Yesterday’s adaptation of Sarah Waters’ 2006 novel, The Night Watch, will have ticked a lot of reliable ratings-grabbing boxes.
BBC television version of a popular modern classic, yes; World War Two, yes; Romance, yes; Lesbians, yes; Lesbians with no tops on having sex with other lesbians with no tops on, god yes.
Waters’ winning combination of literary panache and twisting plotlines has allowed her to jump into the best-sellers list from the ‘gay literature’ shelf at Waterstones, and her books (most notably Tipping the Velvet) have a good track record of successfully entertaining a mass television audience. However, The Night Watch is a 500-page novel, and a 90-minute adaptation was always going to be a difficult trick to pull off.
Were the BBC successful? Sitting happily on my fence, I say yes and no.
The hook of the book is that the story runs backwards - it is split into three parts, starting in 1947, travelling back to 1944 and then onto the conclusion/beginning in 1941. While this might sound pointlessly tricksy, in practice it works brilliantly, unfolding the story while also letting the audience know what happens to the characters at the end, thereby giving some real pathos to moments which should be uplifting. As the voiceover rightly tells us “The secret to a happy ending is knowing where to finish the story”.
Refreshingly, the writers have assumed a certain level of intelligence from their audience and the programme jumps straight into the story with no signposting for the more easily-confused - and if you haven’t read the book I imagine it causes some head-scratching at first. It follows the lives of five intertwined characters – Kay, Helen, Julia, Viv, and token-man-Duncan – through the war and into peace-time, and the backwards narration means that things are mentioned in the first ten minutes that don’t make sense for another hour.
Of course it looked lovely (the BBC prop and costumes department must have been straight down the pub for a celebration pint when they got the memo – when did they last get to dig the boxes of ‘generic rubble’ and ‘40s hats’ out of the cupboard?), and the performances sat firmly on the ‘very good’ to ‘excellent’ end of the thespy scale. Overall though it seemed more a narration of events as they happen in the novel, rather than taking the spirit of the book and running with it to create something new. The gorgeous prose is not transferred onto the screen, and some of the main set pieces in the novel lack the dramatic tension needed, purely because we haven’t got to know the characters in any depth and don’t care that much about them.
SLIGHT SPOILER:
Most criminally – and I imagine this annoyed the legions of Waters superfans - the adaptation changes the ending, taking the viewer back to 1947 for the finale. Waters’ novel is a thing of subtlety and intimates beautifully what the likely fates for the characters are. The adaptation takes a big neon light with “THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS DO YOU SEE DO YOU SEE LOOK LOOK” on it and plonks it onto the final five minutes. A real shame, considering that the rest of the programme was determined not to spoon-feed the audience.
Whilst it's always good to see a decent book covered by the BBC, next time they decide on a lengthy and complicated novel it would be done better as a two- or three-parter. In the meantime, buy the book.
BBC television version of a popular modern classic, yes; World War Two, yes; Romance, yes; Lesbians, yes; Lesbians with no tops on having sex with other lesbians with no tops on, god yes.
Waters’ winning combination of literary panache and twisting plotlines has allowed her to jump into the best-sellers list from the ‘gay literature’ shelf at Waterstones, and her books (most notably Tipping the Velvet) have a good track record of successfully entertaining a mass television audience. However, The Night Watch is a 500-page novel, and a 90-minute adaptation was always going to be a difficult trick to pull off.
Were the BBC successful? Sitting happily on my fence, I say yes and no.
The hook of the book is that the story runs backwards - it is split into three parts, starting in 1947, travelling back to 1944 and then onto the conclusion/beginning in 1941. While this might sound pointlessly tricksy, in practice it works brilliantly, unfolding the story while also letting the audience know what happens to the characters at the end, thereby giving some real pathos to moments which should be uplifting. As the voiceover rightly tells us “The secret to a happy ending is knowing where to finish the story”.
Refreshingly, the writers have assumed a certain level of intelligence from their audience and the programme jumps straight into the story with no signposting for the more easily-confused - and if you haven’t read the book I imagine it causes some head-scratching at first. It follows the lives of five intertwined characters – Kay, Helen, Julia, Viv, and token-man-Duncan – through the war and into peace-time, and the backwards narration means that things are mentioned in the first ten minutes that don’t make sense for another hour.
Of course it looked lovely (the BBC prop and costumes department must have been straight down the pub for a celebration pint when they got the memo – when did they last get to dig the boxes of ‘generic rubble’ and ‘40s hats’ out of the cupboard?), and the performances sat firmly on the ‘very good’ to ‘excellent’ end of the thespy scale. Overall though it seemed more a narration of events as they happen in the novel, rather than taking the spirit of the book and running with it to create something new. The gorgeous prose is not transferred onto the screen, and some of the main set pieces in the novel lack the dramatic tension needed, purely because we haven’t got to know the characters in any depth and don’t care that much about them.
SLIGHT SPOILER:
Most criminally – and I imagine this annoyed the legions of Waters superfans - the adaptation changes the ending, taking the viewer back to 1947 for the finale. Waters’ novel is a thing of subtlety and intimates beautifully what the likely fates for the characters are. The adaptation takes a big neon light with “THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS DO YOU SEE DO YOU SEE LOOK LOOK” on it and plonks it onto the final five minutes. A real shame, considering that the rest of the programme was determined not to spoon-feed the audience.
Whilst it's always good to see a decent book covered by the BBC, next time they decide on a lengthy and complicated novel it would be done better as a two- or three-parter. In the meantime, buy the book.
No comments:
Post a Comment