NCTE President-Elect Valerie Kinloch, the Renée and Richard Goldman Dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Education, moderated the discussion with the show’s creator, lead actor, and executive producer Ethan Hawke and with the novel’s author and fellow show executive producer James McBride. It is told through the perspective of the protagonist, Onion, a newly freed Black youth. True to McBride’s novel, the adaptation tells a story about abolitionist-crusader John Brown and his historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. The series, which premiered on Showtime on Sunday, Octoto positive reviews from critics, is an adaptation of the novel “The Good Lord Bird” by author James McBride, which received the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) recently sponsored an online conversation about the book-to-film adaptation process that centered on the release of the new Showtime® limited series, “The Good Lord Bird.” Many have been memorable experiences that brought the characters and stories vividly to life. Unexpectedly, this final section of the book really takes wing and almost redeems what I think is a missed opportunity.Over the years, Hollywood has adapted many books into movies and TV shows. Twain himself was an expert on local dialect (he had the advantage of employing a freed slave as a butler) and identifies seven in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.Īfter the inevitable tragedy of Harper’s Ferry when most of Brown’s men are killed, or captured and subsequently hanged, Onion finds his way to Philadelphia and freedom. His language is a kind of sub-Mark Twain, ludicrously overcooked (he describes a skirmish thus: ‘The Old Man’s men was confident, shooting dead-on and putting a hurting on ’em’). Onion, although occupying hundreds of pages, is never interesting or even fully realised. Even the great Frederick Douglass is nervous of going to war with Brown, who is almost invariably wrong in his strategic decisions. McBride’s other running joke is that most of the slaves have not the slightest interest in being liberated. All Brown’s followers nod off when he quotes, endlessly and highly eccentrically, from the Bible. Brown’s endless praying seems to be a comedic line that McBride has overinvested in it becomes extremely tedious, a joke flogged to death. The book appears to be very random, as though the author and his editor had failed to spot that there are a troublesome number of repetitions and inconsistencies. This is not the only rather arbitrary plot device. For some reason that is never explained, Onion is dressed as the daughter of a slave, and John Brown takes charge of the child, whom he regards as a talisman.
The Good Lord Bird, McBride, a musician and novelist, enlists an entirely fictional character called Onion, a boy of about 12, to tell the story.
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