More on the subject of modern-day Austen plots

True enough, Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld proved to be a good, reliable read that I was not tempted to give up on. This novel is part of a project in which modern authors recycle the plots from the novels of Jane Austen – Sittenfeld got the fan favourite Pride and Prejudice. When I first heard about this project, I thought it was a great idea, as was the related project to let modern authors re-imagine the plays by Shakespeare. Now, after having read two of the Austen-inspired books – Eligible and Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey – as well as plenty of reviews about the other novels in the Austen and Shakespeare projects, I’m no longer that sure.

I did like Eligible, and greatly preferred it to the McDermid Northanger Abbey, but I found myself liking it the most when it didn’t follow Austen’s template. There were some welcome plot surprises which kept the story interesting. In the exposition-heavy first chapters, I was afraid that here would be another author attempting a somewhat Austenesque style – I think Lydia once accuses Liz (the Elizabeth character) of using long words to make her seem cleverer, and the same accusation can sometimes be levelled at the third-person narrator. Soon, though, the style loosens up, and the dialogue between the Bennet sisters is lively and modern (even grumpy Mary is funny). But if I enjoyed the parts of the novel that were the least like Austen best, then how important is the whole Austen conceit?

My argument for approving, in theory, of retellings of the works of famous authors is that their readers are often as familiar with these plots and characters as they are with myths, legends and fairy tales. If these classic stories can be retold to interesting effect – as they so often are – why shouldn’t the same be true of the equally classic stories we find in novels and plays by authors like Austen and Shakespeare? The problem is that tightly plotted, realistic novels like Austen’s leave less room for manoeuvre than a myth/legend/fairy tale. The characters don’t need to be fleshed out – they are already – and there are few blanks to fill in as regards the plot. What’s more, while it’s par for the course to change things around anyway you like in a story that is part of an oral tradition, in Austen’s case there is a “true” story that the modern adapter has to take account of. You can depict King Arthur in a hundred different ways: the same can’t really be said for Mrs Bennet. Authors in the Austen project are further hampered by the fact that they to a large extent keep the same names as in the original, so there can be no question of “filing off the serial numbers” and keeping the readers guessing as to which character is supposed to correspond to which in the original.

In Shakespeare’s case – and I’m reluctant to admit this as I grew up with and loved the Lamb siblings’ Tales from Shakespeare in a Swedish translation – the plots of his plays, which he mostly filched from elsewhere anyway, are rarely the issue. From what I gather from the reviews, the authors of the Shakespeare-inspired novels have had more leeway than the ones involved in the Austen project, but they don’t seem to have come up with that many fresh ideas for all that. What, Leontes in The Winter’s Tale acts like a jerk? Shylock in The Merchant of Venice is hard done by? You astound me.

Having said that, I do think there is room for entertaining and even thoughtprovoking retellings of the classics. But it’s a tricky balancing act to provide variations on a well-loved author’s themes while in some sense staying true to the spirit of the original. In the “set in modern days” retelling subgenre, Sittenfeld fares better than most, but though I liked it, it reinforced my impression that prequels, sequels and retellings from other characters’ point of view do – at least in theory – provide more scope for the author and more fun for the reader. That is, as long as they are done well.    

Give Theseus a break - he's not that bad

A recent London trip has left me spoilt for choice when it comes to things to spend a blog post grumbling about. The three nights I stayed in and watched telly, I came across an unfunny Midsummer Night's Dream, a costume drama about Louis XIV's private life (Versailles) that managed to be boring, and an Alice in Wonderland film completely devoid of charm. My choice falls on the Midsummer Night's Dream, as adapted by Russell T Davies. My gripes regarding the other programmes can be too easily summarised (Versailles - bad script, Alice in Wonderland - nothing to do with Alice, plus are we really supposed to root for the ghastly White Queen?). Besides, when Theseus in the Dream is turned into a Fascist dictator, I feel a line has been crossed.

I feared the worst for this Dream when Lysander's joke about Demetrius possessing Hermia's father's love - "do you marry him" - fell completely flat. It continued in the same vein: I sat stony-faced through Bottom's grandstanding, the Athenian girls' cat fight in the woods, Titania's infatuation and the rude mechanicals' play. There were nice touches in this adaptation - the feral nature of the fairies; Puck's uncharacteristically disinterested attempt to mediate between Oberon and Titania; a moment during the concluding masque when Puck removes Demetrius's flower enchantment - and he still stays in love with Helena (yep, one does sort of worry about that enchantment and how durable it is). But, as they would have said in The West Wing, they left out the funny.

I love Davies's work on Doctor Who, so this was a major disappointment. His attempts to force some same-sex romance into the Dream were ham-fisted, too. I'm sorry, but Titania and Hippolyta? It simply doesn't work.

Which sort of brings us to Theseus. First of all, if I never see another Fascist Dictator spin on a Shakespeare play, it will be too soon. There's nothing clever about it. There have always been dictators and tyrants throughout history, but that doesn't mean their ideas have much in common with Fascism. Ian McKellen famously played a Fascist/Nazi Richard III, but Shakespeare's Richard isn't wedded to any ideology, however abhorrent. He's simply power-hungry and opportunistic. The parallel didn't make any sense to me, though it had the merit of further distancing Shakespeare's Richard III from the historical one (I have mentioned they have nothing in common, haven't I?). We do not need similarities between historical/fictional tyrants and their modern-day counterparts to be hammered home - we're not stupid. By the way, not all modern dictators have been Fascists, have they?

As for poor Theseus, there's no evidence that's he's a tyrant at all, let alone a Fascist one. He upholds the Athenian law - the "ancient privilege of Athens", so presumably not of his own making - but for a ruler to disobey the laws of his realm on a whim would be to act like - oh, I don't know, a dictator? He reasons quite patiently with Hermia, because he doesn't wish her to die or to join the cult of Diana (Artemis, surely?) and have to abjure the company of men. The scene where her case is discussed ends with him taking away Hermia's father Egeus and Demetrius to talk of "something nearly that concerns yourselves", so it seems likely he tries to reason with them too. Egeus is the character it's toughest for a modern audience - or perhaps any audience - to get their head round. Maybe he has his own reasons for thinking Demetrius a better match than Lysander for Hermia; maybe he distrusts Lysander's motives; maybe he's just trying to call his daughter's bluff. All the same, he does seem quite ready to have his girl put to death (and does not even mention the cult of Diana/Artemis option).

It's often assumed that Hippolyta lends Hermia her silent support and is irritated with her husband-to-be for confirming Egeus's rights. Charles Spencer, the now sadly retired theatre critic of the Telegraph, praised a Dream production where Hippolyta did not, as is the custom, "glower" at Theseus, and I couldn't agree more. Yes, Hippolyta is a strong woman, but she has also been a ruler, and she must surely know the pressures of office. There is nothing in the play to suggest that she is anything but perfectly fine with wedding Theseus. So, he wooed her with his sword. How else would you woo an Amazon? Flowers and chocolate? It stands to reason that she should fall for a successful warrior. There may be different mythological stories about how Theseus came by Hippolyta's hand, and in the end he unwisely ditched her for Phaedra, but the couple we see in Shakespeare's play seem happy enough. Davies's vision of Hippolyta as a strait-jacketed prisoner of war is nowhere in evidence.

There's nothing wrong with having a good think about any of Shakespeare's plays, but the Dream is supposed to be the Shakespearean equivalent of a rom-com, frothy and fun. If Davies gets unstuck over a crustily misogynist piece of ancient Athenian law-making, then I wouldn't trust him with adapting any of Shakespeare's more problematic plays. I'd be glad to see his return to Doctor Who any day of the week, though.

Some expressions from a villain-lover's glossary

While waiting for the next villain crush to hit me (and to be perfectly honest, I'm not looking ultra-hard for a new one at the moment), I can while away the time by defining some expressions -  related to the theme of villains and villain-loving - which I will probably use in my blog posts sooner or later (some have already had an airing or two):

Villain in distress: formed on the template of "damsel in distress". Describes a villain at bay, showing a surprising vulnerability which goes to the heart of seasoned villain-lovers like myself. While it's annoying, in a way, that bad guys so often land in deep trouble, it is a win-win situation for them when it comes to impressing the fans. If they fight back until the last, like Uriah Heep, they come across as plucky. If, on the other hand, they break down completely, the supporter reaction is "Aaah, poor baby". Either way, the hero will end up not looking his best if he insists on gloating over his enemy's downfall. The villain in distress particularly might actually gain support from readers/audiences who would not normally root for him, so a canny hero treads carefully. The classic example of a villain in distress is Bulstrode in Middlemarch, and Eliot is wise enough not to pit her hero Lydgate against him but rather to tie their fates together. The novel's other hero Will Ladislaw is foolish enough to make Bulstrode cry at one point (unforgivable!), but he is noticeably absent from town when the banker's world really starts to fall apart.

Leader of the pack appeal: As in the line - full of profound truth - from the hit by the Shangri-Las: "They told me he was ba-ad, but I knew he-e was sa-ad, that's why I fell for - the leader of the pack". This expression is of course similar to the previous one, and a villain in distress always has leader of the pack appeal in droves. But there is a subtle difference: leader of the pack appeal is not dependent on a certain situation, it is a state of mind. There are bad guys, and plenty of them, who are unhappy all the time, even when they're apparently successful. Triumphs are enjoyed so feverishly there is little real happiness in it. The leader of the pack villains carry a secret sadness with them wherever they go. If only we, their trusted admirers, could be there and nurse their wounded souls! Then things would have been quite different - or not. Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Ralph Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby are good examples of villains with leader of the pack appeal.

Beagle boy appeal: As in the quote from an Uncle Scrooge adventure by Don Rosa which goes roughly like this (always allowing for that it's been translated into Swedish and then back again into English): "It felt somehow honest to cross swords with those Beagle boys. They looked like villains, were villains and were proud of it." This well sums up the appeal of the unashamed, self-confessed bad guy. In comics, he'd be the one to chuckle "Thanks for the compliment" when someone exlaims "You scoundrel!" In more serious contexts, the brush strokes won't be quite as broad as that, but the idea is the same. A beagle boy villain revels in his villainy and invites us to revel with him. Daniel Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop is a beagle boy villain, and perhaps the only one of Dickens's main villainous characters who is practically without any hint of leader-of-the-packiness. I may be mistaken, because I only know them from reputation, but I wager that soap baddies like JR Ewing are beagle boys too.

You'd think that leader of the pack appeal and beagle boy appeal would be each other's opposites, but it's not as simple as that. Each type of villainy carries with it its own problems: leaders of the pack risk getting too soppy and sensitive - lethal for a villain - and beagle boys risk shallowness and vulgarity. And so as often as not, a successful villain blends leader of the pack appeal and beagle boy appeal. It's called having your cake and eating it, and it's something villains are very good at.

Villain surrogate: Surprisingly rare character considering his usefulness: someone who displays the same style and cynicism as a villain, but is eventually revealed to be on the side of common decency after all. See Jaggers in Great Expectations.

High-prestige/Middle-prestige/Low-prestige villains It would be hard to find someone who has never, ever rooted just a little bit for a villain. But there are differences as to how far the great multitude are prepared to go in this regard. I have already mentioned the problem with high-prestige villains on this blog: they are universally popular, and so are just that little bit unsatisfactory for us hard-liners. Without the ordinary, unimaginative punter condemning our dearest love with words like: "Ugh, he's a creep", where exactly would we come in? Anyhow, you know a character is a high-prestige villain when no-one is the least bit surprised at your confessing that he's your favourite character: the reactions will rather be "of course!" and "mine too!". Count Fosco is and remains the prime example.

If you admit to liking a middle-prestige villain, there will be a few raised eyebrows, but you won't be in a minority of one. There are others who think like you, but they are a select group, like a club. Take Uriah Heep: most people may think he's awful, but he did get a rock group named after him. Most villains - and in my view the best - are to be found in the middle-prestige category.

If you admit a weakness for a low-prestige villain, someone is likely to call the nearest lunatic asylum. These are the really hard cases, deficient not only in morals but in style as well. They are not glamorous enough to encourage fan clubs: they're lacking in both leader of the pack and beagle boy appeal, in fact in any sort of appeal. And yet: such a challenge! Monsieur Lheureux in Flaubert's Madame Bovary is a low-prestige villain, a consciously deglamourised version of the Greedy Businessman Scoundrel beloved by writers such as Balzac. All the same - just a hint of the balzacian lynx remains in his make-up. And if we villain-lovers don't take pity on the runt of the litter, who will?                

TV bits and pieces

Blimey. I've forgotten how tired work makes you, and how much time it takes out of your day. I certainly don't feel up for any in-depth discussion of anything, which means this will have to be one of those bitty blog posts about all kinds of things like:

Richard II - well done, BBC: I know I've been hard on the Beeb since... ooh, forever now. Since they axed Dombey, in fact. So it's only fair to mention that I was extremely impressed by the first part of The Hollow Crown which I watched during my vacation. I was no fan of Ben Whishaw's Sebastian Flyte in the mainly disastrous film version of Brideshead Revisited (don't get me started!), nor of his journalist Freddie Lyon in The Hour. They both shared a trait of whinyness, which was a pity, considering Whishaw's nervy good looks - I really wanted to like him. He was great as Richard, though - still not exactly a stoic, but able to skewer his usurping cousin Bolingbroke (Rory Kinnear, satisfyingly conscience-stricken from the first) with wry conviction. First-rate acting and verse-speaking all round: yep, if it has to be high-brow, it should be like this rather than like the soporific Parade's End.

"New grit"? No way! As if The Village wasn't bad enough. Now another gloom-and-doom-and-indignation-politics costume drama has aired in the UK, called - wait for it - The Mill. Well, at least it appears to do what it says on the tin. Apparently, the series starts off with a child worker getting his hand mangled and a woman worker being "sexually assaulted", as reviews primly put it. The events in the series are based on records from a real mill, so this, like, really happened. Well, yes, I'm sure it did. I wouldn't be surprised if similar things have happened at my workplace during its long history, but not, I believe, at the same time and as an everyday occurrence. I strongly suspect the series creators of foul-cherry-picking, milking their source material for grim details which they can serve up to their viewers, so that everyone can have a good boo and hiss over the nasty industrialists. This is the second costume drama in a short time which I have no desire whatsoever to watch even five minutes of. And this time - to be fair to the BBC again - they are not the culprits. The Mill was perpetrated by Channel Four - a commercial channel. What's worse, 2.8 million saw the first episode, which is more than the channel's usual audience at this time. It's still only half of the audience for the new Upstairs Downstairs - which was deemed a failure viewer-wise - but still there is talk of a trend of "new grit", away from cosy dramas.

Let's face it, no-one does costume drama quite as well as the Brits, which makes it so upsetting when they're side-tracked like this. They could spare a thought for their international viewers. Do they honestly think we're going to go wild about some smug, mill-owner-bashing, mud-drenched misery fest? Will we watch it in millions? Will we visit the sites, buy the calendar, like pictures of the cast - all the cast - on Facebook, and swooningly comment on what great personalities they are and how marvellously they are acted? Not bloody likely. We don't want the "new grit", thank you very much. We want the new Downton.

Three is a magic number: A far cry from ambitious Shakespeare-watching, I spent my two last-but-one vacation days glued in front of the airiest and least demanding TV viewing possible: Lace and Lace II. Then again, it might look simple to come up with light and frothy entertainment, but I bet it isn't. As I've mentioned before, formulas must be handled in the right way, or the soufflé sinks. For instance, Shirley Conran settled for exactly the right number of girls for her schoolgirl pact in Lace. Two would have been too few. Four, and the story would have lost focus. Three friends with different characters and backgrounds (though all with families able to afford a pricy finishing school in Switzerland): that works beautifully. Other sure touches include an underplaying of the abandoned daughter's revenge plans in favour of more light-hearted aspects of the plot, such as the heroines' school-girl antics. All this, and a creepy chauffeur too - no wonder I started work in a relatively good mood.                                 

Bankable good reads

Oversized paperbacks, of the kind that's often published now instead of/at the same time as the hardback, are a bit useless. They are just as heavy and awkward to carry around as a hardback, but they don't have the hardback glamour, the kind that proclaims: "look at me, I'm a real book lover". And yet I've bought two of these oversized monsters lately: the already mentioned The Secret Life of William Shakespeare by Jude Morgan and, in spite of my firm intention of waiting for the (real, packable) paperback, Bring Up the Bodies  by Hilary Mantel.

So why do it? Lack of patience plays a part, of course, but another factor is the longing for a read you know will be good, a sure thing. Morgan is one of the surest things going. I know I've said earlier that I prefer his Regency Romances to his more serious based-on-a-true-story historical fiction, but I'm starting to change my mind. True, in the more serious stuff you sometimes come across a somewhat too deep-seeming passage or a bewildering metaphor, but most of the time the author is spot-on, and he has a convincing quality that makes you think "yes, I bet X (=historical personage) was just like that". I gobbled up Secret Life in no time and wished it had been longer, especially as the action ends a bit abruptly.

I normally approve of Morgan's endings - for instance, he humanely chose to end The Taste of Sorrow with Charlotte Brontë contentedly married to Arthur Bell Nicholls instead of with her death - but here, I would have preferred him to go on, even if it did mean that he had to end at a less harmonious time in his subjects' life. Morgan tells part of the story from Mrs Shakespeare's, Anne's, point of view, and you have a feeling that he has an earnest wish for the Shakespeares' marriage to work out (which might explain why his Will is more than usually uxorious, only playing away after his marriage has broken down, if not quite irretrievably). When the book ends, it looks like the couple will be able to solve their differences, which is sweet in a way, but I mean - Will wasn't even done writing yet! I can't help feeling that there are more important things than his getting on with the little woman, who in spite of Morgan's best efforts still comes across as a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. And what about Ben Jonson, another important character in the book? He's left high and dry after suffering a great personal loss. I can think of more uplifting places to leave off a story, though Morgan's Jonson is so unshakeably self-confident you assume he'll bounce back from anything.

I realise that I, as a reader, may be partly responsible for the fact that Secret Life ends when it does. Morgan is probably one of those authors on a one-book-a-year contract, which means he can't go on spinning a yarn forever. And who demands such a punishing schedule from our favourite authors? We readers, that's who. Still, he could solve the problem by writing a sequel or, if necessary, a trilogy, which is what Mantel is doing with her Cromwell novels.

After Secret Life, I tried a historical novel with a Dickens theme, that turned out to be so flat I gave up in despair after only 50 pages. Then, I tried a novel by Joanna Trollope, The Men and the Girls - this one was well written, but not what you want to curl up with after a stressful day at work. The last thing you want to read about, when trying to forget your mundane but annoying problems, is other peoples' mundande but annoying problems. Fine for the lunch hour, but not for the bedside table. Enter oversized paperback number two, Bring Up the Bodies.

Oh, the bliss of reading something you actively enjoy. So far, I like Bring Up the Bodies even more than Mantel's first Cromwell novel Wolf Hall. Maybe it's because there's less ground to cover - only Anne Boleyn's fall from grace and the period leading up to it. I do miss Wolsey - long dead, but still fondly remembered by Cromwell - but bitchy Anne is always good fun. I can't say, this far, that the novel is as much of a white-wash of Thomas Cromwell as has been claimed. Yes, it does make a good deal of his good points - model father, kind employer, oh, and he has a social conscience too - but you still sense the full extent of his ruthlessness. And on the subject of Wolsey: Cromwell carries a grudge against all sorts of luckless bit-players who had anything to do with the cardinal's disgrace, but in the end, who carries the largest part of the blame? King Henry himself. So where's the seething revenge plot meant to bring him down?

The sweetest character in Bring Up the Bodies is Cromwell's son Gregory, tender and a bit gullible (though not as much as people think). Hm, hard-nosed dad, softie son - is this a family curse or what?                

Life and works

After having enjoyed a spot of literary tourism during my holiday (one week still to go, thank Heaven) and having started on Jude Morgan’s latest – The Secret Life of William Shakespeare  – I have reason to ask myself: why are we (people in general, and bookish people in particular) so interested in the lives of famous authors? After all, they often lead pretty unremarkable lives. Shakespeare is a case in point. True, his existence in London must have been mildly interesting, what with belonging to a company of players, getting chummy with a reckless earl, creating a character (Falstaff) who is such a hit with the monarch that she actually requests a sequel (royally commanded fan fiction!) etc. But we know next to nothing about his personality, and for all what we know to the contrary, his plays and poems have nothing whatsoever to do with his “real life”. Jane Austen is another example: I’m sure she herself took the fact that she “never met her Mr Darcy” with equanimity (how do we even know that Austen would have fancied a Mr Darcy?), but the lack of romance in her own life does come as a bit of a disappointment to her devoted readers.  Even a flamboyant author like Dickens cannot hope to live a life that matches his novels in incident (or villain-intensity). So why do we insist on exploring our favourite authors’ lives – why can’t we be content with their works?

I think a lot can be explained by what I call the “passage to Narnia” factor. In the film Shadowlands, a small boy comes to visit C.S. Lewis (I believe it was a relative) and at once runs in search of the famous wardrobe. He finds it, but of course no passage to Narnia. Swallowing his disappointment, he reassures the author that he knew that it was just an ordinary wardrobe, really. This, of course, is perfectly true. But like the boy in the film, we can’t help hoping to find a gateway to the imaginary world of our famous authors, and we think getting closer to their lives will help us. After all, authors do sometimes use bits of their own life in their fiction, don’t they? Who’s to say that Viola, or Mr Darcy, or Uriah Heep never walked the Earth?

Because the primary interest is in the author’s creations, not him/herself, there is something melancholy about literary tourism, at least for my part. A chair that Dickens sat on can, sadly, never have the same apppeal for me as a chair belonging to James Carker, and I’ll never come across one of those because he never existed. And so I find myself having a great deal of sympathy with projects that try to link authors’ lives and works as much as possible. Flights of imagination in biodramas – such as making the foreman of the blacking factory in the TV series Dickens of London into an undeniably Heepian figure – are most welcome. But it can get out of hand. Remember the film Becoming Jane (one of the few Austen-related films I have not been able to sit through)? There, it was hinted that Jane Austen couldn’t possibly have written about love and sexual attraction without having experienced it first-hand. So whatever happened to the author’s imagination, then? As someone correctly and acidly pointed out, no-one presumes that Shakespeare had to murder someone in order to write The Scottish Play.

The greatest part of an author’s imaginary world will, I’m afraid, be available through their work only, and literary characters are for the most part figments of imagination. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t indulge ourselves with a bit of Narnia-chasing (if Morgan doesn’t go to town on Golden Youth-Dark Lady speculations, I, for one, will think it a lost opportunity). Even if we don’t find the passage to a magic kingdom, finding the wardrobe is nice enough in its way.

Holiday bubble

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a proper four-week Swedish holiday would give one more time to blog, instead of less? Not so – the days are just dreamily flowing away, while I attempt to do as little as possible. A long-planned journey to the south of England (I’ll be avoiding London and Heathrow because of the Olympics crowds) suddenly seems a major project. Fortunately, watching The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel put it all in perspective somewhat.

While on the subject of the Olympics – wasn’t the Opening Ceremony great? Ooh, how I loved those Victorian factory-owners/engineers in their smart suits and top hats, headed by a Kenneth Branagh who was obviously having the time of his life. And those chimneys plunging out of the ground! And the molten iron Olympis Rings! “Pandemonium”? Looked more like heaven to me.

Of course, it was a misrepresentation of history to show pre-industrial Britain as an idyllic place where sheep gambolled about and the sweet rustics had all the time in the world for a game of cricket. The population worked from dusk until dawn and starved in pre-industrial times. With friends like me, though, serious champions of the Industrial Revolution hardly need any enemies, because I can’t help being fascinated by the mythical, sinister way – call it “villain chic” – in which the industrial age is depicted by its detractors. It may not be fair to all those 19^th-century men and women (tons of them) concerned with making life easier for the Noble Working Man. But it’s a lot more fun than some balanced, complex view. Shut up, Noble Working Man, and put up another chimney.

My reading has hardly been ambitious since the holidays, or even before then. A Weekend with Mr Darcy by Victoria Connelly fulfilled my need of an uncomplicated happy ending after Through a Glass Darkly. I wasn’t sure about Matt Rees’s Mozart’s Last Aria at first – I couldn’t quite warm to the novel’s narrator, Mozart’s sister Nannerl, who’s looking into her brother’s apparently suspicious death. However, things picked up when a love interest and a suitably formidable minister of police made their entrance. The ending was satisfyingly twisty, there was a terrific character-shows-his-true-villainous-colours-scene, and you’ll be glad to know that poor maligned Antonio Salieri did not do it. In fact he wasn’t even in the frame. The most page-turning holiday read so far, though, was Revenger by Toby Clements, a thriller set in Tudor times and featuring decent spy John Shakespeare (brother of William). The baddies (an increasingly alarming hoodlum and a magnificently foul-mouthed arch-enemy) were rougher than I’m used to but contributed to making the book a cracking good read.

Right now I’m half-way through Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James, and I must say I’m a bit disappointed this far. I confidently expected the crime plot to be a whodunnit with Pride and Prejudice characters as the suspects; sadly, though, the novel is more of a police procedural. The victim is not, as we are first led to think, George Wickham but his comrade-in-arms Captain Denny, and Wickham is the chief suspect. But apart from him and possibly Colonel Fitzwilliam (whom James plainly does not like), the Pride and Prejudice characters all have comfortable alibis: the coppers won’t be asking Lady Catherine to help with their inquiries any time soon. Thumbnail sketches of the harsh-but-fair magistrate and the medical expert prove more vivid than the Austen characters. A family of servants is introduced and will probably have some bearing on the case, but though I like Upstairs Downstairs-dramas, I must confess to having zilch interest in this plot-line. If Wickham and/or Denny has caused some domestic upset in the servant household and this proves to be the explanation of the murder, then why drag Pemberley into it at all? The book could in that case just as well have been about another regency estate altogether.

As I enjoy James’s usual prose style, I also thought it unnecessary of her to use a vaguely Austenesque style for this novel. It’s elegant but not as pithy as Austen, and I think it sould have been wiser to use the tried-and-true Jamesian psychological-crime-story-style. The crime story seems to take precedent over the sequel element anyway.   

Tudor times again

You'd think, wouldn't you, that sooner or later a girl would tire of Tudor era gossip? And yet, recently, I spent my leisure hours during a conference trip devouring "The Queen's Governess" by Karen Harper and starting on "The Virgin's Lover" by Philippa Gregory (well honestly - I couldn't weigh down my luggage with Les Mis, now could I?). Earlier this year I read "The Final Act of Mr Shakespeare" (though strictly speaking that was set in Jacobean times), and last week I watched a second adaptation of "The Other Boleyn Girl", having of course already seen the film - twice. Wanting to see different adaptations of, say, "Oliver Twist" is not very strange, but "The Other Boleyn Girl"? What is all this?

I'm not the only one, it seems, who is hooked on Tudor gossip, seeing as Philippa Gregory's novels have clearly started a trend. "The Queen's Governess" has quite shamelessly been fashioned by Karen Harper's publishers to look as much like a Gregory novel as possible. (I wouldn't be surprised if they suggested the title, too.) It must be a little galling for her as her interest in Tudor times is obviously genuine and un-Gregory-related, but at least the sales tactic is a sound one - the standard woman-in-a-brocaded-dress-cover certainly drew me.

The question remains, though, why? We all know pretty much what happens by now. Henry's six wives - "divorced, beheaded and died, divorced, beheaded, survived" as "Horrible Histories" succintly puts it. (If Harper is to be believed, this is a variation of a real Tudor witticism.) Edward VI dying young. Lady Jane Grey being beheaded. Mary Tudor burning Protestants and pining for the cold-hearted Philip of Spain. And then, finally, Elizabeth, who provides a Golden Age but who never marries: not Dudley, not the eligible Frenchman, certainly not Philip (well, what did he expect?), not our own fine-looking Swedish king Erik XIV (all right, he was a bit erratic, but still - wouldn't it have been wonderful?), no one. And as a consequence, the Tudor line becoming extinct and the Stuarts - the tiresome Mary Queen of Scots' heirs - taking over.

I suppose the answer is right there. It's all the incident that attracts us. You can say what you like about the Tudors, who had little business being on England's throne at all, but things are seldom dull when they're around, executing enemies, friends, wives and erstwhile favourites left and right. What was it like? To be king or queen of the room one minute, and to face the chopping block the next? Or to be someone close to all these notable casualties, or their royal executioners? There's enough human drama there to fill a number of woman-in-brocade-dress-books.

There is one thing the Tudor era lacks, though, which most successful stories tend to have: likeable characters. As I've already mentioned, Cardinal Wolsey, especially as described in Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall", charmed me, but otherwise, what is there? Henry VIII is more or less a monster. Cromwell is clever enough but not exactly sparkling: there's no denying the French do the shady-politician-sidekick-of-famous-monarch-thing rather better. Various earls and dukes are in it for what they can get, which is no bad thing in itself, but they are annoyingly hamfisted about it. The excellent TV series "Elizabeth R" depicted Bloody Mary's unrequited love for Philip of Spain so harrowingly (and besides he was played by Peter Jeffrey: girlfriend, I get you!) I tend to cut her more slack than she deserves, but the fact remains that, apart from being devoid of GSOH, she did burn those Protestants. Not even Elizabeth - much the best of the Tudor monarchs - comes out of the court intrigues altogether well. "The Queen's Governess" was about her governess, Kat Ashley, and is very much pro-Elizabeth, but Ashley's "dear girl" did seem on the calculating side, and with an eye on the throne pretty much all the time. When Mary finally cops it and Elizabeth becomes queen, there is a jubilant, "ding-dong the witch is dead" feeling in the air. Yup, girl, you're queen all right, but only because first your brother and then your sister died prematurely. How about a minute of silence or something?

Things look up a bit likeable-character-wise once Elizabeth is queen: there is the intelligent and loyal (rare combination, that) Cecil for one, and unsurprisingly I have a fondness for spy master Walsingham. But Dudley? Not even Robert Hardy in "Elizabeth R" (those were the days when Tudor crumpet was played by the finest of English character-actordom) could make me understand what she saw in this preening peacock. I doubt Gregory's "The Queen's Lover" will make me see things differently. It's still fun to read, though.

The good old days of historical drama

It's strange, when it comes to period dramas from the Seventies and Eighties, that dramas based on historical lives age better than literary adaptations. It's not that the dialogue flows more easily. It often sounds a little stilted - especially when an attempt has been made to capture the language of the age - and exposition-heavy. There are no pace-making cuts or original camera angles: like the literary adaptations of the time, the historical dramas have a certain whiff of filmed theatre. But as filmed theatre, it somehow works better. The exchanges may not be realistic by any standards, but someone has put some thought into them, and they have been conceived as a TV play from the start. When you have a wonderful novel as a source, it is perhaps easier to think that its words will do all the work for you. It doesn't work that way: I've become more and more aware that a good deal of work needs to be done for a great novel to become good TV. Novels and drama are different genres, and filming even the best actors parroting as many of the novel's words as you can cram in is not the way to do it justice.

Examples of surprisingly good older historical dramas are the excellent "Elizabeth R", which in my view knocks spots off the more recent Elizabethan biodramas I've seen (the one with Helen Mirren and the first Cate Blanchett film); a sweetly partisan TV series about Disraeli; "Edward VII" (which made me feel sorry for the Kaiser - I'm not sure that was intentional) and "Will Shakespeare", a series from as early as 1978 which I have recently watched.

"Will Shakespeare" is very much a case in point here. You could never guess the scriptwriter was John Mortimer of Rumpole fame. The only resemblance I could find with the Rumpole stories is a certain bitter-sweetness: like the crusty barrister, Shakespeare does not have a very easy life, and yet you are somehow not too depressed by his setbacks. Language-wise, though, this is cod-Shakespearean throughout, but thought-provoking enough to get away with it. It's nice to see Tim Curry in a serious part. No flashing of the famous wolfish grin here: poor Will didn't have much to smile about. Nicholas Clay as the dashing Earl of Southampton steals the show rather, though. It was quite hard to imagine him as the golden young man of Shakespeare's sonnets. Unlike poor Marlowe's potentially murderous squeeze in the first episode - continuing the poisonous-youth trend quite nicely - there was nothing even faintly androgynous about Southampton. Nature clearly meant him to be a man from the start.

I was going on to making a point about authors' lives rarely being as thrilling as their work, and dramas about them having to make the best of what they got in different ways. That is why a biodrama of Shakespeare must needs have a golden young man and Dark Lady in it, though there may not have been any such persons outside Shakespeare's imagination at all. I think I'll leave that argument for another day, though, and wrap up instead with another strange thing. How come, when recent literary adaptations are mostly - though not always - more sure-footed that the old ones, that recent historical drama is often so underwhelming? Think of "The Tudors", or (if it qualifies as historical at all, which is doubtful) "Desperate Romantics". Sorry, but a lot of bed-hopping does not a thrilling drama make. You have to invest something in the characterisation. As with Cromwell in "The Tudors", Ruskin in "Desperate Romantics" is saved by a sterling acting performance. Tom Hollander's Ruskin may not know much about what he likes, but he knows about Art - this is definitely the man you would hire to buy an art collection for you. More's the pity that actors playing interesting historical characters don't get more to work with: instead they have to make do with quite clumsy scripts, which will as likely as not shove their guy/woman aside contemptously because he/she won't bed-hop. Some things really were better in the old days.