The Howards End Trifecta

I dove back into my comfort zone this past month: English literature. As you may see from my Goodreads feed in the corner of this blog, I listened to the 2009 Blackstone Audio recording of Howard’s End by E.M. Forster narrated by Nadia May and available on iBooks. I sifted though a few samples before landing on her as my narrator of choice (narrators can make or break an audiobook). This, of course, was after I’d watched the 2017 BBC series based on the novel starring Hayley Atwell and Matthew Macfayden. However, before I decided to compare it with the 1992 feature length film version starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins.

I love watching adaptations. I love getting more of something I already love or seeing how ~maybe~ the movie could make it better *cough cough* The Horse Whisperer *cough *cough* or present it exactly the way I’d imagined and more! Books and their movie counterparts can be equally enjoyable, change my mind. I will say, I was a tad surprised that I found the 1992 adaptation lacking. I was bored stiff, and by amazing actors and performances. But I don’t think it was the running length. Obviously the 2017 miniseries had more time to explore the details of the novel – it was the 1992 versions’ screenplay.

The script followed the outline of the novel well enough, but it was devoid of any of those cinematic moments that truly make you feel for the characters you’re watching. And this is coming from a person who has watched the 2005 Pride & Prejudice FAR more than I ever have the beloved 90s miniseries. The film hit all the right plot points, but I wasn’t torn when Margaret was forced to choose between her sister and her husband upon accepting Mr. Wilcox’s proposal nor was I very worried when Helen suddenly broke contact for mysterious reasons. Those small moments that get us close and intimate with a character I think were lost in the film’s attempt to be a faithful adaptation to the text beat by beat.

I guess I just can’t say enough good things about Macfayden’s nuanced performance as Mr. Wilcox either. He’s an amazing actor to watch. You hate him one moment and love him the next, Hopkins seems far too detached to be likable even in the end when the audience is meant to come around to his character. All the characters seem more fully realized in the 2017 miniseries. Except Leonard Bast… I’m still trying to figure out what Joseph Quinn was doing looking mildly constipated the entire time.

So, here’s the order in which I consumed my media:

2017 BBC miniseries
1910 Novel
1992 Film

I recommend all for comparison, but the novel doesn’t exactly need my endorsement. It’s a classic.

(featured image is Hayley Atwell as Margaret Schlegel in the 2017 adaptation available on STARZ)

little women (the preamble)

Today I was asking a friend of mine whether or not she’d ever read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women or seen any of the film adaptations. She had not! A very exciting prospect to consider, coming to such a well-known text with no prior impressions. What a treat!

She then said she always prefers film adaptations which stick closest to the book.

Slightly disagree. I can’t say I entirely agree. There are too many differences in the way a story is told to justify the idea that “the book is always better than the film.” As previously explored in my post about The Art of Adaptation there’s many reasons why major changes to a source text can result in a successful film. So long as the heart and characters of the story remain intact, I’m happy.

Of the 3.5 versions of Little Women I have seen, the 1990s adaptation with Winona Ryder us my favorite. I didn’t even finish the most recent, gritty, BBC series… 30 min. in and it just didn’t feel like Little Women. As for the most recent theatrical release in the U.S., I have avoided it. From what I can tell, feminist anachronisms abound and I am not about that. The Alcott’s were mold breakers in their own time and I prefer to keep their attitudes in context. But hey, I’ll give it a go today and see if it surpasses my expectations.

Bestsellers

Years ago, a friend of mine and I had the idea to start a list of New York Times Bestsellers Through the Decades and read down the list. The list was meant to start from a decade back and move up to the present… 2016. Needless to say, we didn’t get very far, at all. The only one we did manage to read was The Martian by Andy Weir which, if I remember correctly, I did review on this blog when it was published. Not a huge fan, but it was popular enough to be made into a film so that made me think about bestsellers and how reflective they are of the time in which they are published. We’ve had Mars fever for a while, but only in recent years does it seem as though we’re getting close and closer to actually touching its surface with human beings. Mars is in the public conscious.

Also, think about it, Gone With the Wind was a hugely successful bestseller in 1936 followed by the equal success of its 1939 film, but would that get made today? Maybe, but the direction would certainly be different.

Here was our list:

2015 THE MARTIAN – Any Weir (READ)

2005 THE DA VINCI CODE – Dan Brown

1995 THE HORSE WHISPERER – Nicholas Evans

1985 LAKE WOBEGON DAYS – Garrison Keillor

1975 RAGTIME – E. L. Doctorow

1965 THE SOURCE – James Michener

1955 BONJOUR TRISTESSE – Francoise Sagan

1945 THE BLACK ROSE – Thomas B. Costain

1935 VEIN OF IRON – Ellen Glasgow

2016 (Let’s Bring it Home) THE BURIED GIANT – Kazuo Ishiguro

^ This list is the only reason I own a copy of The Da Vinci Code and The Horse Whisperer. Do people even talk about these books anymore? Remember what an absolute stir Dan Brown caused? Meanwhile, Gone With the Wind is still talked about in all its controversy. So, why do some of these books have staying power and some don’t? Surely, they were culturally relevant at some point. If you look at the list, some still ring a bell, others are almost completely forgotten to the modern reader.

I think I’d like to get back to the list and ask myself the same questions as I read. Honestly, though, I hate holding myself to a strict regiment – so I might just hop around. I’ll start with the books I already own, at least! Maybe I’ll add the decades missing. I think I’ll start with The Horse Whisperer. I’m dying to know what all the whispering is about, 1995 here I come!

The Hero With a Thousand Faces

This looks like it was scanned on an old copy machine.

Where have you been, Kassie? That’s a very good question. I’m living in the UK! Fatherland of Great Literature and I find myself (as a student) with far more time to read than I had before in my crazy busy life in southern California. So, I thought I’d dip back into this for my own enjoyment. It was hard to get myself to sit down and read for long stretches of time (if you can believe it) I kept thinking there were other things I should be doing. BUT I managed to knock out The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell in just over a week. This book was first published in 1949. I was reading an edition from the 1960s borrowed from my school library because, well, poor student – but it served its purpose. I know there’s been more recent editions published so some of my criticisms may have been addressed in subsequent editions, but we can’t all be high-rollers. This book is fairly dense so I will try to keep to short and make it go down easily.

I have a basic familiarity with Joseph Campbell (and by basic I mean I sat through 6 hours of DVD interviews with him) and I have to say a lot of his theories and ideas I think are something that would come to any enthusiast for other cultures/mythologies/religions (you’re talking to the woman who picked up a volume of Finnish folks tales and dabbled in Journey to the West FOR FUN). The ideas that all mythos are interconnected in some great psychological, cosmic (I almost said “cosmotic”) way I think is valid. Although he uses a lot of Freud and dream analogy as evidence for this idea and I think you’d have to be quite a Freudian to go along with some of Campbell’s arguments in that area.

I do love the idea of the monomyth – that there’s one great overarching story we share – and a similar hero’s journey cross cultures. By the end of the book though, I’m not quite convinced he’s gotten his point across that man uses this to find religion in himself: “It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero . . . every one of us shares the supreme ordeal–carries the cross of the redeemer . . . in the silences of his personal despair” (391).  The conclusion is something I get but I don’t know that he’s spent enough time in his text arguing that point and using the evidence to support it. I think Campbell may have stretched himself too thin. This book is dense with research into folk tales and the traditions of other cultures. He may have served his purpose better by choosing fewer examples to give an easily distracted reader, such as myself, more to latch onto.

Now, I’m no feminist, but Campbell hardly references the female journey or “coming of age” rites in this book as well. Granted, he’s a male writer who really wasn’t considering this – which is fine – not really a criticism of him, but if he’s going to apply a universal message to the end it might have been good to see more of the feminine aspects of the societies he analyzes. His does his best to give fair play to the female (and even bisexual) roles of male/female dichotomy in mythology and it’s not his fault women throughout time have mostly played an ancillary role in some of these stories. Still, this is a point worth noting as I am reading this from the opposite perspective… even though most of my heroes are men.

His Catholic roots also show through great deal in this book, more than I think he even realizes. I had to laugh in the DVDs I was watching when he seemed so anti-established religion at times and then called for a return to traditional (I think even Latin) Catholic ceremonies in an effort to call humanity back to ritual which he seems to think is the backbone of order for future generations. I thought, “What a snob you are Joseph Campbell!” To wrap this up, I don’t think this book brought on any major revelations for me, but you can tell it’s fairly exhaustive and Campbell brings up a lot of good points about the interconnectivity of mankind, our search for glory and purpose, and our efforts to understand the world around us for eons and eons. I would love to see someone write a counter to it since it seems these ideas have gone relatively uncontested for so long.