Lay on thy whips

I found out that my review (written in 2008) for "Gaudy Night", the BBC adaptation of the book of the same novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, has been linked and featured on the Edward Petherbridge website! Granted, they cut out the mean parts I wrote about how terrible the series itself was, but I feel, irrationally, somewhat closer to one of my idols. Edward Petherbridge played Lord Peter Wimsey to Harriet Walter's Harriet Vane, and I believe that he is the best Lord Peter that there ever was. Since I don't want to link to my livejournal here, I thought I'd just repost the entire review (edited and cut a bit for length).

A post, finally, about one of the most realistic romances I’ve ever come across. I’ve just finished watching the BBC’s Lord Peter-Harriet vane series. I suppose, in the light of what a crashing disappointment the “Gaudy Night” series was, that it’s unfortunate that I’ve just finished rereading the book on which it was based. I’ve been going on a series of long trips lately and Dorothy L. Sayers is a good companion for long bus rides. Prior to Gaudy Night I’ve also just reread Strong Poison, Busman’s Honeymoon and Have His Carcase, and before these I finally finished that thumping good book, Murder Must Advertise.

My dad came home from Hong Kong some days ago and he brought with him a set of DVDs that I’d requested but didn’t expect to have for quite some time—the three miniseries that feature Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter as Lord Peter and Harriet Vane, respectively.

I suppose I should say that I never do expect much from adaptations of, well, anything. Hence my gratified amazement at having all of my expectations for the 1980s Brideshead Revisited adaptations so wonderfully surpassed. So I was also surprised to find that Have His Carcase was so pleasing, in terms of how faithful it was to the original. Some well-written exchanges were skipped or trimmed, and Harriet seems to be altogether too happy to be with Lord Peter rather than simultaneously friendly but irritable and cautious (lest he get too close), but overall I like the camaraderie between Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter, and Richard Morant as Bunter, while unexpected, really very definitely has his own charm. (He’s unfairly and most cruelly handsome.) (It was also a small treat to have Brideshead’s Boy Mulcaster as the singularly disgusting Henry Weldon.)

And I take back everything I ever said about Edward Petherbridge. He is so very attractive, and than thin, sensitive mouth—that forehead—those shoulders are all Lord Peter’s. I suppose it’s irrational that in my mind, Lord Peter is very much younger—he is supposed to be in his forties or thereabouts at the time of the Wimsey-Vane arc—and Edward Petherbridge brings to the character a mix of playfulness and self-deprecating dignity, with just a dash of snobbishness and a whole lot of humor, with just the right age, that I find myself reevaluating the picture of Peter I’ve made in my mind.

I have nothing to say about Gaudy Night except that it was a horrible disappointment. Am I to blame Philip Broadley and wish that Rosemary Ann Sisson had instead undertaken the dramatization? Gaudy Night was a waste of 150 minutes, or would have been at least, were it not for the scene (not found in the book) of Lord Peter and Harriet dancing, and he smiling. There is something so unexpectedly attractive about Lord Peter when he smiles. He does look as though he is in love with her, and where in Have His Carcase he was admiring and attentive, in Gaudy Night there was a longing, a wistfulness in how he held Harriet and looked at her that was probably the only thing that was faithful to the book. Gaudy Night might not be much of a detective novel but every dialogue, every quotation and every exchange was so well thought out and so laboriously written that Philip Broadley and company might have done so much better than to cut out the important parts and replace it with ones that were not only inconsistent with the rest of the book, but that were very unnecessary as well. What was the point of inserting Miss Cattermole and Miss Flaxman if they weren’t going to bring anything to the plot? And why cut out Saint-George? (Couldn’t they find anyone attractive enough?)

I shouldn’t have expected so much, but I am bitterly disappointed, “Have His Carcase” notwithstanding. There is so much about Gaudy Night that makes it a very complicated book, with the tension between Harriet and Peter at its “verberant core.” Her fears about giving in, and her fear of being dependent on another person for her happiness; Peter bitter and at the same time more accepting, more mature. That moment on the river when Harriet realizes, or accepts, that it has finally happened, that she does love him now. That sonnet, and how Peter had written and meant

Lay on thy whips, O Love, that we upright,

Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed

May sleep, as tension at the verberant core

Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,

Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,

And, dying, so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.

I don’t mind that certain very good books don’t get made into TV or film adaptations. After all, books were written to be enjoyed as books, and if the adaptation turns out to be good or approaching better, then it’s merely incidental. But I would have liked it so much better if Gaudy Night had never been made. It was—to use an all-too-appropriate term—sacrilege.