Word: novelizations
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BLEAK HOUSE PBS, SUNDAYS, 9 P.M. E.T. Even at eight hours, this adaptation of Charles Dickens' tale of an interminable inheritance case is quite nimble a feat for writer Andrew Davies. The Masterpiece Theatre coproduction captures the novel's satire, melodrama and horror-movie suspense without undercutting any of those disparate tones. Gillian Anderson is haunting as Lady Dedlock, a claimant tormented by the mystery of a long-lost lover. But the emotional heart of the story is Esther (Anna Maxwell Martin), the sensible orphan caught up in the suit. This is law drama such as Boston Legal's David...
TWENTY THOUSAND STREETS UNDER THE SKY BBC AMERICA, FEB. 11 AND 12, 8 P.M. E.T. This wistful mini-series, based on a 1935 Patrick Hamilton novel, is less love triangle than unrequited love triangle. Plain, earnest pub worker Ella (Sally Hawkins) pines for naive, literary barman Bob (Bryan Dick), who in turn pines for Jenny (Zoë Tapper), a streetwalker who pines for her former self, her lost opportunities and her ability to love. Streets is a keen-eyed, elegantly acted noir drama of heartbreak in alleys and darkened movie houses...
...Freedom in the bedroom is a novel concept in China, where for decades communist minders dictated most aspects of people's private lives. Dressed in baggy Mao suits?hardly outfits to set the pulse racing?citizens of the People's Republic had to ask permission from local officials on everything from whom to marry to what kind of birth control to use. But these days many Chinese are walking on the wilder side. Sparked by the easing of government control over individual lifestyle choices and the spread of more permissive, Western attitudes toward sex, Chinese are copulating earlier, more often...
...that defense simply invites the question, if it's not factual, why didn't Frey publish A Million Little Pieces as fiction? By claiming that his story was literally true, Frey endowed it with a heightened immediacy and an emotional force that it lacked as a novel-in effect, he borrowed a little extra emotional oomph from his trusting readers, who treated his narrative as 100% lived experience, real dues paid by a real person. That's not trivial. If Frey wasn't entitled to that immediacy and that force-if he stole that oomph rather than borrowed it-well...
...balancing of these perspectives has been his gift ever since his second novel, tellingly called The Shadow Lines. His epic novel of 2000, The Glass Palace, excavated the imperial history of 19th century Burma in part to highlight the torn affections of an Indian in 1943, not sure whether to side with India, or against Britain, in the war. The theme of his most recent novel, The Hungry Tide, is, to some degree, its very setting: the swampy area of the Sunderbans, in west Bengal, now sea, now land, its shifting contours reflecting back to the uncertain allegiances...