Thus, although the film echoes the narrative structure of the book, it ends up telling a very different story.

In Keyes’s novel the acquisition and loss of intelligence in itself provides the trajectory of tragedy, but in the film this tragedy is vitiated and the focus shifts to the emotional (and, indeed, sexual) consequences for Charlie. Nevertheless, the affect of the film, particularly in the way that intelligence impacts upon Charlie’s personal life, is very different from that of the book. In broad outline, therefore, and with due consideration for the different media, the film accurately translates the narrative events of the novel, though there are odd, minor differences: the action is transposed from New York to Boston, the male Dr Strauss in the novel has become a female Dr Straus, and so on. Accordingly, some sense of Charlie’s first person narrative is preserved in the film’s dialogue. In the main, though, the burden of this advance and retreat is carried not through text but through Robertson’s voice slow and hesitant in the early part, more confident and fluent as the story progresses. When Charlie corrects the spelling of ‘school’ on the board, it is the first sign that the medical procedure is having an effect. The adaptation acknowledges this in its title (a form of the name absent from the book) and in the reminders that Charlie writes to himself on a little blackboard at the end of each day. The novella and novel are narrated exclusively through Charlie Gordon’s ‘Progris Riport’, and Keyes uses orthography to indicate Charlie’s mental state: we first become aware that Charlie is regressing when apostrophes disappear from the text. The story is deceptively simple: a mentally retarded man takes part in an experimental surgical procedure which turns him into a genius, but the effect is short lived and he regresses to his original state. The novel became the basis for the film, produced by Robertson and for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor. Keyes subsequently expanded the novella into a novel, also titled Flowers for Algernon (1966), which went on to win a Nebula Award for Best Novel. Since Robertson had already seen other television dramas in which he had appeared turned into successful movies with other actors, in this instance he bought the movie rights to the story himself. In 1961 it was adapted for the live television drama series The United State’s Steel Hour as ‘The Two Worlds of Charley Gordon’, starring Cliff Robertson. It is several years old now, and the book for which I wrote it no longer seems to be a thing, so I’m putting it here.įlowers for Algernon, one of the most powerful and affecting tragedies in science fiction, was first published as a novella in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and went on to win a Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction. This is an essay on the film adaptation of Flowers for Algernon.

Flowers for algernon 1966