IT'S a feeling we've all experienced; you go to the cinema to see an adaptation of one of your favourite books, and you come out at the end wondering how they got it all so dreadfully, embarrassingly wrong. The best defence against such disappointments is to try (if you can) to forget the book before seeing the movie. Comparisons between the two may be pointless, but sometimes they're unavoidable, for example when the writer of the original work is intimately involved in the adaptation, and when he has transformed the original story beyond recognition.
When Nick Hornby's autobiographical book, Fever Pitch, was published in 1992, it tapped into a huge market of readers who loved its wry humour and immediately recognised the world it depicted. The account of a life lived in thrall to that most miserable of football teams, Arsenal, contributed to the rehabilitation of English football after the horrors of Heysel and Hillsborough. In tracing the sentimental education of a hapless Arsenal fan from the Home Counties through his teens and 20s, Fever Pitch also marked the emergence of a new form of popular literature, the male confessional, which has been widely copied since and become a staple of feature journalism in the broadsheet supplements.
Beautifully written and very, very funny, it articulated the experiences of young men growing up in the suburbs in the 1970s and 1980s in a way that hadn't been seen before. The former English teacher went on to write High Fidelity, an equally hilarious novel about the owner of an unsuccessful record shop whose obsession with pop music makes it impossible for him to lead a normal adult life. With these two books, he became the laureate of 1990s British middle-class masculinity, poking into the dirty little secrets of the modern male psyche and revealing the arrested adolescent that lay within.
Like Irvine Welsh, Hornby's books are read by people who don't read books. With the success of Trainspotting, and the whole New Lad-Britpop-Swinging London phenomenon, it was inevitable that Fever Pitch would be made into a movie, and the result opens here next Friday. Talking to him in Dublin last week, though, he was very quick to distance himself from New Laddism, and indeed his soft-hearted, muddled characters are a million miles away from the drink and drug-fuelled stereotypes.
When it came to adapting Fever Pitch for the screen, the author was involved in all the details, "from writing the script to choosing the songs for the soundtrack". It's a shock, therefore, to find that his witty autobiographical exploration of male football obsession has been transformed into a rather average romantic comedy, starring Pride And Prejudice's heart-throb Colin Firth as a thirtysomething English teacher whose love for Arsenal prevents him from "committing" to his romantic relationship with fellow-teacher Ruth Gemmell.
The original storyline, spanning two decades of the author's life, is jettisoned in favour of a simplified, fictionalised plot, set over the course of the 1988/89 season (when Arsenal won the League championship for the first time in 18 years). It almost seems fraudulent to give the film the same name as the book.
"It's not recognisable in terms of incident," agrees Hornby. "But, for me, most of the conversations that happen in the film have a direct equivalent in the book, albeit in a different form. I wouldn't say there's anything in the film that's not in the book. There is a lot in the book that's not in the film, though." In some ways the movie is much closer to High Fidelity than it is to Fever Pitch, he agrees. "I think maybe it's half-way between the two. I did write the screenplay and High Fidelity roughly at the same time."
It's easy to see how film-makers might see Hornby's work as the perfect raw material for romantic comedy. There's a shared implication in both High Fidelity and Fever Pitch that the immature, confused, obsessive protagonists of both stories will only find redemption through the love of a good woman, although the writer feels that: "the whole end of the film is about Sarah's redemption rather than Paul's, because she has never understood the whole thing, and Mickey Thomas's goal [when Arsenal clinch the championship against Liverpool in the last minute of the last match of the season] is in a sense about her getting it. So, I wouldn't say it's her redeeming him in that sense.
But the recurring theme of the two books is of men struggling to become truly grown-up, isn't it? "Yeah, and I'd say that that's still there in the film. It's certainly about reaching a point in one's life where you turn around and have a look at what's going on. I suppose, in those terms, marriage, and fatherhood were a watershed for me, anyway.
Just because a book is popular or successful doesn't mean that it automatically has cinematic potential. I suggest that there are certain things that fictional feature films can do well, and others that they just can't convey. The original book was apparently unfilmable, with its internalised narrative, huge crowd scenes and 25-year span, and it has taken some drastic surgery to wrench it off the page and onto the screen. Perhaps it might have been better just to leave Fever Pitch as a book?
Hornby disagrees. "No, that suggests that the movie was just the next station along the line, and it didn't feel like that. I wanted to do something in dramatic form that contained something of the observations and the spirit of the book. It was more about taking what the book felt like to me and then building something different around it.
"Anyway, I always got the impression that people weren't responding to the football matches in the book at all. They were responding to what happened between the Saturdays, and that was what people liked about the book."
On of the unsuccessful elements of the film is its depiction of the reaction to the Hillsborough tragedy, where Hornby and the director, David Evans, find an intelligent, respectful and moving way to combine their drama with the harsh reality of what actually happened. "Of course, it was difficult to write, but I think it works in the film. The way that David structured all of that - the combination of exhilaration and fear that you got on the terraces. Neither of us wanted to make a film that didn't have Hillsborough in it - that would just be a complete lie. It had to be there."
The impression at the end of Fever Pitch (the book) is that Hornby has come to terms with the fact that football is only a game; that in many ways it represents a suburban fantasy of urban solidarity which hasn't existed for decades. In the book, he muses on the self-delusion that allowed middle-class kids like him from the satellite towns of south-east England to identify with inner-city teams like Arsenal. Football is depicted as having been for many years a nostalgic fantasy of street credibility. After five years of Sky Sports, all-seater stadia and prohibitively expensive season tickets, surely a move to a ring-road site would be the last nail in that particular coffin? "Absolutely. A lot of the media interest around football at the moment is in it as some sort of authentic working class experience. But to me that seems very much beside the point and behind the times. These days, it's a cross between an American sport and pantomime or Riverdance or something like that - a grand spectacular."
Unlike his fellow footie fan Roddy Doyle, Hornby has now moved away from adapting his own work for the screen, handing over High Fidelity for somebody else to develop (the story, apparently, has been relocated to America - the mind boggles). "I'd already decided I didn't want to adapt another book. You could spend all your time adapting your own stuff. I'd rather get on with something else," he says. An original screenplay has been completed, - and he's half-way through his next novel. "It's about the relationship between a man and a child who is not his own."
And does he think his beloved Gunners can win the Premiership this year? (we spoke before Liverpool won at Highbury last Monday). "I doubt it. I can't ever remember a team winning the League who haven't dominated for at least part of the season. I just don't think our squad is anywhere near strong enough." It's nice to see the cherished Arsenal pessimism is still as strong as ever.
