In which the blogger is played by Pierce Brosnan

The apparent unfilmability of the sensuous evocations of Patrick Suskind's Perfume was the staple lead of many reviews of the new movie, as if the novel itself wafted those smells from its pages. In response, the spirited blogger Jahsonic asks What makes a novel unfilmable? and begins a tentative checklist: "plotnessness, philosophical introspections". "Being a novel" would be my first suggestion. A novel should be a novel because it cannot be anything else. The hype generated by an adaptation as an adaptation indicates a lack of faith in its original form, most obviously a lack in the original's cultural authority, but also the residual lack inherent to all art. A question borne on this lack is the one that excites me, drives my entire interest in writing: what cannot be written? Most novels seem only too possible.

Proust's In Search of Lost Time is not unfilmable yet the three attempts I've seen have been at best disappointing. They're just films, while Proust's novel is somehow more and less than a novel. Harold Pinter's screenplay for Joseph Losey never got made probably because it responded in kind to the radicalism of the novel's form. The radio version of the screenplay confirmed to me Stanley Kaufmann's statement that it is "the best screen adaptation ever made of a great work and that it is in itself a work of genius". It wouldn't be congenial to commercial cinema in which adaptations are a means of obscuring the residual lack, turning a unique novel into "a major motion picture".

However, last week, the BBC went against the grain when it announced that plans to make a drama about the cold-blooded murder of Jean Charles de Menezes had been dropped. While some suspect political motives and the producer sees it as a betrayal of de Menezes family, I doubt the film would have done anything but give the murderers and those in the media who spread disinformation in the immediate and crucial aftermath, the benefit of the doubt, the doubt inherent to art.