Andrew Davies’s triumphant TV series has caused sales of Tolstoy’s epic to soar. Here are five more broad reads to fill the gap – from Finnegans Wake to Gravity’s Rainbow. And every one is ripe for the small screenLet the bells ring. War and Peace concludes in triumph. 5.7m viewers can’t be mistaken. The critics agree: the man did it. He crammed Tolstoy’s massive quarts into half a dozen pint pots. Genius in a box set. Andrew Davies,reportedly, is signing up for Les Misérables. No warbling. No subtitles. If it has to be Victor Hugo I rather wish he’d gone for Toilers of the Sea, or just to see how TV handled the giant squid (beats Moby-Dick any day of the week). Davies’s breakthrough was Middlemarch,long ago in 1994. It was a book which Victorians like Trollope thought far too difficult for the common reader (among whom the Chronicler of Barsetshire counted himself he, too, and has been given the Davies kiss of life). Amazingly,Middlemarch shot to the top of the 1994 paperback bestseller list. The common reader, it turned out, and loved Eliot’s Study of Provincial Life.
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Source: theguardian.com