developed, cinema latched onto the striking images that are simply unproducable in the dialogue-heavy sparsity of the theatre. At the beginning of Henry V, Shakespeare apologises for the lack of army, castles, France, and so on, and asks his audience to do him the consideration of imagining them. You don't have to make that excuse in a book or a film. True, the description of a scene in a book requires the use of imagination to flesh it out, but it is never confined by the logistics of the stage. To turn this argument on it's head, if one is of the opinion that cinema is indeed an extension of theatre, then it is in fact of an older tradition than the novel, whose modern form has it's origins in the prose fiction 'histories' of the 18th Century.

And once film did arrive, it was quick to feed back into the medium that had been part of its inspiration. This was often in the form of 'popular' fiction - the trashy romance, the detective novel - but as cinema grew in respectability as an art-form, so it found itself being embraced by literature: at its best a powerful addition to the pantheon of experience that the novelist has to draw on. Raymond Chandler set out to produce entertainment and ended up producing literature, at once drawing on the world of the screen and leaving it with some of its most iconic characters and motifs. He is also quoted as saying, 'if I had been any worse I would not have been invited to Hollywood. If I had been any better I would not have come.' Make of that what you will.

The 'film in the form of a novel' will never be a worthwhile exercise, because it ignores the aspects that only the novel can deliver: we do not yet see for sale screenplays for unmade films, (but watch the shelves, no doubt they will not be long in coming). However, there is no reason to dismiss what prose has learnt from the camera in how to tell a decent story. That, after all, is the crux of the matter: we are confronted with differing arenas in which to tell stories, and the strength of the story can transcend the medium. There are so many terrible adaptations of books, but there are a few gems out there. And you can guarantee that the moment a book is described as unfilmable, someone will attempt to film it - often in the process revealing it to be quite filmable, and indeed filmic, after all. Lolita has now been filmed twice, the first time producing a trailer composed of voices asking in varying tones of shock, disgust and anticipation 'how did they make a film of Lolita?' And it isn't content alone that attracts the label unfilmable: 1990 saw the publication of American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis (or 'Breast Eaten Ellis' as Private Eye affectionately calls him.) Before it even hit the shelves there were howls of protest from the International League of Entirely Missing the Point at its extreme violence and alleged misogyny. But violence and misogyny have never been something that have prevented a film being made - just ask Michael Winner. American Psycho, however was perceived as unfilmable for other reasons as well: its lack of conventional plot, the heavy reliance on internal dialogue, and the ambiguity of imagined and real action that in the end was undermined in the film adaptation by the actual witnessing of events rather than having them related to us. We are accustomed to believe our eyes, but maintain scepticism of the tales that people tell. But actually Ellis gives us a novel that is at once entirely unlike a film but also pure cinema manqué. Despite the aspects inconvenient to screenwriters and directors, we do have a present-tense narrative that at times can't help but read like screenplay, and an obsession with detail that should be a literary device but ends up more like product placement and the director's screenplay notes - in fact not only the director, but the cinematographer, set designers, costumier and make-up artist.

Perhaps this illusion of the book having all the trappings of cinema is the reader's fault, or to be more precise this readers fault. It is not just the author of the modern novel that is in the thrall of celluloid, but a reading audience that is just that - an audience. It is a generation that has been so marinated in the visual image, that it cannot help but envisage a sequence in terms of the physical and visual. And this is a very different assertion that we merely create our own visual imagery with the words at our disposal and our imagination: to Shakespeare all the world was a stage, but to those of an overactive imagination today, all the world is a movie. By and large, following an exciting, unusual or even traumatic event, people do not exclaim, 'it was just like a scene from a book.' Cinematic cliché has invaded real life to a degree that literature does not because a) we watch so much film and television and b) because our initial experience of events - particularly physical ones - is so often a sensory one before it becomes an emotional and intellectual one.