Newsday said of In the Company of Men: You walk away from it feeling as if you’ve witnessed a

(Newsday said of In the Company of Men: “You walk away from it feeling as if you’ve witnessed a rape that you’d done nothing to stop.”) And when LaBute’s film of Byatt’s novel opened last year, the reviews commented on the unlikely nature of their coupling, and enumerated its discomforts.”I wasn’t so huge with the English critics,” reflects LaBute “That was my drubbing. It had been a long time coming, and they took their opportunity and thought, ‘We’re going to roll up our sleeves on this one.’” My favourite was a headline from an online journal: “Misogynist Mormon Goes Soft” Biff Bop Pow. Splat.LaBute admits that he was forced to “sing and dance” to persuade the executives at Warner Brothers to let him have Possession in the first place. “I was in the throes of making Nurse Betty, so the films they had to go on were In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors. So they looked at Possession and thought, ‘Why would we want to give you all that money to do it?’ I had to convince them I was ready for it.”You can see why Warner might have been puzzled by the announcement of his candidature.

Continuities of sensibility between these films and Byatt’s work are hard to detect. In the Company of Men (1997) starred Aaron Eckhart as Chad, a water-cooler Iago with a plan to pick some sad-eyed singleton from the office – “young thing, wallflower type, or disfigured in some way” – hook her with his looks and then humiliate her (“Trust me,” he breathes. “She’ll be reaching for her sleeping pills within a week, and we’ll laugh about this till we’re very old men.”) Your Friends & Neighbors (1998) swam with a whole school of middle-class sharks – Jason Patric’s Cary proved the most vicious when he boasted of exacting revenge upon a lover by sending her a letter on hospital notepaper informing her that she had tested positive for Aids. Nurse Betty (2000), the least merciless picture of the three, sent its heroine – a delusional widow played by Ren?Zellweger – from Kansas City to LA to slake her desire for a soap-opera doctor with whom she had developed an obsession. They are not calling cards for studio costume-dramas.Moreover, other writers had already been defeated by the task of turning the book into a movie script. “I was going to do it with Sydney Pollack,” the playwright Peter Shaffer told me recently.

“I took Antonia Byatt to dinner and said to her, ‘You are aware that this book contains 195 pages of fake Browning?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I am aware of that.’ [Byatt's voice, you should know, was rendered in the style of Les Dawson.] ‘What do you expect me to do with them?’ I said ‘Cut them,’ she said. So we were on the right wavelength.” But, Shaffer reflected, he “dithered over it” and was distracted by work on his play The Gift of the Gorgon, and the job was eventually passed to David Hare. (Hare’s draft was never filmed, but its time-shifting structure probably helped him to measure out The Hours.)To the surprise of many, LaBute did not sharpen the spiky elements of the book. Roland’s nasty landlady was replaced by the indulgent fairy godfather of Tom Hollander.