0:00:02 > 0:00:08Now its time for Meet the Author.
0:00:08 > 0:00:11How much do we still live in tune with the rhythm of the seasons,
0:00:11 > 0:00:12and why does that matter?
0:00:12 > 0:00:15In his much admired novels, Tim Pears has consistently worked
0:00:15 > 0:00:17to explore our relationship with the land, the old habits,
0:00:17 > 0:00:19and inherited feeling for how nature works,
0:00:19 > 0:00:21and maybe to try to rediscover an understanding that
0:00:21 > 0:00:31could be slipping away.
0:00:39 > 0:00:41It's one of the themes of his new book, The Horseman.
0:00:41 > 0:00:44Set in the West Country before the First World War,
0:00:44 > 0:00:46telling the story of an unlikely and almost forbidden relationship,
0:00:46 > 0:00:48and the coming loss of innocence.
0:00:48 > 0:00:57Welcome.
0:01:00 > 0:01:03One of the most powerful elements of The Horseman is the sense
0:01:03 > 0:01:06of the force of nature, the cycles of the seasons and so on,
0:01:06 > 0:01:08and it's obvious that that's not a device.
0:01:08 > 0:01:10Have you always been conscious of that closeness to the way,
0:01:10 > 0:01:11frankly, the earth works?
0:01:11 > 0:01:21I have, yes, definitely.
0:01:21 > 0:01:23The Horseman is set in the West Country,
0:01:23 > 0:01:26and that's where I grew up, I am a country boy.
0:01:26 > 0:01:27But I left there...
0:01:27 > 0:01:29Like many people, I grew up in a small village.
0:01:29 > 0:01:32It wasn't for me when I was there, it wasn't where the world was.
0:01:32 > 0:01:36The world was in the big cities, it was in London, it was in Europe.
0:01:36 > 0:01:46You had to leave home to find it?
0:01:54 > 0:01:57I had to leave home to find it, it is an old story.
0:01:57 > 0:02:00And, having left home and begun to think about it some years later
0:02:00 > 0:02:03and beginning to write about it and use it as a place that
0:02:03 > 0:02:06I wanted to set stories in, I couldn't then go back
0:02:06 > 0:02:07except in the imagination.
0:02:07 > 0:02:10But what you've been able to do, I think, is to recover a feeling
0:02:10 > 0:02:12for the land that has disappeared for most people.
0:02:12 > 0:02:22And it's inescapable.
0:02:30 > 0:02:33Because you are writing the first of a trilogy that will take us
0:02:33 > 0:02:36into the First World War, that it is in part about
0:02:36 > 0:02:38the disappearance of a way of life and an understanding
0:02:38 > 0:02:39of country ways.
0:02:39 > 0:02:40Is that what you feel?
0:02:40 > 0:02:43Well, I feel that, but I also feel something else.
0:02:43 > 0:02:46All the time that I was researching the book, and for the research
0:02:46 > 0:02:50I read a lot of memoirs by old men written in the '60s and '70s looking
0:02:50 > 0:03:00back to their Edwardian childhood, and I felt two things very strongly.
0:03:01 > 0:03:05On the one hand, a kind of nostalgia for what as you say had been lost,
0:03:05 > 0:03:07this closeness to the rhythm of the seasons, not just to nature
0:03:07 > 0:03:09but also to the animals that they worked with.
0:03:09 > 0:03:11The relationship between the ploughmen, the carters,
0:03:11 > 0:03:14and the horses they worked with, which was something that is very
0:03:14 > 0:03:17much the stuff of the book, and I found very interesting.
0:03:17 > 0:03:18Fascinating to read about their working lives,
0:03:18 > 0:03:20and then to write about.
0:03:20 > 0:03:21And I felt that.
0:03:21 > 0:03:24But on the other hand, equally strongly, I felt a relief
0:03:24 > 0:03:27that we don't live like that, because they worked so hard, Jim.
0:03:27 > 0:03:30You can see a bit of that in the story as it develops,
0:03:30 > 0:03:33but what bubbles up the whole time is your feeling for the power
0:03:33 > 0:03:35of the sensibility of knowing that this season will be
0:03:35 > 0:03:38followed by that, the harvest will be followed by this,
0:03:38 > 0:03:42the animals are doing this, the animals will now do that.
0:03:42 > 0:03:43Just watching the landscape change.
0:03:43 > 0:03:45And in your mature years, you still feel that, do you?
0:03:45 > 0:03:48I think I feel it more strongly than ever.
0:03:48 > 0:03:51And I will tell you a funny thing, just personally, which is that
0:03:51 > 0:03:54I grew up with a father who was very much an intellectual,
0:03:54 > 0:03:58he was a priest and his study was a book-lined room where,
0:03:58 > 0:04:01after I left school at 16, I immersed myself in the canon
0:04:01 > 0:04:03of Russian literature that he had on his walls, and I
0:04:03 > 0:04:04went on from there.
0:04:04 > 0:04:07And my mother was not at all bookish, cultural,
0:04:07 > 0:04:09and although she is very much from an upper-middle-class
0:04:09 > 0:04:11background, she basically, I realised, is a peasant in terms
0:04:11 > 0:04:14of being very close to the seasons, and is immersed in the daily
0:04:14 > 0:04:17round of nature and animals and so on, and it is very recently
0:04:17 > 0:04:20I realised with a kind of obvious revelation that I am
0:04:20 > 0:04:23both my parents' child, and that I am the intellectual,
0:04:23 > 0:04:28but I am also the present.
0:04:28 > 0:04:33-- but I am also the peasant.
0:04:43 > 0:04:46It is interesting how long it takes for the penny to drop that
0:04:46 > 0:04:48everyone is the child of their parents, isn't it?
0:04:49 > 0:04:52It is extraordinary that you go back to your childhood,
0:04:52 > 0:04:54to your learning experience, but also to the palpable feeling
0:04:54 > 0:04:57for the countryside that you so much wanted to get away from.
0:04:57 > 0:05:00Well, I will tell you, interesting in writing this book,
0:05:00 > 0:05:03Jim, was that as I began to realise what I wanted to write about,
0:05:03 > 0:05:13these two young people who both have a shared love of horses
0:05:16 > 0:05:19in a different way, the boy, the son of the carter,
0:05:19 > 0:05:22and a hoase whisperer in the making, and this girl who is the daughter of
0:05:22 > 0:05:24the aristocrat who owns the estate.
0:05:24 > 0:05:27I realised that it would only work if I could write about horses.
0:05:27 > 0:05:29Well, my experience in childhood was that I had a mother
0:05:29 > 0:05:33who was very keen on horses, and two sisters who had a pony each,
0:05:33 > 0:05:35and I thought these were just terrifying beasts whose main aim
0:05:35 > 0:05:38in life was to lure young boys and kick them if possible,
0:05:38 > 0:05:43and I kept well away.
0:05:43 > 0:05:46And probably I could count on the fingers of both my hands
0:05:46 > 0:05:49the number of times I actually fed or groomed or rode those ponies.
0:05:49 > 0:05:59So you had to do the research?
0:06:19 > 0:06:20No.
0:06:20 > 0:06:23The thing was that when I came to write the book, that very
0:06:23 > 0:06:24limited experience...
0:06:24 > 0:06:25All came back.
0:06:25 > 0:06:27It all came up, and there it was.
0:06:27 > 0:06:28And maybe that's how it is.
0:06:28 > 0:06:30You could hear the horses, you could smell them?
0:06:31 > 0:06:32Yes, exactly.
0:06:32 > 0:06:33It's the first of a trilogy.
0:06:33 > 0:06:36This one is set in 1911 before those last warm summers
0:06:36 > 0:06:38after which the world fell apart for so many people.
0:06:38 > 0:06:41It is going to take us right through the war, is it?
0:06:41 > 0:06:44One of the things that I had to bear in mind when I was writing
0:06:44 > 0:06:47it was that these people had no idea what was coming.
0:06:47 > 0:06:48Of course, some people did.
0:06:48 > 0:06:50The first dreadnoughts had been built.
0:06:50 > 0:06:52People in the Admiralty knew something was coming,
0:06:52 > 0:06:53some kind of conflict.
0:06:53 > 0:06:54But they didn't quite know.
0:06:54 > 0:06:55They didn't quite know.
0:06:55 > 0:06:57What it was going to be like.
0:06:57 > 0:06:57No.
0:06:57 > 0:07:01These people would have had no idea, and I had to keep reminding myself
0:07:01 > 0:07:04writing it that I mustn't give them this shadow of the war.
0:07:04 > 0:07:05It wasn't over them.
0:07:05 > 0:07:07It's only with hindsight that we see it.
0:07:07 > 0:07:08That was very important.
0:07:08 > 0:07:10But you're right, it is the first part of a trilogy,
0:07:10 > 0:07:12and it is going to carry on.
0:07:12 > 0:07:15To go back finally to where we began, the sense of loss,
0:07:15 > 0:07:19not just in terms of the coming war, which we know about but they didn't,
0:07:19 > 0:07:22but the sense of loss in the dulling of our senses to something
0:07:22 > 0:07:24in the seasons, the chapter headings are the months here,
0:07:24 > 0:07:27the year rolls round.
0:07:27 > 0:07:29Is that something that you think many people
0:07:29 > 0:07:31are now, against the trend, trying to recover?
0:07:31 > 0:07:37That more people are aware of what has been lost?
0:07:37 > 0:07:39Yes, I'm sure you're right, I'm sure you're right.
0:07:39 > 0:07:42But can I just say one thing that I came across in
0:07:42 > 0:07:52the memoirs of these old men who worked with horses...
0:07:55 > 0:07:58Of course, as we know, over a million horses were taken
0:07:58 > 0:08:01to the Great War and lost there, and then after the war,
0:08:01 > 0:08:04the tractor came along, and quite quickly, horses disappeared.
0:08:04 > 0:08:07Farmers, being unsentimental people, took those horses to the abattoir.
0:08:07 > 0:08:09And these men who went from working with these horses
0:08:09 > 0:08:13to working on tractors, they lost that relationship.
0:08:13 > 0:08:15They lost the hard work, but they were kind of in mourning,
0:08:15 > 0:08:18and this is something that I was very touched by coming
0:08:18 > 0:08:19across in these memoirs.
0:08:19 > 0:08:29These men who were grieving for this lost relationship.
0:08:29 > 0:08:31Tim Pears, author of The Horseman, thank you very much.