High-flown fiction ... scene from Angel

I'm rarely actually scared of seeing a film - the last time was when I was in the audience for Gaspar Noé's Irréversible, and found myself squirming and flinching and whimpering five minutes before it had even started.

For a very different reason, I am scared to see François Ozon's Angel, which is due for release here in a few weeks. The reason is that it is based on one of my favourite novels, Elizabeth Taylor's 1957 masterpiece Angel, and I am scared in case he messes it up, or gets it wrong or even that he re-interprets or changes it in some perfectly admissible way that I hadn't anticipated.

Elizabeth Taylor is one of those novelists, like Patrick Hamilton or John Cowper Powys, who are forever being lost and then lavishly, briefly, "rediscovered". Perhaps ironically hampered in part by sharing a name with a famous Hollywood star, Taylor never enjoyed the acclaim that she should have with her shrewd and insightful portraits of provincial life. Her great novel Angel is in fact partly about the awful perishability of literary reputations.

It's about a cheesy and absurd romantic novelist of the Edwardian era called Angelica Deverell, generally known as "Angel", whose ridiculous high-flown fictions of grand ladies and gentlemen are jeered at by the cognoscenti but sell like hot cakes with the public. She is based, partly, on novelists such as Marie Corelli or Rhoda Broughton, once wildly popular and wealthy and now, of course, utterly forgotten. A more familiar comparison might be Georgette Heyer.

With elegance, clarity, effortless wit and brilliant observational touches - and over just 250 pages - Taylor shows the complete span of Angel's life. First, the vain, aloof schoolgirl, imaginative yet delusional, fiercely resentful of her demeaningly modest background, living with her widowed mother above a humble shop. She spins her yearning for a different existence into a miraculous untrained talent for fiction, filling notebooks with reams of stuff.

Then there is the fabulously wealthy novelist, with bizarre and eccentric tastes in clothes and furnishing, living as she imagines a high-born person in public life should live, bullying and browbeating her publisher Theo, her poor mother and a Miss Nora Howe-Nevinson, the mousy-genteel lady of some means who consents to be her "companion", although this position is entirely asexual.

Finally: there is the tragicomically imperious and batty old lady, living in the grand house she had always wanted to buy - shades of Dickens and Gad's Hill - obsessed with the memory of her husband Esmé, Nora's ne'er-do-well brother. He was a minor painter who cynically married Angel for her money and kept an awful secret from her, a secret in which Nora and Theo are miserably complicit until the very end.

Each of these stages is instantly, stunningly plausible. Even though Taylor makes clear that everyone is always laughing at her, she brings off the considerable trick of inducing protective sympathy in the reader, and even a kind of awe at her crazy talent, perhaps genius, as mysterious in its origin as that of a genuinely great artist. Moreover, she never directly quotes a single line of Angel's books; perhaps Taylor considered that pastiche was too showy and studied a literary effect.

Evelyn Waugh, I think, would have been proud to have created Angel and Nora, though he would probably have made them more minor characters, concentrating on their dotage in the run-down house and icily withheld the compassion they receive from Taylor. And they are a little like something from Dickens.

Who could film such a book? My own feeling is that, published in 1957 as it was, the novel came sadly a bit too late for the great days of the Ealing comedy. Perhaps if it had been written just five or 10 years earlier, the dream team of Robert Hamer and John Dighton could have set to work on it, just as they worked on Roy Horniman's obscure 1907 novel Israel Rank, and turned it into Kind Hearts And Coronets, starring Dennis Price as Louis Mazzini, the Edwardian serial killer who rises to a dukedom. Like Angel, Louis resents his humble station and glories in his social elevation.

"Who else could film Angel?" I wondered, when I first read it. The only other directors who vaguely occurred to me were the Maysles brothers who made Grey Gardens, about two impossible old ladies in an impossible old house.

François Ozon is an intriguing candidate. His movie, 5x2, showing the decline of a marriage in a series of scenes in reverse order, is a sort of masterpiece on its own. But will he "get" Angel? Will he get its Englishness, its humour, its absurdity and gentleness? Or will he over-emphasise its macabre quality?

I'm nervous about finding out. Meanwhile, if you haven't read Angel by Elizabeth Taylor, there's a treat in store for you.