Abridging your own book

The novel I'm supposed to review for the local newspaper turns out to be - to me - dull and not inviting to read. I've read fifty pages, and seem no further ahead than I was at the start. I won't say what the book is, because someone else may find it more to their liking than me.

So last night, when it came to going in the bath and wanting something to read, I dug around on my bookshelves and picked up That Hideous Strength by C S Lewis. I've read it twice before, but quite some time ago. Once way back when I was in my thirties, I think, or maybe even earlier, when I was still in London. And once again since at some point. The general story has stuck in my head, but little of the detail.

It turned out that the print in the Pan edition I've got has 'shrunk' over the years, making it rather hard to read. I'm having to use magnifying glasses over my ordinary glasses at present just to read the newspaper, and the computer and the music. It's surprising how many things have become just that much more difficult to read clearly in the last few years.

There’s a note in this Pan edition that says Lewis himself had abridged the original some five or six years after the first edition came out. He writes in a Preface: In reducing the original story to a length suitable for this edition, I believe I have altered nothing but the tempo and the manner. I myself prefer the more leisurely pace - I would not wish even War and Peace or The Faerie Queen any shorter - but some critics may well think this abridgement is also an improvement. 

Lewis was plainly loathe to do to abridge his story, nevertheless this second version reads so well you wouldn't think of it as being edited down, unlike the Reader's Digest abridged versions, for example, which often cut out huge swathes of material, and wound up with books less than half the length of the original.

So, with the print being very small in the Pan edition I thought I’d get a copy on Kindle.

I found a combined edition of all three of Lewis' ‘Space’ trilogy, and bought it. It was only when I compared it to the version I'd started reading that I found extra material in the first paragraph, and more beyond. It turned out to be Lewis' original version, and all sorts of additional material appears in it. His abridged version is very well done; what is missing from the later edition is often writing that adds to the characters in some way, or the general detail. Comparing the two editions would be a good exercise for any writer: Lewis shows how much can be deleted from a text without loss. The tempo is certainly quickened; we're not held up by interesting little sidepaths that add to characterization. But these sidepaths remain interesting. They're not excess.

Out of interest, I thought I'd compare a little of the opening of chapter two in the abridged version with the original. The abridged is first.

"This is a blow!" said Curry.
"Something from the N.O.?" said Busby. He and Lord Feverstone and Mark were all drinking sherry before dining with Curry. N.O., which stood for Non Olet, was the nickname of Charles Place, the Warden of Bracton.
"Yes, blast him," said Curry. "Wishes to see me on a most important matter after dinner."
"That means," said the Bursar, "that Jewel and Co. have been getting at him and want to find some way of going back on the whole business."
"Jewel! Good God!" said Busby, burying his left hand in his beard.

The original is much more expansive. Note the detail in the first paragraph alone, and the extensive background on Place, who's only a minor character, and the additional dialogue later in this extract. 

“This is a blow!” said Curry, standing in front of the fireplace in his magnificent rooms which overlooked Newton. They were the best set in College.
“Something from N.O.?” said James Busby. He and Lord Feverstone and Mark were all drinking sherry before dining with Curry. N.O., which stood for Non Olet, was the nickname of Charles Place, the Warden of Bracton. His election to this post, some fifteen years before, had been one of the earliest triumphs of the Progressive Element. By dint of saying that the College needed “new blood” and must be shaken out of its “academic grooves” they had succeeded in bringing in an elderly civil servant who had certainly never been contaminated by academic weaknesses since he left his rather obscure Cambridge college in the previous century, but who had written a monumental report on National Sanitation. The subject had, if anything, rather recommended him to the Progressive Element. They regarded it as a slap in the face for the dilettanti and Die-hards, who replied by christening their new warden Non Olet. But gradually even Place’s supporters had adopted the name. For Place had not answered their expectations, having turned out to be a dyspeptic with a taste for philately, whose voice was so seldom heard that some of the junior Fellows did not know what it sounded like.
“Yes, blast him,” said Curry. “Wishes to see me on a most important matter as soon as I can conveniently call on him after dinner.”
“That means,” said the Bursar, “that Jewel and Co. have been getting at him and want to find some way of going back on the whole business.”
“I don’t give a damn for that,” said Curry. “How can you go back on a resolution? It isn’t that. But it’s enough to muck up the whole evening.”
“Only your evening,” said Feverstone. “Don’t forget to leave out that very special brandy of yours before you go.”
“Jewel! Good God!” said Busby, burying his left hand in his beard.

Certainly a great example of how to edit your own work and do an excellent job of it!

The Fall

[Spoiler alert.]

Tarsem Singh's film, The Fall, is a visual extravaganza, with some utterly beautiful shots, many extraordinary locations, a great deal of imagination, and a performance from a young Romanian actress called Catinca Untaru (she was eight or nine at the time the movie was made) which is as natural as you can get on film.  Even some of her mishaps with her lines have been left in and add to the charm.  She plays opposite adult actor, Lee Pace, and the pair are fine together. 

Regrettably, The Fall starts out with a good idea, with humour, with a great deal of fantasy, but increasingly becomes incoherent.  What could easily have been a film to delight children (my grandson was watching it until it suddenly became increasingly violent) turns into a film that loses its plot - literally. 

Both Alexandria (Untaru) and Roy Walker (Pace) are patients in a very casually-run hospital around the time silent movies were becoming increasingly successful.  He's a stuntman, and has had a nasty accident jumping off a bridge, on a horse.  The horse dies, and Walker is left paralysed in his legs.  Alexandria has had some fall in which she's broken her arm (she spends most of the movie with it stuck up in the air at an awkward angle). They meet by accident, and he begins to tell her a long and fantastical story about five men who all have a passion for revenge on the wicked Governor Odious.  Initially the story is simple and like a folk-tale; it also chops and changes at the whim of either the storyteller or the listener.  We also understand that Alexandria sees the events in quite a different way - at times - from what Walker intends. 

Unfortunately, Walker more and more adds in elements of his own life and misery, and instead of the story working towards some grand climax and romantic ending for the main character, the Black Bandit, it becomes a brutal and unpleasant tale in which the other four characters die at the hands of Odious' soldiers, along with the savage who has assisted them, and the monkey belonging to one of the adventurers (called Charles Darwin, but only remotely resembling the historical man).  The Black Bandit even admits to being a coward (he was also prepared to shoot his beloved). The story somehow comes into Walker and Alexandria's own time, and with real people are included.

Walker tries to commit suicide, with the apparent assistance of Alexandria, and though he doesn't achieve this, he takes to the bottle, feeling that his life as a stuntman is over.  In a long and not very successfully worked-out sequence, Alexandria, both in reality and in the story, pleads with him to face life again and move on.  He eventually does, and the last sequence has the hospital patients watching the movie that he was originally making, and we hear that he goes on to work as a stuntman in dozens of other movies.

It's a great pity that the movie becomes so downbeat about three-quarters of the way through.  It loses any continuity it might have with the earlier parts, and the two sections are quite inconsistent in style.  The whole film shows a lack of being thoroughly worked-out - even within the ever-changing world of the story there has to be an internal consistency, and this is lacking.  (I've seen a couple of other movies over the years that tried to switch part way through from being a comedy to a tragedy; it didn't work there either.)

We only discover late in the proceedings that some of the characters in the story are based on people in the 'real' part of the movie.  It would have been far more effective if we'd understood this earlier on.  And there are a number of oddities: one example is when the five bandits (as they're sometimes styled) capture one of Odious' caravans in the middle of the desert. A princess appears out of the door.  She's preceded by a young boy, her nephew, (so she informs the others), but extraordinarily he's just left behind, and no further mention is made of him.  The old rule applies to all storytelling: if you're going to introduce a character who appears to have a purpose in things, then you'd better make sure he does, or you alienate your audience.

Equally, it takes some time before we realise who the Princess in the story is based on: the only attractive woman in the cast up to that point is one of the children's nurses.  But it isn't her, and she never actually has anything to do with Walker.  The Princess is apparently the movie actress that Walker is in love with; she's gone off in real life to live with the actor who plays the hero in the movie being made at the beginning. He turns out to be the model for Governor Odious.

I know how difficult it is to structure a story well and I understand that especially in fantasy writing it's easy to leave loose ends.  Unfortunately, this so seriously undercuts the values of this movie that it makes the audience irritated and frustrated.  Given that Tarsem spent four years making the film, you'd wonder that he didn't give himself just a bit more time to pull it all together in terms of the story.  (And he had two other writers on the job, anyway.)

Pros and Cons

Having had another 12 hours or so to think about the latest Harry Potter movie, I thought I'd write a few more notes, mostly for my own benefit.
These will just come as I think of them....sorry it's not a bit more ordered.

Pros: superb technical proficiency. Just one example: the camera shot starts in the train with a group of characters, pulls back outside the train, sweeps along as the train moves past, and catches up with another group of characters further down the train. Of course, it would have been much easier to have done it as two separate shots, but there's a kind of exuberance about this approach.

Cons: No Dursleys. This film begins with the deatheaters do nasty things to London.
Cons: No Voldemort - at least not in his current guise. He turns up (via two very good young actors) as Tom Riddle, in two memory sequences. This film can in no way stand on its own: there are too many characters you're just expected to know, and too many things you're expected to remember from earlier episodes. And characters who don't appear that you're expected to know about as well. Okay, it's all a matter of how much screen-time we've got, but...

Cons: lots of loose ends. London being under attack is shown initially and then forgotten about. And how does it relate to Hogswart and what's going on there? And why is the countryside outside the train so bare?
Why do the deatheaters attack the Wand shop, and who are they dragging out and what do they do with them?
The Horcrux business arrives quite late in the proceedings, and then, after all the effort to get one of them (with Dumbledore nearly dying in the process) it turns out to be a fake. Okay, this is in the book, but it's treated in a very off-hand way here.

Pros: the usual superb mise-en-scene, wonderful sets and design, but....everything is so gray. Harry says right at the end something along the lines of 'I never appreciated how beautiful this place was.' But he's looking at a very gray version of it. It's been a lot more beautiful in the other movies. Admittedly the grays are beautiful in themselves - the early shot of the London office people looking out at the storm is full of wonderfully toned-down colourings. So that's sort of a con and pro in one.

More loose ends: the Weasleys house goes up in flames - we hear no more about this, and no one seems particularly worried. Hagrid's house goes up in flames: is he inside? I'm not sure if we find out in this movie, as I can't remember him being in that late scene where everyone is raising their wands in the air in tribute to Dumbledore.

Con: everyone who knows the books will know that Dumbedore dies at the end of this episode. But curiously there's a lot more emotional feeling in the death of Cedric Diggory in The Goblet of Fire than there is here in the death of Dumbledore. Certainly there's a wonderful piece of elegaic writing in the music score at this point, but somehow it doesn't affect you emotionally. Odd.
When I read in the book about Dumbledore's death, it was shock - this couldn't happen! And you waited in vain in the last book for him to appear safe and sound. So it's a bit of a puzzle that it's nowhere near so affecting here. Perhaps it's because most viewers will know what happens to Dumbledore, and it's difficult for the filmmakers to overcome that. It would be interesting to know what people who hadn't read the book thought about this point (assuming they weren't totally confused by the movie anyway!)
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I said yesterday the film seemed slow. Thinking back again, there are still some very exciting sections: the search in the cave for the horcrux, for example, or the attack on the Weasley's house. And the Quidditch match is superbly done. Think back to the way Quidditch was done in the first movie to compare how much more technically superior this section is. But there's no explanation as to why Ron should be playing Quidditch after all these years, when he's never shown the slightest interest in doing so before, and why Harry isn't playing. (I'm sure there's a good reason in the book, but for some reason the filmmakers have chosen not to tell us.)

Pro: Luna Lovegood. Evanna Lynch has made this character utterly her own. Whatever you thought Luna should look like has been thoroughly overtaken by this actress' interpretation. It's a delight. (Emma Watson, as Hermione, on the other hand, is still 'wrong' in my mind. My impression of Hermione, from the books, was always that she wasn't particularly attractive; it was her intelligence that marked her out. In fact, my original picture of her was of someone not especially slim. Watson's beauty in the film versions makes it hard to understand why she's so interested in Ron, who's not only lazy and unintelligent, but a bit of a slob. And in this film he barely gives her a moment's notice.)

Con: the stuff about the necklace that's supposed to curse Dumbledore and ends up cursing the messenger instead. That's all handled a bit oddly in the movie; it makes Rowling's consistently clever plotting seem clunky. (Maybe it was a bit of that famous Nintendo jewellery I'm always on about...?)

Obviously it's time to go back and read the book and figure out some of these peculiar loose ends and untidy plottings that are in the movie. Thank goodness for the books, which leave far more room for our imaginations than the movies, for all these superb visual reconstructions, do.

Solaris

The other movie I got was Solaris, which deserves a post to itself, rather than being stuck in with Unfortunate Events. Although there are some Unfortunate Events in Solaris too: a couple of murders, a couple of suicides, some hasty and painless dispatching of people who aren’t really people, madness, an abortion, and lives lived without God.
Which makes it all sound very grim. In fact it’s not. The love story at its heart preserves it from being a minor version of Alien, and quite honestly, whatever Solaris is doing to the people on the space ship, it doesn’t seem particularly malicious.
It’s a very slow movie – though nowhere near as slow as its Russian forebear, which takes twice as long to tell the same story. But the slowness isn’t a negative feature, and I found it absorbing. (Not so my wife, who switched off very early on, even though she managed to tell me quite a bit about it later.)
George Clooney revels in having a role that’s got some depth – the role of Ocean is more like a paddling pool by contrast. Natascha McElhone (how did she ever get into movies with a name like that? It would never have been allowed in the good old days!) is an English actress I didn’t recognise, but she was in The Truman Show, and has turned up in a variety of other things, including tv episodes. Her lovely wan smile is used to great advantage, as is her puzzled air. She seems exactly right for the part.
There are virtually only two other actors in the piece: Jeremy Davies, who’s currently incarcerated in Lost, and Viola Davis, who’s one of those actresses who’s in everything but never seems to become familiar. Davis plays a maddening character who turns out not to be who he is, and Davis is a grim reaper of a woman, determined to beat the planet Solaris at its own game. When she figures out what it is.
This isn’t a film I’ll watch with my wife again in a hurry – she said you can watch it on your own sometime – but I’d like to figure it out a bit more. The central mystery becomes obvious enough, but what’s the ending all about? Is it just there to confuse us a little further?