Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Adapting Armadillo

When I told people that my novel Armadillo was being filmed for the BBC the first question I was inevitably asked was: “Are you adapting it yourself?” Yes, I would reply, instinctively, and then a part of me would shout “No! I’m not adapting it. What I’m doing to it is far more complicated than that: I’m writing it again, which is something entirely different.” I think the first thing we have to do is get rid of the word “adaptation”—the problem lies in the image conjured up by that innocuous noun. And the verb “to adapt” sounds too easy: “I’ll adapt it” implies something anyone could do — just hand me my tool kit and give me half an hour and I’ll adapt it. But in actual fact turning a novel into a TV series or a film — or an opera, or a musical, or a radio play — is a far more complex and radical act than one might think. By changing the art form the rules are completely rewritten. Turning a novel into a TV series isn’t a simple matter of “adaptation”—what we’re actually talking about is “transformation.”

Let’s try a thought-experiment. Let’s imagine the novel Armadillo as a house, a standard three-bedroom detached house with a garden. Now you want to turn it into a three-hour series for BBC1. The way you do this is to demolish the existing house and rebuild it using the same materials. As everyone knows when you knock something down and try to put it together again it’s not going to look exactly the same. Some of the bricks will have been smashed, windows broken, pipes burst, tiles cracked, joists given way and so on. As you assemble your materials and try to conform to the original plan certain compromises and alterations will have to be made: the sitting room will be smaller, the attic bedroom will have gone. You find that you can only make the central heating work downstairs, the new windows won’t quite fit their embrasures, you can only get into the kitchen through the downstairs loo and the garden has been ruined by all the heavy machinery. This image is not meant to be flippant or facetious: in my opinion and experience it genuinely reflects the process that is undergone when a novel is rejigged, reshaped and reformed for the screen. When you’ve rebuilt your demolished house it will look similar to the original but the building itself will have been through a process of death and rebirth and in so doing will be utterly transformed. Something different — something new — has been created.

Transforming a novel into a series brings about two fundamental changes, one challenging, the second often wonderfully exciting. First of all, when you move from the page to the screen, you move from a world of almost total liberty — where anything is allowed and anything can be achieved — to a world of boundaries, of peripheries, of no-go areas. In this world we have schedules, budgets, problems of availability, issues of length and timing. But, more dramatically than that, we find ourselves in a world where there is basically only one point of view — that of the camera and its lens. As a novelist who writes for the screen (large and small), I have to say this is the greatest change you encounter. In a novel you can spend the entire time effortlessly occupying the subconscious of one or as many characters as you like. On screen, however, it is astonishingly difficult to be subjective for any length of time. Armadillo is a novel where we are provided almost total access to the thoughts and dreams and fantasies of the central character, Lorimer Black. To reproduce that subjectivity on screen, to get to know Lorimer as well as we do in the novel, required special efforts — and very special acting.

This is the second feature of the film transformation, and one that often provides the happiest bonus — casting. As a reader of a novel you are in effect a one-man or one-woman casting director. You, the reader, flesh out the character on the page; you can imagine what he or she looks like, sounds like and so on. And it’s an intensely private process: each reader will have their own version. But once the film is cast, however, that specificity disappears — the look becomes universal. James Frain is for ever “Lorimer Black,” Catherine McCormack will be the eternal “Flavia Ma-linverno,” Stephen Rae is “George Hogg” and so on.

For the writer this particular identification is not, as some might feel, a source of worry. In fact it is one of the wonderful pleasures of seeing your work turned into a film or series to witness the word made flesh in this way. A TV series is drama but it is also photography and to see these creatures of your imagination as living, breathing human beings can be a magical experience.

Having adapted several novels for the screen (including three of my own) it seems to me that film and television adaptations of novels are handicapped by certain misguided expectations — more so than adaptations that occur in any other art form. Commentators too seem to have no real, practical idea of what is involved in turning prose fiction into filmed drama. I think the problem arises from the assumption that the processes of filmmaking are in some way close to novel writing, whereas in fact, as I’ve tried to show, the two forms are quite distinct — as distinct as a radio play is from a stage play, or a stage play from an opera. No one, for example, goes to see Verdi’s Falstaff and then comes home to read Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and then berates Verdi for the audacious changes he has made. Similarly, no one in his right mind would say that Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd is better than Herman Melville’s. You might as well say an apple is a better fruit than an orange. Yet such comparisons and judgements are routinely and unthinkingly made when a novel is filmed.

I think, however, there is some instinctive understanding of this fundamental alteration that occurs in book-to-film adaptation — for why else would people, having seen and enjoyed the film or the TV series, want to read the novel? All adaptations actively encourage readings of the original source not because people want to see what’s been changed or left out but because the aesthetic pleasures involved are entirely different. The pleasures you derive from seeing, for example, the film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are quite different from those prompted by reading Ken Kesey’s novel. And we don’t need to rank those respective pleasures in a notional hierarchy — each has its own validity. The house of fiction has many windows, Henry James said, and that applies to all the seven arts: we want to keep as many open as possible. And, having taken Armadillo apart, brick by brick, timber by timber (with the help of a few old friends), and then (with the help of dozens of new friends) put it back together again, I can say that the transformed house stands proudly on its re-landscaped plot. The lights are on, people are wandering from room to room, I can hear laughter and conversation. I like my new house very much indeed. Come on in.

2001