Cut beloved texts at your peril

THE UNEXPECTED box- office success of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spyhas set in motion many fiery debates about the limitations and possibilities of the big-screen adaptation. More specifically, John le Carré nuts have been wondering whether a two-hour feature film can ever offer as comprehensive a translation of a novel as can a leisurely TV series.

The 1979 BBC version of Tinker, Tailorhas some very devoted fans (this writer among them). So heated is the debate that, for the first time ever, this column finds itself welcoming Peter Hitchens to the party.

Last week, the articulate right- wing blowhard took time off from whacking social workers to declare Tinker, Tailora "travesty". In an online piece, Hitchens listed an array of alterations to the text and, after each anguished sentence, desperately wondered "why?" The normally avowed enemy of the BBC expressed uncharacteristic enthusiasm for the original series.

That esteemed production emerged just two years before an even more highly acclaimed Granada adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. You might argue that the success of both series scared film-makers away from the sacred texts for another 30 years. When the movie executives eventually tackled those two novels, the receptions were markedly different. 2008's ghastly Bridesheadfilm got its pretty little head kicked in. Tinker, Tailorhas become one of the best-reviewed films of the year.

Yet, away from Mr Hitchens’s swamp of fury, even enthusiasts for the new film have bemoaned the lack of narrative grounding. In particular, those characters suspected of being Russian agents are very sketchily drawn. Point? The criticisms seem to underestimate the beauty of a cleverly streamlined, elegantly compressed movie adaptation.

The TV versions of Tinker, Tailorand Bridesheadwere very peculiar beasts. Sprawling over, respectively, seven hours and 11 hours – neither adapted from a particularly long book – the series were almost experimental in their fidelity. Every comma, hyphen and semi-colon found its visual equivalent on screen.

No sane observer would lightly criticise the work done by the writers for those television extravaganzas. But one should point out that their job is a lot easier than it is for their movie equivalents. With that degree of space, no tricks of narrative compression are required.

When fashioning a movie script from a novel, the demands of the form inhibit verbosity, but impose formal challenges that should ideally stimulate creativity. Le Carré himself used the analogy of concentrating the piece into a stock cube.

That’s a little unfair. The best movie adaptations go beyond mere reduction and convince us that the current story could only ever exist in this new economic form. Who cares what’s missing if what remains works on its own terms? Point?