Novels AMC Should Adapt Part 2: Samuel Beckett's Murphy

Samuel Beckett is perhaps most well-known to the general public as the author of a play about nothing.

'But nothing happens... in the end, no one turns up... nothing happens.'
 
We can argue over the merit of his theatrical work until the sun turns blue, but what is undoubted is his importance to 20th century literature.
Beckett's writing was a game changer, and according to the opinions of many, we're still struggling with how to respond to his output (Joshua Ferris believes that the novel as a form began with Cervantes' Don Quixote and ended with Beckett's 'Trilogy').
 
What is often overlooked is Samuel Beckett as a prose writer - Samuel Beckett the novelist.
And what gets buried even further from the greater public consciousness, is his earlier work, where his unique brand of comedy sprouted originally.

His scattershot, dry, Irish humour is seen on stages worldwide most nights, but we're lacking in screen adaptations. His work is intimidating - if novelists struggle in his shadow, how could one dare attempt to translate his prose to celluloid and digital...

Well I think we can go back to the beginning almost, and with his earlier fiction, create something with the character-comedy of Peep Show or Black Books, and the existential wonderings (with the occasional slapstick) of The Sopranos.

Samuel Beckett's 1938 novel - Murphy

Murphy was Beckett's second published work of fiction (following his hilarious collection of short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks) and first picked up novel. Unlike his later work, and his general shift towards a more minimalistic aesthetic, Murphy is audacious and expansive.

And at the centre of Murphy is, rather appropriately, Murphy - serial shirker and procrastinator, a 'hero' in the mould of Oblomov and Russian literature’s 'superfluous man'.
 
Murphy does not work, indeed, he has no desire to and considers employment as analogous to death: 'In the mercantile gehenna [...] to which your words invite me-' 

If, like most, you have no idea what is meant by 'mercantile gehenna' - Gehenna, in the Hebrew Bible, was a site where apostate Israelites and worshippers of pagan gods would sacrifice their children by fire.

Clearly, Murphy has a low opinion of the nine-to-five routine.

He would rather spend his days locked up in his London flat, strapped naked to a rocking-chair, rolling forwards and backwards in masturbatory fashion, hoping that he can somehow totally escape inwards, within himself, into the blissful ‘will-lessness’ of his own mind, away from REAL LIFE.

Murphy is in essence, the classic 'comedy-of-the-lowlife', and this is central to the novel's enduring appeal. It is quite possibly the closest piece of fiction there is to the bumbling nothingness of Withnail and I. 

The comedy is suitably hectic in parts, such as the Dublin sections - latterly in London - where Neary, his drunkard man-servant Cooper, Wylie and Murphy's spurned lover Miss Counihan, argue amongst eachother and plot the downfall of Murphy (if only they could find the bastard...).
 
But Beckett crafts a subtle warmth, core to the text, in the figure of Celia - an Irish prostitute-immigrant who wants to settle down with the feckless Murphy, and leave behind her less than desirable profession.
That she ultimately can't, due to Murphy's solipsistic battle with the question of whether there is any real greater meaning to anything, to living, delivers the tragedy in this farcical comedy.

Murphy's end (accidental self-immolation, yeah...) is as blackly grotesque as one would expect from Beckett, there is no heroic denouement for our protagonist.
 
But the final scene, where Celia takes her aged grandfather (who is also her pimp, it’s never black-and-white with Sam Beckett) kite flying at Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, would be a marvel of modern television - tragic, poignant and wonderful.

The relative brevity of the novel (just shy of 160 pages), would allow for it to be developed into a cracking three-part mini-series, in the manner of Hugo Blick's dramas on the BBC (such as his excellent, The Shadow Line).       
And with Irish actors being killed off quicker in Game of Thrones than ants in a garden, there would be no trouble in finding a suitable cast to gallivant around central Dublin and west London. Just imagine if they could coax Jack Gleeson from his bizarre retirement to take on Murphy...

Basically, it'd be a great BBC Two thing at 11pm on a few Sundays in a row; in association with Canal Plus or HBO or some other foreign risk taker. I'm sure it would be heralded loudly, but watched by few - as the best shows always happen to be.

Introduction and Novels AMC Should Adapt Part 1: William Gaddis' JR

Introduction to the concept

If you've read any broadsheet paper over the last, oh, I'd say three-to-ten years, you will be aware of a particular cultural obsession - the rise of the television series box set.

From HBO's pioneering crime serials Oz, The Wire and The Sopranos through the late 1990s and early 2000s, to the spread of such mature, experimental programming throughout the schedules of effectively every broadcaster in the US (AMC's Mad Men and Breaking Bad; Cinemax's The Knick; Showtime's Dexter, etc.) - if one is looking for an engaging 50 + hours of television, one does not have to look far.

It has been noted that the prolonged dramatic development (and the associated emotional attachment one, almost unconsciously, gives) inherent to the art form, is akin only to the novel.
One works when one reads - as such, pushing through a thick novel, shoving your way through Dante or Beckett takes dozens of hours.
When you read, you re-read, you imagine and you criticise and you argue.
We do the same with our beloved television shows.

As I've been at pains to posit - they're vaguely similar, alright...

With the rise of the 'serious' TV show, we have reached an age where those great beasts of literature can possibly - finally - be tackled with success.
No more must we settle with abridged cinematic adaptations, we will hopefully see those great works attacked, as Fassbinder did with his 14-part take on Berlin Alexanderplatz (an early masterpiece of the 'box set' genre).

What I intend to do here, is suggest works of literature on a regular basis that could be adapted for the box - I want to put forward novels that have been labelled as, unfilmable.
After all, due to the formal constraints of cinema, texts of a certain length (and depth) just can't be translated into that medium - remember the Watchmen film? Yeah, neither do I...


William Gaddis's 1975 novel - JR

It is difficult to know where one starts with JR. This is a 726 page novel told almost entirely in dialogue, with brief elliptical interludes in the present-continuous. It sounds pretty tough doesn't it?
 
Well, it is. But this should be no reason for one to avoid the book - it's hilarious, it's sexy and - most importantly with regards to our focus - it has plot. The novel is all voice and plot, and the emphasis on these functions makes the book one that is very amenable to the modern television drama series.

So, plot... JR is, centrally, about an eleven year-old boy (the eponymous JR Vansant) who manages to create a corporate empire built on penny stocks via the telephone at his high school. Along the way, the reader will encounter Jack Gibbs (a free-spirited, somewhat nihilistic physics teacher), Edward Bast (failed composer and consistent failure to all of the women in his life) and Mrs Joubert (not just a beautiful school teacher, but the daughter of a recently retired powerful stockbroker), as well as dozens of others. An entire cast-list can be found here.

Why would JR work as a Breaking Bad styled 50-minute-an-episode television show?

Well, we're back to William Gaddis' crucial aesthetic play - the prevalance of dialogue (at least 90% of the text), and those hallucinatory, floaty elliptical interludes.

Portraying dozens of different voices without those signposts writers are so fond of (- 'so and so said'), meant that Gaddis had to really stress the colloquialisms and verbal ticks that come with everyday speech.
Eventually, once the reader has hit a pace and is in the thrall of Gaddis' prose, we know who is talking without needing to be told.
Gaddis' characterisation and his dialogue almost render the need for a screenplay void - just read from the novel, read the dialogue as it was written.
And the verbose interludes in the present-continuous, those serve within the novel as transition shots, as the camera floating from one telephone line and room into another, or as its rise above the trees of the Bast garden into the car of his cousin, Stella Angel.
In a sense, there has yet to be another novel so formally close to the screenplay (yet of course, JR is so much more).

With a massive cast of characters who continually bump into each other’s lives, plot threads which wrap around the central conceit (a satirical attack on free-market capitalism - how timely, eh...) and dialogue that is ready, JR would be perfect.
We would have the wit of The West Wing, and the bite of Breaking Bad; we would have a chance to move Mad Men into the 1970s and indulge in the period detail that is a trademark of these shows. 

If the modern box set could make millions fall in love with subjects as traditionally unpopular (to the majority) as shadow monsters popping out of vaginas, and the graphic ripping apart of limbs and innards, surely we can find a space for a satirical, scathing and hilarious take on free-market economics as exploited by an eleven year-old boy.

(Just so long as Edward Bast is played by Vincent Kartheiser).