Oliver Francis ponders the pervasive influence of cinema on the contemporary novel

In the talking-book section of my local bookshop, you can purchase what appears to be a tape of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. On closer inspection the item is in fact a reading of a novelisation of the film from the screenplay inspired by the book by Victor Hugo. As the Goons very nearly said, 'the book of the film of the book of the tram'. That talking-book neatly illustrates the dog chasing its own tale [sic] of fiction and film. The back-catalogue of classic novels continues to be plundered by well- meaning misty-eyed nostalgics like Merchant Ivory; merchandising divisions will continue to write the book of the film; and as soon as a novel becomes successful its film rights are snapped up for figures that make that publishing advance look like pocket money. And film producers are drawn towards adaptations because they represent greater security of investment: it is less of a gamble betting on a horse that has already won a race – albeit on a different course. Combine all this with a world where many authors have no doubt seen more films than they've read books and you have the contemporary novel that wants so much to be transferred to the silver screen, and is consciously and subconsciously saturated with the language and technique of cinema alongside and often in place of more traditional literary devices.

To take a cause célèbre of an author with popular appeal and literary ambitions, Alex Garland's work embodies many of the troubles and strengths of the novel as an extension of film. With the hugely successful The Beach Garland has effectively produced a sort of easy-access modernised The Lord of the Flies with a heavy dollop of Heart of Darkness. The reason he gets away with it is that whilst his thematic pilfering is from Golding and Conrad, his references are Coppola and the comic book - effectively a story board of a yet-to-be-made film - and his execution is travel diary meets aspiring screenwriter. And he received little condemnation for it: one of the many favourable reviews plastered on the paperback reads 'it is as if the influence of film is so strong that he has written a film in the form of a novel... but it is a very well written film' (Rory Dunlop). It is in fact like many Hollywood films: enjoyable enough whilst it lasts but leaving you with nothing more than a sensation of having been ever so slightly duped. And of course, not only is the book filmic, but its central character becomes increasingly convinced that he is a character in a film bearing striking resemblance in his mind to Apocalypse Now.

Given how much film was already in The Beach, why then was the film so bad? There are far too many reasons for this, many of which have nothing to do with the source novel. However, one that does is that whilst you can refer to Apocalypse Now in a difference medium to its own creation, an attempt to give a nod to such a cinematic classic in its own arena is - of course - clumsy, distinctly underwhelming and unintentionally amusing: it becomes more parody than homage. The novel and cinema pursue a vital but uneasy symbiosis, feeding off each other in a way that can turn to outright cannibalism when each turns on their own kind.

But perhaps we should excuse first novels a little - the authors are, after all, still getting the grips with the medium, trying to wean themselves off the hundreds of films they've sat through when they could have been curled up with a good book. Indeed, Garland's excellent second novel The Tesseract, despite an opening chapter that has suspiciously too much resemblance to a certain Martin Sheen festering in a hotel in Saigon, is a much more literary affair - if not in it's language, then at least in its preoccupations.

And it isn't just the young and trendy who find themselves stumbling over their film- filled psyches. During a programme discussing the 1998 Booker Prize, Will Self claimed to have read Ian McEwan's Amsterdam in under two hours whilst changing a baby and writing two cheques, and demanded that it should be referred to as a 'nov- play or screen-el.' And the same author's Enduring Love whilst undeniably literary falls back on a distinctly filmic - though effectively subverted - dénouement complete with a knife-wielding head-case and a gun-toting protagonist.

However, just as the dichotomy between serious and popular fiction is often a false one, so too may be the one between book and film. In many ways, the book and the film have more in common than proponents of either form might wish to admit. They commonly share the presence of an omniscient third party narrator; the ability to take you anywhere in time and space with full detail of what you might find; to deliver a cast of thousands; and the ability to provide a narrative of action not bound to the narrative of dialogue. And where did film get its grammar from in the first place? Partly theatre, yes, but as technology