We went to see I've loved you so long last night, which - and I'm not a big film man - was very good. Or rather, it would have been very good if they hadn't stuffed up the ending. Having done all the hard work around the characters, the director decided to waste it. If you watch it, it's best to just ignore the last scene, though the rot does start before then.
It's part of a greater problem, that besets a number of books as well as films, of not paying enough attention to structure. The best work is balanced and pays attention to the structure. And there are a lot of ways to get it wrong. I read Nudge the other day, and it struggled to fill out the book, and just meandered through the second half (really second two thirds) without adding much to the admittedly good start. Often you just get bad endings. Captain Corelli's mandolin's is terrible, the endless iteration at the end of Lord of the Rings boring and the 'analysis' essay at the end of War and Peace pretentious and disjointed. See also bad editing, which I am convinced is behind the growth in long books, though its roots are old - volumes five and six of Proust suffer just as much a Harry Potter from this. But it can be done very well indeed. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a classic short book, but length can be just as well done - the first three volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall are magisterially structured as well as written, the pace and the rhythms cover a complex world and long timespan effortlessly.
I spent my entire academic career at university being told to structure arguments and making sure I ended with a flourish. I doubt I was the only one, but it is striking how often this lesson is ignored: organise the material, make sure the ending is worth having, and don't overrun.
I won't either.
1 comment:
I tell you, it's got a bloody good ending, that The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie.
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