Let’s be blunt. Not every poet, however talented, can write a decent novel. So Adam Foulds is remarkable: he has achieved mastery of both forms, above all perhaps with his outstanding work, The Quickening Maze. This is not simply a novel that works; it’s a marvellous fusion of his poetic gifts and the natural urge of a storyteller. I first read the book six years ago when it was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize - I was chairing the judges, and therefore read it three times in the course of a few months. That particular year Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall held sway in the final reckoning but The Quickening Maze proved a memorable and haunting adornment on that list. When this month’s group of readers met Adam in Broadcasting House we had one of the happiest encounters of recent Bookclubs.

Partly, this was because Adam was talking about another writer, and his own sympathy for him. The subject of the novel is John Clare, the rural poet; the setting during his incarceration in an asylum on the edge of Epping Forest around 1840. Clare’s a man with a powerful feeling for landscape and the story of England and he’s tormented by the sensation of a world that’s slipping away. Agriculture was changing; the old ways had been turned upside down by the industrial revolution and in the midst of his own darkness - they called it madness in those days, of course - he finds it hard to see hope. Here’s how Adam described to us his own feeling for Clare. ‘My heart went out to him. As I think it does for many readers of poetry, and people who become familiar with John Clare’s story, there’s something about his journey through life that is transfixingly pathetic, eliciting pathos in your fellow feeling for him, as well as being glorious, luminous with imagination and vision that we see in his poetry.’

That gives you a good introduction to the passion that the author brings to the story. But we’re not talking here about some kind of disguised biography. The novel was inspired when Adam was an undergraduate and discovered in a biography of Tennyson that he and Clare had been brought together by chance when the future poet laureate’s brother, Septimus, was himself committed to an asylum because he suffered what the family called ‘the bad blood of the Tennysons’ That throw of the dice was enough to stir the story-teller in Adam, and years later he produced the tale, where the two men are under the care of the eccentric dominating figure of the Rev Dr Matthew Allen - a man who ‘wobbles on the pivot point between the Regency and Victorian period: someone who’s had a skittishly entrepreneurial scientific past, as a phrenologist, then was in prison for debt and for selling soda water without a licence’. With Allen’s daughter Hannah - an invention by Adam - the story takes shape.

It does so with the help of the enfolding mysteries of Epping Forest, through which Adam used to wander as a boy, and which houses among other excitements an encampment of gypsies, who provide a wild and hypnotic counterpoint to the strange regime of Dr Allen’s asylum. There is a passage in the book in which they strip the flesh from a deer which is one of the finest evocations of a raw life on the land that you will ever read.

The Quickening Maze is a short novel, but it bursts with passion and human endeavour. Adam’s account of Clare’s journey across the countryside to home in Northamptonshire (there to be incarcerated again) is melancholy but uplifting, a hymn of praise to a poet who found the world around him too much. It is a beautiful book.

I hope you enjoy hearing Adam Foulds talking about it.

Happy reading

Jim

 

Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub on BBC Radio 4

We want to encourage as many budding writers and short story enthusiasts to send in their work as possible – our only submission requirement is that writers haven’t had their work broadcast on network radio before.  Stories come in from around the world, from authors about to publish their first novel, to students of creative writing, from bookslam regulars to passionate amateurs. Perhaps a literary star of the future will be among the submissions we receive. 

This year, we were incredibly impressed by the wealth of talent on display. From science fiction to historical fiction, romance to tragedy, the stories have transported us from dazzling coastlines to windswept mountains, from kitchen sinks to far off galaxies.  

Based on our reading we draw the following tentative conclusions about what has inspired this year’s contributors.

1)            Coastline. Being based in London we don’t always feel that visceral connection to the sea, but for many of you the seashore remains a place of rumination, introspection and powerful resonance. Many of our stories drew on the imaginative power of the sea, with an emphasis on drizzly, grey days over packed beaches and dropped ice cream.

2)            Post-apocalyptic / dystopian worlds. Whether it’s the effect of geek culture going mainstream, the tremendous popularity of YA fiction, or a sense of pessimism about the age we live in, many of you created bleak and unsettling worlds for us. The best of these were incredibly inventive about life after global catastrophe. Hollywood should come calling!

3)            Reflection on past tragedy. The short story can be the perfect medium for explorations of memory and guilt, and we received quite a few stories which meditated upon the idea of the past intruding into the present. Sometimes the memories were of young love or early optimism but more often we met characters grappling with wrong turns taken or happiness spurned.

We offer huge thanks to everyone who submitted a story to us. From the most melancholic of stories to comedic romps the range of tales told was huge. These broad conclusions should not be taken as indicators of what we are looking for, or of how to succeed in the future. What continually astounded us was the variety of voice, narrative, style and setting.

We encourage everyone to keep on writing, and please set a date in your diary to hear the readings of our three selected stories: Baker, Emily and Me by Claire Fuller on Friday 29 August at 1545; Audiophile by Ian Green on Friday 5 September at 1545 and The Fox by Fiona Melrose on Friday 12 September at 1545.

Gemma Jenkins is the Producer of Opening Lines

 

Find out more about Opening Lines

BBC The Writers Room: Responsive and proactive, the BBC writersoom finds and champions talent

We can certainly understand his pain. Gilbert, his father, can’t escape from his wartime experiences to talk frankly to his son, and Lewis is troubled. He succumbs to self-harm, to sexual exploits with his step-mother, and the more he thrashes around, the more he feels alone.

At the start of the book, before Lewis takes us back to his youth, we know that he’s been in prison, so from the beginning we’re prepared for a rough journey. His mother dies in a drowning accident, and from then on the society around him seems to become more and more rotten. He doesn’t want to destroy it, just to find a place in it – but again and again he sees himself failing.

But those who haven’t read The Outcast shouldn’t be misled by that. It isn’t a novel that leads to despair. Lewis does seem to be in a spiral that leads him down – he’s always falling for another temptation – but as his friend Kit says of him that he’s ‘completely of the light, he’s not a dark person.’ This is the central conundrum of the book. Lewis, though he often behaves badly and ends up carrying out a crime, is neither bad enough nor weak enough to appear to deserve his fate. We want him to do better, and probably assume that if he hadn’t been born a stockbroker’s son he would have been happier all round.  That, however,  was his lot.

But there’s hope. Sadie told us that when Lewis went to London – he visits a jazz club as a fifteen-year-old – he found it as broken as he was but found in the ruins the seeds of the sixties. ‘And that’s his future,’ she said.

Someone asked how Lewis would be today, in his seventies. Sadie said that even if she knew what was going to happen, she didn’t want to be told. ‘I think it would destroy a thing that you’ve made yourself.’ But our readers concluded that Lewis would probably be happy. I agree.

I hope you enjoy the programme with Sadie Jones. Next month, we’ll be recording in Edinburgh, during festival month, and I’m glad to say we’ll be talking about one of my favourite modern novels, A Question of Loyalties by Allan Massie. If you want to come apply now.

Happy reading….Jim

 

Jim Naughtie is the presenter Bookclub on BBC Radio 4

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Why a 90th anniversary programme? It’s more customary to mark rounder numbers, a 100th say. But there is something about a 90th birthday that makes you think today - with a following wind - the person may still be here to tell us their story.  But James Baldwin is not.  He died aged only 63 in 1987. 

James Baldwin was born into relative poverty in Harlem, New York, in 1924.  During his lifetime as a writer he was a trailblazing explorer of race, class and sexuality in America. As his friend Caryl Phillips says in James Baldwin 90th Anniversary: No Complaints on Radio 4 Extra: “he can be seen as the literary voice of the Civil Rights movement” in 60s America. 

I first discovered James Baldwin far away in a West London school library, aged maybe 14.  I’d accidently come across a book. On the cover was the beautifully striking face of the author. It was Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin. 

That was his debut novel, written while he was barely surviving in France, having left the racial charged United States in 1948.  It made an indelible impression upon me. And so did it too on the British writer Caryl Philips. Struggling as a young writer himself in 1980s London, he had an idea to go and meet one of his literary heroes…  

When I noticed that James Baldwin’s 90th birthday would have been this Saturday 2 August, I did some research in the BBC archive. I found that Caryl Phillips’ idea had led to two remarkable things. The first was No Complaints, Caryl Phillips’s BBC radio interview with James Baldwin in his garden in France in 1984.  The second, decades later, was Caryl’s 2004 Radio 4 play, inspired by his mentor and friend, Some Kind of Home: James Baldwin In Paris. 

An internet search will return endless quotes from James Baldwin, his wisdom and acute vision reduced to a sentence or two. But what Caryl Phillips interview with James Baldwin gives us, with the breeze rustling the vines in Baldwin’s French garden, is what I would have wished for this year:  that James Baldwin would still be here to tell us his story, and to speak his sometimes fierce, always revealing, wisdom about problems that have not gone away. 

Listening to Caryl Phillips revisiting his 1984 interview and his own 2004 play is the nearest thing I will ever find to having my wish come true. 

Listening to James Baldwin talking to us from the archive, hearing the cadence of his voice amidst the birdsong of  “a beautiful summer’s afternoon in August 1984”, as Caryl Phillips remembers it, might be the nearest we will ever get to time travel.

Peter McHugh is the Producer of James Baldwin 90th Anniversary: No Complaints

 

Listen to the James Baldwin 90th Anniversary: No Complaints on 4 Extra

 

Hello,

I read with particular interest Mrs Dalloway’s London crawl.  She covers a part of the West End that I have managed to write about to death over the last few years in this newsletter.  It is odd how the very names – Regent Street, for instance, or St James’s Park – ring as resonantly (almost) as Skiddaw and Snowdon and even the Bristol Channel.  City walks are more popular, partly because more people have time to do them and partly because of the decrease in pollution.  We can now walk along canals that were once full of rusty bicycles and garbage.  We can now go through streets that were once barred to all except policemen in groups.  The air has cleared extraordinarily and the fumes of London have more or less evaporated.  The Chinese come to study how we control pollution.

Hello,

I read with particular interest Mrs Dalloway’s London crawl.  She covers a part of the West End that I have managed to write about to death over the last few years in this newsletter.  It is odd how the very names – Regent Street, for instance, or St James’s Park – ring as resonantly (almost) as Skiddaw and Snowdon and even the Bristol Channel.  City walks are more popular, partly because more people have time to do them and partly because of the decrease in pollution.  We can now walk along canals that were once full of rusty bicycles and garbage.  We can now go through streets that were once barred to all except policemen in groups.  The air has cleared extraordinarily and the fumes of London have more or less evaporated.  The Chinese come to study how we control pollution.

Dickens’ Night Walks are a wonderful read and Iain Sinclair’s walks around the circumference of London are in a category of their own.  Will Self is a walker – I believe he is a sort of professor of walking at Brunel University.  I do not seek to disparage this, but as I am up in Cumberland his precise title does not come to mind.  Having just landed in Cumberland, it brings with it a welcome fog.

It was no sweat at all to leave what will be the hottest day of the year in London for the cool of Cumbria.  I use cool in an old-fashioned way meaning not so hot.  I use hot in an old-fashioned way meaning warm.  It’s an old-fashioned place, Cumberland.  Up on Virgin Rail, one of the joys of which is to hear the announcement when you go to the lavatory that you must not put hopes and dreams, your ex’s sweater, bills or goldfish into the bowl before it is flushed.  It’s a poem all of its own.

Up here – or do we say down?  (After reading Virginia Woolf I think we’d better say down.)  Down here in Cumbria for the tercentenary of the school which I went to.  It started with a dozen or so boys in St Mary’s Church and became a grammar school, and is now a comprehensive of 1,300 pupils drawn from one small town and stunningly, dazzlingly successful.  A very model comprehensive.  If these things can be compared – though that is quite difficult – it’s far better in the field of opportunities and sympathies with varying skills and levels of achievement than ever it was in my day.  Labs have outstripped Latin.  Non-brutal sports have outstripped rugby.  There’s so much to do I wonder that they have time to spend in the classroom learning, but they do that as well and in force.  From this one comprehensive, people stream into Oxford, Cambridge and many comparable universities throughout the British Isles.

The only drawback about the evening is that I’ve been asked to make a speech at the end of the dinner, which means that I’ll be nervous throughout and even worse than usual company to those on my right and left.  No drinking of course.  The speech has to be short, I was told.  As if this would help.  Short speeches are the hardest.  Lloyd George wrote all there was to be said on that particular subject.

Still – hey-ho.  Off we go to this lovely sandstone building, which used to be all in awe as the school and is now surrounded by a plantation of laboratories, extra libraries, study rooms, sports rooms, etc, etc.  Wigton is very lucky to have a place like this and I was lucky to go there at a time when there were three or four wonderful teachers.

So, down memory lane.  Lashings of nostalgia.  And at about twenty past ten, a glass of wine.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

 

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I confess to being fascinated by book titles.  Great ones pass into the language – from the sixties, for example, The Spy who Came in from the Cold and From Russia with Love – and I’m convinced that there are some fine novels that are unjustly ignored because the author has coined a title that is a turn-off. So one of the questions I wanted to ask the American writer Lorrie Moore when she joined this month’s group of Bookclub readers was an obvious one. Why had she called her book Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? I’m not sure, incidentally, whether it’s a good title or not. But it is certainly memorable. And one of our readers wanted an explanation. Well, the title comes from a painting – unfortunately not reproduced in the British edition of the book – and is named by one of the two principal characters, Sils, whose childhood relationship with her girlfriend Berie is the spine of the plot. But that doesn’t answer the question: why? The picture, as it is described in the novel, shows two girls whispering together and evidently disturbed by the sight of injured frogs which have been shot by some cruel boys. And the truth is that Lorrie didn’t even have to make it up. 

She told us that while she was writing the book – still untitled at that stage – she came across the painting, which was being sold by one of her friends in her gallery, and had been painted by another friend. And it was called – Who will Run the Frog Hospital? She couldn’t resist, and – with permissions happily given by her two friends – the painting went straight into the story. Moreover, Lorrie bought the picture, which now hangs on her wall at home.

The point of the story is that Lorrie, who made her name as a short story writer, finds that in the writing process - this is a novel with less than 200 pages,  incidentally – there’s a moment when, as she put it to our readers,  the story is ‘wide open’. By the time you get to the end, everything is closed up and nothing else can get in. But while you’re writing, taking the characters through the story you open to new ideas, odd thoughts, the possibility of a change of direction. When she started the book, she knew nothing of the painting. By the time she was reaching the end it had become an important part of the plot, and had provided a title.

The reason, of course, is that the picture reveals, in a slightly mysterious way, the depth of a childhood relationship between two girls – and that is the theme of the story.  It’s told by Sils’s friend Berie who recalls, on a visit to Paris in adulthood, the power of their friendship. In that sense, the book is not so much an adventure, or a mystery, as a meditation on the recollections of youth that are so much a part of our later lives.

It’s not a book in which men play much of a part – ‘I do have books with men, but this might not be one of them’ – and Lorrie describes it as a novel in which women are presented in a real way, rather than being represented as ideas of who women are. In that sense, she says, all her stories are feminist, though she has always tried to avoid polemic.

The power of this book lies in the revelation of memory – how it shapes us, troubles us, reassures us.  Most of us, of both sexes, will recognise what Berie and Sils are going through. That’s why we follow them through the story, and perhaps why we’re intrigued by the painting that gives the book its name.

After all, the picture doesn’t offer an answer. It simply reminds us of feelings, and questions, that are familiar to us all.

In our next Bookclub on August 3 we’ll be talking about The Outcast by Sadie Jones and our next recording is going to be in Edinburgh on August 23rd, at the height of festival month. It’s at 2pm and our guest will be Allan Massie, talking about his fine novel set in France and dealing with wartime memories – A question of Loyalties. If you want to be there, you’ll find details on the website bbc.in/r4bookclub

Happy reading

Jim

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Jack is that boy, and Room tells the story of his life in confinement with Ma and her strange, threatening  friend, Old Nick, Jack’s understanding of what’s been taken from him, his escape and the strange relationship he has with his mother. Think of the contradiction that drew Emma to the story: what boy wouldn’t want his mother on hand, 24 hours a day? But what happens when he discovers that he’s got none of the freedom that a child also craves? She told our readers, ‘This bizarre plot premise made me think it could be a way to shine a light on that pattern of behaviour between parents and children.’ It isn’t a crime novel, she says, but a novel about parenting.

And how did she get inside Jack’s head. She cheated, says Emma. When she started writing the book she had a five-year-old child, and spent her days watching him like an anthropologist – writing down what he said and watching how he behaved. In particular, she charted his confusions in grammar to try to recreate a child’s language. And it’s through that lens that we see Jack’s world, which means that we gradually understand the distortions that shape his own understand of who he is. ‘I knew that Jack’s predicament would be a bit like, say, Plato’s parable of the cave about the real world – where we’re in an unreal world and we mistake it for reality.’ Jack, for example, takes time to learn how his mother has been hiding things from him, indulging in benign deceptions, pretending.

But when he starts to discover the truth about his position, and his mother’s, this confined world starts to take on a rich and colourful character. The subject may be grim, but there is nothing grey about Room. Since I don’t want to plant a plot spoiler on you, I won’t describe the most dramatic moment in the book – except to say that it’s beautifully described – but it’s important to say that Emma uses the theme of confinement to produce a heightened consciousness in Jack, which communicates itself to readers. The shed in the garden, the contours of the house that’s a prison, the well-meaning but ultimately feckless doctor who’s one of the few visitors from the outside world.

Room is a surprising novel because although  it’s one of those stories that inevitably fills some readers with dread (can I really take this?) it succeeds in describing and explaining the vivacity of a five-year-old’s approach to world. One of our readers asked Emma how she thought Jack would be doing now, wherever he is. Fine, she said. He’d be just fine.In the end, she is an optimist.

I hope you enjoy reading Room.

Happy reading

Jim

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What were your initial impressions of Frank Zappa?

I was working for business people mostly, although I had worked for celebrities, like Gregory Peck, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Terence Rattigan and Marcel Marceau, so I wasn’t fazed by celebrity. But when Frank opened the door with his hair down to his shoulder blades, pitch black ringlets and dressed in a pink t-shirt and orange trousers, I was somewhat taken aback and thought I’d come to the wrong room.

He had this wonderful spoken voice that was so quiet and commanding and he was just very, very nice. I’d got a lot of his lyrics wrong and had made up my own, but instead of being cross, he thought it was hilariously funny. He laughed out loud, really laughed, and debated with me for half an hour about the lyrics to one of his songs, Brown Shoes Don’t Make It, and whether they were immoral or not. I was so stunned by the fact that he was willing to listen to me, take in what I had to say and engage with it. Nobody took any notice of secretaries, you were invisible. So from that point on I was hooked. He was IT as far as I was concerned.

 

Why do you think you got on so well?

His manager told me that it was because I wasn’t a groupie and Pamela Zarubica (Zappa’s friend) said it was because I was more intelligent than most of the other girls around him. And I was obviously quite attractive. I mean I wasn’t beautiful or anything, or pretty, but I was very attractive and I had a certain way with me. I’m sure he initially thought I was going to spend the night with him, but I wasn’t. And I’m sure that made him take notice.

Los Angeles must have been quite a shock to the system. How did you find it?

I wanted to go to university. I told Frank that in the beginning and he pooh-poohed it, saying education is a waste of time, teach yourself and all that business. And then when I got to Los Angeles I thought - this is better than university, this is real life.

I was an observer. I was totally outside of the scene and I was a bit snotty-nosed about it all, frankly. I thought they were all like a bunch of teenagers, even though some of them were nearly 30 years old. They scorned American education and scorned the government. Nothing was any good, parents were dreadful… I just didn’t have any time for it.

But as the time went on, a year and a half later, I gradually got drawn in to it. I became very hippified.

The atmosphere in Laurel Canyon changed in 1969. Why? 

The Manson murders absolutely changed everything. It really was a very friendly place before that. There were no buses down Laurel Canyon, so to get to Hollywood you just stuck your thumb out and any car would stop and take you down. And you didn’t feel nervous. We had no locks on our doors. People wandered in and out of the log cabin and I didn’t take any notice of them because I was so besotted with Frank Zappa. Charles Manson may have come in – Frank would have been mad enough to have given him a record contract.

But as soon as the murders happened, every house became a fortress. Frank put a speakerphone outside and really fortified his place. Everybody did.

What impact did feminism have on you?

When women’s lib came out, it was absolutely stunning to me - I embraced it totally. I waded my way through Sexual Politics and thought it was fantastic. And I thought Frank would agree with me, because he was for the downtrodden and the disenfranchised and I thought he would see women in that light. And he didn’t. From that moment on I thought, “I know more about this than you do. You’re talking rubbish.” And it was the beginning of my moving away from him.

What made you decide to write about your time with Frank?

I’ve always listened to radio plays and I wanted to write. A BBC producer said, “Write something that no-one else can write. That’s your best chance of appearing on the top of the pile.” And so I thought the only thing that no-one else could write is this story of me working for Frank Zappa.

I got the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook and I wrote to every publisher that was suitable in there, about 50 or 60 letters. And about 12 of them wrote back and said “Yes, send a chapter”. So I knew I had a marketable product.

And then I sat outside in the beautiful weather in Singapore, where I was living, and just wrote for ten hours a day, practically. Did my back in, but that’s that. I really learned how to write while I was doing it.

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When he was writing The Slap, published in 2008, Christos Tsiolkas remembers thinking, ‘I want to write a soap opera on acid.’ And it is indeed a book that deliberately breaks boundaries, reflecting his own feeling that Australians like him were dispensing with the culture of the old country...but perhaps even more his frustration that the new country wasn’t changing as fast as he’d imagined that it would. He told this month’s Bookclub readers that he once thought Australia was becoming steadily more socially liberal, that it would soon be a Republic and that there would be reconciliation with the ‘first nation’ - the descendants of the people who lived there before colonisation. To someone of his stance, the politics of the 1990s were therefore a disappointment - ‘xenophobic, anti-immigration’ - and he found the increasing wealth around him an irritation rather than a delight, because he thought it wasn’t producing a better country. That was why, he told us, that he wasn’t writing about the British-Irish world that spawned Neighbours, but another suburbia that he saw with different eyes.
 
So The Slap has pain built into it, as well as a great deal of humour. The plot develops from a simple incident, spawning emotional complications that ensnare the eight characters through whom the story is told.  We enter their heads, one by one, and as a consequence the story has a rampant energy: it’s as if the narrator has a hand-held camera that’s always on the move. With each chapter we hear a different voice, and have a different view of the world. From the moment a four-year-old boy called Hugo is slapped by a man called Harry at a barbecue while the children are playing cricket we start a journey into the melting pot of modern Australian society – especially into the Greek community which is Christos’s own. He says he feels close to the character of Hector – and you can’t get more Greek than that – who is the first man we meet in the book, and whose drug-taking and disorganised emotional life becomes a kind of frame for the story.

‘I was setting out to write a book about a middle class that had become self-entitled, and part of that was the Greek-Australian world.’ One of the results was that he looked at the relationship between Greek men and their mothers – ‘infantile’ was his word – and one of our readers wondered if he wasn’t falling for a stereotype.  Christos hoped not…but what could he do? It was the world he knew.

The Slap became a world-wide bestseller in part because of the gutsiness with which Christos approaches his characters, and their failings. For example, in relation to drug-taking, with which he’s quite familiar. ‘ Maybe it’s a controversial thing to say, but the reality is that one of the reasons we become immersed in drugs is the elation of it. I also wanted to put in – the serpent in paradise. The moment when the kids are going out celebrating, dancing like an Utopian version of multicultural Australia, the serpent in paradise is you, as the reader, knowing it may lead to addiction, to something that isn’t pleasurable.’

That means that although humour flows through the book (as well as a lot of swearing – something Christos found himself having to discuss with his parents) there are dark undercurrents in the misunderstandings and cultural sensitivities that are the spine of the story. But don’t imagine that the characters aren’t likeable, or well-intentioned. Some of them are.

But Christos says, ‘It’s no coincidence that the likeable characters are not of my generation.’
Maybe that says it all.

I hope you enjoy The Slap and Christos Tsiolkas on Bookclub. And you can look forward to another good read next month. The book is Room, and you can hear our conversation with Emma Donoghue on Sunday, June 1st.

Happy reading.

Jim

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John Banville quoted Nietzsche to this month’s readers on Bookclub: every man is an artist when he sleeps. He was making the point that he believes that dreaming is like writing fiction - a good thought for the start of our talk about The Sea, the novel which won him the Man Booker prize in 2005, because it is a book with the quality of a dream. Time shifts like the sands on the seashore, and Max, around whom the story revolves, is conscious of the past and the present at the same time. So is the reader, listening to a mysterious story that isn’t pieced together until the end of the book, and taken into a world that seems to obey the rules of the sea itself - calming and disturbing in equal measure.The Sea tells of childhood memories and loss and regret in later life, and conjures up for every reader the power of simple recollections from a young age - when the world seems to be full of hidden secrets and dangers, as well as excitements. In the case of Max, he’s come back to the seaside at Ballyless which he knew as a boy, and there are secrets he holds back as he tells his story. What did he see at The Cedars, the house to which he has returned?

 

John spoke of the intensity of childhood experience, and the way in which much of his writing has been a process of inventing the past. He has, of course, a style that is poetic, and anyone who enjoys his writing will know the power that he summons up in his language. We spoke about his craft and he described rather movingly the way that he writes. How, for example, did he deal with time in The Sea? ‘Precisely by not trying. I trust my instincts, I trust the sentence. I write by the sentence, not by the paragraph or the chapter. There have been civilisations who lived without the wheel but who had the sentence – like the Incas. The sentence makes us human. It’s the essence of us.’

He also spoke of poetry, and how the story needs to be able to carry it. But poetry, he said was an unexpected business. He told a story about Seamus Heaney. ‘Joseph Brodsky [the Russian poet] came to the west and asked Seamus what rhymed with love. And Seamus said - “shove”.’ John liked that grittiness in a great writer - poetry, he says, isn’t a case of ‘moon and June’.

Our readers, as ever, asked penetrating questions about the mysteries in Max’s life, about the death of his wife Anna, and about his unhappiness - he wrestles like a slug that’s had salt put on its tail, says John.

But although we talked a good deal about the characters in the book, it was a conversation that also probed the spirit of the writer himself. And he revealed his devotion to the mystery of the whole business of creation. One of the problems in meeting his own readers, he says, is that he no longer feels as if he is the person who wrote the book. ‘The person who wrote the book ceased to exist at 6pm when I stood up, and left. A strange ghost remains there all night to think up things to write tomorrow. I have little contact with the person who writes.’

He’s not a mystic, he says. No, but he understands the inexplicable - and he loves it.

I hope you enjoy the programme with John Banville as much as this month’s readers did.

And the book you should read for next month is The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas.

Happy reading.

Jim.

 

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This new series of Publishing Lives sets out to remedy that omission, and I have to say that Melissa and I are delighted with the strange, and often moving, stories we have discovered. In the process, we have not only paid tribute to some truly great 20th century women whose influence on the world of books was decisive, we also describe careers whose experience will resonate with the book world today.

The truth about publishing in Britain has long been that the majority of books published, bought, and read, are first and foremost the special concern of women writers, women editors and booksellers, and of course women readers, up and down the country.

Forget the prophets of doom. This is a golden age of reading. The hungry consumption of the printed word is at an all-time high; at Renaissance levels, in fact. Among new readers, new fiction, above all, has become a women’s business. In the 19th century, names like Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, and Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot) were the exception not the norm.   The Bronte sisters, indeed, had to masquerade as men  (Currer, Ellis,  and Acton Bell) to attract the attention of their Victorian metropolitan publishers.

Today, however, from Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson and Lorrie Moore in North America to Kate Atkinson, Pat Barker and Hilary Mantel in the UK, it is women writers who set the gold standard. Once upon  time, the prize formerly known as “Orange” was a lonely (at times, even controversial) pioneer in promoting women writers.  Increasingly, however, in the 21st century, book prizes are becoming almost exclusively about women writers and their works.

So, to look at the literary contributions of several brilliant and fascinating women -- as we do in this new series of Publishing Lives -- -- really is a no-brainer. Three of the women in question (Kaye Webb, Norah Smallwood and Carmen Callil), are principals in their own stories. Two (Livia Gollancz and Lady Helen Hamlyn) are vital witnesses to the achievements of, respectively, a famous father (Victor Gollancz) and a powerful husband (Paul Hamlyn).  In addition to these voices, we also have rare and fascinating contributions from John le Carré (on his memories of Gollancz), A.S. Byatt (on her recollections of Norah Smallwood), and the famous author-illustrator Shirley Hughes on what it was like to work for Puffin’s Kaye Webb.

It’s also fascinating, through the medium of recorded sound, to rediscover lives that have already become slightly buried in the recent past. There have been so many upheavals in the British book world in the last twenty years (Amazon, Google and the digital revolution; the e-book; global publishing in English, etc.) that it’s easy to forget that some extraordinary individuals have left a vivid mark on the literary culture of their times.

We start with the amazing force of nature that was Kaye Webb, the irrepressible and dynamic promoter of Puffin Books during the 1960s and 70s.  Hers was the poignant story of a woman who escaped her own heartache by enriching the lives of a generation of kids.

Then we go on to explore the life of Norah Smallwood (coincidentally, my first boss), the Edwardian grande dame of independent publisher Chatto & Windus,  who owed her promotion both to luck (the outbreak of the Second World War) and also to her indomitable drive for literary excellence in the works of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Iris Murdoch, Laurie Lee,  A.S. Byatt and Dirk Bogarde. Norah was rather a dragon in her day, who excited strong opi opinions. Separating gossip from actuality  was, occasionally, quite taxing. In the making of this programme, it was an especially spooky moment for me to listen again to that voice which, when I was twenty-three, could sponsor a unique, occasionally unnerving, combination of awe, panic, and exhilaration.

Finally, we conclude with a Publishing Lives scoop, a rare BBC radio portrait of the great Australian womens’ publisher, and co-founder of the Virago Press, the feisty feminist Carmen Callil. This enthralling episode breaks new ground in another way, too. Virago was the triumph of a team effort, a revolutionary cultural collective,  which included Ursula Owen, Lennie Goodings, and Harriet Spicer. For various complex reasons,  these women have, in the past, been disinclined to speak freely of their joint Virago experience. Here, in a mood of mellow reflection, they look back with nostalgia: some fascinating moments.

In this new series of Publishing Lives you can hear the people who transformed the bookshelves in front of you reflect on what it was like to change the world -- with ink and paper, and apple-green paperback books.

• Publishing Lives on BBC Radio 4 from Monday 10th March
• Interviews and hightlights of Books & Authors on Radio 4
• Download the Books & Authors podcast

Robert McCrum writes for The Observer