Could such prodigies really be so hard to find? The more I thought about it, however, the more determined I became to truffle out – for my own satisfaction, if nothing else – some examples of the rare celluloid exceptions: occasions when a demonstrably fine literary work has been adapted into an equally fine piece of cinema. I suppose that's why some of the most satisfying screen adaptations have been television serials – from the definitive 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice to the one that looms over them all, ITV's Brideshead Revisited – which allowed itself a luxurious 659 minutes to cover the novel's 350-odd pages, and with its unapologetic reliance on voiceover devolved, at some points, into little more than a recital of the printed text with accompanying footage of country houses and fey young men in white linen suits. This point might seem to be obvious, but it holds good: any two-hour feature film which attempts to render, in cinematic terms, the full complexity of a serious novel-length work of fiction is almost certainly doomed. 'Well, in Dostoevsky's novel there are many, many words and all of them have a function.' 'You mean that theoretically,' Truffaut prompted, 'a masterpiece is something that has already found its perfection of form, its definitive form.' 'Exactly,' Hitchcock answered, 'and to really convey that in cinematic terms, substituting the language of the camera for the written word, one would have to make a six to ten-hour film. And even if I did, it probably wouldn't be any good.' 'Why not?' Truffaut asked. To which the director answered: 'Well, I shall never do that, precisely because Crime and Punishment is somebody else's achievement. The question Truffaut specifically put to him was whether he would ever consider making a screen adaptation of a great novel such as Crime and Punishment. Looking a little more closely at what Hitchcock said gives us a clear explanation of why this is so often the case. And none of these examples is a travesty, exactly, although we could all name some of those if we wanted to: film history – especially recent film history – is littered with examples where a good novel has been transformed, not into an average movie, but an outright disaster: Captain Corelli's Mandolin and The Bonfire of the Vanities spring immediately to mind. Pride and Prejudice could possibly be on the first, but neither Robert Z Leonard's nor Joe Wright's adaptations will make the second. Joyce's Ulysses might well be on the first list, but Joseph Strick's Ulysses (1967) certainly won't be on the second.

Draw up one of those faintly ludicrous but fascinating lists of the 20 greatest novels, and then do the same for movies: do they match up, at all? Of course not. I accepted the offer at once, and then almost immediately wondered what I'd let myself in for: because the truth is that 99 times out of 100, I'm with Hitchcock on this one.

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