It’s a debate as old as the movies.

One I’ve been hesitant to broach. Books versus their film adaptations. An endlessly looping discussion — like Kim Kardashian or the meaning of life, is there any point?

Admittedly, I’ve enjoyed many films without knowing there were books behind them: Forrest Gump , Good Fellas , The Pianist , Jaws , Requiem for a Dream , Cool Hand Luke , Dr Strangelove . But what about movies based on books I’ve read and loved?

Herein lies the rub.

I’ve been prompted now by the fact that I recently read Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin and immediately after watched Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation. Shriver’s novel, written in epistolary form as letters from Eva to her absent husband Franklin regarding their troubled son, drew me in because of its particular voice.

Eva is a witty, engaging narrator, often unreliable and entirely absorbing; you spend hours, or days in her company, unravelling the tragedy that’s befallen her family. The book is expansive, detailing love, familial and self, grief, fears about motherhood, commitment, success. Through it all, running like a fault line, is the horrific crime young Kevin has committed — you and Eva and the world wonder why. I came to the end, feeling — surely as all good books make you feel — hollow. Bereft of company.

I sought out the movie as comfort for loss.

In short, it was a terrible idea.

As the opening credits faded, I noticed immediately the absence of her voice. The sudden flat silence. Give it a chance, I told myself. After all, movies must be judged according to appropriate criteria, as visual projects and reimaginings. Here, Ramsay’s work was admirable. If she did away with the intimacy of voiceover, she introduced a splintered stream-of-consciousness cinematic style that layered memories, and revelled in colour and symbolism. Yet in all honesty, if I hadn’t read the book I’m uncertain I would’ve followed. The narrative resembled Emmental cheese — punched through with holes. Franklin is a mere prop while Eva — even though Tilda Swinton is marvellous — loses her glorious complicatedness. Grudgingly I watched as memorable scenes and dialogue from the novel were sliced off, details unceremoniously left out. Before I come away sounding irrationally embittered, may I clarify I’m no literary fascist. I recognise the need for sculpting text into big-screen shape. To pare away, leaving behind plot essentials.

Many summers ago, at university, a group of us Tolkien fans watched The Fellowship of the Ring . We emerged into the Delhi dusk, alternatively proclaiming love and dismay, but one among us was distraught. “They left out my favourite character,” he wept. “Who?” we enquired. As far as we could tell, they were all there. The elf, the dwarf, various wizards, and of course the gang of hobbits.

“Tom Bombadil.”

And no amount of persuasion would convince him that a character who appears briefly on page 23 was, perhaps, dispensable.

The greatest challenge, though, doesn’t lie in the culling (or not) of detail, but in translating a vastly interior world onto an external landscape. The element that makes a book like The Catcher in the Rye famously ‘unfilmable’. In the actors’ commentary for House of Sand and Fog (originally a novel by Andre Dubus III) Ben Kingsley explains how it is toughest for an actor to convey pages of interiority in a glance.

But perhaps not impossible?

Think of the silences in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (I’d venture to say it’s a lot more nuanced than Michael Cunningham’s book). Deftly interweaving the lives of three women, Virginia Woolf in 1930s England, a 1950s American suburban housewife, and a publisher in modern-day New York, the movie achieves exceptional balance between dialogue and quiet restraint. The look on Julianne Moore’s face as she sits with her family at the dining table. Or Nicole Kidman lying in the garden, gazing at a dead sparrow.

The other rarity is Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road — as devastating as Richard Yates’ book. The tale of Frank and April Wheeler wrestling with the ‘hopeless emptiness’ of American suburban life (they hope to move to Paris to start afresh) is beautifully, tragically shot. Justin Haythe, the screenplay writer, admits in a New York Times interview that Mendes nudged him to “find ways to externalise what Frank and April do not say to each other”.

I think the greater sin (yes, Samar, even worse than leaving out Tom Bombadil) is adapting the movie into a ‘happier’ version of the book. Take Breakfast at Tiffany’s , for example. (Apparently, Capote loathed the film; also he’d wanted Marilyn Monroe to play the haunted, lost Holly Golightly). While this might be Audrey Hepburn’s most revered, and beloved, role, it is also least true to the original. The characters in the novella are darker, more damaged. The movie ending can only be called a massive Hollywood cop-out — and the exact opposite of what happens in the book. (Did the filmmakers think we wouldn’t notice? Or worse, not care?)

A word of advice? Axe minor characters, lop off extra sub-plots, slash the emotional divergences, but remember, always, always keep the tragedy.

Janice Pariat is the author of Seahorse; @janicepariat

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