#I do like fantine a lot even if i dont talk about her much on here

[ferociousconscience]

Fantine: 2, 3, 7, and 8.

All for Fantine!

2. Favorite canon thing about this character?

I love that even after her death, she lingers on in the story as a always-present but rarely-ever-seen ghost, especially in Cosette and Valjean's life. It's very haunting and very touch, in a way. Hugo has really good writing when it comes to death and rebirth, and Fantine's story does exemplify that.

3. Least favorite canon thing about this character?

I mean, I feel the natural answer to this is what happens to her. It's tragic to watch happen, to see her sink into poverty when she's trying to make a better life for herself, and how badly the Thenardiers milk her for all she has. It's deeply sad to think of how badly fate has thrown her around and takes advantage of her not knowing any better. She makes a lot of mistakes, as Hugo himself points out, but. Still. It's not fun to watch her metaphorically fall down the stairs and hit every step along the way.

7. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you like?

I do genuinely think the fandom handles her prostitution with a lot of respect for her and I appreciate it. It's very clearly something she doesn't like doing, (and given her own choice wouldn't do it at all), and the fandom seems universally careful about it. However…

8. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you despise?

Again, despise is a really strong word. It's less so much what I despise and what I personally find I don't agree with in terms of character analysis. Everyone's going to have their own view of a certain character and I can't despise that, especially not of my fellows who love the same book as me.

With that out of the way, I do have to say that I don't like that the fandom erases Fantine's sassy side, her snark. I think a lot of people associate it with her prostitution and therefore try to avoid it, at the cost of a big chunk of her characterization. Without her sort of blind and trusting spunk, I feel like she gets reduced to a generic "mother" character a lot, which I feel is a disservice to her. This is also a consequence of the musical smoothing down everyone's characters, but that's another conversation entirely…

[bbclesmis]

Andrew Davies on Les Miserables: ‘I’m rescuing it from that awful musical’

Give Andrew Davies a piece of classic literature and he will show you the erotic desires and deep-rooted anxieties that lurk beneath. Think of the passions he unleashed in the nation’s living rooms when he sent Mr Darcy for a dip in his full-blooded 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, or the consternation he provoked when he inserted a spot of incest into War and Peace in 2016.

Yet even to Davies, a new adaptation of Les Misérables – which he claims “will rescue Victor Hugo’s novel from the clutches of that awful musical with its doggerel lyrics” – posed a challenge. Perhaps the biggest question was how to represent the sexuality of its two principal characters: Jean Valjean, the prisoner who breaks his parole (played by Dominic West); and his nemesis, Javert (David Oyelowo) the policeman who hounds him until the end of his days.

Over tea in central London, Davies tells me that he was surprised to discover that, in Hugo’s 1862 novel, neither character mentions any sort of sexual experience, leaving the 82-year-old screenwriter wondering, at least in the case of Javert, whether it was indicative of a latent homosexuality.

“His obsession with Jean Valjean represents a kind of perverse, erotic love,” Davies says. He doesn’t stop there. In capturing the febrile atmosphere of post-Napoleonic France, he also shows how the innkeeper’s daughter Eponine (Erin Kellyman) expresses her desire for the earnest student Marius (Josh O’Connor).

“One of the best things Hugo does is to have Eponine tease Marius with her sexiness because he is a bit of a prig,” says Davies. “So I have introduced a scene where Marius, even though he is in love with Cosette [Valjean’s adopted daughter], has a wet dream about Eponine and feels rather guilty about it. I think it fits into the psychology of the book.”

Another problem that needed solving was Cosette, “a pretty nauseating character in the book”, whom Davies has made “strong and optimistic, rather than just an idealised figure who doesn’t add anything at all.” In the past, he has spoken about how he has turned the more saccharine depictions of 19th-century womanhood he has found on the page into women with the power “to disconcert men”, by injecting into them a little of his own mother’s character. I ask if she also makes her presence felt in Les Misérables. “I don’t think so. Was she like Madame Thénardier?” he wonders, referring to the sometimes violent innkeeper’s wife, here played by Olivia Colman. “No, that would be awful. Although she was quite keen on smacking people. The women in this book are not terribly complicated.”

I suggest that this might not sit well with modern viewers. “Well, I suppose Fantine goes on one hell of a journey,” says Davies, effecting a cod-American accent. “She develops a sort of animal ferocity and that is all because of how she has been treated.”

Davies’ childhood sounds rosy by comparison. No sooner had he started at his Cardiff grammar than he wrote a naughty poem about two of the modern language teachers, which went around the whole school in samizdat. He recites it for me:

He kissed her, she kissed him      

back.  

He took her knickers off and put    

them in a sack.

She took his underpants and put    

them in her bag.

He said: “Excusez-moi, but may I    

have a shag?”

After that, his writing career settled into a slow burn. He studied English at University College London, then moved to Kenilworth, where he met his future wife, Diana Huntley (they have been married since 1960 and have two children) and began teaching literature at the Coventry College of Further Education. He wrote the odd TV play and a whole host of radio scripts – sadly, now all deleted. One 1972 play about wife swapping, Steph and the Single Life, received complaints from those who denounced it as “obscene, disgusting rubbish”.

More solid success came to Davies in the Eighties, most notably with his greatest original work, A Very Peculiar Practice, based on his experiences at Warwick. Heavy on existential gloom, it concluded with the campus being sold to a private American company, which turned it into a defence research base. Never has a series ended to quite such a peal of mirthless laughter and its extraordinary scheduling (9pm on BBC One) was, thinks Davies, a mistake.

At that point, it was hard to imagine that Davies would, a few years later, be the person to turn costume drama into sportive heritage TV. His Middlemarch came first, in 1994, and was followed 18 months later by Pride and Prejudice, one of the most popular TV series of all time. I wonder how he feels about Nina Raine’s forthcoming small-screen adaptation.

“I am very excited about it,” he says. Then he adds, “even though I wish her all the best, I hope it’s not as popular as my one. It gives me so much pleasure when people say, ‘I was feeling rotten and so I just went to bed and put on Pride and Prejudice’. People use it to get over bereavements – I’m better than a priest!”

This is not arrogance. Davies may be sharp, naughty and ironic, but he is embarrassed by anyone who makes a fuss over him. He worries that this month’s documentary about his work, Rewriting the Classics, is “a bit effusive”, and he seems too pragmatic to be affected by writerly insecurity. Is he sensitive?

“I am much less sensitive than I used to be. I remember being cast down when I had a play that went to Broadway,” he says, referring to 1980’s Rose, which starred Glenda Jackson as a schoolteacher and closed after only 68 performances. “Column after column was spent saying how terrible it was. I couldn’t eat solid food for a week.”

He had a similarly bruising experience with the film industry. A decade ago, Davies admitted that he was disappointed that his movie career had not been more buoyant (Bridget Jones’s Diary was a rare success). Talking to me now, however, he is more sanguine.

“And that’s because the writer is king in TV. In film, all the stories that people say, that they pay you a lot of money and treat you like s---, are true in my experience. I have been sacked from several movies without being told. You meet someone at a party and you say you are working on a picture and they’ll laugh and say, ‘No, you’re not.’ It’s not terribly nice.”

Two more Davies adaptations will be shown next year – of Austen’s fragment, Sanditon, and of Vikram Seth’s epic A Suitable Boy. He would love to adapt more 19th-century classics (Dickens’s Dombey and Son and Trollope’s The Barchester Chronicles are top of his list) but before that, we can look forward to his version of the Rabbit Angstrom novels by John Updike, an author whose perceived misogyny might not seem an obvious fit in today’s cultural climate.

“There are a lot of grim things said about Updike at the moment, but he is a wonderful observer of how we all behave,” says Davies. “I don’t think writers are there to be role models, they are there to say what the world is like from their point of view.”

If the number of irons he has  in the fire makes it sound as though Davies is spreading himself too thinly, he displays an air of toughness despite his advancing years and a recent double hip replacement. “I don’t feel old. I had my one-year check-up yesterday and my surgeon pronounced that he was pleased with his work. My hips are good for another 10 years.”

As well as his prolific adapting, I wonder whether Davies has the desire to tell the story of his own life. “I really ought to,” he says. “I would like to start with my parents’ lives, in the early days of their marriage, because something went wrong there.” I ask why and Davies lowers his voice almost to a whisper.  “I think it’s probably something to do with sex.”

Ben Lawrence, The Telegraph, 22 December 2018 (x)