Bright Young Things

Supervision with DR this morning. He was too canny not to notice that I talked more about Shakespeare than Waugh but seemed content to let me continue my non-linear progress to a product. I tried out the thematic three act structure on him and he observed that the boat could be added to my list of death machines. Not sure, taking it under advisement as American lawyers say, whatever it may mean.

Following on from yesterday's jottings, I've bought two new marker pens and I've just used them for the first time. It begins to look as if we have a plan. Also kept up the coffee and banana intake and broke up the day with some unwisely vigorous exercise (see vulgar blog). One aside - I spoke yesterday about writers' papers and libraries and blow me if I haven't heard the same topic twice under discussion on Radio 4 today, prompted by Le Carre's donation of his archive to the Bodleian - Le Carre Donation. It sounds like he is an inveterate amender.

Just finished watching the Stephen Fry Bright Young Things film. Not bad. Not great. So my opinion seems to accord with the general view, which of itself is rather unusual. I did think it particularly well cast and Fenella Woolgar is the dead spit of how I imagine Agatha Runcible. Father Rothschild is reduced to a cameo and James McAvoy is particularly affecting as Balcairn. However not at all sold on the new happy ending. I know it is treasonous ever to disagree with Fry, but I think he misses the point. Bleakness is all in Waugh. Even Guy Crouchback at the culmination of Sword of Honour, who has by common accord 'had a good war', has done at so at great cost to his faith and to his country.

Which brings me to intertextuality. My tentative titles for my three acts are the titles of the three parts of Sword of Honour. As I have previously alluded there is a recurrent darkness in Waugh which envelops both the satires and the later sterner works. Fry does some borrowing from the wartime trilogy when he uses an air-raid to produce his denouement, albeit he disowns the text's pessimism. Lord Monomark (Dan Aykroyd) inherits the Canadian/Beaverbrook vulgarity we find in Rex Mottram (a man to whom war is kind) in Brideshead Revisited.

Fry handles the book's tricky final wartime scene by transplanting it to 1940 Belgium but this conflicts with the period detail which has so deftly placed the action a decade earlier. It also renders incongruous what might otherwise have been a nice little Wallis Simpson joke earlier in the film. All of which sounds rather carping now I look at it again. On balance I would have enjoyed the film far more had I not known the book - this remark could bring us back to musings on the nature and validity of adaptation but we will save that for another day.

In a way I have to admit that I am glad not to find the film a roaring success. It leaves some room for the rest of us to have a pop.