:00:32. > :00:39.Tonight on The Book Review Show, a quartet of new work from some of
:00:39. > :00:46.the most successful modern authors. John Irving's latest epic novel of
:00:46. > :00:50.sex and sexuality, In One Person. Kate Summerscale recounts adultery
:00:50. > :00:52.Victorian-style in Mrs Robinson's Disgrace. Mark Haddon and his
:00:52. > :00:58.anticipated new novel, The Red House. I talk to Hilary Mantel
:00:58. > :01:04.about Bring Up The Bodies, the follow up to her Man Booker winner,
:01:04. > :01:09.Wolf Hall, delving under the covers to judge all of that, best selling
:01:09. > :01:15.author, Kate Mosse, literary journalist and broadcaster, John
:01:15. > :01:20.Mullen, and the inimtable Germaine Greer.
:01:20. > :01:25.Welcome to the monthly book review special. Tonight we have expert
:01:25. > :01:29.opinions in the studio. We love to hear your views too. Join on
:01:29. > :01:34.Twitter or drop an e-mail. First up tonight, the latest novel from a
:01:34. > :01:39.woman who has become a literary sensation, Hilary Mantel. Wolf Hall,
:01:39. > :01:43.her fictional book about the rise of Thomas Cromwell, won the Booker
:01:44. > :01:51.Prize and sold millions of copies. The new book, Bring Up The Bodies,
:01:51. > :01:54.the story of the fall of Anne Boleyn, is the second in her Tudor
:01:54. > :02:02.trilogy. Who would have thought that Thomas Cromwell would be
:02:02. > :02:05.anything at all. When Wollsey fell, one would have thought as his
:02:05. > :02:10.servant he would have been ruined. When his wife and daughters died,
:02:10. > :02:17.you might have thought the loss would kill him. But Henry has
:02:17. > :02:24.turned to him, Henry has sworn him in, Henry has put his time at his
:02:24. > :02:29.disposal, and has said to come Master Cromwell, and take his arm,
:02:29. > :02:33.throne rooms, his path in life made smooth and clear. How do we see the
:02:33. > :02:38.character of Thomas Cromwell evolve, do you think, between Wolf Hall and
:02:38. > :02:48.Bring Up The Bodies? There is a very small gap, we leave Wolf Hall
:02:48. > :02:55.
:02:56. > :03:02.July 1535, the evening of Thomas Moor, he's excuse. We resume
:03:02. > :03:09.Moore's execution. We resume at Wolf Hall, what happens is he
:03:09. > :03:12.realises that Henry has fallen in love with the daughter of the house,
:03:12. > :03:16.storms are clouding Anne Boleyn and it is becoming a political
:03:16. > :03:21.liability and embarrassment. Cromwell is very quick to see this.
:03:21. > :03:26.He is now setting a course that will end in the destruction of Anne
:03:26. > :03:32.Boleyn. Why, do you think, in general, people are so drawn to
:03:32. > :03:38.this period? I think it is the repositry of all stories. All
:03:38. > :03:47.themes, all ark types, I think it touches on our collective processes.
:03:47. > :03:53.Henry is Blue Beards, the wives his victims, Cromwell is a sort of
:03:53. > :03:57.fixed figure. It is strength and fairytale and yet it is real. It
:03:57. > :04:07.was enacted not just in sexual politics, but actual politics.
:04:07. > :04:13.difficult is it to get inside the sexuality Morays of that time,
:04:13. > :04:17.which -- morays of that time? not particularly difficult at all,
:04:17. > :04:26.because the missoingnisic slant of the era is apparent in all sorts of
:04:26. > :04:36.works, in poems, in proz, the woman's is the sin of Eve, she's
:04:36. > :04:40.the sexual temptrous, the man is innocent she -- temptress, the man
:04:40. > :04:45.is isn't, this is clear with Anne Boleyn. There is a third book, are
:04:45. > :04:51.you clear how that will end? It can only end one way. We know the
:04:51. > :04:56.history! I often end my books with beheadings, readers will have
:04:56. > :05:01.noticed. I'm afraid the axeman comes for Thomas Cromwell in the
:05:01. > :05:11.summer of 1540. After his death Henry realises within weeks that he
:05:11. > :05:16.made a terrible mistake. We don't go there. My trilogy will end as
:05:16. > :05:21.Cromwell's consciousness ends. Now John, there are high
:05:21. > :05:27.expectations for Wolf Hall, you were one of the judges which gave
:05:27. > :05:30.it the Man Booker Prize, does Bring Up The Bodies live up to that?
:05:30. > :05:34.skwhrus because I was on the panel, but -- not just because I was on
:05:34. > :05:38.the panel, but I didn't open this book, I couldn't open this book
:05:38. > :05:45.without thinking, I'm really looking forward to this. Because I
:05:45. > :05:49.think Hilary Mantel is one of the two or three best writers of
:05:49. > :05:53.English prose, fictional prose, a prose adapted to whatever uses she
:05:53. > :05:58.wants to put to it. Writing in English today. It is quite unusual
:05:58. > :06:02.to be reading this novel, because in all her previous novels they
:06:02. > :06:07.have been different than the one before. Strikingly different. That
:06:08. > :06:12.is one of her great qualities. sure her publishers and agents must
:06:12. > :06:15.be groaning, as soon as she has a successful one she does something
:06:15. > :06:18.completely different next. It is unusual for her to follow up with a
:06:18. > :06:22.sequel like this. There are enough subtle changes and developments,
:06:22. > :06:28.especially in the central character, in his relationship with Anne
:06:28. > :06:38.Boleyn, and so on, to make it different. But also it has just all
:06:38. > :06:41.the wonderful stylistic versatility and virtue ostee of the previous
:06:42. > :06:46.book. One of the difficulties of writing this kind of book is
:06:46. > :06:52.sustaining any kind of tension, when we Whereareyouknow what
:06:52. > :06:57.happens to Anne Boleyn? It is one of -- When we know what happens to
:06:58. > :07:04.Anne Boleyn? Everyone knows that period of history, whether Keith
:07:04. > :07:08.Starky, or Alison Weir, it has been mined a lot. What I thought was so
:07:08. > :07:14.extraordinary about the novel, two things I associate with Mantel, one
:07:14. > :07:17.that there is a lot of set piece work in terms of whether it is the
:07:17. > :07:23.trial of Anne Boleyn or a hunting incident, or the mistresses being
:07:23. > :07:26.moved in and out. Things that are self-contained, like little
:07:26. > :07:30.vignettes, but underlying that is we know where it is going to go.
:07:30. > :07:34.There is no surprise, but there is the ratchetting all the time of the
:07:34. > :07:39.tension. It is the way, as she's often said. You can't muck around,
:07:39. > :07:43.you can't distort the history, but you can choose how much light you
:07:43. > :07:47.put on something. The order in which you narrate things. That, I
:07:47. > :07:51.think, along with the fact that I think she's one of the greatest
:07:51. > :07:56.describers of tiny things, she can take a whole scene by a little
:07:56. > :08:02.button. That sort of thing. I think it is fabulous. Do you think she
:08:02. > :08:06.moves beyond the drama of the history of the period? No. I'm
:08:06. > :08:11.coming at it from a slightly different point of view, I think.
:08:11. > :08:16.If it's mined this period, it has been mined very shallowly. If we're
:08:16. > :08:21.thinking of the Starky approach, history as gossip, this is more of
:08:21. > :08:28.the same. We are talking about these people as if they did not
:08:28. > :08:34.exist within a very special political and religious context. It
:08:34. > :08:43.wounds me in a way, because, Anne Boleyn isn't just a nobleman's
:08:43. > :08:48.daughter, or this besieged figure, who becomes more and more emaciated
:08:48. > :08:52.and crazy and vindictive. She's a Protestant reformer, she's one of
:08:52. > :08:56.the most important contributors of books to the royal library. Her
:08:56. > :09:02.books are now being identified in the British Library. She has a
:09:02. > :09:08.faction, she is supported. And we mentioned Tindale three or four
:09:08. > :09:14.times, that's massively important. The central character isn't Anne
:09:14. > :09:17.Boleyn, it is Thomas Cromwell? is Cromwell, she does this
:09:17. > :09:21.extraordinary thing, which she does again, of filtering the action
:09:21. > :09:25.entirely through his consciousness, it is a third person narrative, but
:09:25. > :09:29.all done through his consciousness. So you judge him, but you're with
:09:29. > :09:37.him. And that is a really difficult thing to bring off as well as she
:09:37. > :09:42.does. To get that mixture of sympathy and sometimes horror.
:09:42. > :09:48.There is a fantastic phase late in the novel, where he's doing the
:09:48. > :09:56.interrogations of the supposed lovers of Anne Boleyn. They are in
:09:56. > :10:02.the headlights, they have had it. You're with him doing something
:10:02. > :10:07.terrible, you are part of it. rational, and yet he's the origin
:10:07. > :10:10.of every terrible torturer you have ever seen. How does she address
:10:10. > :10:19.that, with writers of historical fiction, to make the language
:10:19. > :10:25.archaic or not? The language is an artifice, it is not a way of
:10:25. > :10:33.producing language appropriate for the story she's telling. It is
:10:33. > :10:37.Wallis Stephens, it is the she and not the he that said it, it is not
:10:37. > :10:43.the oldeworlde writing. There is that third person all the way
:10:43. > :10:47.through, it is he, on Cromwell's shoulder. She never uses his name?
:10:47. > :10:50.He's horrible and awful. When people say this is the story of the
:10:50. > :10:54.fall of Anne Boleyn, the point about all the things that Anne
:10:54. > :10:58.Boleyn is, this is not that book, that is not her project. It is
:10:58. > :11:07.entirely Cromwell, and it is the awful way in which anything will go,
:11:07. > :11:17.the sense of how man niplation works. I think -- man niplation
:11:17. > :11:21.
:11:21. > :11:28.works, -- It is the prose that Hilary Mantel is famous for?
:11:28. > :11:36.first I thought, mystery, what fun, it is like chocolate syrup poured
:11:36. > :11:41.over everything. I wallowed in the elusiveness of it. It is very
:11:41. > :11:45.cinematic, in a way, you have very sharp jump cuts, you see one thing,
:11:45. > :11:50.then another. You build up the image of the actual situation that
:11:50. > :11:55.you are in, in that particular episode, with all these little
:11:55. > :11:58.visual bits pieces. But after a while it began to really annoy me.
:11:59. > :12:04.For one thing she never contracts, it is a bit like the way people
:12:04. > :12:13.speak in BBC adaptations of the classics. "I do not", everybody
:12:13. > :12:19.says, nobody says "I don't", I "I cannot", then you get madness like
:12:19. > :12:22."it was not within his remit". "will" move on there, see what I
:12:22. > :12:26.did. Bring Up The Bodies is out this
:12:26. > :12:33.week. Families are famously tricky things to manage, just ask Rupert
:12:33. > :12:40.Murdoch. Family dynamics at the heart of the new novel from Mark
:12:40. > :12:44.Haddon, another widely popular author. His last book, The Curious
:12:44. > :12:48.Incident of the Dog in the Night- Time, sat on the best selling list
:12:48. > :12:53.for months. After the death of his mother, he
:12:53. > :12:58.asks his estranged sister and her children, and invites them to share
:12:58. > :13:03.a house for a week with his family. This reveals the hidden strains
:13:03. > :13:08.geen adults and children alike. When people are on holiday they
:13:08. > :13:13.haven't got routine and they are thrown back to their resources and
:13:13. > :13:23.come to the surface things do. I'm not keen on holiday, I like things
:13:23. > :13:23.
:13:23. > :13:29.to do all the time. "pensiony had a special dispensation to play his
:13:29. > :13:35.Nintendo because". He wanted to talk about his on going fantasy of
:13:35. > :13:40.which the teacher killed and ate children in her class. Daisy tried
:13:40. > :13:44.to talk to allless, who kept -- Alex, who kept looking at Melissa
:13:44. > :13:50.who ignored him. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-
:13:50. > :13:55.Time is told from the point of view of a boy who has as perinjures.
:13:55. > :13:58.There is also the views of the eight members of the extended
:13:58. > :14:02.family. Writing almost simultaneously from eight points of
:14:02. > :14:05.view was hard, something I committed to early on. You are
:14:05. > :14:10.never a single person with your family. You are often the child you
:14:10. > :14:14.used to be, a parent to someone, quite often you don't really know
:14:15. > :14:17.who you are, it depends who is in the room. As the holiday progresses,
:14:17. > :14:23.several different stories emerge from the different view points.
:14:23. > :14:27.While the three teenagers struggle to navigate the sexual currents of
:14:27. > :14:29.adulthood. The parents find themselves simply adrift. "mum and
:14:29. > :14:34.dad were sitting at opposite corners of the table. Why didn't
:14:34. > :14:39.they love each other? It was easier being here with Louis is a and
:14:39. > :14:44.Richard, who acted as a kind of padding, at home it was always
:14:44. > :14:49.cooler in temperature when the two of them were together." People need
:14:49. > :14:53.to be troubled in whatever way to generate stories, and gain your
:14:53. > :14:58.interest. As the family members try to come to terms with themselves
:14:58. > :15:04.and each other, the Red House itself becomes a presence. Haddon
:15:04. > :15:07.lovingly describes the objects it contain, mute guardians of the past
:15:07. > :15:10.and present. Towards the end of the book where everyone leaves the
:15:10. > :15:14.holiday home where they have staying, they haven't really gone,
:15:14. > :15:19.they have left a few things behind. The house continues as a character
:15:19. > :15:23.in its own right. Full of all the marks and stains and coasts that
:15:23. > :15:27.everyone else who has ever been in the house has left behind. Does
:15:27. > :15:32.Haddon take us on a holiday to remember, or will his technical
:15:32. > :15:36.experiments leave some readers behind?
:15:36. > :15:39.To a certain extent, this idea of people trapped in one house, in one
:15:39. > :15:49.holiday, is a familiar one, do you think that Mark Haddon breathes new
:15:49. > :15:53.life into the device? Well, mostly. I think he does. I admire him, and
:15:53. > :15:58.his previous novels as well, in managing to do, as you say,
:15:58. > :16:08.experimental things, for popular fiction. He's a very popular writer
:16:08. > :16:08.
:16:08. > :16:12.to be trying to do. Sometimes in this novel, not just the use of the
:16:12. > :16:17.eight view points, but rapid shifting from viewpoint to
:16:17. > :16:22.viewpoint, sometimes there are problems with it. I quite admire
:16:22. > :16:27.the effort to do it. It is an old fashioned thing, actually, the idea
:16:27. > :16:32.that actually what fiction does is extends your sympathy to all sorts
:16:32. > :16:39.of characters. It is a George Elliott thing with a sub-Virginia
:16:39. > :16:46.Woolf thing to it. I was laughing at the word "horror" that you said
:16:46. > :16:50.it. What I felt, and I think the idea, exactly as you said, the
:16:50. > :16:54.project, he has done precisely, perfectly, what he set out to do,
:16:54. > :16:58.in terms of an equal narrative. Nobody feels they are less or more
:16:58. > :17:01.important. When you are reading it, you realise he's not going that is
:17:01. > :17:07.the boring one I didn't want to write about. For me, the problem is,
:17:07. > :17:12.that this sense of the trapped house, I have low tastes. I'm
:17:12. > :17:19.brought up on Agatha Christie, Mysterious Affair of Styles, if I
:17:19. > :17:25.read a country house, I want there to be a ghost or murder. There is a
:17:25. > :17:28.ghost. Kind of a ghost. Everything about it I admired. I thought he
:17:28. > :17:34.had completely delivered what he said in the film. I wanted more to
:17:34. > :17:40.happen. I know the point is it is the extraordinaryness of
:17:40. > :17:44.ordinariness. What about the individual characters. What about
:17:44. > :17:49.the Melissa character, the teenager? All of the characters are
:17:49. > :17:53.constructed in a really interesting way. I think maybe the book is a
:17:53. > :17:57.bit too compressed. Because how have they made up these characters.
:17:57. > :18:07.They are made up of memories, true and always, they are made up of
:18:07. > :18:12.
:18:12. > :18:16.what they need, they are made up of the games they play. They are made
:18:16. > :18:20.up of the roads not taken and things not done. He weaves them
:18:20. > :18:25.into one strand which is the one character, and weaves it all
:18:26. > :18:34.together in this family dynamic, in which it is a bit like Chekhov,
:18:34. > :18:39.nothing is meant to happen, there musn't be the gunshot. If there is,
:18:39. > :18:43.you have undone everything. It is really about the complexity of the
:18:43. > :18:46.psychopathology of every day life. You have no sooner decided that a
:18:46. > :18:53.character is good, when you discover that character is
:18:53. > :18:56.treacherous at the same time. Melissa is a bully, but she's also
:18:57. > :19:02.strangely creative, extraordinarily frustrated and manipulative, and
:19:02. > :19:07.stands in the strange relationship to Louisa, which who has a whole
:19:07. > :19:12.life that nobody hardly dares to investigate. And it's like living,
:19:12. > :19:16.but it is deliberately compressed and wrought to this extraordinarily
:19:16. > :19:21.high standard. I would say, though, ultimately it doesn't work. It is
:19:21. > :19:26.just a bit too hard on the reader. You need a bit more elbow room.
:19:26. > :19:32.is funny you say that. Although he does distribute his sympathies very
:19:32. > :19:36.evenly, and he's very fair, I think. Funnily enough, I think he's better
:19:36. > :19:43.on teenagers than adults, and actually, the nearest he gets to
:19:43. > :19:50.the thing you wanted, which is the heror, or something, at the heart
:19:50. > :19:59.of it -- horror, or something, at the heart of it, is with Angela,
:19:59. > :20:03.that is something that felt facticious. It doesn't work. She's
:20:03. > :20:08.revisited by something in the past. It is like he heard a voice in his
:20:08. > :20:12.head saying something like you said. That was one of the false notes in
:20:12. > :20:17.it. I think it is partly of the idea that the construct of the
:20:17. > :20:24.house is character, and requires something extra, whether it is a
:20:24. > :20:32.Sarah Walters or Alan Holeinghurst extra, it is more than the
:20:32. > :20:39.architecture of the novel. The point about Chekhov is right, there
:20:39. > :20:46.is the gunshot, Vanya is it, how can you say that, we won't go with
:20:46. > :20:50.Chekhov. I think that the sense of the, what is being celebrated is
:20:50. > :20:55.that everybody can relate to this sort of story. The idea of
:20:55. > :20:58.mismatched people, coming to the for whatever reason, they want an
:20:58. > :21:03.epiphany, reconciliation. All of these things do work. I agree the
:21:03. > :21:09.teenagers are better. I think he's terrific on girls, not just boys. I
:21:09. > :21:16.think that the twists at the heart of it, which we can't reveal, they
:21:16. > :21:21.are not quite...I Think we can reveal that there is no murder. The
:21:21. > :21:27.Red House is available in all good book shops now. From one troubled
:21:27. > :21:31.family to another. Mrs Robinson's seduction of a younger man in the
:21:31. > :21:36.1960s was seen as sexy and glamorous, for her earlier name
:21:36. > :21:41.sake in Victorian Britain, an affair meant disgrace. The story of
:21:41. > :21:49.that, Mrs Robinson's downfall, has been told by Kate Summerscale, who
:21:49. > :21:55.shot to fame with her story The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. This is
:21:55. > :21:59.the story of a well to do Victorian lady, who kept a diary in the 1850,
:21:59. > :22:05.in which she detailed all her miseries and frustrations with her
:22:05. > :22:10.life, particularly her husband. She also detailed her several
:22:10. > :22:13.infatuations with young men that she met. And in 1854, there are a
:22:13. > :22:20.series of entries which apparently describe her having an affair with
:22:20. > :22:24.one of these men. And her husband read her diary, confiscated the
:22:24. > :22:30.diary, took her sons away, sued for divorce, and that was the setting
:22:31. > :22:36.for one of the first and most notorious divorce cases, when the
:22:36. > :22:41.new divorce court opened in 1858. As with Summerscale's previous
:22:41. > :22:48.novel, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, the story of Isabella Robinson
:22:48. > :22:54.involved meticulous research. found a big cachet of letters
:22:54. > :22:58.relating to the case in -- cache of letters relating to the case in
:22:58. > :23:03.Edinburgh, I was able to get behind the trial and the court case, to
:23:03. > :23:07.see in the protaganist's own words what they were up to and what they
:23:07. > :23:11.thought they were doing, and how they were presenting their stories.
:23:11. > :23:16.The events unfold at the time of new divorce laws. And the bare
:23:16. > :23:21.facts of the story, exposes the shocking Victorian attitudes to
:23:21. > :23:26.women contained in the legislation. There was a stark double standard
:23:26. > :23:31.enshrined, by which a husband could win a divorce, simply by proving
:23:31. > :23:35.his wife had been unfaithful to him. Where as a woman had to prove in
:23:35. > :23:41.order to win a divorce, that her husband, had not only been
:23:41. > :23:47.unfaithful, but had also committed another marital crime, such as
:23:47. > :23:53.beastality, or incest, or brutality towards her. At the time Mrs
:23:53. > :23:59.Robinson's diaries created a sensation with their called born
:23:59. > :24:04.pornographic entries. Provoking -- called pornographic entries,
:24:04. > :24:10.provoking a press reaction that we would recognise today. In court
:24:10. > :24:14.every word was reported, and with relish and excitement, this kind of
:24:14. > :24:17.frank discussion of sexual desire in women was not available anywhere
:24:17. > :24:22.else in the mainstream press. Then, of course, the newspapers would
:24:23. > :24:29.also run editorals saying that the diary entries were disgusting. And
:24:30. > :24:34.that the practice of writing such things was horrendous.
:24:34. > :24:37.I suppose in a way, like Mark Haddon and Hilary Mantel, there are
:24:37. > :24:41.big he can peck takes of this, because of Kate Summerscale --
:24:41. > :24:47.expectations of this, because of Kate Summerscale's previous success.
:24:47. > :24:50.Were you hit by the story? I think so, I got a bit frustrated, because
:24:50. > :25:00.we start off with Mrs Robinson, we get interested in her when she
:25:00. > :25:01.
:25:01. > :25:07.starts to keep the diary. But there is a tragic story before that, we
:25:07. > :25:11.find Kate Summerscale sails over. 19 years old, married to a 43-year-
:25:11. > :25:15.old widowed, retired naval officer. She is married for four years, has
:25:15. > :25:21.a child. Then he suddenly becomes insane, and six months later he's
:25:21. > :25:24.dead. That particular sequence of events suggests something, which
:25:24. > :25:29.would have been a terrible tragedy and injustice done to this young
:25:29. > :25:33.woman, at the very beginning of her life. Because the most likely story
:25:33. > :25:37.there is syphilis, I'm afraid, especially, his naval history and
:25:37. > :25:43.so on, it all adds up. Then you have all the other odd things that
:25:43. > :25:47.happen. She marries unsuitably, she says, by this time she's already
:25:47. > :25:51.fictionalising her life. Her father gives her all this money, which is
:25:51. > :25:56.meant to make her independent of her husband, and she signs it all
:25:56. > :25:59.over to him as blank cheques, and you have to think, why does she do
:25:59. > :26:02.that? That is the stifling relationship at the heart of it,
:26:02. > :26:07.this woman who could have been financially independent, but isn't.
:26:07. > :26:12.Owes tofrg her husband, and so turns, -- owes everything to her us,
:26:12. > :26:16.and turns, whether in fantasy or fact, to another man? There are
:26:16. > :26:23.lots of other stories glanced at in this book. Unlike you, I found that
:26:23. > :26:29.one of the things I liked about it. There wasn't room for all the
:26:29. > :26:33.extraordinary stories of all the strange, offer sexual
:26:33. > :26:39.irregularities and unhappinesss of all the various relations and
:26:39. > :26:43.members of the family. Amazing things were going on. That is part
:26:43. > :26:46.of the effect of the book, what is historically fascinating about this
:26:46. > :26:50.is, this particular story is one example of something amazing that
:26:50. > :26:54.is happening in the mid-19th sent treatment because divorce by our
:26:54. > :26:58.standards doesn't become easy, but suddenly becomes possible. A whole
:26:58. > :27:02.culture goes into shock about the condition of marriage. And has to
:27:02. > :27:11.face up to the prevalence of adultery. Even Queen Vicoria says
:27:11. > :27:16.perhaps people shouldn't get married. Do you think there is
:27:16. > :27:19.adultery, there is an ambiguity, there is an element of fantasy,
:27:19. > :27:24.isn't there? I think Kate Summerscale said something really
:27:25. > :27:29.important in her film. It made me think of the Hilary Mantel, talking
:27:29. > :27:33.about the seam of misogyny, that is so through everything. Unless you
:27:33. > :27:39.look through that prisism, none of it makes sense. For me I thought I
:27:39. > :27:48.was going to be thinking, I wonder did or they didn't they do it. What
:27:48. > :27:52.I actually started to think was, my God, this is quite appalling. Not
:27:52. > :27:55.only the things about a wife being a chat tell, and the husband being
:27:55. > :28:00.able to take everything. But the other things, if the wife loses the
:28:00. > :28:03.children get taken if they are over a certain age. Every time they talk
:28:03. > :28:06.about this woman's inner most secrets, whether madness,
:28:06. > :28:10.deillusion or truth, all the other women are cleared from the court.
:28:10. > :28:16.You have this idea of a single woman, almost as if she's being
:28:17. > :28:21.stoned, surrounded only by men. For me, oddly, like the stories within
:28:21. > :28:25.a story, I found it a horrifying read. We think we know about the
:28:25. > :28:29.position of women in the mid-19th century, there were still elements
:28:29. > :28:33.that came as a surprise? Yes, I think we need to know a little bit
:28:33. > :28:37.more about it. The father who settles money on her, settles it on
:28:37. > :28:45.her. That is for the heirs of her body. That was to protect her. You
:28:45. > :28:49.could do that. That had always been an option. But she didn't take it?
:28:49. > :28:57.She gave it away. You want to know why. Is she guilty about something.
:28:57. > :29:01.She says that funny thing about that first marriage being something
:29:02. > :29:06.to do with unconquerable passion. Clearly it is something people
:29:06. > :29:11.didn't want to happen but it did happen. But is the thing we think
:29:11. > :29:15.happened, happen. What I found was this crucial of the individual,
:29:15. > :29:23.clever woman, desperately trying to seek out intellectual company?
:29:23. > :29:27.is a chronicle of thwarted ap site, isn't it. -- appetite. The appetite
:29:27. > :29:33.is not just carnal, she is desperate for fiscal love --
:29:33. > :29:38.physical love, whether she got it or not from the doctor she fell for,
:29:38. > :29:40.she definitely got it from a tutor of one of the children. She is
:29:40. > :29:48.recording endlessly the speculations about art and the
:29:48. > :29:52.landscape. She wants all that. Like some sort of George Elliott heroine.
:29:52. > :29:56.If you would like to know more about the appetites of Mrs Robinson,
:29:56. > :30:01.in the Victorian diary, the book is out now. Potentially ruinous,
:30:01. > :30:05.hidden sexuality, also lies at the heart of the final book tonight. In
:30:05. > :30:11.his latest model, In One Person, John Irving ifr, whose back
:30:11. > :30:16.catalogue reads like a best seller list, takes on sexual ambiguity in
:30:16. > :30:20.small town America. John Irving gained world renown for A Prayer
:30:20. > :30:26.for Owen Meany, The Cider House Rules, and Hotel New Hampshire, the
:30:26. > :30:33.novel, In One Person, looks at the story of Billy Abbott, a bisexual
:30:33. > :30:39.writer, and his coming of age taking place in Vermont. He is torn
:30:39. > :30:45.between his lust for the librarian Miss Frost, and a manipulative
:30:45. > :30:51.student. "If an unwanted pregnancy was the abyss an intrepid girl
:30:51. > :30:54.could fall into. Surely the abyss for a boy like me was to succumb to
:30:54. > :31:01.homosexual activity. Sor so I believed at the fall of my senior
:31:01. > :31:07.year at Favourite River Academy, I was 18, but my sexual misgivings
:31:07. > :31:11.were innumberable. My self-hatred was huge." The first person
:31:11. > :31:16.narrative goes on to span five decades of American history. And
:31:16. > :31:21.over the years Billy accrues and reflects on a proliferation of
:31:21. > :31:25.partners, from a predatory poet, to a Canadian drag Queen and a budding
:31:25. > :31:35.opera singer. But his fluid sexuality makes him an object of
:31:35. > :31:35.
:31:35. > :31:42.distrust from childhood to retirement. And the book sees the
:31:42. > :31:45.return of Irving to his book The World According to Garp. "You're a
:31:45. > :31:49.transsexual, I said my boy don't name me and make me a catagory
:31:49. > :31:54.before you get to know me. When she stood up from her desk she seemed
:31:54. > :31:59.to tower over me. When she opened her arms to me, I didn't hesitate,
:31:59. > :32:03.I ran to her strong embrace and kissed her". A po lemic against
:32:03. > :32:08.narrow mindedness, In One Person is considered by Irving to be his most
:32:08. > :32:18.political book in years. In the wake of recent books from others,
:32:18. > :32:19.
:32:20. > :32:24.does the theme of sexual prejudice still have bite?
:32:24. > :32:29.The narrative of a bisexual man is unusual? It is only reading a lot
:32:29. > :32:35.of the clips that I realised it is. I hadn't talked about it. We were
:32:35. > :32:39.trying to think of others? could say Orlando, but not really.
:32:39. > :32:42.I think this is tremendous. It is the idea that some how all these
:32:42. > :32:45.discussions have been had, and all right thinking people now think
:32:45. > :32:49.that what matters is you should be yourself, and you should be with
:32:49. > :32:52.who you want to be, and being honourable and decent is all that
:32:52. > :32:58.matters. We know this is not the case. Things are going backwards in
:32:58. > :33:03.many of these areas. What I think he has done with wonderful Billy as
:33:03. > :33:08.the narrate toe. He's a bt bit goofy, he doesn't always get it
:33:08. > :33:13.right. He's passionate about his Shakespeare and acting, he wants to
:33:13. > :33:15.read all the time. It is as much about the power of words and
:33:15. > :33:22.theatres and as it is about sexuality and intolerance. He
:33:22. > :33:28.gently takes us by the hand, and takes us through 70 years, is it 70
:33:28. > :33:32.or 50, I couldn't work it out. was 68? It really succeeded in
:33:32. > :33:37.saying that there are different ways of seeing these experiences.
:33:37. > :33:42.There are some people in the gook who define themselves as gay or
:33:42. > :33:46.bisexual. There is a lot of cross dressing in Vermont t seems to me.
:33:46. > :33:51.I was surprised by the amount of cross dressing in Vermont,
:33:51. > :33:57.actually? It is clever and an intimate personal dialogue between
:33:57. > :34:05.Billy and the reader. Billy's dates coincide exactly with Irving's own
:34:05. > :34:11.dates. The bisexual man, who is a top and not a bottom. Picture of
:34:11. > :34:15.dodger. Picture of Catio, and capable of having sex with both men
:34:16. > :34:23.and women, is a slight low fantastic figure. I can think of
:34:23. > :34:28.lots of gay men who would say they just didn't buy it. But it gives
:34:28. > :34:37.him his get-out, it covers his incomprehension about gay sexuality.
:34:37. > :34:42.Which is incredibly protien, and various, much more so than female
:34:42. > :34:44.sexuality, which is more emotional and straight laceed in its way.
:34:44. > :34:48.These guys are creating extraordinary things to do, that
:34:48. > :34:53.you didn't know you wanted to do until you had tried everything else.
:34:53. > :34:59.The only thing is underneath the notion of sexuality is a pretty
:34:59. > :35:08.ordinary one. And the games he plays with the repeated moatity ofs,
:35:08. > :35:14.like the small breast Moive, and the fact he will refeet his own
:35:14. > :35:18.catch phrases, I was irritated with the use of -- repeat his on catch
:35:18. > :35:22.phrases, I was irritated with the use of Shakespeare. Not all readers
:35:22. > :35:29.will enjoy that. I disagree with one thing you were saying when it
:35:29. > :35:35.takes you gently by the hand. I think he grabs and yaanks you and
:35:35. > :35:43.won't let you go. Too much of a pole lemic? Too much of all sorts
:35:43. > :35:47.of things. He talks a lot this narrator and he talks about the
:35:47. > :35:51.same things a lot, you must be prepared for that. When it works it
:35:51. > :35:57.is the fierceness of his intent. The character of his stepfather,
:35:57. > :36:01.saying to the character at one stage, the trouble with you is you
:36:01. > :36:06.are intolerant of anybody who is not tolerant. And you feel he's
:36:06. > :36:11.being made very much a kind of spokesperson for the author himself,
:36:11. > :36:16.and sometimes I think the fierce passages about AIDS of the 1980s,
:36:16. > :36:21.that is terrific, sometimes it just goes on too much. I thought that
:36:21. > :36:27.was incredibly moving the sections on AIDS, and the pace changed
:36:27. > :36:30.dramatically? I thought that they were terrifically well done. Most
:36:30. > :36:35.people reading that will have read other fiction covering those areas.
:36:35. > :36:39.For me it wasn't like I have read this before. The point I made about
:36:39. > :36:46.gently and repetition, I see it as a deliberate attempt as the
:36:46. > :36:51.novelist to show that over a life you repeat yourself. You slightly
:36:51. > :36:55.change your view and then you go back to something else. I see it as
:36:55. > :37:00.an extraordinarily ambitious thing to do, in a Beckett type way, to
:37:00. > :37:04.leave all of that in, rather than edit it out. Quite near the end the
:37:04. > :37:09.point about the label is, when the beautiful boy, that he vanished off,
:37:09. > :37:14.and he never comes back, but his son comes, and he's angry and will
:37:14. > :37:18.spoil this play. He says what you are doing is making the disgusting,
:37:18. > :37:23.the abnormal, normal and ordinary. For me that was the point of the
:37:23. > :37:27.repetition, was that it makes it ordinary. Shouldn't it be ordinary.
:37:27. > :37:32.It is not just sex at centre stage, there is the literary world,
:37:32. > :37:38.constant references to Shakespeare, to Flaubert? And to the fact that
:37:38. > :37:46.he is a writer. Poor old Madame Bovary has been worked very hard.
:37:46. > :37:53.What about the club and all of that. Not all of it is entirely
:37:53. > :37:57.convincing, we are reworking all of the Irving tropes, wrestling. He
:37:57. > :38:02.has to pull off a movie stunt by doing his famous, whatever that is
:38:02. > :38:06.called, the duck-under. I will wrestle us away from this item and
:38:06. > :38:10.move on. Love it, loathe it, or swing both ways possibly, In One
:38:10. > :38:13.Person is available now. This week saw the announcement of the
:38:13. > :38:18.shortlist for The Orange Prize. Founded by one of my studio guests,
:38:18. > :38:26.guess which one. And this year featuring a familiar face amongst
:38:26. > :38:34.the judge, we asked Natalie to talk us through the runners and riders.
:38:34. > :38:38.Half Blood Blues is set during the Second World War, by Esi Edugyan,
:38:38. > :38:46.it is about ultimate betrayal, it is about jazz musicians in Berlin,
:38:46. > :38:49.and in Paris as the Nazis takeover. As a story it turns on sexual and
:38:49. > :38:55.artistic jealousy, it is the fact that someone else's talent is so
:38:55. > :39:00.great it makes you hate them. It is a sign of her brilliance. The
:39:00. > :39:05.Forgotten Waltz is about an affair, set in Ireland at the time when the
:39:05. > :39:10.credit crunch is just about to hit and hits. It is a metaphor for
:39:10. > :39:15.everything that goes wrong in Ireland for the past decade. Gina,
:39:15. > :39:18.our heroine realises how much money each kiss with this man cost her.
:39:18. > :39:23.Everyone bought their houses when the economy was at a thriving
:39:23. > :39:27.height and now they want sell it. The Song of Achilles is by Madeline
:39:27. > :39:33.Miller, she's the only first-time novelist, but punches her weight
:39:34. > :39:38.with the others. She has written a very beautiful love story with
:39:38. > :39:42.Achilles, it is a story we know from the Iliad, but told by the
:39:42. > :39:47.other point of view. It is incredibly touching and poetic, it
:39:47. > :39:55.is the only book on the entirety of the Orange sub misses list this
:39:55. > :39:59.year that made me fry. The next one is Foreign Bodies, about a woman
:39:59. > :40:03.called Bea, living in New York, where she teaches, and her
:40:03. > :40:11.extremely demanding brother, Marvyn, demands that she goes over to Paris
:40:11. > :40:17.to try to bring his son home. It is extremely clever book, never stuffy,
:40:17. > :40:23.very certificate reebbral, a lot like Henry James. We have State of
:40:23. > :40:27.Wonder by Ann Patchett, she as an old hand, about a woman called
:40:27. > :40:37.Marina, a research scientist, and her research colleague is sent to
:40:37. > :40:37.
:40:37. > :40:42.hout America by their boss to find out what is happening with a
:40:42. > :40:48.research project, and he disappears, she goes to find him. Painter of
:40:48. > :40:51.Silence is set in Romania in the 1950s, at the beginning of the book
:40:51. > :40:56.a deaf mute man arrives at the hospital. He has a terrible story
:40:56. > :41:00.but has no language to express it. He can only draw and paint and make
:41:00. > :41:04.imagery of what has happened to him, the language of the book is
:41:04. > :41:08.incredibly artistic and very beautiful.
:41:08. > :41:11.That's all for tonight. Thanks to my guests, Germaine Greer, John
:41:11. > :41:15.Mullen and Kate Mosse. Remember you can find out more about all of
:41:15. > :41:20.tonight's books and find a longer version of my interview with Hilary
:41:20. > :41:29.Mantel on the website. Do continue to tweet away. Next week Kirsty
:41:29. > :41:35.will be here to discuss the latest installment in the 7-up series, and
:41:35. > :41:45.The Dictator. Jools Holland is up next. To get you into a musical
:41:45. > :42:03.
:42:03. > :42:13.mood, here is King Creasote and # I won't go too far
:42:13. > :42:18.
:42:18. > :42:28.# I promise to crawl # Until I'm back on my feet
:42:28. > :42:29.
:42:29. > :42:39.# If something were wrong # Do you think I'd leave
:42:39. > :42:43.
:42:43. > :42:53.# If something went wrong # Don't you know that I'd be here
:42:53. > :42:55.
:42:55. > :43:05.# So who's been unfair # Who causes you sorrow
:43:05. > :43:08.
:43:08. > :43:15.# Who's been unkind # Who burst your bubble
:43:15. > :43:25.# Who drags you down # Down
:43:25. > :43:36.