I obtained Zoe Heller's novel from the wonderful Bookfinders of Belfast shortly after moving here in 2009. The shop is one of many gems peculiar to the city, and all too rare nowadays - a dusty, dark place where the charming owner serves coffee and plays old classical records, which in Dublin would've been converted into "apartments" long ago.
I eventually brought it with me on a pointless "must use leave up by a certain date" Winter trip to Stockholm, and was soon engaged with a morbidly absorbing, propulsive page turner, which treats a difficult topic 'factually' but sensitively. I'm not a great reader, but this is well up there among the best I have read , and thus on spotting a recommendation for the film somewhere, I instantly rented it.
Novel and film centre around two apparent opposites who become close friends: Sheba, the attractive, wide-eyed, nice girl "bourgeois bohemian", not cut out for
teaching art in a working class London school. Barbara, the deeply incisive, sharp, ungainly, lower middle class smoking spinster approaching retirement who
automatically commands respect from colleagues and students. The younger woman embarks on a disastrous affair with one of her pupils; Barbara soon learns of it...
The film does differ in some respects from the novel. A lurid liberty is taken in introducing a lesbian undertone (absent from the novel) via Judi Dench's Barbara,
making her unpleasantly manipulative, with her point-blank, unreasonable demands upon the friendship. The ending is significantly altered, by which stage, the central
scandal has blown over anyway.
Common to both is the casual, pointless, reasonless "it just happened" nature of the destructive affair. And the older woman's awareness and expression of her own loneliness, acutely articulated.
It's a very good film, but the book is better.
(Editor's note: What is it about film adaptations of books that tends towards longer reviews?)
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