Finished my latest edit of Book 10 of The Demonata today. I know I'll have to go through it at least another 3 or 4 times over the next year and a half, before it's ready to be published, but I'm very pleased with how it currently stands -- as I've said here before, I think it's a suitably action-packed, twisting, vicious finale, which should leave most fans with the big smile you get on your face when you finish a long series and find the ending more than matches your expectations. That happened to me with The Sopranos the other night, when I saw the final episode -- even though it was rather open-ended, which infuriated many fans, the episode built brilliantly and left me smiling sadly at the end, happy because it was great, sad because it was over. The best ending to a TV series ever, in my view, was Six Feet Under -- when that finished, I did something I've never done before or since, and immediately rewound to watch the last several minutes again. I'm hoping the tenth book of The Demonata has something of a similar impact on fans, although of course only time will tell ...

Went to see the movie of The Golden Compass tonight. Wow. Just ... wow!!! I often get asked in interviews what my favourite books by current writers are. I always give the same answer -- although I like a lot of authors at the moment, such as Anthony Horowitz, Eoin Colfer, J K Rowling, Marcus Sedgwick, etc, I think His Dark Materials blew everything else out of the water, and I judge the three books taken together to be probably the best thing to happen to the book world in the last ten years. They were fresh and stunningly paced and structured, and they had a huge impact on me when I read them -- they made me want to raise my game, to stretch myself further, to try to push my imagination as far as Pullman pushed his. I don't know if The Demonata would have been quite as ambitious as it turned out to be if I hadn't read His Dark Materials. I suspect not.

But that meant, of course, that the movie had a hell of a lot to live up to. I never worry about a film "spoiling" a book. I know it's something that troubles many fans, and I must admit it used to trouble me when I was a teenager -- I lived in fear of a Judge Dredd movie that failed to do the comics justice. But these days I look upon films as something entirely separate, which they are. A book doesn't change when a film of it is made -- if the book was good or bad before the film, it will be equally good or bad afterwards. Most film adaptations are dire (just as book adaptations of films would probably be dire if there were lots of them), but I think it's worth letting Hollywood at books because there's always a chance they'll hit gold and make another Godfather or Lord of the Rings or Shawshank Redemption. Chances are they probably won't, but hell, what's the point of living if we refuse to take a gamble?!?

The Golden Compass movie is definitely one of the finer adaptations around, especially of a fantasy novel. For the most part Hollywood does fantasy fairly craply. It's difficult to make a tale of magic work on the big screen -- things that fire your imagination on the page can look ridiculous when brought to life, especially if the film-makers don't have a lot of money. But when a fantasy film works, it can be truly spectacular. And The Golden Compass is just that -- a huge, ambitious, intelligent, beautiful, neatly paced epic, standing heads and shoulders above most other similar movies. Of course it changes things from the book, but far less than it might have done, and mostly for the best -- things that work well in books don't always translate to the screen, and only a fool tries to film a book exactly as it's written. My only gripe would be the ending -- they stop short of the finish in the book, to give it more of a positive finale. I can fully understand why they did that -- they're anxious to make the next two films, but this one has to make a lot of money in order for them to press ahead, so they were wary of ending on a downer and sending viewers away miserable -- but it still disappointed me. But, in the overall scheme of things, it was a minor disappointment. This was the best time I've had in a cinema for quite some time. HIGHLY recommended!!!! It also excited me because Paul Weitz (the director of the Cirque Du Freak movie) was one of the executive producers on this film -- let's hope he brings some of the magic from The Golden Compass on with him to Cirque Du Freak ........