Speaker 1: It's a funny thing when a book that's enjoying widespread
Speaker 1: success is also an emotional health hazard. You can't help
Speaker 1: but watch other readers as they make their way through it,
Speaker 1: keeping an eye on them to see where they are
Speaker 1: in relation to its various lacerating moments. It happened a
Speaker 1: few years ago with Hanya Yanagahar as a Little Life,
Speaker 1: countless readers sharing in a kind of collective trauma, and
Speaker 1: it happened again with last year's Book A Prize winner,
Speaker 1: Paul Lynch's Profit Song. I think I've quite literally let
Speaker 1: out a howl of grief at one point reading this book,
Speaker 1: kind of involuntary reaction that was very undignified on public transport.
Speaker 2: You're not the first person I've met who has had
Speaker 2: a mile breakdown on public transport reading this book.
Speaker 3: That it wasn't great.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's your Profit Song is Lynch's fifth novel,
Speaker 1: and it's inducing mild breakdowns on public transport all around
Speaker 1: the world. It's the story of Alish Stack, whose union
Speaker 1: organizer husband, when the book opens, has been disappeared by
Speaker 1: the state. Lynch's fictional island slips into totalitarianism with the
Speaker 1: Certainties and civil liberties so many of us take for granted.
Speaker 1: Likewise disappearing around, elish and throughout, she tries to hold
Speaker 1: together the normalcy of domestic life, raising three children and
Speaker 1: caring for a father with dementia, all the while keeping
Speaker 1: food on the table. The whole thing reads like a
Speaker 1: fever dream, upsetting and relentless. The book A Prize judges
Speaker 1: called Prophetsong a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave
Speaker 1: that captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment.
Speaker 1: As unused bulletins are full of stories of war and displacement,
Speaker 1: of tragedy and loss. We sometimes turn to the books
Speaker 1: we love for escape or for distraction, But sometimes the
Speaker 1: opposite is true. As much as it might hurt, great
Speaker 1: literature can reckon with great horrors, with grief, an injustice.
Speaker 1: Prophetsong is one such book. I'm Michael Williams and this
Speaker 1: is Read This a show about the books we love
Speaker 1: and the stories behind them. This episode's an unusual one
Speaker 1: for us. A read this departure. It's an edited recording
Speaker 1: of a live interview I did with Paul Lynch when
Speaker 1: he visited Australia for Sydney and Melbourne Writers' Festivals. The
Speaker 1: conversation you're about to hear is from our Melbourne event
Speaker 1: in front of a capacity crowd at the gorgeous Atheneum Theater. Backstage,
Speaker 1: Paul was relaxed and warm, but he was also a
Speaker 1: man who was ten months into a book tour that
Speaker 1: had involved more than two hundred interviews. The machine behind
Speaker 1: the Booker Prize had been working him hard, making him
Speaker 1: think and talk about his book again and again in
Speaker 1: whole new ways with readers around the world, so that
Speaker 1: seemed like as good a place as any to start.
Speaker 2: Well, the book is surprised that you know, ninety percent
Speaker 2: of writers will admit to wanting to win it.
Speaker 3: The other ten percent are lying, and it's just there.
Speaker 2: It looms over you as a writer, and you think, oh,
Speaker 2: that'd be nice, but you don't expect it to come
Speaker 2: your way because so few were chosen. That's just the
Speaker 2: reality of a price like this, and if it comes
Speaker 2: your way, it changes your life. You find yourself on
Speaker 2: the stage before eight hundred people in Melbourne, marvelous. You know,
Speaker 2: I should be at home in Dublin, in my small house.
Speaker 2: So the Booker changes your life and I didn't see
Speaker 2: it coming. And one of the reasons I didn't see
Speaker 2: it coming is that, well, the kind of fiction that I,
Speaker 2: at least that I thought I wrote was, you know,
Speaker 2: it's not designed for the center, shall we say, in
Speaker 2: the sense that there are writers who hit it down
Speaker 2: the center of the court, and that's great.
Speaker 3: But I was always playing it to the edges.
Speaker 2: Looking for the line, trying to find the line, trying
Speaker 2: to just the danger point.
Speaker 3: That's what excites me.
Speaker 2: But not always when you play it that far, are
Speaker 2: you going to get on the radar.
Speaker 3: For the prizes?
Speaker 1: But it happened that approach to writing is that typical
Speaker 1: of who you are as a human being, Like once
Speaker 1: you decided it was a rightly path for you, was
Speaker 1: the only way you were going to stay interested doing
Speaker 1: stuff that did feel like a challenge at all times.
Speaker 3: Well, you say human beings.
Speaker 2: So I mean, there's this citizen Paul, that guy, and
Speaker 2: he's quite normal.
Speaker 3: He shops in.
Speaker 2: The supermarkets quite a lot, he likes to cook, and.
Speaker 3: You know, he deals with his kids and all that stuff.
Speaker 2: But the writer is a different person. And the writer
Speaker 2: is a grumpy old person possibly late seventies, might be
Speaker 2: a lady actually I don't know, but absolutely implacable has a.
Speaker 3: Vision and will not bend to that vision.
Speaker 2: So there's something you know, it goes back to the Greeks. Actually,
Speaker 2: this this this idea.
Speaker 3: Of the word daymonic, the daymon.
Speaker 2: The Greeks called creativity, that the.
Speaker 3: Daemon Socrates talked about.
Speaker 2: When you were in communication with the gods, that you're
Speaker 2: these this thing that you were channeling down was the
Speaker 2: daymon And of course we know that's that's it's there
Speaker 2: is it's internally, but it's the subconscious. And as a writer,
Speaker 2: you learn to live in proximity to that. You open
Speaker 2: the door to it. And I called the door into
Speaker 2: the dock and you and you learn to channel this energy,
Speaker 2: this this voice from back there or maybe it's down
Speaker 2: down here somewhere. It's hard to know where it comes from,
Speaker 2: but it's deeply authentic and it must be obeyed. And
Speaker 2: I have I've had a challenging career, you know, like
Speaker 2: after my second book.
Speaker 3: The Black Snow, that book sold about four hundred.
Speaker 2: Copies in in Ireland and the UK, and you know,
Speaker 2: at the same time it had sold enormously while in France,
Speaker 2: but like twenty thousand or something which is a really
Speaker 2: big number in translation, but in Ireland to the UK
Speaker 2: it was like four hundred. That means you're done and
Speaker 2: your career is effectively done at that point. And I
Speaker 2: thought I was finished and I couldn't get a publisher
Speaker 2: for my third book, and that's the dame on, that's
Speaker 2: the bloody it's you know, there's nothing I could do
Speaker 2: about that. And fortunately I did get a publisher. But
Speaker 2: then I went and wrote Grace, another book that's completely
Speaker 2: implacable and unrelenting and makes no excuses for what it's doing.
Speaker 1: And when you talk about that implacability, when you talk
Speaker 1: about that kind of finding a path and choosing a
Speaker 1: path and staying on it, I imagine that takes a
Speaker 1: certain certain degree of self belief. Do you remember the
Speaker 1: moment when you first said to someone unself consciously, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: I'm pulled inch, I'm a writer.
Speaker 2: Gosh, I do actually, And I said it to my brother,
Speaker 2: who doesn't read very much at all, so he was
Speaker 2: just going to go, what, yeah, whatever, you know, why
Speaker 2: aren't you playing guitar with me in a band like
Speaker 2: we used to do?
Speaker 3: And what had.
Speaker 2: Happened was I had gone to Paris for two weeks,
Speaker 2: as one does when one is experimenting with writing. And
Speaker 2: I found the voice on the page the way I sound.
Speaker 3: I remember hitting it and I just sat back and.
Speaker 2: Went ooh, and I was so excited by it. I
Speaker 2: was writing Red Sky in the morning at the time,
Speaker 2: very early early stages. But that was the moment when
Speaker 2: I knew, I really knew that I was onto something.
Speaker 1: Take me back for a moment to before then, to
Speaker 1: the kind of childhood, the kind of adolescent period in
Speaker 1: your life, and what books meant to you then, what
Speaker 1: your relationship was to being a reader ahead of being
Speaker 1: a writer.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm lucky that I come from a family
Speaker 2: where reading was always a thin My mother was a
Speaker 2: stay home wife to bring us up, but she was
Speaker 2: a serious reader. She later became an adult literacy teacher,
Speaker 2: so she once we were old enough, she started teaching
Speaker 2: adult literacy. But I remember her teaching me to read
Speaker 2: it four or sitting on the floor in her house
Speaker 2: in Malnhead, which is the most northerly point in Ireland.
Speaker 3: But I remember.
Speaker 2: She's sitting on the floor with me and we're reading
Speaker 2: words off cereal packets that have been cut out, And
Speaker 2: that was the start of it, and then a teacher
Speaker 2: at primary school I think I was about eight, eight
Speaker 2: or nine, she handed me to it as an abridged copy.
Speaker 3: I think it was The Prisoner of Zender Wow.
Speaker 2: I remember thinking, I've been reading, I've been reading the
Speaker 2: wrong books until now suddenly I'm completely transported. And then
Speaker 2: King Solomon's Minds came, next came and that was it.
Speaker 3: I was off.
Speaker 2: It was unstoppable, and I read everything, and I read
Speaker 2: the school library dry, I read the town library dry.
Speaker 1: I was.
Speaker 2: I was such a pain in the ass that when
Speaker 2: I was eleven, my mother marched me down to the
Speaker 2: second hand bookshop in the town and said give him
Speaker 2: a job.
Speaker 3: And I and I got a job in in in.
Speaker 2: This books bookshop, and I used to sit there reading books.
Speaker 2: And the owner, a guy called Mickey Heron, who was
Speaker 2: this willowy, yellowy, smoked out individual. He used to make
Speaker 2: tea with moldy milk, and he'd handed to me and
Speaker 2: it was disgusting, and he'd asked me to do things
Speaker 2: and I'd be yam, yeah, and just give me, just
Speaker 2: give me five minutes. And I'd be sitting there just
Speaker 2: churning through a book.
Speaker 3: And That's what it was like.
Speaker 2: And then I discovered music, and but books was Books
Speaker 2: was fundamental. It was like the quiet energy in my life.
Speaker 2: So no matter what was going on, fiction was the thing.
Speaker 2: And I remember reading, of course with you know, Shakespeare
Speaker 2: was all along, but jard Manley Hopkins just lit up
Speaker 2: my brain like a Christmas tree. T. S. Eliot and
Speaker 2: many other poets. Mayor of the Mayor of Casterbridge by
Speaker 2: Thomas Hardy. I remember reading that and getting to the
Speaker 2: end and actually encountering a feeling inside myself that I'd
Speaker 2: never met through a walk of art before it broke
Speaker 2: me and I sat on the bed and I wept.
Speaker 3: God, it makes sense. You're a Thomas Hardy fa Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: unlocks it awful lot. I'm chasing that head ever since,
Speaker 3: and I'm trying to do that.
Speaker 1: To just traumatizing this new generations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, here we go, so kind of it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I know, and I'm sorry, you know, but this is that.
Speaker 1: Feeling is a young reader where you're like, I didn't
Speaker 1: know you could do that. You know that that part
Speaker 1: of the response is I think the earliest stuff you
Speaker 1: often read as a kid goes to a happy ending
Speaker 1: or goes to kind of particular beats of narrative that
Speaker 1: are tried and true. And the first time you read
Speaker 1: a piece of literature that breaks that, something opens up absolutely.
Speaker 3: It shows you the tragic worldview.
Speaker 2: It opens you out to a sort of almost cosmic view.
Speaker 3: Of what we are, what life is.
Speaker 2: That instead of offering solace, instead of offering the happy ending,
Speaker 2: it offers you, I mean as a teenager.
Speaker 3: It offers you the view of, well, this is actually.
Speaker 2: How it ends, this is how it plays out. This
Speaker 2: is the nature of tragedy. Life is lost, life is impermanent,
Speaker 2: and these are the things that imprint you very deeply.
Speaker 3: And that the power of truth and fiction is what
Speaker 3: makes great fiction endure.
Speaker 2: I always say this when I teach that the great works,
Speaker 2: the Classics, it is a body of wisdom.
Speaker 3: And it speaks to what we are, the human condition.
Speaker 2: It speaks to what we are always And we go
Speaker 2: back to the Classics and we see ourselves in there.
Speaker 2: But we see ourselves as we are, not offering easily
Speaker 2: as it's easy, easy consolation. We see the whole gamut
Speaker 2: of it, which also includes joy and wonder and beauty.
Speaker 3: And I think that I've always said this that.
Speaker 2: Even though many of my books are very dark, I
Speaker 2: also think they're very beautiful. I think that they're alert
Speaker 2: to the wonderers, They're alert to what makes this very special.
Speaker 1: I think that's true, and I think beauty is an
Speaker 1: important and recurring part of your books. But the engine
Speaker 1: often seems to be a desire to articulate something fundamentally
Speaker 1: broken about the human condition, rather than something redemptive. Do
Speaker 1: you associate artistic endeavor with.
Speaker 3: Pain pain?
Speaker 2: I think that what I'm trying to get at is
Speaker 2: a sense of the complexity of.
Speaker 3: Being a human being. And I love this line, how
Speaker 3: much human being is in a human being? I think
Speaker 3: it's my project. I'm just interested in how we arrive
Speaker 3: at ourselves.
Speaker 2: How do we define ourselves when things go wrong?
Speaker 3: Because very often in my books.
Speaker 2: There's a character who feels that they're in control of
Speaker 2: their lives, and then something happens and then they're met
Speaker 2: with the unknown. This happens to us in all our lives.
Speaker 2: One minute we're here, the next minute we're there. You
Speaker 2: look back, that's gone. You find yourself in a place
Speaker 2: where you're placeless because the future that you would imagine
Speaker 2: no longer exists. You're in this placeless no place where
Speaker 2: you're just trying to get back to what you were.
Speaker 3: And when you do that, you're just trying to get.
Speaker 2: Back to your own sense of dignity, your own sense
Speaker 2: of who you are. And all my characters meet this
Speaker 2: in different ways, and very often there's a labyrinth. And
Speaker 2: I'm very interested in the idea of philosophical blindness.
Speaker 3: We live our lives, but we live it in a labyrinth.
Speaker 2: We cannot see what's ahead of us, We cannot measure
Speaker 2: the enormity of the forces around us, and we are
Speaker 2: all surrounded by these enormous forces, these great winds that
Speaker 2: throw us around like specks of dust. And for anybody
Speaker 2: who thinks, well, that's not true, COVID, that's simple. Suddenly
Speaker 2: we were all powerless, and all our lives, they're always
Speaker 2: things shaping us. And I'm interested in that idea of, well,
Speaker 2: how much free will is there?
Speaker 3: How much do we really have? And within that the
Speaker 3: ability to just.
Speaker 2: Move through the labyrinth And and and my characters they
Speaker 2: make these decisions, are always trying to outmaneuver the fates, and.
Speaker 3: The fates are blind, and I'm fascinated by that.
Speaker 1: Coming up Paul reveals how he almost didn't write profits
Speaker 1: On in the first place, and why he resists the
Speaker 1: label of political right. We'll be right back. The experience
Speaker 1: of reading this book is not unlike having a three
Speaker 1: four hundred page panic.
Speaker 3: Attack very slowly.
Speaker 1: That you build this world, you build human beings that
Speaker 1: you make us care about, and then you very slowly
Speaker 1: turn the screws across the length of the book. I
Speaker 1: want to start with that idea of very slowly, because
Speaker 1: this is an incremental tragedy, and I want to know
Speaker 1: when you hit upon the pace of the thing.
Speaker 2: Well, I had been writing the wrong book for about
Speaker 2: six months. I knew I was writing the wrong book
Speaker 2: and was drilling through granite rock and getting nowhere. And
Speaker 2: it was a Friday afternoon, about three o'clock, and I
Speaker 2: just thought, jeez, I'm done with this this thing, whatever
Speaker 2: it is, this failure of a novel. I didn't It
Speaker 2: didn't have the juice, it didn't have the sense of
Speaker 2: a story, the vessel that I looked for to to
Speaker 2: carry the reader along but also carrying my obsessions along.
Speaker 2: And so I just said, I'm done. I'm gonna turn
Speaker 2: but return to work on Monday and see what happens.
Speaker 2: I had this sense there was something back there in
Speaker 2: the door, that door into the dark, that there was
Speaker 2: something would come through.
Speaker 3: And you do this as a writer. You learn to
Speaker 3: trust your intuition. You learned to listen to.
Speaker 2: That small quiet voice came back in Monday, I created
Speaker 2: a document.
Speaker 3: I waited and I wrote opening page. It was there.
Speaker 3: The pace was there.
Speaker 2: What dictates the pace is the feeling of now, the
Speaker 2: feeling of the moment that we're in. The book is
Speaker 2: written in close third person, in the present tense, so
Speaker 2: we're always in the space.
Speaker 3: That Alish's inhabiting. We're in these domestic spaces. We're in
Speaker 3: these moments where she's.
Speaker 2: Dealing with kids, teenagers who are killing each other.
Speaker 3: There's not enough milk in the fridge. That just keeps
Speaker 3: happening throughout the novel.
Speaker 2: It's an intimate domestic space, and the book just inhabits that.
Speaker 2: And there are many moments in the book that occupy
Speaker 2: what Virginia Wolf called moments of being, where just that
Speaker 2: sense of being in time.
Speaker 3: We all have it, we just we.
Speaker 2: All have these moments every so often where you lose yourself,
Speaker 2: the little voice in your ear disappears the chattering self,
Speaker 2: and you enter into the now, the world, and you
Speaker 2: just suddenly forget that you are you, and you're in
Speaker 2: this space. It's it's the most perfect inhabitation of life
Speaker 2: and of now. And I say this to somebody who's
Speaker 2: also a meditator and have been meditating for a.
Speaker 3: Very long time.
Speaker 2: And so the book is full of these kind of
Speaker 2: moments where Alias is just inhabiting her space.
Speaker 3: And so when you do that in.
Speaker 2: The present tense, you're bringing the reader into that space
Speaker 2: with her, and so it progresses piece by piece, but
Speaker 2: at the same time there is also the larger dimension
Speaker 2: of what's unfolding, and so you know, there's the classic
Speaker 2: metaphor of you know, the frog in the pot of
Speaker 2: water and the temperature is ratcheting up so slowly you
Speaker 2: don't see it. This is also the world that Ali's in.
Speaker 2: This is the world of profit Song, where what is
Speaker 2: unraveling beginstro unravel so slowly that you don't notice it,
Speaker 2: and at the same time you also deny it because Elish,
Speaker 2: like all of us, just assumes that the world that
Speaker 2: we inhabit now will always continue. And Alish lives in
Speaker 2: a Western liberal democracy, to kind of we've all enjoyed
Speaker 2: since certainly since World War Two, and the kind of
Speaker 2: world we presume will continue.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 2: She's drifting through life in the way we all drift
Speaker 2: through life, and suddenly she's in a world where in
Speaker 2: Emergency Powers Act has been has been brought into brought
Speaker 2: into being by the government. Before the book opens, the
Speaker 2: media is starting to be curbed, and there's that uneasiness,
Speaker 2: but there's also that denial, well, it's not really happening.
Speaker 2: Everything will be fine, and that's part of the creep.
Speaker 2: This the creep, and so the anxiety work filters through
Speaker 2: that creep until you know there's a tipping point and
Speaker 2: nobody sees it happen, and Alish are taking At one point,
Speaker 2: she says, now's not a time to speak, Now's the
Speaker 2: time to remain silent.
Speaker 3: It's all over.
Speaker 1: At that point, one of the great kind of insights
Speaker 1: of the book is, and the prevailing sensation of reading
Speaker 1: the book, is that the tipping point is already behind us.
Speaker 1: You know, the point at which we begin, the tipping
Speaker 1: point has already happened. If we're living, if Alish is
Speaker 1: living in a kind of perpetual now dealing with the
Speaker 1: reality as it is in front of her, that moment
Speaker 1: has already passed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it makes me think of something related to this,
Speaker 2: which is that we all have this feeling when I mean,
Speaker 2: if you're reading the book or we watching these kind
Speaker 2: of similar situations in films, we say I would have known,
Speaker 2: I would have left, I would have got my family
Speaker 2: out in time.
Speaker 3: We all do it.
Speaker 2: We watched the documentary, so I'd be gone, belong gone, Well,
Speaker 2: really would you? And this is what the book is
Speaker 2: exploring because denial is complex. Alis's denial is also related
Speaker 2: to the complexity of her life. And she's somebody who's
Speaker 2: completely enmeshed in her world.
Speaker 3: She's at that point where, you know, mid forties, you.
Speaker 2: Get this squeeze. You know, you've got kids, You've got career,
Speaker 2: you know. She she's very high up in a pharmaceutical company.
Speaker 2: She's got of course, Larry, her husband, who works for
Speaker 2: a trade union, has been taken in for and taken
Speaker 2: in by the GNSB, the Garden National Services Burea, who.
Speaker 3: Are the secret police.
Speaker 2: He's not released, he's been swallowed by the state. So
Speaker 2: she's trying to get her husband released. She's got a
Speaker 2: father called Simon, who is a retired scientist, and he's
Speaker 2: starting into dementia.
Speaker 3: Life's complex.
Speaker 1: And before you go on, I just want to ask
Speaker 1: off the back of that, I'm really interested in how
Speaker 1: important it was that Alis shouldn't Simon was scientists.
Speaker 3: Very Oh yeah, So it's a great question.
Speaker 2: It really distills down to a moment about truth, about
Speaker 2: the meaning of truth, about the rational in many ways,
Speaker 2: if you could say to a certain extent that philosophically speaking,
Speaker 2: the project of rational enlightenment, the project of liberal democrats,
Speaker 2: is that telelogically, we're moving towards a kind of rational utopia.
Speaker 2: We keep adding more rationality onto more rationally. This is
Speaker 2: how we get to the best way we can live.
Speaker 2: And we do that through science, science and.
Speaker 3: All the marvelous.
Speaker 2: Methods that we've designed to get us closer to human
Speaker 2: truth and scientific truth. And but that's the world that's
Speaker 2: been left behind. It's a post truth space. And Simon,
Speaker 2: who is you know, as he says, he is slightly
Speaker 2: into dimension, but his these moments of profound lucidity, and
Speaker 2: he says to Elish at one point he says, you
Speaker 2: know you've taken the degree you understand what the real is.
Speaker 3: But you need to see what they're doing.
Speaker 2: They are, you know, once they're taking control of the institutions.
Speaker 2: And once you take control of the institutions, you can
Speaker 2: take control of the facts because you can change the narratives.
Speaker 2: And once you do that, you start to muddy reality.
Speaker 2: You start to muddy the real That's what they're doing,
Speaker 2: he said, he says, And that's the post truth world.
Speaker 2: And we are all in a space now where there
Speaker 2: are people who no longer agree about.
Speaker 3: The consensus reality.
Speaker 2: We used to We used to all inhabit a consensus
Speaker 2: reality where you know, there would be different opinions about
Speaker 2: what we should do with the consensus reality, and that
Speaker 2: was worth fighting for. But now there are people who
Speaker 2: literally see a complete different reality than the one we
Speaker 2: think we're all in. And it's like, you know, we're
Speaker 2: off with the blue pill and the red pill, and
Speaker 2: they took the blue pill thinking that.
Speaker 3: But they haven't actually got to the reel at all.
Speaker 2: They've got to they're gone on the rabbit hole, and
Speaker 2: it's disturbing. And so this is this is this is
Speaker 2: the world that Profit Song is in in many respects,
Speaker 2: and and you know, Elish is too busy for it
Speaker 2: and her sister in Canada, who's watching the unraveling of
Speaker 2: a first world country on the news. Sister sister, history
Speaker 2: is a silent record of those who did not know
Speaker 2: when to leave, and Ellie says, that's very well for
Speaker 2: you to say, I'm here, I'm dealing with the kids.
Speaker 2: I'm dealing with my life. Mark Stone is leaving. Their
Speaker 2: dad's not well, and what if he falls and breaks
Speaker 2: a hip?
Speaker 3: What then?
Speaker 1: One of my favorite tweets during COVID and during the
Speaker 1: lockdown for some untweeted great the apocalypse is here and
Speaker 1: I still have to go to work.
Speaker 3: And there is something in.
Speaker 1: That idea, the way in which the mundane, but also
Speaker 1: our social structures, our conventions, our expectations, assert themselves almost
Speaker 1: at the expense of objective reality. These are the things
Speaker 1: that we understand. These are the markers through which were
Speaker 1: the final life.
Speaker 3: This is part of life in the labyrinth.
Speaker 2: You know, you deal with what's before you, you deal
Speaker 2: with what you have to deal with, and the scale
Speaker 2: of the problems that are unfolding around you. Well, you
Speaker 2: don't have time to do what We don't have time
Speaker 2: to sit back and measure them or try and work
Speaker 2: them out because you're dealing with getting milk.
Speaker 3: Is there milk in the fridge, You've got to go
Speaker 3: to the supermarket, You're going to do all these other things.
Speaker 2: That's the complexity they leasues in and I'm really interested
Speaker 2: in that complexity. And you know, I've said this before
Speaker 2: because I just it's to me, it's so it's so
Speaker 2: much also about what this book is about. This book
Speaker 2: is not about the politics. You take the Iliad and
Speaker 2: you look at what the Iliad is.
Speaker 3: How it fore grands the politics. It four grands the heroes.
Speaker 2: The action profit song is burning Troy in the background.
Speaker 2: If you turn the Iliad inside out, you arrive at
Speaker 2: ali Stack. You arrive at the personal cost of events.
Speaker 2: There's those hidden moments of life, of domesticity, of somebody losing.
Speaker 3: Their world, their universe, the known world that is to them.
Speaker 3: That's what I'm chasing in this book.
Speaker 2: And that's you know, that's when that's that's the mythic
Speaker 2: dimension in this book. You know, people say, oh, this
Speaker 2: book's are dystopian fiction. To me, it's not at all, Like,
Speaker 2: of course, it's it's handy to frame it as such,
Speaker 2: but this book is far too much in conversation with
Speaker 2: the past and the present. What is happening now, what
Speaker 2: has always happened throughout time.
Speaker 3: And what will continue to happen throughout time. That's what
Speaker 3: this book is about.
Speaker 2: And so there's a mythic space in this conversation that
Speaker 2: I'm not sure maybe the dystopian fiction would allow for.
Speaker 1: So I want to then challenge you a little bit
Speaker 1: and push back on this idea and.
Speaker 3: Challenge to me here, God, it's too easy. Where do
Speaker 3: you get off? No, no, no, that's not it.
Speaker 1: I accept what you're saying about the metaphysical rather than
Speaker 1: the political, But a novel like this, particularly in the
Speaker 1: contemporary world, being the way it is that world that
Speaker 1: you're describing, becomes an inherently political act, like, regardless of
Speaker 1: your authorial intention, the way it's received, the way it's reviewed,
Speaker 1: the way it's read, the impact that has on readers
Speaker 1: around the world is an intensely political one. And I'm
Speaker 1: curious about how you reconcile that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's been very interesting me personally to discover that
Speaker 2: I have written a political novel, because I you know,
Speaker 2: I've always said I'm not a novelist, and I made
Speaker 2: a point of saying that after winning the book a prize,
Speaker 2: because I suddenly saw the label above my head and
Speaker 2: I thought, well, I'd better get out from under this
Speaker 2: label very quickly. And there are many reasons why I've
Speaker 2: said that, because I think that my project remains the same.
Speaker 2: The situation in this book is part of the anthropological
Speaker 2: laboratory that I create. I create a situation, I put
Speaker 2: my characters into it, and the things that I'm tasting
Speaker 2: and looking for goes back to the metaphysical concerns about
Speaker 2: problems of knowledge and problems of being alive and what's
Speaker 2: any human being. But despite that, the book has this layer,
Speaker 2: this political layer, and I can't deny that. I can't
Speaker 2: deny that the book has an attitude to the world.
Speaker 2: I can't deny that it has a political point of view.
Speaker 2: I can't deny that it.
Speaker 3: Has moral power.
Speaker 2: I believe this book does have moral power, and that's
Speaker 2: part of what's what you know, what's what's brought me
Speaker 2: to hear.
Speaker 3: But that was not the goal. And I talk about this.
Speaker 2: Because to me, it's quite important to to to sort
Speaker 2: of ascertain the difference we've had, you know, a good
Speaker 2: ten years where a lot of fiction has.
Speaker 3: Been decidedly political.
Speaker 2: It's it's it's been coming from a particular point of view.
Speaker 2: Where as a citizen I would agree with pretty much
Speaker 2: all of it, but as a writer, i'm i'm I'm
Speaker 2: a little bit skeptical at times because it's my it's
Speaker 2: my personal view. That you know that when you're coming
Speaker 2: at fiction from the point of view of grievance, you're
Speaker 2: trying to fix something that can be fixed. You you
Speaker 2: know the answer to the thing you want fixed, there's
Speaker 2: an answer, and so the fiction is limited by that
Speaker 2: it actually knows its own answers, and so a lot
Speaker 2: of writers are writing that way. I look back over
Speaker 2: the canon, over whatever the canon is, whatever way you
Speaker 2: want to, you know, appraise that in your mind. The
Speaker 2: great books all operate out of grievance. They operate out
Speaker 2: of the things that we are, but cannot change the
Speaker 2: human condition. What it is that that that.
Speaker 3: Lies beyond us? What? What? What you know?
Speaker 2: The true nature of lass and the true nature of
Speaker 2: the impossibilities of knowledge? And Keats talked about this thing
Speaker 2: called negative capability, that the greatest writers were those who
Speaker 2: wrote towards the mysterious. They wrote towards that which we
Speaker 2: could not know, and that without without looking for certainty,
Speaker 2: without looking for answers, and they were comfortable in that space,
Speaker 2: because life is fundamentally mysterious. When we step back and
Speaker 2: we think about it, it's truly strange, and there is
Speaker 2: so many layers to it, and the political.
Speaker 3: Is just one lens.
Speaker 2: But when you sit back, you realize that life is
Speaker 2: it's too complex for that, and great writing needs that complexity,
Speaker 2: and so that's what I chase. And so when I
Speaker 2: hear the lens of the political, I kind of go,
Speaker 2: oh God, because that's just boxing me into this little thing.
Speaker 2: And I think that fiction needs to be maximal in
Speaker 2: its complexity.
Speaker 1: I think you achieve that in spades. And I'm sorry
Speaker 1: for how many more times you're going to be referred
Speaker 1: to as an author of political dystopia, both of which
Speaker 1: are wrong and inadequate to describe the scale of what
Speaker 1: you've done here. What happens after this, what happens after
Speaker 1: you produce a work of art like this that does
Speaker 1: connect with readers across the world, even outside France, where
Speaker 1: it speaks to their fears about themselves, about their loved ones,
Speaker 1: about the human condition, about the nature of the world
Speaker 1: that we're in. I mean, this is you've now created
Speaker 1: a rod for your back. How do you sit down
Speaker 1: and just trust in the writing again without all that noise?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean writing, Getting back to writing is something
Speaker 2: I'm gonna have to learn to do again, because the
Speaker 2: scale of the booker can't be underestimated, you know, the
Speaker 2: imprint of it on the psyche is enormous, and the
Speaker 2: noise is enormous. And I find it very hard even
Speaker 2: just to get bandwidth, just to be me, let alone
Speaker 2: to write. There's no writing. When you win it, you're
Speaker 2: told you you're not going to write for a year.
Speaker 2: In truth, it's longer than that. At some point, I'm
Speaker 2: going to have to pull the shutters down because this
Speaker 2: is beautiful. To connect with audiences is beautiful, and it's
Speaker 2: an honor and a privilege to be able to do that.
Speaker 2: But the reason that I became a writer, and the
Speaker 2: reason that most people become writers, is that there's just
Speaker 2: this authentic self that needs to be articulated. It's a small,
Speaker 2: quiet voice, and you live for that voice. You live
Speaker 2: for communicating with that authentic self. And the days where
Speaker 2: I am lost in language in my quiet room and.
Speaker 3: There's no emails.
Speaker 2: I'm just writing and then I finish after three or
Speaker 2: four hours, and then I just go to the shop
Speaker 2: and do whatever I have to do. They're the best
Speaker 2: days in the world. That's what I live for, and
Speaker 2: it'll be hard to get back to that because everyone's knocking.
Speaker 3: On the door now.
Speaker 1: I wish for you that small quiet room again. So
Speaker 1: but I'm so honored and privilege you've joined us here
Speaker 1: to that. Please join me in thanking the extraordinary called
Speaker 1: Thank You. Pull Into's profit Song, along with his four
Speaker 1: previous novels, is available at all good bookstores now, and
Speaker 1: you can probably pick up an old Thomas Hardy book
Speaker 1: while you're there. Before we get out of here, I
Speaker 1: wanted to let you know what I've been reading this week,
Speaker 1: and it's another Irish book, this one a new release
Speaker 1: from the wonderful Kevin Barry. I loved his novel Nightboat
Speaker 1: to Tangiers a few years back. His latest is just
Speaker 1: a novella, a little slip of a thing and a
Speaker 1: western of all things. But it's characteristically gorgeous and surprising
Speaker 1: and precise. It's called The Heart in Winter and it's terriffic.
Speaker 1: You can find Kevin Barry's books and all the others
Speaker 1: we mentioned at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for
Speaker 1: this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your
Speaker 1: friends about it and rate and review us. It helps
Speaker 1: a lot read This is produced and edited by Clara Ames,
Speaker 1: with mixing and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening,
Speaker 1: See you next week.