Step Across This Line (9 page)

From Suetonius, I learned much about the paradoxical nature of power elites, and so was able to construct an elite of my own in the version of Pakistan that is the setting for
Shame
: an elite riven by hatreds and fights to the death but joined by bonds of blood and marriage and, crucially, in control of all the power in the land. For the masses, deprived of all power, the brutal wars inside the elite change little or nothing. The Palace still rules, and the people still groan under its heel.

If Suetonius influenced
Shame,
then
The Satanic Verses,
a novel whose central theme is that of metamorphosis, evidently learned much from Ovid; and for
The Ground Beneath Her Feet,
which is informed by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Virgil’s
Georgics
were essential reading. And, if I may make one more tentative step toward the unwritten future, I have for a long time been engaged and fascinated by the Florence of the High Renaissance in general, and by the character of Niccolò Machiavelli in particular.

The demonization of Machiavelli strikes me as one of the most successful acts of slander in European history. In the English literature of the Elizabethan golden age, there are around four hundred Machiavellian references, none of them favorable. At that time no work of Machiavelli’s was available in the English language; the playwrights of England were basing their satanic portraits on a translated French text, the
Anti-Machiavel.
The sinister, amoral persona created for Machiavelli then still cloaks his reputation. As a fellow writer who has also learned a thing or two about demonization, I feel it may soon be time to re-evaluate the maligned Florentine.

I have sought to portray a little of the cultural cross-pollination without which literature becomes parochial and marginal. Before concluding, I must pay tribute to the genius of Federico Fellini, from whose films, as a young man, I learned how one might transmute the highly charged material of childhood and private life into the stuff of showmanship and myth; and to those other Italian masters, Pasolini, Visconti, Antonioni, De Sica, and so on, and so on—for of influence and creative stimulation there can really be no end.

March 1999

Adapting
Midnight’s Children

This is the story of a production that never was. In 1998 I wrote the scripts for a five-episode, 290-minute television adaptation of my novel
Midnight’s Children,
a project on which two writers, three directors, at least four producers, and a whole passionately dedicated production team worked for over four years, and which foundered for political reasons when everything was in place and the beginning of principal photography was only a few weeks away.

Midnight’s Children
was first published in 1981, and after it won the Booker Prize that autumn there was some talk of making it into a movie. The director Jon Amiel, who was pretty “hot” at the time because of his television success with Dennis Potter’s
The Singing Detective,
was interested, but the project never got off the ground. I was also approached by Rani Dube, one of the producers of Richard Attenborough’s multi-Oscared
Gandhi.
She professed herself very keen indeed to make a film of my book, but went on to say that she felt the novel’s crucial later chapters—dealing with the excesses of Indira Gandhi’s autocratic rule during the so-called Emergency of the mid-seventies—were really unnecessary and could easily be omitted from any film. Unsurprisingly, this approach, of which Mrs. G. would no doubt have heartily approved, failed to find favor with the book’s author. Ms. Dube retreated, and after that things went quiet on the movie front. I put all thoughts of a film or television adaptation out of my mind. To tell the truth, I wasn’t too bothered. Books and movies are different languages, and attempts at translation often fail. The wonderful reception that had been accorded to the novel itself was more than enough for me.

Twelve years passed. Then in 1993
Midnight’s Children
was named the Booker of Bookers, in the judges’ opinion the best book to have won the prize in its first quarter century. This great compliment attracted the attention of not one but two television channels, and within weeks I was in the fortunate position of being wooed by both Channel Four and the BBC. It was a close thing, but in the end I chose to go with the BBC, because, unlike Channel Four, it was able to fund and produce the serial itself; and because of the reassuring presence of my friend Alan Yentob at the corporation’s creative helm. I trusted Alan to steer the project safely through whatever troubles might lie ahead.

Not long afterward, Channel Four signed up Vikram Seth’s
A Suitable Boy,
and then there were two “India projects” on the go. I was heartened to think that British television was willing to invest so much time, passion, and money in bringing to the screen these two very different contemporary novels from far away. We might offer a welcome change, or so I hoped, from the many costume-drama adaptations of the English literary canon that came out every year.

From the outset I made it clear to Alan Yentob and the original producer, Kevin Loader, that I would prefer not to write the adaptation myself. I had already spent years of my life writing
Midnight’s Children,
and the idea of doing it all over again was both daunting and unappealing. It would feel, to borrow Arundhati Roy’s memorable condemnation of the act of rewriting, “like breathing the same breath twice.” Besides, I had no experience of writing large-scale television drama. What we needed, or so I argued, was a television professional who would be sympathetic to my book but able to reshape it to fit the very different medium it was now preparing to enter. We needed, in short, an expert translator.

We first approached the highly regarded Andrew Davies, who re-read
Midnight’s Children,
thought about it for a while, but eventually turned us down, saying that while he was an admirer of the novel he didn’t have enough of a feel for India to be confident of success. Then Kevin Loader proposed Ken Taylor, the adapter of Granada TV’s
The Jewel in the Crown.
I readily agreed to the suggestion. I was not an admirer of Paul Scott’s so-called Raj Quartet but had thought the TV adaptation, with its high production values, brilliant acting, and finely crafted scripts, to be a marked improvement on the original. And, of course, as a result of his work on
Jewel,
Ken knew a good deal about India.

At our first meeting, Ken, while evidently attracted to the project, expressed worries about the nature of the text to be adapted. Television drama has long been dominated by naturalism, and Ken’s own inclinations and dramatic instincts were strongly naturalistic. How, then, was he to approach a novel with such a high content of surreal and fabulistic material? What was he to make of hypersensitive noses and lethal knees, optimism diseases and decaying ghosts, humming men and levitating soothsayers, telepaths and witches and one thousand and one magic children, indeed of the novel’s central conceit, that Saleem Sinai, a boy born at the instant of Indian independence, had been somehow “handcuffed to history” by the coincidence and that as a result the entire history of modern India might somehow be his fault?

I told him that, however highly fabulated parts of the novel were, the whole was deeply rooted in the real life of the characters and the nation. Many of the apparently “magical” moments had naturalistic explanations. The soothsayer who seems to be levitating is in fact sitting cross-legged on a low shelf. Even Saleem’s “telepathic” discovery of the other “magic children” can be understood as an extreme instance of the imaginary friends invented by lonely children. Saleem’s idea that he is responsible for history is true for him, I said, but it may or may not be true for us. And all around Saleem is the stuff of real Indian history. On the novel’s first publication, Western critics tended to focus on its more fantastic elements, while Indian reviewers treated it like a history book. “I could have written your book,” a reader flatteringly told me in Bombay. “I know all that stuff.”

Somewhat reassured, Ken agreed to undertake the task. It’s easy to be wise after the event, but I now think it was quite wrong of me to “sell” Ken this naturalistic version of my book. I suppose I thought it would allow him to pull the dramatic structure of the serial into shape, and if the scripts needed an injection of “unnaturalism,” that could be added later. Things turned out to be more complicated.

Who would direct the scripts? Much too early to think about that, I was told; script first, director later. And would there be difficulties in gaining approval to film from the Indian government? I hoped not; after all, the novel itself had always been freely available throughout India, so what logical reason could there be for objecting to a film of it? In those early days, it was easy to shelve such matters until later.

Ken went punctiliously to work on a seven-episode screenplay, and I went back to my own writing. In these years I was finishing
The Moor’s Last Sigh,
beginning
The Ground Beneath Her Feet,
and co-editing
Mirrorwork,
an anthology of Indian writing, so most of my attention was elsewhere. There followed a long phase in which Ken beavered away, Kevin Loader left the BBC, producers came and went, an Indian production company was signed up, one of its major tasks being to secure government approval; and concerns grew about how much the project was going to cost. Meanwhile, over at Channel Four,
A Suitable Boy
bit the dust. It’s an ill wind and so on, and there was a small ignoble feeling of relief at our end—we would no longer be competing for the same actors, the same sources of co-financing, the same audience—but we were also saddened, and chastened. The Vikram Seth cancellation was a bad omen for us, too.

I was abroad when a director was finally signed up: Richard Spence, a young filmmaker with a reputation for visual flair. At much the same time, it was decided that seven episodes were too many; could we compress the story into five? In the end we agreed to a feature-length opener followed by four fifty-minute episodes. Two hundred ninety minutes instead of 350: a whole hour less.

When I got back to England I met Richard and was impressed by his ideas. We talked for hours, and I began to feel that we had the makings of something exciting. Richard’s imagination would build on the solid foundations of Ken’s work.

It soon became apparent, however, that the working relationship between Ken and Richard was deteriorating. When I heard that Richard was asking Ken to make further drastic cuts in the story line—in particular to the hero’s childhood years—I began to worry.
Midnight’s Children
without children? The original impulse for the novel had been to write a story out of my memories of growing up in Bombay; were we really going to make a TV version which cut all that out?

There was a crunch meeting in Alan Yentob’s office at the BBC. For a moment it seemed as if the whole project might founder there and then. I tried to mediate between Ken and Richard. Ken was right that the childhood sequence was essential, and was in his serious way acting as the faithful guardian of my book. But Richard was right that Ken’s draft scripts needed revision, to inject exactly that quality of imagination and magic which I’d hoped the involvement of a director would add. By the end of the meeting it seemed we might have hammered out a way forward.

But within days it became plain that Ken and Richard couldn’t work together. One of them would have to go. In Hollywood the decision would have been simple and ruthless; whoever heard of a director being fired because the writer couldn’t work with him? But this was England, and Ken had been working on the project for a long time. The BBC backed him. Richard was disappointed but graceful, and took his leave.

By now, I had begun to worry about the scripts, too. We had lost our director, the money people at the BBC were not “green-lighting” the production, and I heard that the scripts we had were not attracting other directors or inspiring confidence in the BBC’s corridors of power. I myself was now sure that the scripts did need a lot of work, I had all sorts of ideas about how they might be revised, and Ken and I had long telephone conversations about what might be done. But the changes made were minimal. We were going nowhere fast.

It was around this time that Alan Yentob asked me if I’d consider taking over as scriptwriter. I had begun to think this might be the only way forward, but my fondness for Ken and respect for his efforts stopped me from agreeing. Also, I would have to set aside work on my new book, and I wasn’t at all keen to do that.

Meanwhile, Gavin Millar had expressed an interest in directing, but had radical ideas about script revisions. In a document entitled “A Modest Proposal” he offered up a series of provocative thoughts, the most extreme being his idea that we should change the narrative sequence of the story. Instead of beginning, as the novel does, with the story of the narrator’s grandparents and then parents, Gavin suggested that we should plunge into Saleem’s own story, and then tell the other tales in a series of flashbacks that went further and further back in time.

Gavin’s note provoked in me a sort of “lightbulb moment.” I suddenly saw with great clarity how to write the scripts. I saw how to make his “Modest Proposal” work and, beyond that, how to change the architecture of the screenplay into something much freer, more surrealist. (Later, I would decide to abandon Gavin’s time-scrambling ideas and go back to the novel’s original, simpler time line. I’m sure it was right to do so, but I’m also sure that Gavin’s iconoclastic intervention had freed my imagination, and without it I might never have worked out how to proceed.)

I think that Gavin’s note caused an equal and opposite reaction in Ken. It made him feel enough was enough; it made him dig in his heels, and stand by his drafts as if they were shooting scripts. At this point I understood that if anything was ever going to happen, I would have to take over, and after the passage of so much time and effort I wasn’t prepared to let the project founder. So I agreed to do it. The moment I started work I saw that little or nothing of the existing screenplays could survive. The entire manner of the scripts would be different now, the episodes would start and finish in different places, the selection of material from the novel and the internal arc of each episode would be different. All the two versions had in common was the dialogue taken directly from the book.

I asked the production team to make it plain to Ken that what had started as a rewrite had become an entirely new piece of work. There was no nice way of saying this, but it needed to be said. Unfortunately, the executives concerned delayed telling Ken, which meant that the human mess was eventually much worse than it need have been. Ken was hurt and angry, I was upset, our friendship was damaged, there were accusations and counter-accusations. In the end, Ken withdrew, like the dignified man he is. I only wish it had all been handled better.

For a while I worked with Gavin, but in the end, he backed out, too, on the grounds that he didn’t have the “feel” for India that the films required. I had been writing feverishly, convinced that the scripts could be made to work, and Gavin’s withdrawal, coming after everything else, felt like a sledgehammer blow.

All this coming and going had delayed us by over a year, but the delay did give us one lucky break. Tristram Powell, who had earlier been unavailable to direct, was now available. In 1981, when
Midnight’s Children
was first published, it had been Tristram who made the Arena documentary about it. He professed himself keen to make the films, but only on the basis of my new approach. I began a mad writing burst. In five weeks in November and December 1996, I finished a draft of the entire five-episode screenplay. I gave myself Christmas Day off, but otherwise was hardly ever away from my desk. As I have already mentioned, I had a great time. I was much less respectful of the original text than Ken had been. His fidelity to the novel, his sense of himself as my representative, had constrained him. Perhaps nobody would have felt free to make the kinds of changes I made so guiltlessly. Out went long sequences—the sojourn in the valley of Kif, the war in the Rann of Kutch. Out went some of the novel’s more fanciful notions (a politician who literally hummed with energy) and peripheral characters (the snake-poison expert who lives upstairs from the Sinai family). In came new devices, such as the idea of allowing the peep-show man, Lifafa Das, to introduce each episode as if it were a part of his peep show, and occasional “unnaturalist” moments at which the narrator, Saleem, remembering his past life, is able to step into the bygone moments and watch the action unfold.