It’s been a tiring week, mostly because I came down with a virus last weekend (I’m very glad I scheduled four posts to appear before I was stricken!) so I’m looking forward to collapsing a bit. AND seeing my dear friend Mel, who is visiting Oxford. I hope you all have equally fun plans! And if you don’t, solace yourself with a book, a link, and a blog post.
1.) The book – who’d have thought that one of the new books I’m most excited about would be a graphic novel? I loved the colourful, gentle touch of Brecht Evens’ The Wrong Place, so different to the brash superhero-comic-style of many graphic novels (but not all, of course.) So I asked Jonathan Cape if they’d be kind enough to send me his latest, and they very nicely did – it’s called The Making Of and it looks to have the same aesthetic. I will, of course, tell you more when I’ve read it.
2.) The link – is to the first post I’ve written in my new job at OxfordWords! Actually, the first one I wrote will be appearing on Tuesday – this post, on ‘5 Words You Didn’t Know Were Acronyms‘, was written yesterday as a quick substitute for something else – but it was great fun to write, and might surprise you.
3.)The blog post – I’m afraid I’ve been pretty rubbish at commenting on posts this week, from my sickbed, but I’ve been reading ’em. Mary/Mrs. Miniver’s Daughter has some lovely mural images in her latest post. She seems to be at an exhibition every other hour, and I must follow her example and try to get to the British Murals and Decorative Painting 1910-1970 exhibition before it closes on 9th March.
As promised, here is my interview with Cheerful Weather for the Wedding screenwriter Mary Henely Magill! It’s a real privilege to have her here. And don’t forget, the DVD is currently out, available from Amazon and lots of other places.
Mary with director Donald Rice, on set. (photo by Mark Tilley)
ST: For people who haven’t read Julia Strachey’s novel, describe it in a sentence!
MHM: I’m not good at this kind of thing at all, but I’ll give it a go … It’s a very sharp and funny and odd tale about a romance gone awry and a family on the verge of chaos.
ST: How did you discover the book?
MHM: It was given to me as a present by a very good friend. We were both huge Persephone fans and she worked around the corner from the shop in Bloomsbury. I was about to get married, but I don’t think my friend had read the book herself. Dolly is not exactly the model bride-to-be.
ST: What led to you adapting it, and getting the film made?
MHM: I was looking for a small(ish) scale project to adapt and this seemed to be it. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I had worked in production on short films with Teun Hilte and Donald Rice, and they were involved with Cheerful Weather for the Wedding from the beginning. Teun optioned the rights, and we always planned that Donald would direct the movie. He edited the first few drafts of the script and eventually we wrote the script together. Once Felicity Jones was on board, everything moved very quickly.
ST: Were there any bits of the novel which you loved, but didn’t feel would work for the screen?
MHM: Yes! My favourite thing in the book is when Dolly remembers the moment she knew Joseph had fallen in love with her. He didn’t actually say the words. He told her that she would “adore” a jumbly, whatever that is, but he was really saying that he adored her. I absolutely loved this and wrote it into the script. We wound up changing the scene completely and the whole thing was cut – which was really disheartening. But, we replaced it with the barn dance scene, which is my favourite part of the film so it all worked out!
ST: Here’s my idiosyncratic personal question, because it was about my favourite bit of the novel…. why weren’t the socks emerald green?!
MHM: I really don’t know why we changed that. I think we liked the idea that they looked like “cat sick.” That was just a weird thing that got lost in translation somehow. I always laughed about the socks in the book. In the first few versions of the script, everyone who read it would say there was way too much stuff about the socks.
ST: Any amusing anecdotes from the set?
MHM: The crew stayed in chalets at a place called Sandy Balls (look it up, it’s real!) and that provided lots of tittering and silliness. We also had a hilarious evening at a hotel in Salisbury which involved restaurant ineptitude that would make Fawlty Towers look like The Ritz. But, the most amusing anecdotes from the set are far too inappropriate to share on this blog!
ST: If you had to pick a favourite line from the screenplay, what would it be?
MHM: Yikes. I really like when Kitty says that she doesn’t want the boy who looks like he has rabies. I also like it when Mrs. Whitstable says that Dolly is beautiful, and then announces that she (Mrs. W) has lost her eyesight. This was not in the book, although almost all the rest of Mrs. Whitstable’s lines were. I actually took it from an aged great aunt of mine who said nearly the same thing to me when I visited her in Greece when I was 18.
ST: Which other books would you like to adapt, in an ideal world?
MHM: I could go on and on with this one, but here are the first three that come to mind: The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey Timothy and Two Witches by Margaret Storey
ST: And the question I ask everyone… what are you reading at the moment?
MHM: I’m attempting to read Middlemarch for the third time. First two attempts ended in failure. I think I hate it. I feel like a complete philistine for saying that, but I am really struggling to get through it. Pathetic! I also just re-read The Go-Between, which I think is absolutely brilliant.
Thanks, Mary! (And, by the way, I’ve never got beyond the first 100 pages of Middlemarch…)
First off, I should let you know that tomorrow I’ll be posting an exclusive Q&A with the scriptwriter of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, Mary Henely Magill – so, look forward to that!
I saw the film last week (incidentally, it is now available on DVD), and I’ll confess that I was a bit nervous before I went. As quite a few of us said in the fab discussion we had here, the novel (novella?) felt quite unfilmable. And the reviews weren’t all hugely positive… although mostly they seemed upset that it wasn’t Downton Abbey. (Why on earth should it be?) One even complained that it wasn’t very cheerful, and irony exploded. Well, I’ve got to say – with one or two reservations, I thought it was really good. I’d definitely recommend getting hold of the DVD, if you can’t get to a screening.
I’m going to assume I skip a synopsis, because you can just read the novel review above, if you don’t know what’s what. So instead, because I don’t really know how to structure a film review without a synopsis, I’m going to give you my thoughts in bullet points… just below the film trailer.
1) As you can see from the trailer, the film is beautifully shot. That’s usually a damn-with-faint-praise comment, but I don’t see why it should be. Every frame was sumptuous, whether interior or exterior. A golden, hazy spring day was as strikingly gorgeous as a sharp winter’s morning in a bedroom. Even if the script and acting had been appalling (which they certainly weren’t), it would be a delicious film to watch.
2.) Felicity Jones was the Big Name for the film, and she was good, but I think the best people were Ellie Kendrick as Kitty, Elizabeth McGovern as Mrs. Thatcham, and Fenella Woolgar as Nancy. Let’s look at them one by one…
3.) Ellie Kendrick was so wonderful as Anne Frank in a TV series about her a while ago, and she was equally wonderful here. Her Kitty was precocious, spontaneous, affectionate, and witty. The most engaging character on screen, for my money.
4.) We all know Elizabeth McGovern for her Downton performance nowadays, but she was signed up for Cheerful Weather for the Wedding first. On the page, Mrs. Thatcham is unbelievably absent-minded. McGovern brings that across, but also makes her realistically stern and single-minded.
5.) I don’t remember Nancy in the novel, but the dynamic between her and husband David were a wonderful part of the film. Fenella Woolgar is so brilliant at the brisk barbed comment or sardonic murmur. A total joy.
6.) From the main trio – James Norton’s Owen was as much a nonentity on screen as on the page, but that’s the way it should be. Luke Treadaway was fantastic as Joseph, in both impassioned and frivolous scenes, and Felicity Jones put it in a thoughtful performance as bride-to-be Dolly.
7.) I loved how, from the opening notes of the score onwards, the film captured the hysterical madness of the narrative. Especially in the first half, the frenetic, overlapping conversations and muddled characters was done really well – with the right level of detachment from genuine emotional concerns.
8.) The flip-side of this are the extended flashback scenes, and a deep-and-meaningful between Joseph and Dolly on the day of the wedding. I know opinions differ on this, but for my money, the characters in Julia Strachey’s novel aren’t intended to be sympathetic. It doesn’t really matter what they think and feel, because they’re all grotesques, and the point of the book is to be a madcap romp through events. Which meant I didn’t buy the emotional scenes between Dolly and Joseph, which seemed to dilute the tone of the film. You can’t really have your cake and eat it – either it’s a surreal comedy, or it’s a poignant one. I think it would have been better to avoid making the characters at all sympathetic (same goes for the film of Angel), although I understand that that would make it harder to pitch or market.
9.) It *is* a really funny film. The cinema was filled with laughter on many occasions. The trailer goes a bit slapsticky, but the film itself isn’t, and most of the humour came from dialogue and facial expressions.
10.) The socks weren’t emerald green! My favourite bit! But that is something I asked Mary… come back tomorrow to find out her answer to that and other questions…
I can keep it from you no longer! The book is London War Notes 1939-1945 by Mollie Panter-Downes. Congratulations to anybody who correctly guessed that (I’m typing this in advance, so for all I know you all guessed it.) I’ll give you a proper review when I’ve finished the book (and very reluctantly handed it back to the library, because secondhand copies are prohibitively expensive) but here’s an excerpt to give you a taste of Mollie Panter-Downes’ style:
Coming out into the blackout after these evenings is like falling into an inky well; the only lights are the changing green and red crosses of the masked traffic signals and the tiny flashing torches of pedestrians feeling their way like Braille readers around the murky puzzle of Piccadilly Circus. A hawker with a tray of torches does a roaring trade there these dark nights. So great has been the demand for batteries that spares are now unobtainable, and exasperated Londoners whose torches fail find that they either have to buy a complete new one or risk breaking a leg when they sally out of doors. Everyone echoes Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: “A calendar, a calendar! look in the almanack; find out moonshine, find out moonshine.” It is felt that moonlit nights may be an invitation to bombers, but at least they’re more friendly.
More soon…
I promised to tell you about my new job, and now that I’m a week into it, I will.
Firstly, I suppose I should get some housekeeping out of the way. I am now employed by Oxford University Press, and involved with their blog, but all opinions given here are solely mine, and not OUP’s. There, that’s out the way – transparency always a good idea! But I’m not going to pretend to keep blog and job completely secret, because I think there are things on OxfordWords which you’ll really enjoy. Indeed, I linked to it before I ever worked there. It would be silly to keep these things to myself.
So, yes, I am Content, Communications, and Engagement Manager for OUP online dictionaries (for four months, as part of someone’s maternity cover). And – I love it! I have really, really enjoyed my first week – to the point where I’m already a little sad that it’s probably only going to last four months, in this position. Everyone’s very friendly, and the job is both challenging and fun, so far.
What do I actually do? My lovely line manager is still easing me in, and at the moment most of my role revolves around the OxfordWords blog – commissioning, editing, proof-reading, and (occasionally!) writing blog posts about language.
Although I won’t be writing hugely often, I have written my first post – which is a competition, so I didn’t actually have to write very much, but I did come up with this Dickens-related question. Enter to win a Kindle Fire HD! (Yes, yes, you know my stubbornly paper-books-only-please position, but if you’re Kindle-inclined – Kinclined? – then it’s a fantastic competition. And obviously I can’t enter anyway. Incidentally, the only downside to this job is that I can’t receive OUP review copies anymore!)
We language-lovers also, of course, love puns. If they’re puns mixed with pedantry, what more could we ask for? I don’t know where I stand with copyright, so I’m not going to copy the picture across, but I crafted something in Paint which will stand for time immemorial as Great Art… no? (If that Twitter link doesn’t work, try this one on Facebook.)
All in all, I’m so happy that I applied for it – and, more than that, that they offered me the job! It’s even more ideal for me than I’d imagined, and the people friendlier than I could have hoped. It already feels to me like I’ve been part of the team for ages.
I’ll keep mentioning OxfordWords content here, if I feel it’s appropriate for SiaB readers – and hopefully will also be posting regularly here. As a teaser, one of (seven!) books I’m reading at the moment is a fantastically good and observant chronicle of the Second World War… and it isn’t by Nella Last… guesses?
Happy weekend, folks! As I warned, things have been a bit quieter than usual on SiaB this week. I’ll tell you more about my job next week (thanks for all your lovely congrats) – for now, sit back and enjoy a book, a link, and a blog post.
1.) The blog post – You know how great it is when someone loves an author you love? Even better is when initially they don’t, and then discover later that they do. Harriet rather hated her first experience with Ivy Compton-Burnett (whom, as you might know, I adore). Bravely, after some encouragement from me and some reading around the blogs, Harriet decided to give Dame Ivy another try. And let there be rejoicing in the street, it worked! Let Harriet explain it all, here.
2.)The book – just look what will be coming out in April…
3.) The link – I’m afraid I can’t remember where I first saw this (it was on Facebook, let’s face [ahem] it) but thanks if you brought it to my attention! It’s 30 of the Most Beautiful Abandoned Places – some really stunning, quite eerie, photos.
Once or twice on Stuck-in-a-Book I’ve talked about my little foibles when it comes to bookmarks. Click back on those links to find out more (especially the first one, which gives a few examples) – basically, I like my bookmarks and books to fit together, by theme or colour.
And I was especially pleased by the bookmark/book combination that’s currently on my bedside table… so I had to share it with you.
Not only are Jane Bowles’ short stories shaping up to be pretty stunning (thanks Sort Of Books for sending it to me!) but just look how well the postcard from Blackwell co-ordinates with the image of the woman on the front.
If starting a new job weren’t enough exciting news, I have more! Some of you may have seen it on Twitter and Facebook, but I haven’t mentioned it here yet.
I shall be appearing, with Elaine from Random Jottings, at the Felixstowe Book Festival 15-16 June 2013!
We’ll be nattering about book blogging – how we got involved, what it entails, anecdotes etc. Not entirely sure what we’re saying, but I imagine it’ll be fairly organic. Let’s face it, when Elaine and I get talking, we’re not worried that there will be long periods of silence. Hopefully the audience will be able to get a word in, for a Q&A!
If you live remotely near Suffolk, it would be lovely if you could come! Obviously we’re not the only event – the website is here, so have a browse through. I’d love to meet SiaB readers, so do come along and introduce yourselves. For more info, either see that website, or read what Elaine had to say about it all.
I’ve been a bit worried about what will happen when I get to my first Reading Presently book which I haven’t hugely liked. And the time has come. Since it was given by a very dear friend (my ex-colleague Lucy) I don’t want to seem unappreciative – but I also, of course, don’t want to lie. So I’m just going to give my honest review, with the caveat that I’m VERY grateful to Luce for giving it to me (and another addendum, that I’ve just read a really fun, great book which Lucy also gave me.)
As it happens, I didn’t especially dislikeA Spy in the Bookshop (letters between Heywood Hill and John Saumarez Smith 1966-74), it just disappointed me a bit. JSS (as I shall know him for the rest of this review) had previously edited the letters of Heywood Hill and Nancy Mitford, which I very much enjoyed – and was actually the first thing I read in the Mitford canon. Obviously buoyed by success, JSS decided to publish his own correspondence with Heywood Hill…
Hill had just retired from the bookshop at 10, Curzon Street, and running the shop was a man with the extraordinary name Handasyde Buchanan (known as ‘Handy’). His wife Mollie worked there too, as well as assistant Liz. The letters JSS sends to Hill are, basically, 165 pages of them bitching about the Buchanans. Forgive the terminology, but nothing else will quite fit.
You know when you’re on a bus, or in a shop, and overhear angry conversation between two people about an absent third – and you think “I bet it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other”? Yes? That is to say, the absent third person would probably have equally as compelling a case against the gossiping couple present? That’s the feeling that I got from A Spy in the Bookshop (2006). JSS writes off a letter saying “THIS is something awful Handy did today”; Hill replies “Gosh, that’s awful”; JSS writes “You think THAT’S awful? What about THIS!”
I don’t blame JSS for writing these letters. I imagine it was rather cathartic – and sometimes, as with the following example, rather amusing:
Instead, he took the chance when Mollie was away, “to smarten me up”: a process that I need hardly describe, consisting as it always does of a catalogue of his own virtues.
but it does rather pall. Which makes it particularly galling when JSS does edit out excerpts which seem rather more interesting. This editorial comment made me gnash my teeth, and pencil two exclamation marks in the margin:
[Some details followed about Rome and some of the people, including Muriel Spark, whom I’d met through my ex-uncle Ronald Bottrall.]
Oh, John! Tell us about that, please!
There is enough about the everyday running of a bookshop to keep me reading, and anybody who can slip in anecdotes about Nancy Mitford is onto a winning thing with me, but I would have loved more. Heywood Hill could also be witty when he wanted to be:
P.S. One of those real hopeless customer questions from a neighbour here. A book about a man in California who kept wolves as Alsatians. She had it in paperback but lost it, she found it such a help with her jackal.
But here again, I’m afraid I have a problem with their outlook. I hate the idea of books being worth a lot of money if they’re first editions, and all that talk of ‘unclipped’, ‘neat copy’ etc. The idea of books as collectible objects based on their appearance or scarcity rather sickens me, as an avid reader. And commercial value, naturally for booksellers, is paramount in their mind.
Heywood Hill has proven to be a worthy correspondent, in the letters with Nancy Mitford, and I did get the sense that he was lowering himself rather for JSS’s petty missives. I don’t doubt a genuine affection between them, but I do believe that Hill wasn’t bringing out his best letters for JSS.
It’s a fun enough collection, and the bookshop setting certainly helps, but it does scream afterthought, once the Nancy Mitford letters were successful. Without either correspondent having her talent for letter-writing, and with such a repetitive, almost bitter, note sounding throughout, A Spy in the Bookshop is only fairly enjoyable – and there are certainly better places to look for this sort of collection. But, once again, thank you to Lucy for being sweet enough to give me a copy!
