:00:06. > :00:16.architecture? You have eight! now it is time for this week's Meet
:00:16. > :00:22.the Author. Ten years ago, Philip I am became a
:00:22. > :00:32.writer. He was working on Wall Street. His first novel, American
:00:32. > :00:33.
:00:33. > :00:38.Rust was well received. Now he has written the Son. It is not just a
:00:38. > :00:48.saga worthy of an airport blockbuster, it is also a deeply
:00:48. > :00:54.
:00:54. > :00:58.researched historical novel, vivid, story we think you will know. It is
:00:58. > :01:03.something we see in countless Western, the opening up of the
:01:03. > :01:08.frontier, fighting off the vicious Indians, and so on. This book is a
:01:08. > :01:14.deliberate challenge to that traditional notion. Absolutely.
:01:14. > :01:23.you grow up in the US, you are aware of these differing myths. There is
:01:23. > :01:26.the John Wayne myth of the innocent settlers who move west, and a lot of
:01:26. > :01:31.Americans fantasise about this time, the land was open, there were no
:01:31. > :01:37.people, you moved to the edge of a settlement, hacked out a plantation
:01:37. > :01:47.house for yourself and through hard work you made a name for yourself
:01:47. > :01:50.and got property. The competing mythology is that the vicious
:01:50. > :01:56.settlers move into the Native American lands, brutally kill off
:01:56. > :02:00.the Native Americans, who are equally seen as noble,
:02:00. > :02:03.philosophically superior, spiritually superior. They were sort
:02:03. > :02:09.of greater beings who were close to the earth compared with the
:02:09. > :02:13.rapacious white folks. The truth is not even between the two. The truth
:02:13. > :02:18.is that neither of those mythologies were accurate. So what do you
:02:18. > :02:24.think? People were actually the same. The history of North America
:02:24. > :02:30.was not so different to the history of Europe. Cultures rose and fell,
:02:30. > :02:35.assaulted each other. In Texas alone, the Spanish arrived, and by
:02:35. > :02:41.1650, the Apache Indians coming and wipe out almost every other Indian
:02:41. > :02:48.tribe in Texas. This is an area the size of France. By 1750, the
:02:48. > :02:58.Comanche Indians coming and wipe out the Apaches. And by 1830, 1840, the
:02:58. > :03:03.whites coming and begin to challenge the Comanche is. Your central
:03:03. > :03:10.character, Eli, is kidnapped at 13 and brought up by Comanches, and
:03:10. > :03:16.then becomes a cattle baron after a chequered career. What he has
:03:16. > :03:22.learned from this and from his upbringing is that violence and
:03:22. > :03:28.greed other way to get what you want? Absolutely. I think all
:03:28. > :03:32.nations construct this mythology to excuse whatever acquisitive and
:03:32. > :03:39.vicious and violent Avia got them their way and their re-sources, and
:03:39. > :03:47.we all do this. All nations construct these mythologies to
:03:47. > :03:50.dehumanise however -- whoever they have taken the land from. There is
:03:50. > :03:56.one particularly distressing episode where the Comanche is capture a
:03:56. > :03:59.white man and torture him to death. And Eli doesn't step in and end his
:03:59. > :04:04.sufferings. Did you have second thoughts about writing the
:04:04. > :04:08.violence? The politically correct part of me often doubted that this
:04:08. > :04:13.was the right thing to do, but your duty as a writer, an artist, is to
:04:13. > :04:17.tell the truth. The violence in the book is historically based. This is
:04:17. > :04:22.not me thinking about what this might have been like, it is taken
:04:22. > :04:29.from historical records. The fact is that the brutality was equal on both
:04:29. > :04:36.sides. The error of authenticity includes the language. There is one
:04:36. > :04:40.bit on where Eli was talking about living in the city. He said it was
:04:40. > :04:48.nothing but guttersnipe and gay cats, warmongers and Sunday men. I
:04:48. > :04:54.love the slang. You did the research, you learn is to fire a
:04:54. > :05:04.bow, you learned to kill a buffalo, you drank offer low blood. Why go to
:05:04. > :05:05.
:05:05. > :05:08.such detail? There are two types of novelist, those who are quite
:05:08. > :05:12.comfortable if they don't understand every historical detail all the
:05:12. > :05:18.facts of the environment they are writing about, and an unfortunately
:05:18. > :05:21.for me, I am on the other side. Unless I see the land quite clearly,
:05:21. > :05:31.unless I know where the people slept, how they ate, their money
:05:31. > :05:32.
:05:32. > :05:37.came from, who did they vote for. Eli's son, Peter, is another central
:05:37. > :05:43.character, writing a diary later. He is the only character with a moral
:05:43. > :05:48.compass. He is horrified when the families go out and massacre the
:05:48. > :05:53.Mexican families. Then there is Eli's great-granddaughter,
:05:53. > :06:00.Julianne, who becomes an oil baron in the 20th-century in Texas, and
:06:00. > :06:09.she is as tough as the old man. What does the McCulloch family tell us
:06:09. > :06:15.about modern Texas? The family is certainly representative of a
:06:15. > :06:19.modern, powerful Texas family. But they are like most of the powerful
:06:19. > :06:25.families in America, whether you are talking about land in New York state
:06:25. > :06:31.or Pennsylvania all that land was taken. All these fortunes were
:06:31. > :06:35.fundamentally extracted, fundamentally based on taking
:06:35. > :06:40.resources at the lowest possible price. This is how all wealth is
:06:40. > :06:47.essentially built. And you describe a Texas in the 1850s that was green
:06:47. > :06:51.and lush, and after a century of cattle ranching, it is gone. It is.
:06:51. > :06:56.Some of that was intentional. If you look at the Middle East, this is
:06:56. > :07:02.what humans do. Babylon was a rich, lush, beautiful place which is now a
:07:02. > :07:07.desert. This is what people do, they extract resources, not always
:07:07. > :07:12.intentionally, but they take too much. We tend to turn fertile areas
:07:12. > :07:19.to desert, fruits to thorns. This is the movement of history. This is
:07:19. > :07:26.what we do. This is a bleak book. It describes a morally bankrupt society
:07:26. > :07:36.in which the people at the top got there or there and just as, their
:07:36. > :07:37.
:07:37. > :07:41.ancestors got their by greed. don't think of it that way. Here we
:07:41. > :07:48.are, having children, falling in love, building a society, reading
:07:48. > :07:54.books, and I think that Faulkner had the same idea. His books appear to