Maintain Radio Silence: 2018

Wednesday, 7 November 2018

Durham in Autumn

The Oriental Museum,

Durham University

Durham Cathedral in Lego;

George placed some of the bricks last time we were here together,

five years ago this autumn.

Wednesday, 17 October 2018

With all respect to everyone involved with the 2015 BBC adaptation of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr.Norrell, I have to say that it didn't touch the greatness of the book, which is one of the greatest books I've ever read. I talked the show up a lot before it began, as I was so excited to see an adaptation; so many of my friends and family who frustratingly ignored my appeals to read the book might finally allow their attention spans to be drawn into the wondrous enchantment of England's returning magic by virtue of watching TV for an hour every week.

Unfortunately, as is the case with all televisual adaptations, they had to employ actors to play the parts, rather than use the very real characters who live inside the book and my head; they had to use special effects to demonstrate the magic, rather than use the very real magic that lives inside the book and my head. So there was never any escape from the awareness that what one was witnessing was an adaptation, a facsimile several degrees removed from the transformative power of the book. Perhaps it's partly due to my geographical proximity to John Uskglass's earthly capital (I'm forty miles south of Newcastle), but this book changes my world; it uncovers my true England. It reminds me to listen to the song of the stones, the skies and the rivers, to have respect for the shadows in the corners of my rooms, and for those ancient peoples with whom we share this land. You're simply not going to get that in something so clearly knocked together on a budget and shoved on after the news. No-one I expressed my love of the book to watched more than a few episodes, and I couldn't blame them.

Adaptations are always limited in the first instance and will never be the book. The only way they can be as good as the art upon which they are based is if they take an idea and fly with it, becoming something entirely new. Apocalypse Now, for example. However great the Lord of the Rings movies were, or Game of Thrones, they will always be someone's interpretation of the books, tying the non-reader to one particular version of it, whereas the reader can make something entirely new of the source material, something almost entirely real, limited only by their own imagination. The map can never be the place.

That said, I'm looking forward to giving the TV adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr.Norrell another look, liberated as I now am from the weight of expectation, or the hope to convert others to the cause of English magic. This story will either find you and cast its spell, or it won't. The desire that the enchantments which bind us should also accommodate others is, in the end, a lost hope.