Pillars of the Earth

Just finished this weekend watching the brilliant adaptation of the above on the TV. Ah, I wonder whether, one day, the words Based on the novel by David Palin will ever appear on the screen. If they do, I hope they will be appended to something as impressive. Having attempted to write a screenplay of my first novella, For Art’s Sake, and with the first glimmer of some possibilities of that being considered for production, I view everything through the pregnant autumnal mist of possibility at the moment. It was interesting to see how much the ending of Pillars had been changed, but if a song can be interpreted a few different ways, why not a novel? I read the book so many years ago that I’d forgotten huge chunks of it. What I saw on the screen seemed right. It worked. The audience almost certainly got the ending it craved. There are more ways of hanging William Hamleigh, it seems.