Lark Rise to Candleford Lark Rise to Candleford question


4 views
Adaptation, narrative, and themes
Elspeth Rushbrook Elspeth May 09, 2016 03:58AM
This is a good example of how a book cannot be separated from its screen (or stage) adaptation. Some have conceded guiltily that the television series brought them to the book - but I see nothing to apologise for there. This is Good Reads - but why not also Good Watches, and have a place for the fluidity between the different media's telling of a story?

I was very disappointed when I read the book, and very admiring of screenwriter and series devisor Bill Gallagher at the BBC. He took Flora's tiny mentions of characters and ideas and made whole plot themes out of them. Yet the book, as most on here comment, has little narrative at all. As a fiction writer myself, I miss Bill's careful plotting in the books, and found that the "fluid" prose as Kate's post so eloquently explained was not enough, even though I too appreciate and probably write in a slower style.

I've identified that each episode has a theme which is not always the obvious one: as they say in the film industry, there's what's your film about, and then what's it really about. The two main strands in each episode explore something, often to do with poverty (as did Gaskell's highly similar Cranford). For a series that's considered sweet by some, it tackles difficult and diachronic themes, such as domestic violence, hierarchy of society, or love and loss, the way that the state handles poverty and debt. The slightly hidden theme unites the strands of the episodes

I wondered if others would be interested in discussing these?



back to top