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A review by aethelgifu
Emma by Alexander McCall Smith
1.0
Oh dear. Even though I think the concept is dreadful [Why rewrite one of the most perfect prose stylists in English? Why?] I keep trying with 'The Austen Project'. So far we've had Joanna Trollope's 'Sense and Sensibility' [I couldn't get beyond the first 50 pages], Val McDermid's 'Northanger Abbey' [which I really did like - it was a jolly romp :-) ] and now Alexander McCall Smith's much vaunted take on 'Emma'.
The first 90 pages [out of 360] are the backstory which Austen didn't give her readers, and if he'd left it at that it would have been okay, though his attempts to explain why a 21st C family needs a governess are clunky.
It's when McCall Smith bangs head on into Austen that it all goes wrong and none of the characters, as he writes them, or the plots convince
And then there's the poor vicar - I actually felt sorry for him. McCall smith keeps the 'Elton / Harriet Smith' plotline but the denouement - Emma spikes his gin, he drives drunk after her rebuttal, prangs the car, ends up in court on a drunk driving charge - is just horrible, and there seem to be no consequences for Emma at all. She doesn't even feel that guilty.
In Austen there are social and cultural reasons for Emma's pre-eminence in society, which clearly no longer apply, yet because that is the main engine of the book McCall Smith is left with a very self-centred, shallow, girl who is pretty unlikeable, to whom people appear to defer, for no apparent reason. In Austen there is a sense of her growth as a character but this is missing in McCall Smith and the 'love' interest with Knightley is jammed in at the end, almost as an after-thought, and, again, fails to convince.
Isabel Dalhousie just about works as a character in her own series of novels, but transplanting her to Norfolk and calling her Miss Taylor grates, though it does allow McCall Smith to write about his favourite city in that slightly twee way he has.
To sum up, and to quote Jane Austen: 'Badly done' :-(
The first 90 pages [out of 360] are the backstory which Austen didn't give her readers, and if he'd left it at that it would have been okay, though his attempts to explain why a 21st C family needs a governess are clunky.
It's when McCall Smith bangs head on into Austen that it all goes wrong and none of the characters, as he writes them, or the plots convince
Spoiler
e.g. the Frank Churchill / Jane Fairfax subplot - which works in Austen because of the particular mores of the time, but in McCall Smith leaves the reader yelling 'Do they not have Facebook in Norfolk??' as 30seconds on the net would have blown Frank's 'I'm gay' 'cover' story. And the least said about Emma's lesbianism, the better.And then there's the poor vicar - I actually felt sorry for him. McCall smith keeps the 'Elton / Harriet Smith' plotline but the denouement - Emma spikes his gin, he drives drunk after her rebuttal, prangs the car, ends up in court on a drunk driving charge - is just horrible, and there seem to be no consequences for Emma at all. She doesn't even feel that guilty.
In Austen there are social and cultural reasons for Emma's pre-eminence in society, which clearly no longer apply, yet because that is the main engine of the book McCall Smith is left with a very self-centred, shallow, girl who is pretty unlikeable, to whom people appear to defer, for no apparent reason. In Austen there is a sense of her growth as a character but this is missing in McCall Smith and the 'love' interest with Knightley is jammed in at the end, almost as an after-thought, and, again, fails to convince.
Isabel Dalhousie just about works as a character in her own series of novels, but transplanting her to Norfolk and calling her Miss Taylor grates, though it does allow McCall Smith to write about his favourite city in that slightly twee way he has.
To sum up, and to quote Jane Austen: 'Badly done' :-(