Literary Adaptations - by Ciaran Murtagh

I am currently spending a lot of time Head Writing a new 52 episode adaptation of The Wind in the Willows. It's been a long time coming, I began working on it back in 2018 and now it's finally gone into production. I love the book, I love the characters and it's been a joy to dive into a simpler world after all the chaos of the last year or so. 

That's not to say literary adaptations are easy - they're tricky beasts -  and The Wind in the Willows has it's fair share of Toad size mishaps to blunder into if you're not careful - poop poop and all that. 

You want to remain true to the original material while making sure it stays relevant for a modern audience - that's true of everything, but is especially tricky if your source material was first published in 1908. A fair bit has changed and you need to modernise the material -  or at least the relationships within it - without riding rough shod over the things that make it classic. 

The Wind in the Willows has a few tricky bits and pieces to negotiate. One of the main problems is that the core trio of Toad, Ratty and Mole are all male - so too are many of the incidental characters. That had to change. We toyed with changing the gender of Ratty, but in the end plumped for introducing a new character into the centre of our core characters - Hedge, a feisty young hedgehog who can give the boys a run for their money.  How could you not love that face?

'Sacrilege,' I hear you cry!  But to be honest, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Change a gender of a core character - wokeism. Add a new character - meddling with a classic. Like I say, adaptations are tricky beasts, I have a feeling we've done the right thing. 

The class structure is also fairly alien to our young audience - or maybe not. Having a buffoon like Toad mucking things up for everybody might ring some bells for the rest of us... Regardless, there is an underlying metaphor about class struggle embedded in the book, with the filthy proletariat weasels from the Wild Wood rising up against the bastion of all that Toad Hall with it's manicured and ordered gardens represents.  We've had to tone that down. We've also toned down some of the mysticism - sorry. 

We've had to tone down Toad too. He's a great character and will take over every story if you let him. In  the days of ensemble storytelling we want each of our main characters to have a place in the series - this isn't the Toad show. I liken it to Last of the Summer Wine.  The three characters at the heart of that series are not unlike Ratty, Toad and Mole. They each have their flaws and their strengths and you want to give them all stories worth telling. 

We've also been colour blind in casting the voice talent to make sure our Wind in the Willows reflects the society we now live in. Like I say, a lot has changed in 110 years. The problem with all of this is you're always conscious of the uproar The Daily Mail will try to make of everything. But I'll be honest, given they'll make an uproar over how you label a chicken these days, let them get on with it I guess. 

But for all of that, there is a real joy in coming up with new stories for such well loved and well formed characters. Taking the book back to it's essence really gives me an appreciation for the craft of Kenneth Grahame. He balances the core trio beautifully, and at it's heart The Wind in the Willows is a surprisingly modern character comedy. It has an almost sitcom feel. 

One of the advantages  -  or disadvantages depending on your point of view - of this adaptation is that Grahame isn't around to tell us if we're getting it right, or object if we're getting it wrong.  Often when I do a literary adaptation the author - and sometimes illustrator - are in the room with us as we try to make a text meant for one medium fit another. 

Most authors get stuck in. I had a great time with Alex T. Smith when we adapted Claude for Disney.  Claire Freedman and Ben Court were there when we adapted Aliens Love Underpants which found a home on Sky.  Ed Vere really helped when we adapted Fingers McGraw. Sometimes you don't meet the authors at all, as when we adapted Miffy and Pinkalicious. 

Then there's the REALLY strange time with Bottersnikes and Gumbles, I wrote scripts for the TV show, and was then asked to write four books afterwards. So I adapted it from a book, wrote the TV show and then readapted it for books again afterwards. 

I don't know if it helps being an author as well as a scriptwriter. Sometimes I feel like I'm poacher turned gamekeeper, but I also like to think I see both sides of the process. When you write a book you control everything that happens in the world, then suddenly it's being ripped apart and reassembled by hundreds of people in front of your eyes. It can be a very scary thing.

 Like I say, tricky beasts literary adaptations. 

The quirkiest thing your book's been turned into? - Clémentine Beauvais

A short one today!

We know (and might hope) that our books could get turned into audiobooks, plays, films, comics, songs, toys, postcards, T-shirts, games, stationery, posters...

the play drawn from my novel Les petites reines (Piglettes)

...but there are some things we don't necessarily foresee.

Here are two recent funny/ quirky things I've found my book being turned into (or bits of my book becoming). Both are from my YA novel Les petites reines/ Piglettes.

- A plate:

By the lovely young book blogger and vlogger Tom, who took a ceramic-painting class and thought he'd like a plate that says #3boudins, namely the hashtag used in the French version of Piglettes to refer to the three girls (Piglettes in English).

- Nail art:

This one floored me. This artist at Cook Read Create makes videos where she paints (incredibly delicately and beautifully) fake nails to match her favourite book covers:

Just look at her amazing Instagram account - she's got dozens, including many YA books. I particularly love the one for The Smell of Other People's Houses by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock.

How about you, dear colleagues? what's the quirkiest, sweetest, funniest, most unexpected thing your book's been turned into?

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Clémentine Beauvais is a children's and young adult author in French and English, as well as a literary translator. Her latest YA novel, Piglettes, is out with Pushkin Press.

Adapt At Your Own Risk - Clementine Beauvais

This is one of my French books, La louve, fabulously illustrated by Antoine Déprez:

When I say 'fabulously', I mean it in both senses of the term: they're brilliant illustrations, but they also reproduce very well the fable-like feel and texture of the story. La louve is an original story, but it is what is generally called a literary fairy tale - a new story made to feel like it's a classic folk or fairy tale.

This might be why, when La louve recently appeared in the White Ravens list at the Munich International Youth Library, it was described as 'a retelling of a Russian folkale'. To my knowledge (and that of my Russian friends), it isn't. There are many folk and fairy tales around the world that involve transformation, wolves and curses, but this one isn't a retelling of any one in particular.

After La louve, however, the publisher, Alice Editions, has asked us to work on a second opus which would be an adaptation or reinterpretation of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I immediately agreed, because I've been fascinated by that weird tale for a long time. So I started to think about how to do it. The idea was not to retell the tale, but rather to write an original story inspired from, or reactivating or reimagining, the tale.

I soon realised it was an enterprise fraught with interesting peril. First I thought I’d focus on the rats, perhaps make the main character one of the rats. But immediately, a problem emerged: the glacial contemporary political and ideological connotations of a narrative that involves hordes ("swarms"?) of rats "invading" a village, spreading an illness, being thrown out, and drowning. The portrayal of a population identified as parasitic, swarming the streets of a nice little traditional village and taken away to die - in the water - in exchange for money, has a very unpleasant ring to it; or at least, it should, to anyone who’s even vaguely concerned with what’s happening in the world today. You'd have to be the most candid person on Earth not to realise.

A simple retelling of the story just about gets away with those connotations, because the literal explanation proposed by the story - the plague - works sort of fine, and you can sort of turn off the metaphorical reading. But with an entirely new story, you can’t claim innocently that you don't mind that extra layer of meaning. It just invites itself, whatever you do. 

So of course you can play with these political connotations, and turn the story on its head, getting the rats to be the good guys in the story; the misunderstood, the oppressed and the silenced. You can even write an interesting story where the plague is an invention of the humans to create suspicion against the rats. You'd turn the story into a politically committed tale, preaching compassion towards a marginalised group.

Yeah. But it's a really tricky thing to pull off, because in this roman à clefs you're still identifying a group of people as rats - whether or not you're arguing that it's someone else's vision, that's pretty dangerous.

I know Art Spiegelman's done it. I'm not Art Spiegelman though.

In other words, I couldn't see a way of adapting the Pied Piper of Hamelin story without grappling with the metaphorical political implications. And while I'd be happy to do that in another context, it absolutely wasn't what I wanted this particular book to be. It was supposed to be like La louve: intemporal, slightly frightening, low-key and poetic. Not political. 

So I took the story differently. I decided to get rid, so to speak, of the original tale, by putting it in its entirety on the first page. The story begins with a young girl whose grandfather tells her the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. And then the story starts, seemingly unconnected to the tale. But it loops back onto itself... and connects, at the very, very end, with the very, very first page.

Dealing with this adaptation, I felt like I'd spent quite a while, at least a month or two, thinking about how to catch it, a bit like you would observe a scorpion thinking of the best way to pick it up without getting stung, and getting it to do what you want it to do. Coincidentally, the YA book in French I'm currently working on is also an adaptation. And there again, I spent many train rides looking out of the window, thinking of how to catch that particular scorpion.

I'd be curious to hear your stories of adaptations, retellings or reimaginings of classical tales or novels - I'm sure there are many around, as it's quite a common thing to do. Do tell! 

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Clementine Beauvais writes in French and English. She blogs here about children's literature and academia.

In defence of the super villain

On Monday, Nicholas Barber gave me pause for thought, in this Guardian piece, arguing that movie adaptations of childhood classics for young readers like Paddington or Postman Pat, are traducing the spirit of the original in one very specific way.

Villains. Really mean ones at that.

Mr Curry - the nearest thing in the Paddington books to a baddie

He recounts how the new Paddington adaptation from Harry Potter producer David Heyman has Nicole Kidman as murderous taxidermist, hellbent on peeling Paddington's hide. Postman Pat earlier this year had a megalomaniac cyberman, and we'd probably all rather not remember Dougal and co from the Magic Roundabout trying to stop an evil wizard.

Barber argues that the icy blast of cruelty, megalomania and high stakes jeopardy which comes whirling onto the screen with these inserted characters is a far remove from the gentle, charming storytelling which made the original books so popular with young children and their parents. He also gives a compelling example of his six year old daughter being squeamish at anything too scary in the movies - from sharks in Finding Nemo to evil queens in Snow White, never mind a psychopathic Nicole Kidman.

He is, of course, absolutely right on two fronts. Those characters are nothing to do with the world of the books. Paddington needs marmalade, not murderers, to bring him to life. And we all know, and quite possibly once were, young children who frighten very easily at any sign of on-screen darkness or scariness - especially, perhaps, if they weren't expecting it in such a warm and honey coloured world. Like finding a Heffalump when you really weren't expecting one....

But at the same time, these are all movies.

The books don't need those extra lashings of evil and drama. But once a book becomes adapted into a film, it becomes something else, not just a different medium but a different genre too. A genre with different rules and demands. A movie, even one for young children, requires big stories and big characters to fill the scree and sustain not only young minds but their adult minders for ninety minutes plus.

And I genuinely feel for his daughter. I remember being terrified by so much - Maleficent turning into a dragon in Sleeping Beauty or the horrific Garthim in Dark Crystal.

Gruesome Garthim

Somehow I seem to have survived it all, though, bar the odd nightmare. I think the key to these villains is that they are often as comic as they are villainous. Moreover, they can often be safely filed under the category of 'genre archetype' - even if unconsciously. Unlike the recent 'Missy' on Doctor Who - who I thought was brilliant but disturbingly vicious for a family show - evil queens, mad scientists, corrupt developers, emotionless robots - these caricatured characters have their roots in often quite non-scary cartoons and comics rather than any real life basis. (Ironically, the irritable next door neighbour as typified by Mr. Curry from the Paddington books is far more likely to be a real life concern for young children.)

I don't think your average child has met enough crazy taxidermists to be truly checking under the bed for them, and witches and wizards really can be safely banished to fairytale land. In fact, these comic book denizens are by and large safe ways to introduce young children to flashes of the dark side of human nature, without creating undue anxiety or fear.

They almost all meet grizzly and overblown ends too, which is part of the panto fun.

Barber is right that not every child's narrative needs these big bullies, certainly not every book or TV programme. Children's stories may be one of the best ways to address grief and pain for developing minds; that of course doesn't make them obliged to.

But to keep small ones focused and not wriggly in the cinema, I can think of few better ways than a larger than life baddie with arched eyebrows and a maniacal laugh, coming after the young and innocent hero of the hour.

Piers "Cruella de" Torday
@PiersTorday
www.pierstorday.co.uk