Night Manager

The sharpest review of the TV adaptation of The Night Manager has been supplied in The Guardian by  John Le Carre himself. He makes vividly clear what has been done to his 1993 novel, and how, and why, it has needed to be made palatable for an audience in 2016.

Having read the book for the first time only a couple of months ago, and without knowing that it was about to be screened, I wondered how on earth I had missed it 23 years ago.  Seeing the first episode of the TV version on Sunday, I thought at first that the book had been fine as it was, and saw no reason for the multiplicity of changes that had been inflicted upon it by the BBC. Was the updating really necessary and did the settings need to be so ruthlessly altered?

But a book is a book, and an adaptation has nothing to gain from being a meticulous copy. To film it creatively is almost bound to change it into something else.    So Zurich, where the hotel’s night manager originally operated in the book, inevitably becomes Cairo in the film. This, as it happens,  helps to tighten the action in a quite serviceable way and we do not reach Switzerland until later, when it appears, more scenically, in the form of Zermatt in the glare of the Matterhorn, and where the suave villain, described by Le Carre as “the worst man in the world,” arrives by private helicopter instead of by taxi - though with the same entourage of people as in the book.

Meanwhile the British secret agent, a man in the original, who wants to infiltrate the courageous night manager into the entourage and thereby capture the villain, is transformed not uninterestingly into a woman - and a visibly pregnant one at that. Behind all these changes the bones of the story are, so far, faintly discernible. But would I be aware of this without knowing about it beforehand? Perhaps but perhaps not.

Does it matter? It would certainly matter to me if I myself had written the book, one of Le Carre’s most gripping in a surprisingly James Bondish sort of way, with the action shifting around the world.

Yet Le Carre’s famous touchiness as a man and as an author does not seem to have been hugely disturbed by this. He accepts what has been done. Far from dismissing the alterations as gratuitous, he finds them largely understandable, and maybe he is right.

Far from being a grossly modernistic piece of tampering, the story - at least in its first episode - actually seems to be working. Though Le Carre was not consulted, the results have not offended him. Indeed, as far as I can tell, he sees things in the TV version that he never saw in the original.

Certainly my own initial irritation is already waning. I am looking forward to episode two, next Sunday, even although I know that it omits what in the book was some wonderful material. But the film, or so it seems, has its own merits. It is undoubtedly well acted and discerningly shot. Only the critics, it seems to me, have failed to recognise its qualities and have been too eager to find fault with it.

The Night Manager is a good book but, by the look of things, it is also a good film, with Tom Hiddleston -so memorable in Archipelago and Unrelated a few years ago  - as its very definite star. And the leisurely format, like  that of the Alec Guinness version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, will surely suit it.
23 February 2006