruel and unusual punishments, I have no objections against Dickens killing off her husband.

But what happens in the original ending? Estella is still reformed, but instead of being paired off with Pip she marries an anonymous "Shropshire doctor" who has not put in an appearance in the book before. I would not have minded a last-minute love interest for Pip, but one for Estella, and to boot someone for whom Dickens can't even be bothered to invent a name? It just looks like clumsy storytelling. The original ending is also very short, and there is no atmospheric final Satis House scene. As for Pip, he is still unmarried - and likely to remain so - when we leave him. So not only does he not get Estella, he doesn't get anyone else either, and has to mope about supposedly still carrying a torch for the wife of the Shropshire doctor? The first ending's final words are "suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be." I wish Sutherland could explain to me why this is much more brilliant than "I saw the shadow of no parting from her".

Now, if Estella should reform, surely it makes more sense that she and Pip should make a go of it than that she is foisted on a nonentity? And if Pip truly can't love anyone but this ghastly woman, why shouldn't he have her? Dickens's new ending might not be ideal for Estella sceptics like me, but it has considerably more oomph than the original one. The much-maligned Bulwer Lytton was right.

Incidentally, on the subject of Bulwer Lytton, I don't think "It was a dark and stormy night" is such an atrocious way to start a novel as all that.

torsdag 9 februari 2012

Hang on, Javert was NOT a ruined rich kid...

Well, there goes a neat set-up for a blog post. I was planning to muse on the ever-popular excuse of adapters who mess around with their material - namely that they are staying true to the "spirit of the original". Then I was going to go on by comparing the French/German TV adaptation of Les Misérables with Gérard Depardieu (which I'm currently rewatching) and Steven Moffat's and Mark Gatiss's modern-day take on Arthus Conan Doyle's detective in Sherlock. Conclusion: yes, there is actually such a thing as "the spirit of the original", and sometimes free adaptations are closer to it than the superficially more faithful ones who nevertheless get important things wrong.

I'm going to have to backtrack on this idea, though, because the adaptation of Les Misérables gets better later on, and I can no longer accuse it of not understanding Hugo's characters at all. There are some things that are strange about it, though, and I might as well gripe about them a bit. I'll leave Sherlock - and the question of whether it really does capture some of the essence of the Holmes stories, or if it just so bloody good it doesn't matter either way - for another day.

There were many things that bothered me about the Les Misérables adaptation now I've read the unabridged version of the novel. For one thing, there is very little of Hugo's writing in it (at first I would have said "none at all"). This is not so uncommon in adaptations, perhaps - you could say the same thing about Andrew Davies's Dickens adaptations, good as they are - but Hugo happens to be very good at the kind of dialogue that would have translated seamlessly into a TV script. He was a dramatist as well as a novel writer after all. However, the scriptwriter follows the classic teacher injunction to "tell the story in your own words". It's not a bad script at all, but often I found myself wondering what was wrong with the original.

Then, there are the small changes in the characterisation that are a bit puzzling, though I can live with them well enough. Sister Simplice, the nun who always tells the truth, turns out to be something of a babe with a not-so-secret-crush on Monsieur Madeleine alias Jean Valjean. The icy Enjolras is, in this version, a jolly, forgiving sort of fellow, more like Courfeyrac in the novel. Toussaint, the stuttering female servant, becomes a mute male servant. More seriously, Jean Valjean himself is somehow Depardieu-ised. Jean Valjean in the book did demand that the women who worked in his factory led chaste lives, whereas Depardieu's earthy, jovial mayor is prepared even to let former prostitutes work for him and doesn't care a button about propriety. Fantine's dismissal is all down to the forewoman of the factory, who gets a good hiding from Jean Valjean later. One of the points of Fantine's story, though, is how even good men like Jean Valjean/Monsieur Madeleine can fail in mercifulness for reasons they consider to be virtuous. Fantine's accusations are a useful lesson to Jean Valjean in his struggle to become an (even) better person.

But the biggest problem is Javert. John Malkovich's nervy, softly-spoken policeman who swishes about in a slightly kinky-looking leathery coat is an interesting villain in his way, but he bears little resemblance to the tough, confident man's-man of the novel. They have even changed his back story. Malkovich-Javert's motives are by no means paltry - his rich land-owning father was ruined by a swindler - but it can't beat the fabulousness of the original back story, which even the musical found space for in the memorable lines: "I was born inside a gaol/I was born with scum like you/I am from the gutter too".

One villain the TV series does get, though, is Thénardier. Once you've got used to the fact that the Thénardiers are a great deal hotter than you'd have imagined from the novel - I've always thought that they overdo Madame Thénardier's grotesqueness in the musical, but I can't quite see her as looking like Veronica Ferres either - you have to admit that they follow the novel closely character-wise in every other way. They are just as mean, greedy, envious and downright vile as they should be. Christian Clavier - who was such a good Napoleon - plays the emperor's very opposite with evident relish. Éponine, too, is far from the sanitised version of the musical: she's a chip off the old block, all right.

Given the disaster the Thénardiers are in the musical, it is good to see that they are correctly handled in one adaptation at least. But a Les Mis without a convincing Javert cannot be said to be a whole-hearted success.