Daniel Deronda, George Eliot's final novel, published in 1876, has always been thought unfilmable. Its predecessors, Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede, have made it-several times, in some cases-onto the small screen, but Deronda resisted. Periodically someone had another go at writing a script, but it never came to much. Daniel Deronda remained too complex, too sprawling and, above all, too boring to be tucked into a snappy narrative that would keep Sunday evening audiences tuning in.
Half of the book, the part that concerns the passage of beautiful, wilful Gwendolen Harleth-perhaps the finest character that Eliot ever realised-from spoilt girl to disillusioned rich man's wife folds itself beautifully into the demands of television narrative. But the other half of the book, "the Jewish part," as it is often called, is wordy and unvisual. The story of how the eponymous Deronda discovers that he is not an English gentleman but a European Jew sounds fine in summary, but Eliot's treatment is weighed down with lengthy passages of Old Testament theology and stodgy mysticism. For many readers and critics, the book, as it stands, is a failure. FR Leavis suggested excavating the Gwendolen story from the rest of the book. Then, he believed, you would begin to see the shape of the great novel that Eliot almost wrote.
And yet Daniel Deronda, with all its structural difficulties, its longeurs, its sense of not quite holding together, has made a stunning piece of television. Indeed, it is perhaps because of its flaws that it has yielded such a good result. Andrew Davies's script is not afraid to chop into the material, clear away dead matter, sharpen tensions, beef up minor characters-Mr Lush, for example, finally gets the creepy homosexual motivation that remained undeveloped in Eliot's original text. Some of the structural faults of the novel inevitably press through into the adaptation-in particular the over-dependence on chance and coincidence-but, in general, Davies has managed to do what Eliot never quite managed, and make Daniel Deronda work.
Flawed raw material not only feels easier to chop into-if the original author couldn't get it quite right, then it seems less hubristic to have another go yourself-it is less likely to come with its own praetorian guard. Change a single word of Middlemarch or Pride and Prejudice (both of which were adapted for the BBC by Davies in the 1990s) and you will find yourself up against a small army of outraged fans, devoted to maintaining the purity of their favourite text. Swap bits of Daniel Deronda or The Way We Live Now around and not only are people less likely to notice, they probably won't care.
Hacking into texts and sewing them up into a slightly different shape for television not only offers the chance to patch, darn and add an extra frill, it also allows you to point them towards the present. In Daniel Deronda, Andrew Davies finds plenty to say about refugees, blended families, Zionism, soul hunger, house prices and, if you look hard enough, flash cars. In case Davies is accused of overdoing the quest for contemporary relevance, it is worth remembering that nearly all the great classics from Jane Eyre to Tess of the d'Urbervilles via Vanity Fair were themselves historical novels, set up to 50 years in the past. The Victorians used costume drama exactly as we do now, to hold up a mirror at just the right distance to catch a reflection in the round.
Perhaps this is why the BBC is currently targeting second division novels-the wonky, the one-sided, the episodically dull-as source material for its big-budget costume dramas. The big hitters have not only been used up already (even if you're only in your 30s, you will already have seen two Our Mutual Friends, two Love in a Cold Climates and several Jane Eyres) but they offer less room for manoeuvre than Cinderella texts such as Daniel Deronda. On 6th November, the corporation announced a new slew of costume dramas, none of which will be sourced from gold standard classics. Instead, we can look forward to Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, which follows hard on the heels of the unlikely success of The Way We Live Now. The Way We Live Now may not have contained many characters that people had heard of, but it yielded a story about spin, funny money and deregulation that matched the anxieties of the moment.
This is not to underestimate the difficulty of working with comparatively obscure books. They are usually obscure for a reason-because they are difficult or disappointing. In Daniel Deronda, for instance, readerly desire would push Gwendolen and Daniel together, whereas what actually happens is that Daniel marries Mirah, a quiet angel of a girl who shares his Jewishness and his earnestness of purpose. Daniel Deronda may not be a well-known text, but it is too hallowed to allow Andrew Davies to write a new ending, one in which Gwendolen and Daniel invite BBC audiences to their wedding. So this is where Davies really earns his money: he needs to underscore Eliot's story by showing why it would be wrong for the hero and the heroine to do what everyone (the Victorian readers as well as modern television viewers) wants them to do. This he manages to achieve brilliantly, and in a fraction of the words that it took Eliot. The result is a wonder of compression and eloquence.
Daniel Deronda begins on BBC1 on 23rd November
