Friday afternoon literary thought-provoker – part #2

I suppose I owe you all a charitable high-five for not pointing out that not only had our previous Friday afternoon literary thought-provoker been done before, but it had been done by me. Shameful. But you were all v sporting for not whispering about my fading cerebral powers behind your hands. Or were you?

This Friday, new thoughts (one hopes). I'm only fifty pages or so from the end of this (which has possibly the best collection of quotes on the jacket that I've seen for a while) and I'm desperate that it wasn't so. At least with this one, there's two whole sequels, which are equally excellent. I'm just not particularly eager to leave the world of Priss, Lakey and Kay, despite those throwaway name-references making the whole thing sound a little too Blyton. Still.

So, my question to you this fine Friday is: which are the books that, while you're reading them, you wished they'd never end? Subquestion: which book would you actually like to live in?

To complete your happy Friday, here's a man we should all be cheering and whooping and celebrating all round. (Actually am, for once, crying as I read this.) Please read this, as it's so very, very important, and go to your library this weekend, and show it some affection.

Sam the Copywriter

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Friday afternoon literary thought-provoker – part #1

Looking through our Penguin Modern Classics catalogue, I was moved by our mention in the blurb that the wonderful Arpino novel has been turned into not one but two films. I'm moved not because it's nice to dwell upon another creative medium, but because it seems criminally insane that we should want anyone to have to think about this. Which, effectively, is pretty much the same as this.

Over the past eighteen months or so, we've had The Road, Scott Pilgrim, Shutter Island (discussion for a later date: the worst book 'twists' in publishing history), The Chronicles of Narnia, Let Me In (itself a pretty ropey version of a great earlier adaptation), Tamara Drewe and Winter's Bone, as well as the very loose adaption of a fourth-century BC Aristophanes play, Get Him to the Greek.

This year we'll be enjoying/not going anywhere near Never Let Me Go, 127 Hours, Brighton Rock, Water for Elephants, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Moneyball, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy… Wow. At this rate I might not have to read a single book for the whole of 2011.

Well, then: what are (IYHO) the very best and worst book adaptations? Perhaps the film is miles better than the book? Surprised to be delighted by the adaptation? Mine – although I'll almost certainly change my mind when reminded by other suggestions - would have to be this (excuse me – I have something in my eye) and THIS (warning: may cause brain scarring).

Sam the Copywriter

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The Whydunnit

Carol Topolski had a triumphant debut with the highly original Monster Love. It was long listed for the Orange Prize, did very well in both hardcover and paperback editions, and generally scared the pants off everyone with its brilliant collage of voices recounting the story of a murder that we know has been committed from the very first chapters.  It was not a Whodunnit, but a brilliant Whydunnit, and a great literary debut.

Carol is by profession a psychoanalytic psychotherapist – it is why people are the way they are and how they got that way that fascinates her; she mined this rich seam in Monster Love, and now she does it again in her new novel Do No Harm.       

When Carol’s second novel arrived in manuscript I knew it would be scary.  I knew I wouldn’t understand the main character at the beginning of the book. This time, Carol has created a protagonist who isn’t just monstrous (like the married couple in Monster Love who murder their child) but just so repellent that you almost can’t bear to follow her journey on the page. Virginia is brusque with people, rude even. She is greedy, she eats too much; she spills her food down her front; she is large and ungainly, she wears awful clothes and shoes – indeed, she hates clothes.  It seems as if she wants to repel other people. She is also a brilliant doctor, but she doesn’t suffer fools, and only her colleagues and her patients like her – and even then they aren’t allowed to get to know her well.  Then we begin to discover that maybe she isn’t the staunch upholder of her women patients that we thought she is, that maybe she is doing them harm. And yet, by the end of the novel she is a strangely sympathetic character and when you discover all the things that have happened to her, what her childhood was like, you begin to feel grains of sympathy. 

The result is one of the most complex and well realised characters I’ve ever read – indeed, if you walked round her she would be completely 3D.  By the end of the novel we know she is deranged, but, in the way of the best fiction, we understand why.

Juliet Annan
Publishing Director, Fig Tree