KTH RDGWY

A French film production of my first novel The Long Falling starts principle photography in Northern France and Belgium this week. It’s directed by Martin Provost , who made Séraphine , which starred Yolande Moreau - who also takes the main role in the new film. The two of them have, as I understand it, been the driving force behind getting this project - a difficult sell, I’d have thought - off the ground. The novel has been adapted to a French/Belgian setting, and names and other things (including the title) will change considerably. I don’t know anything about the adaptation. I didn’t want to, and didn’t ask. But these are talented film makers, and I’m very glad it’s them, and I wish them well.

I’ve lost count of the number of times books of mine have been optioned over the years. The first time it happened I took a deep breath, thought about the money, and tried to keep a close eye on what they were up to. But I soon realised that film options are a weird sort of futures trading and have little to do with the actual business (never mind the art) of making actual films. It has become quite a welcome, modest, source of income for me. Film makers get in touch, offer money to have exclusive rights to try and develop a script and raise more money to film it, I say yes, they pay me, and then they can’t get it together and after a year is up, maybe even two, they disappear. Suits me.

It suits me because I don’t really want anyone to film my books. They are books. Novels, mostly. Complete unto themselves. They are not blueprints for art in another medium. Why can’t film makers just make films? Do they not have ideas of their own? It puzzles me. Making art might be thought of as a sort of elaborate, public cleansing ritual. It’s odd and unsettling to have some guy come along and climb into your dirty bathwater.

And I can’t be the only reader who gets pissed off when Hollywood comes stamping all over a novel that means something to me. When I love a book, I dread - and I really do mean dread - that some bastard will film it. And worse, that the film will be a commercial success. That characters and scenes and ideas that are alive inside me in complex non visual ways involving language and tone and a carefully, skilfully evoked atmosphere, will turn up as squashed, horrible, crushed reductions all over the television or the radio or the sides of buses.

Most recently for example, The Road . I have no idea if it’s a good film or not. I really don’t care. The point is that that man and his son have lived in my head since I read the book, and my emotional attachment to them, and to it, is so deep and genuinely meaningful to me, that the bits of clips that I glimpsed before I could hit the remote, the bits of useless special effects that suddenly appeared on the TV during ad breaks before I realised what it was, the face of Vigo Mortensen being anguished on posters, have - despite my vigilance - somewhat spoiled the life of the book in my memory. Where it lives as a world, a feeling, built on the language of Cormac McCarthy and the material of my own imagination and experience, and where it should be allowed to live on - without being subjected to a jarring translation into mundane specifics.

Next year, god help us, we get the Tintin films. You have no idea how depressed this makes me. Really. When I was about eight, my Dad bought me a copy of The Black Island in Dublin city centre. I read it in the car on the way home and it changed my life. Seriously. During my teens I learned more from Hergé about how to write than I did from any other writer. (For a superb account of just how good the Tintin books really are, I can thoroughly recommend Tom McCarthy’s Tintin And The Secret Of Literature .) And I lived in those books. Part of me still lives in them. To this day, when I take to my bed, it’s The Calculus Affair, Tintin In Tibet, The Seven Crystal Balls , that I take with me. Most of all it’s The Castafiore Emerald - one of the very few almost perfect books - that sustains my imaginative life. I have smuggled bits of Hergé into every novel I’ve written. Sometimes people notice, and it thrills me.

My point though, is simply that the boy detective and his friends are fully alive in my imagination. They live and breathe and speak there, and the colours of their world and the tones of their voices, though not fixed, move within an orbit created by the skill of Hergé as a writer and an artist, and by my own experience of reading about them, and my childhood and my youth and my life, and that inner world is precious to me, completely precious and valued and loved; and next year, with a deluge of advertising, breakfast cereals, action figures and nauseating celebrity interviews, that bastard Stephen Spielberg is going to fuck it all up, and no matter how much I try to isolate myself and ignore the whole horrible thing, my beautiful inner world is going to be violated by Jamie fucking Billy Elliot Bell and Andy fucking Gollum Serkis, and Nick fucking Frost and Simon fucking Pegg. And even if these people (all of whom I, annoyingly, quite like) create something marvellous, it won’t be my marvellous - the one me and Hergé created - and I’d really rather that the whole project was hit by a shooting star, an Inca curse, something, anything, that shut it down now and forever.

I’m not sure there’s anyone quite as emotionally invested in The Long Falling as I am in the Tintin books. But I know there are people to whom it means a great deal. I hope you won’t mind the film too much. If you think you will, I hope you can avoid it. I’m sure that won’t hit the takings too much.

The truth is that I needed the money. And I am sufficiently removed from the book that it doesn’t tug at me at all. To be honest, I can’t remember much of it. If I watch it (and I suppose I will at some point) I probably won’t be able to spot many of the changes. And I would be lying if I didn’t say that I am sort of intrigued at the idea of a bunch of people running around the Belgian countryside acting out scenes I imagined all those years ago. And I love Grace, and I hope they realise that …

Actually, it seems that it does tug at me. Because I remember things now that I had forgotten. Maybe I won’t watch it. I don’t know. I really don’t.

If I was rich, I wouldn’t allow anyone to make films of my books. But I’m not. Sorry about that.