Books, 8/6.

Movies have been a second career for this writer. Alive he sailed the seven seas, dead he sails the seventh art. He puts in at a port here (Lord Jim), a coaling station there (Victory), an archipelago here and there (Outcast of the Islands). And there are one or two Ultimae Thules with the mist-girt grandeur of great cinema.

One of these is Apocalypse Now. Another is Sabotage, Hitchcock's brilliantly inventive yet faithful-in-spirit adaptation of The Secret Agent. (That great novel is 100 this year and Conrad himself 150.) A third and fourth might have been - what might-have-beens! - Orson Welles's Heart of Darkness, planned as his first movie before Citizen Kane, and David Lean's late, long-planned film of Nostromo, scripted by Robert Bolt and Christopher Hampton. Lean died before it could be made.

These movies, even as skeletons that never took flesh (but got far enough to convey a tantalising promise), have a shiversome charisma and fascination.

Speaking of Christopher Hampton. For the London Times, Jeff Dawson talks with him and director Joe Wright about adapting Ian McEwan's Atonement, the bestselling novel that "comes fully stocked with those features that can present huge problems in transposition: three separate narratives; a time frame spanning 64 years; epic battle scenes (the BEF's retreat across northern France in 1940); the detailed workings of a wartime London hospital; and the seemingly unfilmic central conceit of an author's ability to atone for previous sins through the power of the pen. And all on a low budget, by Hollywood standards."

Philip Lopate reviews Patrick McGilligan's Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only: The Life of America's First Black Filmmaker for the New York Times Book Review: "McGilligan's prose style may be pedestrian, but he organizes his biographical materials into a lively, readable tale.... McGilligan rejects interpretations that would make Micheaux's gaffes the result of Brechtian, Surrealist or Warholian stylizing: 'Again and again, surviving eyewitnesses have contradicted the legend that Micheaux was an intentionally cheap, fast and shoddy director: the mistaken notion that the partial remains of his censored, maltreated films represent a deliberate "style." When Micheaux found the money and time... he worked hard, from read-throughs to "dailies" and retakes.' In other words, sloppiness was all the fault of the moneymen who kept him on a tight budget."

November sees the release of a new book on Videodrome by Tim Lucas, who's been blogging in anticipation.

Killian Fox on Michael Tolkin's latest: "Curiously, The Return of the Player is a lot less about Hollywood than you might expect, perhaps because Hollywood is now beyond the reach of satire." Also in the Observer is an extract from Helen de Winter's book, What I Really Want To Do Is Produce, a dozen or so producers take on the question, "So you're a producer... what exactly do you do?"

On William Gibson's Spook Country:

• Steven Shaviro: "Gibson's prose style is his way of perceiving, and presenting, the world. And the world he presents is the one we live in today: a postmodern world of globalized flows of money and information, driven by sophisticated technologies whose effects are nearly indistinguishable from magic, saturated by advertising and by conspicuous consumption run amok, undergirded by murky conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, and regulated by nearly ubiquitous forms of surveillance."

• Ed Park in the Los Angeles Times: "Spook Country is an oblique sequel to Pattern Recognition, or, better yet, the book is its antic anagram, expanding themes and re-upping a few characters. Here again Gibson gives us a present (more precisely, early 2006 - Tower Records lives!) in which the skies are the color of steel, no matter the city, and the outlines of a chaotic future can be discerned. Sentence for sentence, few authors equal Gibson's gift for the terse yet poetic description, the quotable simile - people and products are nailed down with a beautiful precision approximating the platonic ideal of the catalog. An ex-bandmate now wears a 'Bladerunner soccer-mom look,' a 'Bluetoothed bouncer' patrols a bar and, when Gibson registers a 'delirious surge of graffiti, a sort of street-fractal Hokusai wave,' the phrasing is itself a delirious surge of pleasure-center prose."

• Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing: "And it is a futuristic place, our recent past, a place so weird and light-speed that we don't even notice it. Not until a master storyteller and keen observer like William Gibson comes along to show us what we're all living in."

"Following a titanic bidding war, publishing phenomenon The Dangerous Book for Boys is set to get the big screen treatment courtesy of Disney and über-producer Scott Rudin," reports Time Out's Chris Tilly.

Posted by dwhudson at August 6, 2007 3:39 PM