Screen time

There’s nothing quite as fun as seeing a beloved book series make the transition to television

For the longest time ever, I have wondered why Daniel Silva’s creation, the Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon, does not get the James Bond (or even the Jason Bourne) treatment. For those who have not read Silva’s series of spy novels, Allon is a marvelous creation, art restorer by day and assassin by night (and sometimes the other way around), with a personal tragedy in his past life that haunts him to this day, even though a second marriage to a gorgeous Italian woman and a new family has eased his pain somewhat.

Allon always seemed like a character made for the movies to me. But, it turns out that he is destined to make his mark on the small screen, with MGM Television having acquired the rights to the collection of Silva’s Allon novels. So, Gabriel Allon will be arriving on a TV screen somewhere near you nearly 18 years after he first came to life in The Kill Artist (published in 2000) and I, for one, can’t wait.

As if this news wasn’t enough to send me into ecstasies, it turns out that another of my favourite novelists is having her works turned into a television show as well. Production on Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend – the first book of her Neapolitan quarter – is underway in Caserta, Italy. The book will be turned into an eight-episode TV series set in Naples, telling the story of Lenu (Elena Greco) and Lila (Raffaella Cerullo), the two girls who find each other in childhood and go on to have a life-long friendship with its share of ups and downs. (And the best part is that the series – produced by HBO in collaboration with Rai Fiction – will have the characters speaking Italian, which will give it a certain verisimilitude that wouldn’t have been possible with an Italian cast spewing heavily-accented English.)

But no sooner had I finished celebrating all this good news than my inner Greedy Gretel got going. And now, I can’t stop fantasizing about some of my other much-loved book series being adapted for television, allowing me a glimpse of my favourite characters on the small screen.

Here’s just a small sampling of some of my fantasy TV series.

Donna Leon’s murder mysteries

Set in Venice, this series revolves around the career and life of one of the most engaging private detectives of modern fiction. Commissario Guido Brunetti is not your average tortured detective, smoking and drinking too much as he tries to cope with challenging cases and a dysfunctional family. No, that kind of clichéd writing is not for Leon. Her detective is a family man who walks home to lunch everyday to feast on the three-course meals served up by his intelligent and feisty wife, Paola, so that he can enjoy the company of his two children, Raffi and Chiara.

The crimes themselves are interesting enough but the real star of the series is the city of the Venice itself. You can almost smell the dank scents rising from the canali and calli of the city, see the winding streets that lead to the waters of the Grand Canal and the laguna, and marvel at the architecture of the beautiful buildings that keep Brunetti company as he walks to and back from work.

Strangely enough, only a German production house had filmed some of the stories though the series hasn’t been distributed widely. It’s time someone in the English-speaking world stepped up and gave us Venice and Brunetti in all their glory.

Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romances

Regular readers of this column will know what a dedicated fan of Heyer’s romances I am. So, it would be no exaggeration to say that I have spent the last two decades of my life waiting for someone to make a TV series based on her Regency novels. But much to my disappointment, while every ‘period’ work from Poldark to Howard’s End is regaling TV audiences across the world, nobody seems willing to give Heyer a shot.

It’s a baffling state of affairs. These are ready-made storylines, incredibly well-plotted, laced with humour and wit, and almost cinematic is their treatment. The characters are very well-drawn as well, both the dashing heroes and the sparkling, willful heroines who are no shrinking violets. And yet, nobody seems to have thought of bringing the lovely Arabella, the masterful Frederica or the amazing Grand Sophy to life.

Well, the first one who does will have a bonafide hit on his or her hands. Meanwhile, I live in hope.

Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers series

These were my absolute favourite books growing up. I would devour them late into the night, reading by the light of a torch that I had smuggled into my bed. And then, when I finally fell asleep I would dream of midnight feasts, night-time swims, classroom pranks, and so much more, waking up even more determined than ever to go to boarding school.

Well, that never happened. So, I guess the next-best thing – now that I am all grown up – would be to be transported to the world of Mallory Towers via my TV screen. Strangely enough, while the Famous Five and Noddy have had their stints on television, Darrell Rivers and her friends at boarding school have never managed to make that transition.

And that’s a pity, if you ask me. It’s time a new generation of children was introduced to the antics of this group of girls: the sensible but hot-tempered Darrell, her best friend Sally Hope, the spoilt little brat Gwendoline Lacey and the resident joker Alicia Johns. And what better way to do that for this non-reading generation than through the medium of television?

What's in a name?

Why it helps that we don't know who Elena Ferrante is when we get lost in her fictional world

Who is Elena Ferrante? Nobody really knows. Well, except for her publisher, her literary agent, and possibly, her best friend. For the rest of the world, Elena Ferrante is just a name. Or, to put it more accurately, just a pseudonym. The real woman behind it remains a mystery.

There are some things about Ferrante that we can guess at. She is an Italian. She grew up in Naples. She came of age around the 1960s. She has some experience of growing up poor and unprivileged. And she has struggled to play the traditional roles required of women.

But all that is pure conjecture. We don't know anything about her for certain. All we can do is extrapolate from her books to imagine what kind of life she must have led, what her life experiences were, and how they shaped her as a woman and a writer. So we imagine that she is a woman who had difficulty coming to terms with what society (and her family) demanded of a wife and mother -- or indeed a daughter. We imagine that she struggled with romantic love. We imagine that she broke some hearts and has hers broken in turn.

Despite speculation to the contrary, I for one am quite sure that Elena Ferrante is a woman. Only a woman could have mined her interior life so ruthlessly; only a woman could so perfectly express feminine angst; and only a woman could understand the complicated relationships that exist between women.

But Ferrante is not just any woman. She is one who has become the voice of an entire generation of women who came of age in a pre-feminist era, who had to fight for their education, their right to work outside the home, the right not to be reduced to their primary relationships, the right to be seen as individuals in their own right, the right not to be seen as a sum of their body parts. Sample this sentence from My Brilliant Friend: “The beauty of mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn’t find an outlet, Greco, and it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and it will be as if she never had it.”

So Ferrante's women rage. They scream (sometimes out loud, sometimes silently). They push against boundaries. They explore their sexuality. They laugh. They cry. They behave badly. They tear down stereotypes. They look at the world around them with unflinching eyes. And they are completely authentic no matter what they do. Their voice is the voice of everywoman. Their thoughts are the ones that we sometimes barely acknowledge to ourselves, leave alone give voice to. They are both light and dark, both good and evil, both sinned against and sinning.

My introduction to Ferrante came via her quartet of Neopolitan novels, which is best described as her tribute to female friendship. It is the bond between Lenu and Lila – the Cerullo and Greco quoted above, two girls growing up in the same poor, deprived, brutish neighbourhood in Naples -- that provides the central framework of a story that takes in their entire lives, beginning from the 1950s and continuing into the first decade of the 21st century. The bond between the two women sometimes chafes, sometimes grows loose, sometimes binds them close, and sometimes becomes so tight that it suffocates.

And it is through their story that we see the enormous changes that are occurring in the world around them. You see the world expand through their eyes, as they marry, birth children, make careers, deal with the betrayals of love and the treacheries of life. All of this unfolds through the books following My Brilliant Friend: The Story Of A New Name, Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay, and The Story Of The Lost Child.

It was after I had devoured the entire quartet that I started on the books in which Ferrante had begun to find her voice and learnt to deploy it with devastating effect. Her first book, Troubling Love, is about a daughter’s search for her dead mother and the discoveries she makes along the way. The Days Of Abandonment plumbs the depths of the despair of a wife whose husband has left her for another woman. And The Lost Daughter tells a tale that most mothers and daughters will see something of themselves in.

It is only when you read her novels that you realise that Ferrante's insistence on anonymity is not some writer's caprice or a brilliant publicity stunt set up by a publishing house but an absolute necessity. It is her anonymity that allows her the freedom to say things that we sometimes find hard to even say to ourselves in the depths of our subconscious mind.

And what freedom it is! She can write about the first fumblings of adolescent love. She can shine a light on the resentment mothers feel towards their children no matter how much they may love them. She can examine the dark eroticism of adultery, as it lurks in shadowy corners. And she can do all this without worrying about anyone drawing parallels or seeking common ground in her own personal life.

Perhaps it is this liberty that allows Ferrante's voice to soar as high as it does. And that is what allows it to speak to us. But don’t take my word for it. From this month on, all of Ferrante’s books are available in India. Read and experience her magic for yourself.

Best friends forever

You may ignore the importance of female friendships – but you certainly can’t deny it

Over the last few days I have been immersed in Elena Ferrante’s novel, My Brilliant Friend. The book is best summed up as an ode to female friendship, with all its ups and downs, highs and lows, tantrums and tears, laughter and fear. The story revolves around two young girls, Lenu and Lina, growing up in a rough neighbourhood in Naples, who establish a wary friendship as children. But in telling their tale through the prism of the traumas and triumphs of their relationship, Ferrante delves deep into some of the universal truths of the nature of friendship (and its limits).

Reading it late into the night, I began to think about how much we neglect the importance of same-sex friendships because of our very modern obsession with romantic love (or even sexual desire). But however much we ignore it, we cannot deny the importance of friendship in our lives: the relationship of a child with an elderly neighbour; of a teacher with a favourite pupil; of the man who lives alone with his dog; and of course, that which springs up between two women.

Of all of these, female friendships are the most special, I think (yes, yes, I know, that makes me a sexist so-and-so). And never is their intensity more marked than in childhood and adolescence – that is, before romantic love rears its unruly head.

I still remember my first day at school, kitted out in a strange new uniform, knees knocking together with nerves, my heart pounding with fear of the unknown horrors lying in wait for me in the schoolroom. My only comfort was the presence of my ‘best friend’ who was starting school the same time as me. We clung together as if our lives depended on it, sitting at adjoining desks, sharing our tiffins at break time, and as the final bell sounded, making a break for freedom. We had survived the first day of school. Things could only get better from now on.

And they did. We got to know our classmates. We lost our mortal fear of our teacher. We played hide-and-seek in the lunch hour. Slowly but surely we made other friends. And by the time we finished school we were part of two very different groups. But the memories of that first day in school ensured that the bonds of our friendship never really loosened no matter how much they frayed.

It’s often said that your closest friends are the ones you make in school. And certainly, adolescent girls can get rather intense about their feelings for one another, especially in all-girl schools. Younger girls develop ‘crushes’ on their seniors; not in a creepy, hyper-sexualized way, but in the sense of idolizing them, hanging on their every word, even imitating the way they look and dress. As for the seniors, their emotional lives are in turmoil as well, as ‘best friends’ are made and unmade, quarrels take on epic proportions and end in teary make-up sessions. It’s almost like a love affair, with all of the love but minus the affair.

And then, come the actual love affairs. That’s when the real dramas start. There’s the jealousy that your best friend now has a boyfriend. There’s the judgement when you really can’t work out what she sees in that jerk. Or even worse, you can see all too well why she likes him; it’s just that you can’t figure out why he likes her when he should really be liking you. I know, it’s exhausting stuff! But the good part is that your friendship survives this tricky phase, you will probably be friends for life.

Until, of course, you put children in the mix. That really is the breaking point of most female friendships. When one of the two gets married and starts breeding and the other is too busy conquering the work world, that’s when the tensions kick in. It is not that anyone is judging the other for her life choices. It is just that as time goes on, the two erstwhile best friends realize that they have less and less in common with one another.

The harried mother can no longer party as she used to. The driven career woman has no real appetite for baby sick and dirty diapers. Slowly but surely, both women gravitate towards those they can better relate to. One makes friends with other new mothers in her baby group; the others gets closer to work colleagues. They still remain friends with one another but become more and more absent from each other’s lives. 

But perhaps the most enduring of female friendships are those that are made in mid-life. They could be made at work, at the local club, with the wives of your husband’s friends, or even at the gym; the context doesn’t really matter. What matters is that by now you are sure of what kind of person you are, and what you are looking for in a friend. You no longer have the patience – or, indeed the time – for hypocrisy and manipulation. You are not interested in playing games or even indulging in a bit of one-upmanship. All you are looking for is a friend who will look out for you. And once you find her, you will never ever let go.

And as the two of you grow old together, comparing pregnancy scars, discussing hot flushes, moaning about your husband or children, bitching about the boss, giggling over mojitos at your weekly girlie lunches, or just watching a movie at the neighbourhood multiplex, remember to give a thanks to female friendships. They really are the best.