Author Laila Lalami posted a recent entry on her blog about the trepidation she felt before going to see the newly released film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the post-apocalyptic, months-long journey a father and son make across a landscape that has been annihilated by some unnamed catastrophe that destroyed civilisation and, apparently, almost all life on earth. The book is considered a masterpiece and one of the best literary works of all time, not just of the 21st century.

Lalami writes: “I tried to trick myself into not expecting anything from the movie because I thought that would prevent me from being disappointed.” She goes on to admit that the director did a competent job and Viggo Mortensen (hubba-hubba — my sentiments), who plays the role of the father, does a fine job. Her one complaint, however, was “there was no poetry to this movie and it simply doesn’t do justice to the novel”.

I instinctively understood (and believed) her. You see, it may seem like a little thing — negligible even — this lack of poetry. Some may even wonder, well, what does poetry have to do with a movie? The truth is, for us artsy-fartsy types: everything.

For book lovers, whenever a beloved book is optioned, there’s some anxiety that bloodsucking Hollywood will bleed out the very soul of the book and render our love for it redundant. For book lovers, that’s an existential nightmare of the highest order. It just is. Books mean everything to us. We don’t care for movie makers and their sacrilege, all in the name of turning a buck.

Lalami is not, for the record, a movie critic. But she doesn’t have to be, in my book. It’s actually better that she’s not. In matters concerning movie adaptations, I prefer to read a writer’s take rather than a reviewer’s, anyway. At least with a writer, I know they would have watched the film from the shared emotional point of view of examining the work for the juxtaposition of truth and beauty.

So I felt Lalami’s pain. McCarthy’s novel is, despite its bleakness, simply stunning. It led Oprah to choose it as one of her book club picks and doggedly pursue the famously reclusive author for an interview. The sun, in the novel, is obscured by a layer of ash left in the wake of the holocaust and the father and son, who remain unnamed throughout that trek to reach the sea, for other ‘good people’ like themselves, must of necessity breathe through masks. In that desolate landscape, plants do not grow. And the surviving remnants of humanity are reduced to cannibalism and violence. The sun, which stands for light and life, is covered. The only vague hope is of finding the sea — water — which is the embodiment of rebirth, baptism, hope, etc. How can all the layers of meaning held in these metaphors be realistically portrayed on a movie screen?

The disaster genre is clearly not new; it’s been done on various scales — Lord of the Flies is one example that springs to mind. How do people behave under extreme pressure in the face of catastrophe? Stephen King’s latest, Under the Dome, is another. But McCarthy’s rendering of this doomed world is unequivocally exquisite. It gets the reader to really consider what it would be like if he were to find himself in a similar predicament. For the seekers among us, a question that confronts us is this: is this the state of affairs the world finds itself in after the rapture the Christian church tells us about? Is The Road therefore an allegory for the tenets and beliefs of Judaeo-Christianity, with the dying father who must get his son to safety before his time on earth expires? So many philosophical questions are posed in The Road. And so elegantly. How can the poetry (the man and boy are “each the other’s world entire”) be adequately translated on a 60-foot movie screen? But perhaps it was too much to expect that a film could do a work of this order justice. Films seldom can.

Which made me think about the film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s 2002 blockbuster The Lovely Bones, which is now in limited release in the United States. I bought this book in 2004 and, after reading it, was even more convinced that I had to continue to tell my own stories. Since then, I whip it out occasionally and reread some parts. When I heard, a couple of years ago, that it was being made into a movie, I was excited. I don’t usually like movie adaptations of books; the price of the compromise of art for commerce is usually too steep. I think movies should be made from original screenplays. But I absolutely loved this book and wanted to see what a director of Peter Jackson’s pedigree would do with it.

The Lovely Bones tells the story of Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who, before page 15, is raped, murdered and her body dismembered by a next-door neighbour. She spends the rest of the time narrating from heaven as she watches how her death affects her loved ones, eventually destroying her parents’ marriage. It’s a brilliant portrayal of the powder keg and complexity that is family life. Additionally, I was profoundly moved by Sebold’s portrayal of Susie’s heaven, which, like the one in Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven, describes an afterlife that I wasn’t taught about at Sunday School; an afterlife, frankly speaking, I find more intriguing than the one proposed in the Bible. (Really, for someone like me who is easily bored, how can the notion of sitting around and worshipping Jesus for eternity be vaguely appealing?)

Anyway.

So, imagine my disappointment when I read a recent article on the Daily Beast, entitled ‘Sanitising the Bones’, which noted that Jackson (Lord of the Rings) had completely excised the rape scene — the lynchpin rape scene, people! — and hadn’t depicted the murder onscreen. His excuse: he wanted to make a film teenagers could watch. In other words, he wanted the film to get a PG-13 rating, instead of an R. In other words, ka-ching at the cash register. To add insult, he cuts scenes of the mother’s affair with the police investigator. Hello? How can this be? The adultery represents a sort of point of no return for this marriage in the wake of inestimable tragedy.

Part of the reason that we empathise with Susie and believe her from her new digs in heaven is that we witnessed the grotesqueness of how she, an innocent, was lured to her death. Personally, I’d never before fully appreciated the sacred duty we have, as adults, to our children until I read Sebold’s account of the neighbour’s nonchalant manipulation and breaking of the contract of trust, which only lends that much more poignancy to Susie’s voice from heaven. It is a powerful piece of writing, a poem, really, about mourning and unspeakable loss.

So to hear that all that is excluded from the movie (teens can’t watch a director’s expert editing of this scene, but they can absorb every lurid detail of Tiger Woods’ secret life of creeping?) is depressing to me and strengthens the opinion I’ve had all along: books and movies should never mix. As one fan of the book articulated: “To make Lovely Bones without the rape is like making The Titanic and leaving out the iceberg.”

Amen, brother. I won’t bother to see the film; I want to preserve my fond memories of the book.