Saturday, January 28, 2012

Tinker, Tailor, Whatta Guy

I make it a rule to see a movie that's been adapted from a book before I read the book.  There are two reasons for this. 

First, this is how I can see the movie for what it is, on its own terms, as a movie.  Cinema.  Which is a very different creature from a book -- different technology, different method of consumption, different emotional affect.

 Second, with the cinema version running in my subconscious while I'm reading the book, I get to read two texts at once:  the text the original author wrote, and the screen adaptation that wrenched, torqued and hammered literature into cinema

I have seen Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy twice now in the cinema - I think twice is the minimum required viewings to catch everything and absorb the subtle cinematic structure built by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan, and notice how much character backstory and and information is delivered by the casting.  (Can you imagine having Toby Jones suddenly become your boss? Yeeeeesh!)

In a bookstore today I picked up Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by LeCarre, read the first page and bought the thing on the spot.  It was obvious that reading the book was going to be a rich pleasure, completely different from the movie and yet overflowing with meaning. 

Two chapters in, I am committed to this book, because I know I am in the hands of a master storyteller.  It doesn't matter how complicated things get - LeCarre will carry me through it.

He even does something right off the bat the usually drives me crazy: chapter two is so different from chapter one, in setting and characters, that it could be a second beginning to the story.

Only it's not.  That's not how LeCarre works.  Lesser writers may take LeCarre's success at the "second beginning" as permission to proceed, but they do it badly, and only succeed at jerking the reader around.

LeCarre succeeds because he weaves in just enough references to the characters and setting of chapter one, so that you know that chapter two is happening in the same world, with the same rules, and the people of chapter one are of course going to show up again and be very, very important.

I am also half in love with George Smiley already.  So much feeling under the placid surface.  LeCarre places us inside Smiley's point of view, so of course watching a "Smiley" from the outside - as one must in cinema - he might come off as dull.  Of course he does.  That's his whole intention.

"I like big books, and I cannot lie," as the needlepoint sampler says.  Read on!

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Crrrrrazy Wisdom!

Chogyam Trungpa

"The discovery of magic can happen only when we transcend our embarrassment about being alive, when we have the bravery to proclaim the goodness and dignity of human life, without either hesitation or arrogance. Then magic can descend onto our existence. The world is filled with power and wisdom, which we can have, so to speak. In some sense, we have them already."

“Sacred World,” in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, page 132.
It's the "without arrogance" part that trips me up.  I've often been called arrogant, thoughtless, clueless and cruel for sharing how I see the world as a wonderful place. 
Go figure.