LOVERS of Dickens, beware: Hollywood has its beady eyes on your idol. Having exhausted Jane Austen (her only unfilmed novels are Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey),
Thomas Hardy (the movie of Jude the Obscure has already opened and The Woodlanders is on the way) and Henry James (Jane Campion's take on The Portrait of a Lady is already causing controversy), the studios have turned their attention to dear old Charles.
First up is a contemporary reworking of Great Expectations, with Ethan Hawke as Pip, Gwyneth Paltrow as Estella and Robert De Niro as Magwitch. "Everyone knows the David Lean version," a Fox executive declares, "but in this town you do not keep a good story in the vaults. You dig it out, dress it in modern clothes and enjoy the rewards for your daring originality. Anyway, it's a lot cheaper to lavish attention on Dickens than pay Joe Eszterhas $3 million for what might, turn out to be dross."
That's the spirit, and you'll be thrilled to know that Great Expectations will be followed by Oliver Jones, a revamping of Oliver Twist, in which New York takes the place of Victorian London and for which Quincy Jones is writing the score.
Pamela Anderson, she of Baywatch fame, has even expressed a desire to play in a Dickens adaptation. "No," says a friend, "she has not been reading the books, but I think she's got them on audio tape." Well, she's a busy girl and one shouldn't expect her to be straining her eyesight after a hard day at the beach.
AND if turning classic books into movies is good for Pamela, it's even better for publishers, given that audiences tend to buy the book of the movie they've just seen. And thus over the next few months, publishers will be dusting down the pages of their copyright-free classic novels, slapping a movie-related cover on them and sending them out to the shops to be snapped up by a whole new readership.
Minerva, for instance, will be giving Roddy Doyle's The Van a new lease of life (as if it needed it) to coincide with the upcoming release of the movie. And the same is true of Penguin, who next month are reissuing Ferdia MacAnna's The Last of the High Kings to tie in with the film version.
Those unfamiliar with Joseph Conrad's stern and often forbidding prose will be required to brace themselves for a daunting experience when two of his novels are re-released as movie tie-ins. Albert Finney and Claudia Cardinale are among the stars in a forthcoming BBC2 adaptation of Nostromo, while The Secret Agent is being given the big-screen treatment, with Christopher Hampton directing and Bob Hoskins and Gerard Depardieu among the cast. No doubt Penguin will be promoting the books as rattling good yarns, but, as I say, you have to get through the prose first.
Penguin are also reissuing Defoe's Moll Flanders to coincide with an Andrew Davies ITV serial starting in December, and in the same month the same publisher will be pushing Nabokov's Lolita to tie in with Adrian Lyne's movie version. Given the novel's subject and given the director's track record (Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal), the movie will undoubtedly be for less coy and a good deal more controversial than Stanley Kubrick's interesting but dim 1962 attempt. Or so, I'm sure, Penguin are hoping.
However, if it's tie-ins you're after, nothing comes near the X-Files phenomenon. In the next two months brace yourselves for The X-Files Book of the Unexplained, Volume 2 (Simon & Schuster), The New Unofficial X-Files Companion (Macmillan), Trust No-One. The Official Guide to the X-Files: Volume 2 (HarperCollins), The Truth Is Out There (also HarperCollins), The A-Z of the X-Files in Association with 20th Century Fox (Boxtree), The X-Files Confidential (Little, Brown) and Anderson and Duchovny. An Extraordinary Story (Hamlyn).
It would be a hoot if by next week the whole world had got weary of The X-Files. I know I am.
IN the United Arts Club, Upper Fitzwilliam Street, on Thursday night, Ulick O'Connor, Marita Conlon-McKenna, Ferdia MacAnna and Christine Dwyer Hickey comprised a panel discussing reading and writing.
Nothing very significant or exciting about that, you might think, but the occasion was historic: the discussion was to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Irish PEN, of which Lady Gregory was the first president in 1921.
The whole idea for PEN came from the long-forgotten writer A. Dawson Scott (you won't find her in any current literary reference book), who, earlier that year, invited leading literary figures to a dinner in London and proposed the notion. John Galsworthy was the first president and H.G. Wells succeeded him.
Ambitious for her idea, she contacted writers around the world and asked them to set up PEN organisations in their own countries: Maxim Gorky did so in Russia, Anatole France in France, Edith Wharton in America and Lady Gregory in Ireland.
Down through the years, most Irish writers of note have been associated with PEN, and its list of presidents here have included Mary Lavin, Maurice Walsh, Bryan MacMahon, John B. Keane and Sean O'Faolain.
Active internationally in fighting censorship and repression (a full-time task, one would imagine, in the Ireland of the Forties and Fifties), it did its darndest to reverse the fatwa imposed on Salman Rushdie, and it also runs a Writers in Prison section.
All very noble and arduous work, and the only wonder is that its members find any time to do any writing themselves.