Backlisted - Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

Episode Date: August 7, 2017

Author William Fiennes joins Andy and John for a bumper edition to talk about 'Desperate Characters', Paula Fox's New York set novel of relationships and feral cats. Also; William's First Story charity, Adam Scovell's Folk Horror and Sarah Hall's story collection Madame Zero, plus more on the mysterious Rosemary Tonks.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)13'34 - Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange by Adam Scovell 22'15 - The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall33'48 - Desperate Characters by Paula Fox* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Let's talk about Alex Preston's launch this week. Alex was on the show. Two weeks, three, four weeks? Yeah. Let's talk about Alex Preston's launch this week. Alex, who was on the show. So I... Two weeks, three, four weeks?

Yeah. If you're listening to this in the future. Fifteen years ago. I had a really nice day on Wednesday. If anyone's listening to this who listened to our last episode, you'll have heard me talking about Rosemary Tonks, the poetry of Rosemary Tonks. So I booked a day at the British Library

to read one of her novels because they're all out of print and they go for huge amounts of money. And there's clearly some issue around them, the problems about them being reprinted because when she was alive she didn't want them reprinted and there's negotiations and what have you. So I sat in the rare books of music at the British Library

and read The Bloater by... And tweeted some pages from it, which made it look very good indeed. It's really, really good. I'm not sure it quite adds up to more than the sum of its parts, but the parts in and of themselves, fascinating from beginning to end. It really is the most extraordinary life story. I must say it's one of those. The destruction of all the sacred objects that she'd been inherited from her aunt.

She's smashing all these priceless antiques. It's just the most odd. It's that kind of fundamentalist religion of any stripe which says, what use is art if it doesn't venerate the Godhead but also just the experience it's such a pleasure now you're about to go on holiday I believe

that would be my holiday if I could have two weeks of popping into the reading rooms every day and just sitting there and reading a book I'm just filling, what I always do when I go to Spain I'm filling my bag with Lorca and it's just an excuse to read vaguely Spanish stuff

because I'm in Spain. It's a bit, I go to Dawn's and I'll have that shelf. You should read, far be it from me to suggest what you should read. I'm also going to re-read

Under the Volcano, which is a very good, you know, we've got that coming up. We've got that coming up, everybody, Under the Volcano, if you have a month. You may need it. You should read After the Death of Don Juan

by Sylvia Tanzan Warner oh what a great idea yes very good idea which was recommended to me by one of the nice chaps at the LRB bookshop I've got a book I wanted to read which I've forgotten the title of but it's a memoir of living in a small Andalusian village by Michael Jacobs,

who's an interesting polymath scholar. So anyway, so I went from the British Library, and then I went to the launch party of Kingfisher's Catch Fire, which is our former guest Alex Preston's new book that he has created in collaboration with the artist Neil Gower. And it was a really nice party but it was quite a funny thing where many of the guests were

former backlisted authors not Sylvia Townsend Warner that would have been good so Lister Evans was there and Catherine Taylor was there so strictly speaking back to guests rather than authors. Yeah, well, you know what I mean.

Yeah, all right, OK, OK, yeah, yeah. Make me out a liar for semantic reasons. Although Jane Austen is one of our greatest living authors. That was really great, yeah. And William Fiennes, who's our guest today, was there as well, it turns out. Yeah. Would you agree with me that it was a nice party it was a fantastic party

it really was apparently there were original artworks of Neil Gowers the artist in the window of the shop which would have been a reason by the way I couldn't go because I was watching my son play in his

band at school called Anonymous and he's a drummer and I have to say I was watching my son play in his band at school. They're called Anonymous, and he's a drummer. And I have to say, I was really, really... I think I'm allowed to say that some of the musicians in the group were less gifted, but he was absolutely... They played two Red Hot Chili Peppers songs and an Arctic Monkeys song, and he was bang. Oh, Arctic Monkeys, you've got to be on it for the drummer.

Yeah, there he is. So although it was a shame to miss Alex's party, it was... We were recording the last podcast. I couldn't go to my son's end-of-year prize-giving ceremony where he won a prize. Again, he'll never listen to this, so it's fine. So he won a prize. He won a prize for...

I love this. You know, they hand out prizes for sport and academic achievement. Do they not do what my son's primary school do and tip you the wing? Send you a text saying you may want to be there. Yeah, but I couldn't go because we were, you know. In fact, Backlist must come first. My other child. Unruly adolescent.

So, yes, my son won a prize and it was for services to the library. That's my boy. Absolutely true. That's my boy. Absolutely right. And he deserved it and he borrowed the most books and he was... And he brought them all back. And he enthused about the most books.

So yeah, what with that and Brian Bilston, he's doing very well. Shall we? Yeah. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. You join us in our brownstone in an up-and-coming area of Brooklyn, courtesy of Unbound, the website which brings authors and readers together to create something special. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller. I am the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously,

and I read too many books by women and also not enough books by women. I've been told this week by different members of the public. Joining us today is the author William Fiennes. William's books include The Snow Goose, The Snow Geese, damn that, and The Music Room. And he is the director and co-founder

of the charity First Story which aims to improve literacy and foster creativity in young people through creative writing. First Story is a charity that Unbound are always trying to find ways of supporting but how long is it

you started it in what year? It's nearly ten years ago I'm not the director now. We have a fantastic director called Monica Pohl and a brilliant team. But it's nearly ten years. I mean, it was September 2007 that I started going to a school in West London, in Hounslow, every Wednesday afternoon, to sit round a table and write with about a dozen teenagers.

And it's just grown from there and now there are 70 writers doing that in secretaries all over the country. It's the most brilliant thing. All the writers I know, and there are lots of them who do it, are really passionate about it. And I think what's lovely is

not only is it brilliant for the kids, it's amazing for the writers as well. Well, I always thought, from my own experience, it was a sort of a public health intervention on behalf of writers i mean it was just in fact i was writing the music room when i started going out to cranford community college in hounslow and was finding it sort of incredibly lonely and writing basically being an arena for self-criticism as i thought then go on thinking uh and every wednesday I would I would I would

go and sit with these fantastic teenagers and would be reminded about how exciting voices and images and characters and stories were and yeah it would always send me back home sort of buzzing and feeling that it wasn't a terrible chore and a curse to be writing a book, but actually a great luxury and sort of privilege. Yeah, no, it really... And the quality of that... I've been to some of the events. The quality of the writing is just... It is staggering. Well, yeah, that was always a bit galling because you'd sit round a table and I'd suggest to the students,

you know, something we were going to write about or some little exercise or game. And then I would always write with them and share and would be completely outshone every time. And so you had to kind of make sure your self-confidence wasn't too shaken by that. But yeah, just a very, very exciting thing to be involved with. And I think the message really of it is that writing is or should be a source of not just of pleasure, but a source of power. And we're trying to spread that message through schools as widely as possible,

and particularly the kinds of schools that might not have writers visiting and that kind of thing. Absolutely. That's the brilliant thing. It really is going to schools that wouldn't normally and that kind of thing. Absolutely, that's the brilliant thing. It really is going to schools that wouldn't normally get this kind of attention. And one would have to say that, you know, did you say you've been doing this for 10 years? We're just coming up to 10 years. I think actually next year is our 10th anniversary.

It feels like something that would have been very important 10 years ago but is even more important now, you know, to give the opportunities to people when those opportunities seem to be shrinking. Yes, I mean, I think there are, you know, various other organisations, I mean, people like Arts Emergency and that are trying to maintain a kind of place for the arts in the school day.

And, I mean, of course, there's so much pressure on exam results and so on, which is really important for students too. But, yeah, I think just holding on to that idea that everybody has a voice and we'd hope in the school years to release that voice or take away the constrictions and barriers that might smother it. I was looking on the Twitter feed and quite a lot of the books get the stories get published in in a in book form don't yeah we've always put a big emphasis on that so all the writers in residence in the schools they go in once a week and and and run these writing

workshops and then at the end of the school year we do a well as night professionally produced as we can we get wonderful book designers do the covers and we make these anthologies of the students' work. And I think that's a really important part of it because these then stay in the school library. They live in the school library. Some schools have printed off, have bought hundreds of copies to distribute to their feeder schools to show, look what our students can do. Teachers use them as teaching resources as well, so that rather than studying a poem by Caroline Duffy, they might study a poem by Rukia, who was in the school that previous year. Just say National Writing Day.

Well, yeah, I mean, the problem with First... Not the problem with First Story, but inevitably it's quite a sort of intensive process because we pay fellowships to writers to do it and obviously there's the cost of producing anthologies and so on so we'd like to do it in every school in the country but even doing it in 70 schools involves quite a lot of fundraising so we're always thinking about how to to spread this message a bit more widely and say to young people in schools everywhere that your life is interesting, your way of seeing the world is interesting and valuable,

you have a voice, writing is a source of pleasure and a source of power, it's not a chore, or just try and say all of those things. And also we wanted to get together with many of the other organisations and agencies that are really in the same sort of boat or wanting to say the same kind of thing. So we had this idea of doing a day, a campaign that would be a day about writing, and so sat round the table with the National Literary Trust and the Arvon Foundation and the Royal Society of Literature

and all the regional writing agencies and lots and lots of other bodies to get together and do... So the National Literary Trust on National Writing Day, which was June 21st, launched a big report on writing with young people. And then these agencies all over the country really did wonderful things all day. And it just, yes, we didn't really expect

quite how it would catch on because we were doing it on a bit of a shoestring. But I know there's a plethora of days now and you can't really get through a day without it being a national. And even National Writing Day was also National Selfie Day and something like World Giraffe Day as well. And National Yoga Day. So there were people trying to take a selfie of themselves

writing in a yoga pose with a giraffe. So there was all of that going on. Welcome to the 21st century. But actually a writing day, and it brought in lots of things I didn't expect. Like, you know, people at home who were writing used it as a sort of, well, now I'm going to go back to the novel I stopped writing, and now I'm going to aim to write 1,000 words a day or whatever it was. Lots of people who were involved in writing for well-being, so in hospitals and mental

health centres and so on, who are doing journaling and that kind of stuff. But it was really exciting and I really hope it'll happen again next year in an even bigger way. Brilliant. Well, you're here more as a reader than a writer to talk about a book a 1970s book paula fox's um 1970s novel of societal and marital collapse desperate characters but um which is i yeah that's what it says on my sheet of paper here but before that um maybe now is the time andy to say uh what have you been reading this week? So I've been reading I actually read this several weeks ago

and it got bumped by my enthusiasm for Rosemary Tonks last time. But I've read a book, a new book by Adam Scovell. Adam Scovell? Adam Scovell? Always the problem. I'm going to say Adam Scovel or Scovel

I'm sure Adam will tell us called Folk Horror Hours Dreadful and Things Strange and is a history of folk horror do you wise gentlemen gathered around this table know what folk horror is

yes a bit well I'm just seeing the wicker man wise gentlemen gathered around this table, know what folk horror is? Yes. A bit. Well, I'm just seeing The Wicker Man. Blood on Satan's claw. Okay, so the three unholy texts of folk horror, they're sort of, it's a 60s and 70s TV and film genre. Identified by Adam in the book are The Wicker Man. You are quite right.

The Blood on Satan's Claw. You are quite right. And there's one more. What would it be? Would it be The Witchfinder General? Witchfinder General. You are right. Now, have we all seen all three of those films?

I haven't. I have, actually. I haven't seen Blood on Satan's Claw. Oh. Oh. It has so many good things. Oh. It has so many good things going on. It has a strong flavour. It's actually

brilliant. It's a brilliant film. I watched it on YouTube. I don't know how I ended up watching it now, but not that long ago. Maybe two years ago. And it was completely gripped me. It was raunchy, there's no doubt about it I'm forgetting the name

of the incredibly strikingly beautiful girl who became I'm going to say it's Linda Hayden I think you're right that it's Linda Hayden but it has some fabulous cameos from fruity English

character actors. And it's the Civil War, which I have a bit of a... I don't know, William does as well. I have a bit of a love for that period, as is Witchfinder General. And one of the things that's so interesting about the book, that Adam points out in the book, is... And this is a sign about... We were talking about the hashtags and the world in which we live now.

You know, folk horror as a as a genre dates all the way back to 2010 really it says in that the term is first used in a documentary by mark gatis that was on bbc four yeah you know or seven years ago right and in that time it's this thing which partly because of people's enthusiasm and people having access to a lot of this material via DVD and via YouTube in a way that they wouldn't have done on the internet they wouldn't have done, so we will be talking about

those three films, we will be talking about Nigel Neill's work like the Stone Tape, we will be talking about the BBC adaptations, Children of the Stones Children of the Stones, absolutely, we will be talking about The Owl Service, lots of Alan Garner. We will be talking about the BBC adaptations to M.R. James, Ghost Stories,

Warning to the Curious, etc. Pender's Fen, we talked about Pender's Fen a few weeks ago, Alan Clarke. And Red Shift, in fact, Alan Garner as well. One of the things that's really really fascinating in the book is that Adam tries to, and succeeds, I must say, in defining what all these disparate artefacts, artefacts are these things that have been dug up from the recent past, have in common with one another. And he identifies several things. One thing is landscape. So the landscape of Britain or England

is very present as a backdrop. Things dug up out of the earth. Yeah, the beginning of Blood on Satan's Claw, there's a bit of... I think it's just a bit of a shoe or something on a ploughed field. And the summer isle in The Wicker Man. So there's that.

There's the idea of an individual stumbling into a closed society with disastrous consequences for both themselves and the society. What's odd about it, though, because that trope is already being satirised mercilessly.

American Werewolf in London, the slaughtered ram where they wander into. So it's, I mean, you're looking really only at late 60s to late 70s. Funnily enough, that is the third. What is the other thing that these have in common? It's got to be a lot of flute on the

soundtrack. It's really true. It's Freddie Jones chewing the scenery in all of them as well. They're basically all things... This is a serious point. They're all things that are made in the 60s or 70s. And Adam makes the point that, actually,

there's a fascinating thing going on, simultaneously in kind of historical drama, which is being dug up from the 60s and 70s, which is itself commenting on the era in which it was made. So I'm just going to show you the cover of the book. What do you notice about that photograph? The colour. Okay, so this is a photograph of a woman being dragged towards a pyre to be burnt.

It's from the film Witchfinder General. What do you notice about the picture? It's very vivid in its colours. Anything else? There's a modern house in the picture? It's very vivid in its colours, anything else? There's a modern house in the background There's a modern house in the background, exactly So there's a brilliant picture on the front of this book which you won't notice straight away

of a kind of sort of people in peasant costumes and then in the background a very nice barret home. I'm just going to read this little bit because I think it'll give you a flavour of the book. And Adam says, in April 2014, I was working on an essay on the music used in folk horror films when I was confronted with a rather intriguing photograph.

At first, I believed it to be merely another film still with the potential to illustrate a thematic point in the essay for when it was eventually to be put online. There was however something unnerving about it. The image showed a beautiful summer's day in a rural backdrop depicting a group of medieval characters dragging a woman up a hillside. This was supervised by some sort of religious figure in a black cloak while onlookers watched from afar further down the hill. The still was from Michael Reeves's Witchfinder General specifically from the film's opening scene which was analysed in an earlier hill. The still was from Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General, specifically from the film's opening scene, which was analysed in an earlier chapter. The image is disturbing, capturing the essence and casual brutality of Reeves' film, but something was still not quite right overall. On closer inspection, the uncanny element,

one that was sparking several ideas thematically, was that there was a surprisingly modern house just down the hill in full view. Further the photograph's vista several more modern houses can be seen in a variety of suffolk pinks and pastels the events depicted in the photo were not taking place in darker times long since past but in 1968 in the days of the popularization of the counterculture what was shocking about the photo was that this aspect did not at first present itself as anachronistic to the action that was taking place, but fundamentally was actually a part of it. Of course, barbaric violence, skewed belief and moral systems, and implicit direct misogyny could be perceived as normalised in this era. This was the late 1960s, and in taking into account folk horror's most popular examples,

the early 1970s were naturally a hyper-extension. Throughout this book, the overriding feeling of being haunted by an era should have been building, suggesting that something odd was in the water during the late 1960s, sowing the seas towards the wealth of horror to come in the 1970s. the seas towards the wealth of horror to come in the 1970s, diegetically within such fictional examples, but quintessentially, also non-diegetically, in 1970s Britain itself. In other words, what he's doing in the book, and very convincingly, is setting up a case that says you're watching films or you're reading books that have three time zones happening simultaneously. The fictional one, the one in which they were made, and how we feel about both those different time zones right now.

It's much like reading Redshift, which sort of does that. Yes, exactly. And it's also, I have to say, in terms of research, it's fantastic. You would read this book and want to see most of the things that he talks about. For those of you who like it, he writes a great blog called Celluloid Wicker Man, which he publishes on a Monday, which is one of the few blogs that I bookmark and read each week. It's really, really good.

So that's Folk Horror, Hours Dreadful and Things Strange by Adam Scovell, published by Auteur. John, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading a terrific new collection of short stories by Sarah Hall. Sarah Hall, probably better known as a novelist, although she is winning people and prizes over for her short stories. She's one of my favourite contemporary English writers. Horsewater, the story of the village in the Lake District that was inundated. short stories. She's one of my favourite contemporary English writers.

Haweswater, the story of the village in the Lake District that was inundated in the 1950s. The Cahalan Army, the latest one, The Wolf Border. She writes, I think as well as anybody in contemporary English fiction,

about the strange, liminal kind of worlds we live in between the edges of cities. This book is full of stories about mortuaries, hospital wards. It's full of odd sciences. There's an amazing short story about somebody who is writing a letter to his family, apologising for having invented or being a drug which has led to a sort of massive explosion of a virus.

The first story in the book, the one that I think everybody... It won a... What was it? Yes, the BBC National Short Story Award called Mrs Fox. Appropriately for this particular podcast. Yes, it is. It struck me. Well, it is, and it's about a man, a middle-class man and his wife, and the wife, they go for a walk in the countryside and she turns into a fox, not in any kind of Ted Hughes-y, you know,

Thorpe-fox-y way. I'll read a little bit about the transformation. She's just, she's, I love these stories because these are stories that really don't care whether you like them or not. I mean, there's no attempt to sort of um to sort of plea bargain with the reader there's no neat endings often the characters the characters the characters feel unknowable the resolutions are are either withheld or deferred but the language is strong the imagination is

strong she loves i can only imagine. I mean, I know Sarah a little bit, but she was exposed to a lot of the best bits of Doctor Who and survivors as a child. There are always... There's an amazing story in this... Folk horror. Well, yes. I mean, there's an amazing story in here where climate change has happened and what's destroying the planet is wind,

and this man is having to sort of negotiate his way through a completely destroyed city, through homes with corpses in, and, you know, the birds have been destroyed. Everything has been, it's just massive. So she's great at doing those big kind of sort of almost high-concept sci-fi fantasy scenarios. But what makes them great is they're all about dysfunction,

miscommunication. There's an absolutely brilliant last story in the book, a sexy story called Evie, where a woman just suddenly becomes incredibly promiscuous and her behaviour changes. And I won't get... I mean, it's resolved to an extent at the end, but not really quite.

It's such a great bit of writing. She's the... Nobody writes, I think, contemporary writers I know, writes more convincingly about sex from a pretty much, I mean, kick-ass female perspective. I read Mrs Fox on the way up to record today after purchasing a copy

for a pound from Oxfam in Marylebone High Street before the party we were talking about earlier and so it's a proof as well so whoever, if Faber you're listening to this, somebody is

flogging your proof straight away. That's happened to me. You see your own book in a charity shop before it's been published. It's a bit of a downer. With the inscription, Dear Dad. Yeah, exactly, right? This one's for you. But it has an epigraph by James Salter, and of course she wrote the introduction to A Sport and a Pastime.

Yeah, I think... On the recent edition, and that is Salter's epigraph here, is the more clearly one sees this world, the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist. And that feels really true, actually, to how she approaches the scenarios that she then goes on and writes about. I'm going to just read a little bit. I just think she's an outstanding...

Some of these stories, you just go... Again, you want to read them several times. But this is a great moment. The walk, husband-wife on a walk, and the wife has run on her head. You want to read them several times. But this is the great moment, the walk. Husband, wife, I don't walk, and the wife has run on her head. She turns her head and smiles. Something is wrong with her face. The bones have been re-carved.

Her lips are thin and her nose is a dark blade. Teeth small and yellow. The lashes of her hazel eyes have thickened and her brows are drawn together. An expression he has never seen. a look that is almost craven, a trick of kiltering light on this English autumn morning, the deep cast of shadows from the canopy. He blinks. She turns to face the forest again. She's leaning forward, putting her hands down, lifting her bottom. She has stepped out of her laced boots and is walking away. Now she is running again, on all fours, lower to earth, sleeker, fleeter.

She is running and becoming smaller, running and becoming smaller, running in the light of the reddening sun, the red of her hair and her coat falling, the red of her fur and her body loosening, running, holding behind her a sudden brazen object, white-tipped, her yellow scarves, trails in the briar, all vestiges shed. She stops, within calling distance, were he not struck dumb?

She looks over her shoulder, Topaz eyes glinting, scorched face, vixen. Pretty good. It was really good. I thought the place, yeah, the detonation of the word vixen in that is particularly splendid, actually. Really pleased you chose that.

Her first collection, The Beautiful Indifference, is absolutely fantastic. I mean, it's one of those books of stories that really holds together the whole collection. There's no kind of weak link in it. And it's strange how stories linger. The first and last, I think, there's one at the beginning about a horse. There's this sort of decaying horse

that's been locked up in a barn. And then one at the end about, I think, a woman rowing out in a boat into the middle of a lake in Scandinavia somewhere. That it's just in my head as if it was a dream i'd had years ago fantastic i know i just think she has this ability to to to summon stuff so with such economy but she it's it's something really muscular there's an amazing kind of amazing strength to her to both

to imagination but also her you know she grits you i'm i'm i'm quite i want to go back and read that collection because she seems to me on the face of this one of the most i like stories short stories and it's interesting that her last two books have been stories i mean i think the wolf border which i have but haven't read is uh but she's been nominated twice i think for the booker so that amazing writer so that's madam zero by sarah hall that's published by faber anyway before we get into the main event which is uh you know crouching uh arching its back and rubbing up against the uh the window uh it's time for our regular new look at a book published by Unbound, and tonight it's the turn of Pete Brown. Pete Brown, hooray.

Who is the world's most brilliant writer on beer, and this indeed is a book about beer, and why beer, with its four ingredients, is at least three times more complex and interesting than wine. Take it away, Pete. So, my name's Pete Brown. I'm the author of a new book called Miracle Brew, which is the, I guess, the natural history of beer and what beer is made from. And the reason I love writing about beer so much is that it goes back to the birth of civilization and it's universal and it touches most people's lives. And so you can write history, you can write politics, you can write philosophy about beer if you want. And I wanted to write a book about the sort of natural life of beer because

most people I speak to believe that beer is made from at a guess hops whatever they are and chemicals which is a real shame because beer is the biggest selling alcoholic drink in the world it's second only to tea and coffee in terms of how many people drink it. And at a time when we're really interested in our food and drink, where it comes from, what it's made from, beer seems to be this curious exception that people don't really know very much about. And that's a real shame because the stories behind each of beer's four main ingredients,

hops, barley, yeast and water, are individually fascinating and together they're absolutely incredible. This is one of those books that grew in the telling. I started off thinking that I had most of the material I needed and then as soon as I started working on it and people got to hear about it they said oh well you want to come and come to my maltings or come to my hop farm. I ended up travelling across three continents in search of the best ingredients. So I was picking hops in Kent, in the Yakima Valley in Washington State,

and in Tasmania, which are three of the most exciting hop places in the world. They've got a kind of similar climate and just the magic of picking hops is quite wonderful. I like to write for a general reader rather than just beer geeks. Beer geeks are very welcome to read my books and hopefully find not too much wrong. But I love to get a generally curious reader

and teach them something that they didn't know, perhaps they didn't feel they needed to know, and then when they finish the book they go, wow wow that was such a journey uh it's meant to be entertaining you know beer is fun it's a fun drink it's meant to be kind of informal and casual so i write in that sort of way it's not hugely technical i'm not a technical person i'm a sociable person who enjoys a drink and uh i guess when i when i know i've done something right is when people say things like oh it was like a really interesting conversation at a bar stool person who enjoys a drink and uh i guess when i when i know i've done something right is when people say things like oh it was like a really interesting conversation at a barstool it'd be a

very long conversation to have at a barstool which is why i've put it in a book miracle brew by pete brown is available now from all good bookshops or direct from the unbound website if you're a backlisted listener you can get a special discount by entering the code back off that that's B-A-C-K-O-F-F, when you get to checkout. That was Pete Brown. If you are going to the Green Man Festival this year, do not miss Pete Brown's annual event on the book stage on Friday. It's always the first event on the Friday. Friday he has laboriously matched up tunes by bands who are playing at the Green Man Festival with the most appropriate beer that you could drink at the Green Man Festival the Green Man Festival so as anyone who's known who's been will know has a drinking courtyard with 200 beers

different beers available and that event that Pete does is absolutely brilliant because first of all he's very erudite, he's very funny, he knows about beer, and second of all, they give away loads of free beer. So you might want to attend. What's not to like? Hey, it can't all be book chat. Smoke Chesterfields. So let's talk about Desperate Characters by Paula Fox.

William, you chose this book for us. John, had you read it before? No, no. And I mean, I'm ashamed to say I had a vaguest notion that Paula Fox was someone interesting. No, I think I'd maybe read an obituary or maybe before that an interview

a couple of years ago. She died in March this year. Yes, she died in March this year, yeah. I think by that stage I was already switched on because I think we already discussed doing the podcast but it's I mean again

slightly in the tradition of this podcast blown away really blown away I read it a couple of years ago and really liked it but I must say coming back to it to read it for the podcast read it a couple of years ago and really liked it but i must say coming back to it to read it for the podcast read it in anger yeah coming back to it furious to have to read it again um no not at all i i really loved it on second reading i think i liked it on first read

but i couldn't quite i'm not sure i understood i'm not sure i understood i started to reread it immediately yeah i was i was i was it's such i mean we won't maybe go into the detail of the I'm not sure I understood it on second reading. I started to reread it immediately. It's such, I mean, we won't maybe go into the detail of the ending, but it was so powerful. So, William, where did you first run across this book or Paula Fox? Well, I had a very specific memory of it, and I think one of the reasons I chose it was because, having heard some of the podcasts before, I know it's obviously about celebrating books,

but also celebrating the sort of word-of-mouth transmission of books and one person passing on an enthusiasm or a passion for a book to another and how books are sort of kept alive that way. And I really do have a very specific moment of somebody saying to me, you've got to read this. And it was at a writer's event. It was at the Dublin Writers' Week, and I was there talking about the music room,

and there was a sort of gathering of the other writers, and I was in a conversation with the novelist Maria Hyland, brilliant novelist, M.J. Hyland, and also uncategorisable writer, Jeff Dyer, brilliant writer, Jeff Dyer. Uncategorisable writer, Jeff Dyer, brilliant writer, Jeff Dyer. Uncategorisable Jeff Dyer. And at one point, Maria said, OK, now everyone should say a book that maybe the others won't have heard of, but have to read. And I think I said The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazard, which I'm always saying to everybody, basically, even if they don't ask me for a recommendation.

And Jeff, I think, said something quite show-offy, like... I can't believe that. But I think it was Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, which I did see that was about 1,000 pages, so I veered away from that. And Maria M.J. Hyland said Desperate Characters by Paula Fox, and I kind of pretended I'd heard of Paula Fox because I was wanting to seem that I was at the same table

as these writers I admired. But I hadn't ever heard of Paula Fox. And I did dutifully and quickly go and seek out Desperate Characters. And it's been strange because it totally blew me away when I read it first, and I've read it now twice since then. And it's a very mysterious book. I think one of the hallmarks of great works, not just of literature but anything else,

is that they give you more as you go back to them, and they get bigger and seem bigger as you go back to them. And this does. It works in images. In terms of plot, it's quite sort of small. It's, on one level, a story about a woman who gets bitten by a cat and worries about whether she should go to the doctor or not. But it's sort of TARDIS-like in how much is crammed in there, well, the spaces it opens out into.

I'm suddenly remembering Robert McFarlane wrote a really nice thing about Emily Dickinson poems when he said that you read an Emily Dickinson poem, it's like going into a bungalow and finding that you're inside a cathedral. It's a beautiful observation, but I think there's something like that about this book. It's 150 pages long, it's a novella really, but it's force and it's sense of how much life is packed into it. I'm going to ask you to read something from it, maybe in a moment. I just want to... We often read the blurb from the back of the book,

and actually in this case I think it's quite important for people to, if they haven't read the book, fix where and when it's happening, because I think that's a very important part of what's going on in this novel. So here's the blurb. It comes garlanded with quotes from Jonathan Franzen, who we will talk about later, but also the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books and the TLS. So you can see where it's being pitched. And here is the blurb. It is the 1960s and Sophie and Otto Bentwood live in an elegantly restored Brooklyn apartment

with a complete girter and two shelves of French poets in the drawing room. After Sophie is viciously bitten on the hand while trying to feed a starving cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague their lives. A rock is thrown through the window. Sophie receives a late-night anonymous phone call. A stranger appears, asking for money, and their Long Island weekend home is vandalised. Over the course of just a few days, the Bentwoods are wrenched out of complacency, unearthed from the carapace of ordinary life, as they realise that it is not only their marriage, but also society itself, that has come so perilously

and tragically undone. What do you think? I think the blurb writer should rein it in a little bit on that one. Talk about spoilers. Exactly, a few spoiler alerts. But also, in some ways, it actually diminishes the book a little to pump up the themes like that about society crumbling because it makes it sound like it's in some way kind of preachy or coming at you with big themes. Actually, it comes at you with details. It's much odder. The book is just much odder than that. The originality of it is that just at the

moment when you think you've got it you know, you've got it under your, you know what's going on, she'll write a paragraph that completely I must. It's always just out of reach this book. That's why you want to read it again. I must stick up for the blurb writing. One of the things that I thought

when I read the book the first time was because this book was out of print for many years and did not sell many copies when it first came out it this is a tough book to sell i mean that that's what the blurb is trying to do but i agree with you it's a it's a hard one to to talk about in those terms without seeming to make it melodramatic. Yeah. It resists melodrama, although sort of melodramatic things happen. I mean, we're going to have the reading, I hope, of the cat bit. I thought, as blurbs go... As blurbs go, it's...

Well, could you read us a little bit? Too much information. This is very near the beginning. This is the first chapter, pages... This is just three or four pages in. And they're at this... They're living in this house in Brooklyn, and actually, as the blurb writer picks up on,

there's their sort of hyper-civilised existence, you know, the set of Goethe and so on. And even the first paragraph, which Jonathan Franzen, in his introduction, rather worries that might put people off, but it's very... it's sort of scalperly satirical about even the things they're having for dinner, you know, risotto, Milanese, chicken livers. I think it's precisely, by the way, 1968.

It is 68, yeah. Because there's a bit in the book which is quite important. So the fact that Otto andto and sophie bentwood are so you know they're living in brooklyn at the and they are the sort of pinnacle of western civilization in terms of of the clothes they wear the music they listen to the books they read um the the home furnishings they have it's all um you know it's all very precisely described and well it's not mocked exactly but it but but it is you know they're set up for a fall i suppose and the fall comes in the shape of a stray cat that sophie's been feeding outside the back door the cat had begun to clean its whiskers.

Sophie caressed its back again, drawing her fingers along until they met the sharp, furry crook where the tail turned up. The cat's back rose convulsively to press against her hand. She smiled, wondering how often, if ever before, the cat had felt a friendly human touch. And she was still smiling as the cat reared up on its hind legs even as it struck at her with extended claws smiling right up to that second when it sank its teeth into the back of her left hand and hung from her flesh so that she nearly fell forward

stunned and horrified yet conscious enough of Otto's presence to smother the cry that arose in her throat as she jerked her hand back from that circle of barbed wire. She pushed out with her other hand and as the sweat broke out on her forehead, as her flesh crawled and tightened, she said, no, no, stop that to the cat, as though it had done nothing more than beg for food. And in the midst of her pain and dismay she was astonished to hear how cool her voice was then all at once the claws released her and flew back as though to deliver another blow but then the cat turned it seemed in midair and sprang from the porch disappearing into the shadowed yard below it's just it's just a fantastic a fantastic paragraph and it's not just the um the sort of freeze frame or

slow motion effect of of the action of the cat but how she even smuggles in a commentary on the psychological situation of the marriage that sophie doesn't want to show her pain out loud in front of her husband. Oh, I know. I mean, which is such a brilliant psychological perception of people being in a couple and not wanting to appear vulnerable and so on. But the fact that that's in a subordinate clause

in the midst of this incredibly vividly rendered event and shock, that's a sort of microcosm of how the book works, you know, line by line. That thing about the psychological, I mean, the acuity, also the sense that this book is all about couples. It's like a sort of nestling Russian doll set. Even the stories that get told are stories of, you know, that thing about

the man beating up his wife that extraordinary story that gets told towards the end of the book it's all about the nuance and the emphatic communication I think that's why you're not going to get it all in a single reading

So we have a clip now this is, appropriately enough, this is Paula Fox, recorded in 2002 on CBC Radio, talking about cats. Well, it's so interesting about them. They seem to me, as dogs do, to have a very different, subtler consciousness than they're given credit for.

Of course, I don't know scientifically much about them, but their awareness of the moment, I mean, animals are said to live very much in the present, is a very powerful thing to me, and I feel a lot of respect for a certain kind of presence that cats have and that dogs have too, and even snakes, which I'm really terrified of. Stray dogs and stray cats remind me, this is one tiny element, that I was once a stray child, so maybe there is that element in it,

but it's not the whole thing. She mentions there being a stray child. So maybe there is that element in it, but it's not the whole thing. She mentions there being a stray child. Paula Fox had a rather extraordinary life and was rejected by her mother and father. And we'll talk about that a little bit. But in her memoir, Borrowed Finery, which was published around the time she gave that interview, she talks about meeting with her mother and father at the age of five, which was a very traumatic event for everybody involved. Sounds absolutely horrendous. And part of the trauma was that she was bitten by a stray cat. And so she uses that in Desperate Characters, and she also uses it in one of her children's books.

One-eyed cat as well. uses that in Desperate Characters and she also uses it in one of her children's books, One-Eyed Cat as well. So the point is these aren't whimsical appearances by animals in her work or at the beginning of this book you were just talking about, William. This is real blood that's been drawn.

Her career was art, wasn't it? Because she's written, she wrote many more children's books than she did adult books and her adult books never really, I mean she didn't have a sort of I mean Desperate Characters was 1970. Fascinatingly she has three careers which which don't run parallel they they sort of overlap at points she has a career as an adult novelist which in commercial terms is unsuccessful from from the mid-60s.

She has a career as a children's author, which is very successful. She writes two dozen children's novels. I'm going to talk about a couple of them in a minute, for which she wins numerous prizes and is widely read. And also towards the end of her life, the last books that she writes in the last 15 years of her life are memoirs she becomes a memoirist and i was talking about borrowed finery there i remember that coming out you need have read nothing by paula fox to read that book and find it full of the things that

were remarkable about her writing but the thing about desperate characters is desperate characters which had been out of print, was rediscovered by Jonathan Franz, and we'll come on to that, but became a sort of literary sensation in a way that it hadn't been when it was first published at the turn of the century, I guess, early 21st century.

What was it, William, about the book when you read it that really bowled you over? Can you remember on first reading? Well, I think it was a combination of things, a combination of tones. As John said earlier on, it's very mysterious. There's a mystery in it. And it's partly the mix of tones,

that it can be, you know, at times you feel like you're reading a horror story, actually. I don't think this is a spoiler, but later on, towards the end, Sophie and Otto have to take this cat that's bitten her to be checked to see if it has rabies. And so they coat it into a cardboard box.

And it's essentially the scariest thing in a box in fiction. I mean, I was thinking of other... There's Gwyneth Paltrow's head in the box at the end of Seven. But this is much scarier, because you never actually see it in the box. You just see the stain as its fear fluids start to... Whatever it is it's doing in the box.

And the scratching and the noise of the floors. Nothing's ever quite... But it's also incredibly, sometimes incredibly beautiful and lyrical. I mean, there's a chapter when, a part of the suspense of the book, there's, you know, it is, she gets bitten by a cat at the beginning. Is she going to go, is she going to get rabies?

Is she going to go to hospital? So on. There's that unanswered question. In very early on in the book, too, she goes to have a strange late night drink. This is all set over a weekend. It's very, in terms of the sort of time it's very unified it and and focused she goes to have a drink with her at three in the morning with her husband's business partner charlie and their business relationship is just breaking up while this weekend i'm never quite sure why i mean

it's a very you're not quite sure why and and And Charlie, he's sort of making a pass at Sophie when they go out for a drink and sort of wanting intelligence on Otto. And at one point, rather lulled into this situation, and maybe it's four o'clock in the morning by now, Sophie lets slip to him. She claims it's a joke, but that one day she'll tell him about her love affair.

And it's like Chekhov saying that if you show a gun in Act 1, it has to go off in Act 3. Charlie then has this intelligence. He holds this over Sophie and Otto, the knowledge that she's been unfaithful. And the rest of the novel, you're thinking, is he going to use that? And Sophie's terrified that he's going to use that. So all of these things, and as our famous blurb writer makes clear, there are these sort of events

that have the feel of omens and portents in themselves. They're not that huge. You know, someone's thrown a brick through a window, a stone through a window at a party. There's an intruder in the house, a guy who wants to use the phone. They go to their house in the country, and it's been invaded by people.

But these things sort of gather into a sense of, yes, something huge and flawed about to crumble. And actually, it makes me think, in Jonathan Franz's introduction, he gets stuck a little bit on the name. He doesn't like the name Bentwood. Yeah, Bentwood. and I've been thinking about it is a strange name Bentwood and on the train this morning I was thinking Bentwood is basically it's a synonym for crooked timber that's what it is it's the crooked timber of humanity from which no straight thing can be made

so the wound is is original sin and there's something flawed in these people and by extension all of us. And hence the title. Desperate Characters. Which is a sort of adaptation of Thoreau. Yes and actually the word despair and variations of despairing and desperate. But it can also be really funny

like that. Oh brilliant. The party that they go to on the first night. The party's brilliant it's like woody allen the party is very like woody allen yeah it is all of that yeah you could imagine in the woody allen voice in fact one of them could have been jeff goldblum on the phone you know i've forgotten my mantra just read a little bit from that because it's so this is he didn't know a thing about her not even after 10 years but she loved the air this is that i think he's called mike yeah mike but she loved the air of knowingness,

the flattery that didn't obligate her. And she liked his somewhat battered face, the close-fitting English suits he bought from a London salesman who stopped at a midtown hotel each year to take orders. The Italian shoes, he said, were part of his seducer's costume. He wasn't a seducer. He was remote. He was like a man proceeded into a room by acrobats.

Yes. Bang! I love that. remote he was like a man proceeded into a room by acrobats you know you william you were talking about um franz franz's introduction franz's introduction to this edition is in itself a tiny masterpiece of how to how to um sell a book to the reader while seeming not to do so so he so like you say he does a brilliant thing where he says, I'm not sure about the opening paragraph, but actually it's pretty good. And he says, I'm not sure about the title, but actually it's pretty good. And then he does this great thing where he says really early on,

and this became infamous, he writes this. The first time I read desperate characters in 1991 i fell in love with it it seemed to me obviously superior to any novel by fox's contemporaries john updyke philip roth and saul bellow it put in to go, okay, I am laying down my marker here. And I promised our former guest, Sarah Churchwell, that I would mention this. Sarah Churchwell, reviewing Burrow Finery and the TLS, wrote the following. She says, Franzen's introduction to Desperate Characters, for example, finds it, quote,

obviously superior to any novel by Fox's contemporaries, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow. Not only an overstatement, this is also a profitless comparison. Fox has little of Roth's self-consciousness, less of Bellow's self-importance, and none of Updike's self-pity. Oh! Actually, what she actually done there is trying to out friends and friends.

Sorry, Sarah, if you're listening to this. Unlike all three men, Fox does not jealously save the best lines for a favoured alter ego. And her protagonists do not have... Sorry. And her protagonists do not have a monopoly on nuance. Instead, she distributes her formidable acumen unselfishly so that even the most minor characters can suddenly offer a crucial insight and the unsympathetic characters are often the most fascinating,

brilliant, unfathomable and raging. And I think that's fair. raging and I think that's I think that's fair you know I think the the distribution of wisdom and lack of wisdom is one of the things that makes the the characters feel alive to me yeah definitely Franson was being provocative and those um I I mean I love those three guys that he that he mentions but um and they're so full of riches in their own work. So in a way, the comparisons are odious, as John Donne said. But I think where you could make a case is that even in the great, great works by Updike and Bellow,

you know, The Adventures of Augie March, incredible book, but if it was a page shorter no one would really be that bothered but actually if Desperate Characters was a paragraph shorter it wouldn't be quite the same thing I think it's just the right, the very few books

that are exactly the right length and I think Desperate Characters, and actually that formal sort of structural perfection it's 150 pages long It's Gatsby-like in that way Exactly, it is. At the exact centre page 72 there's a very different

there's a scene where Sophie goes to have lunch with these two friends of hers, Claire and Leon, and it has a completely different tone flavour, rhythm to the rest of the book and it's like the comic relief in a Shakespeare play. The exact centre point of the book, you get this breathing space, where you

get this couple, Claire and Leon, who are sort of boho intellectuals, quite flamboyant, garrulous, much more sort of Rabelaisian and larger than life. And they yammer and they just talk and talk and it's funny, and it's

a breathing space between the horrors on either side, because actually there's also... Otto calls Leon the guy with yellow skin who doesn't listen. Yeah, exactly. There's also, you know, I think one of the most frightening sex scenes in

literature as well, which comes in the second half of the book it is a book of horrors but but also strangely lyrical and beautiful and um you know the the little conversation with charlie in the in the bar at four in the morning triggers this memory of her love affair that sophie had with a bizarrely, a small independent publisher called Francis. Who wrote a book that so reminded me of certain people I'd worked with. Books about ferns. And then we get a whole chapter when Sophie goes back and gets into bed in the early morning

about her remembering the romance with Francis. And it's incredibly beautiful and beautifully done. then later on I mean I had a passage this is later on chapter the end of chapter 11 a book of 13 chapters but again it's Sophie getting Sophie and Otto going to bed then she said oh come to bed and he fell heavily beside her as though he'd been struck down by a blow. She let the magazine slide to the floor, then picked up a Balzac novel from her bedside table. But Madame de Bargeton's ambition and poignant ineptitudes did not hold her attention. Her mind slid away from the page. Otto was asleep beside her. She sat up against her pillows for a long time, wondering what thing it was she was thinking about

just beneath the feigned attention she was giving to those random topics that now drifted through her mind. Deliberately, she visualised the living room of their Flinders farmhouse. Then, blurring that bright, familiar place, another room began to form, the skimpy parlour of her childhood, her father and a friend speaking late into the evening while she lay drowsily on the Victorian sofa, listening to the drone of the men's low voices,

feeling on her cheek the sting of a horsehair which had worked its way up through the black upholstery, safe and dreaming of the brilliance of her own true grown-up life to come. She put her hand on her cheek and touched the place where the horsehair had pricked, and she gasped at the force of a memory that could, in the space of a breath taken and released, expunge the distance between sleepy child and exhausted adult,

as though she thought it had taken all these years to climb the stairs to bed. Utterly brilliant. It's just breathtaking. that's three paragraphs that's just can telescoped yeah i also read for 35 years into into one sensuous detail of the touch of the horse hair on her cheek it's taken her from her childhood bedroom to her adult life with Otto, which is so disappointing and empty. The hopes of a child, the realities of adult life, it's breathtaking, and that's in the space of 20 lines.

I also think that with this book, we haven't talked so much about the time and place, America in the late 1960s. It's very important for this book, and I have to say, I do think it's one of the reasons why people have rediscovered it, that it seems to speak of that particular moment, that post-60s moment,

where society felt like it was in freefall in some ways, and there was a huge generational split. We've got another clip from the interview I was talking about earlier, where Paula Fox talks a little bit about the inspiration, the internal and external inspirations for the book. And I think I felt that very strong sense of personal breakdown and the breakdown of what we call society, all as one thing. And then I invented this couple, but not quite invented, but I patched.

Everything is a kind of quilt. You put things together from the people you know, from yourself. Parts of Otto and Sophie are me. Parts of that cat are me parts of Francis is me and you know they're parts people that I've known but everything comes together when you sit down and I was talking about

work with a painter last evening and I said I think you make the path as you walk, you know, and I think that's true. If you're someone like me. Personal life can be at certain times a reflection of what is outside and what is outside can often be a reflection of personal life. They only rarely are two separate things. And I think in Desperate Characters, they join at certain points.

It's a mark of how good the book is that actually, you know, there's a movie of Desperate Characters. I can't imagine what that was. I'm not going near it. I watched it this week. Did you? That was traditional.

I tend to watch the... Andy does this. Andy does this for the rest of us. I'm not going near them. I watched it this week. Did you? That was traditional. I tend to watch them. I make them. I watch them. Andy does this for the rest of us. Takes one for the team. It's a film starring... Shirley MacLaine. Shirley MacLaine.

It stars Shirley MacLaine. It's got Kenneth Mars in it. It is... What's interesting about it is... Is it a screwball comedy? You know what? It's not even a musical, Matt. It's very faithful to the book

but it's no good because you can't suggest the richness of characters from the bits that you were just talking about and they don't have enough budget to plug it into the societal thing that Paula Fox was talking about in that interview

and you can't do metaphor really in films so something like he looked like a man who was being preceded into a room by acrobats, you can't do all of that. And it's full of just brilliant phrases like that she's just an amazing

technical writer as much as anything else it's one of the things that's that's what i i guess i love about it because it i think you were saying it it's a hard sell it's hard it's hard to say i mean in a way that i would say it's hard you know richard ford it's a weekend with a real estate man selling who sells real estate having a weekend with his son it's quite hard to to imagine that you could turn that into a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel like Independence Day.

In a way, this is sort of slightly, I don't know, not particularly likeable upper-middle-class couple living in Brooklyn and sort of, you know, the story, as you say, is about her being bit by a cat and finding all kinds of reasons not to go to the hospital. I would like to just say, I mean, if you want to read about Paula Fox's life, Paula Fox led a fairly remarkable life.

Her first book wasn't published until she was in her early 40s. She had a baby when she was quite young. 17. She gave away for adoption, who she discovered later in life. Unbeknownst to her, she thereby... She therefore became the grandmother of Courtney Love, which is a slightly terrifying thing to have brought into the world.

Courtney Love and Paula Fox did not get on. They didn't, no. I was trying to think of a British equivalent of that. It was as if Anita Bruckner found out that Jessie J was her granddaughter. Let's propagate that room. We do a lot for Bruckner on Backlist. We've not done that yet.

She is a bit, I mean, Paula Fox, she is Brucknerian. But I would also like to draw attention, I'd just like to say a little bit about her children's books. So I read a couple. She had a long career as a children's author. She won the Newbery Medal for the Slave Dancer in the early 70s, and she won the Hans Christian Andersen Medal.

And I read a couple of her books. The Slave Dancer is a book about, a still controversial book about a white boy who is press-ganged onto a slaver to play the fife for the slaves to dance to. And it's controversial because it was controversial because of its use of language when it was published, and it's controversial now

because it is one of the most terrifying and horrifying accounts of that process that you would ever read um but she also uh wrote a novel in the 60s um which totally blew me away the children's i'm short children's novel called how many miles to babylon it's published by puffin in the uk k web who we we we venerate here okay this is the opening sentence of k web's blurb for how many miles to babylon in the in the front of this puffin books edition from the early 70s k web and biddy baxter basically that's that's our childhood what do you do if you are a very small boy without anyone to look after you properly, and you are forced by three bullies to kidnap dogs and hide them underneath a derelict nightmarish funfair

while they wait for owners to offer a reward? I mean, who's not in immediately? Anyway, this book, How Many Miles to Babylon, I thought was totally remarkable. Anyway, this book, How Many Miles to Babylon, I thought was totally remarkable. And I just would like to read a very brief bit from this, and partly to contrast it, William, with what you were reading, that the different registers of her writing will become immediately clear here.

So the young boy, who's about ten years old at most they've just escaped from the nightmarish funfair and the three bullies are cycling up to coney island with him on the back of the bike sleeping james leaned against gino's back they were going at great speed now through the park down the long slopes, around curves. Coney Island, where was that? He closed his eyes. He was more tired than he had ever been in his life. They were taking him farther and farther away from all the places he knew.

He and Gladys, Gladys being a little dog that they've kidnapped, James fell asleep. He awoke to find himself flying beneath a black sky. His cheek, pushed up against the leather of Gino's coat, was warm and damp. But when he moved his head, the air was icy. He heard a bumping sound as though something were being dragged over boards. There was a peculiar smell. It tickled his nose and it was sharp and clear. Sometimes the smell was like wet wood. and it was sharp and clear. Sometimes the smell was like wet wood. There was another sound, louder than the bumping,

a sound like many people murmuring down a hall, just far enough away so that he couldn't make out what was being said. He hoped Gladys was all right. She was probably warmer than he was, at least she had fur. They rode under a street lamp. Blue, riding next to Gino, cried, Man, it's so cold out here, so cold! James strained to see where he was.

The road they were riding on was made of wide black boards. Along it ran a fence made of iron pipes. By squinting, James could make out, below them, a white line which moved constantly. First it was far away. Then it rushed forward, broke, and when it broke there came the sound of murmuring. What's that? James called out to Blue. What's that? echoed Blue, shaking his head.

Prince, you don't know nothing. That is the Atlantic Ocean. Very good. shaking his head. Prince, you don't know nothing. That is the Atlantic Ocean. Now, it was said by several people when Paula Fox died, and Julia Eccleshire said it in her Guardian obituary, that the thing that Paula Fox excelled at in her

children's writing was portraying children who had been wrenched from familiar surroundings from the perspective of the child. I've never, and this sounds like hyperbole, it's not hyperbole. I don't think I've ever read a better book of a lost child from the child's perspective than How Many Miles to Babylon.

I hope that extract just demonstrates it, because she's fantastic at presenting. If you were a little boy from Brooklyn who'd never been taken to Coney Island, what is that thing over there? It's a wonderful, wonderful book. Actually, one thing that reminded me that I was so excited also in Desperate Characters

was the way she writes dialogue is, I think, absolutely brilliant. And there's page after page in Desperate Characters was the way she writes dialogue is, I think, absolutely brilliant. And, you know, there's page after page in Desperate Characters that you could use as a sort of, you know, just a brilliant example of how to write dialogue. She has these several strands of thought and talk interweaving. While, you know, you're always absolutely sure, you know where you are you know what's going on i mean i i think that's the thing about the book is is it's such it's

such a mixture it's so there's so much in there just one really small passage but just you know you wouldn't think that the person who wrote as lyrically as you just could turn in a paragraph like this this is uh this This is Sophie on the subway. Then to her dismay, her eyes filled with tears, she found a handkerchief in her bag and sheltered behind a cold drink dispenser. There she found two messages. One, written in chalk, said, Kiss me, someone.

And the other, scratched with a key or a knife, said, Fuck everybody except Linda. I mean, it's just those little kind of imagistic things that she is anyway i i i think everybody sort of says it's a book to read more than once and as i think you said earlier um william that is got to be the sign of something good well and it ends with a it ends with an extraordinary image that you could sort of interrogate for days and days and days and it's a wonderful ending in that

it doesn't tie anything up in a bow it just leaves you again faced with something mysterious and suggesting meaning but it's for you to work out what that might be well we're not really you to work out what that might be uh well we're not gonna we're not really

going to add anything to that i think that's let's leave it in that indeterminate place and and say uh thank you william um particularly uh again i've now got another favorite book as seems to be the pattern of this podcast thank you you to William Fiennes, to our producer Matt Hall, and to our sponsors, Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter at BacklistedPod, on Facebook at BacklistedPod, and on our page on the Unbound site, unbound.com forward slash backlisted. If you listen to us on your iPod, it would be great if you could visit the newly renamed Apple Podcast Store to

leave us a review. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Until then, thank you and good night. Thanks, everyone. Hey, Tao, let's hit some of that back. It's a joke between me and Tao. you can choose to listen to Backlisted with or without adverts if you prefer to listen to it without adverts

you can join us on our Patreon patreon.com forward slash backlisted where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks