books, page 114 of 138

This adaptation of Alice in Wonderland was filmed for TV broadcast in December 1966. Director/adapter Jonathan Miller aimed to be faithful to the book, with all the dialogue (except where improvised by the actors) lifted directly from Lewis Carroll’s text. But this, I think, is the adaptation’s main fault. Alice in Wonderland is a curious mix of episodes and skits, not really a story at all, and I think what you need to do with Alice is either find a way of making a story out of it, or to adopt some angle or interpretation to provide a constantly-running theme, something to give it a sort of narrative or spine. The original book wins through on sheer prissy impudence; adaptations need to offer something more.

Miller has two angles on Alice, neither of which really works for me. The first is to connect the book with dreams, and various of his directorial decisions (such as sometimes having Alice’s dialogue overdubbed while she doesn’t move her lips) come from his wanting to make the narrative more dreamlike. But I think Alice isn’t about the dream-world as much as it’s about the world of language, which has its own peculiar logic. Wordplay and double-meanings approached with a literal mind, and the ability of words to be strung together correctly but nonsensically, are what Alice, and other nonsense literature, is about. For me, this puts Alice at the head of a continuing tradition of wordplay fantasy, which includes the Oz books, and Piers Anthony’s Xanth series. It’s that tight-but-illogical logic that makes Alice what it is, not its dreaminess, which is more the province of surrealism. (In my mind, nonsense and surrealism are two quite different things. Nonsense applies logic to things that aren’t logical; surrealism revels in the irrational, with no need of logic.)

Miller’s other approach is to connect the book with “the longueurs of childhood”, a nostalgia for endless summers of blissful boredom, and in his initial edit, he had some long periods in which the actors just sat around doing nothing, in an attempt to conjure this feeling. These were edited out after a viewing by BBC executives, with only a few hints of them left in, leaving some curious points at which conversation lapses, everyone sits around staring into space, then conversation resumes. But I think the book is too energetic, too little-girl curious, for this to feel right. Kids are only bored until they have something to do; Alice, exploring Wonderland, very much has something to do. (It’s teenagers who get bored even when they have something to do; but then again, Miller’s Alice is a teenager.) Lewis Carroll, an Oxford don who could afford to spend entire days picnicking with the Liddells so he could come up with the Alice story in the first place, probably had no need to feel nostalgic for such long-lost periods free of responsibility, so they weren’t part of his book.

For me, Alice is in Wonderland because she’s a child — childhood, and the way a child views the illogical adult world, is Wonderland. All the various creatures Alice meets on her journey are comic versions of adults stuck in their own peculiarly nonsensical worldviews. Alice is the child regarding these adults with a cutting innocence. The book is all about her, in her self-contained bubble of childhood, coming into contact with the dreadfully meaningless self-importance of the adult world, and seeing it for the farce it really is: tea parties and courtrooms at which one must know the nonsensical rules of how to behave, a Queen with the power to cut off your head on a whim, and so on.

Peter Cook as the Mad Hatter

The result of Miller wanting to be faithful to the book is that the TV film feels just like a series of sketches. It relies entirely on the performers’ abilities to enchant with their personalities, rather than a story’s, or thematic argument’s, ability to keep you interested. Thus there are a few highlights that linger in the mind (Peter Cook is excellent as the Mad Hatter, John Bird is funny but too brief, Peter Sellers as the Red King, etc.), but elsewhere a good deal of puzzlement as the film moves from scene to scene without making it clear how or why. Thus, Alice stands outside a door trying to get in, then has a conversation with John Bird, then just opens the door and goes through. Why didn’t she do that first of all? You certainly have to know the book to be able to tell what’s going on, which has the unfortunate effect of making an adaptation nothing but a companion piece to the book, rather than an interesting work in its own right.

It’s easy to be too reverential to the book that’s the source of an adaptation. I enjoy watching film adaptations of books I’ve read, not to quibble with how they’ve departed from the text, but rather to see what they’ve made of it, what their interpretation is. An adaptation is a thing that exists alongside a book, and only subtracts from the original when, by being too literal, it reveals how shallow that original was in the first place.

For a more positive view of Miller’s Alice, see Jonathan Coulthart’s blog post on it. (I really like Miller’s Oh Whistle and I’ll Come To You adaptation.)

If there was any need to prove J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books weren’t created ex nihilo, but as part of an existing tradition of magical fantasy in English fiction (which includes Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch series, and Mary Norton’s The Magic Bed Knob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (filmed as Bedknobs and Broomsticks)), here it is. Joan Aiken‘s Armitage Family stories have very much the same feel of institutionalised magic, where spells work just like recipes, where fantastical beasts are as likely to wander into the story as their mundane counterparts — and just as likely to be adopted as pets, or hatched from the egg and raised till they get out of hand and have to be released into the wild — where BBC 13 is the radio station to listen to if you want to learn about magic (which you can also do by a home study course), where there’s a charity for replacing the worn-out wands of “fairy ladies” (the polite term for witches), and a Board of Incantation that can requisition your home to use as a seminary for young magicians… It all sounds and feels so Potterish, yet the first Armitage Family stories were published in 1958, and Aiken continued writing them throughout her career (the last to be published during her lifetime was in 1998, and this book collects them all, plus four previously unpublished).

There are differences, of course. Aiken’s stories, being short stories, don’t build up into an epic battle against evil, but are, rather, about the more mundane conflicts, botherations, quibbles and quandaries of childhood and family life. Mark and Harriet are perfectly normal children, constantly engaged in their own projects and interests, but quite level-headedly dealing with curses, spells, hauntings, and visits from fantastical creatures, sorcerers and minor gods, as well as that more fearsome antagonist, the awkward relative, in their four-decade long childhood (whose background details get quietly updated as the stories go along, so there’s mention of computers, and the wearing of jeans, though it never breaks the spell of timelessness around their childhood. There seems to be no TV, for instance — Mark and Harriet are simply too busy to watch it).

Andi Watson provides some wonderful illustrations to the Armitage Family stories

Aiken writes with a light narrative tone, perfectly suited to the air of casual, childhood magic and nonsensical surrealism she creates, and that tone never wavers, even when there are touches of genuine tragedy. There’s not a lot of tragedy, nor does it involve any of the main characters (unless you count Walrus the cat), but there is a rather awful, casual destruction of a magical portal (built using sections collected from the backs of cereal packets), that separates two lovers, perhaps forever; and elsewhere, a harmless minor character gets killed so suddenly in a road accident you can’t quite believe it’s just happened (nor that it’s not about to just as-suddenly un-happen, which it doesn’t).

Aiken’s Armitage family stories are full of magical invention, weird characters, and a sort of enduring faith in the resilience, adaptability, open-mindedness, and fair-mindedness of her child characters. (Who, I can’t help feeling, would deal with Lord Voldemort in somewhat under seven pages, never mind seven books!)

I was once asked, in an interview for a job in a bookshop (which I didn’t get), whether a book had ever changed my life, and if so, how. I remember being completely stumped by this (unprepared, as ever). The answer to the first part, I knew, was yes, several times over, but the how of it felt just too immense for a quick, slick answer. It was more the sort of thing I’d want to retreat and write about for several hours, editing, thinking, then leaving for a few weeks before going back to it and writing some more, perhaps producing something of a moderate book length by the end of it. Which is one of the reasons I was so interested in this book, The Film That Changed My Life, in which critic Robert K Elder gets thirty filmmakers to talk about the film (or, in a couple of cases, pair of films) that they think changed their lives.

Of course, as they’re all filmmakers, the answer to the first part of the question (did a film ever change your life) is always going to be yes, if for no other reason than there must have been a film, at some point, which made them realise they wanted to make films, or showed them the style or approach that best suited them — in other words, that provided them with some technical release, some final polish to themselves as filmmakers. And for many of the interviewees in this book, it’s that film — often seen in their late teens, or while at film-school — that they talk about. But there are others (and these are my favourites) who talk about a film they saw, usually as a child, which just blew them away, not for any technical reasons, but for the sheer magic of it, and which has remained as magical throughout their lives. (Perhaps it’s no surprise that the three obvious ones of this type, Brian Herzlinger on E.T., John Landis on The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and George A Romero on The Tales of Hoffmann, are all fantasies.) Herzlinger says “when I left the theater, I just wanted to go in again. I’ve never done any drugs in my life, but I think that is what an addiction feels like.” Romero says, “I was just blown away. I was in a great theater with terrific projection, a really big screen, and it was just beautiful. I was knocked out.” And Landis: “The film itself just made a huge impression on me in creating a completely different world. Instead of being this little kid in a theater in west L.A., [I was] being transported to this magical place, really going on these adventures.” A later, more mature reaction, though of a similar type, comes from Frank Oz, who says (of A Touch of Evil), “I don’t remember the first time I saw it. All I remember is every time I look at it I am never ever bored with this thing.”

I think the answer to the question of how a book or film can change your life is difficult because books and films don’t so much change you as bring into the open what was already there but hidden, or not understood, but which was waiting, if not bursting, to find a way of coming out. That’s why, looking back on a life-changing encounter of this sort, you can’t articulate what it was that changed, because as a result of the encounter you are simply more truly yourself, and in order to articulate the change you have to remember (and explain) a time when you were less yourself, which is really quite difficult to do.

Books, films — everything arty — are really only about one thing, when it comes down to it, and that’s how to be human. How to exist in this world, caught between your imagination and whole inner world on the one hand, and reality on the other. The great thing about art — films, books, etc. — is that it works at bringing the inner (imagination) into the outer (reality), and it’s when you see it being done in a way that reflects (or releases) your own attempts, your own style or personality, that a book, or film, or act of cake decoration or whatever, changes your life. And, really, the only way to explain that is to either make someone watch the same film (or read the same book) but as you, and as you were at the time, (which is of course impossible), or to make your own film, or book, and use that to put them through the same process.

Perhaps it’s simply that the best, most life-changing, books and films simply leave you speechless.

Anyway, I don’t think that answer would have got me the job in the bookshop, but it’s the best one I can come up with!