Nothing much doing this morning, bar only Orangeism and the weather, both, as usual, unspeakable.

All right. Recently invited to (go and) see the new movie version of Lolita, I declined, no doubt in curmudgeonly fashion. Some mention may have been made of wild horses and their dragging deficiencies. At any rate, my unwillingness was made clear. I was then asked to "explain myself", as if personal exegesis were something to engage in at the drop of a gnat, not to mention doing decent psychologists out of a job. Was I a prude? Could I not confront a story of forbidden love? Was it not a favourite book? Isn't Dominique Swain only gorgeous? Did Jeremy Irons make me feel inadequate as a man? No, yes, yes, yes and yes were the answers. They were deemed unsatisfactory.

Must try harder then. When it was announced that Adrian Lyne would direct the latest film version of Lolita, most people expected a piece of glamorous sleaze along the lines of his Fatal Attraction, 91/2 Weeks and Indecent Proposal. Hands were thrown up in horror. Voices were raised. Columns were written. The project was delayed, but the film was finally made. Censors got ready to pounce. The trade got nervous. Distribution problems were encountered in the US and elsewhere. But by all accounts the film is a model of sensitivity and restraint. The reviews have been almost uniformly positive.

Yet I don't want to see it. A few years ago I saw John Huston's swansong 1987 film of James Joyce's The Dead. It had been greatly acclaimed. But it seemed to me, while intelligent, well-acted and visually potent, to possess only a fraction of the power of Joyce's great story. The result was a decision never again to go to see a film of any book or story held in particularly high esteem. There may well be as many bad books produced as there are bad films. Many mediocre books have been the basis of much better films. Film reaches and touches enormous audiences. Simultaneous appreciation is possible with good films, with theatre and with radio, while a book is always a private pleasure. Those are some of the advantages of films over books - though it's arguable that books offer many more delights. But when the book is a work of art like Nabokov's Lolita, a screen version, however sensitive and intelligent, can at best provide only an approximation of the original. Filming such a book is a necessarily reductive exercise. Lolita, the book, cannot but show up the limitations of Lolita, the film. Putting "flesh and blood" (in reality, two-dimensional screen figures) on the fiction is of necessity to thin the blood of the book's characters and make them less rather than more corporeal: to make them less real. The essence of Lolita, conveyed through the fabulous caress of its language, is simply not transferable to screen. Not even when the script is by the author himself. Stanley Kubrick's 1962 version of Lolita, scripted by Nabokov, is generally regarded as no more than a valiant failure, and/or a curiosity. Lolita is proof against all adaptation/meddling. It easily shrugged off the Kubrick film, hardly remembered now. It has even more easily shrugged off a couple of stage versions, not to mention a Stockholm Royal Opera production, some five years back, which managed to include a flurry of choirboys striking up "Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis" at supposedly appropriate intervals.

I have no desire to speed-read War and Peace ("It's about Russia"). I don't want to sit in a cinema beside young people eating popcorn, and who may well be disappointed in the movie for other reasons (suggested by the publicity poster featuring a wet-shirted Swain lolling under a garden sprinkler), to see Lolita's complex and heart-rending tale through Adrian Lyne's eyes in an hour and a half.

Remembering his first love (not Lolita) Humbert Humbert himself pointed out that there are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skilfully re-create an image in the laboratory of the mind, with eyes open, and the other evoked, with shut eyes, on the dark inner-side of the eyelids. I have nothing against Jeremy Irons - no one has used the cigarette as a prop so well since the days of Noel Coward - but when I think of the tortured, increasingly isolated Humbert Humbert it is not Jeremy's features I want to see. I have even less desire to see Dominique Swains's admittedly pretty face peering out alongside him from the pages of my Everyman edition, where Lolita and her sad illicit lover, both of them dead long before the story begins, achieve their immortality.

Thanks, but no thanks.