Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist best known for Birdsong, a First World War novel that became a literary phenomenon.
On the island
Eight records
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.
Piano Concerto in G major: II. Adagio assai
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.
I could have chosen any of The Beatles early singles, but I've chosen this one because I think this is Edwards' favourite too.
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.
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 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
MilestonesFavourite
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
Choir of St John's College, Cambridge, George Guest & Academy of St Martin in the Fields
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.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:28What do you remember of early life at home?
My recollection of home is of being very happy and having a a wonderful time. I had an older brother, Edward … and we had wonderful games. My parents both of them had quite difficult lives up until this point … 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
Presenter asks
6:14What do you think your parents were handing on to you?
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 … But I also uh learned from her I think the sort of importance of courage and sticking at s at things.
Presenter asks
14:29Do you think there was something of [the legacy of your father and grandfather's war experiences] that left you feeling slightly directionless?
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
The keepsakes
The book
Marcel Proust
I've 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.
The luxury
Cricket equipment (bat, ball, stumps, bowling machine, and coconut matting)
I'd like to take 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.
Presenter asks
22:53Did you ever feel weighed down by the significance of [setting Birdsong in the First World War]?
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. and I knew that I risked falling very, very uh flat on my face if I if I got it wrong.
Presenter asks
23:30How did [looking right into the floor of human suffering for Birdsong] affect you personally?
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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”