Greenmantle revisited

A disappointing radio drama adaptation of John Buchan’s Greenmantle prompted me to re-read the book. I’m relieved to report that the book was the same entertaining read I’d remembered from 20+ years ago, and it had clearly suffered in the adaptation process. I recall hearing a radio writer discussing adaptation and abridgement, and saying how difficult it was to strike the right balance between cutting down the detail to produce a tight drama and losing too much of the ‘colour’. I should imagine everyone has a different idea of the ‘right’ balance, and in this case mine was quite a way from the dramatist’s.

The writing has style, warmth and humour, as if Richard Hannay is spinning you a yarn over a rather good port in his London club. The casual racism/chauvinism grated at first, but after a while I simply tuned it out as Major Hannay’s opinion and it stopped bothering me. There’s a strong sense of place and vivid landscape descriptions, from depressed wartime London to snowy German forests to exotic Constantinople to the winter-gripped mountains of the Caucasus. There was one scene that I’d remembered for 20-odd years, where Blenkiron and Hannay wander the streets of Constantinople collecting intelligence messages from such unlikely sources as an orange seller and a beggar who gives change. This adds life and colour, and I suppose there wasn’t room for it in the drama. Yet despite all this cutting, the pace feels much faster on the page. Which is very odd; the drama lasted 2 hours and felt slow, while the book must have taken at least 6 hours to read and felt fast. How could that be? Any suggestions?

The implausible coincidences that annoyed me in the drama were all there in the original, but they worked in the book. I think this is partly because our heroes experience bad luck as well as good, which evens it out, and partly because Richard Hannay acknowledges it as luck. He comes over as an adventurer grasping at whatever opportunity happens to turn up, which gives me the feeling that if that particular coincidence hadn’t happened, something else would have done and he would have turned that to his advantage instead. “Chance favours the prepared mind.” I’m quite happy with that.

Characterisation also works much better in the book, in part because John Buchan makes effective use of some judicious telling when he introduces characters. Here for example is what he has to say about Peter Pienaar:

But first a word must be said about Peter. He was the man that taught me all I ever knew of veld-craft, and a good deal about human nature besides. He was out of the Old Colony - Burgersdorp, I think - but he had come to the Transvaal when the Lydenburg goldfields started. He was prospector, transport-rider and hunter in turns, but principally a hunter. In those early days he was none too good a citizen. He was in Swaziland with Bob Macnab, and you know what that means. [Actually, I don’t, but I get the idea from the context] Then he took to working off bogus gold propositions on Kimberley and Johannesburg magnates, and what he didn’t know about salting a mine wasn’t knowledge. After that he was in the Kalahari, where he and Scotty Smith were familiar names. An era of comparative respectability dawned for him with the Matabele War, when he did uncommon good scouting and transport work. Cecil Rhodes wanted to establish him on a stock farm down Salisbury way, but Peter was an independent devil and would call no man master. He took to big-game hunting, which was what God intended him for, and was far the finest shot I have seen in my life.

-Greenmantle, by John Buchan

Thank you, John Buchan - now I have Peter in my mind and can read a story about him. This reminds me of the way Norse sagas always describe important new characters when they first appear, for example:

Now it is time to mention Njal’s sons. The eldest was called Skarp-Hedin. He was a tall, powerful man, skilful with arms, excellent at swimming and running. He was quick to make up his mind and confident in his decisions, quick to speak and scathing in his words; but for the most part he kept himself well under control.

-Njal’s Saga, translated by Magnus Magnusson and Herman Palsson

After the initial introduction the sagas ‘show’ (and how), but they give you something to start from. This works very well for me as a reader, and I think it’s a pity if rigid application of the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule deprives me of it. How could Buchan ‘show’ all this about Peter? With a flashback of Peter’s career that would go on for pages, confuse me and slow the pace of the main story? Gradually, in bits and pieces of ‘backstory’ scattered over half a dozen chapters, so it loses impact and/or I forget half of it? But without it - as in the drama - I don’t get a clear image of Peter and both character and story lose vitality. Of course ‘show’ the main events (why would you want to do anything else?), but half a page of ‘tell’ can add a lot of extra richness to the background and the secondary characters without losing pace.

A similar occasional use of ‘tell’ also helped to keep the complicated ramifications of the plot straight. For example, in the drama I lost track of why the Russians suddenly became important about halfway through the second episode; in the book it worked fine because someone explained it to me. I think the drama may also have had a problem with pacing, because the first episode finished exactly halfway through the book (page 156 of 314), but an awful lot more things happen in the second half than in the first. This made the first episode slow and the second episode confusing.

So for me, the radio adaptation had managed to retain the Ripping Yarn-style plot at the expense of much of the life and colour. In the terms of a recent discussion here, the adaptation had ‘plot’ but the book had ‘story’.

Incidentally, I’ve seen a discussion somewhere about how the word ‘romance’ used to mean a larger-than-life story of any kind, whereas it’s now narrowed to mean a male-female love story with a guaranteed happy ending. I was reading the 1967 Hodder & Stoughton edition of Greenmantle, and the cover blurb described it as a ‘romance’; clearly the word retained its original meaning at that time. The blurb was also titled ‘John Buchan: Books for enjoyment’, which is a refreshingly honest and direct way for a publisher to describe a book. I don't remember seeing such a straightforward strapline on recently-published books, which seem to have a tendency to the Epic And Portentous. How about the rest of you?