Here's another novel that loses much in translation to film. Have you read any of William Boyd's other novels? - prize-winning, much acclaimed novels -
A Good Man in Africa,
An Ice Cream War -
Brazzaville Beach. These are hard hitting, straightforward approaches to social issues of the time...tinged with humor, with irony - edgy stories, not the romance as the adaptation seems to be.
I'm reading this book because I want to find out what Boyd intended with his plot. I'm puzzled at what has brought this old man to tears as he burns his journals which he has kept all his life. Why is he sobbing? Perhaps it is because he regrets the mistakes he has made. WHY is he burning them
now?
Boyd's novel begins with the quote from Henry James - "Never say you know the last word about any human heart." The next page - the title page says"
Any Human Heart
THE INTIMATE JOURNALS
OF LOGAN MOUNTSTUART
The whole novel is in the form of Journals - which Logan Mountstuart keeps from 1923 when he begins the Abbey School in England, having just moved from Uruguay. I think it was a mistake not to include these early journals, "The School Novels," in the film version - it is here that the boy's character is formed, and life-long associations made with Peter Scabius and Ben Leeping - whose challenges pushed him to behave as he does later in life.
There is a "Preamble to These Jounals" in which Boyd explains that the first years of the diaries, written when he was fifteen - are missing. He tells us that at the start, he vowed to tell the truth, the whole truth. He writes that sometimes he behaved well, sometimes less than well - but has resisted all attempts to present himself in a better light.
He explains that journal keepers keep such journals "to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being."
Perhaps that's why the old man weeps at the end - because he regrets his life - the life captured in these journals. We don't see that old man in the novel. That will come at the end,
perhaps.
Do you keep journals? Sometimes I wish I had...but maybe reading the unedited, unvarnished story of some of the low points of my life = would be too much of a reminder, too hard to take.
I think Boyd's story is about these Journals, not the other way around. We'll see - Know that I'm reading the book, and if there's something in the film that confuses you, please ask, and maybe Boyd the novelist can supply an explanation.
