The action of the story starts, as it so often does, with a letter - in this case (and, again, not unusually) from a lawyer in relation to a deceased estate, as Tony Webster is informed of the passing of Sarah Hall, mother of Veronica. And much of the story - plot - is driven by a crucially absent (and never revealed) text, in the form of Adrian's diary. So it's of a piece that the unreliability of Tony's memories and the story of his life that goes with them are very much in the foreground, in both novel and film; and, as comes with the territory, there's revelation for both narrator and reader/viewer as layers are stripped away.
The novel, while working a familiar vein, does so in a finely crafted and remarkably concise way, and retains a strong sense of mystery - ambiguity between the lines - not least about what is really going on with our narrator; it brings to mind Ishiguro (who is, I think, the best I've come across in rendering this kind of unreliable narrator at once legible and, fundamentally, unknowable). The film, by contrast, perhaps by nature of its medium presents a more defined perspective, not to mention one that is far less dark and less satisfying. (One thing that it does preserve is the ambiguity about whether Tony may have been Adrian Jr's father, although if that were true in the film version, there's nowhere near enough emotional groundwork for that truth to really land in its implications.)
Also, as an aside, while the performances are all strong (Broadbent, Rampling and Harriet Walter in particular), the film didn't help alleviate my long standing movie star crush on Emily Mortimer one bit.
The novel, while working a familiar vein, does so in a finely crafted and remarkably concise way, and retains a strong sense of mystery - ambiguity between the lines - not least about what is really going on with our narrator; it brings to mind Ishiguro (who is, I think, the best I've come across in rendering this kind of unreliable narrator at once legible and, fundamentally, unknowable). The film, by contrast, perhaps by nature of its medium presents a more defined perspective, not to mention one that is far less dark and less satisfying. (One thing that it does preserve is the ambiguity about whether Tony may have been Adrian Jr's father, although if that were true in the film version, there's nowhere near enough emotional groundwork for that truth to really land in its implications.)
Also, as an aside, while the performances are all strong (Broadbent, Rampling and Harriet Walter in particular), the film didn't help alleviate my long standing movie star crush on Emily Mortimer one bit.
