You won’t hear me say this too often: “Don’t read the book, see the movie.”

The movie wasn’t perfect, but was obviously making an effort to examine the characters and ended with an interesting ethical question. When I saw that it was based on a book, I couldn’t resist. I should have. Especially since it cost me 11 euros 40. Which is, for me, a fair bit of time in the salt mines.

It’s my own fault. A dreadful prejudice of mine: that no matter how good the film was, the book must be better.

I’ll admit right up front that I’m not a fan of mystery/thriller novels. That’s being polite. But in the spirit of “what the hell, you never know” I gave it a go. Unfortunately, I was deeply unimpressed. (Re-enforcing that prejudice.)

So why was I so deeply unimpressed?

The first thing that struck me were certain descriptions. They were so bad I kept thinking: “I must not be getting the joke”. The author wasn’t joking. He wasn’t going for a surrealist effect or parodying anything. Brace yourself, here’s a few examples picked semi-randomly:

[four men at a bar] “One of them, a busted heap of red veins and yellowing skin named Lenny, said,…”

How a human being could possibly manage to look like a “busted heap” of anything is utterly beyond my imagination. And I think I have a pretty good one. Now throw in the veins and the skin and what you have here is the aftermath of a really nasty industrial accident.

Here’s another one:

“…with a wide body that seemed as if the thick flesh had wrapped itself in layers over the bone as opposed to expanding organically as the body grew.”

Now the writer is obviously at pains to make a point here, but what that point might be… Frankly, I can’t picture a person whose flesh is “layered”. (Almost sounds like a cellulite treatment from the film Brazil.)

And it continues:

“Big Dave had a bushel of beard and mustache around his lips…”

A “bushel”? Why the word bushel? The whole thing just sounds weird. A line missing at this point in the narrative might be: “He’d just kissed a puddle of super glue and then applied his face to an unswept barbershop floor.” Why not? At least it would be a little clearer.

What is this about? Is it sheer, unbridled laziness? Lack of talent? Early prototype of a novel writing program? Am I missing something?

Anyhow, it just went on and on with descriptions like this. Plus a lot of clichéd dialogue, chummy/hard-assed characters and unbelievable scenes.

Life is short, see the movie.

Tags: adaptation, bad-writing, based-on-a-book, descriptions, film, movie

What can I say, three youngish people join the UN. Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti, Liberia. The chapters alternate between the first person accounts of the three authors. There is a lot of mutual congratulation. The doctor was the one I admired. Interestingly, though, all three quit after a number of years. The doctor understandably burnt out.

Now, I feel I’m treading on dangerous ground here as this is non-fiction. But I found two of the authors’ motives a little unsettling. Postlewait seemed to have joined because she was bored with her life and needed a good paying job. She spends a lot of time drinking, taking drugs, going to parties and sleeping with everyone. Sometimes her parts of the book seem like a diary of a sex tourist. Cain is a Harvard law graduate convinced that America will enlighten, liberate and generally save the world. For all that he went through, he seems to have come out of it only slightly shaken and still remarkably naive.

I’m going to stop there. I don’t regret reading it, because it certainly was a small window into a world I didn’t know much about — i.e.: a glimpse of how the UN functions on an everyday basis.

Related:

If you have Real Player, you can listen to an interview with the authors.

Here’s an interesting essay entitled “Dereliction express” by Roger Sandall on the problem of philanthropy and corruption in Africa.

I heartily recommend the movie Constant Gardener. (It’s based on the book by le Carré. Interestingly, I found the film better than the book — it’s almost always the other way around.) This is a work of fiction, but as the author said, what he found in research was a lot worse than the story he came up with.

And if you’re just overwhelmed by all the suffering in the world and are tired of feeling helpless, consider helping Doctors Without Borders. They have some pretty painless monthly automatic contribution plans starting at $7.50 a month. They’re “an independent international medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural or man-made disasters, or exclusion from health care in more than 70 countries.”

Tags: film