Serenity
Let’s get this out in the open right from the start. I love all things Serenity. I love everything to do with it. I love the film, I love the T.V. series, I love the actors, and most of all, I love the script.
Well nearly all things.
Given just how much I undoubtedly love nearly all things Serenity, when I was given the opportunity to read the novelisation Serenity by Keith R.A. DeCandido, I naturally jumped at the chance.
Normally I’m not too taken with the idea of novelisations. As far as I’m concerned films and books are two very distinct and different things. While books can certainly be taken and turned into films, I’m not sure it’s necessarily a two-way process. While the effectiveness of certain film adaptations of books can certainly be called into doubt, the fact they can be turned into films at all is without question. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy is now the benchmark from which all film adaptations must now be judged. What still – in my mind at least – remains in question, is whether at all films can be turned into books. With its sharp, witty style, and its slick dialogue, if any film could make this “reverse transition” it would be Serenity.
Working as a sort of amalgamation of the film and the T.V. series, Serenity the novelisation, opens as does the T.V. series, with Sergeant Malcolm Reynolds and his squad of “Browncoats” fighting a losing battle in the valley that later gives his ship its name. We later join back up with Mal (now the Captain of a small transport ship) and his rather disparate crew of unique and colourful individuals as they come to take on board the fugitives Simon and River Tam. We soon learn that the Tams are on the run from the Alliance, and before long Mal and his crew find themselves embroiled in an escalating battle with the mysterious “operative” as he systematically works to hunt down and exterminate the Tams.
While fans of the film and T.V. series will no doubt be familiar with the workings of the plot, it’s fair to say that in buying this book they would perhaps expect a little more than an almost word-for-word repetition of the dialogue that takes place in the film. A little more background on the characters would certainly have been nice – as too would a little more in the way of fleshing out parts of the film that could have done with a little more expansion. As it is however, fans will be as disappointed as I was at the lack of content beyond that which the film gave us.
The very first thing that struck me when reading Serenity was just how clumsily it ties itself in with the original T.V. series. While I didn’t necessarily expect a major work encompassing the entire series and film in one single tome, the author’s attempt to skip over something like an eight-month period in a single page, to me seems a little weak. The page in question reads like a list and essentially says: “and this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then lo and behold we’ve managed to tie the T.V. series in with the film in a single page”. Is this acceptable? I certainly don’t think so.
And the rickety plot structuring isn’t even my main gripe with the book.
Actually, I have two.
The first, most obviously perhaps, is the disparity between the writing of the film’s creator Joss Whedon, and the writing of the book’s author, Keith R.A. DeCandido. While I accept they are obviously two very different individuals, as you read the book you can’t help but notice that all the dialogue is clearly taken directly from the film, while the words tying everything together are by a completely different person. This would be vaguely acceptable if the style of the text between the dialogue taken from the film was consistent, but unfortunately this is far from the case.
DeCandido’s writing can be described as formulaic at best. He seems very good at doing the basics of joining the dots between the dialogue elements. What he is not so good at, is adapting his style. The problem comes when he tries to adopt many of the different idiosyncrasies of the filmic text into his own words and in so doing somehow manages to neither place himself as a direct copy of Whedon’s original, or as a writer creating his own unique take on the workings of the film. The book Serenity is neither one thing nor the other. Somehow, even though he tries his best to mimic the style of Whedon, his attempt at replicating the strange mish-mash of comedy, western, sci-fi, and far future dystopia fails to make successful account of one of the film’s many different genre elements, let alone all of them, and thus the text seems to lose much of the heart that is to be found in the film and the simply astounding T.V. series Firefly.
This point links very closely then with my second major gripe with the book, the one I alluded to in the introduction to this review.
Book adaptations of films just don’t work.
Unless you actually wrote the film in the first place (which DeCandido did not), and unless you can work from the premise of being allowed to take your own unique take on the film (as films it seems, are free to do when working in reverse to this process), a book adaptation of a film is ALWAYS going to be flimsy, saggy, and lacking in the heart of the original.
A major problem DeCandido suffers from here is that in trying to represent the film “as it is” he must adopt many different perspectives depending on which character is most important in a particular scene. In so doing he fails completely in fleshing out any of the characters in the text, and can never seem to find the right style to adopt for each character. Because he is working from a standpoint of taking the film “as it is” and turning it directly into a book, he is constrained (as any other author in his position would be) to put together what is essentially a selection of “snap shots” as we see on the screen, and turn them into what the publishers would tell us is a “book”.
In DeCandido’s defence, he has done a very good job given the constraints I can only assume he must have been working to. The problem here is not so much DeCandido himself; more the fact the existence of the book in the first place is a complete folly.
Serenity should not exist, plain and simple. Book adaptations of films are completely pointless. There is nothing in this book that makes it worth reading. I mean it’s only readable in the first place given the fact I’ve seen the film numerous times in the first place. I do not doubt for one moment that if I had read Serenity from “cold”, and hadn’t seen the film or the T.V. series, I’d probably have even more problems with it now than I currently have. Only the knowledge of the film and the universe it stands in gives the book any context at all on which to stand. One cannot forgive the book its failings on account of the fact it’s supposed to go with a film. It is a book in its own right, and should be treated as such.
It seems I must conclude then with a sentiment I really hoped I wouldn’t find myself putting to print. Put simply, the book Serenity just should not exist. I encourage my readers then to go out and watch the film – watch the T.V. series even – but at all costs, whatever you do, I urge you to avoid this book.
