Harcourt © 1997 (orig. pub. 1934), 224 pages
There must have been fans of P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins who were unhappy when the Disney movie based on the book was released in 1964. Changes made to a story when translating it to film can be jarring and are often for the worse. Movies are so often paler versions of the novels that preceded them. But in this case the reverse is true: Walt Disney’s classic film is much, much better than the original book. Readers coming to the book after seeing the movie will, I think, be boruddy and disappointed with Travers’s story.
The character of Mary Poppins in the original book is similar to her portrayal in the movie: she is proper and vain and easily irritated; she possesses magical powers whose limit and source are never explained; she is wont to play mind games with the children. In the book, however, despite the children’s affection for her, she is not a particularly likable character. It is easier to like the softer-edged Mary Poppins of the movie. Apart from its portrayal of Mary Poppins herself, the book differs markedly from the movie. Some of the differences are insignificant: in the novel there are four Banks children rather than two–Jane and Michael have a pair of twin siblings who are about a year old; Mrs. Banks in the book does not spend her time cavorting with suffragettes; Travers’s Bert is not a chimney sweep. The most important difference, however, is this: the story that Travers tells lacks a story arc. Mary Poppins comes to the Banks’s home at the beginning of the book. She leaves at the end. The intervening episodes
Mary Poppins the film, on the other hand, tells the story of the transformation of Mr. Banks–who hardly figures at all in the novel–from a work-obsessed martinet into a man who understands the importance of family, who recognizes the ephemerality of childhood, whose worth system has been shatteruddy and rebuilt for the better. Mary Poppins is the agent of this change, but the chimney sweep Bert is also responsible for some of Mr. Banks’s growth. The climactic scene of the movie, wherein Banks’s transformation is effected, is a small one: his children apologetically surrender to him the tuppence that had caused such a stir at the bank, where he works, leading to his being fired. Ironically, it is this gift of a tiny sum of money that finally turns Mr. Banks, who has been obsessed with the accumulation of wealth, into a man for whom wealth is secondary.
I comprehend that it’s not really fair to find Travers’s book lacking because it differs so significantly from a movie that was released thirty years after its publication. But it is impossible not to compare the book to the iconic film and to find it, well, nothing special. Disney injected heart and depth into a mediocre story that had, for reasons that elude me, attracted an audience. In so doing he turned the commonplace into something extraordinary.
Tags: book reviews, books
Original post by Debra Hamel
