by Jonathan Coe

In the course of their famous book-length interview, Francois Truffaut once asked Alfred Hitchcock about his approach to literary adaptation. Hitch’s response was as magisterial, worldly and mischievous as one would expect: “What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema. Today I would be unable to tell you the story of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds. I read it only once, and very quickly at that.”

When it comes to films adapted from literary sources, 99 times out of 100 I’m with Hitchcock. Draw up one of those faintly ludicrous but fascinating lists of the 20 greatest novels, and then do the same for movies. Do they match up? Of course not. James Joyce’s Ulysses might well be on the first list, but Joseph Strick’s Ulysses (1967) certainly won’t make the second. Pride and Prejudice could possibly be on the first, but neither Robert Z. Leonard’s nor Joe Wright’s adaptations will make the second. And none of these examples is a travesty, exactly, although recent film history is littered with examples of good novels transformed into outright disasters. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and The Bonfire of the Vanities spring immediately to mind.

Looking a little more closely at Hitchcock’s remark will give us a clear explanation of why. The question Truffaut asked specifically was whether Hitchcock would ever consider making a screen adaptation of a great novel such as Crime and Punishment. The director said: “Well, I shall never do that, precisely because Crime and Punishment is somebody else’s achievement. And even if I did, it probably wouldn’t be any good.”

“Why not?” Truffaut asked.

“Well, in Dostoevsky’s novel there are many, many words and all of them have a function.”

“You mean that theoretically,” Truffaut prompted. “A masterpiece is something that has already found its . . . definitive form.”

“Exactly,” Hitchcock answered. “And to really convey that in cinematic terms, substituting the language of the camera for the written word, one would have to make a six to 10-hour film. Otherwise, it won’t be any good.”

The point may seem obvious, but it holds good. Any two-hour feature film which attempts to render, in cinematic terms, the full complexity of a serious novel-length work of fiction is almost certainly doomed. That’s why some of the most satisfying screen adaptations have been television serials — from the definitive 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice to the one that looms over them all, the 1981 Granada adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, which allowed itself a luxurious 659 minutes to portray the novel’s 350 or so pages.

So are there rare celluloid exceptions, occasions when a demonstrably fine literary work has been adapted into an equally fine piece of cinema? Could such prodigies really be so hard to find?

Looking at this year’s most high-profile releases, it’s striking how often filmmakers turn still to the contemporary or recent novel for material. We have had films based on, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version, and True Grit by Charles Portis. In the latter case the Coen brothers have gone out of their way to adapt the novel rather than remake the John Wayne classic. 127 Days and The Social Network were also adapted from literary sources, albeit non-fiction ones.

Barney’s Version might stand as a textbook demonstration of the pitfalls, as well as the rewards, of transferring literary material to the screen. It is an entertaining, funny, well-crafted film. It broadly adheres to the narrative highlights of its source material and was obviously made out of love and reverence for Richler, both as a writer and as a Canadian public figure. (Friends and younger members of his family appear in walk-on roles.) And yet there is no getting away from the fact that it is radically unfaithful to the tone and the narrative strategies of the novel.

Richler’s long, complex, tricksy novel is probably unfilmable. It’s a construct, which in Truffaut’s phrase, “has already found its definitive form”, and any attempt to transfer it to another medium is doomed to do no more than skim the surface.

More faithful adaptations can be found at the other end of the literary spectrum in shorter literary works. Joyce’s The Dead was made into an exceptional screen version by director John Huston.

The story itself is an odd, beautifully misshapen thing. Roughly 40 of its 50 pages are devoted to a detailed description of the annual Christmas party of two elderly Dublin sisters and Huston follows this narrative contour with absolute fidelity.

From the early 1900s, literature and film became storytelling bedfellows, and it must be for this reason that nearly all the best adaptations are of modern books, while attempts at doing the pre-20th-century novel on celluloid usually end up as mummification rather than reinvention. (As always, there are exceptions: I have a soft spot for Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones and John Schlesinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd, although these are both really swinging ’60s romps in period costume.)

Joseph Losey’s 1967 Accident, with Dirk Bogarde and Michael York, presents another example of modernist literature and cinema conjoining as if made for one another. Nicholas Mosley’s novel, published in 1965, must have seemed gleamingly strange and original at the time. Today it feels even more so.

Harold Pinter adapted it and wrote probably the best of his produced screenplays. We seem, in fact, to have a case of novelist and adapter so in sync with each other that a sort of symbiosis starts to operate. The thought and speech rhythms of Mosley’s central character Stephen, an Oxford philosophy don, seem to have seeped into Pinter’s consciousness. Moreover, Pinter appears to be so tuned in to Mosley’s cadences that he is able to transpose some of his dialogue verbatim and then improve upon it.

Mosley has one of his dons remark on a survey of students at Colenso University, Milwaukee, which shows that 70 per cent of them have sex in the evening, 29.9 per cent in the afternoon and 0.1 per cent during a lecture on Aristotle. In Pinter’s version, this is followed by a bored silence, broken only by the Provost observing laconically: “I’m surprised to hear Aristotle is on the syllabus in the state of Wisconsin.”

We might look at Accident now and feel our jaws drop at the thought that there was once an era when something so unashamedly highbrow could attract commercial financing and receive a wide release. The film makes no concession to its mass audience in rendering the oblique, rarefied atmosphere of Mosley’s novel. The single most surprising thing about it, now, is that it allows itself to preserve all of the original’s many ambiguities.

And this, perhaps, suggests a reason why, even though modern literature and cinema could easily form a natural partnership, the marriage nowadays is so rarely successful. So much of the best modern fiction tends towards ambiguity and open-endedness, while increasingly the commercial cinema has a fetish for closure and ends neatly tied.

This might be a partial explanation for the disappearance into near-oblivion of what I consider to be one of the best adaptations of a modern novel ever made, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. It was published in 1981 and, 30 years on, has already achieved the status of a minor classic. Bill Forsyth’s film version, made in 1987, is an unswervingly faithful adaptation, preserving the narrative shape, the tone, the desolate backwoods atmosphere, even finding visual correlatives for Robinson’s scriptural, luminous prose. And yet it has been almost completely forgotten.

The film stars Christine Lahti as Sylvie, a wanderer and free spirit who finds herself, through a series of family tragedies, summoned back to Fingerbone, Idaho, to look after her orphaned nieces, Ruth and Lucille.
One of the unusual things about Housekeeping, the movie, is that it’s an adaptation made by someone not previously known for adaptations — in this case, a writer/director of original screenplays who had already staked out a highly personal territory. Forsyth became famous for his second feature, the charming comedy Gregory’s Girl, in the early 1980s before scoring a considerable commercial success with Local Hero, which was followed by the more introverted and melancholy Comfort and Joy.

Housekeeping, the first fruit of his troubled American career, came as a surprise to most of his admirers. In it, Forsyth has submerged his own creative voice, putting himself entirely at the service of another artist’s vision, with a commitment born out of passionate admiration for Robinson’s novel.

At just over 200 pages, with a broadly linear narrative, the book doesn’t pose the same kind of structural or compressive challenges that something like Barney’s Version throws up. Forsyth uses voice-over, but uses it sparingly. Loose-limbed, intimate, rigorously economical in its dialogue and its storytelling, Housekeeping doesn’t feel like an adaptation at all. It doesn’t feel “literary” either. Its most magical sequence shows Ruth setting out with Sylvie to explore a secret place — “stunted orchard and lilacs and stone doorstep and fallen house, all white with a brine of frost” — and then spending a whole night out on the lake.

You don’t get the many words judiciously chosen and crafted in the book. Instead, you get the British Columbian landscape photographed in all its dappled beauty by Michael Coulter, you get Mike Gibbs’s eerie, subtly dissonantmusic (scored for stringsonly), and the utterly truthful, unaffected performances of Lahti and the young Sara Walker. And for once, it feels like a fair exchange.

The novel ends — if I’m reading it correctly — on a note of poised ambiguity. Having alienated the townspeople, Sylvie and Ruth make a daring escape by nightfall across the narrow, precarious railway bridge which extends for miles across the lake. Do they make it, or do they die in the attempt? Robinson does not quite let us know, and neither does Forsyth, ending his film with the dark, tantalising image of the two fugitives dwarfed by the parallel lines of track stretching in front of them into infinite blackness. It’s a comfortless but arresting image, typical of a film which — like the novel — refuses classification as comedy, tragedy, or anything in between.
There lies its greatness — and therein, as far as Hollywood is concerned, its inevitable failure. In an unhappily prophetic 1985 interview, Forsyth — then scouting locations for the film — reflected that, with loose cannons like him, studios were always going to “worry that you are going to get involved in something that is unwatchable or, worse, unmarketable”.

Housekeeping’s disappearance from the collective memory bank of most filmgoers proves nothing except that Forsyth made an unmarketable film. But he also did the right thing. He honoured his source material; and incidentally proved that even Hitchcock — now and again — could be wrong.