Backlisted - The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks

Episode Date: May 13, 2018

The poet Rishi Dastidar joins John and Andy to talk about Sebastian Faulks' least known and first non-fiction title, The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives.Also in this episode Andy talks about the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn while John has been enjoying Folk by Zoe Gilbert. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)8'35 - The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St Aubyn16'55 - Folk by Zoe Gilbert21'45 - The Fatal Englishman by Sebastian Faulks* 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

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

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. Happy birthday to me, everyone. Andy's birthday. Cheers. We're recording this about three days after the website was launched. And people seem to love the website, and quite right too,

because it was plainly a labour of not just love, but also labour. And I think we've publicly thanked and should again, Joe Hodgson, who did a lot of the listening to and making of the notes. Joe, Joe will never hear this, because my God, he doesn't want to listen to me and you talk anymore than he's had to already. God almighty. But Joe, if you are listening, thanks ever so much.

What a brilliant job you do. Yeah, I mean, I think it was a six weeks it took him, which is a lot to listen to. We've got to load up our events this week. And it was amusing. For 12 hours, there were the Andy to write in the FAQ. I was going to say, right, eagle-eyed website visitors spotted. I wasn't asked to do very much for the website.

I was asked to answer two questions but failed to hit my deadline, which is the story of my creative... Andy to write is the story of my creative life. But, you know, if you do see those two answers now, they are good. They are like, they were well worth waiting for. And also, John,

what do you think about being confronted with the track record of two and a half years i actually found quite unsettling the thing is you realize that you have read quite a lot no no no the thing it made me think was i kept seeing references to things that i don't remember anyone mentioning right and then i was thinking what there should be is there should be a cross-referencing. Joe, if you're listening, you can go back and do it all again. There should be cross-referencing between stories that we've told more than once,

where you can hear alternative versions of the same anecdote. Because God knows everybody, they've captured like 70 hours of you and me quacking on now. It's quite hard to talk for 70 hours without repeating some of your best material. I believe you'd position them as shared motifs. That's right, OK, yeah. Maybe the fools or bad guys.

Blinding the whole... William Goldman, which lie did I tell? But obviously, very, very happy for people to use it and, you know, go on there. I mean, I think we should say that the way we've set it up is that the links for the books if you buy your books through the website we get some money which is nice but also you can through Hive you can nominate a local independent bookseller to support as well I mean you know you're not going to get quite the discounts that you get from Amazon but we sort of

felt it would be not in the spirit of Backlisted for us not to try and do something that supported. I just wish all the book orders were routed through a small second-hand bookseller in Hay-on-Wye, who was suddenly overwhelmed with demands for copies of All the Devil's World.

Like the old Waterstones mail order department. That was based in Bath, was that? It was based in... Bath. Bath, was it? Yeah, Bath. We made the great story. God, this will sound quaint to anybody who doesn't know,

but before the... The interweb. Yeah, the word mail order. Waterstones, one of its early services was an out-of-print book search service. And you know the time that Jonathan Toutel, the amazing Jonathan Toutel, used to quote? He would say it would be a minimum of three months if he got back to you at all he was amazing and he would advertise in all the various journals and and see which

dealers came back and then he would haggle for a price i mean the thing is the basic mail order well i bet but i bet you weren't paying as much as you would pay now in some cases because the internet as we know creates a scenario where it only takes two people anywhere in the world to want the same book and the price can be you know

not artificially inflated but the market will set the price so you can order books and you can get a T-shirt and a backlisted mark as well if you so desire, if your life feels incomplete without them. Don't run down the merch. No, I'm not running down the merch.

Don't run down the merch. You've got a T-shirt there. I've got my master storyteller T-shirt. I'm looking at it enviously, hankering after one immediately. Excellent. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in three places at once.

A seaside hotel room in Brittany watching a man paint with demented energy. In the cockpit of a Spitfire soaring above the grey waves of the English Channel. And standing silently on a bitter Moscow autumn morning watching a man help carry the coffin of his friend, the disgraced spy Guy Burgess. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher on Bound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and joining us today is Rishi Dastadar, a poet and copywriter whose first collection, Ticker Tape, was recently published by Nine Arches Press. and rishi is also chair of

the london writers charity spread the word consultant editor at the independent poetry magazine the rialto and a fellow of the complete works to a program that promotes quality and diversity in british poetry i have all of those things you are you have a portfolio i believe yes that's what it's called now, Portfolio Career. Anyway, the book that Rishi's joining us to talk about today is The Fatal Englishman, Three Short Lives by Sebastian Fuchs. It's a biography of three English men, and it was first published in 1996. And it is Sebastian Fuchs' only work of nonfiction. We will discuss why that might be and the ramifications of that when we get on to the main book.

We will. I think it's worth saying sometimes when you say Sebastian Fuchs, you say, oh, I thought that listed was about people you never heard of. And you say, well, it's about books that are less well, perhaps less often regarded. And Sebastian Fuchs obviously is a major best-selling contemporary English writer. But this book, and we'll go on and discuss why, is, I would say, pretty easily his least often discussed. Yeah, and I've got some interesting theories as to why that might be. Well, listen, but before that, before we pin down the butterfly soul of Englishness, But before that, before we pin down the butterfly soul of Englishness, we welcome back this episode's sponsor, Spoke, the ultra-cool online menswear company. Spoke designed trousers with a difference, ones that fit you and not the other way around.

They have a wonderful online fit finder. Enter a few simple data details and under a minute, you'll have the perfect fit. You can choose from almost 200 different size combinations. They obsess over every single detail. Fabric, lining, fasteners to the wash. So ordering from Spoke is like going to your own tailor. But without the hassle or expense or that sort of standing around with men with tape measures kind of asking you on which side do you hang and such forth with spoke you get sharp personalized design delivered in just two

working days and i can tell you well i know something different about you this i'm glad you noticed that i am wearing a pair of olive spoke i mean i i guess you'd call them chinos but actually they're much nicer than that they're sort of slightly crinklier and louder the material is great they've got fabulous the inside uh chimmies are all are all in orange and it came it came andy i've annoyingly left this in my coat it came with a lovely little tag with a kurt vonnegut quote in it. Oh, really? So the point about Spoke is we have a deal for you, as you know, as a backlisted listener. If you go to www.spoke-london.com,

the link is obviously on the Backlisted FM website, and place an order, you'll get £20 off your first order. Just use the code BACKLISTED20. Now, brilliantly, I ordered my Spoke trousers and forgot to put the code backlisted20. Now, brilliantly, I ordered my spoke trousers and forgot to put the code in. So, listeners, I paid full price, and I feel they were excellent value. But you, if you could just follow simple instructions,

which I self-evidently can't, you'll get money off, which is lovely. Anyway, from neat creases to messy realities. Andy, what have you been reading? So so i'm going to talk a bit more i mentioned i was reading uh the first of these books a few weeks ago but i have been reading the patrick melrose novels of edward st aubin with huge pleasure i've managed to read four of them in a fortnight. Wow. Because I wanted to, listeners, and because I was enjoying them. I was reading for pleasure. As I've said, that occurs occasionally,

but when it does, it's absolutely marvellous. These books have been adapted for TV. They're going to be on Sky later in the month, in May. Ten hour-long episodes, all five novels, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. And this is why you wanted to get your reading in first. I knew what would happen was that I would not be able to watch the TV because I wouldn't want to be I wouldn't want to see the TV if I hadn't already read the books. So I read the first one, which is called Nevermind in March, yes, in March, sort of speculatively, and I really enjoyed it. And then I thought, okay, well, in March, sort of speculatively,

and I really enjoyed it. And then I thought, okay, well, what I'll do is I'll kind of sprinkle the remaining volumes through the next six weeks or so. What actually happened is I read the second one and then just thought, oh, you know what, I'm an autonomous individual. I'll just read the rest of them. So they are absolutely wonderful. They are a fantastic combination of deeply distressing and extremely funny.

And that is quite a trick to pull off. And I was trying to explain to somebody yesterday that the glue that holds it together is the sheer talent of the person writing the book. I think in a lesser writer would not be able to pull this off. And I read a very interesting interview with Edward St Norbin where these novels are extremely autobiographical, extremely dark in places, and full of awful people. and full of awful people.

Terrible toffs doing appalling things, all of whom speak with the most magnificent levels of wit and esprit d'escalier. And in the interview with him, it was put to him that these people speak impossibly cleverly and amusingly and he said the thing is because so much of the books are based on what really happened to me i had spent years rehearsing the things that i ought to have said and other people ought to have said to me so it's a whole sort of esprit d'escalier kind of uh revenge and i thought i would allow myself and them the true fictionalization of giving them one wonderful line after another and i'm going to read a little bit from volume three some hope and i again i'm trying to i don't want to give away any of the big plot developments in the books so i'm concentrating slightly on the dialogue here But what you need to know about these books is that they were,

the first one I think was published about 20 years ago. The first three were published in quick succession. Then he took a break, wrote Mother's Milk, the fourth novel, as a non-Melrose novel, but then realised when he finished it that it was a Melrose novel, and he went through and changed everything in his Word document, just changed the character names and how he pressed it, it worked. One of the things they are about is Englishness in the terms defined by Sebastian Fawkes in the fatal Englishman and there are fatal Englishmen in this

these people who are living very disordered lives by a code of conduct which has been handed down to them by their appalling parents who in turn it was given to them by their appalling parents, who in turn it was given to them by their appalling parents. The English upper classes who have had a tradition of superiority, cultural superiority, here stranded in the 70s, 80s and 90s. And there is an account in some hope of a dinner party with Her Royal Highness the Princess Margaret, which is drawn upon by craig brown in his wonderful book um mom darling if anyone who'd listened to this podcast knows how much i love that book it's it's like a wonderful reappearance by that awful princess

margaret but also it's just the most grisly dinner party man anyway i'm going to read you a bit we're in the run-up to the dinner party where our hero patrick melrose he's not staying at the house he's not allowed to stay at the house he's in the annex of the little soddington house hotel so here he is patrick arrived downstairs before johnny and ordered a glass of Perrier at the bar. We should just say that Patrick Melrose, when we met him in the previous book, was in New York nursing an appalling heroin habit, which was costing him a fortune. He's cleaned up somewhat when we meet him in Volume 3, some hope. Patrick arrived downstairs before Johnny and ordered a glass of Perrier at the bar.

Two middle-aged couples sat together at a nearby table. The only other person in the bar, a florid man in a dinner jacket, obviously going to Sonny's party, sat with folded arms looking towards the door. Patrick took his drink over to a small book-lined alcove in the corner of the room. Scanning the shelves, his eyes fell on a volume called the journal of a disappointed man and next to it a second volume called more journals of a disappointed man and finally by the same author a third volume entitled enjoying life how could a man who had made such a promising start to his career

have ended up writing a book called Enjoying Life? Patrick took the offending volume from the shelf and read the first sentence that he saw. Verily, the flight of a gull is as magnificent as the Andes. Verily, murmured Patrick. Hi. Hello, Johnny, said Patrick, looking up from the page. I've just found a book called Enjoying Life.

Intriguing, said Johnny, sitting down on the other side of the alcove. I'm going to take it to my room and read it tomorrow. It might save my life. Mind you, I don't know why people get so fixated on happiness, which always eludes them, when there are so many other invigorating experiences available, like rage, jealousy, disgust and so forth. Don't you want to be happy, said Johnny. Well, when you put it like that, smiled Patrick. Really, you're just like everyone else. Don't push your luck, Patrick warned him. Will you be dining with us this

evening, gentlemen, asked a waiter. "'Yes,' replied Johnny, taking a menu and passing one on to Patrick, "'who was too deep in the alcove for the waiter to reach. "'I thought he said, "'Will you be dying with us?' admitted Patrick, "'who was feeling increasingly uneasy about his decision "'to tell Johnny the facts he had kept secret for 30 years. "'Maybe he did, said Johnny.

We haven't read the menu yet. I suppose the young will be taking drugs tonight, sighed Patrick, scanning the menu. Ecstasy, the non-addictive high, said Johnny. Call me old-fashioned, blustered Patrick, but I don't like the sound of a non-addictive drug. of a non-addictive drug it's sort of like it's like urban willis written by anthony pole anyway johnny felt johnny felt frustratingly engulfed in his old style of banter with patrick these were just the sort of old associations that he was supposed to sever but what could he do patrick was a great friend and he wanted him to be less miserable why do you think we're so discontented, asked Johnny, settling for the smoked salmon. I don't know, lied Patrick. I can't decide between the onion soup and the traditional English goat's cheese salad. An analyst once told me I was suffering from a depression on top of a

depression. Well, at least you depression on top of a depression. Well, at least you got on top of the first depression, said Johnny, closing the menu. Exactly, smiled Patrick. I don't think one can improve on the traitor of Strasburg, whose last request was that he give the order to the firing squad himself. So if that's the sort of thing you like, there are five volumes of that. John, what have you been reading? Well, it couldn't really be much different, I have to say. I've been reading a novel published earlier this year called Folk by Zoe Gilbert.

Well, it's interesting. What is it? Is it a novel? Paul Kingsnorth's review of it in the New Statesman said he wasn't sure it was. It's a sequence of stories set on an island called Neverness, an imaginary island with a village. Each of the stories, I guess the characters are shared between the stories. Each of them is sort of structured like a tale. It's a lot to do with the ritual and mythology and the folklore of this island. It's very dense. It's definitely not for everybody. There are many people who will look at a story called Swirling Clift or Water Bull Bride or The True Tale of Jack Frost and say, not for me.

But if you're a fan of Ursula Le Guin or you're a fan of Alan Garner, the book it most reminds me of is a book that we published at Unbound called Tattered Amalien by Sylvia Lindstedt. Very quickly, you become part of the world. I mean, it's sort of world-building skills Zoe Gilbert has done. She won for a story called Fishkin Hairskin in 2014. She won the Costa Short Story Award. It's very dense, beautifully, viscerally kind of written.

It sort of sits in some kind of relationship to the Fen, the Daisy Johnson book that I wrote, to Pond by Claire Louise Bennett, to Sarah Hall. It's beautifully written, brilliantly, I think, compelling. I mean, you find that actually, although it's a little bit difficult to get into perhaps at first if you're coming from, as it were, something as, you know, I've been reading, as you know, Dance to the Music of Time across this year.

It ain't like that. No. But it has a kind of a crazed intensity and logic, you know. It starts with an amazing folklore where there's lots of gorse and the sea salt and herring and, you know, it's kind of elemental hair as a figure a lot. It's very Celtic. I think she's sort of based it on the Isle of Man. There are, I think there are 12, 13 stories in the book, but this is one of the longest is called Long Have I Lone Beside the Water. And it was one I really liked. It was about a man called Galashine who lives in a house on the hill.

And he had lost his first love. She'd slipped into the waterfall and died and was drowned. So he marries her sister and then has a daughter. And it's the moment of the daughter, 16, of coming of age, the sort of coming of age ritual. She disappears. He has a sort of long, dark night of the soul. But then he finds her again and she comes back to the house.

This is a very typical but very good, in a way, you're going to like this book if you like this kind of stuff. You're not going to like it if you don't. There are no mirrors in Galoshin's house. When he sits at his table, his daughter on his left side, he tries to enjoy the meat he eats, but tastes only earth. His wine is like brown river water in his mouth. Each meal is a penance. He asks May, that's his daughter, to play for him sometimes. She will be fiddle-master after quail, the best

player that Neverness has. They like to walk together along the river and watch the water swirling against the muddy banks. They sit by the willow tree, and Galushin tells his daughter about his first love. May imagines what love will be like, the warmth that will soften the chill in her heart. She lets her father talk as long as he wants. He has endured so many years of silence. When he has finished, she takes her fiddle and stands beneath the willow's waving fronds. While she plays, her fingers pressing into the long neck of bone,

Golushin closes his eyes and listens to his lost love calling from the water, calling through the dark. A lot of that? Yeah, OK. No, that sounded like it wasn't for me. The thing about it is only a writer who's really on top of their game could probably get away with it. And she, I mean, you know, as I say,

I've got a soft spot for this kind of thing anyway, but she's very, very good. This is a very, very good novel. I saw that our former guests, both Alex Preston and Ben Myers, raved about this book, right? And also Paul Kingsnorth. Yeah, I mean, it sort of fits into Paul's sort of vision of trying to write about a world that is not. I mean, the Sylvia Lindstedt book, The Tattered Amalien, was also that. I got to know that book through Paul, through her sending stuff into the Dark Mountain anthologies.

But this is published by Bloomsbury Folk and comes highly recommended. Time now for an advert. Okay, so The Fatal Englishman is a book that came out in 1996. And I remember reading this. I have my actual hardback copy with me, the copy that I read 20 years ago. And reading it again, I still really like it. There are things that I had forgotten, things that I felt differently about. But before we talk about that, we must ask you, Rishi,

where and when were you when you first found this book? This is a formative book for me. It was about 99, 2000 or so that i first encountered it i just finished first degree at university moved back in with my parents and i had i was frequenting again stanmore library in northwest london a teenage hangout of mine which again became a place where i would spend some time in that nether zone of what the hell do I do with my life? And I'd always had a fondness for the biography section there. I'd discovered many sort of wonderful things, Duke Ellington just sprung to mind in particular.

And I saw this and I think I was intrigued by the title more than anything else, that combination of fatal and Englishman. And I picked it up, took it home, and I remember racing through it with that sort of grip that you only get from a thriller, almost, in that sense. And the setup is clear. You know that these three people die, but at the same time there was this, but how, how, how?

And that sense of urgency was almost the first visceral reaction that I had to the book. But what was really surprising to me was the jolts of recognition that I had through each of these stories from three characters who are very different to me in space and time. And yet I was able to see things that I very different to me in space and time and yet i was able to see things that i thought talked to me and talked to where i was in my life at that time right we're going to come back to that i want to ask john now john you hadn't read this before do you want to tell us that you want to yeah i want to tell i want to tell us so i hadn't read it before and it's been a busy week.

We've been launching the website. I discovered that I couldn't get hold of it quickly enough physically. So I did the thing, which I don't often do. I just downloaded it as an e-book. And because it's Sebastian, folks, and I never really thought through the titles of Fatal English, but I never really thought about it. I never read the blurbs I didn't I just started reading and I made the assumption that it was a novel that it was three

invented characters and I have to say I thought it was absolutely brilliant that he had you know what an amazing job of having having you know so immersed himself in these three separate worlds, three separate worlds which are kind of emblematic of a certain kind of 20th century English experience, a painter, a pilot, and a spy. And then I came across the last story, I suddenly thought, it mentions the Wolfenden Report, because the final character, there are three characters, Jeremy Wolfenden's father wrote the wolfenden report i thought well i know the wolfenden report was a real thing hang on maybe this maybe this isn't a brilliant kind of a reconstruction maybe this is i mean and oddly enough of course it turns out that these all three of these christopher wood

richard hillary and jeremy wolfenden are all people who have lived and died and all died young. And although I had to recalibrate the things that I would have said slightly about the brilliance of Sebastian Foch's imagination and how creating fictional characters out of real details and real people, I don't have to do that because, in fact, they were real people. But it does make you... What Rishi was saying about pace is very interesting, right? You can read it.

It took you till the third section in terms of pacing. It carries you through incredibly gripping considering it's three short biographies. I just want to play a clip now. This is Sebastian Falk's, recorded a few years ago, talking about the difference between researching for non-fiction and researching for fiction. The essential point about research is it depends if you're doing something factual,

if you're doing something novelistic, something fictional. And after Birdsong, I wrote a book called The Fatal Englishman, which was three short biographies, rhywbeth ffictsionol. Ac ar ôl Birdsong, ysgrifennais llyfr y'n enw'r The Fatal Englishman, a oedd tri biograffiaeth bach, tri bywyd o bobl a oedd yn fwy fel meteorion, llawn hymrwy a llwyr, ond pob un o'r rhain wedi marw'n ifanc, o'r 28, 29, 30 mlynedd oed, o wahanol rhanau o'r 20eg ddiwethaf. Ac felly, wrth ysgrifennu'r llyfr hwn, roeddwn i eisiau gael gwybod popeth y gallwn i am y tri bo'r bobl hynny. Dyna oedd gwneud, darllen unrhyw beth maen nhw wedi'i ddysgu, llyfrau, diarau, a'r hynny yna,

llyfrau cyhoeddus, siarad â ffrindiau, pobl sydd wedi'u gwybod, darllen cyfrifau eraill. Nid wyf yn mynd ymlaen, mae'n amlwg bod darllen popeth neu gael gwybod yr holl beth y gallwch chi ei gael yn ymwneud â'r pethau. Gyda fficsiwn, yr hyn rydych chi'n ceisio ei wneud nid yw rhoi'r stori cyflawn, oherwydd byddai hynny'n can consist of. With fiction, what you're trying to do is not give the complete story, because that would be a history, but what you're trying to give is an authentic feeling of what it was like. So for instance, when writing Birdsong, I wanted to try and feel what the First World War was like for a soldier in the trench. What you're for really is is little clinching details and of course what's interesting about that is i think that is actually one of the things that

makes the fatal englishman work in the way you've both just described is it is those little clinching details funnily enough even though it's under the guise of non-fiction i think there's an interesting tension there as well because he at certain points feels ambivalent about the intention that he's actually writing with them through because I think in the preface or towards the end there's a note where he actually says of course if this

was fiction, I'm paraphrasing now, effectively I would have smoothed out some of the edges here and that almost feels like he's admitting to a slight reluctance to actually take these lives as he's found them and the sort of rackety nature of a lot of them and just let them be. It felt like he had to suppress a lot of his novelist urge

to shape things to make them smooth. And, yeah, as John was saying in terms of John's accidental reading of it, of course it does, but it does work novelistically because his aim in the book is to compare and contrast three English lives at different points of the 20th century and, as the title suggests, imply the ways in which Englishness was fatal for a certain kind of young man growing up in that era. Before we go any further, I'm just going to read the blurb, which will do, for a change, will do two things for us. It'll do the thing it always does, which is we can have a bit of fun seeing if we like the blurb or not.

But also it will give us a short potted biography of each character and then Rishi I'm going to ask you to read a bit from the the first one so this is the blurb this is the original hardcover blurb from 1996 this is a book about three extraordinary lives Christopher Wood a beautiful young Englishman decided to be the greatest painter the world had ever seen he went to Paris in 1921 at the age of 19. By day he worked at his studies, by night he attended the parties of the Beaumont. He knew Picasso, worked for Diaghilef and was a friend of Jean Cocteau. In the last months of his 29-year life, he fought a ravening opium addiction to succeed in claiming a place in the history of English painting.

addiction to succeed in claiming a place in the history of English painting. Richard Hillary, confident, handsome and argumentative, flew spitfires in the Battle of Britain before being shot down and horribly burned. He underwent several operations by the legendary plastic surgeon A. H. McIndoe. His account of his experiences as the last enemy made him famous but not happy. He begged to be allowed to return to flying and died mysteriously in a night training operation, aged 23. Jeremy Wolfenden was born in 1934, the son of Jack, later Lord Wolfenden. Charming, generous and witty, he was by common consent the cleverest Englishman of his generation, but left all souls to become a hack reporter. At the height of the Cold War,

he was sent by the Daily Telegraph to Moscow. Here, his louche private life made him, and that is an understatement, made him the plaything of the intelligence services. A terrifying sequence of events ended in Washington, where he died at the age of 31. Sebastian Fawkes has brought to this ambitious triple biography all the compassion and narrative power that characterise Birdsong. So our friends at Hutchinson will have it for us.

And I'd just like to add that Sebastian Fawkes' author biog in 1996, what you said, John, is quite right. Sebastian Fawkes is a significant figure on the cultural landscape, partly because of the success of Birdsong and partly because of his appearances on radio and television. This is how he self-described in 1996. Sebastian Fawkes was a journalist and reviewer for 14 years and is now a full-time writer.

His novels will include The Girl at the Lyon Door, A Fool's Alphabet and the best-selling bird song he is married with two children and lives in france there you go it's i don't know what i don't know what his author bio says now but um anyway rishi could you read us a yeah a little bit from the christopher wood yes this is from i think roughly around 1922 or so. So Wood has left England and gone to Paris to seek both training and a wider entree into that Parisian artistic world. And he's back on a visit to London. It had happened rather suddenly, in a way. It had happened, rather suddenly, in a way, but now there was no denying that Christopher Wood,

who had left England in 1921 with nothing more than a perverse and earnest ambition, had returned as an artist. His success was at this stage only with other artists and not yet with the public, but he valued their opinion more than that of dealers or buyers. His position was roughly comparable to that of a writer who has had his first book accepted for publication. However minor, and however embarrassingly recollected in later years, it is a breakthrough. Wood handled his success badly. He was so afraid of losing it that he was superstitious, even of admitting it to himself. This fear could be quelled only by little rushes of conceit. There are one or two modern French people, two painters amongst them, he told his mother, who think I am already a better painter than anyone in England except John,

who doesn't come into it at all, and who is too old-fashioned now. He had said it, and perhaps it was better to be frank. A young painter could not be faithful to both Picasso and Augustus John. It's so good in terms of condensing time, place and information. But you can sort of see just from that reading that this is a novelistic voice. I'm sorry, it's not the voice of Michael Holroyd. It really doesn't matter that it's real.

It's just the skill with which he kind of marshals his material. You feel that he's obviously he obviously has done the work and understands the three milieu in which the three young men lived. But he does wear that lightly. You don't feel at any point, this has not got footnotes, this has not got a bibliography.

He even says slightly kind of archly at the end, he said, well, I read lots of books for this, but I didn't write them down. I didn't write down the books that I... Yes, that's funny. It's almost like he's intentionally not wanting to write an academic biography. So you have to ask, what is this? What is the book?

But also each chapter, each biography is built on a different type of source material. So the Christopher Wood section is built around christopher's letters to his mother for the most part that's the prime source material the richard hillary section is built around hillary's book the last enemy and the wolfenden section is built mostly around interviews with journalists sebastian fawkes knew who like Neil Asheson and Philip French, who knew Wolfenden, but also because there were no other real sources of information about Jeremy Wolfenden. He left, the Wolfenden of the three left nothing behind.

The most brilliant. Yeah, very little trace, it appears. And I think there's a point at which Fawkes has asked the Telegraph to call up any articles that he may have written during his periods in Moscow and Washington and they had disappeared in a move or what have you as well. Yeah, they'd always lost in a move, right? So even his cuttings from the Telegraph, though his parents or his family had some of them, but they'd gone.

John's point about the marshalling of the sources, I think, is very apposite as well, because what you get is, and it was unexpected to me, rereading it, is the absolute certainty of the judgments. There's absolutely no room for any other interpretation about what was going on in these lives at any particular point, no room for, you know, well, it might have been this, or it might have been that. point no room for you know well it might have been this or it might have been that yeah he absolutely delivers a crystal view on what was going on in each of these men's minds at any given moment and it's delivered with an almost a bit partly because of the style but it's almost

an unarguable force to it and you don't feel at all impelled to actually stop and say well hold on a minute how do you actually know you? You are swept along with this absolute certainty. I found a piece about this book by Jane Gardner, Jane Gardner, who we love, as you know. And she says a really interesting thing here. She says, when I first read this book, I felt that Fawkes, much moved by his subject's lives, was still feeling his way to explaining the reason for writing about them.

He had wanted to call it The Artist, The Air airman and the spy but then thought that sounded like a novel a novel tempts towards conclusions i also remember not liking the present title englishman for a start forks is firm that he doesn't mean british and says the two are not interchangeable but explains no further yet the englishness of the three is not the word that comes to mind. Wood, born in the last gleam of England's golden age, made off abroad at 19 and was later proud to call himself the first English painter to have made it in France. Brackets. Not quite true. Hilary was an Australian born with an Australian wanderlust and Wolfendenenden, a slightly sinister-looking young roué, was a polyglot. He read Greek at three.

Fatal is also puzzling. Does Fawkes mean that Englishness was fatal? Oddly, I had misremembered the title as The Moral Englishman, which would have surprised all three. And she goes on to say how much she likes the book because it slightly plays with your expectations all the way through. Yeah, you were fundamentally talking about three people who had this overwhelming urge to try and remake themselves in some way,

who were very definite that they weren't going to accept the conditions that they were born into. And so they had to go somewhere do something to discover themselves in some way so in kit wood's case it's go to paris and reject the the sort of bourgeois um you know conditions that he becomes properly bohemian yeah yeah um hillary almost in a sense has to yeah although he never considered himself Australian, it seems like there was something there that felt that he had to prove that he was more English than English in this forced bearing and nobility through the immense suffering that he had, but also actually his reasons for wanting to fight the war so badly. And in Wolfenden's case, there's clearly some fundamental rebelling against the

father and how Jack Wolfenden had been so successful in terms of, you know, coming from the provincial Yorkshire background to become the establishment figure and doyen that he did. And in a sense, each of these three projects of remaking these lives ultimately failed. They ultimately spun apart and unrave unraveled almost in a sense because they were grasping too far they were reaching beyond their talents although in wolfenden's case that's clearly not the case but you know this fundamental mystery that you know that you're left asking how did people with so much manage to throw it away and if we start to read which we might say it that exact phrase is why how we might look at the empire depending on how you would view the empire that the dissolution of

the empire is built into it's a flawed structure which which collapses in on itself i think the thing it reminded me of very strongly was a book that we both read around the um ian fleming episode that we did a few months ago which was simon winder's book about james bond and about ian fleming and about how bond represents and then i of course one of the other books that sebastian one of the other novels sebastian fawkes has written is that he wrote one of the james bond novels about 10 years ago he wrote a book called devil Care, which he wrote in about six weeks to his great credit, giving himself the exact same time frame that Ian Fleming

used to. You've got to admire his... Sorry, John. This is from Fawkes on Fiction. Sebastian Fawkes writing about how he prepared to write his Bond novel. I think, again that that thing of compression is very interesting it's very short eventually i decided i would read all the bond books in the

order in which they had been published if i liked them and had an idea of how i could add another one to the body of 12 then i would do it i didn't expect them to have lasted at all well but i think i was only about 40 pages into moonraker when i knew that i wanted to say yes what impressed me about the books was a single thing jeopardy you feared for the safety of the hero all the time here was a man with a single underpowered handgun the beretta which as a gunsmith told fleming was a quote lady's gun and not a very nice lady at that. Soft shoes, a short-sleeved shirt, and really only his wits and fists to defend himself against enemies more numerous, better armed, more cynical, and more powerful than himself. But he had one other thing, cruelty.

While blindly patriotic and essentially fair-minded bond would if necessary do ruthless things to protect himself and the national interest there was the thrilling sense that we were being given a privileged look into the world of those nameless men who unofficially made it safe for us to sleep at night we did not approve of what bond did necessarily but it was not his or our fault that other people were so scheming so power crazed and so murderously hostile towards us if bond had occasionally to be a bastard then we would grimly acquiesce because we live in troubled times and he was our bastard it didn't occur to me at this stage that i would end up one day writing about Bond as a snob hero yes villain if he had to be lover with relish but also snob now I think again that is that is a tremendously

that sounds like it was easy to write and perhaps it was easy for Sebastian Falk to write, it is not easy to write with that much clarity and focus, in my opinion, anyway. And just to pick up on an interesting thing in that as well, I mean, the undertow that's there, of course, again, to dial into this post-imperial moment, is that why are they being so nasty to us as a country geopolitically we've given the world all these marvelous things and yet they're still being mean to us and cruel to us and isn't that jolly unfair and and often you feel that um a lot of attempts to grapple with the hugeness that is

you know the legacy of the british empire can often fall into that sort of self-pitying, relatively unreflective mode. And I think what's interesting about The Fatal Englishman, that in its relatively coded way, it starts to suggest that actually we can and should be slightly more clear-sighted about what the ledger actually is the second section of the book is about richard hillary and rishi rather than ask you to know rather than ask you to read from it um we have an audio clip of richard hillary reading from his book the last enemy he would have been about 21 years old when this was recorded. The book was written during the Second World War.

And here he is describing a dogfight in the Battle of Britain which didn't end very well for the author. Just below me, to my left, I saw what I'd been praying for. A metasmid climbing and away from the sun. I closed in to 200 yards and from slightly to one side gave him a two-second burst. Red flame shot upwards and he spiraled out of sight. At that moment I felt a terrific explosion which knocked the control stick from my hand and the whole machine quivered like a stricken animal. In a second the cockpit was a mass of flame. I reached up to open the hood. It wouldn't move.

I tore off my straps and managed to force it back. But this took time and when I dropped back into the seat and reached for the stick in an effort to turn the plane onto its back. The heat was so intense that I could feel myself going. I remember thinking, so this is it. I'm putting both my hands up to my eyes. Then I passed out. I regained consciousness free of the machine and falling rapidly. I pulled the ripcord of my parachute and checked my descent with a jerk. Looking down, I saw that my left trouser leg was burned off, that I was going to fall into the sea, and that the English coast was deplorably far away. Deplorably. Isn't that amazing?

Yeah, I mean, the other thing that the book is about is war. In its various manifestations, Wood is the generation, very Delterfield-like, his generation at school, the names were read out of the people who had fallen, and he escapes into the sort of the demimonde of Paris in the 20s, and that feeling of people having to enjoy themselves and the opium and the release. Hillary is obviously a Spitfire pilot

and is horribly disfigured and ends up wanting to go back, obsessed with wanting to go back and that ultimately leads to his death. And Gerry Maltham is... Cold War. He's a kind of Cold it sets us a cold war he finds himself inadvertently kind of being used as a sort of a patsy by the by the yeah and the

secret service yeah and there's an interesting point because wolfenden being one of the most brilliant students of his generation was on the navy's russian translation course which you know was effectively the clearinghouse for all the bright people, pre-national service and filling out those sorts of talents. And there's a lovely section when the Navy suddenly realised, of course, that this training is utterly redundant for the new style of war that is going to be fought. And so you suddenly see these assumptions that shift through as the nature of warfare changes.

And do you think that the fatalness of the title, which Jane Gardner sort of slightly takes issue with, is it that the Englishness itself, is it a fatal condition? Well, I mean, I guess you know everything is a fatal condition in one way or another, but is that the idea a fatal condition well i mean i guess you know everything is a fatal condition in one way or another but is there something is that the idea of the of the end of empire of the of the changing of the world order that somehow because it's full of institutions isn't it it's full of it's full of you know public schools uh oxbridge the army um so the all the institutions that have sort of been the vehicles the that have

underpinned the empire in some ways this book subtly kind of shows you that they're no longer producing human beings even when they appear to be as gifted and as and as incredibly uh blessed i mean you know none of these people of these people in their childhoods at least are struggling with those financial difficulties, I guess in Christopher Wood's case when he's a painter, but you know, they are privileged people who can

for some reason can't turn that privilege into a life that work or that last very long. I think it suggests a deeper unravelling because Fawkes makes a great play of the fact that, say, Wood's desire to become an artist starts during World War I and that coincides with a period of ill health while he's a teenager. And there's almost this sense of saying,

even if you weren't directly affected by the events there was still some form of shadow and it was and it is inescapable what i thought was really interesting um is the way forks says at the beginning of the book that it's not just as in birdsong where you're talking about to be english is to be doomed on a mass scale but there's something about englishness which runs through the culture from keats onwards the model of the englishman who is too beautiful and brilliant to live who must cough themselves to death or must and he draws a line through from key you could have written this book here's the thing you could have written this book, here's the thing, you could have written this book not about these three characters, but let me give you an alternative three. Keats, Wilfred Owen, who is mentioned, and Nick Drake would be the third one. And in fact, Fawkes was approached by the Drake estate in the 1990s to write about Nick Drake.

to write about Nick Drake. And Fawkes said Drake fits this template perfectly, except perhaps Drake reached the apex of his talent in a way that Wood was just beginning to, and certainly the others probably did not. I think the one point at which Fawkes gets a little judgmental The one point at which Fowlkes gets a little judgmental is actually Wood's avoidance of any awareness of the tumult of the 1920s that he's in and around. And almost to sort of suggest it's a dereliction of his duty as he develops as an artist that he is so unaware of what's going on in contemporary events and that so as much as he's saying war is this psychic scar actually you become richer and deeper as a human if you are at least cognizant and aware of it and i think at some level he's he almost penalizes wood

for being so focused on his development and artist and only seeing pretty much no further than his studio or the tours of the mediterranean that he does that there's a there's a little bit of i'm going to tick you off for not being plugged in if you didn't have that what animates the book as you said john it's not like reading a dryer writer atister at work, is it? What animates the book is the personality of the author at work. And what I like about the way he's done it is he doesn't draw cheesy sociological connections. There are resonances between the three stories that definitely help you see that it's one book.

But he doesn't come to any pat conclusions. I think when I read it 20 years ago, I enjoyed it more, actually, as a kind of three anthems for doomed youth, as an account of the rise and fall of these people. And I can see how, narrative terms to a writer, that story is appealing. You're telling the same story three times. John, did you find that reading it, you know, novelistically?

Did you feel that there were... So when you read the second, the Richard Hillary biography, were you thinking, oh, that's interesting, he's... Yeah, I guess so. I mean, what I thought was that um that you that that that he picked if you're going to take three big 20th century kind of themes or uh milieu then you know the artistic scene of the 1920s where you've got this massive explosion of modernism and Picasso and Cocteau and surrealism and you know that's and then to have an English painter who I hadn't heard of

in the middle of it all it just seemed like and then you've got the war and you've got to do you know how do you how do you deal with the war well you go for them in a way you go for the the most heroic you know the Spitfire pilot. He's brilliant on the whole, on why the Spitfire was a good plane and how cold it was up in the cockpits. So all that you feel, this is novelistic detail. This isn't a biography. And then you've got the Cold War, you've got spying, you've got Philby MacLean, you've got brilliant academic, you know,

take that academic brilliance and what do you do with it? Absolutely nothing. Man, drinking himself to death. So I do feel that it's funny if you invert it. I admired what he was doing when I thought it was fiction, but I admire it in a kind of reverse way. Absolutely, I know that it's not fiction, because you could have disfigured the narratives by trying to make them to say too much. I mean, he gently tries to tease out what's going on with Hillary, because Hillary was pretty famous during his lifetime. And his book, The Last Enemy, became a kind of emblematic of a sort of heroic,

like Douglas Bader. And it's, as he's painstakingly pointed out, not a very good book. Yeah. Well, no, that's not fair. He says it doesn't quite come off, but there are passages within it which are very good. I think this book is so interesting,

I think I thought this 20 years ago, I think it again now, because it's a hybrid of exactly the type you're talking about, Johnny. It isn't straight biography, it clearly isn't fiction, and yet it's some interesting mixture of the two. And that's probably, there are two reasons why people don't talk about this book the first is this must be Sebastian Fuchs' least successful book because it doesn't really fit

it's not fiction and it doesn't quite live in biography we were all so interested to talk about it but the other reason is, forgive me because it's by Sebastian Fuchs people think they know what Sebastian Fuchs is about he know, people think they know what Sebastian Fawkes is about. He's very present on radio and television. If you haven't read Birdsong, you still will be familiar

with Birdsong. And I wonder whether that counts against the quirk, I hate the word quirky, but the sort of the lesser known parts of a writer's back catalogue. One of the things that happens if you are a famous writer in this country is you get to appear on Pointless Celebrities, either as a guest or, in this case, as a round. Here is a round from Pointless about Sebastian Fawkes. Here it comes. We gave 100 people 100 seconds to name as many Sebastian Fawkes novels as they could. Sebastian Fawkes novels, Richard.

Yeah, any full-length novel written and published by Sebastian Fawkes prior to May 2011, please. No short stories or collections or anthologies, just his full-length novels. OK, now then, Dianne Collin, you go first this time. I think this is going to be a fairly short round then I'm afraid because we neither of us know any Sebastian folks novel day at the seaside a day at the seaside Pat and Tony Sebastian folks novel it's gonna be extrem short round, cos we don't know one either. Can't even guess at one. Murder.

A Day At The Seaside and Murder. LAUGHTER His subject is murder. OK. Aha! So, Dee and Colin, A Day At The Seaside by Sebastian Falks. Let's see if that's right. Let's see how many people thought that was right. No.

What about Murder by Sebastian Foulkes? Let's see if that's right. And if it is, let's see how many people said it. Congratulations. You're as good as each other. OK. Sorry, Sebastian. Sorry, Sebastian's family.

The best thing about that clip is it proves that when average British people think about what novels might be called, they're called either A Day At The Seaside or Murder. And, of course, you combine the two, you've got an absolute win. Exactly. Publishers who who are listening get on it I should just say something about Birdsong John, have you read it? No

And I haven't either And I should confess at this point I've read none, no other Sebastian Falk's book Well that's amazing I've read and loved years ago The Girl at Leondor And I've sort of I've paddled around for a bit in Charlotte Grey years ago, The Girl at Leandor. I think it's... And I've sort of...

I've paddled around for a bit in Charlotte Grey. My history with Birdsong... It was 1994, Birdsong, wasn't it? Yeah, my history with Birdsong is basically that it's the book that I recommended more than any other when I was a bookseller. Yeah. But I only read it about two weeks ago.

And the thing about it was it was as good as i said it was in ignorance 25 years ago but this is why you should always you know surprise folks read books it was different to what i thought it was going to be and the things that are fascinating about it and are a great literary achievement are the thing i was talking about earlier the the portrayal of life in the trenches as the result of mechanized mass slaughter of a of a holocaust that precedes the holocaust with which the the word is synonymous there's a lovely thing in that jane garden piece as well where she talks about, again, that pre-lapsarian vision

of village England without war memorials when she's thinking of when these men were young, all through, you know, you hadn't been through the trauma, the absolute trauma of two massive world wars. trauma the absolute trauma of two massive world wars and it it is i still i i still think that englishness is a concept it's always in relation to those two traumas you can't really kind of you can't and i would say to the and also to the the bigger and the other trauma which is empire and the end of empire and the discovery which is after all what we're talking about at the moment

that empire might not have turned out to be such a gloriously positive and beneficial thing as we once thought I think it's an even better Sebastian Fawkes novel than A Day at the Seaside.

And it's soon to be televised sequel murder. But I do think that's part of the reason why I've never read anything else by him. I feel there's a certain, you know, almost in a sense distillation of how perfect the themes are that

I don't want to encounter anything that might start to... People in the Random House marketing department with their heads in their hands weeping. I don't, because I've never read Stefan Zweig. Haven't you? No, so I just haven't. No, we...

I've been struggling all week to try and think of people, I mean it's very it's very unlike anything else. It's like three very, very brilliant essays by some. Yes. But, you know, that kind of, the sort of biographies that don't get written. Javier Marias wrote a selection of biographies. I'm struggling to think of comparisons.

A closer contemporary parallel I was thinking of was Miranda Carter's The Three Emperors. But when it comes down to it, where does it live in the bookshop? It can't live on the novels shelf because it's not a novel. And where does it live in biography? Well, it must go under Sebastian Fulks because it can't go under any one of those subjects, right? Or history. But where does it live in history?

20th century history? Well, I suppose so. I mean, it's brilliant and it's flawed. It's a genre-defeating book. That's the problem. Which is why we love it. Which is why we love it. We love it, but we've got to stop. Thank you to

Rishi. Thank you to Alana, who has done brilliantly standing in for us alana who is has done brilliantly yeah she has done brilliantly nikki birch to our uh to to unbound and obviously to our neatly turned out sponsor spoke thank you if in fact you would like to sponsor an episode of backlisted the way to do it is to visit our website, which I can now say, backlisted.fm, and hit the Sponsor tab. It'll explain to you how and why and all that. You'll also, of course, on the website, as we keep saying,

find all the books we mentioned and links to buy them, further reading, of course, for those of you who want to go into more depth in the subject, and tasteful merchandise. Hopefully there's going to be further tasteful merchandise to come, other of our greatest slogans. Well, I know that several people have wanted, well, have you read the journals?

It's on a T-shirt. We don't want to become victims of our own sad catchphrase. If you've enjoyed this episode, you can leave a review for us on itunes or wherever you get your podcasts from uh thank you very much people who've been leaving uh star ratings and reviews particularly in the states there have been two or three lovely lovely reviews that people have left i mean really we do read them and it's uh it's cockles are definitely very much warmed by them. So thank you.

Especially the gentleman in America who said he can't move around his flat now because of all the books he's had of his apartment, because of all the books he's had of his... There's a lot of people complaining on Twitter about the fact that we're... Pushers. Yeah, literally, that we're gateway drug to a large pile of unread books by the bedside. Of course, we're still on Twitter, we're still on Facebook and Boundless, but our new permanent home is backlisted.fm.

Do visit us and let us know what you think. Thank you for listening. We'll be back in a fortnight. Until then, goodbye. Let's do a day at the seaside on the next episode. We've actually got a book Marie Phillips is doing a book called Who I Do Like To Be

and it's a book about Shakespeare and the shout line is to B&B or not to B&B thank you applause music music music music 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 at 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.