Pascali's Island: Barry Unsworth's Novel and the 1988 Ben Kingsley Film Are Both Excellent
My copy is the Penguin film tie-in, secondhand, cover soft at the corners, Ben Kingsley’s face floating over a block of hot orange. Usually a tie-in edition is a warning sign. It means the book is being sold on the back of a film, and the film is generally the reason nobody bothers with the book afterwards. This one is the exception. The novel is very good and the film is very good, and they are good in different enough ways that neither spoils the other.
The setup is simple. It is 1908, on a small Greek island still nominally Ottoman, in the last months before the whole arrangement falls apart. Basil Pascali has spent twenty years as a paid informer, writing regular reports to Constantinople on the doings of his neighbours. The money arrives. No reply ever does. Not one, in twenty years. Nobody has ever acknowledged a single thing he wrote, and he has slowly built an entire inner life around the possibility that somewhere in a filing room his words are being read by someone who matters.
Then an Englishman turns up calling himself an archaeologist, wanting a lease to dig, and Pascali is hired as his translator.
The book
The whole novel is Pascali’s final report, which means you get everything through a narrator who lies for a living, embellishes when the truth is dull, and is jealous, cowardly, snobbish and terribly sad all at once. He is half English himself, which makes him an outsider twice over, tolerated by the Greeks, useful to the Turks, at home nowhere. He is also in love with Lydia, an Austrian painter who is fond of him in the way people are fond of a clever pet, and who takes rather more interest in the Englishman.
Unsworth is very good at heat and dust and the particular claustrophobia of a small place where everyone can see you. Under two hundred pages, hardly a wasted scene, and it tightens steadily until the last section, which I won’t touch. It was shortlisted for the Booker in 1980 and lost, in a brutal year that also had Burgess and Golding on the list. Americans got it under the title The Idol Hunter, which is a worse title but a fair description of what Bowles is actually doing.
The film
James Dearden wrote and directed the 1988 version, the year after he wrote Fatal Attraction, and he does something adaptations rarely manage. He keeps the report. Kingsley narrates in that formal, wheedling, faintly obsequious register, addressing a Sultan who has never once answered, and it holds the film together the way the prose holds the book together. Kingsley sweats and ingratiates and watches. Charles Dance is exactly right as Bowles, all sunburn and good manners and total plausibility, the kind of Englishman you would lend money to. Helen Mirren gives Lydia a warmth the story badly needs.
Then there is the look of it. Roger Deakins shot this, years before anyone outside the industry knew his name, on Symi and Rhodes. Whitewash, blue water, low sun, no showing off. It premiered at Cannes, made almost no money, and has been quietly recommended by people ever since.
Order doesn’t much matter. If you read first you will spend the film watching how faithfully Dearden kept the voice. If you watch first you will hear Kingsley in every line of the prose, which is no bad thing.
Either way, both.