12. Truman Capote (1958), Breakfast at Tiffany's and other stories

Since the two books I read before this one had been awful and disappointing respectively, I turned to this one for a reasonably-guaranteed good read. That's the advantage of literary classics - people are likely to have kept reading and recommending them for a reason, so you're on safer ground than with something new and untried. This one was lent to me by lady_lugosi1313 probably up to a year ago now, when the film was on at the Cottage Road cinema and we were thinking of going to see it. In the end, we didn't, but I kept the book anyway and this was its time. I have seen the film in the past, but before I began regularly blogging films here I think.

Breakfast at Tiffany's itself is a novella of c. 100 pages. It's told in the first person from the perspective of an unnamed narrator who is a writer by profession, and has a fresh, light modern style which seems simple but is actually quite finely crafted when you stop to look at it. The broad set-up is similar to the film - Holly Golightly moves into the same brownstone apartment block as the narrator, lives an expensive and aspirational lifestyle funded by her rich lovers, turns out to be the child bride of a simple Texan farmer, gets arrested for inadvertently assisting a drug trafficker, and is then released on bail. But the ending is very different, in that the film gives Holly and the narrator-character (Paul for screen purposes) a romantic happy ending, whereas in the novella she gives him the slip and disappears from New York and his life forever. This is hugely more in keeping with everything we learn about her character over the course of the novella - she is a fly-by-night, living in the moment but always searching for something better, who is fundamentally incapable of settling down anywhere or with anyone. That doesn't mean her portrayal in the film, or its ending, isn't appropriate and satisfying in its own right, of course. It's just that the two have to be treated as quite different animals.

The novella paints a picture of New York living which must have seemed quite shocking at the time (and certainly led to a bit of difficulty getting it published). It's not just Holly's transactional relationships with men, but the fact that she smokes weed, speaks openly about her 'dyke' friends and at one point declares that a person ought to be able to marry men or women because "Love should be allowed. I'm all for it." Indeed, the same sort of subjects come up in two of the other three stories included in the book. The first, 'House of Flowers', is about a Haitian woman who starts the story as a sex worker in Port-au-Prince and ends up going into the mountains to marry a simple farmer (who treats her appallingly). She's a kind of reverse Holly Golightly, in fact. The second, 'A Diamond Guitar', is about an older prisoner who becomes such close friends with a younger man who arrives in the compound one day that "Except that they did not combine their bodies or think to do so, though such things were not unknown at the farm, they were as lovers." Capote himself was gay, but also clearly more broadly interested in challenging conventional morality and exploring the lives of people at the bottom of the social pyramid. The final story, 'A Christmas Memory', is more sentimental and wholesome, featuring the friendship between a young boy and a much older female relative who conspire to make Christmas cakes together despite their very limited means, but Wikipedia confirmed my instinct that it too reflected Capote's personal experiences, drawing on his rather financially and emotionally deprived childhood. I certainly read it at the right time of year, since I finished this book in early December, though I hadn't planned that.

13. & 14. Leah Moore & John Reppion after M.R. James (2016-17), Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

I received these two volumes of graphic adaptations of M.R. James ghost stories for Christmas, and had read both before the end of Boxing Day. John Reppion, one half of the production team, spoke about how he and Leah Moore had approached the stories and showed us some of the artwork from them at the M.R. James conference I went to in York in late September, and I was impressed enough by what I saw to put them on my Amazon wish-list in anticipation of Christmas. My sister did not disappoint, though opening them on Christmas day at her house proved a little dicier than I had reckoned when Christophe (four years old) saw them, realised that they were basically picture-books and demanded a story... I solemnly obliged, but thankfully (as I'd felt pretty safe in predicting), he'd got bored and wandered off by the end of the second page of 'Count Magnus' - though not before having cause to ask what a 'mausoleum' was!

They contain the same eight stories as the original James collection of the same name, four per volume, but with each story drawn by a different artist in their own distinctive style. Drawing the stories of course forces particular artistic decisions which writing them can elide - particularly whether or not to show monsters which James deliberately only partially describes, or events which are only implied such as Mrs Mothersole transforming into a hare in 'The Ash Tree' - and it was the intelligence with which John talked about the reasoning behind these decisions at the conference which was one of the main factors that made me want to read the books for myself. On the whole, the lean is in favour of showing the monsters (though not Mrs Mothersole's transformation), but usually sparingly - e.g. only partially (like James himself) or not until the very last panel. I think it is the right decision, and actually more Jamesian than not. For all that he argued for treating ghosts 'gently', he does also like to deliver what I have heard called 'the Jamesian punch' - that is, those few very evocative words with which he conveys utter grotesque horror after a long and tense build-up, such as “a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being”.

The pleasure of good M.R. James adaptations is that they make you see and appreciate things which you might previously have missed in the stories. I got the same out of the Radio 4 adaptations written by Mark Gatiss which were broadcast in the run-up to Christmas, of which 'The Mezzotint' particularly inspired me to realise in a way I never quite have before how much the story capitalises on and plays around with the subjective real-life experience of viewing art. I think it was having different people playing the various roles (Williams, Binks, Nisbet, etc.), and commenting on the different things which each of them had seen in the picture, that really brought that out, in a way that reading it yourself or hearing a single narrator like Robert Lloyd Parry read the whole thing isn't as likely to capture. Likewise in this collection, I found I appreciated the structure and menace of 'Count Magnus' more than I usually do the written version, and that my rather jaded over-exposure to 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You' was overcome by the freshness of experiencing the story in a new medium, with characters whose faces I hadn't seen before. There is also lots of charming detail to soak up in the panels, delivering content not conveyed by either the original stories or the inset narrative bubbles such as images of pages from the manuscripts the characters are poring over or details of the rooms and other locations they inhabit. I can highly recommend both volumes, and hope that John and Leah feel inspired to progress on to some of James' other stories at some stage in the future.

That now concludes my books read for 2018 in the sense of books finished. I selected a volume of ghost stories by Elizabeth Gaskell for the run-up to Christmas, also lent to me by lady_lugosi1313, having enjoyed doing the same with Dickens last year, but haven't yet finished those, so that they will have to count in due course as my first book read of 2019. Another seven films of 2018 yet await...