But first let's have a flashback. A few years ago someone gave me the two CDs of the TV serial made out of John le Carre's Smiley's People.
Recalling how much pleasure I had derived from the book, I quickly put them on, only to be hugely disappointed. The dramatisation, even with le Carre as one of the screenplay writers - or perhaps because of that - just didn't make the cut.
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But that was when people were still making movies and serials out of books by writing screenplays later. Now, it seems to me, they are doing the opposite. Screenplay first, book later.
Does it make a difference if the author does not "help" with the screenplay to, as they say, "preserve the book's integrity"? Not necessarily. Some adaptations are very good, integrity be damned.
Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse novels were converted quite nicely into a long-running serial, but lost much of Morse's character as a stingy and alcoholic curmudgeon. Mr Dexter, if I recall rightly, did help with the screenplay.
The Sherlock Holmes stuff has also worked quite well, as did the Hercule Poirot series. Neither of the original authors helped with the screenplay. No integrity, you see, or very little.
But P G Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster - Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie's valiant efforts notwithstanding - fell a bit flat. That period strikes no chords any longer anywhere.
Fish or fowl?
I am not sure if I can take any names, but the next time you read a pacy thriller or romance or some other trash, just check one thing: how much of it is in the form of a dialogue and how short the sections are.
I counted in three new bestsellers. In each of them, dialogues accounted for 80 per cent of the wordage in a chapter - which itself tends to be very short, around 5,000 words - and the remaining 10 per cent is simply setting up the scenes that the chapter covers. The whole thing is written in modules, I suspect.
As a result, even though it is sold as a novel, there are no deep thoughts, even passing ones, no depressing insights into the "human condition", no attempt at Hardy-esque descriptions, no wandering down little by-lanes that inform you about something - à la Dick Francis - nothing. Just a lot of quickly moving stuff. Wham-bam, and you are done.
Often enough, the rapid movement itself is an illusion because the story line is thin as toilet paper and the characters are as empty as Sam Weller's drum. These novels are, if you will, like well-made souffles, full of air and no substance.
In short, what you are reading is most likely neither a novel nor a screenplay. It is a hybrid. You can start skipping after the first 50 or so pages and accelerate as you go along, ideal for short journeys.
In fact, on a fairly short recent flight, much to the puzzlement beside me, I tried an experiment with the cheapest of the trash I had bought. I edited it with a black felt-pen, rather like Yossarian censoring prisoner of war letters in Catch-22.
What remained was pretty much a pure screenplay.
Caveat emptor
I mentioned this to some friends. They said I was a fool to have destroyed a book, because there had always been a distinction between potboilers and serious fiction.
One of them reminded me how Edgar Wallace could produce a perfectly readable mystery story over a weekend. Even Graham Greene could write a book in six months.
They are right, of course, but I think there has been a qualitative change in the approach to writing even those. Earlier, authors wrote primarily for a reading public and not a viewing one. Now they write primarily with adaptation in mind. If a good book results, that's a positive externality.
Is there anything wrong in this? Of course not. As long as you get your money's worth from the thing you have bought, it should be OK. Just don't pay too much for it.
But whether or not you get your money's worth depends on your expectations from it. When you buy a novel, you may be buying one only in the dictionary sense of the term.