Two days

There are two days to this story, the second following on straight after the first.
The first day is a showery August Bank Holiday – an ideal day to dedicate to reading David Nicoll’s 2009 novel One Day.  ‘Twenty years, two people’, shouts the cover.    ‘A wonderful, wonderful book’ according to The Times.  The second day is the final day of August, an indulgent end to the last official month of summer, watching the lunchtime showing of the newly released film of the novel.
48 hours, one book, one film.  At last, I am putting into action my long-standing plan to read a novel for the first time, cover to cover, in a day, and then watch the movie of the book as soon as I can afterwards, while the book is still vivid in every detail.  My intention: to challenge my prejudice that if the novel comes before the film, the novel is bound to be better.
Within an hour of the first day, I am hooked on David Nicoll’s book.  Within a few pages, I can see lots of reasons why it could make a great film.  They include: a clear and simple structure – one chapter each for twenty sequential years, each taking place on the same day, 15 July; a central storyline with in-built suspense – a long-playing love-story between an improbably matched heterosexual couple;  a narrative punctuated by set pieces – a university graduation, foreign adventures, alcoholic melt-down; and enough smaltz to tug the heartstrings – a mother dying of cancer before she’s 50, a wedding at a country estate with the precocious children of the monied prominent among the guests.
A text-book novel, in many ways. And certainly the stuff that movies are made of.  Nonetheless, on day two, I buy my cinema ticket with trepidation.  Why? Because I don’t want the highly satisfying experience of reading the book sullied by the minor blemishes or gaping wounds of the film.  I know for certain I will find some, even though I have resisted the temptation to read the reviews before I make the change from reader to viewer.
I know because it’s happened too often before.  Two early examples stick in my mind: a golden, glowing Julie Christie in the role of the dark-haired, aloof Bathsheba Everdene of Hardy’s novel Far from the madding crowd in John Schlesinger’s  1967 film; and Oliver Reed and Alan Bates as industrialist Gerald Crich and intellectual Rupert Birkin in Ken Russell’s 1969 film Women in Love.  (If you’re interested in the author’s intentions for Bathsheba’s appearance, take a look at Helen Paterson Allingham’s illustrations of her for the original, 1874 serialisation in Cornhill Magazine.)
As I stood in the cinema queue, the two things I was fretting about in particular were how the film would handle the complexity of the timescales and location shifts, and how make-up and technology would combine to age the two central characters between their early twenties and very late thirties/early forties.   But I was worrying about the wrong things. I should have been concerning myself with casting, domestic interiors, the heroine’s Yorkshire accent and the unfeasibility of skinny-dipping joyfully in Normandy, even in the summer.  In my book, all wrong.  I’ve read the reviews now, and my opinion is not by any means an uncommon one.
So what result from my little experiment?  Am I a changed reader? A person less wedded to books and more open to film? The answer is no to both.   I have tried, and failed, to shake off the notion that there is a right and proper order to these things: read the book, then, perhaps, see the film.  For the reader, though, isn’t the lure of the film as much about seeing what the scriptwriter has done with the novel (even if the scriptwriter and the novelist are one and the same person) as much as it is about the film for its own sake?  But as a writer, I feel differently, as dialogue is what I love writing most, and dialogue dominates in film in a way it rarely does in fiction.
I’ll be repeating my fiction-and-film exercise twice more over the next couple of months. Cary Fukunaga’s film (yet another!) of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre will be showing in a cinema near you from 6 September and the long-awaited film of Lionel Shriver’s Orange Prize-winning novel We need to talk about Kevin hits the screens on 26 October.  I’m looking forward to them already.