From KCRW, Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. I am honored to have with me the playwright.

I like the thing that

everyone still as a journalist and screenwriter Tom Stoppard, whose newest project is a production,

a co-production with HBO and the BBC of Fort Maddox Ford's Parades Zen. Tom, thanks so much for being here.

It's great to be here. Thank you.

What was it about Parades, then, that made you want to adapt it?

Well, I should say I hadn't read the book until they asked me if I were interested in doing this job.

Okay.

Yeah.

You know, Fort Maddox Ford's always been something of minority pursuit.

There's a book called The Good Soldier, of course.

Which most people who know Ford, they know that book. But Parades End turned out to be a book

which relatively few people had read, but those who'd read it considered it a favorite

novel. They were passionate about it. There was a bit of a

cult around it. Starting with Graham Green. Indeed, he was early on the case, a great admirer. Ford was

an early generation, and Parade's End is actually four novels, though I think of it as three and the

Coder. But they were written over the course of some years at the birth of modernism, the year of

the wasteland, the year of Ulysses, for example, 1922. And it is an astonishing book. And I must say that although I didn't know quite what I was

getting into, by the time I'd read 100 pages, I really wanted the job. And I found it interesting

because I think it's really the beginning of the 20th century, and I think of Christopher Hortigens,

the protagonist is kind of like the last of his breed,

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