AKA: In which I rant at
length about Jane Austen.
After reviewing the
modernised Sense and Sensibility and
Northanger Abbey, I’ve been excitedly
waiting for the next installation of the Austen Project. For those less
obsessed with Jane Austen than me, the Austen Project, is a new series, in
which six novelists each take one of Austen’s novels, and rewrite a modernised
version set in today’s world. As a massive fan of Jane Austen’s novels and a
massive fan of adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, you can understand why I’m
excited by this project – and also why I’m a bit disappointed
The latest release is
Alexander McCall Smith’s rewriting of Emma.
I was especially curious to read this as I’ve really liked the other modern adaptations
of Emma that I’ve come across – the 1995
film Clueless and the recent
youtube vlog adaptation Emma Approved.
Both of these were, for me, somewhat more successful that McCall Smith’s
adaptation. Don’t get me wrong - I did enjoy the modern retelling of Emma. It’s probably impossible for me to
read or watch anything related to Jane Austen without enjoying it at least a
bit. And the novel is certainly an
easy read. As with Sense and Sensibility,
I read it pretty much in one sitting. Mr Woodhouse is done perfectly. I love
that Philip Elton gets arrested for drunk driving. I like the hints that Emma
befriends Harriet partly because she’s physically attracted to her. It was a
bit random, but it was deliciously random, even if it seemed to lead nowhere. There
was a lot in this book that I loved; I figure I should make that clear before I
launch into what I thought let it down.
As with Joanna
Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility and
Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey, the
first thing is to do with logistics and modernisation. The strange thing about
the Austen project is that these are modern
adaptations of Jane Austen books – and yet the authors seem so unwilling to
modernise things. Why, for example, is Miss Anne Taylor still Emma’s governess?
As McCall Smith happily admits within the book, people don’t have governesses
nowadays. Mr Woodhouse ‘did not know anybody who had had a governess’, and has to
search for one in an ‘old-fashioned’ country magazine. Surely if, as a writer,
you have to justify your anachronisms by explaining them away as ‘old-fashioned’,
that should ring alarm bells. What annoys me isn’t just the fact that having a
governess feels thoroughly unmodern, but that it could have been so easily
fixed. Rather than being her governess, Anne Taylor could be instead Emma’s
school teacher, her neighbour, her godmother, even a tutor that she seems a few
times a week. If McCall Smith really wanted her living with the Woodhouses, it
wouldn’t be impossible that the Woodhouses let out one of these eleven bedrooms
to a PhD student or something. There are so many ways this issue could have
been sorted out.
I have a similar
problem with Miss Taylor’s engagement to James Weston. They get engaged within
two weeks. Two weeks. Two weeks.
There is just no way whatsoever that, in the twenty-first century, Miss Taylor
could get engaged to a man she’s been going out with for two weeks, and that
none of her friends, especially Emma, wouldn’t turn around and say, what, are
you mad? If they’d been together six months, even three months, if would have
been quick but believable. Two weeks is just preposterous. This too would be
easy to fix; McCall Smith could simply make Emma set Mr Weston and Miss Taylor
up several months or a year prior to the summer in which the book’s mainly set.
They could then get engaged and/or move in together at the start of the main
plot.
As I found in Sense and Sensibility, there’s also the
issue of money. I think I’ve said this before, but the fact remains: if the aim
of writing the Austen Project is to make Jane Austen more accessible to more
people, then it’s not quite working, for reading about the exceedingly rich
today is just as alienating as reading about the gentry in the early
nineteen-century. I sort of understand why Emma has to be fairly rich, because
it’s part of the plot and her character that she’s a snob. Yet why Mr Weston still
has to have a house with eight bedrooms, and why Mr Elton and Mr Knightley still own masses
of property, is beyond me.
This issue of money
and class another problem in Harriet, Robert Martin, and Philip Elton. For one thing
I’m convinced that a modern day Elton would openly admit to himself that he’s
mainly interested in Emma for her house and ‘dowry’, nor that a modern Emma
would turn her nose up at Robert simply because his parents own a B&B. I’m
much more convinced by what’s been down in Clueless
or Emma Approved, where Emma
disapproves of Robert because he’s “uncool”. Here Emma’s snobbery feels forced.
Likewise, Emma’s desire
to set Harriet up with a rich man in order to look after her is completely unconvincing.
There is no way that an independent twenty-two year old girl who doesn’t want
to get married and is about to start up her own business, would say this to her
friend:
It’s quite hard for us these days… Girls.
Women. We have to work. Guys have always had to do that, I suppose, but now it
applies to us too. Unless one’s, well, unless one’s lucky… One can let men pay
the bills... You can still find men who are prepared to look after women. There
are still a few women who don’t have to work… You could say that it’s an
exchange. Men might have the money. Women exchange their… their friendship for
practical support. They look after the men emotionally. They cook for them and
so on. In return, men worry about the bills. Don’t you think that sounds like a
fair exchange?
To be honest I hope
that no twenty-two year old girl would ever say that. Sure, some people want to
be stay at home mums, but surely no one thinks about it like that. Emma’s not
describing two people falling in love and one of them deciding to stay at home
to look after the kids. She’s talking about an ‘exchange’. I sat there and
seethed. Apparently McCall Smith has forgotten that between Jane Austen’s
original novels and the present day, something called feminism happened.
The problem with all
of this is that McCall Smith’s Emma still
feels like a regency novel. It’s not a modern take on a classic plot and
characters; it’s Jane Austen with cars and potential bisexuality. A modern Emma
wouldn’t ‘pop round’ to give out invitations to a dinner party; she’d send them
out on facebook, at least to the younger people. In fact, she probably wouldn’t
have a dinner party (which McCall Smith knows, because he makes Miss Bates
mention that ‘so few people hold dinner parties these days’). Likewise, a
modern Emma wouldn’t obsess over how to invite Harriet and Philip Elton to her
house for tea at the same time. They’re all of the same age; she’d just organise
for a group of them to go to the pub.
Some aspects of the
plot were changed, certainly. I quite liked what was done with Harriet at the
end, even if more could have been made of it. I thought the modernisation of
Frank and Jane’s plot worked fairly well, although it could have been done more simply and clearly. I just wish the minor elements of
plot had been updated too. I understand, of course, that the Austen Project
seeks to keep the important family and inter-family relations of the original
novel, that looser adaptations such as Clueless
and Emma Approved tend to lose.
Still, I’m sure there are ways of doing this in a twenty-first century way.
And beyond the
logistics, I have another problem with McCall Smith’s Emma. At times it felt… lazy.
Even when Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey don’t work, you can
feel in every page a deep love of Jane Austen. I didn’t feel that at all in Emma.
There were a few
things that just made no sense. Emma studies design at the University of Bath.
As someone currently attending Bath Spa University, I know very well that the
University of Bath doesn’t do a design course, because it only does
science-related subjects. Emma could have studied at Bath Spa, of course, but
the fact that McCall Smith didn’t bother with the two minute google it would
have taken to find this out seems just lazy. Similarly, it makes no sense that
Miss Bates forget to mention than Jane went to Cambridge when she’s normally so
keep to show off about her.
A lot of the novel
felt rushed. Take the characterisation. Mr Woodhouse is perfect. He worries about
the microbes in John Knightley’s long unwashed hair, doesn’t understand
similes, and is scared his Londoner grandkids are going to forget to pronounce
their h’s and t’s. It’s great stuff – and yet I couldn’t help feeling as I read
the book that Mr Woodhouse was McCall Smith’s favourite character from the
original, and so he’d decided to neglect everyone else.
The other characters
all felt a little skimmed over. I liked what was done with Mrs Goddard (and her
cake), but she is completely McCall’s creation, not one stitch Austen’s. Anne Taylor too has become McCall’s character and bears little real resemblance to the original. Harriet Smith was done reasonably well, I suppose, but when it came to
Philp Elton, Frank, Jane, George Knightley, even Emma – I don’t think I’d have
got sense of who these people were if I didn’t know the original. Knightley is
barely in the book. He appears four or five times, and we get no sense of his
relationship with Emma, before or after they apparently fall in love. It doesn’t
ever feel like her and George are friends. I wanted them to get together
because they do in the original, not because of anything McCall Smith wrote. Even
at the end of the book it seemed to me that Emma was more attracted to Harriet
than she was to George.
I think the absence
of characterisation is partly an issue of dialogue. All of the characters, John
Knightly and Mr Woodhouse excepted, speak in exactly the same voice, and that
voice is not a twenty-first century one. For example:
Emma: ‘I shall put myself at one
head of the table… As hostess, if you don’t object’
Emma: ‘Where does one find a friend
like that, I wonder?’
Philip Elton: ‘It’s a very civilised
practice that seems to be dying out these days. I’m very much in favour of
dinner parties… But you’re right, Emma. I should hold a dinner party, and I
shall do so soon. And I hope – I fervently hope – that you will head the list
of invitees.’
George Knightley: ‘I must stretch my
legs… There is always a danger of cramp.’
Harriet: ‘Oh, I couldn’t have borne
that… I would not wish Philip to see me in the nude’
Harriet: ‘I didn’t know you drew…
May I take a look?’
These are just not
twenty-first century sentences. People nowadays just don’t talk like that, especially
people in their twenties or early thirties. Harriet is twenty years old. She wouldn’t
say ‘may I take a look?’ She’d say, ‘can I have a look?’ Likewise, I don’t
believe that any twenty-two year old today uses ‘one’ as Emma does, except in a
jokey way. I sort of understand that Emma’s supposed to be posh, but Harriet’s
not, and yet she talks in the same formal, stilted way. So does George Knightley,
and so does Philip Elton, who at one point uses the word ‘alas’ in casual
conversation. Admittedly I use the
word ‘alas’ sometimes, but that’s because I read far too much nineteenth
century literature, and it normally results in people giving me weird looks - because it’s not the way people now talk.
I think perhaps the
Austen Project as a whole has a problem with style. These books are modernised
in setting but not in style. The fact is that we write books in a different way
today than in the 1790s or 1810s, and that’s okay. Now I’m not demanding that
the next Austen Project novel is told from multiple unreliable first person
narrators or that it’s in stream of consciousness. But the novel was in its
infancy when Jane Austen was writing. I absolutely and utterly love her novels,
but there are things that worked in her day but just don’t now. It was one
thing for Jane Austen to start a book with a brief history of the family
lineage up until today, but that’s not what we do now. Perhaps because of
cinema, we tend to write more in scenes than removed overviews that zoom in on
dialogue. The problem I’ve found with all the Austen Project books, especially Emma, is that it still reads like a
regency novel. It’s Jane Austen with cars.
I’ll admit that I’m a
little divided on this though; on the one hand I really admire that all three
of the Austen Project novelists so far have tried to emanate Austen’s writing
style as well as her plots – but it does stop the modernisation. I think it
just about worked in Sense and
Sensibility and Northanger Abbey
because, while the narrator spoke like someone out of the nineteenth century,
the characters didn’t. Here, where everybody talked like they’d stepped right
out of the original Jane Austen, it all fell flat. McCall Smith’s Emma is a fun read, but it lacks the
necessary alterations to really bring Austen’s brilliant novel into the
twenty-first century.
I’m sorry about the
ridiculous length of this rant. I’m genuinely impressed if anyone has actually
reached the end.
Greatest
strength: Without
a doubt the portrayal of Mr Woodhouse.
Greatest
weakness: I
suppose the rest of the characterisation. I could have to an extent forgiven
the book the anachronisms (as I did in Sense
and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey),
if I’d felt convinced by his portrayal of the characters.
Let’s
finish on a quote:
“We need
to marry her off,” he muttered.
Miss Taylor frowned. “I didn’t think
people spoke in those terms anymore.”
No, Miss Taylor – nor
did I.
Next week: We shall be having an exciting
guest review of H. G. Well’s, The War of
the Worlds, written not by myself but by Chris King
No comments:
Post a Comment