Amanda's blog

 

One of the things I’ve found most amusing and (in a non-financial sense) rewarding about being the Times’s children’s books critic was learning that my column is read by several Hollywood producers. Presumably they have their own talent scouts, but it’s nice to know that almost all the books that I’ve spotted as especially interesting – Harry Potter, Northern Lights, Holes, City of Ember and this year Percy Jackson and How to Train Your Dragon – have made it onto the silver screen.

Plenty more – Artemis Fowl, Across the Nightingale Floor, Wolf Brother – are stuck in development hell. They really shouldn’t be, because when you have a big groundswell of support for a book or a series, then not only do you have a ready-made core audience but you have something which is going to work an awful lot better in terms of plot and characters. When you see some of the real dross that does get made, it’s very sad.

Of course, there’s always the danger that a film adaptation could ruin a good book. This is what happened to the ghastly adaptation of Pullman’s The Golden Compass (originally Northern Lights). A combination of fearing to offend the American Christian Right and clod-hopping direction by the Chris Weiss left the story, literally, up in the air. My son loves to imitate the flat, nasal intonation of the actress playing Lyra (“We’re going North, Pan”), and every child I know seems to want to kick poor Daniel Radclyffe for his wooden performance as Harry Potter. Being a child actor must be hell, with those your own age either despising or envying you. Such has been the boom in family films in the past decade that there are few private schools in London which no not have at least one child star – often paying for his or her education not just with their own earnings, but with the sort of ostracism which appals.

Anyway, yesterday I took some of my family to the preview of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. We are all fans of Rick Riordan's series about the dyslexic boy who discovers he's the son of Poseidon, and a demi-god. It was a lot of fun; Uma Thurman plays a part she was born to play, Medusa, with terrific wit, and Piers Brosnan was charming and unusually hairy as Percy’s Centaur teacher. The actor playing Percy was nice, even if Annabeth, his future romantic interest, had one of those huge jaws American girls seem to have. We thrilled to see two of the leads in the superlative TV series, Rome, acting Poseidon and Athene. I’m always fascinated to see the way a film-script strips a book down to the engine of its plot, but also adds a lots of visual detail that books usually miss. Just as one of the nicest things about the Harry Potter films was seeing all the portraits and the moving staircases at Hogwarts, so we were entertained by things that weren’t in the book like Percy seeing lots of other demigods groaning on stretchers when he arrived at Half-Blood Camp, and enjoying his Poseidon-inspired cabin there. The jokes about Hades’s Underworld looking just like a slightly more hellish Hollywood were beautifully done, and Grover’s new line on seeing Charon burn paper money (“don’t you know there’s a recession?”) raised a laugh.

Yet film-scripts always meddle with things they shouldn’t. Annabeth, daughter of Athene, was far too much like Ares’s aggressive daughter, Charisse. Above all, what was missing was Zeus’s satirical speech about the way Olympus moves from country to country as each becomes the dominant power in the West (which is why, naturally, the home of the Greek Gods wound up on top of the Empire State Building). Maybe the director, Chris Columbus, worried this sounded too triumphalist – or maybe that a more accurate version would be to see Olympus drifting towards China or India.

I don’t myself think Percy Jackson will be the kind of hit that Harry Potter was, largely for emotional reasons. Percy spends about five minutes being miserable about his dyslexia, ADHD and fatherlessness and then it’s all slashing swords and swelling music. The point about HP is that his loneliness and stoicism speak to every child who’s ever felt left out. His relationship with adults, especially, is cross-hatched with so many currents of trust, frustration, admiration and anguish that Percy’s just look like the usual teen stroppiness.

This kind of fantasy fiction look formulaic and therefore easy to pull off, but it’s anything but. I have my own reservations about JK Rowling’s books, largely to do with their tendency to gigantism in Books Five, Six and Seven, which together with poor editing lost a large number of devoted readers. However, what I’ve always thought unique about Rowling is the way that she writes with the whole of her imagination. Every character has clearly been felt through as well as thought through, and this is what children respond to. The Percy Jackson books are a delight, with much that is wise as well as witty, but it’s not really a child’s world, more a teenager’s. Much as Hollywood does the teen stuff well, the life of an American teenager is already so much more affluent, privileged and free than that of any other nation, they already look like demi-gods to us mortals.