“I like fast spy stories,” quipped my friend as we chatted about The Night Manager, a TV series that aired a couple of years ago but which I got around to watching only recently. I liked it but not in a jaw-dropping sense of it. My friend, on the other hand, thinks highly of the plot and the way it has been written for the screen.
For all his unique, non-conforming philosophies of life, he prefers fast-paced storylines to long drawn-out dramas even if the genre was espionage. Like many people.
I grew up on Sidney Sheldon’s run-of-the-mill mystery thrillers till one day, I picked up a second-hand (or perhaps third-hand) copy of John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold from a paper mart. It took me a while to actually read the novella. At first, I did not like it and this was even before I was a third of my way through it. I was severely underexposed to slow, boring narratives and quite overexposed to Sheldon’s thrilling ones. But eventually, something happened and I took to reading the book from the start. The result was an appreciation of many things: the boring bits of espionage, the ruthlessness of human immorality, the writer’s ability to more than bring alive his characters not through action-packed or emotionally charged verbs and adjectives, but surprisingly through a littany of sentences and paragraphs that were totally irreverent and, oftentimes, boringly long descriptions of a character’s internal strife.
The true genius (and artistic fruit) of John le Carre’s stories are not the stories themselves although they are indeed quite elaborate and intricate. The writing itself is a bliss to go through if you have the patience and the human curiosity to delve deeper into any given character’s life. I’d go out on a limb to say that the style of writing, a.k.a the presentation, supercedes the plot. And this is perhaps why, even if so many have tried to transfer his novels to the big screen, movies based on his novels aren’t exactly the same or better experience. Every time I watch a movie based on his novel that I’ve read, it feels like limbs have been cut off and the quintessential soul of John le Carre’s writing has taken a leave of absence.
You can’t really make a movie out of some writers. No, I don’t mean you cannot in a literal sense. Of course you can write screenplays out of almost anything and convert it into a movie. But along the way, things are lost in translation. In John le Carre’s case, what’s lost in translation is the most crucial part of the whole le Carre experience - the counter-intuitive process of an irreverent writing paving way for a highly-engrossing and thorough experience of what his characters go through. Some of these come from as simple a thing as Peter Guillam sitting on the bed or George Smiley walking into a safe house on a rainy evening in London. Before and after the specific actions, there’s a barrage of words that enable us to conjure up a lot of things about the characters. To depict them on screen would be almost an impossibility.
He was lauded by the media back when his third novel came out; lauded for the unique, matter-of-fact style of presenting the world of espionage when writers like Ian Fleming glamourized the same world. He wrote of not just guns, honey pots, larger-than-life villains and deep-seated murders, but also of the typists typing telegrams, agents depositing money in banks, executives killing off assignments and cases after deliberating on a bunch of them. He wrote these in as much detail as he wrote the fancy bits of espionage.
Unfortunately, the “boring” bits aren’t exactly television or movie-friendly.
On television or movies, you can’t really show these in as excruciating detail as they are written in novels. Again, it’s not just a matter of possibility. It is a matter of feasibility. Movies involve more money, more people, more investment of resources. And perhaps that is why, it is harder to break the mould or question the status quo. The status quo is this: spy stories have to be fast-paced and thrilling.
No wonder then that The Night Manager (TV series) is the way it is. Not only is the plot significantly different from the original novel on which it is based on, but in its quest to be an attractive, appealing miniseries, it kills the soul of a le Carre narrative. But perhaps, it is good for its own sake: if the adaptation had tried even remotely to bring le Carre’s writing to life, it would have failed and miserably so.