Igenlode Wordsmith

I've been trying to identify just why I find the current Andrew Davies adaptation for "Les Misérables" so unsatisfying, which is hard to put into words without coming across as just another 'oh no, he dared to alter one word of the Sacred Text' rant. Save that it happens to be several years since I reread the book (for the purposes of writing my AU-Cosette story), and what I'm getting are feelings of general wrongness which turn out to be corroborated when I do go to look up the relevant sections of the novel, but are not the sort of verbatim recall that can identify every little deviation.

See, I do know about adaptation. I understand perfectly well that you can't reproduce even something as short as the first Harry Potter book on screen in every detail exact as it was printed (and in fact, those films might have been better films if they'd been a bit less constrained by the anticipated expectations of millions of screaming fans). Putting a novel on screen is a question of conveying the spirit of the story, not every incident, and that often involves writing new scenes between the characters or else streamlining bits of the plot because internal agonising doesn't come over well on screen (or simply to shorten it).

But what I'm getting from this adaptation is the sense of a writer who thinks he is taking the chance to improve on the perceived deficiencies of the original. ( Read more... )

Let's see, so far I've ended up changing Javert's address (I'd managed to pick the name of one of the roads in Paris where the barricade was built, in a feat of spectacular subconscious association), Cosette's hair colour(!) and the degree of 'leniency' shown in Javert's later cases (I really don't see him letting criminals get off scot-free, however disproportionate their crime). This is what comes of breaking the habit of a lifetime and uploading a chapter to fanfiction.net before first putting it up here and letting it sit and stew for a while... I shall be very interested to see whether anyone on FFnet notices that the location of Javert's lodgings has changed between the original chapter 1 and the upload of chapter 2!

This was obviously a considerable stylistic experiment. Having done musical-verse Eponine, I thought I'd go for the full Hugo this time as a means of summarising and compressing the narrative if nothing else (ironic as the idea of Hugo's compressing anything is...) It was originally intended as a one-shot, but it got somewhat too long for that.

In any case it was a considerable challenge to un-learn all the conventions about 'limited third-person PoV' that I'd spent the last couple of decades in perfecting and to deliberately introduce authorial moralising, head-hopping and tendentious generalisations ("she was a child, and hence she loved...") I had to keep consciously pushing the story back when it tried to turn into my standard dialogue/monologue-driven narrative: I didn't quite manage to write it without any direct speech at all, but I came pretty close.

Hugo does of course give us direct dialogue — indeed, he gives us entire chapters of stream-of-consciousness transcription where some of his more bombastic characters are concerned — but he rather tends to keep things at a distance and tell us about the characters talking rather than show the conversation through the eyes of one of the participants as a modern author would. I was aiming hard for that 'detached' feel.

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Chapter 1: l'inspecteur Javert

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