Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is probably the best thing I've ever been forced to read. After reading it the compulsory one time in year 11 at high school I immediately set out and bought my own spiffy copy of it so that I may read it again. It goes up there amongst The Catcher in the Rye, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Catch-22 in my favourites of all time list. There's a delicate interplay of opposing forces in this book that I really love. Love and revenge. Tenderness and brutality. Religion and the supernatural. Sophisticated man and wild nature. At it's very core Wuthering Heights is a gothic romance that goes unrequited and is destined to destroy all those around it. So when I saw the ads on ABC for a television adaptation I immediately stamped it down in my mental diary and waited with curiousity to see how one of my favourite books of all time would be treated.
If you are unfamiliar with the general plot of Wuthering Heights let me fill you in. One day the wealthy owner of an estate called Wuthering Heights goes into town and brings home an orphaned child of possible gypsy decent into his home for adoption for some reason. He calls the boy Heathcliff and raises him as one of his own alongside the initially perplexed biological children Hindley and Catherine. Catherine eventaully warms to the boy and they become really close while Hindley acts like a complete cunt, treating him like a servant or slave. Things only get worse years later when their father dies and Hindley inherits the estate, treating Heathcliff in a most cruel manner for winning the affections of his father and sister. So romances and bitter rivalries are set up. More characters are introduced. Misunderstandings and selfish mistakes ensue. Hearts are broken left right and centre and more bitter rivalries are set up. Then finally the tensions are built into a beautiful crecendo of brutal revenge, passion and cruelty. Then the whole thing ends with cousines marrying each other but that's really not important. The narrative itself spans almost 50 years and it can get a bit hard to follow the different characters within the different time periods (the fact that there is a Catherine Earnshaw and a Catherine Linton is particularly confusing). But the plot is pretty solid and well played out even if I do make it sound like an amature drama, Bold and the Beautiful style dog's breakfast.
'But what of the actual production?' I hear you cry out like the well educated and sophisticated fanbase that you are. Well let me first say that I had some very real reservations about this series. Wuthering Heights is a classic in English literature and many attempts have been made in the past to adapt it to either movie or tv. They range from somewhat lacking to an absolutely souless, abomination made by MTV that took the text out of the isolated, turbulent moors of the novel and into a horrible teen drama world with Heathcliff being renamed Heath. But I am happy to say that this adaptation does the original text justice. It knew which angles to take at which points. It knew how to make each and every character so horribly flawed but yet sympathetic and human. It did everything really well. The cast was unfamiliar to me but I'm sure there is some epic bonnet drama enthusiest who'll know who they are but let me tell you that they were spot on. Sure, I had my initial doubts about the actor playing Heathcliff, something about his voice didn't immediately gel. Sure it sounds fussy but Heathcliff is like the most complex and excellent character in the book and if they fucked him up that would be game over in my books. But the man knew what he was doing and I became really immersed in the drama. That said, the first half of the series is definately the weaker of the two. If this adaptation was a disaster movie, the first part would be the annoying character developing stuff at the start where the hero works a dead end job and has 2 kids that his ex-wife won't let him see. Part 2 is the nice beefy intense stuff that I found myself completely drawn into. I came away from the whole production remembering exactly why I loved the book so much and in my eyes if an adaptation makes you do that then it's definately a success.
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