According to the mighty working

In Bright Young Things (Stephen Fry’s adaptation of Vile Bodies), the protagonist Adam arrives at Dover and in a scene played for broad farce (‘I know filth when I see it, and this is filth!’) has his novel manuscript taken away for burning by Customs. This triggers a whole series of misadventures as Adam needed the book to raise money to get married.

The trouble lies in making it completely arbitrary. It’s as if Fry was saying, ‘Look, I’m not even bothering to explain this because we all know it just has to happen for the sake of the plot.’ Audiences are willing to collude in that kind of thing but you do at least have to give them some kind of rationale, however flimsy.

In the novel, Waugh has the Customs officer look through the manuscript and become increasingly appalled by what he reads. The movie doesn’t have time for that, but it should at least have him light on one line – something read out of context that sounds subversive or obscene. Anything, however spurious, would do. In fact the more absurd, the better; it makes us take Adam’s side. And that line out of context could be funny, too, which would recruit our sympathy even more strongly. But to have no reason given at all leaves the audience no reason to connect with the character and buy in.

It’s an abstract injustice and thus a failed opportunity. Blake Synder would never have let that pass. Do watch the movie, it's a lot of fun and I wish Fry wrote & directed more movies, but read the novel first. Waugh tells a tougher and truer story throughout than the one the filmmakers have put on screen.

Showing not telling revisited

The recent announcement that the James Bond books are being reissued in versions edited by sensitivity readers provides us with a simple and striking example of the contrast between good and bad writing.

(By the way, we’re not concerned here with whether literature should be edited to reflect contemporary attitudes, just with the craft of storytelling. The debate about revising novels of the past will no doubt continue to rage on social media for a long while to come, so we don’t need to go into it here.)

The example is from Live & Let Die. Bond and Felix Leiter visit a strip club and are watching the action on stage as a girl performs an erotic dance.

Ian Fleming’s version reads:

“Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry.”

And (allegedly) the new version:

“Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.”

If you ever need to explain the difference between showing and telling, you have it right there. The second version is a cliché, of course, and it’s also abstract and unspecific, which is always weaker writing.

More importantly (though for this you need to look at the story as a whole) a recurrent motif in Fleming’s novels is the way Bond projects his own self-disgust onto others. At the beginning of Goldfinger he devours (Fleming’s term) a banquet of stone crabs and toast washed down with pink champagne, only to be consumed by revulsion at the sight of his pudgy dinner companion wiping butter off his chin, and thereby revolted also by his own gorging indulgence.

Similarly, Bond’s attitude towards women is reflected in the way he regards the other men at the strip club as being “like pigs at the trough”. That is the writing. Start with Casino Royale:

“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling--a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension--becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.”

Fleming has a lot to teach you about storytelling, but it’s not a lesson his editors have learned, so be sure to study him in the original.