:00:00. > :00:18.Francis Spufford's first novel, Golden Hill, is typically energetic
:00:19. > :00:24.and surprising. New York before the revolution. A hero known only as Mr
:00:25. > :00:29.Smith. A mysterious fortune and a trial for murder. Above all, a piece
:00:30. > :00:45.of storytelling that never lets you go. Welcome.
:00:46. > :00:55.Nobody can turn the pages of Golden Hill, Francis Spufford, without
:00:56. > :01:01.realising that you enjoy being in New York, and the 1740s, what is it
:01:02. > :01:07.about that period, the state of the city, that clearly excited you so
:01:08. > :01:12.much? It is the lost moment before the famous history of 18th-century
:01:13. > :01:16.takes over. A generation before the American Revolution with all its
:01:17. > :01:21.mythology and what you might call a very strongly moralised sense of
:01:22. > :01:24.good and evil. It is the last moment that can be mysterious to
:01:25. > :01:30.contemporary readers, with its own politics and rules, and its own
:01:31. > :01:36.secrets hidden in places. It's own rules and secret but also the
:01:37. > :01:41.feeling that anything goes. A man arrives, Mr Smith, Mr Smith goes to
:01:42. > :01:45.New York, you might even say, rather like Mr Smith went to Washington in
:01:46. > :01:48.the famous film, with ?1000, though but he knows where it has come from,
:01:49. > :01:53.and there is the feeling that anything could happen. It is a
:01:54. > :01:57.frontier town. One of the things that is hardest to get your head
:01:58. > :02:02.around, the idea that New York is, in the first place, a small town
:02:03. > :02:06.where everybody knows everybody, and that it is effectively a frontier,
:02:07. > :02:19.the wild continent begins just north of Wall Street. Thus Mr Smith thinks
:02:20. > :02:23.he can behave like a man in a big city, coming from London, but
:02:24. > :02:28.instead he discovers that he is somewhere where gossip follows you,
:02:29. > :02:32.biting at your heels all the time, and every single one of your actions
:02:33. > :02:38.comes back to haunt you in short order. And so different from our own
:02:39. > :02:42.time in the sense that New York is 100 times smaller, by population,
:02:43. > :02:47.than London. So you go there, and if you have money and the gift of the
:02:48. > :02:52.gab, which he has, pretty soon you know everybody. Yes, because
:02:53. > :02:58.everybody is... It is only about 7000 people. From 1000 are slaves.
:02:59. > :03:02.English, Dutch, and African slaves, perched on the very southern tip of
:03:03. > :03:10.Manhattan island, basically down in what is the financial district of
:03:11. > :03:13.New York these days. In this little transplanted bit of 18th-century
:03:14. > :03:18.Europe, which is busy working out what else it can be. We should not
:03:19. > :03:21.give the impression that this is a meditation on history, it is a
:03:22. > :03:26.rollicking good story. It is an adventure story. An adventure which
:03:27. > :03:31.produces the unexpected, in which there is a sense of mystery. In that
:03:32. > :03:37.way, what you have done by setting it in the 18th century is also to
:03:38. > :03:43.write a sort of picturesque novel, a man, on his own, heading off on his
:03:44. > :03:47.adventures, to tell a story. I was very attracted by how loose the
:03:48. > :03:52.rules were at the beginning of the novel. In the same way that New York
:03:53. > :03:55.is a gold rush frontier town, the novel is a gold rush frontier form
:03:56. > :03:59.of literature at that point, nobody knows what the rules are and what
:04:00. > :04:05.you can and cannot do. So 18th-century novels tend to throw in
:04:06. > :04:09.everything, and the kitchen sink, and ignore all of the later rules
:04:10. > :04:15.about what counts is serious and light. In your nonfiction life you
:04:16. > :04:18.can all sorts of rules, writing about strange subjects and sometimes
:04:19. > :04:23.taking a slightly unusual, maybe even bizarre point of view. And you
:04:24. > :04:29.brought that to fiction. What made you decide that you did want to
:04:30. > :04:34.start making up stories? I have been working my race slowly toward it.
:04:35. > :04:42.Like a crab like creep. For 20 years. A fistful of reasons. But I
:04:43. > :04:51.suppose the main one is that I was tired of explaining, and I wanted to
:04:52. > :04:58.hand at the reader all of my trust, and let them sort it out. Which is
:04:59. > :05:01.why the story of Mr Smith is full of cheats and revelations and secrets
:05:02. > :05:05.that ought not to be revealed until the last page. It hands the reader
:05:06. > :05:11.an enigma and asks them to sort it out. The average reader will know on
:05:12. > :05:15.page one that there is probably going to be something on page 300
:05:16. > :05:21.and what ever, that will be a surprise. There is no secret about
:05:22. > :05:26.that. Now, but they should still be surprised by the nature of the
:05:27. > :05:32.surprise. Which we will not reveal. Naturally. One of the fascinating
:05:33. > :05:36.things is that in sinking yourself into this time, New York of the
:05:37. > :05:43.1740s, before the revolution, when it was beginning to find itself, you
:05:44. > :05:47.adopted a form of storytelling and speech, that tries, inevitably
:05:48. > :05:50.artificially, but tries to replicate the kind of way that people would
:05:51. > :05:58.have spoken to each other at the time. It is quite an ambitious thing
:05:59. > :06:02.to do. I think it is necessary. If you are genuinely interested in the
:06:03. > :06:07.difference of the past, you have two come to some kind of artificial,
:06:08. > :06:12.yes, but necessary linguistic settlement with the reader. You
:06:13. > :06:17.cannot do the difference of the past in entirely modern language. You
:06:18. > :06:20.must reach for one of the expedients, for example, Hilary
:06:21. > :06:24.Mantell has developed that so well, you have to find a way to convey the
:06:25. > :06:28.past and is the past in the language, even if are also taking
:06:29. > :06:33.half a step toward the reader to make sure it works. And it is
:06:34. > :06:36.inescapable that the reader brings our own experience, our knowledge of
:06:37. > :06:41.New York, if you have been there, certainly of the USA, bring that to
:06:42. > :06:47.bear on the period. So you cannot read it without knowing that it is a
:06:48. > :06:53.world about to be transformed in an extraordinary way. I was relying on
:06:54. > :06:58.that dramatic irony, caused by the reader being such a very different
:06:59. > :07:01.position, I needed the reader is a call operator, knowing that my cast
:07:02. > :07:06.are standing in the foreground raising a glass to the King, there
:07:07. > :07:10.is a historical tsunami appearing in the distance which none of them have
:07:11. > :07:17.noticed yet. Because New York was a very royalist place. Royalist and
:07:18. > :07:19.loyalist. You, as a reader, should be able to see the fault lines that
:07:20. > :07:25.will soon turn to the American Revolution. But they don't know
:07:26. > :07:29.that. They think they are part of His Majesty's North American
:07:30. > :07:34.domains. And one of the excitements of the book is to find yourself in a
:07:35. > :07:40.very unexpected place, with New Yorkers toasting the King, it is a
:07:41. > :07:46.lovely shift in our own consciousness, it sets you up for a
:07:47. > :07:51.good story. I have strong the plot of it between both. One of the nice
:07:52. > :07:59.things was that November and December, 1746, studied by feasts
:08:00. > :08:03.which no contemporary Americans celebrate anymore. There was no
:08:04. > :08:06.thanksgiving back so it runs from also stayed through the Kings
:08:07. > :08:12.birthday, Guy Fawkes' Day, very big in the colonies, all the way through
:08:13. > :08:16.to win the Dutch New Yorkers celebrate the arrival of a saint in
:08:17. > :08:25.a red robe with white trimming, and then on towards, not Christmas,
:08:26. > :08:29.which is deeply disapproved of by the Puritans, half of the New York
:08:30. > :08:33.population, but with any luck the very things they celebrate should be
:08:34. > :08:36.telling you that the pastors is another country. And there's nothing
:08:37. > :08:42.like a journey into a vanished world, is there? Nothing like it.
:08:43. > :08:43.Francis Spufford, thank you very