Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer whose trilogy His Dark Materials brought international fame; prize-winning fantasy with armoured bears and gay angels, loved by millions, criticised by t
On the island
Eight records
Michel Béroff and Jean-Philippe Collard
This is a very pretty piece. I'm I'm a great fan of pretty things, prettiness. And and this is pretty music. There's a lot of French piano music which is very pretty, but this is the prettiest of all, I think.
Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: Variation 1
I love this work. It's inexhaustibly inventive and refreshing and full of delight and imaginative power. And I like it on the piano, too.
This is one that that was a hit when I was in Australia, when I was a boy in Australia. And there was no television then in Australia, so we listened to the radio all the time.
Franco & L'Orchestre O.K. Jazz
This is a lovely example of a kind of music I grew to love when I was visiting Africa... My peripatetic parents were living in Uganda at the time.
Lee Konitz with the Gerry Mulligan Quartet
This is a piece I I I'm very fond of because I I bought the record when I was young and I played it till it was scratched and hardly hardly listened to a bull at all.
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67: I. Allegro con brio
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Carlos Kleiber
I couldn't select eight records for a desert island without having something by Beethoven, so this is the opening of the fifth symphony.
Sonata Reminiscenza in A minor, Op. 38, No. 1Favourite
One of my great musical passions is the piano music of Nikolai Metna... I love his music because it is so full of melody.
Les Francs-juges, Op. 3: Overture
London Classical Players, conducted by Roger Norrington
The final piece of music is is by Berlioz, a character I've always enjoyed. His memoirs are the most terrific yarn.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:30How does it work for you, being chosen by the story?
It does sound rather, if not mystical, then somehow platonic, as if the stories inhabit a different realm and they come to me. I don't really believe that, but it certainly feels like that. It feels as if a story comes to me and and says, Tell me, this is this is your job, this is what you've got to do.
Presenter asks
5:20You say, nevertheless, although it is fantasy, you say you're a realist. I don't understand that.
Yes, well I say these things to provoke really and um uh to provoke and annoy. No, what I meant by that really is that I'm trying to be psychologically realistic. The problem with some fantasy... is that it doesn't... seem to be very interested in human psychology, in what it is that makes us feel human, what it's like to grow up, the things that interest me.
Presenter asks
6:41You can't have been surprised when you upset the church, therefore, because [the church in the book is a malevolent force]?
Churches are malevolent forces in our world, and have been. If we look at the history of the Christian Church alone, we see persecutions, hangings, burnings, uh tortures carried out in the name of the the the God of love it's a history of infamy almost without parallel... religion is a malign thing.
The keepsakes
The book
Marcel Proust
Because there's so much in it. It's so full of life. It's funny, it's tragic, it's ironic, it's inexhaustible.
The luxury
The Jar of Apricots by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
My luxury would really be would have to be a painting. It's a painting by the greatest painter of still life, Chardin. It's called The Jar of Apricots, and it's one of his delightful still lifes of little ordinary sort of every day things that you see in a kitchen, and apart from the beauty of the way the paint is applied and the exquisite way the forms are arranged, It's full of little intriguing things. There's a parcel there which is wrapped in paper and string. There's a loaf of bread and a knife. And there's a delicate little porcelain cup, into which somebody has just poured perhaps coffee or chocolate or something, because there's a drift of steam coming off the top. And I'd like to imagine that whoever poured that would be just out of the picture, and perhaps bringing a chair for me to sit on or something, to come and talk. So it it's a pic picture that suggests human companionship without limiting it to one face. So I could imagine anyone I wanted to sitting down with me to drink this. and enjoying the apricots.
Presenter asks
9:20Did your grandfather, [who was a clergyman], put you off organised religion, or something?
No, absolutely not. He was the kindest of men, the most delightful companion, story teller... a man of total rock like certainty in the truths of the religion he professed. But he didn't force it on me, no, not at all.
Presenter asks
11:51Why do children want [to be an orphan or to discover they were adopted]?
Well, part of our growing up involves the awful discovery, usually in our early teen years, that we've been put in the wrong family by mistake. And who are these awful people I have to live with? Surely I don't belong with them. I must be a princess or something.
Presenter asks
17:40Why was [your English degree at Oxford] an absolutely useless waste of time?
Well, it was rather harsh, perhaps, perhaps I shouldn't have put it quite as harshly as that. What I now realize I should have done was to go to art school. and do something physical with my hands, making things.
“Goodness and wickedness both come from the human heart. There is no supernatural origin for these things. We are the origin of good, and we are the origin of wickedness. And there ain't no elsewhere, there is no God.”
“There's no such thing as writer's block. There are times when it's difficult to write, and times when it's easy to write but what you have to do is do the same amount every day, no matter whether it's difficult or easy.”
“So the only way to get out of the world of the dead is to live this life as fully as you can and achieve. What you can do, and end up with a story to tell.”