meteordust | The Night Manager (Reply)

After watching the excellent miniseries, I decided to read the classic novel it was based on, since it can be fascinating to see how the adaptation process went.

I read the 2016 Penguin edition, which has the dreaded movie photo cover, but also a new afterword by John le Carré. It was really interesting to hear about his experiences with prior adaptations of his books, but also his thoughts about this one in particular.

Spoilers for the end of the miniseries.

Then a few days ago I finally get to see the whole movie, three hours in the evening, three the next morning. And what I like best of all is how Susanne Bier goes on chewing at the bone of the drama long after other directors would have given up; and how, in this back and forth interaction between film and book, a two-way process occurs, as I begin to spot in her film things she herself may not be aware of, just as she has spotted things in my novel that I may not have been aware of.

Does she realise, for instance, that in her film Richard Roper goes down winning? He does to my eye, anyway. Even thrashing around in the back of the police van on his way - is it to the gallows, or to the Reichenbach Falls? - he comes over as a fellow who, for all the awful things he's done, has been hard done by in return.

Maybe that's because Hugh Laurie's Roper has been entertaining us for so long with his cool, his wit, his urbanity and his sheer wickedness that we don't want to let him go. Or maybe it's because we've taken to wondering by now whether Jonathan Pine isn't enjoying himself a bit too much in his role of avenging angel. Whether Pine's sins, put together, are not in their own way on a par with Roper's?

Has Susanne Bier really thought that one out, I ask myself? Or is this just a case of two superb British actors of a certain class subconsciously giving out an aura of insuperability, of a complicity that extends beyond the rational into the homoerotic? Put another way, are Pine and Roper mutually aware of their purposes from the very start? At moments it almost seems so: as if Roper actually enjoys being a partner in his own destruction, just for the pleasure of pairing with someone as intelligent and ruthless as himself; almost as if he's a little in love with his own executioner.

Did I really get all that into the novel? I'd like to think I did. But if I didn't, my thanks to the movie for doing it for me.

So it's not just me with the slash goggles, then.