Interview with writer Tom Edge
Interview with writer Tom Edge
Published: 31 August 2017
I think we all know J.K. Rowling’s stature in the publishing world. There is an inevitable playfulness when you understand that this is Jo as Galbraith looking at the world of publishing
Could you start by introducing us to The Silkworm?
The Silkworm is a real puzzle piece of a novel. It begins as a missing persons inquiry which for Cormoran Strike is a real breath of fresh air. He’s used to trailing people around London as he services divorce cases which pays the rent, but is a fairly unlovely and unstimulating line of work. I think he’s really pleased to be able to do something that is on the side of the angels for once and helping a woman track down her missing husband.
When he is found murdered - and murdered in an incredibly baroque style - this quickly blossoms into an investigation into the circumstances of his killing.
For Strike as well, even though he is on the outside of the investigation, technically he’s not police and should be kept at arm’s length. As he sees the police being led down a series of blind alleys by a killer who has planned this meticulously, he feels that he has to step forward and try and prevent a miscarriage of justice. That’s really what drives him through this.
In terms of the story as a whole, nested underneath all of this is the story of another kind of crime, a deep dark secret that has been buried for 30 years at the heart of London’s literary community, and the events that the story finally bring to light.
How did you work with Kieron Hawkes, the director, in adapting such a dense novel?
Kieron's instincts were to look at the visual side of it first, and perhaps that’s because one of the biggest challenges in The Silkworm was how to realise the world of Bombyx Mori, the arcane sort of novel within a novel that Jo has given us.
In my first few meetings with Kieron, he was sending me images of medieval plate masks and that was tremendously exciting. He had a huge challenge on his hands, finding a visual language to tell that aspect of the story.
How aware are you that you’re interpreting Galbraith’s words and putting them on to the screen? Is that a constant check for you?
Whenever you adapt something you have to have a fidelity to its heart and soul. If you take on a job and you don’t fundamentally like what the book has to say about the world and its point of view on character, then that’s a terrible mistake. Even if you might disagree with some aspects of its construction and so on, you have to have a genuine interest in how that book appears to see the world.
I think when approaching this book, like any other book, I was really looking for its heart and soul. In terms of Strike and Robin and their relationship, what are the deeper themes and how do I respond to those and understand them and how can I shape things around that? As soon as I started looking at what seems to be the novel’s preoccupations, that’s where I begin and built out from there.
Given that these books have such a huge fan base, there’s always a danger that if you remove someone’s favourite scene or so on and so forth, that someone will feel cheated at some point. But I think ultimately if there is a fidelity to the book’s deepest intentions then you’re doing a faithful adaptation.
How do you make sure that there’s a balance between giving away too much and not giving away too much, when you’ve got a lot of characters, suspects and a murder to deal with?
In The Silkworm, yes absolutely it is a complex plot, with multiple suspects weaving in a deep history where there are a ton of surprises and reveals to be found.
It is very challenging to take a book that’s more than 500 pages and distil it into two hours without sending out a diagram to the audience explaining who is who and where and when. But I have a lot of help, there’s a great team at Brontë [the production company] and it is very much not just the writer just sitting in an ivory tower, dispatching pages. It’s an organic process as we collectively try and tease out what matters most.
How much did you feel you needed to go away and look at the publishing world to understand it, or did you feel you got from Galbraith’s book that whoever has written this knows a great deal about publishing so you didn’t need to go any further?
I think we all know J.K. Rowling’s stature in the publishing world. There is an inevitable playfulness when you understand that this is Jo as Galbraith looking at the world of publishing. That’s very joyful.
One of the consistent things about the Galbraith books is they are meticulously researched. On other projects I’ve done, you sometimes get the sense that the writer has invented the world in which their book is set because it hasn’t been their primary concern.
But that’s not how these books are constructed. If you read a scene where a gutter runs into a drain at a specific point outside a pub, absolutely that gutter is to be found, be it in Kettering or anywhere else.
Actually, compared to other projects, I didn’t feel the need to step inside these worlds and ask my own set of questions. I felt those questions had been exhaustively asked and put together for me. Which was nice.
