Earthly Powers

The book - Earthly Powers - became a bestseller but, despite many attempts, has only been dramatised 25 years later and not on television.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

MARK LAWSON:
Anthony Burgess always hoped this story would last and have various adaptations. This is the first on radio. What did you think?

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
I thought it was sad, a pretty poor attempt. They carved out a nugget out of the plot out of this huge book. It is a wonderful book full of word play and aphorisms, none of which gets in at all. That said, the second episode, which actually seems pretty much invented or imposed on Burgess, which is this homosexual romance is wonderful. There's an actor, Andrew Scott, who I thought was fantastic. Henry Goodman does about ten of these very florid accents, Italians and Germans and whatever, and of course for radio you've got to have that. But I think Burgess would have thought it was comic and overbearing.

MARK LAWSON:
I've read it many times and Michael Hastings, the adaptor, has in fact invented huge episodes and I think quite cleverly sorted out the central plot. John?

JOHN HARRIS:
I agree with Elaine. The problem is it has been hacked down. In the process of hacking down I am not sure they have come to a conclusion about what is important and what is not. You have episodes fantastically disjointed. The first centres on the Italian family and the ascendant cleric who becomes Pope. The second is about the unrequited gay affair on the fringes of the British Empire and has a certain charm on account of that, and the third, my favourite, actually brings into focus what the book really centres on, which is this bumbling self-deprecating British writer placed against the backdrop of this very dramatic period in European history - who embodies really, a large part of the British attitude to that, which is while Europe's in the middle of this absolutely hideous - we're sitting there using phrases like "I'm about as good a writer as a Maynards wine gum etc etc.

MARK LAWSON:
But then in the fourth episode you get a version of the Jamestown Massacre and that is very cleverly linked back to the opening scenes to do with the Pope and a miracle. Tom Paulin?

TOM PAULIN:
There's a line in it, "everything will never be the same again". I thought "no, no, nothing will be the same again". It is not English, and the thing about Burgess, I've read a couple of his novels. In some ways he's a very gifted linguist. Never the real thing - lots of tedious word play, and that's just one example. He doesn't quite write English. Sometimes that can work with a great writer like Conrad, it's not quite the English language but a wonderful version of it. Not with Burgess. This is about being free of history, not caring about history. All these burbling voices of the kind you get in silly TV commercials. It is pointless, tedious; three hours of boredom I've had today listening to a CD of the damn thing.