0:00:02 > 0:00:06On The Review Show tonight, home and abroad with the Man Booker short list,
0:00:06 > 0:00:10featuring love and loss in gold-rush era New Zealand,
0:00:10 > 0:00:12a mother's grief for her murdered son,
0:00:12 > 0:00:15xenophobia in rural England...
0:00:15 > 0:00:18the children of Zimbabwe's lost decade,
0:00:18 > 0:00:22a tale of family and exile in India and Rhode Island,
0:00:22 > 0:00:26and a Tokyo teen captivates a novelist in rural Canada.
0:00:27 > 0:00:29Plus music from Steve Mason.
0:00:36 > 0:00:38Hello and welcome to The Review Show.
0:00:38 > 0:00:41Tonight I'm joined by an extremely literary panel
0:00:41 > 0:00:43as we discuss the Man Booker short list.
0:00:43 > 0:00:46Professor John Mullan from University College, London,
0:00:46 > 0:00:49Sarah Churchwell, professor of American literature at the University of East Anglia,
0:00:49 > 0:00:51and the writer Paul Morley.
0:00:51 > 0:00:55The nominees this year come from a very diverse range of nationalities
0:00:55 > 0:00:57and backgrounds,
0:00:57 > 0:01:00including a Zen Buddhist priest, the first Zimbabwean,
0:01:00 > 0:01:02and the youngest author ever to be short-listed.
0:01:02 > 0:01:07Their novels are equally broad, covering subjects from immigration to xenophobia,
0:01:07 > 0:01:10political uprisings to the conflict between man and the natural world.
0:01:10 > 0:01:14But before we actually discuss them, how did you approach the short list?
0:01:14 > 0:01:17I mean, you only had six books. Imagine what it was like when it began.
0:01:17 > 0:01:20Was it daunting even to have the six? Well, it was, but I kind of arranged it
0:01:20 > 0:01:21as an entertainment show
0:01:21 > 0:01:23in the order I'd like to see them appear,
0:01:23 > 0:01:25because it is kind of an entertainment show.
0:01:25 > 0:01:27It's X Factor, it's the Eurovision Song Contest.
0:01:27 > 0:01:30So I figured out in what order I'd want to do it,
0:01:30 > 0:01:33and luckily enough it worked out just correct in terms of the pacing.
0:01:33 > 0:01:35So I started out with one or two that I might have read anyway,
0:01:35 > 0:01:37then into a middle-ground area,
0:01:37 > 0:01:41and then the huge one at the end that I did consider hiring a few interns to make their way through,
0:01:41 > 0:01:43but in the end I did do it, and that was the right order,
0:01:43 > 0:01:47because I think if I'd begun with the big one, I might not have got to the others.
0:01:47 > 0:01:48Did you jump around?
0:01:48 > 0:01:50I didn't jump around,
0:01:50 > 0:01:52I'm actually quite a methodical reader,
0:01:52 > 0:01:55because I want that sense of... it is a daunting task for anyone...
0:01:55 > 0:01:58and I want that sense of accomplishment, so I want to know I'm working my way through it.
0:01:58 > 0:01:59So I did begin with the longest,
0:01:59 > 0:02:03but also, I have to say, because it did look the most appealing to me, actually.
0:02:03 > 0:02:05I love 19th-century novels and it's based on that,
0:02:05 > 0:02:09and so I really liked the idea of really jumping into something that does a lot of storytelling.
0:02:09 > 0:02:14And then I moved...I made sure that I didn't keep the one I was least looking forward to to the last,
0:02:14 > 0:02:17because that's always a mistake. Did you do it differently?
0:02:17 > 0:02:21No...well, I was methodical, but I was also sort of more escapist
0:02:21 > 0:02:25than Sarah. I mean, I left the daunting task till last,
0:02:25 > 0:02:29II left the 832-page Eleanor Catton novel till last.
0:02:29 > 0:02:33Just I felt it would sort of elbow the others aside, I might spend too long on it almost.
0:02:33 > 0:02:36You might get fatigued? And I did start...
0:02:36 > 0:02:40Actually, that's not quite true, because there's one I've read before and I left that to the very last,
0:02:40 > 0:02:42so that I would reread it.
0:02:42 > 0:02:46But I started with the Jim Crace because I suppose he was a novelist I knew a bit
0:02:46 > 0:02:49and I felt it was familiar ground. And it was nice and short!
0:02:49 > 0:02:54Well, let's start with that daunting task, the longest book of this year's short list,
0:02:54 > 0:02:58and long-listed before it was even available to the public, Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries
0:02:58 > 0:03:04is an epic literary page-turner set during the Gold Rush era of mid-1860s New Zealand.
0:03:04 > 0:03:07Using astrological charts as a plotting device,
0:03:07 > 0:03:11the story unfolds as a Scottish fortune hunter Walter Moody
0:03:11 > 0:03:15unintentionally interrupts 12 men who've gathered in a hotel smoking room
0:03:15 > 0:03:20to discuss mysterious and murderous events in which their lives are intricately entwined.
0:03:22 > 0:03:24"Some kind of heist was in the offing, he guessed,
0:03:24 > 0:03:29"or maybe they were forming an alliance against another man. Mr Carver, perhaps.
0:03:29 > 0:03:32"They numbered twelve, which puts Moody in mind of a jury,
0:03:32 > 0:03:37"but the presence of the Chinese men and Maori native made that impossible."
0:03:37 > 0:03:42I had this idea of, you know, a stranger coming into a bar
0:03:42 > 0:03:45which feels like a very...
0:03:45 > 0:03:49archetypal situation in a literary sense.
0:03:49 > 0:03:55And I knew already that I wanted to play with the zodiac as an idea,
0:03:55 > 0:03:57as a kind of structuring idea for the novel,
0:03:57 > 0:04:04and wrote that first sentence, you know...it took me quite a while to kind of put that on the page,
0:04:04 > 0:04:07and kind of went from there.
0:04:07 > 0:04:10I know that that seems like a very vague answer,
0:04:10 > 0:04:17especially because the book ends up being so intricately plotted later, but really it wasn't.
0:04:18 > 0:04:25Standing at a colossal 832 pages, the story recounts a series of unsolved crimes
0:04:25 > 0:04:29involving a missing wealthy man, a near-dead prostitute
0:04:29 > 0:04:33and an enormous amount of money found in the home of a luckless recluse.
0:04:33 > 0:04:37However, as the reader works through each layer of the story,
0:04:37 > 0:04:40the layout of the very novel itself takes centre stage.
0:04:40 > 0:04:46My main ambition for the book, really, was that I wanted to create an experience
0:04:46 > 0:04:48that was very like looking at the night sky.
0:04:48 > 0:04:53You can see the constellation of Leo, for example, or the constellation of Aries,
0:04:53 > 0:04:56and you can trace the pattern in it and it's a picture.
0:04:56 > 0:05:03But if you really want to know more about the kind of harmonies and correspondences and patterns at work,
0:05:03 > 0:05:08they're there to be excavated, they're there to be studied,
0:05:08 > 0:05:11but not necessarily immediately visible.
0:05:12 > 0:05:17"What does it prophesy, a month without a moon?" The widow gazed at him impenetrably.
0:05:17 > 0:05:22"'I'm not mistaken,' she said. 'I have an almanac and I'm very skilled at reading it.
0:05:22 > 0:05:26"'The moon is waxing now above the cloud. It will be full by Monday night
0:05:26 > 0:05:31"'and on Tuesday it will begin to wane. Next month will be a month without a moon.'"
0:05:34 > 0:05:39Sarah, is this about the story or about the way the story's told, the mechanics of it?
0:05:39 > 0:05:41It's a good question. I actually think it's about both.
0:05:41 > 0:05:47And what happens is for the first half of the book, she tells the story of one extraordinary day
0:05:47 > 0:05:50through the point of view of 12 characters who are the kind of constellations
0:05:50 > 0:05:54around whom...who orbit around the two luminaries of the story, the sun and the moon,
0:05:54 > 0:05:56who turn out to be these lovers.
0:05:56 > 0:05:59And that's all very clever and it's very engaging
0:05:59 > 0:06:03and it's a really bravura opening and it feels like it's building and building and building,
0:06:03 > 0:06:05and as you get to each character, you learn something more about the story
0:06:05 > 0:06:10and about these two mysterious individuals who are going to come together.
0:06:10 > 0:06:12And then she makes the decision, as she says there,
0:06:12 > 0:06:15as the moon is waning, the story's going to start to unravel,
0:06:15 > 0:06:18and the chapters are going to get smaller and smaller and smaller...
0:06:18 > 0:06:20I think... So there are two problems...
0:06:20 > 0:06:25the first is that you put in this... and I did love the book, actually...
0:06:25 > 0:06:29You put in this massive investment and she starts to deliberately pull it away from you,
0:06:29 > 0:06:33and you start to feel like she doesn't...she's not going to give you the pay-off that you want...
0:06:33 > 0:06:35Let me just ask, did you feel cheated?
0:06:35 > 0:06:38Cheated? Well, I felt it was more technique than content ultimately,
0:06:38 > 0:06:41and after the first 400 pages which is almost the opening chapter,
0:06:41 > 0:06:43then she halves each chapter going through,
0:06:43 > 0:06:46I felt, like, "Well, that's interesting. You've just spent 400 pages explaining something
0:06:46 > 0:06:49"that in an episode of Deadwood would have taken 45 minutes!"
0:06:49 > 0:06:51It does feel like Deadwood. Which is interesting
0:06:51 > 0:06:53because there is a post-box set world that she's inhabiting,
0:06:53 > 0:06:56which is also fascinating, the idea that the box set... It fascinates her.
0:06:56 > 0:07:02It fascinates her, which...the novel was influential on these long HBO sophisticated programmes
0:07:02 > 0:07:05that allow characters to develop... And now it's feeding back into the novel. And now it's feeding back in.
0:07:05 > 0:07:09And so for me in the end what ultimately took over was the technique.
0:07:09 > 0:07:12A lot of information, a lot of description, a lot of explication...
0:07:12 > 0:07:16but ultimately at the end of it, I felt that what I'd been through was very clever,
0:07:16 > 0:07:21ferociously, brilliantly... an extraordinary achievement, but for very little.
0:07:21 > 0:07:25Ultimately, I felt like I'd been in more of a soapy area of box sets
0:07:25 > 0:07:27which seemed to contradict the immense effort.
0:07:27 > 0:07:30I think there's only one thing that it's very little of... it's very little...
0:07:30 > 0:07:33it's quite like a kind of a 19th-century novel in some ways,
0:07:33 > 0:07:39it's kind of quite like a Wilkie Collins novel in the elaboration of its plot and deeds and gold
0:07:39 > 0:07:42and who's married to who, but...
0:07:42 > 0:07:49it doesn't deliver that sense of sort of psychological richness that you get...
0:07:49 > 0:07:52and psychological identification that you get...
0:07:52 > 0:07:58and when you hear her talking, she's talking about structure and harmony and pattern...
0:07:58 > 0:08:01but in terms of that it's brilliant and I think that...
0:08:01 > 0:08:05Do you care that you don't actually get to know and follow her characters that well?
0:08:05 > 0:08:08I think you have to not care. I mean, I think you have to sign up to that.
0:08:08 > 0:08:15And it's not that the detail in it, the thickness of it, is just sort of larded on for its own sake.
0:08:15 > 0:08:19Everything matters, everything matters to the elaborate relationships... It's epic,
0:08:19 > 0:08:23but it's incredibly twee. It's bold, but incredibly conservative.
0:08:23 > 0:08:28It's really safe and tidy ultimately, so you're going through an immense amount of material for very little...
0:08:28 > 0:08:29I think that's right. For me, actually,
0:08:29 > 0:08:32I don't mind that the characters don't have that psychology,
0:08:32 > 0:08:34because at the beginning it feels like they do actually.
0:08:34 > 0:08:39The problem for me is that I'm left holding very little. I'm not sure what all of this was in aid of.
0:08:39 > 0:08:44What I do think though is her descriptions...you get this feeling of the Wild West,
0:08:44 > 0:08:48the jail not quite built... but to me it's like she's creating an elaborate stage set.
0:08:48 > 0:08:52Very cold. I don't agree actually with that at all.
0:08:52 > 0:08:55As a page-turning story, especially for the first half of it, she had me gripped!
0:08:55 > 0:08:59I want to know what was going to happen... You have to go back to retrieve her characters, don't you?
0:08:59 > 0:09:02No, I don't... Because she does that herself. No, you don't have to. You do!
0:09:02 > 0:09:04But then the organisational principles...
0:09:04 > 0:09:06I mean she talks a bit about the stars,
0:09:06 > 0:09:10and we should say there's a kind of great astrological organisational principle in this,
0:09:10 > 0:09:14and I was reading this, and I'm thinking, "God, this is a bit random!
0:09:14 > 0:09:16"She obviously probably doesn't believe in astrology,"
0:09:16 > 0:09:22and yet it's...then you think, "I know Chaucer did this and Edmund Spenser did this..."
0:09:22 > 0:09:27It's a beautiful, mathematical sort of pattern and that's what you've got to enjoy,
0:09:27 > 0:09:31her sense of pattern and connection in the way you make a narrative.
0:09:31 > 0:09:35People have said we should talk, not the programme, but just generally,
0:09:35 > 0:09:39this is the youngest person ever to have been on the Booker short list...
0:09:39 > 0:09:44do you think it is quite a kind of virtuoso performance for someone as young? Oh, completely!
0:09:44 > 0:09:45I think it's a virtuoso performance for anybody!
0:09:45 > 0:09:49I disagree with John a little bit, because I think that the pattern is wonderful,
0:09:49 > 0:09:53but she actually doesn't give us enough information to decode the pattern.
0:09:53 > 0:09:55We need to know a little bit more about astrology, you know,
0:09:55 > 0:09:58assuming that we don't all know as much as she does... how do we read the charts?
0:09:58 > 0:10:01She's pulled all of this stuff into it and we can't quite pull it all back out again.
0:10:01 > 0:10:03There's also like this sense of the achievement and the youngster...
0:10:03 > 0:10:08it started to happen with the X Factor, actually, that just because you open your mouth and have a voice,
0:10:08 > 0:10:12that you're immediately adored, and it seems to be the instant creation of a star,
0:10:12 > 0:10:15so the very nature that she can do it seems to be what's overwhelming,
0:10:15 > 0:10:18rather than what's actually happening. It's very...
0:10:18 > 0:10:21We need to move on now, because we're going from the longest book to the shortest book
0:10:21 > 0:10:22on this year's list,
0:10:22 > 0:10:27and, indeed, at just 101 pages, the slimmest ever to be short-listed for the Booker prize.
0:10:27 > 0:10:32Twice nominated in previous years, Colm Toibin's latest takes us back 2,000 years
0:10:32 > 0:10:37and retells the greatest story ever told from a new and controversial angle.
0:10:37 > 0:10:41In The Testament Of Mary, he re-imagines the crucifixion of Jesus
0:10:41 > 0:10:44from the perspective of his mother Mary.
0:10:54 > 0:11:00I suppose that in the images we have of Mary she's meek, she's humble,
0:11:00 > 0:11:03she's the meek mother or she's the grieving woman,
0:11:03 > 0:11:07but in the New Testament she doesn't speak very much,
0:11:07 > 0:11:12so I suppose just simply the idea of having her speak
0:11:12 > 0:11:15and also having her speak after the event,
0:11:15 > 0:11:20so it's not a commentary on the event, it is somebody traumatised.
0:11:20 > 0:11:24We find Mary living out the last years of her life
0:11:24 > 0:11:27under the unwelcome supervision of two of her son's followers,
0:11:27 > 0:11:32unrelenting in their pursuit of a Gospel-worthy account of the death of her son.
0:11:32 > 0:11:36Mary gives to us what she denies her oppressors,
0:11:36 > 0:11:37an unflinching testament
0:11:37 > 0:11:42of the events leading up to one of the world's most notorious acts of violence.
0:11:42 > 0:11:45"I sensed a thirst for blood among the crowds.
0:11:45 > 0:11:51"I could see it in people's faces how their jaws were set and their eyes were bright with excitement.
0:11:51 > 0:11:55"There was a dark vacancy in the faces of some,
0:11:55 > 0:12:01"and they wanted this vacancy filled with cruelty, with pain, and with the sound of someone crying out.
0:12:01 > 0:12:08"Only something vicious would satisfy them now once they had been given permission to want it."
0:12:10 > 0:12:14I understood that I was playing with fire.
0:12:14 > 0:12:19And I think that gave me a sort of energy which I could put into the sentences,
0:12:19 > 0:12:24so that in her ways of speaking in the book, in her voice,
0:12:24 > 0:12:28there's a tone which is heightened, which is strung out.
0:12:28 > 0:12:35"And then time created the man who sat beside me at the wedding feast of Cana,
0:12:35 > 0:12:38"the man not heeding me, hearing no-one,
0:12:38 > 0:12:44"the man filled with power, a power that seemed to have no memory of years before
0:12:44 > 0:12:46"when he needed my breasts for milk,
0:12:46 > 0:12:49"my hands to help steady him as he learned to walk,
0:12:49 > 0:12:52"or my voice to soothe him to sleep."
0:12:57 > 0:13:02Paul, I think even hearing Colm Toibin speak it is utterly shocking, isn't it?
0:13:02 > 0:13:06It's fabulous as well, because it has that thing that the longer one we've just talked about doesn't have,
0:13:06 > 0:13:09whereas at the end of it I still feel it's resonating and it's carrying on
0:13:09 > 0:13:12and I still feel like I'm remembering the dream that's getting more vivid,
0:13:12 > 0:13:15whereas, oddly, with the longer one, I'm forgetting the dream.
0:13:15 > 0:13:19And so the idea that it might be a short book, it still seemed to have an awful lot of information.
0:13:19 > 0:13:24And I loved the approach that was taken. For me this list this year lacked sort of ideas as such,
0:13:24 > 0:13:28and at least this was a great idea. This is a great idea, incredibly subversive.
0:13:28 > 0:13:30Yes. I mean, it really... you say it resonates,
0:13:30 > 0:13:35that's partly, I think, a product of its length or its shortness.
0:13:35 > 0:13:39I mean, you can read this comfortably in two hours, and I think that's the way to read it.
0:13:39 > 0:13:42And afterwards it's as if you've been steeped in something.
0:13:42 > 0:13:48And I think that the length means that it is in some ways not like any other novel,
0:13:48 > 0:13:54in that he hasn't... he's taken one thing, one idea and absolutely saturated it.
0:13:54 > 0:13:56I mean, I think he's a masterful writer,
0:13:56 > 0:14:03but also in a way because of its shortness he hasn't had to confront creating the larger world
0:14:03 > 0:14:07that a novel has to create. But he's done what he's done amazingly.
0:14:07 > 0:14:09I mean, there are so many different aspects to this book,
0:14:09 > 0:14:11but particularly what he deals with was motherhood,
0:14:11 > 0:14:15and also the idea that the true Mary is not the Madonna,
0:14:15 > 0:14:19the true Mary is the one whose son has moved away from her and that she's got a bit of a problem with.
0:14:19 > 0:14:22Absolutely! It is subversive in so many ways,
0:14:22 > 0:14:25and I think not enough attention has been paid, in my opinion,
0:14:25 > 0:14:29to the fact that this is an absolutely brilliant imagining of a mother's grief
0:14:29 > 0:14:33and a mother's suffering... And aloneness. And, you know, from a man.
0:14:33 > 0:14:35And we're always giving people a hard time
0:14:35 > 0:14:38about whether they can imagine enough from a different person's point of view,
0:14:38 > 0:14:42and Toibin does a beautiful job of that here. We've heard about mothers so many times.
0:14:42 > 0:14:45Absolutely, absolutely. But what is so great about his vision of Mary
0:14:45 > 0:14:47is that this testament is a testament of doubt,
0:14:47 > 0:14:53and she's saying, "I don't know why he let his friends convince him he was the Son of God,"
0:14:53 > 0:14:57all these misfits who came along, and he got too big, you know, he got bigheaded.
0:14:57 > 0:15:01I love that, you know, the idea, I'm just trying to think in the same way,
0:15:01 > 0:15:08the idea that the disciples are kind of malingerers, misfits, problematic, you know,
0:15:08 > 0:15:13and clearly she's very annoyed presumably with John who's trying to get her
0:15:13 > 0:15:15to sign on the dotted line, "These things happened."
0:15:15 > 0:15:19I love the fact that she doubts herself the most about her son,
0:15:19 > 0:15:24that this myth that will expand over time... She's appalled by it, she's embarrassed by it.
0:15:24 > 0:15:28And that's interesting, because I was wondering how I would feel about reading it
0:15:28 > 0:15:33if I was more obviously a Catholic or a lapsed Catholic, or if I was invested in it.
0:15:33 > 0:15:37The disturbing thing if you're a believer is not the disciples,
0:15:37 > 0:15:39but the evangelists who are different
0:15:39 > 0:15:43and they're quite sort of minatory characters, they're there,
0:15:43 > 0:15:46and they are forging a new... they know what they're doing,
0:15:46 > 0:15:50and they are forging a creed and they want to use her.
0:15:50 > 0:15:54It's extreme. It could be seen as extremism as well, I read it like that. Absolutely.
0:15:54 > 0:16:00But there's also a tremendous bit which really made me think when Lazarus rises from the dead,
0:16:00 > 0:16:06"My God! Is he ill!" He's a zombie! He's a zombie! Yeah, it's totally horrifying.
0:16:06 > 0:16:10But also the wedding at Cana. She says it was so chaotic with all of the people so excited,
0:16:10 > 0:16:11who could tell what was water and what was wine?
0:16:11 > 0:16:15So she's doubting all of the miracles, she's saying it's just people getting hysterical,
0:16:15 > 0:16:17you know, who are surrounding him.
0:16:17 > 0:16:21And you were talking about the idea that he's pulling out one idea, but the command of the language... Yeah!
0:16:21 > 0:16:27Well, I agree. I think, you know, of all the writers on the list he is the best writer.
0:16:27 > 0:16:31Or he's a writer at a stage in his career when he can really do it.
0:16:31 > 0:16:34This comes after two or three really terrific novels.
0:16:34 > 0:16:37And I think he's a really great writer.
0:16:37 > 0:16:40And therefore it's about content as well in a way that the first one wasn't.
0:16:40 > 0:16:44You're coming away with every page being different, whereas in the first one 400 pages tend to be the same.
0:16:44 > 0:16:48I don't want to compare them, but it is interesting that there seems to be more in this, more richness
0:16:48 > 0:16:50than in all those other hundreds of pages.
0:16:50 > 0:16:53Out of this, out of every sentence comes another layer, another revelation.
0:16:53 > 0:16:59But I think for the judges to choose this just shows that in their view they believe this to be a novel,
0:16:59 > 0:17:02not a novella, not a prose poem... No... It started out as a stage monologue. You have your doubts.
0:17:02 > 0:17:07I mean, obviously, the judges chose it because of the quality of the writing,
0:17:07 > 0:17:12but I do think the length is a kind of problem for this prize,
0:17:12 > 0:17:20because it is as if he has got this fantastic, intense, one, concentrated idea and he's done it,
0:17:20 > 0:17:25but I think that a novella, something as short as this is different from a novel,
0:17:25 > 0:17:29and hasn't had to make that kind of larger world that a novel has to make.
0:17:29 > 0:17:33But I think it's interesting what you say...because we're so aware of this story that's been told so many times,
0:17:33 > 0:17:37it comes with itself so much around it, that you feel that it's embedded in such a big thing.
0:17:37 > 0:17:40Yes, but he's relying on that. I actually agree with John to a certain extent.
0:17:40 > 0:17:44I do think it's perfect as far as it goes, but he could have done 60,000 words instead of 30.
0:17:44 > 0:17:48And I wanted more, so why not do more? So what are we talking about, though?
0:17:48 > 0:17:50Are we talking about laziness or are we talking about...?
0:17:50 > 0:17:55In a sense its intensity is perfect. It started as a monologue.
0:17:55 > 0:17:59Well, let's move on, then, from the harrowing testimony of the mother of Jesus
0:17:59 > 0:18:01to a teenage diary and a Hello Kitty lunchbox
0:18:01 > 0:18:05which finds its way from one side of the Pacific to the other.
0:18:05 > 0:18:10The novel by Zen Buddhist priest, writer and filmmaker Ruth Ozeki
0:18:10 > 0:18:13crosses continents, straddles decades and tackles themes
0:18:13 > 0:18:17from quantum physics to the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction.
0:18:18 > 0:18:21A Tale For The Time Being opens with the discovery of a diary
0:18:21 > 0:18:24which is washed up on a British Columbia shoreline
0:18:24 > 0:18:29after apparently drifting across the Pacific following the 2011 tsunami.
0:18:29 > 0:18:34Its author is a mysterious teenager in Tokyo, Nao Yasutani.
0:18:34 > 0:18:37"My name is Nao and I'm a time being.
0:18:37 > 0:18:39"Do you know what a time being is?
0:18:39 > 0:18:43"Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.
0:18:44 > 0:18:48"A time being is someone who lives in time and that means you and me
0:18:48 > 0:18:52"and every one of us who is or was or ever will be.
0:18:53 > 0:18:59"As for me, right now, I'm sitting in a French maid cafe in Akiba Electricity Town,
0:18:59 > 0:19:05"listening to a sad chanson that's playing sometime in your past, which is also my present,
0:19:05 > 0:19:09"writing this and wondering about you, somewhere in my future."
0:19:11 > 0:19:17The diary is found by Ruth, a novelist, who becomes preoccupied with Nao and what has become of her.
0:19:17 > 0:19:21You know, if there's one theme in the book,
0:19:21 > 0:19:25it's the theme of interconnectedness.
0:19:25 > 0:19:27The characters are connected geographically
0:19:27 > 0:19:33by the great oceanic gyres that connect Japan and the Pacific Northwest of Canada,
0:19:33 > 0:19:37but the characters are also connected through time as well.
0:19:38 > 0:19:40"She inhaled again, steeply this time,
0:19:40 > 0:19:47"and then put the book - no, not a schoolgirl's nice pure diary - back on the bedside table,
0:19:47 > 0:19:50"still pondering how best to read this improbable text.
0:19:50 > 0:19:53"Nao claimed to have written it just for her,
0:19:53 > 0:19:58"and while Ruth knew this was absurd, she decided she would go along with the conceit.
0:19:58 > 0:20:01"As the girl's reader it was the least she could do."
0:20:02 > 0:20:05It's a story about the relationship between a writer and a reader
0:20:05 > 0:20:10and the way in which, in a sense, they kind of co-create each other.
0:20:10 > 0:20:15As a writer I do my role and then I sort of cast the book out into the world
0:20:15 > 0:20:19and hopefully there's be a reader there to pick up the book and read the book.
0:20:19 > 0:20:25But of course the book that I write is very different than the book that, for example, you read.
0:20:25 > 0:20:30It's a co-creation, it's a collaboration that you and I do together,
0:20:30 > 0:20:32even if I don't know who you are.
0:20:34 > 0:20:39So this is a book which crosses continents, it's got lots of narratives, it's got dreams,
0:20:39 > 0:20:44it's got magic realism, it's got everything. Is it a book that you enjoyed reading?
0:20:44 > 0:20:51It's a book I intermittently enjoyed and intermittently I was exasperated by it, I confess.
0:20:51 > 0:20:53It's got two main narratives,
0:20:53 > 0:20:58and the narrative of Nao the 15-year-old Japanese schoolgirl...
0:20:58 > 0:21:05I sort of was a bit suspicious at first, 15-year-old narrator, so a lot of those...
0:21:05 > 0:21:10it's a character who's conveniently innocent but almost adult, they're always 15,
0:21:10 > 0:21:13but actually I thought that kind of quite well done.
0:21:13 > 0:21:19It was the other narrative, the narrative about Ruth and her partner or husband Oliver,
0:21:19 > 0:21:24and it's about the novelist, the novelist is called Ruth and she has a partner called Oliver...
0:21:24 > 0:21:28It's the antithesis of this idea that writers are always asked, is it autobiographical?
0:21:28 > 0:21:32Not only is it autobiographical, same place... Same place... Same job.
0:21:32 > 0:21:35I just found it smug, actually. I found that narrative smug.
0:21:35 > 0:21:37I mean, they're insufferably right-thinking.
0:21:37 > 0:21:41The husband is the biggest know-all I've encountered in fiction recently.
0:21:41 > 0:21:46Well, maybe so's her real husband. Well, he probably thinks it's very unfair to him, I don't know.
0:21:46 > 0:21:49What did you make of the intertwining of it?
0:21:49 > 0:21:54The fact that she's on this mission to find out what's behind what's in this Hello Kitty box.
0:21:54 > 0:21:59Well, I find it... This one is a weird combination of the experimental and the whimsical.
0:21:59 > 0:22:03And I'm wondering if it would have been better if it had just been Nao, if had just been the Japanese girl.
0:22:03 > 0:22:06Yeah. She captured her voice really well, I thought.
0:22:06 > 0:22:08I thought there was a better story appearing
0:22:08 > 0:22:11than this familiar story that we've heard so many times before,
0:22:11 > 0:22:15and ultimately is about a kind of writer's block, I think could have disappeared very easily
0:22:15 > 0:22:17without harming the book.
0:22:17 > 0:22:20That's actually the thing. There is a kind of sub-genre of books about writer's block
0:22:20 > 0:22:22where writers write themselves out of it,
0:22:22 > 0:22:24John Barth has done it really well, Philip Roth does it really well,
0:22:24 > 0:22:26and she's playing the same kind of metafictional games
0:22:26 > 0:22:29where the writer puts themselves front and centre and says, "I've got writer's block. What do I do?"
0:22:29 > 0:22:33I think the problem is that what she did was she did write herself into a very good novel
0:22:33 > 0:22:36about this girl in Japan and she should have jettisoned the parts
0:22:36 > 0:22:39that were actually getting her into it, and not tried to tie them together
0:22:39 > 0:22:41which is what she actually tries to do.
0:22:41 > 0:22:44In order to bring them together, she actually has recourse to a dream
0:22:44 > 0:22:46which I think is a very cheap cop-out.
0:22:46 > 0:22:50And if she had done something cleverer in order to bring those stories together,
0:22:50 > 0:22:53I might have bought it more. I didn't find those sections as irritating as you did,
0:22:53 > 0:22:55I just didn't think she brought them together successfully.
0:22:55 > 0:23:00Interestingly, she says that she started to rewrite this after the earthquake and the tsunami,
0:23:00 > 0:23:03because she was concentrating on Nao before, the Nao story, sorry,
0:23:03 > 0:23:06and then suddenly she felt she had to being herself into it.
0:23:06 > 0:23:08And I think you do feel these different parts of it.
0:23:08 > 0:23:11It's a book that also has a problem with form in the way we were talking about with the Catton as well.
0:23:11 > 0:23:15It's a book that keeps wanting to explode its own form. It uses footnotes, it has appendices,
0:23:15 > 0:23:17it can't figure out... What I find interesting about this
0:23:17 > 0:23:22is that it's the middle of the road book-club type book that tries to incorporate post-modern techniques
0:23:22 > 0:23:25but isn't transcendent enough to really pull them off,
0:23:25 > 0:23:30so you're aware almost that they'd like the idea of making these books a little bit more literary
0:23:30 > 0:23:34than just good reads, so they go into an area that actually they're not very successful at, for me.
0:23:34 > 0:23:38It's kind of literary fiction in a slightly pejorative sense, don't you think?
0:23:38 > 0:23:43We were just talking about the idea that you've got to have all these footnotes and appendices
0:23:43 > 0:23:46which are meant to sort of... Are they meant to take you away from the story?
0:23:46 > 0:23:50Are they meant to make you feel cleverer, or the fact that she's trying to educate you?
0:23:50 > 0:23:52Well, I think there is a bit of that,
0:23:52 > 0:23:57and under the sort of pretext of kind of post-modern playfulness,
0:23:57 > 0:24:00and it's not playful at all, I don't think,
0:24:00 > 0:24:02she tells you things, the author's in there telling you things,
0:24:02 > 0:24:07and I think a lot of the narrative of Ruth has information in it,
0:24:07 > 0:24:09and when it's not conveyed by the irritating husband
0:24:09 > 0:24:12it feels as though it's being conveyed by the novelist.
0:24:12 > 0:24:15So it's like an academic exercise? Well, no, I think that's not fair.
0:24:15 > 0:24:17I think she's trying to make it playful
0:24:17 > 0:24:19and I think that she's trying to actually make it...
0:24:19 > 0:24:23she's trying to ask questions about the relationship between the author and the character.
0:24:23 > 0:24:26How does the author pull up their own character? Where does it come from?
0:24:26 > 0:24:32And then what happens when there's this interchange between the reader and the author?
0:24:32 > 0:24:34I just don't think she handles it very successfully. It's not natural to her.
0:24:34 > 0:24:38If often get the feeling that she was just putting her arm round me, and almost patronising me,
0:24:38 > 0:24:42and trying to take me through the book and, "Look what's happening now and this is how clever I'm being!"
0:24:42 > 0:24:45rather than itself being something that you disappear into. OK.
0:24:45 > 0:24:48Well, we're going to take a break from the Booker for a moment
0:24:48 > 0:24:52with the man behind the critically acclaimed Beta Band and the cult King Biscuit Time.
0:24:52 > 0:24:56Here's Steve Mason with his new single Fire.
0:25:18 > 0:25:22# Won't you let me in your heart?
0:25:23 > 0:25:27# Are you in here on your own?
0:25:29 > 0:25:32# What can we do just the two?
0:25:33 > 0:25:38# Something here from us to you
0:25:48 > 0:25:52# We don't like the way you live
0:25:53 > 0:25:58# Did you forget how to give?
0:25:58 > 0:26:02# All that beauty that you stole
0:26:03 > 0:26:08# I know how we find your soul
0:26:12 > 0:26:14# Fire!
0:26:15 > 0:26:17# Hands up!
0:26:18 > 0:26:19# Fire!
0:26:19 > 0:26:22# I wouldn't go from here, it's clear!
0:26:23 > 0:26:24# Fire!
0:26:24 > 0:26:27# I wouldn't go from here, it's clear!
0:26:27 > 0:26:28# Yeah, stick him in the fire!
0:26:39 > 0:26:43# Is this your first day starts cryin'?
0:26:43 > 0:26:47# Carve you up and down with blood
0:26:49 > 0:26:52# So much blood in foreign lands
0:26:53 > 0:26:58# We scrub the state upon your hand
0:27:09 > 0:27:12# Where do we go from here? It's clear!
0:27:13 > 0:27:14# Fire!
0:27:14 > 0:27:17# Where do we go from here? It's clear!
0:27:18 > 0:27:20# Fire!
0:27:20 > 0:27:22# Where do we go from here? It's clear!
0:27:23 > 0:27:24# Fire!
0:27:24 > 0:27:27# Where do we go from here? It's clear!
0:27:27 > 0:27:29# Yeah, stick him in the fire!
0:27:38 > 0:27:39# Fire!
0:27:48 > 0:27:49# Yeah, stick him in the fire!
0:27:49 > 0:27:52# Where do we go from here? It's clear!
0:27:54 > 0:27:55# Fire!
0:27:55 > 0:27:57# Where do we go from here? It's clear!
0:27:59 > 0:27:59# Fire!
0:27:59 > 0:28:02# Where do we go from here? It's clear!
0:28:03 > 0:28:05# Fire!
0:28:05 > 0:28:07# Where do we go from here? It's clear!
0:28:08 > 0:28:10# Fire!
0:28:10 > 0:28:13# Where do we go from here? It's clear!
0:28:14 > 0:28:15# Fire!
0:28:15 > 0:28:18# Where do we go from here? It's clear!
0:28:19 > 0:28:20# Fire!
0:28:20 > 0:28:21# Where do we go from here?
0:28:22 > 0:28:25# Yeah, stick him in the fire!
0:28:28 > 0:28:30# Fire!
0:28:34 > 0:28:35# Fire!
0:28:42 > 0:28:45# Hands up, yeah! Stick him in the fire! #
0:28:46 > 0:28:51Fire from Steve Mason's latest album Monkey Minds In The Devil's Time.
0:28:51 > 0:28:55It's released on 4 November and you can hear more from Steve later in the show.
0:28:55 > 0:28:57Back to the Booker now.
0:28:57 > 0:29:01NoViolet Bulawayo is the first Zimbabwean and the first Black African woman
0:29:01 > 0:29:03to be nominated for the Booker Prize.
0:29:03 > 0:29:07Her debut novel We Need New Names tells the story of one girl
0:29:07 > 0:29:13whose harsh, vibrant childhood in Zimbabwe is interrupted by emigration to America.
0:29:14 > 0:29:18"We all turn around and follow Bastard back into the bush,
0:29:18 > 0:29:22"the dizzying smell of Lobels bread all around us now..."
0:29:30 > 0:29:33We Need New Names is about a young girl named Darling
0:29:33 > 0:29:36and her group of friends who are all growing up in a shantytown
0:29:36 > 0:29:38named Paradise.
0:29:38 > 0:29:43They are trying to be children at a time when the country's falling apart,
0:29:43 > 0:29:47so their day-to-day experience is that of struggle,
0:29:47 > 0:29:48just trying to survive.
0:29:54 > 0:29:57"We are on our way to Budapest:
0:29:57 > 0:30:01"Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me.
0:30:04 > 0:30:06"We are going even though we are not allowed to cross Mzilikazi Road,
0:30:06 > 0:30:11"even though Bastard is supposed to be watching his little sister Fraction,
0:30:11 > 0:30:17"even though Mother would kill me dead if she found out; we are just going.
0:30:17 > 0:30:22"There are guavas to steal in Budapest, and right now I'd rather die for guavas."
0:30:22 > 0:30:26I decided to write from the perspective of a young girl
0:30:26 > 0:30:32because I'm interested in giving voice to the voiceless,
0:30:32 > 0:30:37and I feel like children are some of the most vulnerable citizens.
0:30:38 > 0:30:45Darling and her friends are able in the face of all these difficult challenges to remember to play
0:30:45 > 0:30:47and laugh and be hopeful.
0:30:47 > 0:30:53When one writes you just hope that you get a reader, an open-minded reader
0:30:53 > 0:30:56who will pick up your book and appreciate that they are reading
0:30:56 > 0:31:01not always but sometimes about a real place with real people,
0:31:01 > 0:31:08so I look at We Need New Names as a text that will help put a face to a story
0:31:08 > 0:31:10that people may have heard before.
0:31:12 > 0:31:18"Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages,
0:31:18 > 0:31:22"and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised.
0:31:22 > 0:31:29"When we talked our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men.
0:31:29 > 0:31:33"Because we were not using our languages,
0:31:33 > 0:31:35"we said things we did not mean.
0:31:35 > 0:31:41"What we really wanted to say remained folded inside, trapped."
0:31:44 > 0:31:49NoViolet Bulawayo has this incredible band of children, a kind of weird and wacky Famous Five.
0:31:49 > 0:31:51But these kids are struggling
0:31:51 > 0:31:57because they're the children of the people that Mugabe has displaced from their homes. Yeah.
0:31:57 > 0:32:01She creates an amazing energetic start to the book, doesn't she?
0:32:01 > 0:32:05It's an incredibly bravura opening and it's very funny, it's very moving...
0:32:05 > 0:32:09it manages to be charming without ever being twee or being condescending.
0:32:09 > 0:32:13There are these children with these names, one is called Godknows as one word,
0:32:13 > 0:32:15one is called Bastard, one is called Darling,
0:32:15 > 0:32:19and there's this sense that English is being played with
0:32:19 > 0:32:25in really...it creates this kind of frisson where the words don't mean quite what they're supposed to mean.
0:32:25 > 0:32:31And we had Budapest in that VT, Budapest is a place in Zimbabwe that the children are going to,
0:32:31 > 0:32:34and so you keep encountering words that you know in the wrong place,
0:32:34 > 0:32:38and it makes it all very fresh and very vivid and brings it really to life.
0:32:38 > 0:32:43I think we have another book for me where the first half was far, far better than the second half.
0:32:43 > 0:32:46And when she comes to America it really all sort of falls apart. John?
0:32:46 > 0:32:49Yeah, I think Sarah's completely right about that.
0:32:49 > 0:32:53The first half was terrific, and often really funny. Yeah.
0:32:53 > 0:32:58I mean, it's a ten-year-old narrator, and, you know, people try and pull that off quite often,
0:32:58 > 0:33:00but she really does,
0:33:00 > 0:33:05and it's got, oh, yes, the horrors of life
0:33:05 > 0:33:08in the shantytown, but actually the absurdity of it too.
0:33:08 > 0:33:11You get the sense these kids are incredibly strong. Incredibly,
0:33:11 > 0:33:16and it's got a wonderful picture of...it's got a preacher in it
0:33:16 > 0:33:22whose hypocrisy, I mean, Dickens would have been really pleased to have brought out as well as she has,
0:33:22 > 0:33:27but then we go to America and things... Fall apart?
0:33:27 > 0:33:30Well, they don't fall apart... Become a cliche. Exactly.
0:33:30 > 0:33:34It's extraordinary how quickly that happens. But before we get to America,
0:33:34 > 0:33:38because I think America is almost like a footnote, bizarrely, in this story,
0:33:38 > 0:33:41you have a situation where she does create certain set pieces.
0:33:41 > 0:33:44She's got a hilarious section in Zimbabwe where the kids are not stupid,
0:33:44 > 0:33:46when the NGOs arrive.
0:33:46 > 0:33:52Then she's got a really difficult one, of one of her friends, you know, who is pregnant,
0:33:52 > 0:33:58who they try and remove the child... With a coat hanger, it's harrowing. With a coat hanger, it's harrowing.
0:33:58 > 0:34:03But you understand that actually this is actually incredibly as it probably happened.
0:34:03 > 0:34:07Absolutely. It's an 11-year-old girl who's been impregnated by her grandfather,
0:34:07 > 0:34:09and the other children go along to try and solve the problem,
0:34:09 > 0:34:12but they don't really understand where the baby came from, they don't know really how to get it out,
0:34:12 > 0:34:15and you sit there thinking, are they really going to go through with this?
0:34:15 > 0:34:18And they way that she moves back and forth between these scenes of comedy
0:34:18 > 0:34:22and these scenes that are really, really terrifying, I think she does it with great delicacy and style.
0:34:22 > 0:34:25Is it too episodic, do you think? No, it's not episodic,
0:34:25 > 0:34:27but I think that the problems of the trip to America also come
0:34:27 > 0:34:29because there's a structural problem about the novel.
0:34:29 > 0:34:33She's got this voice, she's absolutely got it,
0:34:33 > 0:34:38and then it's as if she's slightly ticking off the things that she wants to put in the novel.
0:34:38 > 0:34:40When she goes to America, now we're in America, Paul,
0:34:40 > 0:34:46nothing much happens... It's a difficult thing... ..Except she's in a kind of synthetic difficult area
0:34:46 > 0:34:50with an aunt and an uncle, and nothing is really made of what happens,
0:34:50 > 0:34:53it's a very cliched view in a way. It's a very interesting moment, actually.
0:34:53 > 0:34:56You can't deny that there would be a development
0:34:56 > 0:34:58and the writer wants to move on,
0:34:58 > 0:35:01but it's almost like the development of the writer who's moved to America
0:35:01 > 0:35:02to do a certain sort of thing in her life
0:35:02 > 0:35:06is absolutely corrupting what it is about her that makes her a special writer.
0:35:06 > 0:35:09There's something about America, it's over-familiar, we know those stories,
0:35:09 > 0:35:11Darling seems to become someone completely different as well,
0:35:11 > 0:35:14she becomes more of a spoiled brat...
0:35:14 > 0:35:17There's a danger because in the West we have a sense of the exotic...
0:35:17 > 0:35:20Well, I'm thinking at the front there's definitely a theme developing here,
0:35:20 > 0:35:21we've seen in three of these books,
0:35:21 > 0:35:26where at the beginning we're excited, maybe this is a certain sort of literary exoticism,
0:35:26 > 0:35:28a tourism, if you like, we're cruising in something,
0:35:28 > 0:35:31that we're very grateful to get this kind of information
0:35:31 > 0:35:33and it seems to be beautifully told, as far as we know.
0:35:33 > 0:35:38When it goes to the place we're familiar with we suddenly notice there's a lot of cliche,
0:35:38 > 0:35:40and we're thinking, "Well, maybe we've been hoodwinked at the beginning,"
0:35:40 > 0:35:43so it throws back an interesting shadow on the first thing,
0:35:43 > 0:35:46you think, "Well, maybe that wasn't as original and beautiful as we thought."
0:35:46 > 0:35:52Towards the end, you get a sense of...there's one really tense moment, I think...
0:35:52 > 0:35:56we can't really give away the end, which is a relation backwards to Zimbabwe,
0:35:56 > 0:35:58which I thought could have been developed a lot more. Absolutely.
0:35:58 > 0:36:01One of the things that happens, without giving away too much,
0:36:01 > 0:36:05is that when the narrator moves to America, she leaves behind this little posse
0:36:05 > 0:36:09that she's been travelling around with, and we've become invested in them,
0:36:09 > 0:36:12we want to know what happens to them and we don't really learn very much about what happens to them.
0:36:12 > 0:36:16I won't say more than that. But I think there's an emotional failure there as well.
0:36:16 > 0:36:19But I don't think we have been hoodwinked in that first half.
0:36:19 > 0:36:21I think it's... The real deal.
0:36:21 > 0:36:25This was a winner, going by the first few pages.
0:36:25 > 0:36:28Well, the immigrant experience in America, as Paul said,
0:36:28 > 0:36:32is also the focus of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland.
0:36:32 > 0:36:37Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1999 short story collection The Interpreter Of Maladies.
0:36:37 > 0:36:41With this latest novel, the Bengali-American author
0:36:41 > 0:36:44has written a family saga which spans four generations
0:36:44 > 0:36:48and explores the tragic fallout of one of the brothers' involvement in revolutionary politics.
0:36:54 > 0:36:57"In the papers there were photographs, taken from a distance,
0:36:57 > 0:37:02"of those who gathered to hear Sanyal's speech, to give the Red Salute.
0:37:02 > 0:37:06"A battle cry declared, a generation transfixed.
0:37:06 > 0:37:08"A piece of Calcutta standing still.
0:37:10 > 0:37:13"It was a portrait of a city Subhash no longer felt a part of.
0:37:13 > 0:37:18"A city on the brink of something; a city he was preparing to leave behind.
0:37:19 > 0:37:21"Subhash knew that Udayan had been there.
0:37:21 > 0:37:26"He hadn't accompanied him to the rally, nor had Udayan asked him to come.
0:37:26 > 0:37:28"In this sense they had already parted."
0:37:29 > 0:37:36Inspired by a real-life Naxalite shooting, The Lowland hinges on Udayan's brutal political murder
0:37:36 > 0:37:40and the immense upheaval the family must suffer in its wake.
0:37:40 > 0:37:44I was interested in both what led to that moment
0:37:44 > 0:37:46and what resulted from that moment
0:37:46 > 0:37:48for each of the characters
0:37:48 > 0:37:51and even beyond the obvious,
0:37:51 > 0:37:55even through time in terms of the subsequent generations
0:37:55 > 0:37:59and how something like this can have such force,
0:37:59 > 0:38:03have such presence, and lives on in some way.
0:38:05 > 0:38:09In the novel, we follow Subhash and his brother's young widow Gauri
0:38:09 > 0:38:11as each breaks with tradition
0:38:11 > 0:38:16and crosses continents to find a fragile sense of themselves elsewhere.
0:38:17 > 0:38:19"He told her he knew she still loved Udayan.
0:38:19 > 0:38:24"He told her not to think about what people might say, how his parents would react.
0:38:24 > 0:38:30"If she went with him to America, he promised her, it would all cease to matter."
0:38:34 > 0:38:38I think the book has to do with family, first and foremost,
0:38:38 > 0:38:43it's about the effect of political violence on a particular family,
0:38:43 > 0:38:48it's about a bond between brothers, it's about marriage,
0:38:48 > 0:38:50it's about parenthood...
0:38:50 > 0:38:54I think it's about independence in all sorts of ways.
0:38:54 > 0:38:59I think this book is less about identity and more about independence
0:38:59 > 0:39:02on a variety of levels.
0:39:06 > 0:39:11John, do you think that she creates a family dynamic
0:39:11 > 0:39:15that is powerful enough for the book to be credible?
0:39:15 > 0:39:21She creates a kind of family inheritance which is of a kind of emotional numbness, really,
0:39:21 > 0:39:27which I think will make some readers feel a bit let down,
0:39:27 > 0:39:32because all the main characters are kind of cauterised in their feelings.
0:39:32 > 0:39:34But she does it brilliantly well.
0:39:34 > 0:39:41And it has the virtue, I think, of a lot of her short stories, she's a brilliant short-story writer,
0:39:41 > 0:39:45where you have to infer what's not stated and which suits very well...
0:39:45 > 0:39:50she writes in this incredibly, I think, this almost chaste way.
0:39:50 > 0:39:54She doesn't like metaphors, she doesn't like to go lyrical on you,
0:39:54 > 0:39:58she's not going to claim that something is more significant than what it is,
0:39:58 > 0:40:00and that's how she does it.
0:40:00 > 0:40:03And it produces a very kind of melancholy effect,
0:40:03 > 0:40:10but I think it also leaves you to wonder whether anybody in this novel has ever had a laugh or whether...
0:40:10 > 0:40:15The problem for me, and I think this is a brilliant novel,
0:40:15 > 0:40:20but I do think there's a real problem, I feel there's no interior life of the characters.
0:40:20 > 0:40:22No, because again it's interesting... technically, it's superb.
0:40:22 > 0:40:26But it often seems like she's moving people around, it becomes very clinical,
0:40:26 > 0:40:28and again when it started I thought this is interesting,
0:40:28 > 0:40:31revolutionary politics, we're in Calcutta, this is exciting!
0:40:31 > 0:40:37And the familiar again takes over, we move to America, we're in America, we know this so well in a way,
0:40:37 > 0:40:42this kind of story, and for me, coincidentally or not, the book starts to leave behind
0:40:42 > 0:40:46the revolutionary element, the Maoist element that I was exited by, and we're into a family saga
0:40:46 > 0:40:49that gets weaker and weaker as the book progresses.
0:40:49 > 0:40:52It's written with great integrity, unbelievable skill,
0:40:52 > 0:40:54but ultimately seems mechanical.
0:40:54 > 0:40:56I completely agree with Paul.
0:40:56 > 0:41:00My feeling was of these puppets who were just being pushed around on a stage
0:41:00 > 0:41:03in order to fulfil certain functions that she wanted them to fulfil.
0:41:03 > 0:41:08And, yes, the ideas are there, but even the revolutionary stuff, she's kind of text-dumping,
0:41:08 > 0:41:11I thought there was like a Google entry on the Naxalite revolution.
0:41:11 > 0:41:15I don't think it's a novel of ideas at all. But there was a hint at the beginning it might be.
0:41:15 > 0:41:21Just as a kind of counter example to what you're saying about the puppeteer aspect of it,
0:41:21 > 0:41:28actually, I think, a test of her skill as a writer is that whenever there is a kind of crisis episode,
0:41:28 > 0:41:32you can't give things away, but there are certain crisis episodes,
0:41:32 > 0:41:36a certain confrontation between a mother and a daughter she hasn't seen for a long time,
0:41:36 > 0:41:38which you know is going to happen,
0:41:38 > 0:41:44an explanation a father has to give to a daughter of something that he's been dreading telling her...
0:41:44 > 0:41:46I think they're handled brilliantly well.
0:41:46 > 0:41:53Moving on to the other character in the novel which for me seems to be the Lowland, that atmosphere,
0:41:53 > 0:41:57she does create the idea that there's more beyond where things happen.
0:41:57 > 0:42:02Yeah, I mean, the Lowland is sort of the novel's one metaphor, I guess! Exactly.
0:42:02 > 0:42:04She does create a sustaining atmosphere.
0:42:04 > 0:42:07The problem was I found the atmosphere so totally suffocating
0:42:07 > 0:42:09that I just really couldn't bear to be in it.
0:42:09 > 0:42:12Even though I agree about the skill with which she does it,
0:42:12 > 0:42:16she's creating an effect that I found so rebarbative that I just couldn't stay there.
0:42:16 > 0:42:20The idea again of the immigrant experience, as you say, to Rhode Island...
0:42:20 > 0:42:25this is what this Booker short list is about, isn't it? It's fascinating.
0:42:25 > 0:42:28And it's always true... It's all about displacement, every book.
0:42:28 > 0:42:32But consistently in a way the theme is to America all the time as well. Yeah.
0:42:32 > 0:42:34And started really getting me down in a way,
0:42:34 > 0:42:37because I'm thinking, you know... "Why don't they come to Britain?"
0:42:37 > 0:42:39But in a way it's an imagined...
0:42:39 > 0:42:43but it's kind of true in a way, because the America thing is over-familiar,
0:42:43 > 0:42:45the Rhode Island thing, the university campus...
0:42:45 > 0:42:48again you're representing autobiographically...
0:42:48 > 0:42:53The writer's experience seems to be overcoming the imaginative state of the book and it is disappointing.
0:42:53 > 0:42:57Well, finally, now the only British writer in the short list, Jim Crace,
0:42:57 > 0:43:01has emerged as the bookies' favourite to pick up the Man Booker Prize this year
0:43:01 > 0:43:05with what he has reportedly said will be his final novel, Harvest.
0:43:05 > 0:43:12Old rural England and members of a small community at harvest time find their way of life under threat
0:43:12 > 0:43:14with the arrival of a handful of outsiders.
0:43:14 > 0:43:18After centuries of toiling in ridge and furrow,
0:43:18 > 0:43:21the village is changed for ever in just seven days.
0:43:21 > 0:43:25The story is told from the perspective of one of the inhabitants.
0:43:25 > 0:43:29My narrator Walter is very much an outsider.
0:43:29 > 0:43:31I think he's an outsider is every respect.
0:43:31 > 0:43:35He's moved to the village in order to work for his master but he falls in love with a local girl.
0:43:35 > 0:43:36He discovers
0:43:36 > 0:43:39this ancient relationship which makes so much sense for all of us,
0:43:39 > 0:43:42not just owning fields, but owning a garden.
0:43:42 > 0:43:45It's stitched into the English psyche more than anything.
0:43:45 > 0:43:52"It did not take many working days before I understood that the land itself, from sod to meadow,
0:43:52 > 0:43:54"is inflexible and stern.
0:43:54 > 0:43:57"It is impatient, in fact. It cannot wait.
0:43:58 > 0:44:02"There's not a season set aside for pondering and reveries.
0:44:02 > 0:44:05"It will not let us hesitate or rest;
0:44:05 > 0:44:11"it does not wish us to stand back and comment on its comeliness or devise a song for it.
0:44:11 > 0:44:15"It has no time to listen to our song."
0:44:16 > 0:44:21When things start to go wrong in the village, they start looking for scapegoats.
0:44:21 > 0:44:28And even though Walter has been there for many years, he's still not of the soil.
0:44:28 > 0:44:33He's still not made from local wood, and therefore they start to pick on him.
0:44:33 > 0:44:35I'm not interested in getting the facts right,
0:44:35 > 0:44:42I'm interested in telling lies so that I can investigate and look at 21st-century sensibilities.
0:44:42 > 0:44:46This is not a novel about the Tudor times, this is not a novel about enclosures,
0:44:46 > 0:44:49this is a novel about xenophobia,
0:44:49 > 0:44:57and our strange ambivalent relationship towards property and the land.
0:44:59 > 0:45:04"'We've ploughed these fields since Adam's time,' they say,
0:45:04 > 0:45:07"counting back the granddads on their fingertips.
0:45:07 > 0:45:12"They're ancient families, they'll not easily be driven out before the torrents of the law
0:45:12 > 0:45:18"to disappear in towns or villages where their names and faces cannot ring a bell,
0:45:18 > 0:45:21"robbed of their spirits and their futures, as well as of their fields.
0:45:22 > 0:45:26"The people who have bounced between feast and famine all their lives
0:45:26 > 0:45:30"are nothing if not tough-minded and hard-nosed.
0:45:31 > 0:45:34"A sack of barley is not worth a life, they realise
0:45:34 > 0:45:39"as they watch the afternoon sun dip into the latticework of trees."
0:45:42 > 0:45:47Well, it's not anchored in time or place, it's anchored in the seasons certainly.
0:45:47 > 0:45:51Did you feel a lack of not knowing where you were?
0:45:51 > 0:45:54No, I adored that. That liberation was fantastic for me,
0:45:54 > 0:46:00because in a list that kind of lacks a sense of not only nowness, really, but also the future,
0:46:00 > 0:46:03one of the things I took from this was that it was so isolated from a specific time or place,
0:46:03 > 0:46:07it could have been post-apocalyptic, you know, it could have been the future, everything stripped back,
0:46:07 > 0:46:11everything was stripped back, so it took on a futuristic kind of quality to me
0:46:11 > 0:46:14by being so lacking in specific time and place.
0:46:14 > 0:46:19So I adored that and I adored the idea that effectively there were some ideas here.
0:46:19 > 0:46:23You could feel something about where we are now that wasn't really just technique,
0:46:23 > 0:46:27it was about something that resonated with who we are now,
0:46:27 > 0:46:31and the community's breaking down and globalisation, it's like the sheep in the enclosures,
0:46:31 > 0:46:34you could say that's Apple and Google, so it did have something about now.
0:46:34 > 0:46:39Yes, but what I also thought was lovely was the way he portrayed the land. Yeah.
0:46:39 > 0:46:44That language did seem to me to be set somewhere else. It's the language, isn't it?
0:46:44 > 0:46:48I mean, I'm not as keen as ideas in novels as Paul is, I can take them or leave them,
0:46:48 > 0:46:54but I think what Jim Crace does in this novel, and it's what he does, it's what he always does in a novel,
0:46:54 > 0:46:58it's as if he invents a new language for each novel,
0:46:58 > 0:47:03a language which...it has to be sort of adequate to a sense of pastness,
0:47:03 > 0:47:06but it can't be antique or antiquarian,
0:47:06 > 0:47:07and it's really extraordinary how he does it.
0:47:07 > 0:47:11He did it brilliantly in a novel called Quarantine about Jesus in the wilderness.
0:47:11 > 0:47:16And here he's doing it again. he's quite like William Golding, I think, in that sense...
0:47:16 > 0:47:18And that would be his hero. Would it?
0:47:18 > 0:47:20I think it would be. Well, I mean, I hope he's complimented by it,
0:47:20 > 0:47:25because I think he's up to following Golding, because he does this extraordinary thing
0:47:25 > 0:47:30of imagining the past not as understandable, but as strange, as weird,
0:47:30 > 0:47:33it needs its own new kind of figurative words.
0:47:33 > 0:47:37And weird in the way particularly that religion is dealt with, because there is no church.
0:47:37 > 0:47:40I mean, there's a kind of pagan element and there's obviously the idea of witches as well...
0:47:40 > 0:47:45And sorcery... ..Which kind of does kind set it apart from what we might think of as being the past
0:47:45 > 0:47:48in that time of the Tudors. Absolutely! It is almost...
0:47:48 > 0:47:51Without making it sound cute, which it isn't even remotely,
0:47:51 > 0:47:54there's a kind of fairytale aspect to this in the proper sense of it,
0:47:54 > 0:48:00in a Grimm's dark, gothic, wooded sense that's mythical and fabular...
0:48:00 > 0:48:04he's creating a fable here that has great depth and great resonance.
0:48:04 > 0:48:08I do think though that there is... I mean, he's making it... It's a seven-day allegory,
0:48:08 > 0:48:11things will happen at the end of those seven days,
0:48:11 > 0:48:16and I do think that although he thinks that he's not sentimentalising the village
0:48:16 > 0:48:20that is going to fall apart because of enclosures, I think he effectively does.
0:48:20 > 0:48:22It is a paradise that's going to be lost,
0:48:22 > 0:48:25and I would have liked for it to be a little bit less of a paradise
0:48:25 > 0:48:27in order for that fable to really gain its resonance,
0:48:27 > 0:48:32but that's ultimately... that's a quarrel, but it's so powerful in its effect...
0:48:32 > 0:48:35And it was a better than some of the others, the idea of the writer, of the narrator.
0:48:35 > 0:48:39The narrator in this book is the lonely writer who is opposing fear and prejudice
0:48:39 > 0:48:42through constructing an imaginative landscape.
0:48:42 > 0:48:45And what I loved about this book is it really is, because we can't pin it down and say...
0:48:45 > 0:48:50it's the imagination, it's what a novel should be, it's creating a whole new place. In Walter Thirsk,
0:48:50 > 0:48:55he creates this wonderful character who in the end himself is actually quite a weak person.
0:48:55 > 0:48:58I really liked that. He's a coward. He's a coward.
0:48:58 > 0:49:02And actually what I thought about that was quite interesting, because that is human nature,
0:49:02 > 0:49:06because so many of the villagers were cowards. Mmm. Yeah. Especially when it came to the woman.
0:49:06 > 0:49:10But I mean, I think... Dealing with the woman. It's interesting that it's Tudor times, though.
0:49:10 > 0:49:18I think, you know, some readers will flinch from the historical unspecificity of it,
0:49:18 > 0:49:23because you think what village in any place could ever have been quite like this?
0:49:23 > 0:49:27Untouched by Christianity, apparently? Would that have been possible?
0:49:27 > 0:49:31Seemingly in a world where outside the village is sort of nothing, you know?
0:49:31 > 0:49:35It's a kind of zone where... Nobody ever comes in and nobody ever goes out.
0:49:35 > 0:49:38That's what's so wonderful. It's like outside of the book as well,
0:49:38 > 0:49:40and it's so stripped back of any references,
0:49:40 > 0:49:44we're forced to invent responses, that it's very exciting.
0:49:44 > 0:49:46My other quarrel with the book, and I did hugely like it...
0:49:46 > 0:49:49You're doing lots of quarrelling with it! I know, I'm sorry.
0:49:49 > 0:49:55But there is a story here also about a character called Quill, who is known as Quill,
0:49:55 > 0:49:56who comes in and is going to map it,
0:49:56 > 0:50:00and Thirsk kind of creates a bond with him.
0:50:00 > 0:50:02Something happens to Quill, which I won't give away,
0:50:02 > 0:50:07but it raises a question about what happens to him and why it happens, and Crace refuses to answer that.
0:50:07 > 0:50:10And I think that that question probably needed to be answered.
0:50:10 > 0:50:15But just the other thing I think was wonderful... it's like an oral tradition,
0:50:15 > 0:50:18this is the kind of story you could imagine being told round a fire late at night,
0:50:18 > 0:50:22and changed with every telling, that it's not absolutely fixed...
0:50:22 > 0:50:25And do you think it's really going to be his last novel? I hope not!
0:50:25 > 0:50:30Hadn't he said he was going to stop before this one? Before this one. And then the spirit moved him!
0:50:30 > 0:50:32I think the spirit might move him again.
0:50:32 > 0:50:34It's like the Rolling Stones' farewell tour since 1981. Right. Here we go, then.
0:50:34 > 0:50:38This is the point where I'm going to ask you a question.
0:50:38 > 0:50:45Two different things...what you think should win and will that be the same as what you think will win?
0:50:45 > 0:50:48John? Oh! Me first? Yeah.
0:50:48 > 0:50:53Well, I think that the Jim Crace novel stands a very good chance of winning.
0:50:53 > 0:50:59And I'd be very happy to... I mean, I don't think it's his best novel, I think he should have won it before,
0:50:59 > 0:51:03and I think the other one that might be in the running just for the quality of the writing
0:51:03 > 0:51:09is the Colm Toibin, but I think the fact that it is so short will stand in its way.
0:51:09 > 0:51:15Sarah? I have to say I'm very close to agreeing, which is... I know you'd want more dissent here!
0:51:15 > 0:51:21But no, I agree, I think Toibin has a really good chance of winning unless its brevity works against it,
0:51:21 > 0:51:23in which case I think it's going to go to Crace.
0:51:23 > 0:51:25For me, the Toibin should win probably.
0:51:25 > 0:51:28Well, you know, I'm going to agree to an extent the Crace...
0:51:28 > 0:51:30you know, because if these books are like dreams,
0:51:30 > 0:51:33this is the one I'm remembering most and getting more and more vivid as time goes by.
0:51:33 > 0:51:37I've got an anxious horrible feeling about The Luminaries, funnily enough,
0:51:37 > 0:51:42I'm just slightly worried that somehow it's that moment when the book-club kind of book...
0:51:42 > 0:51:46Come on! That's doing it a huge disservice! No, it's not! We can't leave it at this.
0:51:46 > 0:51:49We should start again... It's a much better book than that! ..with The Luminaries.
0:51:49 > 0:51:51I hope the Toibin wins, so there we go.
0:51:51 > 0:51:55Next year's going to be all change, because we now know that the Americans are coming!
0:51:55 > 0:51:58And we are going to have Americans.
0:51:58 > 0:52:02Now, I mean, Philip Hensher, Jeanette Winterson, a lot of people have been writing about this,
0:52:02 > 0:52:04but do you think it's a good idea or a bad idea, John?
0:52:04 > 0:52:06I think it's a bad idea, basically.
0:52:06 > 0:52:11I think the Booker, the Man Booker works really well at the moment.
0:52:11 > 0:52:13I think it's done a lot of good.
0:52:13 > 0:52:17And I think one of the good things it does is it brings on to the short list and under scrutiny
0:52:17 > 0:52:22and to possible popularity, every year, usually, at least a couple of books,
0:52:22 > 0:52:24which are never going to get on any more.
0:52:24 > 0:52:30It's going to become so crowded the competition that those first-time books and those surprising books
0:52:30 > 0:52:33aren't going to get their chance. Two things need to be said here.
0:52:33 > 0:52:35Everybody's talking about it as the year the Americans will join,
0:52:35 > 0:52:39but it is open now to anybody writing and publishing in English who's also published in the UK.
0:52:39 > 0:52:42So Indians will be open for the first time, Israelis...
0:52:42 > 0:52:44if you're writing in English and publishing in the UK.
0:52:44 > 0:52:47And that's the second point. The Americans have to be published here as well.
0:52:47 > 0:52:49It's not any American book. It's a hugely different thing now.
0:52:49 > 0:52:53Does that mean there'll be more and more books and someone will do pre-sifting?
0:52:53 > 0:52:57The whole thing is, the marathon... you've done it! ..The marathon the Booker judges go through...
0:52:57 > 0:53:02No, what they've said is they've set up a kind of series of catch-alls
0:53:02 > 0:53:04where they're saying that is not going to be the case,
0:53:04 > 0:53:08that every judge will still read every book and that's still going to be the way that it's done,
0:53:08 > 0:53:12and that's what they're saying. Different kinds of judges, do you think? American judges?
0:53:12 > 0:53:14I would have slimmed it down, really.
0:53:14 > 0:53:16One of the things that annoyed me about this particular list
0:53:16 > 0:53:19was what we might call the Commonwealth element, to be honest,
0:53:19 > 0:53:23because as much as it satisfies a certain sort of middle-brow liberal guilt
0:53:23 > 0:53:25about the exile in these kind of books,
0:53:25 > 0:53:30I started to miss the North, Scotland, Wales, Ireland... I started to miss things!
0:53:30 > 0:53:34I'd go the other way! But the Booker is not just a British prize and never was.
0:53:34 > 0:53:39But it was the Commonwealth that took us to America! They kept taking us to America.
0:53:39 > 0:53:46It's a literary community that I really think there isn't between the Commonwealth and the United States,
0:53:46 > 0:53:50at least not in the same way. We just might as well give it to Pynchon as well. It's ridiculous!
0:53:50 > 0:53:53Well, it'll be interesting to see if the first winner is an American. Well, he's eligible!
0:53:53 > 0:53:57What do you think will happen to the International Man Booker? Will that just stay the same as it is?
0:53:57 > 0:54:00I find that difficult to imagine, actually.
0:54:00 > 0:54:05I mean, it's been quite dominated by Americans recently... The last two. The last two.
0:54:05 > 0:54:08And the thought now that the Americans aren't going to be on that,
0:54:08 > 0:54:13so it really becomes literature in translation, I mean, it's a good...
0:54:13 > 0:54:16Maybe the Pulitzer will come here as well! Oh, well... That's not looking likely.
0:54:17 > 0:54:21Well, the 2013 Man Booker Prize will be announced on 15 October
0:54:21 > 0:54:26and I'll have the first TV interview with the winner on Newsnight that night.
0:54:26 > 0:54:30Also on the 15th you can see a Review Show special on BBC 4,
0:54:30 > 0:54:31featuring my interview
0:54:31 > 0:54:33with the American author Donna Tartt
0:54:33 > 0:54:36ahead of her long-awaited third novel The Goldfinch.
0:54:36 > 0:54:40Thanks to my guests, John Mullan, Sarah Churchwell and to Paul Morley.
0:54:40 > 0:54:42Martha will be here next month
0:54:42 > 0:54:44to review November's box of cultural delights,
0:54:44 > 0:54:46but we leave you now with more music
0:54:46 > 0:54:49from Steve Mason. This is Oh My Lord. Good night.
0:55:12 > 0:55:16# Don't know what to feel, my sister
0:55:17 > 0:55:22# My child walks, my sister
0:55:24 > 0:55:27# Why do I wonder on old dreams
0:55:27 > 0:55:29# Why do I mind the old sins?
0:55:29 > 0:55:33# A sight for sorrow A mask you borrow
0:55:33 > 0:55:36# When you're in, you're out for ever
0:55:37 > 0:55:40# Oh my Lord, forgive me!
0:55:42 > 0:55:45# Oh my Lord, forgive me!
0:55:48 > 0:55:51# Oh my Lord, forgive me!
0:55:54 > 0:55:56# Oh my Lord, forgive me!
0:55:58 > 0:56:02# The loss, the pause, my brother
0:56:04 > 0:56:08# Should I know where to go, my brother?
0:56:10 > 0:56:12# What should I cry for in your life
0:56:12 > 0:56:17# Just a boy with a knife in his eye
0:56:17 > 0:56:21# You don't see all the loss when he weeps
0:56:21 > 0:56:26# I still reach for the sky with a tear in the eye
0:56:26 > 0:56:29# And there's a passage through the black
0:56:29 > 0:56:32# Is that sunlight through the crack?
0:56:32 > 0:56:35# And if I pick up the speed
0:56:35 > 0:56:38# I'll make a break for the trees
0:56:38 > 0:56:41# A sight for sorrow A mask you borrow
0:56:41 > 0:56:44# When you're in, you're out for ever
0:56:45 > 0:56:48# Oh my Lord, forgive me!
0:56:50 > 0:56:54# Oh my Lord, forgive me!
0:56:56 > 0:57:00# Oh my Lord, forgive me!
0:57:02 > 0:57:05# Oh my Lord, forgive me!
0:57:07 > 0:57:12# I still reach for the sky with a tear in the eye
0:57:12 > 0:57:15# And there's a passage through the black
0:57:15 > 0:57:18# Is that sunlight through the crack?
0:57:18 > 0:57:21# And if I pick up the speed
0:57:21 > 0:57:24# I'll make a break for the trees
0:57:24 > 0:57:27# A sight for sorrow A mask you borrow
0:57:27 > 0:57:30# When you're in, you're out for ever
0:57:31 > 0:57:34# Oh my Lord, forgive me!
0:57:37 > 0:57:40# Oh my Lord, forgive me!
0:57:43 > 0:57:45# Oh my Lord, forgive me!
0:57:48 > 0:57:53# Oh my Lord, forgive me! #
0:57:53 > 0:57:56# Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
0:58:02 > 0:58:06Everything to look forward to, on BBC Four.