Is there light as The Luminaries series ends?

Adapting a novel for the screen must be easy if you’re also the source’s creator, right?

Not according to Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries, which won the 2013 Booker Prize.

“It took me five years to write The Luminaries, and another seven to adapt the novel for the screen,” she claims. “As a novelist I tend to write only one draft, constantly circling back to the beginning, and refining as I go; once I reach the end, the book is done. Screenwriting couldn’t be more different.

“By the time we started shooting in late 2018, I had written perhaps 200 drafts of the first episode alone, and throughout the shoot, the scripts continued to change in order to fit the budget and the schedule, both of which got tighter by the day.

“This was often heartbreaking – a novelist never has to cut a scene they think is working! But it could be exhilarating too, as when the set design introduced new possibilities for action, or when the actors had ideas for improvements to their scenes.”

It’s oddly pleasing to hear that this offbeat period drama was made in such an organic manner, with suggestions from all and sundry who must have felt as if they then had a vested interest in the project rather than merely being hired hands.

“Episode six would have wound up quite differently if it hadn’t been for the brilliant plot solutions provided by Eva Green and Márton Csokas (Lydia Wells and Francis Carver), whom I inadvertently offended early in the shoot by referring to their characters as ‘the villains’,” adds Catton.

“I didn’t mean it at all pejoratively – I love villains – but immediately had to backtrack when I saw that I had caused offence. Of course, Eva was Lydia, and Márton was Carver; they experienced the story from their characters’ points of view. For them, it was a tragedy and they were the doomed heroes.”

Now, as her adaptation is coming to an end, the writer is in a reflective mood.

“When The Luminaries was first published, I knew the book so well that if someone opened it and read out three or four words, I could finish the sentence – and then keep going. I can’t do that any more; in fact, when I open the novel now, I start to doubt that I was ever its author in the first place.

“The strangeness is partly due to the fact that the show reinvents the novel so thoroughly, turning the story inside out and back to front, beginning near the end of the book, splitting the narrative into two different timelines, and following characters who in the novel are important but largely obscured.”

She concludes: “In a deeper sense, though, the story no longer feels as though it belongs to me alone. I’ve lived with these characters and this world for all my adult life, and it’s a great feeling, now, to see the story all grown up and leaving home.”

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