Clarke is a favorite author, but 2001 isn't really a favorite for me among his novels--but that might have something to do with my introduction to this story. My mother dragged me to see the 2001 film when I was five-years-old. I found the psychedelic odyssey among the stars terrifying and cried until my mother was forced to leave the theater before the film ended. Ever after she'd tell the story of how I was a brat and I'd tell the story of how she was callous. So, to a child that last part of the film is scary.
As an adult? Well, I don't recall my reaction when I saw the film next, or if I had read the novel by then, but I imagine the reaction of most would be what Clarke relates in the introduction. He reported Rock Hudson left the film asking "Can someone tell me what the hell this is all about?"
I'm betting that is what sends a lot of people to this novel--and Clarke says some even complain the novel ruins the "mystery" of the film. It was interesting by the way learning this was in a sense a novelization of the film. On the title page it says this is: Based on a screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. Although it in turn was based on a short "The Sentinel" and what Clarke says was material from five other shorts, the novel was simultaneously developed with the film; it's impossible to read this without constantly thinking of the film. Naturally given their origins, they're very faithful renditions of each other, but that only underlines what different experiences they are--the film versus the text. The written form being far less ambiguous and the film more concise.
I think that's particularly brought home by the Part I, "Primeval Night" through the point of view of "Moon-Walker"--a "man-ape" ancestor to humans. I think the film wins here: the eerie music of the obelisk, the brilliant way Kubrick with the toss of a bone tool into the air turns it into a space station--in an instant saying everything needed about the passage of three million years and the power of technology. For me reading the novel pays off in the last part, "Through the Stargate" because I do find the mystifying end to the film more confusing and thus annoying than inspiring. And here the novel clarifies things immensely.
