A match made in heaven: screenwriter Andrew Davies and A Suitable Boy

By Ginny Dougary. Sydney Morning Herald, October 16, 2020.

Andrew Davies is a literary conqueror – first Russia with his adaptation of War and Peace (praised, disconcertingly, by Vladimir Putin for capturing the Russian soul), then Les Miserables (sans tunes) mining the spirit of France via Victor Hugo, and now comes India, with the television screenwriter’s latest adaptation: Vikram Seth’s 1349-page magnum opus elegantly filleted to fit neatly into six one-hour episodes.

At the centre of this huge bestselling book’s beating heart is a simple story that admirers of Jane Austen would recognise: a pushy mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra (based on Seth’s grandmother) needs to get her daughter, Lata, into an arranged marriage and is met with resistance. There are three possible boys, Kabir (a fellow student, and a Muslim), Haresh (a shoe businessman, like Seth’s father) and Amit (a poet) – all very different – so which one is our heroine going to choose?

The period is the early 1950s, focusing on four families – over 18 months – in a newly post-partition India. The characters are embroiled in a time of monumental shifts: the first post-independence national election, continued Hindu-Muslim conflict, land reform and its impact on the old feudal landlords.

Davies first read the book not long after it came out in 1993 partly, he admits, because it had been suggested that he might be interested in adapting it: “I just loved the book but I didn’t see then that it would gain from being dramatised and I doubt that Vikram would even have agreed to it back then.”

In the intervening decades, and after Davies’ more recent work on the mammoth classics, War and Peace (1225 pages) and Les Miserables (a whopping 1900), Seth entrusted Davies with the task of adapting his novel. “It was all very nice,” Davies says down the phone from his home in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, “we had a four-and-a-half hour lunch at The Ivy and made firm friends. Part of the lunch was a bit like a Viva Voce [a gruelling aural exam once used to decide whether a student would ‘go up’ a degree at Oxford or Cambridge] – you know, he’d start a quote and I’d be expected to finish it.”

This sounds like the classic experience with Seth. The doggedness (it took eight years to complete A Suitable Boy) and bravura it takes to write such an epic novel is part of the writer’s legend, along with the stories of him interviewing ranks of international literary agents (some from the same agency at the same time), testing them on their knowledge of poetry, what novelists they liked, their philosophy on agenting and how they would go about selling his book before choosing the one who conformed to his tastes best, the late Giles Gordon. As Gordon wrote at the time: “Agents never get interviewed by authors. I mean, the chutzpah of the man!”

Seth has spoken fulsomely about Davies’ skills: “Andrew has a huge gift for bringing the essence of an expansive book into believable human vignettes. And yet not just vignettes but something organically connected.”

‘Andrew has a huge gift for bringing the essence of an expansive book into believable human vignettes.’ Author Vikram Seth

He says that the passing of time since the book’s publication has inured him somewhat to smarting at every change and necessary adaptation. “I would not compromise with the essence of the book but I was less bothered about the periphery,” he has said. “There were several occasions where I thought, ‘That’s brilliant, Andrew. It really works.’ It may not be what I wrote but it’s true to the spirit of the book, true to the spirit of the characters.”

I wonder whether Davies’ skill is like an act of ventriloquy or chameleon-like shape-shifting. He has his own identity as a writer, of course (along with certain trademarks) but he must also feel a pressure to be true to the voice of the original author? “Yes, absolutely. Well, it’s equally the characters but of course it’s the author who creates the characters.

“You kind of learn the core of each character’s idiolect, as it were, and eventually you’re confident enough to generate new sentences for that character. It’s one of my great pleasures to be able to write a line and people assume that it’s in the original novel and go hunting for it. But I’ve made it up for that particular scene.”

‘One of my great pleasures to be able to write a line and people assume that it’s in the original novel and go hunting for it.’ Screenwriter Andrew Davies

Perhaps the most famous example of this is Parliamentary Secretary Francis Urquhart’s line from Davies’ 1990 adaptation of Michael Dobbs’ political thriller House of Cards : “You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment.” It’s a line that has entered the political lexicon and it belongs to Davies. “Yes, I more or less ignored Michael Dobbs’ dialogue and did my own,” he says with a short laugh. “House of Cards had a great plot but that was about all. I didn’t find the characters or the dialogue convincing but that’s what I’m here for in a way, if that’s needed.

“That was a very different enterprise from, say, adapting Jane Austen who I absolutely adore and revere and A Suitable Boy was very easy in those terms. I didn’t have to work hard on the characters. There they were, and they were lovely. I didn’t have to work hard on the dialogue – it was so beautiful.”

The challenge was to give an accurate sense of what India was like in that period, what the important questions were then and why this first general election was so important. “Luckily I had a lot of help with these brilliant young producers who are all many decades younger than me but ferociously bright and funny and fun to work with who would look up various points.

“And I felt very secure knowing that we had Vikram on hand and if we were getting anything wrong, he would make sure we knew about it!”

Davies says that A Suitable Boy is the kind of book that makes you want to meet the author who created all these charming and funny characters: “You know, he’s almost bound to be charming and funny himself. And you meet him and he is. It’s been such a pleasure and a thrill making friends with this genius writer. Although you need to catch him when he’s feeling like it because he protects his privacy which is quite right because he’s at work all the time.”

When Seth was writing A Suitable Boy he would regularly work a 12-hour day. He told me when I interviewed him when the book came out that he goes slightly crazy if he spends more than 30 per cent of his time with other people. When he was doing that round of publicity, he was longing to get back to work. We are still waiting for the book he has been promising us for nine years, A Suitable Girl, the follow up to his bestseller. As he has said, “I’m not going to let Boy strangle Girl.”

The Indian writer is partial to word play and there is a delightful titbit of naughty playfulness in the second episode of the TV series when minxy Meenakshi Chatterjee (before setting off for her adulterous afternoon tryst) is getting her nails done and musing on the name of her polish comments: “This Smitten Kitten’s off to be bitten.”

So it that Davies or Seth (this could become a parlour game)? “I think it’s me,” Davies says. “Smitten Kitten is definitely me because one of my wife’s pleasures is to go to the beauty parlour along the road and get her toenails painted and they have wonderful names for the colours. One of the ones she brought home and showed me was Smitten Kitten so I thought, ‘I must get this into the script somehow.’

“But the rest of the line might have been Mira [Nair, the director] or the actress [Shahana Goswami] because people kept on picking up these little bits of rhyming word play and extending them and improving on them, so it was a very collaborative enterprise all round.”

Davies and I met back in 1992, shortly before A Suitable Boy was published. This was three years before his iconic – overused word but nothing else will do – Wet Shirt Moment, as Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy emerged, dripping and gorgeous, from the lake on his Pemberley Estate in Davies’ much-lauded adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

But even then the writer had a reputation for sexing up the classics. He had done the adaptation of Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and told me, something I’ve never forgotten, that wherever possible he inserts a bath scene. “Ah, yes,” he remembers. “I did and I must get back to doing that. Did I put one into A Suitable Boy? Not quite, no.

“I think there are probably some bath scenes in Rabbit [his next big series is his 12-part adaptation of John Updike’s masterpiece of American life, each book a decade and he is still hankering to adapt Alison Lurie’s novels]. I shall go back over it and make sure there are.”

If Putin admired his War and Peace, how would Davies feel if Trump becomes his number one fan after watching his Rabbit adaptation? A big laugh. “With Putin, I didn’t know whether to be thrilled or appalled really, but you know I just normally take any compliment and chalk it up with a kick.”

Let’s put it another way: who would you feel thrilled by becoming your fan in America? “Hmmm, Marilyn Monroe is dead but [if] it were her and she said, ‘Oh Mr Davies, I’d love to be in something of yours one day’, that would be thrilling.”

At 83, age has clearly not withered his brain, and since having various operations – back, and hips – he says that he is a new man physically. So his dancing days are not over (a prospect that made him sad)? “No, definitely not, and we will have a dance next time we meet – an Indian dance.”

A Suitable Boy will be screening on Netflix from October 23.