The Telegraph, kicking off its “Great Adaptations” offer, ponders the uneasy relationship between a book as source material and the film that’s based off of it. But Philip Horne ultimately believes that “films and books, in fact, give us different and complementary pleasures.” Why is that? “Despite their seeming rivalry, we’re better off with both – for the sake of the variety of stimulus they can give us, the strengths, even the wisdom, embodied in the two forms. And they are deeply intertwined. From the beginning, films have taken their stories from other sources – above all from bestsellers, often from classics. What makes a classic is mysterious, but one thing it does mean, which pleases big studios, is that thousands of readers have found a story exciting, thought-provoking, profound, moving; above all appealing.”
As examples, Horne brings up the spate of Jane Austen adaptations as well as the adaptation of Bram Stoker‘s ‘weird and wonderful’ novel DRACULA. “Whether the film is actually better than the book, in any of the cases in the Great Adaptations Collection, is the kind of question readers and reading groups across the country will find themselves debating. Comparison is the soul of criticism, and talking about a film adaptation – even a flawed one – often brings out things about the original work one would otherwise have missed. It also helps us understand better how films and books work – which can only sharpen our pleasure in both.”