Just been watching the first of a series of BBC adaptations of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series. As you may be able to guess from the "Bookworm" sidebar on my blog, I'm a fan of the books... so I'm afraid I'm going to come up with a classic reaction to the TV adaptation. You see, one of the problems with a writer like Mankell is that his sense of place is acute, and it comes across in every detail of the books.
Wallander doesn't live in a detached house with posh furniture and wood-panelled walls; he lives in a town-centre apartment block, where he has to use the basement laundry on a rota with the other residents. The person who turns out to be the murderer lives on the fifth floor of a squalid block, not in an elegant detached country house. Wallander's police headquarters is functional and slightly depressing; it doesn't have abstract interior murals and montages of historic cameo photo portraits. Wallander's father doesn't live on the coast, and he's never described as doing anything as un-introspective as standing on the jetty gazing out to sea.
The Beeb deserves marks for making the series in Skåne, in southern Sweden, to be sure, but all the Swedes I've spoken to about Skåne describe it with a certain sense of alienation. The other Swedes, they say, regard Skåne's inhabitants with a certain suspicion... they don't quite belong; they live rather a long way south; their TV aerials don't point inwards towards Sweden, but outwards towards Denmark...
And that's the essence of the problem with the Wallander adaptation: it's had a Swedish make-over. This isn't Skåne as Mankell describes it, it's the Sweden of designer furniture, polished wooden floors and crisp, tasteful interiors. What Mankell depicts is a Sweden bewildered by changing social mores, cheap tastelessness and the impact of immigration and liberal social policy. The adaptation may yet make for good telly, but as so often happens, it is not going to match up to what the author has put into the minds of his readers.
The late Douglas Adams said that the reason he wrote for radio rather than film or TV was that on radio, the visual effects were better.
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