Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
An English novelist
On the island
Eight records
I first went to France and Spain when I was quite well into my twenties, and I can remember the excitement of hearing sort of folk music played for the first time. And I remember going to Andalusia and hearing Flamenco played.
I could take this composer's entire works, I think, because I'm very fond of him, and it's Couperin. And I like the poetry of his work and the humour.
I like it because I find it very well sexy and erotic. In fact, I understand the words to say that I'm very lonely, I'm very drunk, and I'm very fed up. But it's the sound of it that I've always liked ever since I first heard it.
Concerto for Flute, Oboe and Strings in G minor, RV 439 "La Notte": V. Il Sonno (Largo)
I would like to choose what I I think is the best uh bit of film music ever written, although it was written uh a long, long time before the cinema was invented.
I like this one because it's got a simple and rather appealing lyric. And it's also got, I think, the best backup group she ever had.
As I Roved Out (Seventeen Come Sunday)
I'd like to choose a record we used to hear on BBC radio a lot in the 1950s. It used to introduce a folk music programme.
One of the saddest, most poetic pieces of all jazz piano music by by the strange player Jimmy Yancey... nobody's ever played the piano quite like him.
Trio Sonata for Two Transverse Flutes and Continuo in G major, BWV 1039: Adagio
Frans Brüggen and Leopold Stastny
I must have one piece by Bach, and I can't say that this isn't his greatest music, but it's a piece I'm particularly fond of, partly because it's played by a musician I admire very much, the great Dutch flute and recorder player, Frantz Brueggen.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:34How well could you endure loneliness?
I think fairly well. First of all, all novelists' lives are extremely lonely. I in particular have always liked solitude.
Presenter asks
1:01How important is music in your life?
Well, I perform very badly on the recorder... I find when I'm writing that to break off and play a little music Is very relaxing.
Presenter asks
3:18Do you consider yourself a town boy or a country boy by upbringing?
Well, uh if you were born at Lyoncy, you have to say you had a suburban upbringing. But what saved me was moving in the war to Devon, where I did live in a Devon village. And I I would say everything... About me is really more of the country than the town.
Presenter asks
4:38What did you do during your time in the Marines?
I didn't enjoy it, if I'm I'm frank... Then the last year in the Marines I did enjoy because I was on Dartmoor training not commandos, but Marines who'd been picked to go into the commandos... But that that meant you spent most of your life wandering over Dartmoor, which was fine.
The keepsakes
The luxury
because my sight's not too good and I depend on them very much when I'm in the country here.
Presenter asks
5:32Why did you read French [at Oxford]?
Mainly because I'd done it at school. I s have never had much aptitude for mathematics and in those days that kind of choice was decided very early... And I did French and German, in fact. But when I got to Oxford, we were allowed to drop German. And so I went on with French.
Presenter asks
28:48Would you try to escape [from the island]?
Don't think so... I think I'd just enjoy the island.
“I in particular have always liked solitude. And many years ago I seriously contemplated writing a new version of Robinson Crusoe in in which the castaway would uh his great worry would not be getting off the island, but staying on the island, not being discovered.”
“I was a kind of little gauleiter or dictator at the age of eighteen, and I've never wanted that kind of life since.”
“If I'm honest, I don't terribly enjoy being published. I love keeping manuscripts for year after year after year because you can take them out and you can always improve them if you have.”