Adaptations already!

the guy behind the guy: a discussion thread

Hello to all my new subscribers, I’m so glad you’re here. I’ll be back in the bookshop on Friday, and I’ll tell you all about it in the free Receipt from the Bookshop then, but in the meantime today’s post is for my paid subscribers. The Book Club choice for June is here, the discussion thread will open toward the end of the month. If you enjoy reading my work please consider a paid subscription to access everything. You can interview me for that promotion here. All Shares, Restacks and Recommendations are really appreciated. Now let’s get to it…

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It is a truth relentlessly hammered into our culture that anything good should be remade as something else. This is because of money, but also fear, the attention economy and also, somehow, squishmallows. Everything is a spin-off, spun-out and squeezed for whatever shred of value can be bled from it. It’s no wonder we’re all so blown away when someone has an original idea; we’re so impressed by the concept of new material than even the worst review would still congratulate the creator on daring to dream.

We could spend all day making fun of the bad, the pointless and the ill-judged adaptations of the world, but what’s the point? We always cry ‘WHY’ when a new adaptation is announced, because we love the other ones we’ve already got, even though we were angry about those too, that time ago. Today I want to talk about adaptations of books that are brilliant. I’m being careful in my word choice here - brilliant can mean accurate and faithful, but it can also mean surprising and transcendent. I have another caveat, for the purpose of this discussion, you can only judge an adaptation of a book if you’ve also actually read it. There are many films and TV series I’ve loved that have been based on books that I have no intention of ever reading. I count some of them among my very favourite films! But I’ll never read Tolkien, so I can’t love ‘Lord of the Rings’, I am simply wedded to those films that Peter Jackson made. If I had read Master and Commander, maybe it would be in my list today, but I haven’t, so I can’t include it. Even with this criteria to contain the conversation, there are still more tremendously thrilling adaptations of novels than there is time to reasonably talk about, and I’m always mindful to talk about them as separate pieces of art. You can love one and not the other, a bad book can inspire a great film and a great novel can make terrible television programme, but sometimes both are sublime. I’ve picked a few of my stand-out adaptations of novels (that I’ve read!) below, and I’d love to hear yours in the comments. I think what this list probably reveals is that there are a lot of very famous books I haven’t read…