The miniseries is a romance not a realistic novel.
I have a liking for the long form in television ever since I saw the twenty six half hour episodes of “Victory at Sea” in the Fifties, the bass narrator and the Richard Rodgers score accompanying the film record of naval battles in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters. Although the sitcom was a weekly half hour episode, you could think of it as also a miniseries in that it was a set of seasons, five to seven years long, from “All in the Family” to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” to “Cheers” and “Friends” and “Seinfeld”, all of which exhausted their possibilities by the time the series ended. There was nothing else to say. I felt the same of “The West Wing”, which follows an administration something akin to reality, or at least a Liberal version of one, until a successor President comes into office, predicting it would be a minority President before Obama became one. And I was struck by the miniseries “Band of Brothers” which followed the 82nd Airborne Division from the training for D Day to past the end of the war while the heroes were still in Europe, the story having rightly ended in that what happened to these heroes in the Fifties and afterwards was irrelevant. “The Best Years of Our Lives” was a different story. And so I am not surprised that television dramas also take the long form, particularly the HBO miniseries “The Queen’s Gambit”, which uses seven hour long episodes to tell its story and which I have seen through for three times, just as I have seen the run of “The West Wing” three times. The long form was invented by Charles Dickens who allowed himself digressions to side characters and subplots whatever the main matter of the story was whatever the coincidences required to tie these together so as to provide the full amplitude of life while Jane Austen was based on expanding the form of a play and, even further back, Fielding was posing as a mock epic to structure “Tom Jones”, itself a mighty saga filled with outrage and uncertainty. And so I come to “The Queen’s Gambit” not quite that glorious but a very successful bildungsroman worthy of Dickens, which is no faint praise indeed.
“The Queen’s Gambit” is a romance. That does not mean it is about love, which is a subsidiary theme in this story of many entwined themes, nor is it restricted to the novel, though the miniseries is based on one, and some critics think that all ancient epics are novels though I am dubious because protagonists in novels need not be heroes while in epics they are. There needs to be something added to the novel to make it heroic and one way of doing that is a romance, which is about a low born protagonist who accomplishes great achievements and becomes a hero. This is a kind of story that is very old. Young David was a shepard who slew Goliath and through a variety of subsequent adventures, became King of Israel. Arthur pulls the sword from the stone and becomes King and head of the Round Table. In doing so, the quest to the top is accompanied with great formality and courtesy. Moses is raised by his mother in the guise of a nursemaid in the household of royalty and therefore capable of becoming princely. Gawain, in the comic version of the romance in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, afronts the process by having sex with an attractive lady, but he is not badly punished because, after all, she was an attractive nuisance. Similarly, James Fenimore Cooper and much of Herman Melville are romances, as my college professor, Quinton Anderson, said, and so, I would add, is Ayn Rand, who makes the architect in “The Fountainhead” triumph over the adversity of plebeians who would drag him down into being ordinary. It is easy enough to confuse this book with political theory and even eminent people can make the mistake. For her part, the protagonist in “The Queen’s Gambit” is an orphan or, worse, the daughter of a demented mother, and she becomes the best chess player in the world. A wonderful fantasy of achievement even if critics say it is unrealistic to see alcoholism so easily cured. Well, it is a romance and so great transformations can take place and viewers can imagine they occur in their own lives.
The texture of the story is chess, which is like a number of other competitions in that it is clearly and ultimately and everywhere ranked in that everyone knows where they stand in the ratings. Thaty also happens with mathematicians and Nobel Prize physicists who are recognized as gifted and destined for greatness since they were children. It is clear even in academics or law where honors and vitas attest to relative achievement levels. It is not true of politicians who have very different kinds of abilities, some show horses and some work horses, and where circumstance plays a large role in determining who will rise to the top of the greasy pole, and much less for ordinary people who manage to get through their disparate lives and come to be thought, like Willy Loman, a kind of hero only by a loved one. The juice and satisfaction of Beth Harmon, our protagonist, is that the viewer thrills as she moves up in the ranks, surprising her competitors and officials, from being unranked to astonishing people by overcoming state champions and then the U. S. champion and then, after setbacks, into becoming the best chess player of all by beating the Soviet champion. She acknowledges her courtesy by publicly acknowledging those who helped her along the way, sure to call back to her childhood friend, but finally she is so exalted that her only true peers are the old men who play chess in the parks in Moscow. Meeting the American President is merely an obligation. This story is a romance because the heroine comes to be her true nature as that is recognized by all as her nature, and that hope or ambition is so satisfying, so exhilerating, to contemplate even if so rarely accomplished. These are rewards not only of hard work but an unalienated expression of what you are and so more magnificent than getting a raise or being promoted. Your own self is what triumphs over adversity.
But the miniseries is not just about chess. What makes it exceptional is how it intersects with other aspects of ordinary life that are part of the furniture of life but not resolved into its major theme, remaining quizzical in how they are coexisting. There is the matter of friendship. Beth becomes friends of chess players along the way she has successively defeated, each in tribute to their superior prowess and becoming assets to her team, though at the end she has to rely on herself to solve her greatest challenge, another aspect of how complete is her heroism and the fantasy of a romance. But there are other friendships. She comes to appreciate and value her adopted mother, defending her name to her adopted father who held her adopted mother in poor regard. Beth found it difficult to adjust to losing her adopted mother just as she had mourned losing her birth mother. And then she rediscovers a friend from the orphanage who correctly tells her that they are a real family even if it had been created by having been dropped into an orphanage. Beth has had a history made through her life rather than just thrust upon her. All these people can be relied on and sustain us emotionally whatever the circumstances were that came them across. The miniseries is full of the juxtapositions, not just friendship, of just growing up. There is her first period and youthful sexual experiments and the long term challenge of drink and drug abuse which threatens to seriously endanger her talents and her own self. The series allows her to triumph over all adversities and that makes the viewer feel good because she becomes able to buy good clothes and seem accomplished as well as admired.
There are other insights that the miniseries provides. One is the settings. The orphanage is an old and grim bhilding. She learns chess from the janitor who works in the basement and for the rest of his life keeps clippings of her activities. Also important is the house of her adopted parents that she buys and repairs so that it is truly her home, however much that is not enough to satisfy her demons because she goes into an alcohol decline before being rescued by her old orphanage friend. But that place, in its Fifties decoration is also a true home, just like the orphanage she finally goes back to visit and so makes her ready for her ultimate triumph. And the acting is just superb. Anya Turner-Joy is able to express the insularity of her character in her expressions, the cinematographer moving into numerous closeups that earn the accolade that silent stars had faces rather than mere words. The rest of the cast are each memorable, including the awkward state champion who teaches her what she can know from him about chess and life before going on to higher tests and development, and the adopted mother, played by Marielle Heller, a most formidable actress who conveys to the role both pretentiousness and gloom and decency to accomplish some kind of life, and by her end manages it, a story that can stand alone as a novel but is subsidiary to the main ones, just as Miss Havisham is a character in Pip’s life, a robust story enclosed within the life of the people in “Great Expectations”, this ability to have people intersect one of the triumphs of all novels.
The miniseries is superior to the novel even though it very closely follows the incidents of the novel. That is because the author, Walter Tavis, is not a very good writer, just a set of scenes that might have provided a screenplay for a director to craft into a movie by adding pacing and characteristic moves of the camera and thanks to the superb casting and settings to accompany them and that make a movie flow as a distinct entity, just as good novelists supply a style that is distinctive and ties its parts together under a common authorial toned whether or not the author is present as is true in the great Victorian novel, by intruding comments along the way. So Tavis doesn’t rise itself to literature, while the miniseries directed by Scott Frank does.
While many novels show the aspirations characters have in their times and the politics in which the events of their times are set, I think neither the novel or the miniseries make a mark on the state of the times about when it is set. The dates could be anytime after when chess was well developed, and so the novel and miniseries are unlike George Eliot whose works are of the decade being written about and George Orwell is about the British Thirfties and Jane Austen would not make sense outside the Regency Era however universal are her themes. What is accomplished is an indelible and distinctive and complex set of characters, especially its protagonist, and a feel for the world of chess, and those are sufficient and worthwhile endeavors and so worth rerunning and savoring.