As Bridget Jones herself might say to any doubters – with tongue only slightly in cheek – “shut up please. I am very busy and important”.
Last week, the latest film in the much-loved series chronicling the hilarious mishaps, mayhem and, well, men in Bridget's life helped Working Title, the production company behind the series, tip its total earnings from the UK box office since it was founded in 1983 over the US$1 billion (Dh3.67bn) mark. Which suggests that it might have been an oversight the size of Bridget's famously large pants to take 12 years to come up with the third instalment, Bridget Jones's Baby.
There had been a third book to adapt for a while. It's called Mad About the Boy, and Helen Fielding wrote it three years ago. The problem is, Bridget's husband Mark Darcy is dead and she's struggling to cope as a 50-something widow with two children. Depressingly, you can see why studios might have thought it wasn't exactly the film to strike comedy gold at the box-office.
So the publication of Bridget Jones: The Baby Diaries this week says a lot about how the much-loved character has moved from being an enjoyably acerbic literary character to a film franchise. Fielding co-wrote the screenplay first, and novelised the tale of a 43-year-old Bridget finding out she is pregnant and unsure of the father, later.
Still, it’s a “sort-of” new book in a series that has sold millions of copies around the world, so its publication on October, 11 will still be an event, so much so that publisher Jonathan Cape refused to release advance copies. But it also suggests the big-screen Bridget Jones, played by Renée Zellweger, has become more important to its author than the original print Bridget, who first appeared in a newspaper column 21 years ago.
It is understandable. Maintaining a fidelity to the original character and their narrative arc in a book series that has become an iconic movie or must-watch television show is a tricky balancing act. J K Rowling just about managed it in the Harry Potter series – the final three books were published after the films began – and even she revealed at the James Joyce Awards in Dublin that “the only actor or actress who has ever, ever intruded while writing was Evanna Lynch, who is absolutely perfect as Luna [Lovegood]. And I must admit I have heard her voice in my head when I wrote the book”.
It is not just authors who struggle to banish celluloid from their minds. Daniel Radcliffe and Harry Potter – or Hogwarts and the castle at Alnwick where the film was shot – are now so intertwined, some of the great joy of reading to formulate images in the imagination is inevitably lost.
Meanwhile, the Game of Thrones TV series is in the strange position of possibly "plot spoiling" events in George R R Martin's as-yet-unfinished novels in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. As executive producer David Benioff admitted at an Oxford Union talk last year, because the show is rapidly moving forward while the books are still being written, they have to talk to Martin about "where things are heading".
Martin told Northwestern University students that this state of affairs “doesn’t influence what I write, other than adding to my stress” – but it would be a strong author indeed who did not see Kit Harington’s Jon Snow in his head while writing the character.
In fact, when The National spoke to crime writer Ann Cleeves this year at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, she admitted her irascible detective Vera Stanhope had mellowed in the books because of Brenda Blethyn's remarkable performance in the TV adaptation, Vera.
“You do have to divorce yourself from the series, but Brenda is so strong,” she said. “I wrote some backstory that’s not actually in the books – which was lovely to do – because Brenda wanted to create a history for her. So it’s natural that I sometimes hear Brenda’s voice when I’m writing dialogue.”
Vera Stanhope and Bridget Jones have certainly joined that exclusive club of literary characters who no longer need to be tethered to the books they originally appeared in to enthral and endure, alongside other favourites such as Ian Fleming's James Bond, and Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne. Because these franchises are so strong, it doesn't really matter that Skyfall wasn't based on a book by Fleming or that this year's Jason Bourne bears little resemblance to Ludlum's books – and given those authors are long dead, any fidelity to their creations feels less of an issue.
But this is why Bridget Jones: The Baby Diaries does feel slightly odd – it is the rewound adventures of a character now so embedded in our consciousness as a slapstick movie character, we may never see the depths of her personality in a "proper" novel again. This is a great shame: for all the criticisms the book endured, there was something rather daring in Mad About the Boy, challenging stereotypes of "women of a certain age". You rather suspect Helen Fielding won't go there again – not if there's another box-office hit to write, anyway.
artslife@thenational.ae
