Keeping up with the next best thing can be an exhausting business. Writers, readers, broadcasters and journalists are ready to crown the new great talents in an effort to look authoritative and influential, fuelled by more than a smidge of desperation. After all, no one wants to be the one who let the latest and greatest slip by without their noticing. What’s left after the hype and frenzy has dissipated is another matter.
It’s probably not all Graydon Carter’s fault, but he’s a fun one to blame. After discovering that he was a secret environmentalist, Carter deftly combined the world’s favourite eco-hero and an indecently cute baby polar bear in an Annie Liebowitz shot cover for Vanity Fair’s latest wheeze, the annual Green Issue. And so, with a little help from Leonardo DiCaprio, Knut went stratospheric. And so, with a new found love for polar bears the, to quote George W Bush, “global warming folks” had their image. Since then polar bears have been perching perilously on ever decreasing chunks of ice – a sign of a world heating up and hearts melting. And where the magazine shoots and news footage went, book covers followed.
When it comes to books, there’s one phrase guaranteed to depress. (Well, maybe there are two.) Whether said as an apology, boast or sidestep, “I’ve no time to read” crops up whenever books are mentioned. (And it only ever applies to books – when have you ever heard anyone say they don’t have time for TV or music?)
After a Christmas of Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop, the BBC has lined up Little Dorrit as its latest adaptation. Expect the “Bleak House treatment”: a smattering of stars, soap-like scheduling and enough swooshing camerawork to leave viewers of a delicate disposition suffering from whiplash. All this and an Andrew Lloyd Webber-helmed search for kids to star in a new production of the musical Oliver! to tide you over until next Christmas’s cinematic outing of A Christmas Carol. Is anyone else getting Dickens fatigue?
Elsewhere, Jane Austen still reigns. After her back catalogue was exhausted by last year’s ITV season, a new spin is required. ITV offers us Lost in Austen about a modern reader who (feminists, read on with caution) “longs for a man who can spark the fires that lie within”. And lo, she is transported into the pages of Pride and Prejudice. The BBC, meanwhile, has created a drama about Austen’s own life (especially her romances), Miss Austen Regrets, a conceit recently explored in the BBC-backed Becoming Jane.
Indeed, it’s cinema that seems to be stealing all the good books. Despite their classic status as TV series, both Middlemarch and Brideshead Revisited are going to Hollywood, much like Joe “Atonement” Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (though the BBC got their own back here by unnecessarily re-making Sense and Sensibility).
Even what is original seems curiously familiar. Cranford was trumpeted as something new, but it’s actually the third Elizabeth Gaskell novel the BBC have brought to life in recent years. The most unique thing about it is that adaptor supremo Andrew Davies was nowhere to be seen (perhaps too busy with Fanny Hill and A Room With A View). While current Sunday night success Lark Rise to Candleford is less well-known, its genteel humour, strong female cast and surplus of bonnets surely induces feelings of déjà vu.
If television’s collected works of Austen is well thumbed, there are reasons. Drama is expensive, especially period pieces, so risks are to be avoided. With their wealth of characters and episodic structures, Austen and Dickens lend themselves to multi-part programmes, and they’re also hugely exportable, especially to America, where they are lapped up by Anglophiles when shown on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre.
However this greatest hits and cover versions approach to adapting English literature leaves other writers and books languishing. Isn’t there a crime writer worth thinking about other than Agatha Christie (there’s been around 30 Marple or Poirot adaptations since 2000)? And what of the other great Victorian writers – Wilkie Collins or Samuel Butler, perhaps? Or 20th-century novelists like Jean Rhys or Angela Carter? Even international authors or, whisper it, a book from this century?
Still, the BBC may be a step ahead. Announcing their new production of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the publicity material says Thomas Hardy is arguably “the most neglected of our great literary authors”. Quite right too; it’s been three years since his work was last shown on television.
And finally, the dreaded VD. Whether celebrating or consoling, Penguins Great Loves are a good bet for February 14th. No “I wuv woo” banalities here, the 20-strong series celebrates the anguish, pain and passion of love with authors as diverse as Hardy, Kierkegaarde and Chekhov and the same price as a couple of wilting roses reeking of the petrol station they were bought from.
Given Christopher Hitchens’ ability to infuriate, befuddle and offend, you wonder who’s still buying his books. A strident proponent of the Iraq war, in print Hitchens has also scalped Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa and Henry Kissinger. Here he returns with his third book this year, a companion to his anti-religion polemic God Is Not Great.
I know we’re not allowed to judge books by their covers, but can we at least judge the covers themselves? The US-based Book Design Review thinks so, and does so annually. It’s just announced its favourites of 2007 and a stylish line-up it is too. Taking inspiration from an eclectic range of sources, like maps, textbooks and slogan t-shirts, the selected jackets are a persuasive reminder that, when it comes to books, the art doesn’t just lie between the covers.
Veronica is a novel of symbiosis – beauty and cruelty, glamour and decay, Veronica and Alison. In this tale told in the present day but focused firmly on the 1980s, Alison thinks back over a life of fleeing those who need her, running even as she clings to them.
There are many famous books that never were. Homer wrote a lost epic, Byron’s memoirs were destroyed after his death and Sylvia Plath never lived to complete her second novel. Now to this illustrious list we can (possibly) add Russell Brand’s Booky Wook. At time of writing, his autobiography hadn’t been completed, leading to Brand pulling out of the presitigious Cheltenham Festival. As Hodder and Stoughton draw their collective breath, here’s some titles looking more definite.
Valerie Plame is a woman with a story to tell, but she’s only being allowed to tell part of it. Her much-anticipated book Fair Game is an intriguing read, and not just for the subject matter. Entire sections of the book are quite literally blacked out, the text beneath it lost. It’s a curious practice (but a growing one) which brings a new meaning to reading between the lines.
