It's Always More Complicated

Somebody mentioned in passing in comments to another post that there was a forthcoming TV version of a Ford Maddox Ford novel with Benedict Cumberbatch.

And it turns out not be The Good Soldier, where I could completely see him as Ashburnham, but the tetralogy Parade's End (from the rather sparse IMDB entry I can't tell how much of it they're actually doing, but a link to a press mention suggest 5 episodes covering the whole thing). As Christopher Tietjens.

WHUT.

This is even worse than Rufus Sewell being darkly broody as Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch, a character constantly referenced in the text in terms of sun and light, not to mention being a bit of a Victorian Fotherington-Tomas. Or the depiction of Robert Carne as a Lawrentian bit of rough in the recent televisual travesty of South Riding.

I am not even alone in my pedantic Maddox Fordery WTF - there's already a discussion thread on the IMDB page also going 'Errrr....' and one commentator suggests, cynically but probably correctly, that 'they have gone for the glamour factor for this series and wanted people who looked great and who would look even better in the period costumes and settings'.

Tietjens in the books is very definitely not a Romantic Hero figure - he's a large and awkward statistician (in the Armistice Night episode he starts dancing and Valentine thinks 'The elephant! the elephant!'). And I see they seem to be making his marriage to Sylvia a lot more recent than I remember it being in the text, where it has been completely on the rocks for some considerable time when he meets Valentine being a suffragette on a golf-course.

And the tetralogy is about far more than a Romantyk LUHHHRVVV Triangle.

I have further qualms about how the whole thing would work if you took the story elements out of the brilliant narrative style, which is a good deal about interiority. In a helter-skelter five episodes, even.

O dear.

I was thinking further of that tendency of women to downplay achievements in interviews and indicate that they would have been/would be partial to the Normal Feminine Satisfactions of Life but somehow those have not/not-yet come their way...

And wonder whether in a statistically significant number of cases this is an elaborately performative bit of self-deprecation, which may be partly about avoiding Hubris and averting Nemesis, but also about the social conditioning not to boast and to indicate that one's achievements somehow Just Happened, during, for example, those hours when the writer got up at 5 o' clock before the babies woke and wrote like billy-oh until they did...

More generally on women and the problem of ambition, I was watching that TV drama last night Page 8 (I was staying with my family and it was on).( Um, perhaps I should cut for spoilers?? )