North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell)

I remember one or two years ago a part of my f-list was gashing and squeeing over the BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel North and South.

Well, I finally picked the DVDs from the library and watched it. And then I downloaded the book from Gutenberg project site and read it.

What can I say? I loved the book much more then the series, although I am glad I watched the series first. I loved the actors, especially the main characters, and I was glad to be able to put faces I liked in my head when I was reading.

The larger part of the series I was mostly meh. Of course, Mr. John Thornton (as presented by Richard Armitage) broods as the best of them, and I am very appreciative of a quality brooding, the whole as three episodes seemed to consist of walking and brooding and class struggle, and not much else. However, the fourth episode, mainly the ending, redeemed it all.

The book did not suffer from silent walks and long scenes where nothing happened - it had them, for sure, but it didn't suffer for all that. :) In fact, I was surprised just how engaging the slow beginning was - in contemporary fiction I would have been very annoyed if nothing much happened by the second chapter - but here everything flowed with the slow pace and yet I wasn't able to put the book away. The slow walks were not tedious but full of thought and passion. The looks have actual meaning, and the class struggle wasn't much of a grey mass affair as it was in a series. The Higgins family though are equally good in both book and TV form, but reading their accent was more tiresome than listening to it. :)

The ending, though, I loved it in book several times more than in the series. I guess it is just Victorian usage of familiar words, or that I am that much of a word person, but the book ending was damn hot! and very very satisfying. ;)


( Here is the actual ending of the novel to see what I am talking about (text from the Gutenberg Project) )