A neurotic Miss Havisham vs... another neurotic Miss Havisham

I have finally watched two of the episodes of the most recent Great Expectations TV adaptation (Yes, I know, GE again... but it is the Dickens Bicentenary after all), and I must reluctantly confess that I do not hate it. I had no time at all for Sarah Phelps's Oliver Twist adaptation, as I've mentioned in this blog before, but this is quite different. Maybe it helps that, according to a newspaper article Phelps wrote, Great Expectations is her favourite Dickens novel. She seems to understand Pip in a way she didn't understand Oliver, and so she has not changed the character overmuch. The other characters are relatively unscathed too. Joe is good and honest - if a bit more rugged and less simple than one is used to - Jaggers is splendidly stony (you'll never see David Suchet behaving less like Poirot), Orlick is properly scary and no working-class hero as in the Beeb's previous adaptation, though his case is made. Herbert Pocket behaves brattishly as a child, which is a bit of a shame, but when he appears again as a grown-up he is just as charming as he should be. Estella is treated much too kindly, but then she almost always is.

The only character radically different from the book is Miss Havisham - and here, Phelps is helped by the fact that the previous adaptation with Charlotte Rampling wasn't true to the Miss Havisham character either. Also, I have to admit that traditional Miss Havishams have a hard time making the character as chilling and as poignant as she should be. Miss Havisham is tricky. She is so very histrionic - but at the same time, she has been through every woman's nightmare, so you can't dismiss her behaviour as being completely incomprehensible. I can understand the temptation to try to make something different out of her than the usual bird's-nest-wigged hag. Where Rampling was nervy and slightly diva-ish, Gillian Anderson goes one better. Her Miss Havisham has the manner and voice of a child-bride whose development has been arrested: if Dora Spenlow had been jilted on her wedding day (and had been more ill-natured) she might have ended up like this. It's a pity all the same, this trend for neurotic Miss Havishams. Dickens's jilted bride had a wryness which is lost if you play her as self-indulgent and round the twist: in some ways, in spite of never getting over Compeyson's betrayal, she is still a tough old bird.

The best TV adaptation of Great Expectations, in my view, is still the one from 1989 with Jean Simmons as Miss Havisham, John Rhys-Davies as a sweet Joe and (somewhat improbably) Anthony Hopkins as Magwitch. But then, that adaptation had oceans of time at its disposal and could include such things as Wemmick's private "castle" and his Aged P. Phelps has much less time and has been forced to prune the story ruthlessly: Biddy has been sacrificed, as has (to Phelps's own regret) the Aged P. I don't care much for Biddy - I'm sure she doesn't guilt-trip Pip consciously, but her mopeyness is one of the reasons he feels so ill at ease with his old family once he has become a gentleman, and thus avoids them when he can. Still, Biddy is essential to Joe's happy ending, and I wonder how the third episode will work out without her. Orlick, surely, is less central to the plot and could have more easily been disposed of. For all that, so far, this adaptation is an improvement on the last one. Now a great deal hinges on how the relationship between Pip and Magwitch is depicted in episode three.

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.

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.

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.

From Tiny Tim to Mopey Tim

I have known of the existence of Louis Bayard's novel Mr Timothy for a long time, but something always held me back from buying it, although it is that comparatively rare thing, a sequel to a Dickens book (A Christmas Carol). The something holding me back was probably the blurb, which tells us that the Mr Timothy in question is Tiny Tim grown up, and that he's slumming it by living in a brothel and earning an extra quid dredging corpses in the Thames. We also learn that he is "not the pious child the world thought he was" and that he is trying to break free from his dependence on Scrooge. Most ominous of all, "the thick of London's underbelly" is mentioned.

Well, I bought the book in the end. When glancing at it in the bookshop, I could see that it was well written, and that there seemed to be at least one interesting scene with Scrooge in it. And yes, it is well written, but otherwise my fears have to a great extent been fulfilled.

If Tim keeps a civil tongue in his head while visiting Scrooge, it is partly because he still needs money. The visit only takes place because it's the only way he can get his allowance, and he has the effrontery to feel resentful about having to put in an appearance. There is no sense of affection for the old man who, as Carol makes clear to us, saved his life. What's more, instead of making something of himself given the great opportunity offered by Scrooge's benevolence, Tim is wasting his time mooching around the slums of London, feeling melancholy. For this, at least, he appears to feel some kind of guilt.

There seems to be quite a few people about who have such a problem with the message of A Christmas Carol that they feel they have to write a corrective narrative where it all goes belly up. There was a short story knocking around the net somewhere with the premise that Scrooge lost money so heavily on his charitable schemes his business floundered. (Mind you, I only read a paragraph or two of it, not caring for the prose style.) I read about a play shown not so long ago in London where Bob Cratchit coldly informs Scrooge that he is no longer welcome at the Cratchit family dinner: Bob has come to be sick of his boss's japes, see, and is envious of his bond with Tim. (At least in that version Scrooge had a bond with Tim.) Then there's the Blackadder version of Carol I've mentioned earlier, where Ebenezer Blackadder goes from being an exploited philantropist to a scoundrel. The kindest thing one can say about that version is that it identified the person with most reason to feel resentful about Scrooge's benevolence: Scrooge himself.

As I've said before, I have my own problems with A Christmas Carol, and I can understand a certain instinctive resistance to its unsubtle moral message. But I don't care for these corrective Carol narratives, mainly because I suspect that what bugs many about it is that Scrooge is allowed to be a hero at the end, someone whose generosity has the chance to make other people's lives better. And though by the end of Carol Scrooge has become a kind man full of fellow-feeling instead of a cold-hearted miser, he still has one characteristic which condemns him in the eyes of some, whatever he does. He is still rich.

Me, I'm with Ebenezer all the way - always was, to be honest, redemption entirely optional. But there are other things that irritate me about Mr Timothy, apart from the ingratitude of the glum adult version of Tim. There's the "London's underbelly" syndrome. When an author gushes about Mayhew, it is seldom a good sign. It means that a lot of time will be spent mayhewing around London's slums for atmospheric, descriptive purposes. I'm sorry, but "London's underbelly" does not interest me much, and if it did, I'd probably be reading Mayhew himself so I could be spared the self-righteous aren't-the-Victorians-horrible tone of modern historical novels. By the way, what is an underbelly exactly?

It is rich that we so often accuse the Victorians of hypocrisy and prurience. If Victorian novels have their fair share of "fallen women", it is nothing compared to our own age's obsession with the Victorian prostitute. Wherever there is a historical novel set in Victorian times, there always seems to be a prostitution plot somewhere. Serial killers with sordid motives are popular too. So there we are, tut-tutting about these supposedly Victorian phenomena (for my part, I've only ever heard of one Victorian serial killer, while our modern age produces a great deal more of them), while avidly reading (and writing) about them. Hmmm...

For all that, I'll be sticking with Mr Timothy a bit longer, as the crime story element is starting to get interesting, and the obligatory cheeky urchin is reasonably likeable. I may come to regret it, though.

The Borgias or The Whitewash of Cesare

Well, this is something I didn't see coming. Jeremy Irons plays the villain in a TV series - and very well too - and I end up rooting for his worst enemy, a ruthlessly idealistic cardinal who seems to be Renaissance Italy's answer to Maximilien Robespierre. Nevertheless I proclaim it without hesitation: Cardinal Della Rovere as pope! And whoever he wishes as king of Naples!

Yes, I've been watching The Borgias, season one. Irons is, as always, great at playing a villain, and I'm far from being out of sympathy with his corrupt but purposeful pope. But his kids, now, that's a different story. Most enervating is Lucrezia - not as black as she's painted, it is suggested, still I wouldn't trust that slyly smirking maiden one inch. And then there's Cesare.

The most surprising thing about the series is the way it always appears to take Cesare Borgia's part. Now, I must admit I know little about late 15th-century Italy - what I do know has been snatched up from holiday tours in Italy, sumptuous films about famous painters made in the Fifties etc. But Cesare Borgia a sensitive, misunderstood figure? Really? Granted, the series-makers don't go as far as to deny that he is deeply involved in all kinds of Borgia skulduggery, but they are eager to furnish him with all sorts of excuses for his behaviour. Yes, he bribes cardinals to vote for his father as pope, but his father's rivals do the same. Yes, he poisons a cardinal, but the said cardinal wanted to kill him and the rest of his family. Yes, he frames Della Rovere for murder and later tries to have him assassinated, but he is only trying to protect his dear old dad, whose idea it all is anyway. When Cesare kills a man whose wife he has taken a fancy to, we are given almost half-a-dozen extenuating circumstances. The man was a brute to his wife. He insulted Cesare's mother. The swoony wife asked Cesare to "release her". And he was really in love with her - it wasn't just lust at all. And anyway, it was a fair fight. With all these things in Cesare's favour, it seems downright perverse that the "released" lady should flee to a nunnery.

We are also invited to sympathise with Cesare's frustration at not being allowed by his father to take up arms. Instead, he must content himself with being a cardinal, while his younger brother Juan - who commits at least one faux pas per episode - is given the military commands. It's so unfair, we're surely meant to think. Look what a mess Juan makes of everything. The Commander in Chief should be sensible Cesare instead! In fact, as being a soldier requires a great deal less diplomatic skill than being a cardinal, one may argue that Irons's pope has reasoned well when distributing high offices to his children.

You can tell that the makers of The Tudors had a hand in The Borgias as well. There is the same over-reliance on sex scenes to hot up the story, though they add little - yes, even the ones with Jeremy Irons in them. However, either the source material is richer or the scriptwriter has been more inventive: The Borgias doesn't drag as much as The Tudors sometimes did. The high points of the series are the adventures of cardinal Della Rovere who, ousted from Rome, tries to raise a foreign army that will capture the city, rid him and Christendom of the Borgia pope and make him pope instead. It is not out of personal ambition that Della Rovere wishes to do this, though the cynical rulers he encounters keep trying to make him admit to a selfish motive. His real aim is instead to purify the Church - and if that means that civilians will be slaughtered on the way, well, tough. Della Rovere is sorely tried, though, as he travels from one extremely eccentric ruler to the next. You see the pain on his intelligent face as he realises: oh dear, it's another nut case. I don't care how many "Della Rovere and mad ruler" scenes they pack in: they're a great deal more interesting than seeing Lucrezia cavorting with the groom.

The French, the Scots, Parliament... Who wants to be an English king?

As I enjoyed David Starkey's program about Henry VIII which was shown in one of our more learned TV channels, I bought the whole series Monarchy featuring Starkey when shopping in New York, thinking I'd probably get through it in a leisurely pace as the evenings where I feel ambitious and eager to learn new things can be easily counted.

Unexpectedly, I was completely hooked. This is as fun as watching a costume drama. It's the kind of history that got me interested in the subject in the first place. Personalities, that's what grips you - not the invention of the stirrup, or horrid agricultural reforms, though I realise they were fearfully important to a lot of people. The problem about the courses I studied in History at University is that even when they did grudgingly mention kings and queens - "political history" as it was called - they made it purposely as dull as possible so as to leave young minds with the impression that, yawn, it really is all about dates and battles. However, if the strategy was supposed to kindle our enthusiasm for the lives of peasants instead, it didn't work. The lives of peasants were still boring, no matter how you dressed it up.

Not even Starkey dares to admit that his series is all about kings and queens. No, it has a greater theme: the uniqueness of the English monarchy as an institution. And to be fair, he does say quite a lot about this. His argument is that the English monarchy has always had limited power, and been all the better for it. But this doesn't hide the fact that there is a lot of personal stuff about the various monarchs crammed into the series, and this is what makes it so watchable. The donnish matter-of-factness of Starkey, even when he's imparting gossip, is a hoot. One minute he's trying to sort out the different religious factions in the Civil War - another he's stating, poker-faced, "The only thing rigid about Charles [II]..." and ends the sentence the way you would expect, but would not think a professional historian would dare to.

Not that I'm any wiser as to what makes a good king, though. Starkey is too much of a historian to make his personal likes and dislikes too plain. As for what makes a king (or queen, for that matter) popular in the eyes of his/her contemporaries, the answer is depressing: if you're successful in war, then basically you're home, even if you're a thug like Henry V. Here are some dos and don'ts of English kingship (or equivalent) as I can make out:

DO:
1) Whack the French.
2) Whack the Scots.
3) Whack the Spaniards if they attack - otherwise they're not worth your time.

DON'T
1) Get beaten by the French, or make peace with them, or form an alliance with them.
2) Get beaten by the Scots. Don't form an alliance with them either, because once you do they'll suddenly start to lose.
3) Declare war on the Dutch - one, because they'll beat you, and two, because they're not really the enemy. Unlike the French.
4) Think that just because you're the Head of the Church of England, that means you actually have a say about religious issues.
5) Dissolve Parliament every fortnight, not even when they are being really annoying and denying you money for obvious things such as the defence of the realm. If you have to dissolve Parliament, do it in a manly, decisive way so as not to seem petulant (I'm not sure this helps with the contemporaries, but it helps with Starkey).
6) Have a sarcastic boyfriend.

So the "don't" list turns out to be rather longer than the drearily martial "do" list. I do sometimes wonder when watching Monarchy: is there no other way to become great than on the battlefield? What about some cracking laws? Or an impressive state administration (well, I am a bureaucrat by trade)? And most of all, why would anyone want to bother with it all - uppity Parliamentarians, gruff nobles who criticise your love life, men of the church who always seem to be against the doctrines you favour yourself - just for an English-style, limited monarchy?

Well, that's the monarchs' problem: I enjoy just seeing them fight it out best they can, poor beasts. I'm not always in agreement with Starkey - he's convinced Richard III murdered the Princes, for instances, and he's a bit severe on the Charleses - but then no-one is perfect. Let's see if I can stand watching the Napoleonic war episode without hurling things at the screen, though. As already established, whacking the French, in whatever context, for whatever motive and with whatever consequences, always seems to be considered a good thing by the English.