The novels of John Irving have proved problematic for screenwriters attempting to adapt them for the cinema, although the quite underestimated films of The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire both have their merits (while the recent Simon Birch, which was "suggested by" Irving's novel A Prayer For Owen Meany, was, in a word, execrable, and was disowned by Irving). The latest and most accomplished Irving adaptation is the Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom's enthralling, superbly acted film of Irving's 1985 novel, The Cider House Rules, featuring Tobey Maguire as Homer Wells, an orphan who is returned by two sets of adoptive parents to St Cloud's orphanage in rural Maine, where he is raised by the unorthodox Dr Wilbur Larch (Michael Caine).
In his teens Homer is delivering babies at the orphanage - even though he never went to high school, not to mind medical school - but he draws the line at assisting Larch in carrying out the abortions which the doctor justifies by staying that otherwise the women would go elsewhere and suffer at the hands of backstreet abortionists.
One of the keys to the successful transposition of The Cider House Rules from page to screen was Irving's willingness to write the screenplay, and the author regularly expresses his enthusiasm for the film in My Movie Business, his memoir of the book's protracted passage to the cinema over the course of 13 years and through the hands of three other directors before Hallstrom became involved. (The author also notes with pride his own little cameo role in the film, as the stationmaster at St Cloud's.)
Irving reflects on the crucial differences between the two media, how his original manuscript for the novel ran to over 800 pages while his finished screenplay amounted to just 136 manuscript pages; how there is less time for character development in a film than in a novel; and how he reluctantly and painfully accepted that he had to excise entire characters and relationships, and a good deal of comic relief, from the novel as he adapted it for the screen.
In its structure My Movie Business actually adopts the classical, three-act form of a screenplay. The first section of the book deals directly with the abortion theme in The Cider House Rules, novel and film, with Irving's firm belief in the right to abortion, with his derision for the Right-to-Life movement and his firm opinion that those who want to legislate this "morally complex" decision - in effect, to make that decision for someone else - are "simply wrong".
The book goes on to chronicle Irving's impressions, as other writers adapted Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire for the cinema, his growing interest in the medium, and his respect for the directors of those films, George Roy Hill and Tony Richardson, respectively. We learn of his film project with director Martin Bell, which effectively became the novel A Son of the Circus, a project which has come close to being filmed several times in recent years.
IRVING explains how deeply he immerses himself in every aspect of his books, right down to the jacket art and the copy for the front and back flaps, and - though he had contractual approval of the director chosen for The Cider House Rules - how much he frets about what aspects of the story will be highlighted in the posters and publicity material. We also learn how little Irving knows about movies, that he has been to the cinema just twice in the past 10 years (to see two literary adaptations, Schindler's List and The English Patient) and how he probably wouldn't see any movies if the VCR didn't exist.
A prerequisite for anyone reading My Movie Business should be to read the novel or see the film of The Cider House Rules; otherwise, the memoir's often pedantic layers of detail will prove meaningless. It would have been very interesting to read Irving's views on how A Prayer For Owen Meany was so comprehensively botched in Simon Birch, but there is not a mention of the latter in My Movie Business.
This is merely a moderately interesting book which offers few fresh insights into the screenwriting or adaptation processes, and the writer's impressions of actors, directors and other movies are mostly superficial. Certainly, the book exerts none of the compelling charge of Irving's fiction and it is devoid of the remarkable sense of humour that informs his novels.
Michael Dwyer is Film Correspondent of The Irish Times