IN his foreword to Nostromo, published in 1904, Joseph Conrad tells of its genesis. The author of Lord Jim, then in his 40s, was undergoing a midlife crisis. His best work was behind him. He was all written out. Then one day he heard a story of a man who had stolen a boat full of silver, a fortune, somewhere off the Tierra Firme seaboard of South America and had got away scot free. A while later the tale re appeared in a sailor's autobiography which Conrad picked up in a second hand book shop. He was up and running. But what to do with it? "To invent a circumstantial account of the robbery did not appeal to me, because my talents not running that way I did not think that the game was worth the candle."
Instead Conrad's talents ran to inventing a world in which such an event might take place, a world so rich in character and human psychology that the events that follow have the inevitability of history. (Indeed the past 90 years have shown his imagination to have been uncannily prophetic. For silver just substitute oil.) Through a dazzling narrative technique that uses flashback as naturally as memo, Conrad's words conjure into being "twilight country" of the Republic of Costaguana - its sounds, its smells, its colour, its heat, its intrigues, its corruption and finally its destruction of those who try to own its wealth, its silver.
Nostromo has been called the finest book about South America ever written in English. Those familiar with the much later works of Borges, Fuente, and Marquez will recognise the landscape and mindset immediately.
The cinematic possibilities of Nostromo were spotted early on. However cautionary the tale, Conrad always soaked his novels with the page turning power of adventure. The film rights were first sold in 1920. A silent version (The Silver Treasure) made it to the screen in 1926. When it came to telling more than the story as adventure, however, the problems began. Unlike other great novels (War And Peace, Le Rouge Et Le Noir) whose sub plots could be cut away to allow the central story to unfold in under two hours, Nostromo allows little such scaling down.
Yet Conrad is the ultimate storyteller, and film makers (this century's inheritors of the tradition) seem inexorably drawn to him. Orson Welles did a screenplay - for Heart Of Darkness (Never made. Citizen Kane intervened.) The same (short) story was later updated by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now. Steven Spielberg is also reported to have been involved with David Lean's attempt to make a cinemascope Nostromo in the early 1980s.
Yet for all Lean's experience with epics, both Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago were essentially simple stories. Nostromo is not, with layers of meaning as deep as the silver mine of San Tome itself. First to wrestle with the screenplay was Christopher Hampton, then came Robert Bolt - neither of them slouches when it comes to Eng. Lit. But nothing. Too dense, too difficult.
Then in 1992 the multi national co production potential slipped into gear, television adaptation allows three times as long to tell the story. And although Nostromo is set in south America, its central characters are an Italian, three Britons, several Spaniards and an American. Five years and £10 million down the line, Nostromo is here.
Curiously, given the cinema's ability to time shift so easily (flashback) the adaptor, John Hale, has put Conrad's intricate convolutions of narrative into straightforward linear chronology. As for those whose lives and characters are Nostromo's life blood, Colin Firth (Charles Gould) is very British, Albert Finney (Dr Monygham) is very moving, Claudia Cardinale (Teresa Viola) looks utterly gorgeous and Serena Scott Thomas (Emily Gould) is as close to Conrad's intelligent, beautiful and betrayed heroine as he could have wished. Whether Joseph Conrad would have appreciated the BBC's Radio Times magazine feature on his eponymous hero ("Claudio Amendolo as hunky Nostromo discovers it's a jungle out there" - headline "Steamy Stuff In Columbia") is another matter.
Because, however worthy the intentions, luscious the locations, good the performances (and some are very good), ultimately this screen Nostromo - any screen Nostromo - can barely do more than scratch the surface: "a circumstantial account of the robbery..." - is this game worth the candle? Yet God forbid I should put off anyone who has not read the book.
Last year's choice for classic serialisation, Jane Austen's ironic tale of money and matrimony Pride And Prejudice, subsequently reached No 1 in the best seller list for the first time in its 200 year history. So if past experience (and the female population's addiction to Colin Firth, Mr Darcy in P&P) is anything to go by, hundreds of thousands of readers will soon be experiencing the dust of the streets and the scent of the jacarandas Conrad conjures up in words on a page, something no acting, costumes or 10,000 colour co ordinated extras can ever match.