A Discovery of Witches

No spoilers (well nothing significant)
 
Goodness, I like a good vampire story. Add a few witches (and daemons) and I’m drawn to it (an expression used liberally in this Sky adaptation of Deborah Harkness’s popular book The Discovery of Witches.) And I like my vampires tall, dark and handsome. And well dressed, cultured and clever. Not for me the teenage angst of Twilight or the raunchy white trash of True Blood. My teenage years were filled with the writings of Bram Stoker, Mary Shelly and the film of the Hammer Film Studios. Christopher Lee was the template for my vampire. Until Frank Langella came along. His Dracula was the sexiest that had ever graced a film screen. It was at that point that I got it. Vampires are supposed to be sexy. Very sexy. When Dracula was published in 1879 it must have been revelatory. Victorian England was so repressed that the sight of a naked ankle was enough to send a man into a frenzy. Sex could never be mentioned in books or in society drawing rooms. But we can imagine many Victorian men and maidens tucked up on the sofa being stirred by the description of long fingers caressing necks and blood sucking. Also the promise of everlasting life must have been intoxicating.
 
I also don’t subscribe to the sheer volume of (good and bad) fantasy writing that has deluged the book, cinema and TV world in the past couple of decades. But Discovery of Witches pushes all the right buttons; Oxford (always at home to centuries of magic and intellectual homicide), Venice (centuries of mystery, licentiousness, corruption and beauty) mysterious medieval chateaux in the Auvergne, even the ‘American’ settings are whimsically magical.
 
I hadn’t read the book before I started watching the TV series. I hadn’t even heard of the book as fantasy fiction is not really my preferred genre but I was intrigued by the trailer and the cast list. As a rule I don’t even watch live TV, preferring to record series and then watch in my own time. This however, caught my imagination and sent me reeling back to a time, as a founding member of the Dracula society, I absorbed and delighted in all things vampiric.
What fun!
 
Having thoroughly enjoyed the whole series, I felt I needed to read the book. And while I am perpetually in awe of anyone who can write a book and get it published, I found the book extremely hard to read. And before its fans fall on me and rip me to shreds for having dissed their favourite book, can I just say that I wasn’t the only one if the reviews on Amazon are anything to go by.
 
Clearly Deborah Harkness is very clever. She knows her history and has a feeling for the mystical elements of the story. I enjoyed all the DNA threads (a clever take on the original vampire theme) and the concept of creatures living anonymously among us is also a central theme of Bram Stoker’s Victorian novel. My problem is that I found the two main characters so unattractive that I couldn’t engage with the love story. Matthew Clairmont was arrogant to the point of unpleasantness and Diana Bishop was flaky and irritating and I couldn’t buy into her intelligence. While I don’t necessarily need to like all the characters in a book, I do need to find something to like in the main protagonists. And they didn’t get better as the book progressed. I could have something to do with the first person narrative. Writing in the first person is extremely difficult to do unless you are very experienced. Evelyn Waugh for example did it to great effect in Brideshead Revisited for example. Here it just made the story one dimensional and, as I didn’t like the character of Diana, very dull to the point where I was struggling to keep going. Vampire yoga; what is that all about?
 
However……
 
Normally I don’t like adaptions of books but in this case the writers have taken a rather rambling first person story and turned it into something much more compelling. They ditched the yoga, thank God. And all the food. They fleshed out some of the one dimensional characters and brought them into each episode rather than just being a footnote to the book Diana’s self-obsession. All the character threads were woven carefully together so that the final episode made sense of all disparate creatures.
 
Even where the dialogue slips into cliché, Sky has delivered such a stellar cast of superb actors that it all sounds so believable. Don’t get me wrong. Any tale of witches and vampires requires you to suspend disbelief – as an opera fan it is a concept I am happy with. As long as the gaps don’t show. For my money, an actor of the calibre of Lindsey Duncan could recite my shopping list and make it sound convincing. As the matriarch of the de Clairmont family she can make the hunting and devouring of a helpless animal seem Shakespearean. Ditto Matthew Goode as our eponymous hero. Vampires need to be tall, dark and handsome. Ticks all round. Sophisticated – tick. Erudite – tick. This talented cast gives us the ‘less is more’ school of acting – perfect for elevating this material to a thoroughly absorbing tale. A special mention of Trevor Eve here; in other hands this archetypal evil vampire could have been a caricature but gosh, he’s menacing.
 
The production values in this series were extraordinary. While I avoided the online fan sites, I did watch the clips produced by Sky on the background to the filming. I was absolutely convinced that they must have filmed in the Bodleian Library but they built the set in the Cardiff studios. Even the polystyrene books looked convincing.
 
I was fascinated by the colours; costumes, backgrounds, furnishings and objects all conformed to a limited pallet of colours: greys and blues with highlights of reds and golds. Give all those colours pantone references and they all contained a high percentage of black. I don’t know anything about lighting but even all the sets and outdoor scenes were washed with a blue/black. Even the blacks were blue/black. Matthew and Diana wore greys, blacks and blues; the other characters were allowed flashes of red or orange. Even the tops of the test tubes in Matthew’s lab were either blue or red - and in Hamish’s office the red and blue Rubik cube. The attention to details was a treat to this designer’s eyes. Serious money was spent on this production and it was worth every penny.
 
Not sure about the next series. The book takes the reader back to the Elizabethan period. Hopefully the script writers will not abandon the rest of the characters but it is going to be difficult to weave them into the story with such a time difference. I’m not sure I can take another Elizabethan narrative – I even thought that Wolf Hall might be a Tudor Tale Too Far but it was so superlative I was compelled, thankfully, to watch. Let's wait and see.