Five years behind everyone else, we recently watched the Netflix The Queen’s Gambit, starring Anya Taylor-Joy as fictional 1960s chess prodigy Beth Harmon, and hugely enjoyed it.
It’s not just the superb performances of Anya Taylor-Joy and the rest of the cast (including Thomas Brodie-Sangster, briefly on Doctor Who on TV and less briefly on Game of Thrones); it’s the amazing use of interior sets in Berlin, and exteriors there and in Toronto, to look like a dozen major cities worldwide, from Mexico to Moscow. One really felt a (totally confected) sense of time and place.
I know that everyone else watched it during the first lockdown, and you were all quite right to do so.
Back in 2005 I read a book by Walter Tevis whose protagonist has extraordinary talents but descends into addiction, particularly to alcohol, and which was then adapted very successfully for the screen: The Man Who Fell to Earth, remembered mainly for the film version starring David Bowie. At this distance I don’t remember much about it, except that it’s pretty depressing, as the alien hero ends up as a crushed victim of cruel humanity.
The Queen’s Gambit is more optimistic. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
“Yes, ma’am.” Beth was seated in the straight-backed chair in front of Mrs. Deardorff’s desk. Fergussen had come and taken her from study hall. It was eleven in the morning. She had not been in this office for over three years.
It would have been very easy to slip into the rabbit hole of chess jargon and make it substitute for telling a story, but Tevis manages to make the chess serve the plot, and we’re in no doubt that it’s a story about a person rather than a game. Here’s a list of differences between the novel and the TV show, of which I think the most important is that Beth in the novel is not as pretty as Anya Taylor-Joy – young Beth sees herself as ugly, though Jolene tells her when they reunite that “You ain’t ugly anymore anyhow.” That of course is one of the demands of the screen format – you have to cast attractive stars and make them look pretty, unlike on the printed page. (Also in the book, Beth doesn’t get seduced by a sexy woman in Paris, she just gets outplayed by Borgov; but that makes for less exciting television.)
Otherwise I was rather impressed by how the series stayed true to the narrative arc of the book, and enjoyed the book as much as I did the show, which was a lot. You can get it here.
One of my personal minor historical fixations is the famous round-robin tournament in April 1979 where the unrated Garry Kasparov, who turned 16 during the event, won against 15 international grand masters including former world champion Tigran Petrosian. (The USSR had sent Kasparov by mistake, under the impression that it was a youth tournament.) The event was held in Banja Luka, then in Yugoslavia, where I later lived for fifteen months in 1997-98, and I have always wondered exactly where the venue was. Here’s an interview with Kasparov, showing a nice picture of him playing Petrosian, but without enough clues to show which building it is in. It could possibly be the Banski Dvor, which was the major cultural venue at the time.
