Can Jane Austen work in the age of the mobile phone? And must Holly Golightly always look like Audrey Hepburn? William Boyd, Val McDermid and other modernisers explain how to update a classic
How will Shakespeare's Caliban fare in the era of the digital monster? What modern scandal could possibly recreate the shock of Lydia's flight to Brighton with the dastardly Wickham in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice? How can an epistolary romance survive the Facebook era?
Such are the challenges facing the growing ranks of writers signed up to bring literary classics to new life. We're not talking genteel Andrew Davies-style adaptations here, but full-blooded reinvention. Margaret Atwood, signed up to recreate The Tempest, will be joined by Ann Tyler, Jeanette Winterson and Howard Jacobson, among others, in a new series of reimaginings to celebrate the 400th anniversary in 2016 of Shakespeare's death.
Meanwhile, a Jane Austen bicentenary revamp got under way in the autumn with a new version of her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, by Joanna Trollope. Discussing the project at a Folio Society event with the Guardian book club, Trollope mused on the challenge of finding the right vehicle to give perfidious Willoughby in lieu of a horse. She decided a leased Aston Martin would convey that Austenesque sense of speedy raffishness. Next up in the series is Val McDermid with Northanger Abbey (see below), followed by Alexander McCall Smith with Emma, and American novelist Curtis Sittenfield with Pride and Prejudice.
A successful relocation of a story, a society, a psychology is the sum of many tiny parts. So we asked four people brave enough to mess about with iconic works how they went about it.
**The face: Holly Golightly by illustrator Karen Klassen**
Truman Capote's Holly Golightly has become so closely associated with Audrey Hepburn, with her bangs and tiara and that little black dress in the film of Breakfast at Tiffany's, that it's easy to forget that she was, in fact, a blonde. Fortunately, I only watched the film after I had completed my sketches for the illustrations. Holly is a free spirit whose personality seems light as a feather, as though she doesn't hold any stress or let things get her down. She captivates the people who come in contact with her. She is described in the novel as having short blond hair, and although the illustrations aren't necessarily literal ones, I wanted to be true to how Capote imagined her. I wanted her clothing to be fashionable yet classic (which the film does well). I also wanted the book to have a certain timelessness. I deliberately kept some details vague, so as to not be depicting a specific style, pattern, or era. Colour is a more elusive thing. I did want to inject some Tiffany blue, but otherwise I took a more intuitive approach, using colour to create a mood and to grab the viewer's attention. I am happy that I was free to create my own Holly Golightly, and that I was able to create a bit of a fantasy world where backgrounds and people became abstracted.
Breakfast at Tiffany's is published by the Folio Society.
**The location: Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid**
* *
When we read Jane Austen now, it still works because her characters behave in ways we recognise. Time and circumstances change, but human nature remains the same. The main challenge I faced in reimagining Northanger Abbey in a contemporary setting was how to regenerate the reactions and responses in the characters, so the story could work itself out as it does in the original.
Catherine Morland, the 17-year-old heroine, is an innocent abroad to a degree inconceivable in any teenager who has been through a modern high school. So I set her down in a small Dorset village with few contemporaries and a mother who home-schooled her children.
The action of the original takes place primarily in Bath during the season. But people no longer flock to Bath for weeks on end to show themselves off or to find a partner. The solution was obvious to me – Edinburgh during August, when the festival, the fringe, the book festival and the TV festival fill the city to bursting point with hordes of visitors whose motives range right across the spectrum of possibility. And of course, the miracles of modern comms technology both creates and resolves a host of plot problems. "Oh, my brother has just texted me!" and "There's no phone signal down in the valley" both provided opportunities.
There's one motive that remains constant, however. Austen would have recognised the greed of bankers and the cry of "He's minted!" Some things never change.
Val McDermid's updated Northanger Abbey will be published by The Borough Press in March.
**The flavour: James Bond by William Boyd**
The issue is not so much about "reinventing", it seems to me: the challenge is to make something deeply familiar and known fresh again – seeing it new, as it were. In the case of James Bond, one has the added problem of the films and their increasing distance from the original inspiration. Therefore, when it fell to me to write a new James Bond novel, I decided to go back to the literary source and ignore everything cinematic. The "thought-experiment" I set myself was to try to write a novel that would aspire to recreate the same pleasures that readers of the first Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), experienced.
In pursuit of this objective there were all the significant Bond tropes that had to be included, of course, boxes that had to be ticked: the villain, the love affairs, M, the locations, the cars, the booze, the weaponry. But, as I reread Ian Fleming's 12 Bond novels and various short stories as a preparation for writing my own, it was always the tiny details, rather than the broad brushstrokes, that drew my attention. I took great care to extract these nuggets of information from the rich seam of Bondiana that the novels provide. Everything that may seem unusual or untypical in my Bond novel, Solo, actually originates in Fleming.
For example: Bond wasn't English – he's half Scottish, half Swiss. Other curious foibles and facts emerged: Bond hates laceup shoes; he doesn't like women who wear nail varnish; he saw combat in the second world war; he will weep fairly readily, and so forth. But it was in the familiar Bond territory of food and drink that I think my close reading really delivered. In Casino Royale, Fleming remarks in an aside that Bond takes his own jar of salad dressing into the canteen of the secret service headquarters to improve the indifferent salad provided there. This is in 1953, remember. Bond was a foodie long before foodies were invented. Ten years later, in a 1963 short story, 007 in New York, Fleming provides, as a footnote, Bond's recipe for the perfect scrambled eggs on toast. The opportunity presented itself, irresistibly.
And so, in Solo, James Bond makes his own vinaigrette, and I supply the recipe in a footnote. No one can accuse me of breaking ranks – the precedent is clearly established by Fleming – but I have to admit that the vinaigrette recipe is my own.
Solo by William Boyd is published by Jonathan Cape.
**The voice: Maigret by Gareth Armstrong**
Georges Simenon's solitary Inspector Maigret strikes a match in the grainy dark of our black-and-white TV at home in the 60s and lights his pipe, illuminating another terrific hour of entertainment. Rupert Davies, the actor who played him for over 50 episodes, was Maigret. Big, rumpled, embodying common sense, cunning and patience – with a touch of genius.
I came to the books later, and they reaffirmed my affection for the French policeman. And now that Audible has embarked on an ambitious audiobook project, producing all 75 famed novels, I have the opportunity – and the pleasure – of bringing the iconic Parisian detective back to life for a new audience.
I transport myself to the underworld of mid-20th-century Paris. Pimps, tarts, whited sepulchres, bourgeois matrons and people with a past all need to be conjured up with distinctive voices. The regular characters, Maigret's wife and Lucas, his sidekick, must be established and sustained.
But the real challenge is the man himself. Simenon's portrait is so detailed and consistent – I have a clear picture of his lived-in face, his heavy body, his walk, even how he eats those mouthwatering lunches.
My producer, Paul Kent, and I decided that Maigret's voice had to be one that conveys his gravitas, wry humour, and his ability to sympathise or intimidate when necessary. The omnipresent pipe and the beer he enjoys at elevenses, would affect the timbre of his voice. Lack of regular sleep and exposure to the seamier side of life lend a world-weary tone. He needs a measured delivery to reflect his self-confidence, and the vocal equivalent of a twinkle in his eye.
The hardest quality to communicate in a vocal performance is Maigret's humanity. You'd like to see his eyes for that. But fortunately, thanks to Simenon's pellucid writing style, I believe you almost can.
Maigret by Gareth Armstrong is available on audible.co.uk Reported by guardian.co.uk 17 hours ago.
How will Shakespeare's Caliban fare in the era of the digital monster? What modern scandal could possibly recreate the shock of Lydia's flight to Brighton with the dastardly Wickham in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice? How can an epistolary romance survive the Facebook era?
Such are the challenges facing the growing ranks of writers signed up to bring literary classics to new life. We're not talking genteel Andrew Davies-style adaptations here, but full-blooded reinvention. Margaret Atwood, signed up to recreate The Tempest, will be joined by Ann Tyler, Jeanette Winterson and Howard Jacobson, among others, in a new series of reimaginings to celebrate the 400th anniversary in 2016 of Shakespeare's death.
Meanwhile, a Jane Austen bicentenary revamp got under way in the autumn with a new version of her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, by Joanna Trollope. Discussing the project at a Folio Society event with the Guardian book club, Trollope mused on the challenge of finding the right vehicle to give perfidious Willoughby in lieu of a horse. She decided a leased Aston Martin would convey that Austenesque sense of speedy raffishness. Next up in the series is Val McDermid with Northanger Abbey (see below), followed by Alexander McCall Smith with Emma, and American novelist Curtis Sittenfield with Pride and Prejudice.
A successful relocation of a story, a society, a psychology is the sum of many tiny parts. So we asked four people brave enough to mess about with iconic works how they went about it.
**The face: Holly Golightly by illustrator Karen Klassen**
Truman Capote's Holly Golightly has become so closely associated with Audrey Hepburn, with her bangs and tiara and that little black dress in the film of Breakfast at Tiffany's, that it's easy to forget that she was, in fact, a blonde. Fortunately, I only watched the film after I had completed my sketches for the illustrations. Holly is a free spirit whose personality seems light as a feather, as though she doesn't hold any stress or let things get her down. She captivates the people who come in contact with her. She is described in the novel as having short blond hair, and although the illustrations aren't necessarily literal ones, I wanted to be true to how Capote imagined her. I wanted her clothing to be fashionable yet classic (which the film does well). I also wanted the book to have a certain timelessness. I deliberately kept some details vague, so as to not be depicting a specific style, pattern, or era. Colour is a more elusive thing. I did want to inject some Tiffany blue, but otherwise I took a more intuitive approach, using colour to create a mood and to grab the viewer's attention. I am happy that I was free to create my own Holly Golightly, and that I was able to create a bit of a fantasy world where backgrounds and people became abstracted.
Breakfast at Tiffany's is published by the Folio Society.
**The location: Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid**
* *
When we read Jane Austen now, it still works because her characters behave in ways we recognise. Time and circumstances change, but human nature remains the same. The main challenge I faced in reimagining Northanger Abbey in a contemporary setting was how to regenerate the reactions and responses in the characters, so the story could work itself out as it does in the original.
Catherine Morland, the 17-year-old heroine, is an innocent abroad to a degree inconceivable in any teenager who has been through a modern high school. So I set her down in a small Dorset village with few contemporaries and a mother who home-schooled her children.
The action of the original takes place primarily in Bath during the season. But people no longer flock to Bath for weeks on end to show themselves off or to find a partner. The solution was obvious to me – Edinburgh during August, when the festival, the fringe, the book festival and the TV festival fill the city to bursting point with hordes of visitors whose motives range right across the spectrum of possibility. And of course, the miracles of modern comms technology both creates and resolves a host of plot problems. "Oh, my brother has just texted me!" and "There's no phone signal down in the valley" both provided opportunities.
There's one motive that remains constant, however. Austen would have recognised the greed of bankers and the cry of "He's minted!" Some things never change.
Val McDermid's updated Northanger Abbey will be published by The Borough Press in March.
**The flavour: James Bond by William Boyd**
The issue is not so much about "reinventing", it seems to me: the challenge is to make something deeply familiar and known fresh again – seeing it new, as it were. In the case of James Bond, one has the added problem of the films and their increasing distance from the original inspiration. Therefore, when it fell to me to write a new James Bond novel, I decided to go back to the literary source and ignore everything cinematic. The "thought-experiment" I set myself was to try to write a novel that would aspire to recreate the same pleasures that readers of the first Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), experienced.
In pursuit of this objective there were all the significant Bond tropes that had to be included, of course, boxes that had to be ticked: the villain, the love affairs, M, the locations, the cars, the booze, the weaponry. But, as I reread Ian Fleming's 12 Bond novels and various short stories as a preparation for writing my own, it was always the tiny details, rather than the broad brushstrokes, that drew my attention. I took great care to extract these nuggets of information from the rich seam of Bondiana that the novels provide. Everything that may seem unusual or untypical in my Bond novel, Solo, actually originates in Fleming.
For example: Bond wasn't English – he's half Scottish, half Swiss. Other curious foibles and facts emerged: Bond hates laceup shoes; he doesn't like women who wear nail varnish; he saw combat in the second world war; he will weep fairly readily, and so forth. But it was in the familiar Bond territory of food and drink that I think my close reading really delivered. In Casino Royale, Fleming remarks in an aside that Bond takes his own jar of salad dressing into the canteen of the secret service headquarters to improve the indifferent salad provided there. This is in 1953, remember. Bond was a foodie long before foodies were invented. Ten years later, in a 1963 short story, 007 in New York, Fleming provides, as a footnote, Bond's recipe for the perfect scrambled eggs on toast. The opportunity presented itself, irresistibly.
And so, in Solo, James Bond makes his own vinaigrette, and I supply the recipe in a footnote. No one can accuse me of breaking ranks – the precedent is clearly established by Fleming – but I have to admit that the vinaigrette recipe is my own.
Solo by William Boyd is published by Jonathan Cape.
**The voice: Maigret by Gareth Armstrong**
Georges Simenon's solitary Inspector Maigret strikes a match in the grainy dark of our black-and-white TV at home in the 60s and lights his pipe, illuminating another terrific hour of entertainment. Rupert Davies, the actor who played him for over 50 episodes, was Maigret. Big, rumpled, embodying common sense, cunning and patience – with a touch of genius.
I came to the books later, and they reaffirmed my affection for the French policeman. And now that Audible has embarked on an ambitious audiobook project, producing all 75 famed novels, I have the opportunity – and the pleasure – of bringing the iconic Parisian detective back to life for a new audience.
I transport myself to the underworld of mid-20th-century Paris. Pimps, tarts, whited sepulchres, bourgeois matrons and people with a past all need to be conjured up with distinctive voices. The regular characters, Maigret's wife and Lucas, his sidekick, must be established and sustained.
But the real challenge is the man himself. Simenon's portrait is so detailed and consistent – I have a clear picture of his lived-in face, his heavy body, his walk, even how he eats those mouthwatering lunches.
My producer, Paul Kent, and I decided that Maigret's voice had to be one that conveys his gravitas, wry humour, and his ability to sympathise or intimidate when necessary. The omnipresent pipe and the beer he enjoys at elevenses, would affect the timbre of his voice. Lack of regular sleep and exposure to the seamier side of life lend a world-weary tone. He needs a measured delivery to reflect his self-confidence, and the vocal equivalent of a twinkle in his eye.
The hardest quality to communicate in a vocal performance is Maigret's humanity. You'd like to see his eyes for that. But fortunately, thanks to Simenon's pellucid writing style, I believe you almost can.
Maigret by Gareth Armstrong is available on audible.co.uk Reported by guardian.co.uk 17 hours ago.