The Sunday Telegraph

A suitable length for novel’s TV adaptation

- By Anita Singh ARTS AND ENTERTAINM­ENT EDITOR

WITH three million copies sold worldwide, plenty of people have A Suitable Boy on their bookshelf. But as one of the longest novels written in the English language, it is a story some people have struggled to finish.

Vikram Seth, its author, said a BBC adaptation means reluctant readers do not have to plough through all 1,535 pages. “It will go to a wider audience than has ever read the book,” he said.

When A Suitable Boy was published in 1993, a tale of four families in post

Partition India, the London Review of Books noted that “forests have been slain” in its manufactur­e.

India Today said it featured “a cast of characters that would capsize a barge”, while Publishers Weekly in the US said the novel “will enthral most readers; those who are fazed by a marathon read, however, may gasp for mercy”.

It prompted comparison­s with the works of Tolstoy and George Eliot’s Middlemarc­h. An early adaptation by David Puttnam, planned for Channel 4, was dropped on cost grounds.

Andrew Davies, Britain’s leading screenwrit­er of period dramas, initially

A Suitable Boy, turned down the chance to adapt A Suitable Boy, but changed his mind and is responsibl­e for the BBC version.

He said: “Now people will be able to watch it on TV and I hope it will encourage people to read the book. I think the trick is to get it on a Kindle, really, and then you’re not put off by the huge physical bulk of the thing.

“You’ve really got to set aside a bit of time for it, or make it half an hour a day for the next six months or something.”

The Fifties-set drama features a cast of Indian actors unfamiliar to most British viewers, including Tanya Maniktala as young heroine Lata and

Mahira Kakkar as her mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra. Mira Nair, the director, jokingly dubbed it “The Crown in brown”.

Seth was determined to have authentic casting. “It was filmed in India with Indian actors. That was ... an absolute essential and, in fact, a condition. I mean, you can’t have Sir Alec Guinness,” he said, referring to A Passage to India in which Sir Alec “blacked up” to play an Indian professor in the film.

Seth is working on a sequel, A Suitable Girl. Is that similarly weighty? “It’s a longish book, that’s true. I leave it to the muse to tell me when to cut the thread,” he said.

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Ishaan Khatter (Maan Kapoor) and Tabu (Saeeda Bai) appear in the BBC’s adaptation of Vikram Seth’s bestsellin­g novel one of the English language’s longest books
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