How to Adapt a Book: BBC’s 2015 And Then There Were None

Raise your hand if you’ve ever thought to yourself in disgust, “The book was better.”

Okay, now that your hands are all up in the air, wave them around like you just don’t care. And — wait, what was I talking about? Oh, right: and then settle in for that most elusive of adaptation reviews, a “the-book-was-really-good-and-so-is-this-even-though-they-are-different.”

Ready?

I’ve already blogged about how much I admire the construction of Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None. I mentioned then that her own stage adaptation changes the ending. And the previous movie versions I’ve seen choose to adapt the play rather than the book.

But the BBC’s 2015 miniseries adaptation goes back to the novel instead. And they do an amazing job.

It’s easy to point out things that can make an adaptation bad: changing the plot and characters so much they lose the spirit of the original, making the story worse instead of better, trying to tell a completely different story. It’s much more difficult to evaluate what makes it work.

Most fans would agree that a good adaptation is “true to the original.” But that doesn’t add to our knowledge — it just changes our vocabulary. What does it mean to be “true” to a story? What are the effective ways of being “true”? We know that simply putting every single thing that was in the original into the adaptation doesn’t always (if ever) result in a palatable final product. No matter how much Potterheads missed Peeves, few really wanted 8+ hours of verbatim dialogue and voiced-over narration.

The 2015 And Then There Were None miniseries demonstrates that a good adaptation can stray from the original in major ways without alienating its audience — in fact, it can engage them better than meticulous accuracy.

(From here on in, I’ll be discussing some elements of the miniseries that you might regard as spoilers if your key interest is how it differs from the book. I won’t go into detail, but I will mention some overall trends and describe the general idea of some added scenes.)

First, Sarah Phelps’s script acknowledges the gap between the social context of the late 1930s and that of today. She adds explanatory scenes and tweaks dialogue to achieve our standards of verisimilitude. For instance, it doesn’t read right to contemporary audiences if adults stuck in a homicidal nightmare don’t indulge in strong language upon the gruesome discovery of a body. So they do.

On the plot level, the idea of travelling across the country to an isolated island manor just because a stranger sent you a letter seems ridiculous. But Phelps inserts scenes — snippets, really — that not only show us how the mastermind baited every hook just right but also reveal aspects of each character’s personality and circumstances: who is lonely, who is desperate for a job, who is careless.

Phelps also artfully massages the mores of the time in which the story is set to elicit both our empathy and condemnation. For instance, one of the characters is a police officer accused of breaking the law to convict a suspect in custody. In the novel, this is portrayed as pursuit of a guilty party gone too far, and we’re to understand that this officer lost control in pursuit of justice without necessarily feeling sympathy for the victim.

But in the miniseries, Phelps incorporates our contemporary understanding of how the justice system can treat marginalized communities. She builds a picture of a murder we, twenty-first-century viewers, immediately understand as a homophobic hate crime. The characters’ emotional reactions feel appropriate to the 1930s, but the narrative structure tells us that the story wants us to have the more enlightened reaction: disgust at this bigotry and violence.

In fact, Phelps and the performers expand on each of the characters, giving them twenty-first-century-style emotional depth. Their biggest secrets aren’t that they committed a murder; their biggest secrets are what they protected by killing, the parts of their selves they can’t or won’t accept. In flashbacks and dream sequences, we see how they can’t cope with sexuality or don’t know how to accept that they are wrong.

Which brings me to the second thing a good adaptation does: uses the new medium’s strongest attributes to achieve the goals of the original.

In the novel, the reader gets a lot of internal monologues that tell what a character is thinking and why he or she took a life. Books are good at that. They can keep us inside the head of a single character, focussed on only the details the author wants us to see, side-stepping any “wait a minute” that might occur if you zoom out, take a look at the whole scene in context.

Rather than translate these stretches of text verbatim, with voiceovers or crawls or spoken tirades, the miniseries does what film does best: it shows us. We see how each character feels by their expression and body language. We tag along through each emotional discovery in real-time, navigating both flashbacks and present-timeline scenes. Every detail we see and hear informs us in a way that the written word can’t.

To use a major example, at the end of the novel, the reader learns the exact solution to the mysteries unresolved in the final scene by reading a long piece purportedly written by one of the characters. Novels can do that and make it work.

Instead of poorly copying the original in this respect, the miniseries tweaks the scenario to allow one character to explain the most pressing plot point in dialogue with another. We don’t learn how every single little detail played out, but we don’t have to: based on what we were shown, we can piece together the rest ourselves. And instead of having the character describe a particularly clever process relevant to the plot, we watch that character carefully set it up and pull it off. No paragraphs needed.

Just as too much text can overload movies, too much description can bog down books. By recognizing the limitations and strengths of each medium, the creators of the BBC miniseries keep their adaptation compelling and preserve the key elements of the original.

But what exactly are those key elements, if everything is so mutable?

That brings me to the third and final reason the miniseries works so well: rather than meticulously re-creating each tree in the book, the series aims for the forest. Instead of asking, what did the original do here, it asks: how did the original make this plot point feel?

And Then There Were None is a masterpiece of suspense: it cultivates a need to know what’s going to happen next, who’s going to be safe, who’s the killer? It depends on clever, complex plot machinations that the reader always sees too late. It makes us care about the characters just enough to be invested in what happens to them, but not quite enough to make us forgive their homicidal crimes.

Wherever it had to choose between staying true to the details of the original (for example, providing an opportunity for the audience to read and analyse the chilling but lengthy rhyme at the centre of the story) and making the audience feel the way they did when reading the original (creeped out, afflicted with a strange sense of fatalism and the conviction that if they and the characters just think really hard, they can figure out what’s coming next), the miniseries chose feelings.

Did this out-of-control party scene happen in the book? No, but it makes the audience feel the paranoia bordering on hysteria from that point in the story. Were the sexual themes so overtly developed? Not by Christie, but we interpret sexuality differently than her between-World-Wars audience and may need to see more explicit actions to understand the relationships between characters the way the book wanted us to.

The miniseries does have its weaknesses: fans of particular creepy details in the book might find that a few of them have gone AWOL. Readers who loved the coziness of the mystery might find this adaptation borders too much on bloody thriller. But overall, the strong writing, the nuanced performances, and the clever character development make this an adaptation you might just consider a masterpiece in its own right.