Sebastian Faulks

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand nine.

Presenter0:27

My castaway this week is the writer Sebastian Foules. By his own estimation, he didn't really get his life on track until he was about thirty, musing that he could quite easily have gone off to shear sheep in Cumbria or something. Luckily for us, and possibly the sheep, he didn't. Described as one of the most impressive novelists of his generation, his literary acuity has delivered a succession of profound and popular works.

Presenter0:51

He is best known for the book he wrote more than fifteen years ago, Birdsong.

Presenter0:55

Set in the First World War, it told in shocking human detail the misery of life in the Flanders trenches.

Presenter1:01

It was published with little fanfare or glossy advertising and didn't win any major awards, but it became a literary phenomenon.

Presenter1:09

He says I've long ago abandoned any search for meaning, but I do believe there are values, and I do believe experiences have value. I'm wondering if that's one of the reasons you write um to explore the meaning of experience and values.

Sebastian Faulks1:24

I suppose it is. I think a lot of novelists set out to impose a shape on the world which otherwise we're in danger of finding completely incomprehensible. Human beings have this terrible curse. It's the curse of consciousness. It's what first happens to Adam and Eve when they acquire self-awareness. The dog and the woodlouse and the tortoise all live quite happily because they don't really understand that they're going to die, but we live in this ridiculous, shaggy dog story, which can only end one way. And I think that one of the important things that serious novels do is to try to give comfort, reassurance, and a sense of redemption to what is otherwise a really meaningless sequence of events.

Presenter2:08

I'm taking for granted that you will have been told by many people on many occasions how much your work has meant to them that they will say they have taken.

Presenter2:16

Not just comfort from it, but many other things too. Do you find it extraordinary that something that is imaginary, people that you have created on the page,

Presenter2:24

can be so meaningful and so real to readers.

Sebastian Faulks2:28

I find it very gratifying. I suppose I don't find it extraordinary because that is the the magic that one is trying to work. My my wife has this theory that um I write novels because I'm so bored with life, bored with other people, as she put it rather mournfully. But that's not quite true, it's that I'm unsatisfied with life and I do find that by imposing an artistic shape on it that makes it uh easier to deal with.

Speaker 12:39

Uh

Presenter2:52

Does she see, given that she probably knows you better than anybody else, does she then see that you're only truly engaged in the stuff of life when you're actually immersed in writing?

Sebastian Faulks3:00

I suppose she does really. I mean she doesn't actually see me writing, but I remember she came to my office. I don't work in the house, I have an office about ten minutes' walk away, and she looked up at the wall and she saw the endless charts and diagrams of plots and characters and the analysis of case histories and and I do a lot of drawing and I'd drawn several of the buildings in the book and she looked at them and she just was overwhelmed really. Uh I don't think she really appreciated that how much of my life was away.

Presenter3:30

Tell me about your first piece of music today, then.

Sebastian Faulks3:32

This is an American singer called Boz Skaggs, who was briefly popular here in the seventies. His voice has got better and better as it's got rustier and smokier. And I was driving down to stay with some great friends of ours in France. They have this beautiful barn overlooking a river, and I was with my eldest child, William. And I thought I knew all Bozz Skaggs' s songs, but then this absolutely beautiful, haunting, sad song came on. So it reminds me of him and all my life, but also of the very happy times we've had on holiday.

Speaker 34:01

Taps

Speaker 34:03

Oh well.

Speaker 34:08

Just go!

Speaker 34:13

I'm all out of answers, but yes, the answers no

Presenter4:28

Voskaggs and Jusko. Sir Sebastian Folks, you were born nineteen fifty three in Berkshire. What do you remember of early life at home?

Sebastian Faulks4:36

My recollection of home is of being very happy and having a a wonderful time. I had an older brother, Edward, who's about two and a half years older than I am, and we had wonderful games. My parents both of them had quite difficult lives up until this point, because my father was settling in to work as a lawyer in 1939 when the war broke out. And he then had seven very active years in Northern Europe, North Africa, Italy, in trenches. He was shot in the army, was shot through the head and left for dead at Anzio. If you've seen a lot of people killed, including many of your friends, you're rather looking forward to a second chance at life. And my mother had had rather a difficult upbringing because she was brought up by her grandparents, her parents not being particularly interested in her. But they met by chance in 1948 and Edward was born in 1950. And I think that what came over to Edward and me in our childhood was this great sense of excitement, of a chance to start again, to live a life, for my mother to have a family, a happy family that she hadn't had as a child, and for my father just the chance of actually being alive without a you know a bullet in you.

Presenter5:43

And your maternal grandfather, too, had fought in World War One.

Sebastian Faulks5:47

Yes, my mother's father fought in World War One and then during the Second World War he was a newspaper man, he was a reporter. Towards the end of the Second World War the telegraph where he worked had run short of reporters and he volunteered to go with the Americans as they were pushing through eastern France across the Rhine into Germany and he was killed on a bridge at Remargem crossing the Rhine by a German sniper. So having survived as a a soldier he then died as a journalist.

Presenter6:14

Um there was something very interesting you said about about the nature of the the legacy of generations, and it was that um experience can last through a person's life into another generation. What do you think your parents were handing on to you?

Sebastian Faulks6:29

I think that uh my father handed on a wonderful example of fairness. That was his uh a principal quality, I think. He was terribly fair minded and very, very humorous, but he was also kind. And from my mother I think we got books, music, painting, theatre, and she took us off to galleries and to the theatre a great deal. But I also uh learned from her I think the sort of importance of courage and sticking at s at things.

Presenter6:58

Tell me about your second piece of music, then.

Sebastian Faulks7:00

Well this actually I first heard with my mother. It's a Ravel piano concerto, the slow movement, and I was standing with her in the kitchen at home when I was about twenty, twenty-one, and I was very unhappy at this time. And I remember just hearing this absolutely beautiful piece of music, and my mother was trying to sort of encourage me and say, Don't worry, everything'll come out all right.

Sebastian Faulks7:22

And years later when I was married I discovered that my wife had also quite independently loved this piece of music, and we used to listen to it when driving round a rather beautiful part of southern France in the Auvergne. So it's a a lovely piece of music, and b it reminds me of the sort of the poles of near despair and and great happiness.

Presenter8:39

Werna Haas playing part of the second movement of Ravel's piano concerto in G was the National Opera of Monte Carlo. And you were saying as we went into that it's a piece of music that makes you think both of your mother and of your wife for for different reasons.

Presenter8:53

I'm not the only person to say this. You do write women extraordinarily well, which which leads me to wonder

Presenter9:00

If that first relationship with a woman with your mother was a was a very close one.

Sebastian Faulks9:04

Yes, it was. You know, we got on very well, and she took great pride and interest in both of us. But as for the sort of depiction of women, we are now allowed to admit, I think, those wars having been fought and won, we are now allowed to admit that there are small but significant differences between most men and most women. And one of the more interesting ones to play around with is the idea that men don't really inspect in a continuous way their inner lives and feelings and their development of their states of mind, whereas women tend to keep a more running audit. And it seemed to me that this gave some dramatic possibility to a novelist. If you have a woman's inner life which is kind of quite continuously introspective and a man's which is only intermittently so, you immediately have some kind of friction or possibly fruitful tension there.

Speaker 19:33

Yeah.

Presenter9:53

Uh let's talk about when you were, well, sent away to school, really. You were eight, you went to boarding school.

Sebastian Faulks9:57

Yeah.

Presenter9:58

It was just what was done, was it?

Sebastian Faulks10:00

Yes, indeed you didn't have to, but I think that uh my parents thought it would be uh a good idea, we'd get better educated. So off we went to a funny little boarding school. I was there in the nineteen sixties, it could really have been the eighteen sixties, but um I I loved it. And I was also quite competitive. It was a very competitive school. They were always reading out your, you know, marks and orders. Every week you could see your placement in the form and if you came top you got five shillings or something at the end of term. So it was you know highly incentivized.

Presenter10:29

And then you went on to do your O levels at thirteen, your A levels at fif fifteen, was it?

Sebastian Faulks10:34

I was pushed through these things quickly, because in those days you could. And there was a chance I was going to have left school before my voice broke actually, which would have been great, because the school I was at by then, Wellington, I was considerably less sympathetic. But on the other hand, you know, I had friends, and if you make friends, you know, anything is tolerable really.

Presenter10:52

I I've noticed in preparation for talking to you that you you don't talk much in interviews when you give them uh about your school days at all, which is interesting for somebody who was such a high achiever. It doesn't really seem to be a significant part of your life.

Sebastian Faulks11:06

I think people who get hung up on school days and how many O levels they got are really rather pathetic. Um you know, life's considerably more interesting now, I find. I mean, uh there's people I know who always boasting that they got seven A stars or something. I mean really really, there is much more to life than that.

Presenter11:21

You did appear as a student on University Challenge, I gather.

Sebastian Faulks11:23

Oh god, yes.

Presenter11:24

Uh hung over and smoking.

Presenter11:27

How did that happen?

Sebastian Faulks11:30

Yeah, that was uh kind of embarrassing. But we all everyone smoked like uh crazy. You smoked on television then, and so my parents watched this, and they were absolutely appalled at their sort of nineteen-year-old son with behind these clouds of smoke. And we had been out to the pub beforehand because the producer said that was a good idea. So we drank about six barley wines each, which wasn't which didn't really help our performance, and we were thrashed by someone else. Glasgow, I think it was. Good.

Presenter11:54

Tell me about your next piece of music, then.

Sebastian Faulks11:56

Uh the next piece of music.

Sebastian Faulks11:58

Well, when I was about ten or eleven, we Edward and I used to listen to radio a lot. We liked pop music. But something explosive happened in about 62, 63. And I remember looking at Edward and him looking at me and thinking, God, I didn't know life could be this exciting. And if it's going to be like this, let's get going. And

Sebastian Faulks12:22

I could have chosen any of The Beatles early singles, but I've chosen this one because I think this is Edwards' favourite too.

Speaker 312:29

Say you don't need no gallon rings, and I'll be satisfied.

Speaker 312:34

Tell me that you want that kind of thing, the money just can't buy.

Speaker 312:40

I don't care too much for money, money can find me though.

Presenter12:58

The Beatles and Can't Buy Me Love. Uh pretty much everyone in your family had been a lawyer. Um was that what was expected of you?

Sebastian Faulks13:05

My father suggested I should become a diplomat, but I was just wasn't ready for it. I was just too confused and young and so on. So when I left university I did what a lot of people with English degrees do, which is just look through the small ads and eventually I found a job teaching in a a private school, which is not really what I wanted to do long term, but I had to pay the rent.

Presenter13:26

And so did you know that you were in a sense treading water until you found your thing?

Sebastian Faulks13:30

Yes. I knew from the age of about fourteen or fifteen that I wanted to be a writer. There was a sort of moment, I think, of revelation, really, when I started to read grown up books for the first time, and it just seemed to me that there was nothing in the world that was as worth doing as writing novels.

Presenter13:47

I mean, you have said that things have worked out okay as it happened, but it was a close-run thing.

Presenter13:52

That hints at a an interesting period. That hints at a time when maybe you were thinking about jacking in the idea of being successful at anything.

Sebastian Faulks14:02

I don't think I ever quite got to the idea of jacking everything in, but it certainly took me a very long time to get going as a writer.

Presenter14:09

And why was that? Do you have very high standards for yourself?

Sebastian Faulks14:12

No, I just it it just took me a long time to work out, first of all, how it was done, and secondly, to find what I wanted to say. And I wrote three or four novels in my twenties, completed them, and they just weren't any good. I came across one the other day in a box, and it was quite staggeringly bad. I mean, really much worse than you'd imagine.

Presenter14:29

And that period in your twenties, I mean, let let's not forget the two generations that had gone before you, both your father and your grandfather, as we've spoken about, had had significant roles in the wars. D do you think there was something of that, maybe the legacy of that, that left you feeling slightly directionless, that there they had been absolutely

Presenter14:47

tramlined into this experience that they had very little choice in and it was so extreme and true, and there you were sort of having to choose your own path.

Sebastian Faulks14:56

Um yes, I never felt um particularly guilty about not fighting. I felt incredibly relieved about not fighting actually. But I think the problem for me really was that the the w the modern world I lived in in England seemed to be very lightweight and very lacking in texture, uh lacking in a sense of emergency, lacking in depth. And I found that the books were that were being written at that time in the seventies, the novels were very, very frivolous and they were you know what became um scornfully known as the Hampstead novel. You know, adultery television producer lives next door to a journalist and he has it off with his wife I mean just dire stuff. So I think the the problem for me was not the sense of parents and grandparents but the thinness of the society in which I lived and the very second rate nature of the novels that were being set in it.

Presenter15:42

At what age were you when you ended up being a reporter at the telegraph?

Sebastian Faulks15:44

I was about twenty six when I joined m what had in fact been my grandfather's old paper as the sort of most junior runner on the diary column.

Presenter15:50

Mm-hmm.

Presenter15:53

Yeah, yeah.

Sebastian Faulks15:56

Yes, it was called London Day by Day and no one else on the diary column was much interested in art, so I used to go off and do a lot of galleries and I was supposed to cover the sort of literary world. In theory, I had some sort of connections in that. But as the editor of the column put it to me, well, of course, other days we just drink. And it was a very, very boozy culture, which suited me down to the ground.

Presenter16:18

Di did you booze a lot?

Sebastian Faulks16:19

Yes, I had a very hard head which I'd built up diligently over years at university, but I loved it.

Presenter16:26

Tell me about your next piece of music.

Sebastian Faulks16:28

Uh the next piece of music is by a French singer called Charles Trunet. France has uh been a big part of my life, particularly my writing life. And what I like about this song, En quiton na ville, is that it's uh Trunet was a ridiculous character, and it's a ridiculous song, very perky, jolly, absurd, but underneath it it has got that awful sort of melancholy of departure and people saying goodbye to one another.

Speaker 116:53

La voire des flaus enchanteur, qui font au fond de monqueur des serenadres.

Speaker 117:00

Janton, le trista pelle des pateau, ouis la champsons les voiseaux, sur lesplanades, vois si le siel, pebblais, de c'est mutem bland, vois si la mer, troblais, spectacle, troblant, Janton, la ville le qui maud di bonsoir, Et mois sur le qu'ête lagard, je did monieu, des mour d'adieu.

Presenter17:23

Charles René and Enquiton Laville on leaving the town and memories there understandably of nothing else but France, really. It's a very good idea.

Sebastian Faulks17:29

Oh actually funny enough also memories of William and Holly are our two older children going absolutely crazy on the back seat when the sort of weird little horn comes in. They loved that song as well.

Presenter17:39

I mean, you you've mentioned family holidays to to France. What is it about it there, sort of freedom for you or?

Sebastian Faulks17:43

Freedom for you? Yeah, as you can imagine, this is something I've puzzled over a lot. And it connects to what I was saying before about the thinness I found of contemporary life in England.

Presenter17:48

Yeah.

Sebastian Faulks17:54

Above all, for me what happened going there in the seventies and early eighties was a sense that the past was much more available. It was like driving back into the thirties or even into the twenties.

Presenter18:05

As a journalist, is this right, you were sent to to report on Flanders?

Sebastian Faulks18:08

Yup, that was a bit later on in 1988, which was the seventieth anniversary of the armistice. I went with a party of veterans and of course in those days there still were quite a lot of survivors of the First World War. And I remember standing with this guy of about must have been in his mid-nineties, his name was Doc Wilson, and he was holding my hand, as old men sometimes do. And we were standing looking down at the mud, and he said, Over there, that was the German line. You can still see there was still a sort of ruined pill box. And he said, I was standing here, and my best friend Maltby was standing next to me, and part of a German shell came and took him and exploded him into several small pieces. And I picked them up, each one no bigger than a leg of mutton, and put them in a sandbag. And I made a wooden cross and I put him about ten yards over there. I said, Oh, that's that's terrible. Anyway, that evening we were walking through one of the battlefield cemeteries, and as we were walking along, this old man, Doc Wilson, suddenly was brought up short because he was staring at the headstone which had his friend Maltby's name on it. And what had happened is someone clearly in 1915 had found this wooden cross and given him a proper funeral and he hadn't realized. And so here we were seventy years later, whatever it was, and he just stood in front of it saying, Oh, I say, oh, I say and it was a very moving moment. And the First World War then became to me something that moved out of history off a shelf and became something that came within tangible, literally tangible reach. And I felt emboldened after that to think that maybe the book that had been in the back of my mind for a long time, a book set during the First World War, was not impossibly ambitious, but could possibly be pulled off.

Presenter19:58

Tell me about your next piece of music, man.

Sebastian Faulks19:59

The next track is from Steely Dan, who in most people's view who know about these things are what happened after the Beatles and the Beach Boys and before whatever happened after I stopped listening to pop music.

Sebastian Faulks20:14

This song uh reminds me of all the times I suppose between the ages of about eighteen and thirty-eight when I got married, going out in the evening and before going out. I suppose I went out about, you know, three hundred times a year for eighteen years. That's a lot of going out. And um before you go out you want to have a drink and get in the mood and no one did it better than uh Steely Dan.

Speaker 320:40

Come to me, Snake Mary's gone to bed.

Speaker 320:47

All our steaming sounds of love cannot disturb her in her night, or raise her sleeping head.

Speaker 321:00

All I ask of you is make my wildest dreams come true.

Presenter21:06

Steely Dan and Rose Darling. So, Sebastian folks, the professional life that you were keeping on the road just to pay the bills at this time w was what? Where were you?

Sebastian Faulks21:15

By this time I had left I'd been at the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, I was then at the Independent, which launched in nineteen eighty six.

Presenter21:21

So you were there for the birth of a new paper. I mean, that was the first time in seventy years that it was quite exciting, wasn't it?

Sebastian Faulks21:23

That was the first time in six.

Sebastian Faulks21:24

It was, yeah, it was very exciting. I loved journalism and I gave it my my best uh shot, but i it wasn't ultimately what I wanted to do. And luckily journalism regurgitated me a few years later in nineteen ninety one, by which time I was on the Sunday paper, The Independent on Sunday.

Presenter21:41

The papers merged.

Sebastian Faulks21:42

The papers merged and all the m senior editors got that their jobs ceased to exist, which was absolutely fantastic for me because I had a year's worth of money, I think it was. So I now had a chance to see if I could just write.

Presenter21:47

Mm.

Presenter21:55

Well, you sound very optimistic about it now, but that's quite easy to sound optimistic when you're as successful as you are. I can imagine at the time you had sort of forty unemployed

Sebastian Faulks22:03

Slightly, Harry. Well, we had we we my wife and I had one child and another one on the way, and so having no income was uh slightly worrying, I suppose. But Veronica, my wife, was incredibly helpful and calm and she backed me up all the way.

Presenter22:20

Well, you refer to Veronica. I mean, that surely that's the greatest thing you had to thank the Independent for whilst you were working there?

Sebastian Faulks22:25

Absolutely. We hired Veronica and she came to work for a couple of years there.

Presenter22:31

Did she work then directly for you?

Sebastian Faulks22:33

She did to begin with, poor thing. But later on you must have a lot of things.

Presenter22:34

Did you ruthlessly exploit your position of power?

Sebastian Faulks22:37

No, I was incredibly gentlemanly, as you'd expect, Cassie.

Presenter22:40

Kind of annoying. Let's talk then, Sebastian Folks, about birdsong. It is about the First World War, but essentially it's about the relationships between men, women and children, the things that are common to all of us.

Presenter22:53

The fact that you set it in the First World War, which is of course loaded with such significance for for our nation, was an extraordinarily brave thing to do. Did you ever feel weighed down by the significance of that?

Sebastian Faulks23:05

Yes, I did. And when I first mentioned to my publisher that I was setting a book during the First World War, she held her head in her hands. I felt that this was material that I would probably only approach full on once in my life. And I did feel that it was pretty important not to mess this one up.

Sebastian Faulks23:25

and I knew that I risked falling very, very uh flat on my face if I if I got it wrong.

Presenter23:30

You said that you wanted to look right into the floor of human suffering. How how did that affect you?

Presenter23:35

Personally, I mean, it's hugely traumatic to actually to read the book. I can't imagine how traumatic it must have been at times to to to confront the sort of evidence that you did and then

Presenter23:45

Somehow in your head to to work with it, to take it apart and piece it back together.

Sebastian Faulks23:51

Uh well, that's exactly right.

Sebastian Faulks23:53

It was very upsetting. I was frequently quite overcome and would have to get up, walk around the room, go outside into the garden, take a breather. But you cannot just pound the typewriter keys with tears in your eyes. That's not going to communicate itself. What you have to do is calm down and very methodically and carefully pick the details which are likely to evoke in the reader the response that you've had. You have to have the splinter of ice in the heart. This sounds very manipulative and cold-hearted, but underneath I did have quite an idealistic motive. I didn't want

Speaker 124:09

Yeah.

Sebastian Faulks24:29

The events of fourteen eighteen and the texture of that experience, and its significance in human history to be forgotten.

Presenter24:36

I'm wondering why Birdsong has never been made into a movie. I can't help but think it would be an Oscar winning belter.

Sebastian Faulks24:39

Can't

Sebastian Faulks24:43

Well, it's been fifteen years in development, but uh the film world is uh is a slow place. The truth is that most serious books are too long, too complex and too inward to transfer successfully to the screen. So if there is no film of Birdsong that's fine by me, it's either a good film or it's no film, don't let's go off at half cock.

Presenter24:46

Building a

Presenter25:04

Tell me about your next piece of music then, track number six.

Sebastian Faulks25:06

Track number six, Jonie Mitchell. I think she's such a remarkable artist who's done something which would be absolutely suicidal for a novelist, but worked as a singer-performer, which is I think she lived her life as material for songs. And I heard this song when I was about twenty-two and quite myself quite romantic and susceptible, and it's called Help Me.

Speaker 325:34

I think I'm falling in love again When I get that crazy feeling I know I'm in trouble again I'm in trouble Cause you're a rambler and a gambler and a sweet talking ladies man And you love your loving

Speaker 325:57

Not like you love your freedom

Presenter26:01

Joni Mitchell and help me. So last year, Sebastian Fuchs, to celebrate the hundredth year of Ian Fleming's birth, you published Devil May Care, which many people saw as an unlikely thing to do for you. It was Sebastian Fuchs writing as Ian Fleming, and it was the world of Walter P P. K.'s and Bentley Continentals and Soda Siphons and all rather quick and sharp and as anyone reading a Bond novel would want, but not necessarily something that I would imagine came that easily to you. Or did it come all too easily, maybe?

Sebastian Faulks26:34

Well, it was a uh casting against type, I think. I'd just written Human Traces, which was five years in a Victorian uh lunatic asylum, and I was uh quite keen to do something different. Anyway, the truth of the matter is it was intensely good fun. It took me six weeks to write, which is what Fleming took to write his Bond books, and I figured out how he wrote, which wasn't very hard to figure out, because it's a newspaper man style, basically.

Presenter26:38

Gotcha.

Presenter26:57

Did you almost inhabit him, as you were writing Fleming, I mean?

Sebastian Faulks27:00

No, it wasn't quite like being channelled. I didn't want to be inhabited by Fleming. I think the sort of cigarette smoke would have driven me crazy for a start. I've seen.

Presenter27:03

I don't want to be inhabited by Fleming.

Presenter27:07

Prison.

Presenter27:08

I've seen a a photograph it was in a magazine I think of Where You Write couldn't be more dingy and depressing.

Sebastian Faulks27:14

Oh, I'm sorry you say that, Kirsty.

Presenter27:16

The curtains are hanging off the curtain rail. It's piled high with all sorts of things I can't imagine are essential.

Sebastian Faulks27:17

I'll let

Sebastian Faulks27:21

I had no idea how squalid it was until I saw that picture, but I just don't care what it looks like, because when I'm there I'm not really there anyway. I'm in an in imagined world, so I just as long as it works, I just couldn't care less what it looks like.

Presenter27:33

So you said six weeks to write Devil May Care, but five years, as you've uh mentioned, to write Human Traces, where you were obser you you even went into these Victorian, as they were characterized then, mental asylums and and sort of steep yourself in all of that horror.

Sebastian Faulks27:47

Yes, and these wonder not wonderful, but oppressive and appalling buildings. The only one that was still functioning as such that I was able to get into was Broadmoor. But I got in there and of course when I looked down from Broadmoor, which is set on a hill above Crowthorne in Berkshire, down in the plain was where I'd been at school, Wellington. The asylum took the high ground for the views and the school took the low ground for the playing fields. Every Monday morning during double physics there the alarm at Broadmoor would go off.

Sebastian Faulks28:15

It was quite strange. You have this feeling of life coming round.

Presenter28:19

Are you as good at marshalling the chaos of real life as as the imaginary life that you capture?

Sebastian Faulks28:24

We keep life very simple. We have a very ordinary life. And no, I'm not very organized, and I never remember what I'm supposed to be doing from one day to the other. But my wife's very good, and she sends me emails, actually. It says, Don't forget six o'clock tonight, blah, blah, blah. That's how we manage.

Presenter28:42

Tell me about your next piece of music then.

Sebastian Faulks28:44

America is a country that's also meant a lot to me, and I remember once uh flying over Manhattan coming into land, and I had this huge fistful of whiskey on ice in my right hand, and on the headphones was Miles Davis, and this is a a track called Miles.

Speaker 329:06

Dun dun dun dun.

Presenter29:58

Miles Davis with Cannonball Adderly and Miles. Both your parents have have died now, Sebastian. Did they live to see at least some of your success?

Sebastian Faulks30:08

Yes. My father uh died in nineteen ninety eight, and he'd seen my brother Edward Take Silk, and he'd seen certainly some of my books. He'd seen Birdsong and a couple of others. I think he w was slightly worried that I would ever sort of get anything together, but uh by the time he died he was felt very happy, I think.

Presenter30:27

And your mother, who had nourished this boy, must have satisfied her greatly.

Sebastian Faulks30:29

Yeah.

Sebastian Faulks30:31

I think she was thrilled that both of us had uh done things that we wanted to do and seemed happy and both married and and all that. And I took her along to Buckingham Palace when I got her a gong, and she was absolutely thrilled to bits with that, and that was one of her last outings actually. So no, I think that um we can say that they both got good value really.

Presenter30:51

Life then on this island. Um you talked a bit about this the ridiculous shaggy dog story that is our life, you know, the fact that we are conscious and that we we understand almost too much of ourselves to make our lives in any way balanced and happy and and natural. How much of the life on the island will be spent inside your head?

Sebastian Faulks31:10

Well, I suppose I live uh so much inside my head anyway. Um I frequently don't speak to anyone until seven o'clock in the evening. I get up quite late, and by the time I go off to work, everyone's gone out of the house. I sometimes don't utter until seven: thirty in the evening. So all that's going to be pretty familiar. And I am actually one of the least practical men in the world. You're talking about what one inherits from parents. That's something I seem to have inherited from my father, who, so far as I remember, couldn't even change a plug. And there's going to be very little DIY and handy shelters. It's going to be very, very rudimentary. Well, you've seen my room in the as photographed in the newspaper.

Presenter31:44

Tell me about your eighth choice to leave.

Sebastian Faulks31:46

When my father died we had a memorial service for him, and the choir sang the Pie Yesu from the Requiem by Foray. And I don't think I really want to hear that too sort of poignant, but the Sanctus is a wonderful piece of music and it has a tremendous confidence and faith. It's as though everything is moving inevitably to a proper, fitting and redemptive conclusion. I don't myself have this faith, but I tremendously envy people who do, and this is a very, very calming and uplifting piece of music.

Presenter33:20

The Sanctives from Foray's Requiem with the Choir of St. John's College, Cambridge, led by George Guest and the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields. So I'm going to give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. You're allowed to take another book, Sebastian. What's your book going to be?

Sebastian Faulks33:34

This was much harder than um choosing the music. However, I've uh gone with Proust, The Remembrance of Things Past, because it's the only novel I've ever read which made me just stop and bore anyone who was around by just reading out sentences again and again and again in just sort of wonder, and it's just an extraordinary book, and it would also have the added advantage of lasting rather a long time.

Speaker 133:45

Hmm.

Presenter33:57

It's yours. Uh your luxury to make uh life a little more comfortable.

Sebastian Faulks34:01

Uh if I'm allowed to, I'd like to take uh a strip of coconut matting and a net and some cricket stumps, a bat, a ball and a bowling machine with an endless supply of cricket balls. And the bowling machine can be programmed to be Shane Warne or Dennis Lilly or Gary Sobers or anyone you like. And I'm going to play a series of timeless tests in which I'm England and I'm going to play the rest of the world. But I shall also be the umpire, so it's possible that England will do rather better than they have done in reality.

Presenter34:29

How could I possibly deny you that? It's certainly yours. And if the waves were to threaten to wash to the shore and take away the disks, which one would you run through the sand to save?

Sebastian Faulks34:38

Well, I've had periods of feeling sad and melancholy in my life, and I've through with that. I just want to be happy, so I'll take Miles Davis. What could make you feel better than Miles and John Colterin and Cannibal Adderly?

Presenter34:49

Sebastian folks, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Sebastian Faulks34:52

Thank you. It was a great pleasure.

Presenter35:00

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.