Rogues vs villains

All right, so this is a bit of a cheat. I haven't written about Victorian fiction in simply ages (although surely adaptations and not-really-adaptations somehow count?), and then when I finally get round to reading a story by one of my favourite Victorian novelists it's not even a full-length novel, but a novella of 125 pages. Still, I'm sure I can find something to say about it.

The novella in question is A Rogue's Life, by the - almost - always readable Wilkie Collins. It is really enjoyable after a somewhat irritating start - I'll get back to that - but it made me ponder why I don't feel the same degree of warmth towards rogues as I do towards villains.

I think it's fair to say that the words rogue and villain aren't entirely the same, but can I really claim that there's that much of a difference? "Villain" shows up as an alternative when you search for synonyms for "rogue", and they have other synonyms such as "rascal" and "scoundrel" in common. Isn't rogue essentially a sub-category of villain? Maybe, but in that case it's a sub-category I have problems with. What I appreciate in a villain, apart from brains, is drive and strength of will. Rogues, like villains, act selfishly and immorally, but they also tend to be lazy. They don't expect to have to make an effort to achieve their goal: they want success to be handed to them on a plate. Fiyero's song "Dancing Through Life" ("life is fraughtless, when you're thoughtless") from Wicked comes to mind when I try to pinpoint a rogue's outlook. Now, there are loveable rogues to be sure, mostly of the mildly criminal but humorous kind. But to my mind, it's hard for a fictional character to pull off the blithe and laid-back opportunism of a rogue without becoming annoying.

Frank Softly, the protagonist of A Rogue's Life, is a case in point. When he is revealed to have made money out of drawing caricatures, his father (a hard-working doctor, a profession Frank has tried but detests) orders him to stop for the sake of the family honour: "I answered dutifully that I was quite ready to obey, on the condition that he should reimburse me by a treble allowance [...] or that Lady Malkinshaw should confer upon me the appointment of physician-in-waiting on her, with a handsome salary attached". Frank's father refuses his "extremely moderate stipulations". There is more in the same self-congratulatory vein. When Frank later tries his hand at portrait painting, he finds it quite beyond him to paint a flattering portrait of his brother-in-law Mr Batterbury (who's hilarious: Collins can be relied on to make the most of his side characters). He follows up the painting with a self-portrait, "making my own likeness quite a pleasant relief to the ugliness of my brother-in-law's". To sum up, far from finding Frank charming, I found him smug and conceited, and didn't particularly wish him well. With rogueishness so often comes a kind of "aren't I a bad lad" preening which can be hard to bear.

The story improves immensely, however, when Frank becomes embroiled in the mysterious doings of the father of a girl with whom he has fallen in love. For one thing, Frank's feelings for the fair Alicia are genuine: for a rogue, he is remarkably steadfast in the relationship department. More importantly, however, the plot becomes thrilling enough for the reader to better put up with its protagonist. It's a page-turning adventure story full of chases, near-escapes and cunning strategies in order to avoid the law. The narrative is wrapped up rather hastily, but for the latter part of the novella I was hooked.

The story also contains one of those neat legal conceits that you often find in Collins: the reason Mr Batterbury is concerned for Frank's welfare at all is that Frank's scornful sister Arabella will be left a legacy of three thousand pounds, providing Frank outlives the aforementioned Lady Malkinshaw, his marvellously robust grandmother. It's an amusing situation, though not quite as amusing as Frank finds it. I was firmly Team Batterbury here: no-one can say he doesn't put some solid work into getting that legacy (I'll not reveal whether he's successful).

A Rogue's Life is a good read. But if you're looking for a loveable rogue, I don't think that you'll find him here.    

Pleasant audiobook distractions

Ugh - while I had a run of benevolent posts at the end of 2019, I suspect 2020 will be the year when I complain a lot and will actually have to move into contentious territory, though I really don't wanna. Not yet, though. Let's have a nice, unprovocative theme for this week's post. Like, erm, audiobooks?

I've never really been into audiobooks until the last months, because I always preferred actually reading the books, and I still do. Belatedly, though, I've discovered the perfect use for an audiobook: as a means of taking your mind off the fact that you're doing something mind-numbingly boring. Earlier, I've tried music as a boredom-reliever, and in some situations - like simple working tasks that still require some attention - it's still the best remedy. But when it comes to, say, domestic chores, music leaves too much room in my brain to reflect on how dull the chore in question is and how much I would rather be doing something else. If I'm very lucky and find an audiobook I really enjoy, on the other hand, the opportunity to listen to it partly makes up for the dreariness of doing the washing, packing my lunch, unpacking supermarket bags or cleaning the kitchen. The first audiobook I tried - River Road  - helped me get through a four-hour train journey when the novel I'd brought failed to thrill.

The service I use is Audible, which has its advantages and disadvantages. The selection of books on offer is outstanding, but it's pretty pricey. I thought that the monthly subscription would give me access to the audiobooks on offer for free, but no such luck. You get a couple of free ones at the start, then one free book per month, but that's it: the rest you have to buy, and they're not cheap. I'll think I'll stick with it, though: I can work the app now, and it's nice to have so much to choose from. Here are some of the audios I've found so far:

River Road by Carol Goodman: Carol Goodman is the perfect autumn read, and most enjoyable in traditional book form. The settings, which are often academic and/or connected to creative writing, like a school teaching the Fine Arts or a writers' colony, have a high cosiness factor, and Goodman's use of myths and folklore appeals greatly to my inner librarian. On the down side, her heroines - often pretty opinionated - can annoy me, and the payoff of a nicely set up story is not always satisfying. The earliest books - The Lake Of Dead Languages and The Seduction Of Water - had wonderful atmosphere, and I loved the fairy-tale theme in The Seduction Of Water. But there are really no prizes for guessing who the main villain is in either of these novels. Later novels like The Other Mother and The Night Visitors are less easily guessable, but also less cosy and less full of "gosh, I know this myth/fairy-tale - aren't I learned" moments.

River Road was a novel I didn't get hold of in book form, so I was glad to find the audio version. It's in between the early, bookish but a bit predictable Goodman novels and the grittier later ones. Though not Goodman's best, it still has an enjoyable atmosphere - the protagonist Nan teaches creative writing at a college, which is the kind of job you have if you're a Goodman heroine - and as she has had some hard knocks in her life, like losing her small daughter in a car accident (why are writers so obsessed with kids who die or go missing?), I may actually have appreciated this story more as an easily digestible audiobook than if I'd pored over the pages of the actual novel.

Blythewood, also by Carol Goodman: This teen fantasy story was a disappointment. I'd have thought someone well-read like Goodman would be able to come up with a fantasy world enriched by classic myths and fairy-tales, but this was pretty generic stuff. The teenage heroine's love interest is a beautiful boy with wings, and the main villain is a creature of smoke and shadows - nothing particularly new there, and the magic school setup feels pretty done by now. I don't think I'll bother with the sequel; swooning over winged, misunderstood male beauties just isn't my thing.

Evil Under The Sun by Agatha Christie: One way to make sure you don't lose the thread of an audiobook's narrative is to listen to a book you've already read. This was read with relish by David Suchet, who did all the voices, not just Poirot's. If you stick with it through the somewhat slow start - Mrs Gardiner's monologues can be a bit much in this format - this is good fun, ideal for sorting and archiving documents to.

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie: What, again? Well, this was one of the freebies on offer at the start of my subscription, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to familiarise myself with the play as opposed to the book. It wasn't made clear, though, how close this adaptation actually was to the play, and apart from some obvious liberties taken with the source material - the Darling household scenes are set during the Blitz; Tiger Lily leads a gang of "Lost Girls", so not for the first time in the history of Peter Pan adaptations her poor tribe is shafted and written out of the story altogether; Hook flirts outrageously with the devoted Smee - the story follows the one in Peter and Wendy very closely indeed. I'm not sure I'm much the wiser. It was a nice, light-hearted listen, though. Rupert Everett's Hook is the campest pirate who ever yo-ho-hoed on the seven seas, which is something of a pity - even the Disney version is a wonder of dignity and menace in comparison - but he draws the odd chuckle. Adeel Akhtar is sweet as Smee (the polar opposite of his Thénardier) and the kids are convincing.

The Two Destinies by Wilkie Collins: OK, I'm not going to lie: about one hour in, this story is still rather soporific, even if it is read by the admirable Sam West. I'm a huge fan of Collins, but he can be long-winded in his explanations, and perhaps he's not ideal audiobook material. Anyway, I couldn't resist getting nine hours listening time as my free book of the month (a Christie would only have offered six hours). It remains to be seen if my greed has deceived me - nine hours are no good if I'm to give up after three. But sometimes Collins is a late starter, so there's still hope.

The latest BBC Woman in White and the Fosco challenge

So, I finally made my way through the BBC's latest The Woman in White adaptation. I wasn't blown away by it, but it did have some virtues. Above all, it stays faithful to the original story, or nearly (I'll come back to that), which sets it apart from the adaptation from the Nineties, not to mention the musical. Sir Percival Glyde's "Secret" is finally the same as in the book - hooray! - and Sir Percival dies dramatically in a church trying to destroy the evidence of it. The events leading up to this climax play out the same way as in the novel, too. The two heroines - the resourceful Marian Halcombe and her put-upon half-sister Laura Fairlie who is married off to the dastardly Glyde - are well-cast. Jessie Buckley has strong, somewhat masculine features which we might consider handsome today but would not have gone down well in the 19th century (hence Walter's reaction in the book: "this woman is ugly"), Olivia Vinall as Laura is pretty as a picture, and the acting of both is top-notch. Vinall plays Anne Catherick too, which makes every sort of sense, though she has to sport a somewhat off-putting set of dentures as Anne just to show that while similar, the two women are not identical. Marian is not, mercifully, made out to have a thing for Laura's true love Walter Hartright (for a moment, the narrative seems to be heading that way, but it backs away just in time). Instead, she is shown to be the true and loving sister she is in the book, and a good friend to Walter, too. As for Walter, he never resents Marian's early insistence that his and Laura's love isn't meant to be - as Laura is engaged, and Walter is her tutor, he can see for himself that things look hopeless. Another thing I thought worked well was the framing device of having a scrivener, Erasmus Nash, question various witnesses in the case which then leads to flashbacks of what happened. It gives a taste of the novel's clever structure of several narrators. I don't remember there being a Nash in the novel, and I suspect he may have been created as an excuse to shove Art Malik into the story, but I like Art Malik, so I can see why this is something one would want to do.   

As to elements that were more mixed: Charles Dance has and is fun as Frederick Fairlie, but beneath all that old-man make-up he is too much the picture of health to convince as an invalid. It is true that Mr Fairlie is a hypochondriac, with nothing much actually wrong with him, but he should at least be able to put up a show of being frail and infirm - Ian Richardson, with his wavering tones, was more convincing than Dance, whose voice still rings out with Tywin-like toughness. Dougray Scott is the right type for Sir Percival Glyde, and overall I'd say he earns a pass not without distinction: it's a tricky part, as the charismatic villain of the piece is so obviously meant to be Fosco, and Sir Percival is more of a second-league scoundrel. All the same, a little more plausible amiability in the early  stages of the story wouldn't have gone amiss. One reason why Sir Percival's marriage to Laura isn't halted is that no-one is able to find fault with him or pin something on him: it's only after the marriage that his true nature reveals itself. While Limmeridge House and Blackwater Park are both convincingly "house-cast" - the one looks imposingly affluent, the other gothic - other locations, like what passes for 19th-century London, isn't quite as persuasive: you get the impression that the budget wasn't exactly abundant.

When I looked up reviews of this adaptation, more than one of them spoke of it being a version of the tale "for the #metoo generation". Though they meant it as praise, I'm sure this labelling of the series didn't do it any favours. No need to fear a preach-fest, though. It's true the first scene features Marian railing against men who are allowed to "crush" women and go unpunished, but this and other outbursts of the same vein only occur when she is deeply upset on Laura's behalf. I didn't find them against character, and wouldn't be surprised if some of them were actually in the book (I haven't checked). Maybe the focus gets a little skewed as we never see Marian being scathing about her own sex, which I believe she was in the novel, but all the same I'd say the levels of modern right-on-ness are well below alarming. In fact, the most jarring scene for me wasn't Marian being a proto-feminist but Mr Fairlie's footman, Louis, rising up against him and demanding that he should apologise to his niece Laura at the end. Fond of Louis as Mr Fairlie seems to be - he is mentioned surprisingly often in Fairlie's narrative in the book - a servant would never be allowed to behave like that without being dismissed without a character. After all, there are other handsome footmen out here.

There are more serious problems with this adaptation than excessive pandering to modern sensibilities. For one thing, it feels way too long at four hours and a bit: the tense atmosphere of the novel doesn't quite translate, and I found myself yawning, especially in the beginning. Walter is little more than a pretty boy, whereas he should be a man of parts although he's the standard hero type. Above all, there's the presentation of the novel's main villain Count Fosco.

Yes, now it's finally time to address what I hinted at in the title. Riccardo Scamarcio is charismatic, but not in the Fosco way: he is far too Byronically dashing, and only a size-zero supermodel would call him fat. I could see Scamarcio working well as a world-weary seducer who's been at his game a while but is still very good at it. The novel's Fosco, though, is quite another sort of bad guy. He doesn't charm the domestic staff or Marian with smarmy hand-kisses but with bonhomie: he is the steely, amoral mastermind disguised as a jovial, humorous, sociable fat foreign gentleman. Although Fosco is a little too easy to like and "high-prestige" for me to be completely smitten with him as a villain, I appreciate him, and I've always assumed that the part in all its showiness would be an absolute gift for an actor. It seems, though, as if it's harder to bring Fosco into other media than the novel than one would have thought. The musical played him too much for laughs. In the Nineties adaptation, he was strangely muted - even though he was played by Simon Callow. Here, he is suddenly a Latin charmer, probably in order to make Marian's attraction to him more plausible to the viewers. This really isn't necessary. Fosco is no more conventionally handsome than Marian is conventionally pretty, but this doesn't stop them from coming across as attractive, exciting people in the novel. The challenge to rise to would surely have been to make this work in the TV format, too.

The Woman in White adaptation wariness

I could blame the heatwave for the long blog pause, but truth be told it's more a matter of dearth of subject matter. My reading these last weeks has included a) Once-related fan fiction (for the most part sadly Rumple-free) b) a pedestrian historic crime novel, which is neither good enough to merit a recommendation nor bad enough to merit a rant c) a YA novel which was actually very good indeed - but in Swedish (as the author, Sara Bergmark Elfgren, is one of the writers behind the successful The Circle, it may be translated soon - so even if you're a non-Swedish speaker, keep your eyes open for an atmospheric ghost story set in an old Stockholm school). As for TV viewing, it has been bitty and unambitious. And not even Han Solo - especially when he's not played by Harrison Ford - can get my lazy self to a cinema at the moment.

So we're back to the theme which has occupied me for a while now, which is: has costume drama abandoned me, or have I abandoned it? My last "what has happened to me?" pang came when I found out, via Amazon, that there was a new TV adaptation of The Woman in White available. I'm on record as approving of Wilkie Collins and recommending that his work should be brought to the small screen. Like everyone else, I consider The Woman in White to be his best novel. And yet, when I saw this adaptation advertised, my spontaneous reaction wasn't "Yes, finally!" but "Do I have to?".

There is, I know, a fairly new Moonstone adaptation out as well, but I feel on safer ground ignoring it as I have never pretended to like The Moonstone. The previous BBC adaptation from the Nineties was made bearable by containing some of my favourite then-living British thesps, albeit wasted in non-villain roles. I don't feel obligated to try another one, though. But The Woman in White? Count Fosco? Marian Halcombe? Charles Dance as hypochondriac Mr Fairlie? I should be excited, shouldn't I?

Grasping for other explanations for my lack of enthusiasm than the possible Macra-devolving of my mind, I can really only think of one - that adaptations of The Woman in White I've come across in the past haven't been that impressive. Again, there exists a Nineties adaptation, with Tara Fitzgerald - no less - in the pivotal role of Marian, Ian Richardson as Mr Fairlie and Simon Callow as a surprisingly svelte and comparatively low-key Fosco. You'd think it couldn't go wrong, but in spite of its stellar cast, it failed to thrill. What I remember best about it was my irritation over the fact that they changed the nature of "the Secret" which the woman in white of the title, Anne Catherick, claims to know. "The Secret" concerns Sir Percival Glyde, baronet, who also happens to be the person who keeps Anne locked up in an asylum (though to be fair, she doesn't seem altogether sane).

Now, I'm going to have to be spoilery about the book here. Sir Percival Glyde's secret is that his parents were never married: therefore he is illegitimate. Presumably, someone thought that modern viewers wouldn't be able to understand why anyone would go to great lengths to hide what, in most of the western world, no longer constitutes a moral stain on a person's character. But the point of Sir Percival's secret was never that he was ashamed. Wilkie Collins himself didn't think illegitimacy particularly shameful (see No Name), and not even Dickens - who could be infamously high-handed in moral matters (on paper, at least) - thought it fair to blame a child for the marital status or lack of it of its parents (see Bleak House). Victorians aren't necessarily as fusty as we imagine. What made "the Secret" so harmful for Sir Percical was its legal implications. Were it to be known that his parents were never married, he would lose his claim to both title and family fortune. It's actually an elegant twist that "the Secret" which Anne makes so much of isn't what makes Sir Percival a villain - it's the steps he takes to cover it up. I'm sure modern viewers are perfecly able to grasp that Sir Percival isn't a bastard for being, well, a bastard, but instead, Collins's intricate plot building was scrapped in favour of a child abuse story (this being a modish plot device in dramas at the time).

Then there was the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Like Love Never Dies, it contains some first-rate musical numbers, but is let down by its plot (and, in this case, sometimes by the lyrics). At the time I saw the Woman in White musical, what bothered me the most - as I was deep into my James Carker phase - was that B-list villain Sir Percival Glyde died in the same way as Carker, i.e. he was smashed under a train. I thought this was distasteful villain-death-snitching, and anyway, wasn't a burning church (which was how Sir Percival copped it in the book) dramatic enough? Now I understand the musical's references to  The Signalman better I can more readily understand the change of villain death, but there are three other changes to the story it is harder to forgive.

One, in the musical, Marian Halcombe is in love with Walter Hartright, the hero who swoons over her half-sister Laura Fairlie. This isn't the only place where this silly theory has been aired. I remember a sequel to The Woman in White that I read once - the main plot concerns how Walter (who's a painter) becomes obsessed with Turner - where Marian is also in love with Walter. I also seem to recall a theory that Collins, who himself had two women on the go, imagined a kind of ménage à trois consisting of Walter, Laura (the pretty one) and Marian (the clever one). But there is no indication whatsoever in the book that Marian is in love with Walter. It's unfair to give her selfish reasons for discouraging the Walter-Laura romance, like the musical does, when she sides one-hundred-per-cent with her sister throughout the novel and is downright annoyed when they can't find any obvious fault with Sir Percival which would justify Laura in breaking off their engagement. The man Marian frankly admits being attracted to (though of course she never acts on it as he's chummy with Sir Percival, married to Laura's aunt etc.) is Count Fosco. When it comes to classic novels, a heroine who admits to seeing the appeal of a villain (of the brainy kind - the worthless cads are doing all right) is a rare thing. And yet there are people who would have her pining after Walter!

Two, in the second part of the musical there's a cringeworthy scene where a tarted-up Marian flirts with Fosco and catches him off-guard so she can search his rooms for clues about Anne. The musical's Count Fosco is in fact far from a dead loss, though he's played too much for laughs. His lyrics are witty, and his big number "You Can Get Away With Anything" contains some worthwhile tips on how to be a successful (fictional) villain: "You can get away with anything, it all comes down to style... Yes, you can have your cake and eat it, the love of those whom you betray...". But the scene with Marian in seduction mode is degrading for them both. The novel's Marian, who wants to fight like a man, not a woman, would never stoop to such a stratagem, and Fosco would never fall for it.

Three, they changed "the Secret". Again. Granted, the musical's version is better than the TV adaptation's (Sir Percival has an affair with the thankfully just-about adult Anne Catherick and then drowns their child), but it's still so unnecessary. In the novel, when Walter hears Anne railing against Sir Percival he suspects that the baronet has "wronged" her in the usual, that is sexual way. When he hints to the girl that this could be the case, however, she is utterly bewildered. It's a fun way to up-end the reader's expectations - and it seems that the Victorian reader's expectations in this regard weren't that different from ours.

All the same, all these adaptation faux-pas should make me more inclined to see a new version which, perhaps, does better, not less. I have dutifully ordered the new adaptation and will watch it in due course. Reviews indicate that it may actually be faithful to the original story this time. The cover does look cheap, though.

Famous authors as characters (and narrators)

I haven’t had much luck in my reading of late, but after 50 pages of Drood by Dan Simmons I’m cautiously optimistic. Perhaps it’s partly due to my low expectations which were easy to exceed. For a long time, I passed Simmons’s novel by on my book-buying sprees, as the reviews had given me to understand that it  1) had horror-story elements  (and I don’t like horror stories) 2) was sneering about Dickens. In the end, though, immersing myself in yet another Dickens-themed tale proved too tempting, and besides the novel is acclaimed and can be seen as an Ambitious Book Project. After a lot of trying out of potentially soufflé-light reads which failed to give the proper comfort-blanket feel, maybe an ABP is exactly what I need.

I wasn’t wrong in my prejudices – Drood does have horror-story elements (though I’ve been able to stomach them so far) and it is sneering about Dickens. The sneeriness is largely a consequence of its narrator, though, who – supposedly – is Wilkie Collins, Dickens’s friend and protegé. Collins in this version is deeply envious of his older and more successful friend, and this colours everything he says about Dickens as a man and as a writer.

I find I can bear attacks on Charles Dickens’s character surprisingly well. Few people would contest that he behaved like a pig towards his long-suffering wife Catherine, for instance (though there are actually those who do). I have no problems in imagining Dickens as a difficult man; I admire him as a writer, not as a wonderful specimen of human kindness and philanthropy. Consequently, criticism of his writing is much harder to take, but in this context we needn’t credit the clearly biased narrator’s musings on the subject.

If anyone comes out of this set-up looking less good than he should it’s Wilkie Collins, and since I really like his books I think it’s a bit of a pity that he has to play the role of “Salieriesque rival” – as the blurb will have it – in Drood. I’d have preferred a fictional, envious sidekick to Dickens. Maybe the real Wilkie Collins’s position as young friend, colleague and reluctantly admitted almost-family member (Collins’s brother married Dickens’s daughter, a match Dickens didn’t care for), as well as an opium addict, is what makes him ideally placed to be the narrator of this book. I’ll take the liberty of seeing  Collins in Drood as fictional in substance, however, as I would like to think that the real Wilkie was a great deal less small-minded than he’s described as here.

One thing that makes it easier to imagine Drood Wilkie Collins and the real Wilkie Collins as separate people is that the narrative style in Drood doesn’t resemble Collins’s style at all. Again, this raises the question of why Collins is the narrator when he doesn’t even sound like Collins: on the other hand, we are spared cumbersome pastiche, which makes the novel a far more interesting read. I like Wilkie Collins’s style when he is the one using it, but I can imagine that it would not fare well in the hands of another author, especially as even the original can become a bit knotty at times when Collins insists on explaining every detail of his plot in order to make sure that there are no holes in it.

Another author whom you pastiche at your peril is Jane Austen. I’ve lost count of the times I wished that an Austen-themed novel – sequel, prequel, retelling, you name it – was not written in a supposedly Austenesque style. Austen managed to be pithy and amusing in spite of the regency feel of her prose. Modern authors, however, seem to use regency expressions in order to make the prose more genteel and circumspect than it need have been. This, in my view, is to misunderstand what makes Austen such a good writer – and it often makes for a boring read, too.

I’ve had mixed experiences with Stephanie Barron’s series of crime mysteries where Jane Austen is the narrator and sleuth. I remember enjoying Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor as a cosy manor-house mystery, and I liked the salaciously gossipy Jane and the Barque of Frailty (what it blithely presents as a known fact about Castlereagh even Wikipedia finds hard to credit). On the other hand, I can’t remember anything about Jane and the Wandering Eye except that I found it surprisingly heavy going, and recently I felt the same about Jane and the Man of the Cloth. In the latter case, I was also irritated by Jane’s crush on mercurial man of mystery Geoffrey Sidmouth, whom I found eminently resistible and notably underwritten, as if the mere idea of a moody squire with his own code of honour etc. should be enough to set hearts a-flutter. The books are written as pastiches on Austen’s style – it’s supposed to be extracts from her diary – and this simply weighs the narrative down, as do the faux-scholarly footnotes. Even if the real Jane Austen’s family does play a part, I was still left wondering why the heroine had to be Austen. There’s not much about her writing in the “diary extracts” (admittedly, what there is I enjoyed). The characters and plot of the book don’t connect to Austen’s novels in any interesting way. Surely, any plucky regency lass would have done just as well as protagonist, and would have been more likely to be susceptible to crushes than the level-headed Austen.

I’ll give this series a couple of more chances – after all, I’ve already purchased a few of the books in it. Man of the Cloth and Wandering Eye are early books, and maybe the mysteries pick up pace as the series moves along. But on the whole, I wonder if famous authors may have one thing in common with villains – they’re better off being depicted in novels at one remove, by someone close to them rather than supposedly in their own words.       

19th-century classics that would make good TV drama

Poldark series four. Victoria series two. The Crown season two. Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Les Misérables and Howard's End. No newly-scripted ensemble drama/family saga in the Downton mould in the offing that I've heard of - perhaps viewers like me, who failed to take The Halcyon to our hearts, are partly to blame, but even so. And no news of The Gilded Age, which Julian Fellowes is supposed to be scripting for American television. Hmmm.

As you may have gathered, I'm not all that excited about this "safety first" line-up of costume dramas, though I do enjoy watching Poldark, Victoria and The Crown. But instead of whining about the costume drama turnout as I usually do, I thought I'd be more constructive and actually give a few suggestions as to which novels would make good period telly. I'll not be broaching the Dombey and Son subject again, as I've already gone on about it here and here. And elsewhere.

Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens  I've never actually seen a TV adaptation of Barnaby Rudge, not even an old and dusty one. It must be ages since they did it. It's true, the novel has its faults, but they could easily be ironed out in an ace adaptation by, say, Andrew Davies (cut John Grueby, for one). There are many points in favour of Barnaby Rudge as a TV drama: an engaging title character, dramatic riot scenes, and an at least partly strong supporting cast including Maypole Hugh, Sim Tappertit, sharp-tounged Miss Miggs and the delightfully ignoble blind man Stagg. Not to mention Grip the raven (an animal trainer would be needed).

V for villain factor: High. This is the novel that includes Gashford and Sir John Chester - the latter even made my top ten male Dickens villains list. These are parts which I think top-notch British actors could do much with. Charles Dance could still work as Sir John, surely?

Armadale by Wilkie Collins Just about anything of what I've read by Collins would make great television - excepting perhaps Hide and Seek. I'll limit myself to mentioning the two books which I think are his best (apart from The Woman in White, which has been adapted, though not very well). Armadale takes a while to get going, but again this is something a skillful adapter would know how to deal with, plus watching the back-story acted out rather than narrated would be sure to add interest. It's a novel full of both incident and intrigue, and there are plenty of meaty parts as Collins knows how to take care of his secondary characters.

V for villain factor: No worthwhile male villains as I recall, but what a villainess! The flame-haired temptress Lydia Gwilt is so determined and intelligent she would be sure to appeal to male and female viewers alike - and you certainly can't say that for many femme fatales. One very likeable thing about her is that she remains completely unimpressed by the novel's ostensible hero, popular but dim-witted Allan Armadale, and instead falls head over heels for his loyal friend Midwinter, who is the far superior man. But Allan has the cash... What to do?

No name by Wilkie Collins  Anti-heroine Magdalen's efforts to regain the family inheritance she and her sister lost by unfortunate legal circumstances are another instance of exciting Collins plotting. She is wrong-headed and highly-strung to be sure, but needless to say a lot more interesting than her virtuous sister Norah. With new twists at every turn, this would make a thrilling mini-series, and whoever played Magdalen would have a show-case part which could bring her an award or two.

V for villain factor: It's not easy to say who counts as a villain, as you rather want Magdalen to succeed in her intrigues, though not at too high a cost for herself (and I don't think that's just me). The cousin who got the inheritance and whom she intends to ensnare, Michael Vanstone, I remember reminded me of the Disney cartoon version of Prince John in Robin Hood (it's been a while since I've read the book now). Not very impressive villain material then. Captain Wragge on the other hand, the swindler who helps Magdalen out and can be classified as either a high-prestige villain or a villain surrogate, is very entertaining, and his battle of wits against the equally intelligent Mrs Lecount, who tries to protect her master Vanstone from a woman she's convinced is up to no good, would surely be telly gold.

Villette or Shirley by Charlotte Brontë One is well-plotted, has an interesting setting and a memorable female antagonist. The other has two likeable heroines and a happy ending. Both have at least one worthwhile heroine love interest (irascible Paul Emanuel in Villette, somewhat Napoleonic mill owner Robert Moore in Shirley). If you could combine elements of these two novels, you'd have the perfect costume drama. As it is, it's hard to choose which one would work best on the small screen. My vote would, I think, go to Villette, as I remember it as being the better read. The heroine Lucy Snowe may not be a charmer, but she's not entirely without potential, and besides, they can't all be sunny, witty Lizzy Bennets. The ending poses more of a problem, but although Lucy almost certainly loses the love of her life she is successful professionally, so maybe it wouldn't have to be all bleak. One could do a "tomorrow is another day" spin on it.

V for villain factor: On the male front, zilch. Charlotte Brontë may give us brainy and interestingly flawed heroes as well as quite a lot of power play in the various love relationships, but there's a cost: she feels no need to introduce worthwhile male villains as other characters have already covered the cleverness and power-hungriness angle. And no, Brocklehurst still doesn't count. (Though wasn't there someone quite tasty in The Professor?) Madame Beck, the female antagonist mentioned above, is a great character, but the question is if she really counts as a villainess: she has nothing personal against Lucy, and when she opposes her you entirely see the Madame's point.

Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac or something else by Balzac, maybe? Colourful characters, attractive Parisian settings, lots of love entanglements, plotting that may sometimes surprise you, vivid language that would surely prove inspirational to an adapter - what's not to like? (All right, in this case, the appalling hero, or rather anti-hero, Lucien.) Not to mention...

V for villain factor: ... absolutely marvellous villains! The best in this novel are found in Lucien's provincial home: the two businessmen brothers Cointet, especially Boniface aka "the tall Cointet". He enlists the help of lawyer Petit-Claud (a good, solid minor villain) in order to pinch a valuable patent, and in return furthers his associate's career by arranging his marriage to the bastard daughter of a local nobleman. "She's so ugly", Petit-Claud complains. "Do you think you'd be allowed to have her if she was pretty?" Boniface coolly responds. There's a lot more in the same pleasingly cynical vein. Given that Balzac's villains can be so enjoyable, it's a wonder my interest in them never quite erupts into a long-lasting villain crush - with the exception of Frédéric de Nucingen, whom I did not fancy but felt a great deal of sympathy for in A Harlot High and Low, they are maybe somewhat lacking when it comes to leader of the pack appeal. But they're certainly good enough for a fictional villain fling.

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?                

Summer grumble

It starts with the bus stop tantrum. I seem to have one every year, in full view of a nervous audience of fellow travellers. The ongoing problem is, from the beginning of June to the middle of August, the bus timetables are changed and buses run much less frequently. This means you will either be far too early or a little late to wherever you're going - or, as is so often the case, much too late because the bus that is running is delayed (and packed, of course). Sometimes scheduled buses don't arrive at all. I certainly don't begrudge bus chauffeurs their holidays, but this drives me up the wall every single year. No effort seems to be made to keep time, and the impression you get is that the bus companies think that, hey, what does it matter, everyone's on holiday anyway. But I'm not on holiday. No-one's on holiday from June to August, worse luck. I'm still working, and the worst part of it is, I don't want to be. Having to run to catch a bus which then does not turn up or turns up ten minutes late only adds insult to injury.

The yearly bus stop tantrum is only a symptom of end-of-summer-term malaise. School is out, but work is still very much in. As the city shuts down around you and the TV channels start sending reruns, as the sun beats down and last-year pupils whoop and holler, enjoying one of the happiest days in their life, you are only too aware that your freedom is still far away - well, far-ish. It's not even as if things are slowing down, either at work or privately. There are so many things you need to fix "before the summer hols" that there is not much time for lazying in the sun - or out of it, comes to that.

But they will come, the holidays - and when they do, I'd quite like one of those famous good summer reads. In fact, I could do with one now. Why is it so hard to find an honest page turner? I tried another one of my family sagas and gave up after approximately a hundred pages - luscious descriptions of idyllic summer days full of honeysuckle, butterflies and what have you before Disaster Strikes (World War One) are not the best way to catch my interest. Not even Wilkie Collins can be relied on. The man in the black skull-cap in Hide and Seek turned out to be a sad disappointment - a Rough Diamond, if you please. I never much cared for men of the wild: I like my diamonds to be polished, thank you very much. Hide and Seek's plot reminded me of The Dead Secret in a way: in both novels, the characters who try to find out a secret and the ones trying to hide it are good-natured people, and so there is not much suspense. You know they will all get along swimmingly by the end. There was one plot twist I didn't see coming, but Hide and Seek still remains the weakest of the Wilkie Collins novel bunch. And even a pro-Victorian like myself must marvel at how little you need to do to be branded a vile seducer. No matter if you meant to marry the girl; no matter if you left the country not knowing she was pregnant; no matter if all your letters were intercepted through no fault of your own; no matter if you tried to make contact the moment you came back, only to learn that the girl was dead and the child you didn't know about had vanished without a trace; you are still a terrible person. Because you shouldn't have slept with her, should you? Not before you'd put a ring on her finger. I must say, supposedly moralistic Dickens cut Captain Hawdon in Bleak House much more slack than this.          

Anyway, I've now started reading a slim Swedish volume which seems to be evolving into an elegant chiller, set in a manor-house in an unspecified country during an unspecified war. I'm not greatly in favour of mysterious dystopias generally, but this story seems promising, and the author conjures up atmosphere without being boring. Perhaps I've struck gold at last - or at least first-rate electricity-conducting copper.

Short Eurovision lowdown - plus scraping the Wilkie Collins barrel

I don't feel up to much Eurovision blogging this time round. I was planning to do a review of the semi-finals and the finals and award prizes like "love triangle of the year" (Azerbaijan - both the crooner and his girl seemed more interested in the dancer in the box than each other), "vampire of the year" (Romania's answer to Farinelli), "stylish V-lizard-inspired fashion statement of the year" (Norway), "bad loser of the year" (guess - I'm not talking about the singer here but about her country's endlessly charming press) etc. However, the party's over now and my enthusiasm for the subject has nearly faded away. But hey, wasn't it an amazing show? I don't care that our boy-singer didn't get a better result: he did a respectable job with a song I personally didn't like much, and we didn't make fools of ourselves. The contests were professionally organised and hosted, and if the humour was a little strained sometimes, it was still P.G. Wodehouse compared to normal Eurovision standards. At last, one of my new year wishes came true!

On the reading front, I have come through one of my impulse-bought family sagas, which turned out to be more of a Catherine Cookson-inspired, heroine-faces-up-to-grim-destiny-and-wins-through-up-north tale. It wasn't a disaster, but neither was it brilliant. I suspect Cooksonish stories are most enjoyable in TV form (but then they are very enjoyable). I needed a safe card after that, and so I picked a fairly early novel by Wilkie Collins, Hide and Seek.

I'm well read-up on Collins by now. I've read his most famous novels (The Woman in White, The Moonstone), the ones experts think should be more famous (Armadale, No Name), the almost-as-famous as the almost-famous ones (Man and Wife, Poor Miss Finch), novels generally considered to be also-rans (The Law and The Lady, The Dead Secret) and some of his shorter fiction, like No Thoroughfare which he co-wrote with Dickens. Enough bragging: the simple reason I keep returning to Collins is that he's such a good writer. Even a Collins also-ran is more interesting and more vivaciously written than many modern authors' best efforts. I have to say, however, that so far Hide and Seek is the weakest of the Collins novels I've read. I even liked The Moonstone more - which is saying something, as that book is a bit of a bug-bear of mine.

Collins's language is lively here as elsewhere: he knows how to freshen up descriptive and getting-from-A-to-B passages with flashes of humour, and he takes care of his secondary characters. The problem is, if Collins can do charming and engaging characters, he can also do very annoying ones. The main characters in Hide and Seek, if not as annoying as, say, Sir Patrick in Man and Wife or just about every protagonist in The Moonstone, are nevetheless on the irritating side. This may be because, for once in Collins, they are dangerously close to being stereotypes. The story of how the Philantropic Painter Valentine Blyth rescues the Beautiful Child Mary aka "Madonna" from a Dastardly Circus Owner reminded me of the melodrama acted by a group of itinerant players in the Lucky Luke adventure The White Knight (I'll probably return to this adventure at a later date, if ever I blog about what I call the "Lucky Luke audience syndrome" - confusing actors with the characters they play). It is such a basic and shamelessly button-pushing plot - good man, bad man, innocent child - as to be ridiculous. Back at home, the Philantropic Painter has a Bravely Long-Suffering Invalid Wife. The Beautiful Child grows up to be a Good and Beautiful Woman and, what do you know, she bears her fate with courage and good humour too (she's deaf and dumb as a result of a riding accident in the circus). She falls in love with a Good-hearted but Wayward Youth. Please, enough!

The other plot strand so far - how the strict upbringing of Mary's object of affection Zack has turned him wayward, in spite of himself - is even less interesting than the saccharine Blyth household. Strange how even plot-lines meaning to show that you shouldn't be too moralistic can stick in your craw if they're over-didactic. I saw from a glance at the Introduction that Hide and Seek is often compared to Dickens's Hard Times. I look forward to reading more about this once I've finished the book (you should never read an Introduction unless you already know what's going to happen in the novel). For all the surface differences - good circus owner versus bad circus owner, taking a circus girl away from the troop as a doubtful project versus taking her away as an unequivocal good thing (even if it means tearing her away from her foster mother), the perils of an over-scientific education versus the perils of an over-evangelical one - the two novels have a fault in common in my view. They are trying to prove their point or points at the expense of character complexity.

I'm not giving up yet, though - I have hopes that Hide and Seek will become more exciting in the second part of the book, the one called "Seeking". The opening chapter of this part is called "The Man with the Black Skull-Cap". Good. I like skull-caps.          

Wrapping up Great Expectations

The last episode of the new Great Expectations adaptation was a bit of a let-down, because once again - it was the same with the Rampling version - they failed to get the relationship between Pip and Magwitch right. It is really important that an adapter follows Dickens closely here. In the novel, Magwitch never guesses that Pip is disappointed in his benefactor - and I and I suspect a great many other readers want to keep it that way. But no, the modern the-truth-must-out-generation feels compelled to change the story so that Magwitch does suss that he's not wanted, but by the end he and Pip have formed a bond based on true feelings. For pity's sake, people! There are more important things than honesty at all costs, and Magwitch's affection for Pip being undimmed by trouble from first to last is one of them. Go and do a high school movie and get all that "truth prevails" nonsense out of your systems.

Miss Havisham's personality change ended up bugging me more in the last episode than in the two previous ones, as she's not even allowed a proper epiphany. The TV adaptation's Miss Havisham, apart from her little-girl-lost ways, is also meaner to Pip than she was in the book. There, Miss Havisham's cruelty was more an indication of indifference than anything else: Pip was someone for Estella to practice on, and someone Miss Havisham could annoy her relatives with. He was collateral damage. In the adaptation, as a contrast, she starts him dreaming of becoming a gentleman only to consciously dash his hopes by paying for his apprenticeship. I don't think it entered Miss Havisham's head in the novel that her payment of Pip's apprenticeship might not be welcomed by him. Even so, there is an argument for a more malicious Havisham-treatment of Pip: he is a man, after all.

What is necessary, in my view, is that Miss Havisham realises the grief she has caused him and others by witnessing his impassioned plea to Estella. She recognises the pain of thwarted love and is sorry. This is central to the novel: in the adaptation, however, Miss Havisham is unmoved by Pip's plight and doesn't scruple to make things worse by insulting him. It's only after she's lost Estella completely that she asks his forgiveness, rather half-heartedly. Her death becomes more or less another act of self-indulgence.

These and a few changes to Magwitch's back story which left Jaggers looking worse than he is were my main gripes, but other things were handled well. Pip's debts were reduced to an amount which it would be plausible for Joe to pay off. Pip paying Magwitch's jailers and undertakers with bits and pieces of his gentleman uniform such as his rings and his cane was a nice touch, and so was Estella thanking the horse that did for the spot-on loathsome Drummle. The ending, thankfully, had the right note of hope. All in all, still a better Great Expectation adaptation than the last one.

What is the BBC planning to do next in the Victorian novel genre, though? A new Moonstone, if you please! I've started to rewatch the spendidly cast version from 1996 trying to figure out how they could possibly improve on it. No luck so far. The story moves along smoothly, the characters are shorn of their most irritating characteristics and played by the cream of English actordom. As I've said before, I find The Moonstone overrated as a book, and this is already a better adaptation than it deserves. Why waste time on a new one? Please, BBC, be a little original once in a while. Why not do Armadale instead?

A delicate balance

A few weeks back, the author and critic Philip Hensher wrote a very readable article on villains, regretting the fact that the age of the charismatic villain in the mould of Shakespeare’s Richard III (have I mentioned that he has nothing to do with the historical Richard? I have? Let’s move on then) seems to be past. They just don’t make’em like that any more. Hensher, who has read a great deal more modern fiction than I am ever likely to, has a theory about why authors of today seldom deliver on the villain front. They are simply too fond of seeing everything from everybody’s point of view: instead of condemning a potetial villain’s behaviour, they want to understand him. “What is needed in imaginative writing, perhaps, is a little less sympathy and a little more judgement” is Hensher’s conclusion.

It is always cheering to read the reflections of another villain lover – and a Dickens fan, too – and in my view, Hensher’s on to something. The “bad guy” in a novel often thrives on the appalled reactions of other characters, and occasionally of the narrator (though I find wry distance more fitting in the latter case). Needless to say, for a baddie, being called “villain” or ”scoundrel” is only gratifying, as are comparisons with predatory or otherwise sinister animals such as wolves, tigers, vultures and sharks. Accusations of coldness, heartlessness and ruthlessness also look good on a dastardly CV. Talleyrand is supposed to have said about his political rival Fouché that he had “a heart of diamond, a stomach of iron and an eye without tears”. This is the kind of glowing review that a villain – and his groupies – would appreciate. Conversely, it is possible to hug a villain to death by showing too much sympathy for him (or her – I’m not denying the existence of wonderful villainesses, though I confess I’m more interested in the male of the species). If a baddie is too obviously endorsed by the author, you get at best a high-prestige villain, like Count Fosco and Long John Silver , whom many people will like but who do not create the same illicit thrill as Shakespeare’s Richard III. At worst, you end up with a failure, albeit often an interesting one: either the author can’t bear to let his/her darling go through with the wicked deeds required for the plot, so the potential baddie turns out to be a bit of a wet, or he goes through with his plans, in which case the author’s soppiness unsettles us – is he/she saying that murder, theft, horrible vengeance etc. are OK now?

On the other hand, you can overdo the ostracising of a baddie. I do think a good villain deserves his/her day in court. That’s why Dickensian villains are of such superior quality (mostly): you see where they come from, while realising that through their own bitterness and wrong-headedness they have ended up in the wrong place. And there is one drawback of heaping abuse on your villain: if he turns out to be a cracker, those doing the heaping will look a bit stupid. How popular will a hero or heroine be who is continually sniffy about a character that many readers see as the most interesting in the whole book?

A balance is needed, I think, between sympathy and judgement. A villain should ideally have a case (though admittedly there are those charistmatic enough to do without one) but not one good enough to excuse his actions. As for the scarcity of great modern villains, could the decline of epic narratives such as the Victorian novel have something to do with it? A villain thrives on drama: slightly dreary descriptions of the small disappointments of everyday life, which seem to be popular among modern authors, aren’t really a good setting for colourful characters, wicked or not.

Holding out for a villain

This is the time of year when I should feel my spirits reviving after a long, cold winter. Spring is in the air, or nearly. I no longer have to have my extra radiator on all the time. But still the winter melancholy lingers, the working weeks feel long and the weekends feel short. Not much to moan about, considering, and I know it. I can't help but wonder, though: where did the spring feeling go?

Maybe one problem is I haven't discovered a new fanciable villain in simply ages. And now there aren't any Dickens novels, or even Christmas books, left to explore (not that you'll find much villain talent in a Christmas book). Bit-part-playing Bitzer was the - appropriately white - last unicorn. Yes, of course I can wallow in old favourites as long as I want to, but it would be nice to discover something new. But where to find someone with the same magic touch villain-wise as Dickens?

Balzac, maybe? I read quite a lot of him when I studied French, and he had a good line in dastardly bankers and other "lynxes". It would mean brushing up on my French, though, or cheating by reading him in Swedish - or, an even worse insult for a French author, in English! Ibsen? That Judge Somebody-or-Other in "Hedda Gabler" sounds a dish judging by various reviews, maybe I should check him out?

You may be wondering why I'm overlooking the obvious. Here's an author, you might be saying, who creates great villains - in fact, great characters of all descriptions - and whom I've mentioned in my blog more than once. Wilkie Collins, remember?

I do remember. I am faithfully watching the old adaptation I've mentioned earlier of "The Woman in White" and am constantly reminded of what an admirable villain Count Fosco is. Charming, funny, psychologically astute, with great force of character, appreciative of Marian's intelligence, and completely ruthless when he has to be - the man ticks all kinds of boxes. Plus, Marian more or less admits at one point that she finds him attractive. A Victorian heroine who is attracted, even the littlest bit, to a brainy villain (as opposed to the feather-brained cads heroines otherwise seem to favour if they so much as think of straying): now, that has to be a first.

Count Fosco belongs to a certain sort of villain by whom you are allowed - even supposed - to be taken in. Long John Silver is another specimen. "It's all right", you can almost imagine the author saying, "go ahead and like this rogue. I've a soft spot for him myself, in fact". I call baddies like this high-prestige villains, and they are very enjoyable and useful: they act as ambassadors for villain-lovers everywhere, and are one of the chief reasons people don't look at you as if you should be locked up when you confess to a bias for baddies. But (and this but has been coming for quite some time) where's the fun in loving a villain you're supposed to love? Where's the sport? No, high-prestige villains are good in their way, but they're for amateurs. I'd like something more hardcore.

Maybe I should try "The Changeling" by Middleton? Or is that too hardcore?

Making Daniel Deronda palatable

I seem to be stuck half-way in several TV series at once at the moment. "West Wing" season one - because I've seen it too many times and am starting to pick holes in the manipulative (if funny) argumentation. "Fame" season two - because the next episode is apparently another Disability Issue Episode (Wilkie Collins could have taught the preachy script-writers a thing or two). An old adaptation of "The Woman in White", which there is nothing wrong with really, only sometimes you want to watch something with a bit more pep. I haven't even started with "Lorna Doone" which I've borrowed from my parents, despite the blurb's promise of "one of the worst villains of all time".

One TV series I have managed to finish watching, though, is the 2002 adaptation of George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda". The adapter is Andrew Davies, and he shows yet again why he is the king of classic costume drama here. He has a trick of making potentially problematic characters just that little bit more bearable. You would not have thought from the "Middlemarch" adaptation that Will Ladislaw in the book is a self-centred, immature, preening, spectacularly ungrateful pain in the neck. Scenes wisely cut from the TV version include the one where he glumly reflects that he might as well sleep with Rosamond (the wife of one of his friends, let's not forget) because he has lost everything anyway and he was kind of mean to her; the one where he visits Casaubon's church just to spite him; and the one where he makes Bulstrode cry (true, that whole subplot was cut, but I suspect it wasn't only for simplification reasons - I doubt even Rufus Sewell would have looked good pouring scorn over Peter Jeffrey's tormented banker). As I've commented on earlier, Darcy owes much of his popularity to the treatment Davies gives him in the "P&P" adaptation - for instance, the scene where Darcy apologises to Bingley for interfering in his love life is added by Davies and does much to reconcile us with the way he treated Jane. In "Daniel Deronda", it is Deronda himself who gets the Andrew Davies makeover.

And my goodness he needs it. In the irritating hero department he outshines Will Ladislaw by far. I actually saw the "Daniel Deronda" adaptation for the first time before I've read the book, and I realise I may have been influenced by Romola Garai's five-star performance as Gwendolen Harleth when reading it, but I remember being squarely on Gwendolen's side throughout, and wondering what a woman like her - so human and complex - saw in the smug, self-regarding twerp Deronda. What, he teach her about morals? He who won't tell Mirah, the other woman in his life (who can't hold a candle to Gwendolen) when he thinks he has found her long-lost family, because he finds them common? He who is angry with his kind and loving guardian Sir Hugo Mallinger when he finds out about his real descent, although he generously decides to forgive Sir Hugo for bringing him up as his own son in the lap of luxury? And on the basis of what pearls of wisdom does Gwendolen consider Deronda worthy of being her moral compass? Why, because he disapproves of gambling because the gambler's gain "is another's loss". There are many good arguments, both ethical and commonsensical, against gambling, but this is surely not one of them. Yes, a gambler's winnings have once belonged to losers at the gaming-table, but they have passed through the hands of the gambling-house's bank after that, and if no-one had won they would have stayed there. The "another" whose loss one is supposed to condole is in fact the gambling-house. Well, boo-hoo.

Tha adaptation does include the gambling gaffe (though softened and reluctantly uttered) and Deronda's unfathomable objection to the kind-hearted Cohens, who luckily for him turn out not to be Mirah's family after all. But otherwise, the protagonist comes across more as Gwendolen's best friend than a pontificating moralist. He is always giving her pep talks, saying things like "you musn't think that" when she starts blaming herself. Also, he keeps looking as if he very much wanted to kiss her, which is not what a moral compass is supposed to do. Deronda is played by the good-looking Hugh Dancy, who spends most of the series seeming very upset rather than superior. It worked well when he played David Copperfield in the Hallmark adaptation of that novel, and it works rather well here as well. Though you still don't understand what makes Daniel Deronda so special that two very attractive women should come close to an unladylike cat-fight about him.

Davies has pruned well in other respects too - for instance, the part of Mordecai has been so ruthlessly cut that he actually appears to be intense and charismatic rather than a perfect bore. But all credit should not go to Davies. The adaptation is well-directed and extremely well-cast. Jodhi May lends such warmth to Mirah that you can almost accept that she's Deronda's True Love, and Hugh Bonneville shines in the role of chilling sadist Mallinger Grandcourt. His range is impressive - he has played Charles Bovary and other decent sorts just as convincingly.

What I also like about this adaptation - and here I'm back to Davies-gushing - is the fact that there is a small but vital scene which I can't remember being in the book. Deronda comes across Mirah praying, is awed by her piety and confesses he has never felt very pious, and that he envies her. In the novel, I was bothered by the fact that Deronda just shrugged of Christianity like an old coat, and no-one even appeared shocked by it. Also, his fascination with Judaism seemed to have more to do with its rich culture and with his regard for persons such as Mirah and Mordecai than with any religious aspects. The prayer scene adds a needed religious dimension to what is after all the story of a man's conversion - rather, it is hinted here, from indifference to Judaism than from Christianity to Judaism.

Wilkie Collins and women

I have neglected the historical studies lately. The reason is that, after having finished reading the satisfactory Jude Morgan regency romance "A Little Folly" (he really is just as good as Heyer, if not better, though the Austenesque moral message grates a bit - less painful self-revelation for the heroine, please!) I started yet another Wilkie Collins novel. I've read quite a lot of them by now and am constantly surprised at how good they are, even the unknown ones. The only one who has really disappointed me is, strangely enough, "The Moonstone". Whenever I've had problems with some aspects of the other books - the time it takes for the author to set the scene for the really thrilling plot in "Armadale" (though the pre-history is dramatic, it reads a little like a summary of a serialised novel in a women's magazine: you almost expect it to end with the words "now read on"), the disappointing ending of "The Law and the Lady", the seriously irritating lawyer-hero Sir Patrick in "Man and Wife" - I've always ended up thinking: "come on, it's still good, and way better than 'The Moonstone'".

I may have a good moan about "The Moonstone" at a later date, but for now I'd like to dwell on one of the things Collins does really well, and that is female characters. The novel I'm reading right now is "Poor Miss Finch", and though the titular heroine Lucilla Finch is charming enough, though a little missish, the most likeable female in the book is the strong-minded, honest, opinionated, loyal and affectionate Madame Pratolungo, her companion, who is the novel's chief narrator.

Like so many of Collins's admirable women, Madame Pratolungo is a "doer". She engages herself wholeheartedly for the welfare of Lucilla and shows endless initiative. She doesn't mince words either. When Lucilla's love Oscar acts like a poor fish (which one can't help thinking that he is, even though Madame Pratolungo has reason to revise her bad opinion of him as the story unfolds) she gives him an earful. When Oscar's twin brother Nugent starts to get uppity, she gives him an earful. Not that these earfuls help a lot, because the brothers are both in their separate ways pig-headed, but you love Madame Pratolungo for trying. In a way, she is a good version of the impressive female baddie Mrs Lecount in "No Name": they are both resourceful French widows, often reduced to bullying the weak-willed menfolk around them, and they both love and revere their late husbands. Madame Pratolungo memorably remarks regarding the aversion Lucilla (who is blind) has to dark colours and complexions: "This singular prejudice of hers against dark people was a little annoying to me on personal grounds [...] Between ourselves, the late Doctor Pratolungo was of a fine mahogany brown all over."

It is strange that Collins, who created characters like Marian Halcombe in "The Woman in White", Lydia Gwilt in "Armadale", Valeria Woodville in "The Law and the Lady", the two aforementioned French widows and many other fine female characters often speaks so slightingly and patronisingly about women in general. Granted, it is his characters who speak and not he personally, but you have the feeling you are supposed to agree when, for instance, Sir Patrick muses on the female sex and its weaknesses. But I suppose, as a woman, you have to take the rough with the smooth.

The disability lobby must feel equally ambivalent about Wilkie Collins's outlook. On one side, he includes a large number of characters with one handicap or another in his novels and enters feelingly into their situation. On the other hand, these characters are no better or worse than the others, and their particular disability is shamelessly milked for dramatic effect. The novella "The Guilty River" is a case in point: the baddie in this story is deaf, and he is not able to become a better person until his deafness has been cured. At the same time, the story contains a harrowing account of how his condition separates him from his fellow men. I rather like this - horrible word - unsentimental approach. It must surely be a "right" worth having to be depicted as a flawed or downright villainous character in a novel - they are so much more interesting than butter-wouldn't-melt goodies. But then you're talking to the girl whose favourite fictional blind character is Pew in "Treasure Island".