Literature’s joys on the big screen

In the autumn of 384, a young North African rhetorician and philosopher, who later would be known as Augustine of Hippo, arrived in Milan to take up the post of public orator.

Ambrose, the city’s Christian bishop, was renowned throughout the Roman world for his learning and eloquence, and the professionally interested Augustine went to the city’s basilica to hear him preach. Deeply moved by what he heard, the young man -- along with his own pupils -- paid a call on Ambrose. Tradition tells us that he received them in his library and that Augustine and his companions were stunned to find their host doing something they never had seen before -- reading silently.

Nearly all the manuscripts we now esteem as part of the West’s classical heritage were written in scripta continua, that is, without paragraphs, capitalization, punctuation or even spaces between the words.

They were meant to be declaimed and assumed a reader would be artful enough to provide the pauses, stops and emphasis that would make the text comprehensible. Punctuation spread later, as part of the church’s effort to fix the meaning of an orthodox scripture that could be transmitted to everyone.

Until that occurred and because the notions of authorial intention and intellectual property -- at least as we understand them -- were foreign to the ancients, it simply was assumed that these artful readers would reinterpret the text before them. Augustine and his friends, therefore, took Ambrose’s silence as evidence not only of his intellectual prowess, but also of a deep interiority.

All of this comes to mind because we seem to be passing through a kind of watershed moment in the history of entertaining literature’s translation onto the screen. It’s an energizing and engrossing inversion of that long-ago era in which literature was transformed from communal aural pleasure to silent private passion.

As such, it raises interesting questions about the nature of the reading we do for pleasure and of what is gained and what, if anything, is lost, when our personal joy is transmuted into public euphoria. Are those experiences complementary, contradictory or merely coincident?

This weekend has brought the release of director Peter Weir’s “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” which is drawn from two of the 20 celebrated adventure novels the late Patrick O’Brian constructed around the British naval captain Jack Aubrey and his great friend and ship’s surgeon, Stephen Maturin. Most critics have hailed Weir’s film as a masterful and enriching adaptation of novels regarded by many as the finest ever written about the great age of sail and those who fought aboard its wooden ships.

Next month will bring the third installment of Peter Jackson’s astonishing cinematic retelling of J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary fantasy, “The Lord of the Rings.” There is no need to rehearse the praise -- all of it deserved -- that these films already have received. Suffice to say that the fans of this trilogy are lucky indeed to love a story fortunate enough to pass through the hands of two masters.

Last year brought director Phillip Noyce’s grippingly autumnal adaptation of Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American,” which like all that author’s self-described “entertainments” retains its uncanny power to simultaneously unsettle and involve.

Whether five films and three directors make a trend is open to argument. But they’ll make a discussion, so here we go: It may be nothing more than coincidence, but all these adaptations were directed by filmmakers from down under -- two Australians, Weir and Noyce, and a New Zealander, Jackson. If there is such a thing as an antipodal sensibility, it is characterized by both irreverence and a lack of irony, an ability in other words to take the material at hand seriously on its own terms without lapsing into piety. In all these cases that sensibility has been key to the director’s successful translation of beloved literature into thoroughly satisfying films.

(It is, moreover, what’s lacking in the unfortunately unsatisfying cinematic adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, though as a writer, she’s out of her depth in this company.)

Novelist, screenwriter and critic John Gregory Dunne is one of the O’Brian series’ admirers and, along with his wife and collaborator, Joan Didion, saw Weir’s adaptation this week.

“I’ve never read the Potter or Tolkien books,” he said, “but I’ve read all 20 of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin stories and think they’re terrific. I found the movie very satisfying, even if it lacked some of the books’ subtlety.”

Strangely enough, one of the things that makes these entertaining literary works translate so well onto the screen is a massive dose of technology.

It’s the fashion nowadays to bemoan the way in which advancing film technologies have subsumed cinematic humanity. But something Jackson’s and Weir’s successful adaptations have in common is their utterly confident use of cutting-edge technologies to create completely convincing narrative worlds. In this, they are reading directly from Tolkien’s and O’Brian’s subtexts.

One of the things that makes a serious literary entertainment joyfully engaging is its ability to use the devices of literary technique to construct a credible and all-encompassing world.

Giving oneself over to it is one of the principal pleasures of this form of reading. The adroit use of computers, animation and digital technology now has made it possible to do the same for the film adaptations.

“Technology is one of the very large things that these films are about,” said Didion, “and it’s important because these directors have used it to do one of the important things the books do, which is to create a satisfying and stable imaginative world.”

Still, the common experience of the cinema always will be different from the private rewards of reading. Great material grants joy in both venues, but it is of a qualitatively different sort. Is it possible that the memorable images created by powerful films can subvert the experience of reading?

John le Carre, for example, once complained that after Alec Guinness’ definitive portrayal of George Smiley in a stunning series of adaptations for British television, it was impossible to write another novel about his master spy because he had irrevocably lost his character to the actor.

Will generations of readers to come now bring to O’Brian’s novels an indelible image of Russell Crowe as Lucky Jack Aubrey? Perhaps.

On the other hand, the contrast with the fixed nature of every film portrayal is one of the things that makes ongoing literature of this sort a source of richly satisfying surprise.

Dunne recalled, for example, that shortly after the publication of O’Brian’s 14th Aubrey-Maturin novel in the United States, he was invited to a small dinner party for the author. “Everyone there had read all the books,” Dunne said. “I asked O’Brian whether Aubrey ever was going to make admiral?

“ ‘I don’t know,’ he replied.

“On the penultimate page of the 20th novel, Jack gets his blue admiral’s flag.”