On the whole, I think it’s fair to say that the adaptations of Robert Harris’s novels have not lived up to the source material. It’s not that they have been bad, exactly. There has been no shortage of attempts and they have always attracted interesting people. HBO’s miniseries of Fatherland had its moments. Enigma, with its Tom Stoppard screenplay and Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet in the leads, was alright. Roman Polanski has had a couple of cracks. First 2010’s The Ghost, in which he directed Pierce Brosnan as the Blair-analogue prime minister Adam Lang. Then, in 2019, An Officer and a Spy, possibly Harris’s most satisfying novel, a historical drama about the Dreyfus Affair starring Jean Dujardin. Remember him?
For all the talent involved, however, the films have never quite achieved the blend of propulsive plotting and deftly worn research that sends each new Harris book spiralling into the Christmas stockings of dads all over the world. Perhaps contemporary prestige TV would be a better vehicle, allowing the worlds to be rendered in more detail. The Fear Index (Sky Atlantic) gives us a chance to find out. Published in 2011, the novel was Harris’s delayed response to the financial crisis, a techno-thriller based on the “flash crash” of 2010, when stock markets fell precipitously before recovering just as fast, in one of Wall Street’s most alarming lunch breaks.
