0:00:00 > 0:00:02talks to Michele Roberts about her new book
0:00:02 > 0:00:02The Walworth Beauty.
0:00:02 > 0:00:05Dickensian London in the year of the Great Exhibition,
0:00:05 > 0:00:08and the churning metropolis of our own time.
0:00:08 > 0:00:10Brought together by two characters whose stories are intertwined
0:00:10 > 0:00:14and this and who reach for each other across the years
0:00:14 > 0:00:21that separates them.
0:00:21 > 0:00:23Michele Roberts' new novel, The Walworth Beauty,
0:00:23 > 0:00:25is a hymn to London.
0:00:25 > 0:00:27Its changing ways and its enduring character.
0:00:27 > 0:00:30And also a book about how we live now, that celebrate timeless
0:00:30 > 0:00:31longings and desires.
0:00:31 > 0:00:36Welcome.
0:00:46 > 0:00:50There is a ghostly element to this story.
0:00:50 > 0:00:52Do you like ghost stories?
0:00:52 > 0:00:55I do love them, and that's partly because I have felt haunted
0:00:55 > 0:00:58myself a couple of times, and they have had to work
0:00:58 > 0:01:02out what was going on, and I worked out that to explain
0:01:02 > 0:01:11a ghost, and the fear itit induced in me, I had to tell a little story
0:01:11 > 0:01:14to myself to make sense of it.
0:01:14 > 0:01:18One of the things about the ghostly element in this book is that it is
0:01:18 > 0:01:24very delicate and gentle.
0:01:24 > 0:01:26It's not somebody clunking along with his head under his arm
0:01:26 > 0:01:30or chains, it's just a breath on the neck, that kind of thing.
0:01:30 > 0:01:31Was that your experience?
0:01:31 > 0:01:34Yes, it was on the back of my neck, is if someone was pressing
0:01:34 > 0:01:35cold cobwebs against it.
0:01:35 > 0:01:36Gosh.
0:01:36 > 0:01:39And then a mirror fell off the wall in the middle
0:01:39 > 0:01:40of the night and crashed.
0:01:40 > 0:01:42And I just felt full of terror, the atmosphere
0:01:42 > 0:01:43was charged with terror.
0:01:43 > 0:01:46The ghost in my novel, I think, is a bit of a kinder
0:01:46 > 0:01:48ghost, it's not so scary.
0:01:48 > 0:01:50Well, I didn't know any of this when we started,
0:01:50 > 0:01:52but that's really a very interesting story, because the book
0:01:52 > 0:01:54is wonderfully atmospheric, 1851 Dickensian London.
0:01:54 > 0:01:57And the London that anybody who lives there now in 2011, 2012.
0:01:57 > 0:02:02You see them, really, part of a continuous story, don't you?
0:02:02 > 0:02:05I do, and I think anyone who loves large cities with ancient buildings
0:02:05 > 0:02:08and streets in them, and he walks in, as I do,
0:02:08 > 0:02:15has a sense, always of history being just below the pavement.
0:02:15 > 0:02:18It's as though the city is layers and layers of mystery.
0:02:18 > 0:02:27Sometimes, it's popping up, a pavement tilts up,
0:02:27 > 0:02:29something happens, you pass by an old graveyard,
0:02:29 > 0:02:31you see an old industrial building.
0:02:31 > 0:02:33Now, the story's told, essentially, by two characters,
0:02:33 > 0:02:34Joseph and Madeleine.
0:02:34 > 0:02:35Whose stories are more than a century apart,
0:02:35 > 0:02:38and they are told in separate chapters which are
0:02:38 > 0:02:39interwoven in the book.
0:02:39 > 0:02:41And it's quite clear that you see something,
0:02:41 > 0:02:43despite all the differences between them, that connects them.
0:02:43 > 0:02:44What is it?
0:02:44 > 0:02:46I think they are both very concerned with the lives
0:02:46 > 0:02:47and fates of young women.
0:02:47 > 0:02:49Joseph is charging around South London doing research
0:02:49 > 0:02:52on to the lodgings of prostitutes, of young girls working
0:02:52 > 0:02:53with prostitutes.
0:02:53 > 0:02:55And Madeleine, a century later, is very concerned with two young
0:02:55 > 0:02:58female friends of hers, how they survive in the big city,
0:02:58 > 0:03:01and learning that, obviously, not all young women these days,
0:03:01 > 0:03:05despite their poverty, feels the need to sell
0:03:05 > 0:03:12themselves as prostitutes.
0:03:12 > 0:03:14So Josef and Madeline are having the kind of conversation
0:03:14 > 0:03:16that they are in a sense, haunting each other
0:03:16 > 0:03:18as much is being haunted.
0:03:18 > 0:03:27Madeleine finds in her back garden, shards of bone, old buttons,
0:03:27 > 0:03:29cloth buttons, little bits of china, and she can't bear
0:03:29 > 0:03:30to throw them away.
0:03:30 > 0:03:31She's been digging the plot.
0:03:31 > 0:03:34So she brings them indoors, and that's when the hauntings start.
0:03:34 > 0:03:37By the end of the novel, we understand what those little tiny
0:03:37 > 0:03:38broken pieces refer to.
0:03:38 > 0:03:40And do you have a constant sense of the past?
0:03:40 > 0:03:46Not just in what happens if you dig up the street,
0:03:46 > 0:03:48but in the characters who walk those streets, what
0:03:48 > 0:03:49they thought and felt?
0:03:49 > 0:03:52And what, in a sense, has been passed on to us?
0:03:52 > 0:03:54Yes, one of my characters is the grandmother of Madeleine.
0:03:54 > 0:03:57She's dead, long since, Nellie.
0:03:57 > 0:04:00But she talks to Madeleine, sort of, over her shoulder all the time.
0:04:00 > 0:04:03And she is a real bridge with the past, because that's
0:04:03 > 0:04:04how I remember my own London grandmother.
0:04:04 > 0:04:07Her quips and saying, her amazing cockney accent.
0:04:07 > 0:04:11Her bawdiness, her funny stories.
0:04:11 > 0:04:15I mentioned that the chapters are intermittent, one called Joseph
0:04:15 > 0:04:17and one called Madeleine.
0:04:17 > 0:04:26And the story unfolds way.
0:04:26 > 0:04:28Technically, that's quite a tricky thing to carry off.
0:04:28 > 0:04:31Did you find it difficult and did you simply write a Joseph chapter,
0:04:31 > 0:04:32then a Madeleine chapter?
0:04:32 > 0:04:36Or did you do a lot of Joseph chapters then stick Madeleine in?
0:04:36 > 0:04:37I started with Madeleine.
0:04:37 > 0:04:39And it was clear, quite quickly, that it wasn't going to work
0:04:39 > 0:04:41with just her as the narrator.
0:04:41 > 0:04:44And I was thinking, oh dear, is there really a novel here?
0:04:44 > 0:04:48And then went Joseph erupted and just opened a door,
0:04:48 > 0:04:51went up a staircase in darkness, opened another door, I thought, yes,
0:04:51 > 0:05:00the story starts now.
0:05:01 > 0:05:04Well, of course, if we didn't know that you were a
0:05:04 > 0:05:05Londoner before this,
0:05:05 > 0:05:07anyone reading the book would understand that you are,
0:05:07 > 0:05:10because it's just pulses with a love of the city and its history,
0:05:10 > 0:05:11its ways and voices.
0:05:11 > 0:05:13Yes, and I've always lived in London.
0:05:13 > 0:05:16I grew up in the suburbs in London and moved to London
0:05:16 > 0:05:17as fast as I could.
0:05:17 > 0:05:21And I walk around it all the time, on my own, often at night.
0:05:21 > 0:05:23Always trying to take a different route, happily getting lost,
0:05:23 > 0:05:25going to a pub, someone will come and talk to you.
0:05:25 > 0:05:29London is very alive for me, full of ghosts but full of people
0:05:29 > 0:05:30in the present as well.
0:05:30 > 0:05:33In that sense, it is still, especially in parts of south London
0:05:33 > 0:05:38that you set the bar again, it still has a Dickensian feel,
0:05:38 > 0:05:39that sort of churning, nonstop life.
0:05:39 > 0:05:41The characters who inhabit it.
0:05:41 > 0:05:44I suppose it's like any big city, but London seems
0:05:44 > 0:05:45to have that quality.
0:05:45 > 0:05:48I think partly it is because we've got the City of London.
0:05:48 > 0:05:50And it is always renewing itself, following up new buildings,
0:05:50 > 0:05:54old ones come tumbling down.
0:05:54 > 0:05:58And people are very energised, very driven, they hurtle about.
0:05:58 > 0:06:01Even where I live in Southeast London, on the main street,
0:06:02 > 0:06:03a sort of hurtling that goes on.
0:06:03 > 0:06:05This is the London that you love.
0:06:05 > 0:06:07The London I love is very much the modern city,
0:06:07 > 0:06:10but the city with all its echoes of Dickensian times,
0:06:10 > 0:06:11through old industrial buildings.
0:06:11 > 0:06:12They are Venetian, they are neo-Byzantine,
0:06:12 > 0:06:14they are neo-Gothic, they just send me into rapture.
0:06:14 > 0:06:16I assume you love Dickens?
0:06:16 > 0:06:18Do you know, I have a lot of trouble with Dickens.
0:06:18 > 0:06:20I find him a very difficult writer to read.
0:06:20 > 0:06:21That's interesting, why?
0:06:21 > 0:06:23Partly, it's the carnivalesque, elaborate baroque prose.
0:06:23 > 0:06:25Partly, it's the length of the novel.
0:06:25 > 0:06:26To my shame.
0:06:26 > 0:06:29Partly, it's his absolute incapacity to create interesting women
0:06:29 > 0:06:34characters who aren't just sugar dolls.
0:06:34 > 0:06:37Well, there we are, we'll get some letters about that.
0:06:37 > 0:06:43But there is that wonderful capture of a life that is, I suppose,
0:06:43 > 0:06:49now people would talk about it as being magic realism.
0:06:49 > 0:06:59You know, spontaneous combustion, all the things that happen,
0:07:12 > 0:07:15there's a kind of life that takes us out of the here and now
0:07:15 > 0:07:16with wonderful beeps of the imagination.
0:07:16 > 0:07:18That, I suspect to you, must be exciting.
0:07:18 > 0:07:21It is, and I actually find that in Dickens' essay, Night Walks,
0:07:21 > 0:07:24when he describes walking at night, roaming the city, coming across all
0:07:24 > 0:07:26kinds of strange characters, pausing to chat to them.
0:07:26 > 0:07:28That is the Dickens I love.
0:07:28 > 0:07:31When did you start this business of wandering around London at night?
0:07:31 > 0:07:33When I was very young, I came to London when I was
0:07:33 > 0:07:3421, after university.
0:07:34 > 0:07:36And I just began to wander the streets.
0:07:36 > 0:07:39And of course, for women, there is a sexual double standard.
0:07:39 > 0:07:41If you're always told, it's dangerous, you mustn't do it,
0:07:41 > 0:07:44a woman who wanders the streets is called a streetwalker
0:07:44 > 0:07:46which means a prostitute, a man who wanders the streets
0:07:46 > 0:07:48is called a psycho geographer, or a flaneur.
0:07:48 > 0:07:50But I always thought, I'm not going to let anyone
0:07:51 > 0:07:51take my freedom away.
0:07:51 > 0:07:53I have always walked around the streets.
0:07:53 > 0:07:55So you discovered a parallel universe of your own?
0:07:55 > 0:07:58I have, because as a reader, I've thought a lot about women
0:07:58 > 0:08:00writers who love the city like I do.
0:08:00 > 0:08:03So every time I'm in the City of London, I'll think
0:08:03 > 0:08:05of Charlotte Bronte coming to the coffee house before
0:08:05 > 0:08:06setting sail for Brussels.
0:08:06 > 0:08:09Or as I move up towards Hampstead, I think of Elizabeth Gaskell,
0:08:09 > 0:08:11walking from Harley Street to Hampstead, for an evening picnic.
0:08:11 > 0:08:12People like that.
0:08:12 > 0:08:15And many people will associate that with The Walworth Beauty,
0:08:15 > 0:08:16when they pick up your novel.
0:08:16 > 0:08:18Michele Roberts, thank you very much.
0:08:18 > 0:08:20Thank you very much, Jim.
0:08:31 > 0:08:31Good