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| Show me the Money | Mark Lawson I'm thrilled that Martin Amis's great novel is to be adapted for screen – but the omens aren't goodHaving always been sceptical about television's obsession with costume drama, I've never really understood what it must be like for the admirers of Jane Austen when, every two or three weeks, as it seems, a new production of Pride and Prejudice or Emma is announced.Yesterday, though, I experienced the combination of excitement and defensive apprehension which must affect Jane-ites when they learn that yet another young British actress is being measured for a bonnet. Martin Amis's Money, a key book for my generation of English students and fiction readers, is to be dramatised on BBC2, bringing to an end a quarter of a century of aborted attempts since its publication in 1984.Whereas the followers of Miss Austen sit nervously in front of their sets worrying if Mr Darcy will be dashing enough, we will agonise about whether the protagonist John Self – an Englishman chasing sex and wealth in 1981 New York – will be sufficiently slobby.We're probably right to worry. The melancholy rule is that versions of contemporary novels tend to achieve the unfortunate double of disappointing those who have read the book while failing to interest those who haven't.Although most movies and a significant percentage of TV dramas are taken from published fiction – largely because most producers find it easier to read a book than a script – the enterprise is fundamentally eccentric. Screen storytelling favours the lean and linear but novels – and especially modern ones – tend to be long and told in a complicated way. Amis's Money is caught on both charges: a 400-page story that incorporates a film within the book – and Martin Amis pops up as himself.Another ill omen is that Amis has admitted he was always concerned about the book's reception because it is a "voice novel", one that depends almost entirely on the novelist's ability to ventriloquise the narrator: John Self, as he moves between London and New York in the year Charles married Diana, speaks in a lingusitic smoothie-blending London slang, stolen Americanisms and cinematic and financial jargon.But authorial or character voice is what notoriously has to go when prose becomes pictures. Even the Jane-ites are forced to admit that, for the addition of Colin Firth in a damp shirt, they have to accept the subtraction of the light but peppery sentences. The temptation for Money's screenwriters will be to pour voiceover on the script like syrup over a glutton's pancakes but, if it became an illustrated audiobook, the project would have failed.Casting is another traditional pitfall for filmed books because of the obvious risk that the Mr Darcys or John Selfs available from Equity contradict the casting in the mind's eye of the reader. Self has, in fact, been visualised before – Mel Smith played him in extracts for a South Bank Show – and Nick Frost, the BBC2 choice, has the right physique and spirit. The book also features Lorne Guyland, an ageing Hollywood actor based on Kirk Douglas. In one of the earlier attempts at filming, Kirk was slated to play himself, but perhaps Michael could be signed? And who will play Amis? Surely even that youthful-looking novelist can't play himself in 1981.Possibly, though, this novelist self-reference should be dropped, along with much else. The most frequent reason that literary adaptations fail is that the producers have been motivated by devotion to the prose and have a tendency to protect the original – perhaps fearing the disapproval of their literary hero. A great modern novel, Philip Roth's The Human Stain, was reduced to a ghastly movie because the screenwriter and director maintained a character (the narrator Nathan Zuckerman) who had an entirely novelistic function, and cast as the young version of Anthony Hopkins' character an actor who in no way resembled him.Tricksy books, such as Money, can be successfully filmed – Michael Winterbottom made a good show of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy by turning a movie inside out in the way that the writer had flipped fiction. But the screen is most at ease with traditional narratives of domestic interaction: which is why, despite TV's inability to find a visual equivalent to her style, Austen has become a drama stand-by.Filmed literature works best when the content of an old book chimes with the times and Money fits this dollar bill: a character caught in financial fantasy and learning that wealth can be a form of fiction feels apposite. More gloomily, though, the central plot of Money involves the terrible failure of a US-UK movie co-production. Perhaps I'll end up wishing they'd made another sodding Sensibility instead.BBCTelevisionTelevision industryMartin AmisJane AustenEnglishMark Lawsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
She Who Must Be Obeyed This biography of Madame Chiang Kai-shek presents her as far more complicated, awful and brilliant than we had imagined. feeds.nytimes.com |
The Vows of Silence by Susan Hill | Book review The fourth novel in Hill's highly successful detective series starring Simon Serrailler, a talented but lonely police investigator, sees a serial killer terrorising the town of Lafferton. The gunman seems to harbour a grudge against engaged or newlywed women. While the plot is somewhat formulaic, it's enriched by the more engaging personal stories from the community Serrailler lives among: his sister, the GP, and her family; Jane, a former flame; Tom, the teenager who has fallen in with born-again Christians. It's a murder mystery, but one in which death can be caused by anything – a bullet or a brain tumour – and where it's not the delusions of a demented killer, but the nuances of people's ordinary lives that make for a captivating read.Mary Fitzgeraldguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Publishing guru prepares to turn Indian doctor into a literary star Abraham Vergese's stunning story of Siamese twins in Ethiopia could top the paperback charts on the back of TV endorsementA novelist, even a well-reviewed one, may sell just a couple of thousand books. It is no way to make a living, unless of course you catch the attention of Britain's biggest literary star-maker, the television producer Amanda Ross.Novels that find favour with Ross can be expected to achieve much, much more. The film The Lovely Bones, to be released at the end of this month, is based on the novel of the same name by Alice Sebold which shot up the bestsellers list after it was featured on the programme Ross devised, Channel 4's Richard & Judy. Cecilia Aherne's PS I Love You followed the same route to the cinema, while Victoria Hislop's The Island was plucked from relative obscurity by the show's regular book review slot.Now the most powerful book club in the land is coming back to our screens with new presenters and a new tip for the top."My favourite book that I have found this time, I think, is Cutting for Stone, sent to me by Gail Rebuck at Random House," said Ross this weekend as she announced the 10 titles to be featured on the new TV Book Club. "I was very pleased I found that one. I have always loved ER and it is set in a hospital. It is written by Abraham Verghese, an Indian doctor, and it is quite quirky and nothing like any book we have had on the programme before."Cutting for Stone is Verghese's first novel. Set in Ethiopia, it begins with an attempted abortion and ends with a liver transplant, so, although it has been lauded by critics, with the director Richard Eyre comparing it to Chekhov, it is not the kind of book to be promoted as an airport read. But all that could be about to change."We do make millionaires on this show, so these days I do choose authors who are really nice people," said Ross, who selects the list with a team of three assistants from more than 800 submitted books. "The writers we pick often stay part of the family around the programme. It has quite an impact on their careers so they send us all their new books. I love that."With Aherne and Hislop, Ross feels she helped establish reputations. "We made a difference. Although Victoria is married to Ian Hislop, the broadcaster and editor of Private Eye, I don't think that helped with the wider public and she didn't play on it anyway. The Island had already come out in hardback and hadn't sold that many. Her publishers, Headline, think it may have ended up selling only 5,000 if we hadn't picked it up and sent it over a million."Verghese, who works at Stanford University in California and is an expert in the treatment of AIDS, has had non-fiction success in The New Yorker, Granta and The New York Times Magazine, and has written two published accounts of his life. But Cutting for Stone is his first novel.He grew up in Addis Ababa and the book tells of abandoned twins, born at a mission hospital in the city 50 years ago. They grow up in the hospital then move to America, as many Ethiopian refugees did. The book title is a phrase from the doctors' Hippocratic oath.If Verghese becomes a bestselling author in this country it will be testament to Ross's gift for understanding her audience. She believes the key to the new show, once again produced by her company, Cactus TV, is the choice of presenters. Instead of the husband and wife team Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, Ross will field the comedians Jo Brand and Dave Spikey on a panel alongside the style consultant Gok Wan and the actors Laila Rouass and Nathaniel Parker."When you are in a book club you feel confident to talk when the people in it are on the same level as you," said Ross. "With some of these other television book programmes, the panellists are completely intimidating. They make me feel I am not qualified to read."The great thing about Richard and Judy was that people felt they were on their level. This time it is a stand-alone show, rather than a 12-minute segment and I hope people will feel, 'Oh well, it is a group of actors and comedians and my opinion is just as good'. There is a presenter for everybody. Sometimes it will be funny, but for other books the treatment will be quite straight-talking."Over the past decade, celebrity endorsements of books have become hugely valuable to the market. When a title was featured by Oprah Winfrey in the book club segment of her American chat show it was guaranteed a boost of more than a million sales, now known as "the Oprah effect", while in Britain Jonathan Ross's Twitter recommendation of The Men Who Stare At Goats, by Jon Ronson, sent sales soaring.The TV Book Club list includes titles by Sarah Waters and Nick Hornby, as well as by the former television presenter Sarah Dunant and by George Pelecanos, one of the creators and writers of the hit American TV drama, The Wire. "What has been great in the past is that, as well as making new names, we have broadened the readership of established writers such as William Boyd and Julian Barnes," said Amanda Ross, who is happy to be described as the Simon Cowell of the book world. "I would love to be him. I have got an amazing amount of respect for what he has done, but the main difference would be that he makes money out of the talent that he finds and I am not allowed to."We have got to show the same sort of integrity now about how we choose the books as we always did. We have self-imposed rules that we should never choose more than three books from one publisher. I always think about the book first before I look to see who the publisher is. For me it is just about keeping people talking about books."TelevisionTelevision industryVanessa Thorpeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Can Apple's tablet do it again? Apple's latest product is the eagerly awaited 'tablet' electronic reader. But no one knows exactly what it will do, nor whether it can duplicate the runaway success of the earlier iPod or iPhone. So what might we expect?Here's a story from the near future. It's been a long day. Finally throwing aside the cares of work, you slump down on your sofa and pick up that shiny new device you bought the other day. Costing the thick end of £1,000, it's Apple's stylish new iPad (iTablet? iSlate?) – a smooth 10in screen with no keyboard, like an iPhone on steroids. You pick it up, turn it on with one swipe of a finger, and begin to . . .At this point, the picture goes hazy and freezes. The reason: while the Âinvitations for the launch of Apple's "latest creation" in San Francisco next Wednesday have finally gone out to the great and good of the technology industry, still no one is certain what the hell their creation is actually going to be for, nor even what it will be called (though my money is on iPad or iSlate).The device that Steve Jobs, chief Âexecutive and co-founder of Apple, will unveil at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is variously predicted to transform our experience of reading electronic versions of books, newsÂpapers and magazines (there are Âpublishing executives clasping their hands heavenwards with that fervent wish); of watching TV and video; of surfing the web and playing games; even of making internet video calls. Perhaps it will do all of the above.Not surprisingly, then, this is being called "a critical turning point for the way we get and use all sorts of media", and "Apple's reconception of personal computing". In the New York Times, the media columnist David Carr wrote: "I haven't been this excited about Âbuying something since I was eight years old and sent away for the tiny seahorses I saw advertised in the back of a comic book." Another gasping fan wrote: "The only thing I know is that I'll take two."A carefully leaked story in the Wall Street Journal at the start of the month gave the scantest of details of what to expect of the new tablet: a 10.5in "multi-touch" screen (more of that later), no physical keyboard, probably in two different colours, available to buy in March.What is known is that HarperCollins and other publishers have already been negotiating with Apple to make their Âe-books, magazines and newsÂpapers immediately available on the new device. The Apple Âtablet's reading experience is Âexpected to be much enhanced from the current crop of handheld e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle, which launched in November 2007 and costs about £300. With its monochrome screen, plasticky white buttons and limited web browsing Âcapabilities, you'd never mistake the Kindle for an Apple product, and Âindustry rumours suggest it has sold no more than 1m Âdevices worldwide."With big names like HarperCollins and Time magazine weighing in, the Apple iTablet is going to change digital publishing in a way Amazon's Kindle hasn't yet done," says Peter Moore, Âdirector of specialist publishers PSP Rare. "With a touch-enabled colour screen and a similar size format to Âcurrent magazines, the experience should be almost physical – with the added Âbenefit of live content and links through to websites."Richard Charkin, executive director of Bloomsbury Publishing, is eager to meet this new entrant in the e-reader market. "The fact that Apple is coming in is terrific. E-books are already Âhappening with the Kindle – we have been pleasantly surprised by the Âvolume of e-book sales – but this will accelerate it."To truly revolutionise our lives, however, Apple's creation must go far beyond being the best e-reader in class, and change the way we view film and games too. And there the question Âremains: how different can it be from an ordinary laptop computer, aside from being pricier and without a Âkeyboard? After all, Lenovo, Asus and Apple itself all make super-thin laptops that weigh barely any more than the A4 office envelope you can slide them into.But that is to underestimate the common denominator of most Apple products: that they (almost always) take an existing idea and make it cool and desirable. The iPod, the iPhone and the flatscreen all-in-one iMac all redefined the idea of what a device ought to do, forcing everyone else to copy the new benchmark that they set. Which means that, in five years' time, the person picking up the tablet-thing in their living room might be you – even if its maker isn't Apple.Consider the iPod. Apple wasn't first into the MP3 player market in ÂOctober 2001 but, says Ian Fogg, Âprincipal Âanalyst for consumer products at ÂForrester ÂResearch, it instantly Âredefined music on the move by Âmaking the player smaller and its Âcapacity far bigger (around 1,000 songs). The real revolution was its "scroll wheel" for navigating through all those songs – obvious in retrospect; but the cool it exuded shot the iPod to immediate dominance.Similarly, the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone capable of email or web browsing. "Those had existed for eight or nine years," says Fogg. "But the iPhone did it in such a different way." Effectively a handheld computer, it was iPhone details such as the ability to "double-tap" to zoom a column of text up to readable size that made it feel revolutionary to users – not to mention the multitude of useful, funny and plain weird apps software that soon sprung up around it.And so, goes the logic, it will be with the iPad/iSlate. Because tablet computers are already here, having been launched as long ago as November 2001 by none other than Jobs's arch-Ârival, Bill Gates. "I'm already using a [Microsoft] Tablet as my everyday computer," Gates told his audience at the Comdex show in Las Vegas back then. "It's a PC that is virtually without limits." He then added his own modest little prediction: "Within five years, I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America."But Gates was wrong. Today, the tablets market makes up less than 1% of sales of all computers, because they are usually cumbersome and pricey (about 20% more expensive than the equivalent laptop). This is because the Âmajority are, in reality, dual-purpose laptops: turning them into a tablet Ârequires twisting the screen to hide the keyboard; not a Âparticularly elegant solution. The Âalternative format, the "slate", uses virtual keyboards that you poke at with a special stylus, or handwriting recognition that is Âhit-and-miss.Apple, however, has Âalready shown it can make a workable virtual keyboard on the iPhone, which people use to write quite long messages. So what, Âultimately, is the revolution we are Âanticipating? In one word, multi-touch: being able to control the Âcomputer Âdirectly via its screen without the need for keyboard or mouse, using one or more fingers. With a hint of Tom Cruise in Minority Report, this instinctive, Âfuturistic control system allows users to tailor their screen (even the size of the keyboard) and move from function to function effortlessly and with style.A 2007 interview with the New York Times explained how, "Mr Jobs seized on the multi-touch technology after Apple product designers proposed it as a 'safari pad', a portable web-surfing appliance. Instead, he saw the technology as something that could be used for a similar purpose in a cellphone." Now, having made the phone, why not finish the "safari pad"?Multi-touch first came to public Âattention thanks to Jeff Han, a Âresearcher from New York University. In February 2006 at the TED conference (an exclusive gathering of physicists, artists, futurists, comedians and Al Gore), Han gave a talk using a 36in x 27in touchscreen that wowed people by doing what iPhone users now take for granted: moving things around Âusing his hands and fingers (you can find this on YouTube).What Han did was a revelation. He moved pictures and files around the screen like someone shifting paper across a desk. But he also "pulled" them bigger, "squeezed" them smaller, flew over landscapes, tilted the view by holding two fingers down and pushing. The audience wowed and cheered."When I hear about the $100 laptop [a scheme to equip schools in the Âdeveloping world with a low-cost Âmachine]," Han told his audience, "I cringe at the idea that we're going to introduce a whole new generation of people to computing with the Âwindows, mouse, pointer interface. I think this" – he shuffled the pictures and then brought up a virtual keyboard – "is the way to go."He flipped some more pictures. "Isn't this great?" he said rhetorically, sounding exactly like Jobs extolling the latest item to emerge from Apple's labs. Watching him, you could only agree.Since then, Microsoft has also added multi-touch to Windows 7 (although most PCs don't have the capability to do anything with it), but it is clearly rattled by all the talk around Apple's forthcoming device. Though dismissive about the price tag on Apple products – Microsoft's brand manager David ÂWebster last year sneered to Newsweek that, "Not everyone wants a machine that's been washed with unicorn tears" – the company let it be known, through leaks to the media, that its chief Âexecutive, Steve Ballmer, would be showing off tablet computers in his keynote speech to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month. He duly did – and it was the second time Microsoft has launched tablets and Ânobody took any notice.Now, however, armed with a decent-sized screen, effortless multi-touch, sleek good looks and all those Âmillions of apps, perhaps ÂApple's tablet will prove the holy grail of being the consumer favourite for watching TV and movies, reading e-books, surfing the web and playing games (entirely new multi-touch games, played against fellow Apple tablet users).Among the newly unearthed Apple patents that have been sniffed out this month is one where the screen shows a three-dimensional view of items arranged on a sort of landscape. Is that what Apple is Âgoing to do to make the tablet feel even more futuristic?This is where the head-scratching Âreally starts. Whenever you talk to Âanyone about tablet computers and Apple, the conversation follows the same pattern: everyone reckons that tablets just aren't that workable, Âbecause they are neither fish nor fowl in computing terms. Yet still they Âbelieve Apple can create the device that will be on everyone's menu."There's no really clear series of Âapplications which define what a tablet is for," says Fogg. "It is more defined by its form factor – its shape and Âappearance – than its use."And, it should be remembered, ÂApple hasn't always got it right. The Apple TV, launched in March 2008, isn't a TV; it's a set-top box for playing videos or music from the iTunes Store or your computer. Not heard of it? That is because it has done underwhelming business. Similarly the Cube, a solid-looking 8in cubic Âcomputer launched in June 2000, was a pet project of Jobs's (who, in his previous company NeXT, had proudly Âunveiled a cubic black computer). ÂNobody could quite understand who the Cube was meant to appeal to. It cost more, but could do less than ÂApple's professional desktop machines. Apple, though, insisted there was demand for it. Then, a year later, it halted sales and said it was putting the Cube "on ice".It is, though, highly unlikely that Apple's tablet will meet the same fate. Jobs is smarter now, and the combiÂnation of multi-touch, cheaper screens and all that video must add up to something. Mark Mulligan, who specialises in media analysis at Forrester Research, says the tablet could "break down the 20th-century media product boundaries which we understand and define our media consumption by."CDs, DVDs and so on have forced us to use different devices to watch films or listen to music. But a successful tablet could end all that. "In the age of media multi-tasking," Mulligan says, "it would join the dots Âbetween the multiple Âdevices we live our digital media lives across."It sounds exciting. But it still does not answer how. For that, we will have to wait until next Wednesday.AppleiPhoneiPodEbooksCharles Arthurguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |