all hail vic

Austen, Jane Austen

I went into a fever this week, but to explain it, I must give you some background information:

In February 2006, I went to a cinema here in Prague and saw the newly released (in the Czech Republic, that is) film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice.

I loved the story, being a sucker for romance.

Flash forward to this week, when I decided to pick up the book and read it. In an effort to broaden my literary knowledge, in the past few years I've been trying to catch up on many of the classics that I never read (even if I was supposed to) in High School. So I picked up Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice and I started to read. I've been maintaining trade paperback size novels as public transport reading - things to read when I'm in the often lengthy transits in Prague.

I had just finished Pushkin, my first ever Russian writer. I decided that I wanted to give Austen a shot. I was apprehensive; I knew that I had very much loved the film, but the writing was something I thought I would never get into.

I was completely wrong.

With a bullet, Pride & Prejudice is easily my favorite novel thus far read in my life. (Geez, I'm even writing like her.) In a position formerly occupied by Heller's Catch-22, it's hard to imagine it being supplanted by a book of such radically different character.

Pride & Prejudice was, without a doubt, one of the funnier books I've ever read, as I could often tell that Austen had her tongue firmly planted in cheek. Other times, the simple ridiculousness of the characters brought a full laugh. All this, but the thing that drove me through it so quickly was the romance underneath.

It should be no secret that I am a romantic, but this book, I fear, has just proved that I am an unabashed, sentimental romantic. I wish the world could be so perfect.

The thing is, I was saving the book for trams and metros and buses and cafes, but I spent most of one day finishing off the final 200 pages, even though I knew the story and the outcome.

My obsession is about to get more ridiculous though:

Within 30 minutes of having finished reading the novel, I popped in the 1995 BBC/A&E miniseries version, which I'd never seen before. When I was home this winter break, I bought it on DVD because I knew that I loved the 2005 film and that many people regarded the 1995 version as the definitive version. So I figured that I would watch the "definitive" version and brought it back with me to Prague, along with the 2005 version.

So I watched the BBC series with Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. It felt a little too staged at times which is the nature of the BBC, I feel; but it did strike many of the right notes. It contained a lot of lines directly from the book and the actors were well-cast.

The thing with literary adaptations is that I have never had a problem distinguishing between a book and a film - I fully understand that what works in one medium does not necessarily work in another. It never bothered me if a film strayed too far from the book, as long as the film was good...

The BBC version of Pride & Prejudice was great, except it felt too much like a BBC version just from the production aspects.

To complete my mania, I decided with only a few hours break, to rewatch the 2005 version as well, which I did last night. It wasn't hard because they cut so many corners and I enjoyed seeing how they did it... But because they cut so many corners and that I now knew the full story, I was bugged by how much they forced and/or cut into a 2 hour adaptation of the story. A film which I once loved is now only decent - considering how much they crammed into 2 hours, I'd say it's a good adaptation, but it misses a lot of the charm of the book.

So, in the end, what's the point of all this? Nothing, really. Except maybe that, in an ideal world of recent Austen adaptations, they would give the production values of the 2005 film to the 1995 cast. But even then, the book would still be better.

This is the only instance where I've been disappointed with film adaptations which are so severely different from the book.

Posted by iain at January 27, 2007 11:37 AM