Was anyone else amazed that this "dense novel" became a thin film?

I watched it via BBC iPlaŷer, and thought it sounded good. I didn't pay too much attention to that detail, but wish I had in hindsight. It seems like such a wasted opportunity.

Once the film got going I assumed it was perhaps an elongated episode 1 of a quality multi-part TV series. Similar to ep 1 of HBO's The Night Of. When it ended with such a whimper, I automatically assumed further installments were to come.

What really baffles me is the interview with the author on the BBC site, where he accepts the premise that the book's prose is dense. Assuming his novel was not a skinny volume, I guess they must have left out a lot.

I was amazed the author had anything complimentary to say. This dreary 90min film could only barely scratch the surface of the source text.

If this 90mins was just an extended intro to a quality well-paced 3, 6, 8 or 10 part decent BBC TV drama - it would serve as a nicely made introduction.

I was flabbergasted to find out the lame ending was final. Whatever story the TV adaptation was attempting to tell, it missed the mark by a long mile. For a single 90min film, why did they not make better use of the original story from the novel? They left so many gaps it made the writing and production look really lazy!

Am I the only viewer so underwhelmed by this lame effort?

A quick Google surprised me, as the critics seemed to like this vacuous waste of celluloid. What were they smoking? This was dull with a capital D.

What's even more surprising is that the BBC interview with the author went so well. Admittedly I've not read the book, but if it managed to pass the scrutiny of major publisher's screening process, to proceed to publication - it surely cannot be as limp and cr@p as this awful TV adaptation suggests?

Am I the only one seeing the major fail here? Did anyone else persevere for the full hour and a half, expecting a subsequent installment to continue the barely-begun plot lines that were never resolved, just like the rest of the story?

If not do folks rate this as high as the dumb critics? I'm annoyed at the amount of time this terrible show wasted, which I can never get back. Shame on the BBC, they usually do good and often excellent work - this was not such a time, unfortunately!