Series 3

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Transcript

Fiona: My reading experience with poetry is that I’m in the presence of somebody and we’re in that kind of potentially– well, depending on the poem and the mood it might be that slightly late night, kitchen-table [music begins] moment where you’ve, sort of, got through all the news and the stuff and you actually enter into where you really are and what’s going on and what you really need to talk about it.

Jessica: [Speaking to podcast listeners] This is the Listening Books podcast, for every kind of reader and especially for fans of audiobooks. I’m Jessica Stone and today I have the great pleasure of offering this conversation with not one but two special guests, poet Fiona Bennett and actor Michael Schaeffer, both from The Poetry Exchange, which invites people to share a poem that has been a friend to them in their life. In this conversation we talk about this framing of friendship with poetry and how the way we encounter poems can shape our experience of them.

[Music ends]

[Speaking to Fiona and Michael] I think maybe we should start, um, by talking about how The Poetry Exchange began and, Fiona, as you’re the founder, I think perhaps you’re the person, um, best positioned to talk about how this was conceived and [Fiona: Mm.] came about.

Fiona: Gosh, it feels like a long time ago now. Didn’t you use to feel like that when that question was asked, just having a new realisation of how old we are Michael, uh, in a good way, you know? It’s a very– one of those, sort of, quite simple synapses-in-your-head thing that happened, accidentally, where I was invited by a phenomenal woman, who is called Beth Cuenco, who ran a beautiful and extraordinary festival called Wise Words Festival, which was a, kind of, combination of literature, all forms of literature, and great thinkers, so wise words. Which actually, in a way, was before its time. It’s got a lot of that, kind of, medley of programming about now, but actually at that time it was pretty– there weren’t so many things that were doing that. Um, it was phenomenal.

And she said, you know, ‘Would you like to do something with poetry at the festival?’ and I felt a bit intimidated by the title of this festival being– I was, like, [gasps] Wise Words, I don’t know what I’d do with Wise Words. And then that quite quickly took me to the thought that most of the wise words that I’d received in my life, uh, come from conversations with friends. And then I quite quickly realised that some of those conversations with friends were in fact conversations with poems as well, and so I thought about this idea of– which is my reading experience really. My reading experience with poetry is that I’m in the presence of somebody and we’re in that, kind of, potentially– well, depending on the poem and the mood it might be that slightly late night, kitchen-table moment where you’ve, sort of, got through all the news and the stuff and you actually enter into where you really are and what’s going on and what you really need to talk about.

And, yeah, poems are, kind of, like that for me and I thought, well, is this the case for anybody else? Let’s find out. So the beginning was that idea, was to, kind of, find out, and I did a number of things initially just putting that question out, ‘Have you got a poem that’s been a friend to you?’, in a number of simple ways. And then I thought, well, I need somebody very skilful to help me with this endeavour and Michael was instantly the person. Because there was another idea going on in my head, which was that if people were going to come and talk to us about the poem that’s been a friend to them, which was obviously where things began to head, then they needed to be given something in exchange for doing that; you can’t just go around asking people for their time! And so we had this idea of gifting back a reading of the poem inspired by the conversation and that, in particular, felt like something that Michael would be terrific to be alongside me with and– both the conversation and the readings.

Michael: It was actually called The Poetry Survey to begin with, Fi, wasn’t it? That was the very first iteration of it [Fiona: Mm.], was this idea of, kind of, making a survey [Fiona: Mm.], what poems have been friends to people, you know. And there was a mapping element to it at one stage I remember, right in the early days. But it wasn’t a podcast!

Jessica: Right.

Michael: You know, we were having the conversations with individuals, um, and we were going, ‘Well, this is great, isn’t it? These amazing conversations we were having!’ You go, ‘Yeah, it is, it’s brilliant Fi, but, you know, [chuckling] there’s only person benefitting from it at a time, you know, other than us!’ [Fiona: Mm.] And I was getting into podcasts at that time, it was, sort of, in that first wave of podcasts and, um… So I can remember, we were sat at the end of a day, sort of, you know, I was talking to Fiona about podcasts and we thought, well, let’s try it, let’s get some recording equipment and see how that is. We were concerned that it [Fiona: Mm.] might affect the conversations, weren’t we, Fi? [Fiona: Mm.] We were, like, we’ve got to be fairly unobtrusive because [Jessica: Mm.] we don’t want people to become too aware of the microphones or…

Jessica: Yeah.

Michael: …any of that kind of stuff.

Jessica: And did you find that it affected the conversation?

Fiona: Ah, that’s a good question.

Michael: Do you know the truth, I think, is that it can…

Jessica: Yeah.

Michael: …is that there are times when it can. [Jessica: Mm.] And I think that we had to then, um, find ways of settling people [Jessica: Mm.], you know. And so we’d always do a thing about, um, having a cup of tea and a biscuit and, you know, just a nice little settling moment, and I think in a way that’s– I’m sure you find this Jessica but that, sort of, part of the skill, uh, of talking to people on podcasts and trying to, sort of, draw people out and make them feel relaxed and comfortable and then, you know, um, people do then forget that they’re being recorded or whatever and [Fiona: Mm.] they just chat.

Jessica: Yeah.

Fiona: I mean, that’s also interesting because there’s, kind of, recording it is one layer and then the second layer is the possibility of it being, you know, out as a podcast [Jessica: Mm.], which, you know, is a complicated, intricate thing. So it is absolutely the case for us that we don’t commit, you know, we’re still having the conversations in a sense as part of the survey of…

Jessica: Right.

Michael: Yeah.

Fiona: …gathering this material. We’re gathering these stories and these poems and that’s our primary thing. We also are recording it for an archive and for potential use in a podcast. So I think that does help, because I think that, you know, if you can really convince people that that’s the case and that nothing has to go anywhere beyond this room, um, you know, then it helps.

Michael: And there is also a difference. Because we speak to a mix of people, so we speak to [Fiona: Mm.] readers of poetry and, um, sometimes we’ll just do an open call on Twitter or something like that, people that listen to the podcast, if they want to talk to us then, you know, we’ll hold some times and we’ll just invite that in a really open way. And then sometimes we’ll try and say, oh, you know, let’s get Andrew Scott or Brian Cox or Maxine Peake or, you know, someone that’s got a little bit of profile [Jessica: Mm] to, uh, try and help us with our listenership and, you know, all the rest of it; increase the sort of visibility of the podcast I suppose. There can be a difference between how people approach that. [Fiona: Hm.]

Jessica: Hmm. Oh, say more about that.

Michael: Well, I suppose just in terms of if you’re a public figure. Uh, there’s something about the fact that we’re talking to people, uh, about themselves via the medium of poetry in a way, [Jessica: Hm.] is what I think ends up happening a lot of the time, and I think if you’re a public figure that’s a slightly different proposition [Jessica: Hm.], um, that perhaps there’s some bit of your brain that’s going, oh…

Jessica: That’s protective.

Michael: …this is going to be there out there in the world and so I need to slightly– I’m not saying this happens with everyone and of course people do this very differently and, um, [Jessica: Hm.] you know, I get that, but there can be a difference I think. [Fiona: Hm.]

Jessica: Mm, I could definitely understand, um, a more heightened cautiousness.

Michael: Absolutely. [Fiona: Hm.] Yeah, I think that’s really appropriate as well. [Fiona: Hm.] If you are somebody like that, you know, I think that’s entirely appropriate. Um, and I guess if that’s not something that you’re used to doing and if you’re not in the public eye, I think it’s a very different, uh, experience because it might be that these are people that haven’t spoken about themselves much or they haven’t spoken to anyone about a poem in depth like this before. You know, that can be really quite a powerful experience for them.

Jessica: Yeah, I think it’s a sad truth that I think very few people probably talk about poetry as a matter of course in…

Michael: Yeah. [Fiona: Hm.]

Jessica: …social settings. Um, after my experience of the Poetry Exchange I was trying to put my finger on what about it made it such a profound experience and I finally thought, outside of actually going to a therapist and paying for that time, I couldn’t think of when else there would be a scenario in which I would bring something that really meant something to me to a conversation and for the bulk of the hour everybody in that conversation is focused on appreciating that thing with me. Um, and it’s such a powerful gift of attention and I think it must take a great deal of listening on your parts, both to the poem and to the person, uh, and what they are hearing from the poem. And it, sort of, led me to wonder if there’s something about the practice of poetry itself, the writing of it or the reading of it or indeed the performing of it, um, which trains you in the art of listening.

Fiona: Thank you for saying all of that [Michael: Mm.] so beautifully, um…

Michael: Yeah.

Fiona: …it’s amazing to hear. And yeah, I think silence is a, you know, a huge, kind of, acoustic– for a writer, silence is a absolute precondition, well, for me anyway, for most I know. Which sounds like an odd thing to talk about silence first of all but I feel like that is really important [Jessica: Hm.], um, and also because particularly in poetry, where, you know, it’s profoundly about the space between the small number of words, um, that silence is a presence. You know [Jessica: Hm.], um, that space is a presence. So I think that oftentimes we don’t have a quality of attention or are listening because of the amount of noise that we’re dealing with. So I think I’m somewhere getting [chuckles] to your point that maybe because we, kind of, have a habit or a practice of quietening noise or putting noise away, and Michael can say more about it as a performer, I think that gives you a good precondition at least that you know how to, kind of, make that space. [Jessica: Hm.]

Michael: Yeah, I’m really aware that when we have those conversations, um, that there is a quality of attention that’s necessary to bring to it and it’s, um– one of my teachers at drama school used to say two ears, two eyes, one mouth…

Jessica: Yeah!

Michael: …use them in that proportion, you know! And I think, you know, generally speaking it can be true, and I think we live in a world where everyone’s, kind of, putting their opinions out, you know, everyone– oftentimes a lot of people are, kind of, on transmit as opposed to being on receive and, um, there is something about the practice of doing it, um, yeah, the practice of listening in a way. [Chuckles] You know, I think it is a practice. When we, in the olden times, used to meet face to face in rooms with people to do this, Jessica, um, it would always often be the case that, um, there would be quite a lot of silence. You know, um, Fi and I would, kind of– we know each other really pretty well now and so we’re able to trust that silence I think. I think that’s a little bit harder in the digital version of things, um, but very often we’d just, sort of– there’d be three of us – me, Fiona and a guest – sitting in a space somewhere, and we’d just, kind of, allow for the silence a bit and, you know, the energy of the poem or, you know, the echoes of the poem would, kind of, be with us and we’d just sit with it until– almost like that Quaker thing I suppose, you know!

Jessica: Yeah!

Michael: Until somebody feels moved to speak, I guess.

Fiona: It’s very important to me that space actually, Michael; it’s good to hear you remind me of it. I’m even getting, kind of, like my body, there’s something happening in my body as we’re talking about this, you know, and I know how much I need to be able to be in a room with it again soon, which we are planning to do in the autumn obviously and… Um, but the other thing that I was going to say in terms of what you were talking about, Michael, which we’ve often observed, is that the poem, the presence of the poem itself is also what facilitates that kind of listening and presence with each other. Because we’re all focused on the poem, we’re not focused on each other [Michael: Hm.], in a way, and that deals with a whole lot of noise immediately, [chuckling] just takes that noise away because we’re channelling into something that is, um, another frequency.

Jessica: Beautifully said. Um, am I right that you encounter the poem, um, for the first time– I mean, you may have read it before on your own but that you don’t, sort of, um, do your homework on it before you have the exchange? That you let the person who’s bringing the poem introduce you to the poem, as it were for the first time? Is that right?

Fiona: Yeah. It was quite a quick decision that. It was quite early on, we went let’s not [Jessica and Michael: Hm.], let’s not know what’s coming through the door. So the person– I mean, you know, in a super ideal version of it we’re in a real space and, you know, the person walks in and we’ve been given an envelope with some poems in, which is the day’s set in a sense, and we go, ooh, okay! And, um, that’s great. Um, with the digital version we have to, kind of, get it in advance and sometimes we will just go, okay, let’s just…

Jessica: Have a peek! [Laughs]

Fiona: …know what it is.

Jessica:Yeah!

Fiona: But then you do have to stop yourself going any further than that, um, because it’s not helpful.

Jessica: Yeah, I sort of wonder if your personal reaction to a poem is often very different from the person who’s introducing you to it.

Michael: I think, again, this is something that we recognised fairly early on, that what was almost most helpful was to, um, not– just to try to hold back our own sense of what that poem might be for us or, uh, but to, sort of, try to investigate what it meant for somebody else. Where it’s useful to, kind of, throw in a, ‘Oh, it was interesting, because when I read it, it meant– I had images of X, Y, Z [Jessica: Hm.], so it’s really interesting to hear that for you it was around A, B, C’. Um, so it can be useful in that way. But actually most of the time I think we try to, sort of, hold back from putting our thing on it [Fiona: Hm.], because who cares what I think about a thing. It’s about somebody else’s experience, somebody else’s relationship, um, with that poem and what it’s meant and what it continues to mean for them in their life.

Jessica: Yeah. Do you find that lots of the same poems show up time and time again as friends to people?

Michael: It’s really fascinating what we’re– you know, having done it for as long as we’ve done it now, and I think Fiona said we’ve got about 280 poems that have been brought to us, to see the patterns. You know, we’ve had no Shakespeare, for example.

Jessica: Really?

Michael: We’ve had no sonnets or even, you know, some of the actors that we’ve spoken to I thought, oh, we might get some Shakespeare! [Jessica laughs] Andrew Scott might bring us some Shakespeare or something, you know, that’d be wonderful! Uh, and he’d just done Hamlet, you know, um, and… But no, nobody’s brought a Shakespeare. We’ve had a surprising amount of, um, Larkin. [Fiona: Hm.]

Jessica: Yeah.

Michael: Maybe I shouldn't be surprised by it but we’ve had a lot of Larkin. [Jessica: Mm.] Um, we’ve had quite a lot of Yeats. We’ve had Lake Isle of Innisfree more than once. Um, who else have we had, Fi?

Fiona: But that’s almost the only one, where you go very…

Michael: Yes, and well, maybe most surprising is, yeah, how few repeats we have.

Fiona: It’s unbelievable. To me it’s…

Michael: Yeah.

Fiona: Well, it’s not unbelievable, to me it’s– a major part of the joy is [Michael: Mm.], you know, that the diversity of the material is as diverse as the people we meet and the poets that have, you know, done what they can do to meet the human experience and put it down in words. And actually the collision, because there is a kind of– you know, there are patterns, there are, kind of, worlds, there are registers but they’re not to do with period or culture or… You know, they kind of cut across. So you get these meeting points between, you know, uh, Rumi and Larkin. I mean I can’t think of one actually, saying that, I need to be tested on that but, you know, there is that sort of sense in which, you know, the super modern sits next to the very classical [Jessica: Hmm.] work and, you know, they speak very differently but they’re speaking towards something that resonates and it’s very interesting how you then hear. Uh, this comes to, kind of, some of the other work we’re doing.

So we also had this wonderful online evening in the middle of one of the lockdowns where we held an event called In the Company of Poems, which was [Jessica: Hmm.], for a change for us, not about conversation and was purely about reading some of the poems that have come through the door and gathering a really terrific group of readers to do that with us. Um, but hearing on that evening, um, you know, contemporary American poet Ellen Bass next to, uh, Dylan Thomas or– you know, just fantastic. And I think when you do, are able to find a way to place them, you know, thoughtfully, kind of, in relation and thoughtfully in terms of the voice in relation [Jessica: Hm.], you hear them really– it brings something to the listening, um, that they’re in one another’s echoes somehow.

Jessica: Yeah. 

[Interval music]

 [To podcast listeners] This is the Listening Books podcast and we are in conversation with Fiona Bennett and Michael Schaeffer of The Poetry Exchange. This event they just mentioned, In the Company of Poems, I’m told that’s happening again in the autumn, so do check their website. I believe they have a newsletter you can sign up for if you’d like more details. And of course, if you haven’t heard their beautiful podcast, get ready to befriend some new poems. If you’d like to hear about the poem that has been a friend to me in my life, you’ll find a link to that episode of The Poetry Exchange in the show notes. That’s also where I’ll put Fiona and Michael’s upcoming recommendations for the Audiobook Listening Challenge.

[Music]

[To Fiona and Michael] I wonder, um, how does it change your experience of a poem to encounter it through introduction by someone else rather than coming upon it in the wild, so to speak? [Laughs]

Fiona: Ah, that’s beautifully put. I love the idea of coming upon them in the wild. [Jessica laughs] Um, oh my goodness, that’s the heart of the matter there you’ve put your finger on Jessica. [Jessica: Hm.] Um, because it’s just phenomenal. I mean, always the poems that have been brought to me by the people we’ve met, uh, they’re inside me in a way that I couldn’t possibly– you know, maybe a handful of those would be friends of mine and therefore I would have my private version of whatever that is but there’s others of them there that probably wouldn’t be [Jessica: Hmm.], but they are now because they’ve been introduced to me by, you know, with this, yeah, very powerful and specific connection.

And it’s something about the fact that that happens even when it’s digital, happens, you know, in person through the body and life of another human being and it’s not just me, my head in a page [Jessica: Hm.], there’s another human life there with it. And the other thing that’s really extraordinary, and I think is the test of it in a way, is where there is a poem that I have had a strong relationship with and somebody comes through the door, it’s fine but it also now lives with me in a kind of– you know, there are three parallel doors I can go through with that poem, you know, and sometimes I walk through that door and sometimes I walk through this one. Um, it’s the same poem in there but there’s just a different atmosphere and a different, uh, focus of attention and a different resonance.

Michael: I don’t think I’m a particularly good reader of poems on a page and I’m often not drawn to it. I have to really be in the right mood and [chuckling], you know, uh, but somebody introducing a poem to me through their personal experience of it and their relationship with it and their lived relationship, uh, with it, opens it up in this whole totally new way. It’s alive, you know, it’s a real thing, it’s extraordinary to me and it goes inside of me and it, sort of, does become a friend of mine actually, um, in a way that it absolutely wouldn’t if I hadn’t have been introduced to it through someone else’s experience of it. It’s completely revelatory for me and the experience of having these conversations alongside Fiona, uh, has opened up poetry to me completely and it’s one of the reasons why I’ve been interested to continue doing it all this time, is because it’s, um… I would hope that the podcast is able to introduce non-poetry people to poetry…

Jessica: Yeah.

Michael: …and to, sort of, take some of the curse off of it a little bit, which I still experience if you give me [Jessica laughs] a book of poems! I still feel that resistance to it a little bit, that somehow, you know, at school it, sort of, did feel a bit like a cryptic crossword puzzle…

Jessica: Yes!

Michael: …and nobody had given me the keys to unlock it and I was like, am I getting it right? You know, it’s about right and wrong at school, isn’t it, often?

Jessica: Yeah. So this is…

Michael: This is a whole other thing.

Jessica: Sorry to, kind of, cross you there, Michael. I got very excited because one of the things that I love about the concept of, uh, poem as friend is that friends don’t want to be solved like a puzzle but they do want to be understood and they offer understanding. But, you know, the sort of understanding the poem is asking of you is not, like, the solution to a puzzle [Fiona: Hm.], it’s not demanding that you notice every layer that is there. Um, like I would never notice and appreciate every layer of a human friend either, there are too many! And yet there is this understanding between us and a poem offers this understanding of what it is to be human in this world. And, um, the kind of understanding that it asks of us is such a friendly, um, request, not a– or invitation even, not a request, a friendly invitation I think.

Michael: That’s brilliant, that’s really great, I love that, and we wouldn’t consider ourselves a failure if we didn't understand every layer of our friend.

Jessica: Right.

Michael: Do you know?

Jessica: Yeah.

Michael: Whereas I’ve experienced that as a reader of poetry, going, well it’s clearly my fault [Jessica chuckles] I don’t get it.

Jessica: Yeah.

Fiona: And I think, you know, there is a kaleidoscope thing going on, right? Not a puzzle to be solved but there is a kaleidoscope thing going on, which is, you know, multiple layers, multiple patterns, multiple significances [Jessica: Mm.]. And, yes, absolutely deft craft by the poet in laying those multiple things on top of one another but, different poets would answer this question differently I’m sure, but it’s not your intention for somebody to get it when you write the poem either. You know, it’s to give an experience of something [Jessica: Mm.] or to send something out that has much more mystery in it than that. [Jessica: Mm.] Um, you know, it’s a mysterious process as a writer as much as it is as a reader in my sense of it and actually it’s honouring that in the poet that I’m, kind of, trying to do, which is not to be dismissive of, you know, the rigour of craft and all those things [Jessica: Mm.], they’re there but they’re not the only things there!

Jessica: Yeah.

Fiona:You know, the other thing that’s there is a beating heart in both the poet and the reader, which is bigger and more mysterious than that [Jessica: Mm.], which Yeats, you know, knew so well.

Jessica: I really do appreciate this idea of poem as friend. I do think that makes it, um, more accessible to people in an age when I think poetry has got the unfortunate reputation of being only for intellectuals or the very literary type or that poets are really only writing for other poets. And, of course, poetry belongs to this really ancient tradition, far older than the novel, for heaven’s sake, um, and it’s older than writing itself. [Fiona: Mm.] And, I mean, all writing relies on sound, writing is meant to reflect sound, but poetry in particular, um, relies on sound for what makes it poetry. [Fiona: Mm.] And, I mean, other than songs, because you have lyrical poetry and that is performed, but I’m, sort of, wondering if we were exposed to non-musical poetry as performance more often, do you think it could shed that reputation of being too heady or, sort of, reserved for some educated elite?

Michael: Well, you just put me in mind, Jessica, of, um, when we were at Wise Words Festival in Canterbury [Jessica: Mm.], being in a tent and seeing Kae Tempest perform. I hadn’t ever read their work, I’d heard of them [Jessica: Mm.], um, but it was my first time seeing them on stage and I was absolutely blown away. It was a visceral experience. When poetry is performed it’s made real, it’s made flesh and it enters into us in a different way, vibrationally and, you know, that did make me realise that it had the power to affect me in a way that poetry hadn’t previously on the page. [Jessica: Hm.]

Fiona: That was an amazing, amazing night that.

Michael: Yeah, it was, wasn’t it Fi?

Fiona: I will remember that forever.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah.

Fiona: Um, I mean, you know, I would, kind of, say I don’t think there’s any poetry that isn’t musical [Jessica: Mm.], it’s just musical in different ways.

Jessica: Yes.

Fiona: And there’s so many different kinds of poetry as well! That’s– you know, it’s, again, sort of, back to this thing of the, kind of, original survey thing that I love, is just all the multiple genres, the multiple voices, the multiple places it’s coming from, the multiple places it can go to [Jessica: Mm.] when it’s read on a page, when it’s performed, when it’s offered. That to me is completely the wonder of the art form and actually I think it’s very– yeah, it’s great to, kind of, get away from the, sort of, boundaries of performance or page or, you know, it’s people with the material together. That doesn’t mean to say that it’s always– you know, some work lends itself more to being read aloud, being performed; two different things even there. [Jessica: Mm.] You know, so there are kind of multiple ways in which it can happen but, in terms of what you’re asking about, Jessica, I think finding ways for us to be together [Jessica: Hmm.] with poetry, um, is definitely something that can open it up.

Jessica: Yeah, how to be together. I don’t know if you watched any of the US presidential inauguration back in January but I was struck both by the performance of Amanda Gorman when she delivered the inaugural poem that she had written for the occasion. [Fiona: Mm.] I was struck by that because, I mean, it was riveting, it was an absolutely riveting performance that I watched several times, um, but I was also struck by the collective gasp, you know, and from people who I’m fairly confident do not make poetry a part of their everyday, um, practice or are not exposed to it every day. I felt like that was a very communal reaction and there was something of togetherness in experiencing that poem.

Fiona: Mm, that was astonishing, it was absolutely astonishing. You’ve reminded me in describing that so beautifully, of, um, something that Krista Tippett did talk about as well in the episode with her, which is about the power of naming. [Jessica: Mm.] And I think that’s a lot what was going on in that moment, was the power of beautifully, accurately– I mean, accuracy is a huge ask in poetry. You’ve got this tiny canvas, you’ve only got this number of lines, you’ve got to be accurate. If you’re not accurate about what you’re talking about…

Jessica: Yeah.

Fiona: …your poem starts– you know, I know that when I’m drafting work. I go, oh, it’s flaky there, I’m not accurate, that’s not specific enough, that’s not accurate enough. You know, the accuracy with which she was able to meet that huge moment. And, yeah, I think Krista talks about the healing power of the naming of something [Jessica: Mm.], that in naming it we heal something and I think that gasp was a kind of healing.

Jessica: Mm, I hope so. Um, one of the things I’ve been asking all our guests for this series of the podcast is for recommendations for those of us doing the Audiobook Listening Challenge, uh, which is linked in the show notes. And one thing you might notice is that poetry, sadly, does not make an appearance as such! But there are at least two of the challenges where poetry can get a look in. One is a book narrated by the author, so any contemporary poetry that’s performed by the authors themselves might be a place where someone could meet that challenge. And then the other, my favourite challenge, is the free space, where you get to design your own challenge.

I was chatting with some colleagues about this and what we had decided our free space would be and I was surprised by how often poetry came up. And, again, the desire expressed is from people who, like me, we don’t necessarily make reading poetry a daily practice and yet the experience of reading it when we do is always so great that we wonder why we don’t do it more often! And so this came up quite a bit, um, to include poetry as our personal or custom-designed free space. Um, so I was wondering if the two of you could recommend any collections of poetry for people who are taking up the Audiobook Listening Challenge this year?

Fiona: Hmmm.

Michael: Well, it was interesting because I was looking through, um, some of my favourite anthologies [Jessica: Mhm.], most of which Fiona Bennett has bought me!

Jessica: [Laughs] That’s a good friend!

Michael: I was…

Fiona: Now, Michael, when you say anthology, do you always mean anthology or do you mean collections and anthologies?

Michael: I meant specifically anthologies…

Fiona: Okay.

Michael: …because that’s what I was looking for, and I do enjoy experiencing poetry through anthologies [Fiona: Mm.], um, and I was really disappointed to discover that none of the ones that I treasure in my home have audio versions.

Jessica: [Gasps] Oh, well, now there’s an opportunity! [Laughs]

Michael: And I guess that’s something to do– well, um, yes! I don’t know if that’s something to do with, you know, the complications of permissions and stuff like that…

Jessica: Could be.

Michael: …but Fiona and I, uh, under the banner of The Poetry Exchange will be creating, uh, an anthology of poems and we will be doing an audio version of it.

Jessica: Oh, how wonderful.

Michael: Um, yeah, so, um, watch this space for that. But, uh, I couldn’t find one that I wanted to recommend. Fiona, have you found collections, any audio collections?

Fiona: I think I would hotly, and hotly is the appropriate word [Jessica chuckles], recommend Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture [Jessica: Oo.], which is a terrific collection and I’m pretty sure, you may have to double-check, Jessica, but I’m pretty sure there is an audiobook version out there with her reading the whole collection. And I recommend that, partly because I really, really enjoy her reading her work [Jessica: Hmm.], she really takes the time and space that it deserves. Um, she’s got a beautiful, kind of– there’s that rich, kind of, um– yeah, you’ve just got a full voice resonance going on in there, I really like that, and yet it’s not into that kind of declaiming. She manages to [Jessica: Hmm.] do intimate and epic at the same time, which is what I adore in all my favourite actors and all my favourite…

Jessica: Intimate and epic at the same time.

Fiona: Yeah.

Jessica: Wow.

Fiona: You’ve got to be able to do that. So that would be my suggestion, would be Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture. Now, um, I’m sure I could think of more. I want to mention one other reading, what’s the thing? Challenge?

Jessica: Yes.

Fiona: Which is not the poet themselves reading but it’s a brilliant, brilliant listening experience, it’s my top ticket, which is a, kind of, poem for voices written by Alice Oswald, called A Sleepwalk on the Severn. It’s three voices and the poem, in a way, is expressing something about what happens when the moon touches us and when the moon touches the planet [Jessica: Hmm.] and the different phases of the moon. And there are three voices who voice these different perspectives of the river and the moon and some of the characters that live and work by the river, and, um, it’s extraordinary. It’s my favourite audio-poetry experience.

Michael: I have to say, it’s been really interesting to do this and to think about audiobooks because I don’t listen to audiobooks. [Jessica: Hmm.] I listen to podcasts [Jessica: Mhm.], I listen to [chuckling] plays on Radio 4 and, um, do them sometimes! But, uh, I never listen to audiobooks. So my Audiobook Listening Challenge [Jessica: Hmm.] is going to be to listen to an audiobook.

Jessica: Very good. Any audiobook? Just any audiobook?

Michael: Any audiobook, yeah, I’m going to pick one.

Jessica: Yeah!

Fiona: I mean, this has just been so fascinating for us, hasn’t it Michael? Because…

Michael: Yeah, nice to be on the other side, isn’t it, Fi?

Fiona: Yeah! [Jessica laughs] Yeah, being on the other side and also maybe we don’t– I mean, we’re, sort of, heavily involved in the business of recording and audio work and…

Michael: Yeah.

Fiona: …all this, but we don’t often have the chance to stop and think about it, and it’s such a, um…

Michael: Yeah.

Fiona: …such a beautiful connection to be doing that, guided by somebody who’s got such a thoughtful approach [Michael: Mm.] to it, uh, and such a purposeful approach to what it’s all for. It’s really made me think a lot, which is great.

Michael: Yeah.

Jessica: Thank you.

Michael: Yeah, very well said, yeah, yeah.

Jessica: Thank you for those very kind words and thank you for introducing poems as friends.

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Jessica: [To listeners] And thank you for listening. I did check on the Carol Ann Duffy collection Rapture and it is indeed an audiobook narrated by the poet herself. Now I wonder, is there a poem you’ve befriended recently? We’d love to hear about it. You can find us on social media, @ListeningBooks, and as usual I’ll put links for how to find us there and how to leave a review in the show notes.

The Listening Books podcast is produced by Listening Books, a UK charity that provides an audiobook lending service for over 100,000 members who find that an illness, mental health, physical or learning disability affects their ability to read the printed word or hold a book. It’s simple to join. For more information, head to our website www.listening-books.org.uk.

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[End of Transcript]

Transcript

David: The kayak gives this incredible perspective on the world, where you are really embedded in the worlds of other species, you’re surrounded by other animals. Um, they don’t respond to you in the way that they respond to humans on foot because obviously they are so much more skilled in and on the water than you are.

[Podcast theme tune begins]

Jessica: [Speaking to podcast listeners] This is the Listening Books podcast. For every kind of reader and especially for fans of audiobooks. I’m Jessica Stone and because this summer lots of us are staying close to home I wanted to bring some adventure, some voyage, some discovery to my reading, and to the podcast. So today I offer you this conversation with David Gange, author of The Frayed Atlantic Edge, a historian’s journey from Shetland to the Channel.

[Music ends]

[Speaking to David] Welcome David, and thank you for being here. The Frayed Atlantic Edge is an account of the year you spent kayaking the Atlantic coastlines from Shetland to Cornwall. You’re a historian, and I can’t speak for everyone, but I know when I picture historians I don’t generally picture them in a kayak battling the elements! So, can you tell me a little about how this project was conceived and how it came about?

David: Okay, great, thanks. So, um, I think historians more and more these days are not, kind of, stuck in the archives that we usually associate with them, uh, partly because those archives tend to record the stories of very particular people. So I think it’s a, kind of, general trend that you’ll see with the absolutely wonderful historian called Bathsheba Demuth, for instance, who’s written a great book called Floating Coast about the Bering Strait, again, spending loads of time outdoors, um, talking to people, collecting those stories, oral histories, rather than, um, archival ones. So, yeah, um, my approach to this came from, um, kind of dissatisfaction with what stories are told in the archives, so what stories historians have traditionally told about Britain and Ireland, which tend to be very urban stories, focused on London in particular but generally in big cities.

Um, so I was, yeah, wondering what it would look like to think about those histories from the perspectives of the coasts, from the perspectives of people whose stories aren’t usually recorded, um, rather than from the middle. Um, so that’s where the, kind of, impulse came from. Um, but other than that, just, um, I used to do loads of my reading outdoors, I used to do loads of reading in mountains and on the coast and that reading was never about the outdoors. Um, and then gradually, through doing that began to, kind of, see the stories in the places I was going, um, and a couple of people, including, um, the author, Adam Nicolson, began to just, um, push on me the idea that maybe the kayak would be a useful, kind of, tool for researching and writing and maybe I should take advantage of the fact that I did that, and stop reading books about cities on the coastline and start writing about the coastline itself too.

Jessica: Why the kayak specifically?

David: Um, okay, so the kayak gives this incredible perspective on the world, where you are really embedded in the worlds of other species, you’re surrounded by other animals. Um, they don’t respond to you in the way that they respond to humans on foot because obviously they are so much more skilled in and on the water than you are. So you’re, kind of, in their territory, um, and it gives you a really different sense of your role in the world, of your place in the world and one that I think is actually really historical. Like, um, the coastlines of the British Isles were, um, kind of, the main arteries of trade and transport. They were places that people lived much more than they do today. I mean, this is a country that really has turned its back on the sea in, kind of, practical ways [Jessica: Mhm.] and, yeah, most of the people out at sea in the past would have been in, like, tiny family boats, not in big ships or anything. So getting out in that little boat is a way of, kind of, finding connection to those pasts, to those– not just pasts but futures that we need as well. [Jessica: Mhm.] Futures where we don’t think of ourselves as quite so separate, where we imagine ourselves to be part of the natural world rather than different from it. Um, I love the kayak for that. Just this, kind of, sense of connection to so much, this sense of, kind of, getting out of the way the city separates us from things.

Jessica: Mhm. What expectations did you have going into this and how did those end up comparing with the reality?

David: Um, so I remember waking up in, kind of, total cold sweats one night, um, just before setting off on the journey, realising that I had signed a contract to do something that I had no idea whether I could do it all. Um, I’d never taken on a kayak journey on this kind of scale at all, and I was sleeping outdoors, um, in just a waterproof sleeping bag for most of the journey and I had no idea how long I could do that kind of thing for either. Um, and I was also going to some sea that is absolutely ferocious. I mean, starting from Shetland, where the sea is as wild as can be, um, that felt absolutely terrifying when I was setting off on it. Um, but then I quite quickly felt extremely guilty because I’d told people what a challenge this was going to be and then for the first couple of months the weather was just perfect, it was as still as could be, and I felt like I was just in an armchair at sea. [Jessica laughs]

It was as flat as could be and I’d told people this is going to be such a challenge and, I think I say in the book at one point that my biggest threat for those first couple of months was, like, sunburnt ears. Um, so, yeah, it was extremely fortunate. In a different year I would failed, I wouldn’t have been able to do it at all, but for some reason that year, um, the, kind of, September gales didn’t arrive till January and it was just so much more straightforward than I could have possibly have imagined it would be. And it just created that couple of months introduction [Jessica: Mhm.] to be able to get to grips with things, to be able to, kind of, build up some kayaking stamina, to get used to spending all that time outdoors, um, before things did get more difficult over the winter.

Jessica: Yeah, I was going to say that seems like a project you don’t want to start in the winter! [Laughs]

David: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it was really fortunate to have such pleasant conditions to start in. I deliberately made the first couple of legs of it quite short, like I spent a month on Shetland, which could have been kayaked in a few days [Jessica: Mhm.] if I’d have been pushing it. Um, just, yeah, making my, kind of, way as slowly as possible to really, kind of, absorb myself in the places. Then round Skye, um, in the winter, that was a really tricky part. It rained for nearly the whole month, um, and I was just constantly soaked through. [Jessica: Mmm!] That was a very, very, very different experience.

Jessica: Yeah. Are there any places that you went to that you’d definitely love to go back but in a more welcoming season?

David: [Laughs] That’s a really good question. Um, pfuh, so absolutely, I mean, and I guess– so I got to Ireland [Jessica: Mm.] just as the spring was beginning and I did the first few bits, like round Donegal [Jessica: Mm.] and down and across to Tory Island and things like that, um, when there were just, kind of, the first inklings of spring and when the water was still really holding winter. That was quite an ordeal because, um, I was having to launch through surf all the time and land in surf, which meant just quite a lot of bruises from falling out of the kayak when landing, things like that. Um, and I would love to do that bit again in flatter seas, in seas that I wasn’t having to worry about quite so often. Historically it’s such an interesting coastline and places like Tory Island, which has historically had this most incredible independence, um, like the islanders refused to pay tax for, um, decade after decade. Um, they were notorious for, kind of, fighting off tax collectors [Jessica laughs]. Tax collectors would, kind of, come back to the mainland saying that they’d been trussed up and thrown back in their boats and talking about the violent women of the island who’d sent them away, in a phrase from one of the reports, ‘much less of a man than I had arrived’. [Both laugh] So, yeah, going to spend a lot of time in places like Tory Island, um, socialising properly without the worry of, um, what bruises were going to appear as I hit the water again, [Jessica chuckles] that would be wonderful.

Jessica: This book contains so much. Uh, there is the adventure complete with danger as well. Um, there’s the history and geography. There’s poetry, there’s the natural world, there’s stories and folklore. I suppose because I work in audiobook production I have a natural interest in the spoken word and oral traditions. So I was wondering if you could say a little about what poetry and storytelling offer historians?

David: Poets are profoundly important on all of these coastlines, on all of these islands, for several different reasons. Um, one of them is that islands on the west coast of Britain have often been seen from the mainland as being, kind of, exotic or as being backwards. Um, they’ve been given these, kind of, urban-centred histories that really marginalise them and historians have not been good at reclaiming that. They’ve not been good at pushing back against that. Poets have been wonderful at it. So, for instance, there’s a poet called Christine Evans on Ynys Enlli, um, a little island off the coast of Wales, Bardsey Island, who has, kind of, devoted her career since the 60s to rewriting the, kind of, tropes that Bardsey has fitted into, to giving it a different role in history, um, to recreating the meaning that its given.

So it’s a place that used to be a site of pilgrimage, it’s supposed to have, like, 20,000 saints buried there, so it’s associated in the way that most people write about it, with death. [Jessica: Mhm.] And she really kind of reframes that and makes it a, kind of, living place of birth and of real, natural life in ways that are absolutely wonderful and it ways that no historian has tried or maybe no historian would try. And then there are poets in places like Shetland, like Roseanne Watt – whose work is absolutely glorious, came out just after this book was published, so it isn’t included in it but I wish it was – who, yeah, do lots of this rereading, make these islands central, give them the kind of meanings that they have for people who live there rather than the ones imposed on them from outside. [Jessica: Mm.]

Um, and yeah, there’s a real sense in which the, kind of, histories written in archives, the official documents, um, tell stories that islanders don’t recognise and the poets, um, who are really the inheritors of long oral traditions, so languages like Gaelic in Scotland or Irish or Welsh have much, much stronger oral, yes, storytelling traditions than, um, English tends to have. And the poets can, kind of, run back through those oral histories in ways that it’s more problematic for historians to do in prose. So I always, when writing about these places, try and make sure that the voices of those poets speak, that I’m not, kind of, um, trampling over that with historical prose, um, but instead providing some amplification for those absolutely astonishingly wonderful poets that occupy those islands.

Jessica: That reminds me. You mentioned in the Western Isles section that, uh, Robert Macfarlane had received some pushback, uh, for the way that he had described those communities, more the tone, the sort of lyricism, um, and that he had responded to that in later works by incorporating more voices, uh, from those communities. Um, but basically it made me wonder if you have – and you can set me straight if I’ve got that a bit muddled! Basically I’m wondering I’m wondering if you’ve had any feedback from readers from the communities that you’ve described in this book?

David: Great, yes, so first thing to say is I love Robert Macfarlane.

Jessica: Yeah.

David: Like, I’m not being, kind of, snarky about his incredible body of work or anything like that but, yeah, the thing you are referring to I think is the, kind of, really, really wonderful literary figure, poet and critic and, um, everything else, non-fiction writer, um, Kathleen Jamie [Jessica: Hm.], who wrote a really powerful review back in 2008 in The London Review of Books. Um, in which she challenged Robert Macfarlane for his first book about these kinds of things, called The Wild Places, for the way in which a lot of the difficult histories in these landscapes didn’t appear [Jessica: Hm.], how he was, kind of, um, yeah, writing lyrically about beautiful places and ignoring some of the histories. And I think it’s a really fantastic example of how a strongly worded, um, but very insightful review can actually, kind of, improve a whole field. [Jessica: Hm.] Like, I think it said– and a huge credit to Robert Macfarlane that rather than responding to what was quite a critical review in a, kind of, defensive way, that he really, really developed his writing and enriched it in extraordinary ways, um, for the later books. So, I tell that as something that’s supposed to be a, kind of, good story rather than one that’s critical of anyone at all really.

Jessica: Yeah.

David: And in terms of the second part of your question, um, I mean, I’m sure there are people along the coastlines who don’t recognise the picture that I give in the places that they live, it would be strange if there weren’t, but I’ve been so happy with the response to the book from those coastlines. Um, okay, most of the talks that I get booked to give are along those coastlines and places. I was really pleased that the Highland Book Prize responded so well…

Jessica: Yes.

David: …to the project and, yeah, the links that it’s, kind of, allowed me to make with people up there who do like the way that I’ve presented those things and, kind of, advocated for the voices from those coastlines. That to me has been the thing I’ve enjoyed most about the whole process really. [Jessica: Hm.] There was one writer from, um, Shetland who did ask me whether my whole method for writing is waiting in coffee shops or bars to ambush locals and, um [laughing] yeah, and learn about the places! That was after I’d ambushed him in a coffee shop.

Jessica: [Laughing] That’s lovely. I mean that seems like a good strategy to me! [David laughs]

David: It’s certainly a different one!

Jessica: You mentioned this earlier, that one of the striking observations that you made, uh, in the book is how our current understanding of place and our perceived connection or lack thereof to other places has been shaped by the dominance of cities in the interior, um, and how fundamentally our understanding may be altered when the focus shifts to the coastline. You did touch on this earlier but I wondered if you could say a little more about that, and what connections these coastlines reveal that might surprise us.

David: Um, the journey was, kind of, calculated to be both quite obvious, it was simple, it was just following those coastlines, but also to really, kind of, defamiliarise. So it was [Jessica: Hm.] all the way down, um, Britain and Ireland, um, but the first seven months of it were all in Scotland and only one month of it touched on England, the very, very last one. Um, and I’d travelled for, I think, five months by the time I reached the second town with more than 6,000 people in it, um, so it was…

Jessica: Wow.

David: …really, like, travelling for a long time without any sense that cities existed. Um, and, yeah, the coasts I was travelling along were not, kind of, port towns and beaches, so I think I’d been travelling for many months longer than that before I reached the first beach that you might, like, buy an ice-cream at. And so, a very, very different kind of perspective in that sense, and also linguistically as well. So, [Jessica: Hm.] a really extraordinary proportion of the whole journey was spent on coasts where English isn’t a really dominant first language, where the other languages are really significant and those languages give us really, really different perspectives on the world too.

Um, like, if you’re thinking about the stories that we tell about different bits of history, um, like a big concept like the Enlightenment, for instance, uh, that moment that for cities was this real kind of flourishing, um, but that I would think of as being quite a violent moment of cities beginning to dominate other places and taking, kind of, from other places. Like the Scottish coastlines, for instance, the west coast of Scotland had its enlightenment far earlier and the years that we think of as the Enlightenment were totally disastrous for those coastlines because [Jessica: Hm.] the cities tried to incorporate them into, kind of, this new political economy, this new way of doing agriculture, which led to the Potato Famine in Ireland being far worse than it should have been and led to the Clearances in Scotland.

So the Enlightenment was a dark age for the coasts, um, just as [Jessica: Hm.] the 70s were a kind of economic downturn for the cities, but a real moment of revitalisation on the coastlines. So, often the stories are opposite and I would like us to find ways of being able to tell British and Irish history without telling the stories that only work for cities and that still, kind of, continue to marginalise those coastlines in the way that they have been for so long. They really have, through so many periods of our histories, been the centre of the islands that we live on, um, and they’re so outward looking, so connected to other places, whether that be, kind of, other Celtic places, like Brittany, or whether it be, kind of, the whole north Atlantic world. Um, I mean Shetland has so many connections to Denmark and Germany as well as to, um, Scandinavia and to Iceland and Faroe, um, so they’re profoundly outward looking and cosmopolitan, but just really different geographical links than we usually associate, um, Britain with having.

Jessica:  Hm. I can’t help but note, um, that the year that you did this journey, um, in 2016, was also the year that the UK decided to leave the European Union and that strikes me as, um, something, which, again, we think of maybe from an understanding based on the dominance of cities rather than coastlines, maybe? I don’t know, um, but I’m wondering if that felt more or less removed for you while you were doing this journey?

David: Um, yeah, so that vote happened, I guess, about a month before I set off. So I set off in [Jessica: Mm.] July 2016 and kayaked till, kind of, July 2017. Um, so yeah, it was very– the sense of Britain trying to decide what direction it was going to go in was really quite palpable during that journey. So, um, a lot of the communities that I was travelling through, um, communities where fishing is a really important industry, um, a lot of those fishing communities did vote for Brexit and [Jessica: Mm.], um, were, kind of, really debating at that point whether this was going to be a good thing or not. There were some who were quite optimistic about that and others who felt that this was going to be a total disaster for the areas. Um, well, I mean we’ve seen how fishing has been treated over the last few months, um, in those terms. So it would be very, very interesting to go back now and see how the tone of those debates has changed.

Um, but yeah [Jessica: Mm.], there was a real sense of those coastlines reconsidering what their futures might be in the light of what had happened. Of course, for most of Scotland, most of those coastal regions of Scotland, um, the vote was really predominantly to remain, um, and there was, yeah, a kind of real sense of betrayal at the same time. So, yeah, we’ll see what happens with these coastlines. The thing I was trying to get towards, um, is the way in which the EU over the last, kind of, um, thirty years or so had been working to, kind of, reintegrate, um, these, kind of, coastal areas in some way. One of the seven EU cultural zones that they identified was the Atlantic Arc and lots of projects [Jessica: Mm.] were put together through that to bring, like, Galicia and Wales and, um, Gaelic-speaking Scotland together. And, um, that has produced some things that I think have been quite exciting and it would be interesting to see, um, where those kinds of projects go now that we are, kind of, severed from that Atlantic Arc in practical terms.

Jessica: Mhm. If I could ask you speculate a little [chuckles], um, do you think that this tension between what’s good for coastlines and what the, sort of, mainland decides is best for itself, are those always, uh, destined to be intention or can decisions be made that benefit both?

David: Um, yeah, I think– so there are ways in which organisational changes have worked for the benefit of coastlines over the last, kind of, thirty, forty years. Ways in which, um, kind of, local councils have been reorganised in ways that bring decision-making to the coastlines. Like that sounds like a, kind of, boring, mundane, kind of thing but it can actually be profoundly important for allowing some kind of self-determination on those coastlines. I would love to see a, kind of, increasing localisation of decision-making. Um personally [Jessica: Mm.] I think that the nation is the, kind of, most problematic organisational unit of all. Um, I think working in international terms or in very local or regional terms tends to operate quite well and the nation [Jessica: Mm.] can often, um, be really problematic, is this, kind of, middle ground, middle-, um, size structure. Um, so yeah, I’d just love to see the coastlines be given more power in that kind of decision-making. I’d love to see, um, more resources being put into the languages of the coastlines as well.

Jessica: Yeah.

David: Um, they’re under real threat at the moment despite the revitalisation of the last few years, and they contain, kind of, so many riches of perspectives on the world that we desperately need, as we come more and more to terms with how damaging, um, the kind of, mainstream culture that we’ve pursued for the last century actually is.

[Interval music]

Jessica: [To podcast listeners] You’re listening to a conversation with David Gange, author of The Frayed Atlantic Edge, here on the Listening Books podcast. Now feels like a good time to mention that David has a website that offers a lot of wonderful supplementary material to the book, including resources for language learning, if you’re inspired to take up one or more of the Atlantic languages highlighted there. The website is frayedatlanticedge.wordpress.com. I will, of course, link to it in the show notes. There’s also some stunning photography from his journey and some of those include encounters with wildlife, which is what we’re going to hear about next.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, there’s a few things you can do beyond listening, if you like. You can follow or subscribe, to make sure you always get the next episode. You can share a link with people you think would enjoy it. You can write a review on whatever platform you use. And you can engage with us on social media, @ListeningBooks. We always love to hear from you.

[Music]

[To David] You mentioned earlier, you know, the benefit of the kayak and being, you know, relatively unobtrusive and quiet and how much closer wildlife is willing to get to you like that. So I wondered if you could just share some of the more memorable encounters with wildlife that you had?

David: [Laughs] Um, that’s a lovely question and thanks for saying nice things about the photography, um, [Jessica laughs] which it doesn’t really deserve! But, um, so, yeah, the kayak is just the best wildlife hide you can possibly imagine. Um, so a few of the things that really, really struck me wildlife-wise that I will remember forever. Um, one of them, the first one was, kind of, setting out from the very, very beginning of the journey, heading up north from the very north of Shetland up to the rock that is the northernmost part of the British Isles, um, a little rock just called Out Stack, which is right next to Muckle Flugga, which is a huge gannet colony. So, heading out and thinking, I wonder if this is going to feel, kind of, ceremonial and like a dramatic, kind of, start, and within a few minutes of leaving Shetland behind, um, was just absolutely surrounded of thousands of gannets, just in a big, huge circle overheard, this big, kind of, vortex of gannets. Um, they weren’t squawking or anything, they weren’t vocalising but still the, kind of, sound of their wings was immense. So just this immense sound of gannets overhead, to the point where I couldn’t hear the sea anymore at all, um, and just…

Jessica: Wow.

David: …you know, the scale of life involved in that was, kind of– with great skuas coming along and trying to pluck them out the air as well. Um, and just so dramatic, so unusual and just such a, kind of, beautiful moment for setting off, to feel that I had this, kind of, vast, orchestrated accompaniment. Um, really, really quite something. Um, then one thing I love to do, so I have a little, kind of, they’re not goggles but it’s like a mask; so not a full snorkelling mask but a kind of mask that allows you to see at 360 degrees. So I have that with me and if something really exciting comes along then I will put that on and tip myself up so I can see it in the water, and doing that with basking sharks if basking sharks approach [Jessica: Ah!] is just one of my favourite things ever. I love basking sharks a lot.

Uh, but another really memorable one that was almost disastrous, um, was, kind of, sitting in the kayak watching minke whales. So I was sitting watching them come up and, kind of, learning a little bit about the patterns. So they’d come up, like, once and then they’d go down for another five seconds or so and then come up, kind of, thirty/forty feet further onwards, um, and then go down for another five seconds or so, or ten seconds. Um, and then they do that, kind of, three or four times and then disappear for a while. And I suddenly out of the corner of my eye caught sight of one come up about the distance behind me that meant I should expect it to, five or ten seconds later, come up right underneath the kayak.

Um, so I held on to my paddle very carefully with one hand, making sure I could brace, and got the camera out with the other, and, kind of, held the camera up and it came up about ten feet to my right and I got this incredible view of this– there was quite a bit more swell so it was almost like the side of the wave was, kind of, museum glass and this, kind of, whale’s eye and throat pleats coming out [Jessica gasps] and I got my one photo, um, just before it went down again. And my whole kayak, just by the water it had displaced, just, kind of, shifting sideways, just about managed to stop the camera going to the bottom of the sea, and started paddling on and got the photo. So that’s one of my favourite photos I’ve ever taken just because the moment of it [laughs] and the fear of whether I was actually going to be able to stay upright through that was such a dramatic one.

Jessica: That’s amazing. You’ve got to have that framed in your home somewhere, right?

David: Oh, I haven’t, but I probably should at some point, but… [Jessica laughs] And then just the other little rarities you sometimes see. So I love little auks. So little auks are like cousins of the puffin but about the size of a sparrow [Jessica: Ah!]. They are really tiny and they spend their whole year just on the wing, out over the ocean. Obviously, there’s these huge, kind of, stormy seas and you’ve got these tiny little, kind of, seafaring cousins of the puffin out, and every so often, especially after bad weather, um, a handful of them might, kind of, turn up on different bits of the coastline.

Jessica: I’d like to ask you about the audiobook now. Um, Ed Hughes narrates the audiobook and, um, I was just wondering, did you have much input in the casting and production of it?

David: Not really. He asked me for, um, some advice on some pronunciations and things and I was given a choice from four people…

Jessica: Oh, okay.

David: …to begin with, to read it. So, um, Ed was the one I chose from those four. I just got a brief snippet of each of their voices.

Jessica: Yeah. Were you ever tempted to do the narration yourself?

David: Um, yes. Yeah, I– there are many ways in which I would have loved to. Um, I was advised that when authors try and do audiobooks themselves, um, [Jessica laughs] they– [chuckles] the sight of them coming out of the studio, um, can often be quite a dramatic one of, like [Jessica laughs] people who look like they’ve been through quite some kind of ordeal, especially for people not used to doing that kind of thing. There is a benefit to having a professional [chuckling], um, do…

Jessica: Yes.

David: …that kind of thing.

Jessica: Yeah, I think it is true that, um, it’s a test of endurance in many ways to read an audiobook, especially if you’re not used to it. And, I think, especially if you’ve been out in the open air [laughing] enjoying yourself in a kayak, then to suddenly be in a very, small dark room [laughing] while you’re– for hours on end…

David: Yeah.

Jessica: …to read aloud. That does seem like it would be challenging.

David: Yeah.

Jessica: I wanted to ask you, uh, because I saw on your website that there are some other projects in the works. Would you like to say anything about what you’re working on now?

David: Yeah. So this is a book that because of the pandemic is taking, um, a fair bit longer than was originally planned, but the next book is called Afloat and it’s, kind of, casting off the kayak [Jessica: Oh.] and instead taking traditional boats, so wooden boats and skin boats, and it’s taking a much bigger geography as well. So, um, including Faroe and Greenland and Newfoundland and, um, then down to the Caribbean to finish, looking at the...

Jessica: Wow.

David: …stories that can be told, um, through the, kind of, small-boat traditions of those places. So at the moment I’m reading lots and lots of, um, First Nations and other Indigenous perspectives on boats and the, kind of, significance of boats to those kind of cultures. Which in some ways are incredibly different from the histories that I’ve written about so far but in other ways have quite a lot of parallels in terms of places that a bigger, um, kind of, commercialised culture has dramatically trampled, um, and, kind of, taken centre stage over, um, where there are many perspectives from those small-boat communities all round the North Atlantic that I think are really, really worth recovering.

So I’ve taken, um, ten individual small-boat styles and, um, have taken journeys– well, in fact I was going to say I’ve taken journeys so far in some of them, but in fact only in one of them so far. Um, so starting in Ireland with a boat type called the Bád iomartha, um, which is now entirely extinct, um, but that it was possible to find a boat that was going to become a sail boat, called a Púcán – where if it didn’t have a sail in it, it would be essentially a Bád iomartha – and, kind of, use that, um, to explore the, kind of, ways of life that the Bád iomartha had made possible in some, kind of, small parts of Connemara. Um, so, yeah, again [Jessica: Mm.], journeys.

Um, there’s a lot more kind of discussion with people who make and use boats in this book. There’s a lot more, kind of, portrait photography and things too, and a much more, kind of, black and white aesthetic rather than the, kind of, full-colour of The Frayed Atlantic Edge with its bright yellow kayak. Um, so, yeah, it’s a wonderful project to be doing, it’s just one that it hasn’t been possible to do all the planned travel for. [Jessica: Mm.] I was supposed to be spending the whole of 2020 travelling to places like Greenland, which has obviously been delayed but, yeah…

Jessica: Gee, I wonder what…

David: Yeah!

Jessica: …happened that could have possibly thrown off those plans! I want to shift gears now and ask you for some reading recommendations for listeners who might be attempting our 2021 Audiobook Listening Challenge. One of the challenges is simply to listen to a non-fiction book that is not a memoir, and you reference so many wonderful books in The Frayed Atlantic Edge that I figured you’d be a great one to ask for recommendations for this category.

David: Okay, great. I’m having a think. So, the book that I mentioned right at the beginning, if you want a really significant historical, kind of, re-reading of a place that is full of other species, full of really sensitive understandings of different cultures then Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast, it really is the place to go. It is wonderful. [Jessica: Mm.] Um, a book that, um, I think everyone, um, would benefit from some kind of engagement with, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweet Grass. Um, I know it’s very popular at the moment, so lots of your listeners might already have it on their lists, but it is really wonderful. Can I make a suggestion for poetry too? I don’t know if it’s available in a, kind of, full audiobook form, but most of the poems from it are available to listen to or even as, kind of, film poems too; um, Roseanne Watts Moder Dy is such, such a glorious book that, again, I think it can really help anyone understand those, kind of, coastlines that are so close to us. Um, Rebecca Giggs’s book called Fathoms, which is about whales, is also [Jessica: Mm.] absolutely brilliant. There are some great books about whales out there – whales with an H I mean.

Jessica: Wonderful, thank you for those recommendations. Um, you know that Listening Books is a lending service, um, for people who, for reasons of disability or mental health reasons or for a variety of reasons, find it difficult to read traditional printed books, um and when I first asked you about doing this conversation you mentioned that there was a link between this project and disability. And I just wondered if that’s something that you would like to talk about and share?

David: Yeah, so the person who the book is dedicated to, who was my partner for twenty years, um, who was the person who got me into, I mean, so many other things to do with books. So, um, she’s a first-language Welsh speaker, um, so that’s, kind of, where my interest in small languages comes from. So I didn’t grow up kayaking at all or reading anything to do with the sea but then back in 2009 she had a car accident, um, a kind of really life-changing car accident. So we used to do lots in the mountains together until then but since then she’s not really been able to walk for more than, like, five, maybe ten minutes a day, um, and, yeah, her mobility has been, kind of, drastically reduced by that accident.

Um, and yeah, it was shortly after that that we thought maybe boats are the way for us to still do lots of outdoors things, um, even though we can’t, kind of, get in the mountains anymore. Um, so we bought our first little inflatable two-person kayak and we, um, took it on some incredibly stupid journeys, some ones that [Jessica laughs] I can’t quite believe we did. Like, one of our first trips was to Bardsey Island, across some of the most dangerous tides imaginable! And it was terrifying, um, but we got the bug, um, we both absolutely loved it. Um, so, yeah, since then the kayak has been, kind of, her way of doing lots of outdoors things still. Um, she is now a Paralympic hopeful kayaker, she’s part of the, kind of, team, um…

Jessica: Wow.

David: …for those kind of events. She’s currently the reserve for the World Championships coming up and, yeah, I now obviously spend lots of my career writing about, um, kayaking. So it was a very, kind of, fateful decision. Um, yeah, but one thing that I’ve learned through, kind of, engagement with the Paralympic team and things is just how, um, amazing boats are for people with limited mobility, just the kind of freedom a kayak can give to some people with those kinds of conditions. So, yeah, it’s been quite an incredible journey.

Jessica: That's really an inspiring story and I thank you for sharing that with us. I think a lot of our listeners will appreciate hearing that.

David: Great.

[Music begins]

Jessica: [To listeners] And thanks to David as well for all those enticing book recommendations. I’ll put those in the show notes along with the all the usual links. If you want the book equivalent of feeling the salt spray of the Atlantic on your face this summer, The Frayed Atlantic Edge is for you. I’ll be back next month. In the meantime we’d love to hear how you’re finding adventure in your reading this summer. So come find us on social media, @ListeningBooks, we’d love to hear from you.

The Listening Books podcast is produced by Listening Books, a UK charity that provides an audiobook lending service for over 100,000 members who find that an illness, mental health, physical or learning disability affects their ability to read the printed word or hold a book. It’s simple to join. For more information, head to our website www.listening-books.org.uk.

[Music ends]

[End of Transcript]

Coming Soon!

Summary

Author Francis Spufford talks about what it's been like to launch his new novel, Light Perpetual, during a pandemic, the many talents and accents required of audiobook narrator Imogen Church, the fondness he holds for his 'unlikable' characters, and why the narrator was especially important for his historical novel Golden Hill. To top it off, he delivers a beautiful reflection on the extraordinariness of our ordinary lives.

Transcript

Francis: My other conviction here is that when you’re writing difficult things you should make them as rich and pleasurable as possible for the reader, that there need to be compensations.

[Podcast theme tune]

Jessica: [Speaking to podcast listeners] This is the Listening Books podcast, a show for every kind of reader, but especially for fans of audiobooks. I’m Jessica Stone and today I’m bringing you a conversation with Francis Spufford, author of quite a few books actually but today we’re focusing on his historical novel Golden Hill, set in eighteenth-century Manhattan, and his latest novel Light Perpetual, which begins in London, 1944, with the bombing of a Woolworth’s and follows the hypothetical lives of five fictional children killed in that moment. I found this discussion rather moving, as you’ll soon discover, and I hope you do too.

[Music ends]

[Speaking to Francis] Thank you, Francis, for, um, giving us your time today. Your latest book, Light Perpetual, came out in early February this year. What’s it been like to launch a book during a pandemic?

Francis: Ah, well I’ve had a whole year of pandemic to get used to some of it in, like everybody, so it’s not as if, um, doing everything by Zoom came as much of a shock! Um, the strange and encouraging thing I suppose is that people have read their way through the pandemic and they’ve been remarkably welcoming when new books came along. So although I’ve really missed the direct human presence parts of bringing a book out – it would have been nice to get inside physical bookshops and meet physical readers, who I’m assured have, you know, arms and legs and are solid human beings like me rather than just faces on screens – um, there has still been a sense of real contact and of the book leaving me and heading off out into the world to have adventures in other people’s imaginations.

In a way– because of course that part’s always very mysterious for a writer, you never know what becomes of your book once it’s left your mind and taken up residence in somebody else’s and in some ways I’m kind of getting more bulletins back about people reading the book because everybody is talking to everybody else, um, on screen anyway. So it’s not like it just dropped out into the void, it’s, you know, I can see it in the distance having conversations on its own with people.

Jessica: That’s lovely. I know, um, when I heard about it, it was on Twitter, it was before it was released and there was conversation already happening about it and it was nice to have something to get excited about, um, last year and to look forward to for February. Um, so do you usually enjoy then all the activity that surrounds, uh, a book launch?

Francis: Yes. Uh, I know that not all writers do but I am both a genuinely solitary person who enjoys the, kind of, reclusive aspect of, you know, sitting alone writing a book for years and years, and then the contrasting bit when you get to go out into the world and be gregarious in ways that make up for all that solitude. Um, so on the whole yeah, I like book festivals and I like book shops and I like talking to people, um, and as you’ll discover I’m a motormouth anyway. I’m a solitary motormouth, so I’m good with talking and talking and talking and talking and [Jessica laughs] talking some more about it!

Jessica: Here I was worried I might not have enough good questions!

Francis: I promise I’ll let you get a question in edgeways here and there! [Jessica laughs]

Jessica: Well, one thing that, uh, was funny to me in preparing for this interview was just the last guest we had for the podcast, um, the actor Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, who’s an audiobook narrator as well, he was talking about the narrators that he really admires and, um, he was really quite effusive about, um, Imogen Church, who of course is quite a celebrated, uh, narrator. Um, so I was, uh, surprised and pleased to see that actually she narrated Light Perpetual as well. Um, did you have much input when it came to choosing who would narrate the book?

Francis: Um, a little bit, in that her name came up and they sent me a kind of taster clip of her doing the beginning, um, and then there was a, kind of, little bit of backwards and forwards, um, in which I recorded the beginning and sent it to her and then she sent me a recording back again, which was a, kind of, nice feeling actually. Um…

Jessica:  Yeah.

Francis: …I’m a strong believer in the test of good writing being whether it works out loud and I enjoy reading my own work out loud, um, and it was kind of exciting handing it to a professional who could take things that with me were just, kind of, little hints and ideas and then make something of them. And she was really good at doing the, kind of, variety of London voices that [Jessica: Hm.] the book requires, because as you can tell listening to me, I speak rather boring, kind of, southern-English-counties RP English, whereas the book needs to, kind of, run around the, kind of, gamut of London accents over the last 50, 60, 70 years, um, not just, kind of, your generic, kind of Cockney turning into Estuary but something a bit subtler than that, and she was really good at that. Um, and also… 

Jessica: There’s singing and Italian in there as well! [Laughs]

Francis: Yeah, absolutely! No, no, no, I needed somebody as versatile as her, I really did. Um, no, it contains, kind of, chunky quotes from operas who one of the characters is, kind of, helplessly besotted with so that has to happen on the page and it has to happen in your ear as well. Um, and also another of the characters is a songwriter. [Jessica: Mm-hm.] She doesn’t quite break through, she spends most of her life professionally as either a backing singer and then as a music teacher, but being on the inside of her, writing her songs and thinking musically is important to the book. So that also had to happen first on the page and then, kind of, realised by Imogen in people’s ears. So I needed someone who could handle, kind of, the extroverted and the introverted bits of it and I think I was very lucky [laughs] with, you know, who I got and what I ended up with.

Jessica: Do you always listen to the finished production?

Francis: No, I don’t because I suffer from embarrassment [Jessica laughs] at the thought of having committed this thing. Um, I listened to bits here and there and thought, yes, yes, yes, no that’s fine, yes, um, but then I could feel a kind of gathering blush and I, kind of, you know, took off my headphones and stopped, glad that it existed free of me because… I don’t know. I don’t know why it feels so presumptuous, more presumptuous to send a piece of speech hours and hours long into the world than it does to send out a, kind of, printed object but for some reason it does to me. So no, I find it very difficult to listen to the whole [Jessica: Hm.] of my own words read by somebody else.

Jessica: Hmm! Do you ever worry that they won’t notice all that you’re inviting the reader to notice?

Francis: Of course I do but then that’s not an exact science anyway, I mean it– and part of, kind of, the power of writing is that you don’t control what the person at the receiving end is getting from it, and that’s the strength of it too. It means that a good share of what happens between a reader and the story is the reader’s business and comes with, you know, where their imagination is and where their ears are and the way the picture it and the way that they do, you know, half the job of bringing it to life. And as a writer you can, kind of, nudge that, you can have pictures in your own head and hope it’s going there but you can’t control it and you can’t guarantee it. Um, and, you know, it’s not a question of settling for something, it’s a question of being glad at the independent life of your story once it’s left you.

So maybe they don’t get all of the things that I was thinking of but then they get loads of other things that they were thinking of. Um, the frustrating thing being that – except in rare lucky cases where I get to have a conversation with a reader – I don’t find out what those were. Um, so if anyone would ever like to keep a very elaborate diary of [laughing] their reactions to [Jessica laughs] reading my writing and send it to me, I would read it with genuine interest, um…! But, um…

Jessica: That seems like a dangerous invitation, but…! [Laughs]

Francis: No, no, no! I wasn’t completely serious when I said that but I was serious about the idea

Jessica: I mean, I’m buying a new journal right now! [Laughs]

Francis: No, no, no! Really, that’s fine, no.

Jessica: I will say that, um, I was interested to hear about your back and forth about the opening chapter because I found myself needing to read that opening chapter out loud and I was struck by how it forced me to slow down, not because it was difficult but because it was important. Do you– I don’t know if I’m conveying this well. It was an astonishing opening chapter actually, um, and the invitation to ponder, um, the infinite within the finite, um, was really just something that I felt I had to take my time with and feel that. And there was an interesting, um, mix of gravity, um, and lightness as well in that chapter that I found really effective. Um, but…

Francis: Thank you.

Jessica: …that’s not a question, that was my experience of it.

Francis: No, no, no, in fact it’s the kind of conversation I was just expressing the wish for a minute ago [Jessica laughs], so thank you. Um, yeah, I wanted that opening, which, you know, for the vast majority of people who haven’t read this book or haven’t heard this book is about, um, a German missile falling on a branch of Woolworth’s in south London in 1944 in very slow motion. Because, um, the event that starts the book off takes about, you know, a fraction of a second and I wanted the writing to slow down enough to show it and give it the weight, kind of, you know, proportionate to how much of an effect it was going to have on the characters’ lives for the rest of the book. And I wanted to write from a kind of unearthly viewpoint, a sort of something not quite like a human-eye view because we don’t on the whole perceive events that take one ten-thousandth of a second.

Um, so it’s written in very slow motion bomb time and I needed it to, kind of, establish some strangeness after which the familiarity of the rest of the book– because then it’s about the lives of five kids born in about 1940 who grow up and have lives that reflect all of the ways that London has changed and all of the, kind of, different possible destinies for working-class children born in the 1940s. Um, all every kitchen sink except I wanted the kitchen sink to have a background of strangeness, of life seen within a frame of death or time seen within a frame of eternity or something like that. So the beginning was supposed to, kind of, move you to seeing from a different angle, both ideally, yes, light and heavy too. Um, and then to provide a kind of lingering sense that this wasn’t quite the ordinary close-up story of ordinary familiar lives that you usually get.

Um, I have form as a writer who provides obstacles for their readers and hearers at the very beginning. My previous novel, Golden Hill, starts off with an insane sentence that goes on for about a page and a half, which is there as a kind of threshold going, kind of, if you can get over the door into the book, um, then I shall reward you, but I’m warning you right now that it’s going to contain some of this kind of thing. And, um, my family tell me off for always leading with the bad news when I’ve got an anecdote. I always point out the drawbacks of something, even when I’m feeling quite optimistic, so maybe this creeps into the way I write books as well. It does tend to get easier after the first few pages of anything [Jessica laughs] I’ve written!

But my other conviction here is that when you’re writing difficult things you should make them as rich and pleasurable as possible for the reader, that there need to be compensations. [Jessica: Hm.] Not delayed compensations but compensations right now for something you need to concentrate on. So it ought to be rich and it ought to be satisfying and it ought to be a pleasure as well. It ought to be funny and it ought to have sentences whose shape are satisfying in themselves and I do tend to write to be read aloud [Jessica: Hm.], um, to myself, you know, by myself in the first place when I’m producing the sentences, but then part of the way that I want to, kind of, send writing out into the world is as something that will work out loud. I was a very happy reader of bedtime stories for 13 or 14 years until my younger daughter grew out of it and, alas, that kind of era in our lives came to an end. And it’s such a good test for writing, whether it works out loud. So that’s always in my head as a thing I want to make sure I’m getting right. [Jessica: Hmm.]

[Interval music]

Jessica: [To podcast listeners] You’re listening to the Listening Books podcast, and if this conversation is prompting thoughts you’d like to share we’d love to hear from you. You can leave a review on podchaser.com/listeningbooks and you can talk to us on social media @ListeningBooks. Links in the show notes. Coming up, Francis Spufford makes me cry but makes up for it with some stellar book recommendations.

[Music]

[To Francis] Um, you were talking about Golden Hill…

Francis: Yeah.

Jessica: …and the way it starts off. Um, it’s set in Manhattan, 1746, uh, when Richard Smith arrives from England with a mysterious bill of exchange, which gets stolen almost immediately, and we’re off into what I think of as just really good old-fashioned storytelling. Um, it’s written in a style that accessibly imitates the eighteenth-century novel, um, and one of the key parts of that is the narrative voice [Francis: Hm.], which tells the story in third person but also addresses the reader directly, which is quite amusing in parts. I promise, I am getting to a question! Um, now, Golden Hill, uh, it holds a number of surprises in store for the reader and I’m hoping not to spoil any of them. I do suspect that one of them is possibly less surprising if listening to the audiobook! Maybe not!

Francis: I know what you’re talking about here. [Jessica laughs] I know how to have to creep up on this question.

Jessica: Do you? Okay.

Francis: Which won’t spoil it any more than it’s already been spoilt for people who have already worked something out because they’re listening to the audiobook.

Jessica: Okay.

Francis: Um, ah, okay. So, um, it’s an eighteenth-century, um, historical novel but, kind of, written as much as I could like an eighteenth-century novel because one of the great things about those very first few decades of the novel is that nobody knew what the rules were yet! So they tended to throw together all sorts of, kind of, pleasures and satisfactions, which later on would scatter out to, kind of, different parts of the fictional sky. So you’d get, you know, love stories mixed in with political intrigues, mixed in with, kind of, ridiculous adventure plots, mixed in with people writing each other long, long subtle psychological letters, mixed in with, kind of, courtroom dramas and everything you could possibly think of all thrown in together into the, kind of, eighteenth-century Magimix, um, and I really liked that.

And one of the other things I really like is that eighteenth-century narrators, though a bit stiff and unsubtle by modern standards, also have this tendency to buttonhole the reader. They like to break the fourth wall. They, you know– In Tom Jones Henry Fielding leans out of the page and goes, ‘Are you worried about where Tom has got to now?’. Um, and in Tristram Shandy, um, Sterne, the author, practically steps out of the page, settles down in your sitting-room and has a cup of tea with you, talking about this and that and only very reluctantly getting back to the story at hand [Jessica laughs] at all.  So, possibilities there I thought, and I thought I could use this as a way to deal with the problem of the fact that I’ve got one protagonist whose mission in New York is a total mystery from the beginning.

So I’ve got to be intimately close to somebody I’m withholding the most important thing about [Jessica: Hm.] from the reader’s point of view. So the book follows him around like a, kind of, um, what’s it called, a steady cam in film, one of those slightly wobbly cameras that hovers somewhere over his left shoulder. Every now and again it lets you know what he’s thinking but on the whole it just lets you, kind of, watch him and listen to him, but we see the world not in his head but very near to his head. But, um, there is a trick to the book, which is that actually it’s not a third-person narrator at all. The person who is producing this, kind of, omnipotent– not omnipotent – omniscient voice? The thing that breaks the fourth wall and leans in is actually somebody within the story and it becomes, if I’ve done it right, more and more obvious who that somebody must be.

And then at the end they confess it’s them because there are things they just don’t know and every now and again, when having to describe a high-stakes card game or a duel or the [Jessica laughs] sex scene they suddenly get a bit perplexed and you can see their fancy footwork as they desperately try to come up with something which will fill the gap. Um, and of course the issue with the audiobook was that, um, if that’s going to work then the person who is narrating the whole book has to correspond in some ways to the person who turns out to be the secret narrator inside the story and, in particular, they have to correspond in gender terms. [Jessica: Hmm.] The book has got to be narrated by a person of the same gender as the one who turns out to be the secret narrator within the story. Is that mysterious enough do you think?

Jessica: I think we’ve done as…

Francis: Because anyone who hasn’t actually listened to it is still going to be mystified…

Jessica: Yes.

Francis: Good, yeah.

Jessica: And also, they might have fun picking up on the clues…

Francis: Yeah.

Jessica: …um, which, because I didn’t know that the narrator would turn out to be a character, wasn’t really paying attention to, um, and…  

Francis: Aha! No, because you don’t…

Jessica: Yeah.

Francis: …until somebody persistently breaks the fourth wall and goes, actually, it’s not just a storyteller here, it’s somebody with a point of view with some deficiencies and things they know about and things they don’t know about, that doesn’t occur to you, which, you know, it’s great. [Jessica: Hmm.] You could hide a possibility in plain sight because until your attention is persistently drawn to it you won’t get it, which is fun to play with.

Jessica: Yes! Well, I was wondering, I mean, was this just a fun extra, uh, bit of playfulness to add to it, a fun surprise, um, or was this integral to your vision of the book, to highlight this character?

Francis: Yes, it was. The second [Jessica: Hm.], it was definitely essential to the book because, um, I wanted to get it so that the book, which appears to have only one protagonist [Jessica: Hm.], um, actually has two. It was a way of ensuring that the second protagonist, who is secretly the narrator, um, gets equal time and an equal share and that in the end it’s not really the story of Mr Smith’s adventures in New York, it’s the story of somebody’s reactions to Mr Smith’s [Jessica: Hm.] adventures in New York. Um, it was quite fiddly to do, um, [Jessica laughs] and I’m hoping it works. Um, also I’m very– I mean, [sighs] this is all a bit coded, I’m sorry, but the person it turns out to be is a very divisive character. [Jessica: Hm.] Some people hate them and some people are very fond of them [Jessica: Hm.], um and they are genuinely a nasty piece of work in some ways. I was tired of the form of narrative in which, you know– you know, one of the staples of romance is people behaving extraordinarily badly to each other and being mean and vicious because they really care deep down.

Jessica: Oh right!

Francis: I thought that’s a cliché and it’s actually much more interesting if you’ve got somebody whose mean streak is actually a mean streak and then have it be a romance all the same in which you [laughing] genuinely got to see whether a couple of people can work their way around the fact that one of them is in some ways a nasty piece of work. [Jessica: Hm.] Um, so, um, I knew that there would be some people who just be enormously irritated and even hate [Jessica laughs] the person who turned out to be the narrator but I don’t, I love them. Note the [Jessica: Hm.] careful pronoun. Um, I really enjoyed being them and I really enjoyed giving them space to be not just a bit, bad tempered but, [laughs] actually [Jessica laughs], you know, genuinely unpleasant!

Jessica: Speaking of, uh, less cuddly characters! [Francis: U-huh.] Um, I believe you’ve got one of those in Light Perpetual as well.

Francis: Oh, I’ve got several of those in Light Perpetual, um, yeah! [Jessica laughs]

Jessica: Well, one in particular I think has stood out when I’ve, sort of, read reactions, uh, to the book or have heard reactions from friends. Um, you’ve mentioned him earlier, Vernon, who is the opera…

Francis: Yeah.

Jessica: …lover. Um, did you enjoy writing that character the way you enjoyed…?

Francis: I’m nodding. I should say that out loud, shouldn’t I? [Jessica laughs] Um, yes I did, um, but then I’d… [Sighs] In some ways Vern, who is a property developer going on con artist, he wants to be rich, he tries repeatedly, he manages it in the end, um, before losing it all again. I mean he is not likeable. Um, as his irritated daughter says to him at the end of his life, ‘Have you ever tried doing business with anyone you didn’t try to rip off?’, um, and the answer to that is no, no, he really doesn’t. Um, but he has this helpless responsiveness to opera, it moves him to tears in a way that he doesn’t fully enjoy or understand but he just can’t help it. [Jessica: Hm.] It’s a flame that he warms his hands by and can’t stop doing it and, yeah, with Vern I wanted to write somebody who, again, was not really very redeemable but who had this kind of secret compartment in which something else was going on. Um, disconcertingly he was my mother-in-law’s favourite character when she was reading the book. She really liked Vern.

Jessica: Really?

Francis: She is a retired academic and also a soprano, so [Jessica: Ah.] she enjoyed the opera stuff and she found his, kind of, grossness and his unapologetic grossness, kind of, satisfying. There’s something both assertive and helpless about Vern and she liked the combination.

Jessica: Yeah.

Francis: And she’s not the only one. I’ve come across other people whose favourite he is, which I thought was pushing it a bit. I didn’t think [Jessica laughs] he’d be anybody’s favourite character! But, but, but, but, I do– I mean, some of the reactions to this book have been, kind of, you know, you’ve avoided your cast being killed by a V-2 at the beginning but they don’t seem very nice, do they? [Jessica laughs] They don’t have very likeable lives. Um, and not in some ways but I love my cast and I was deliberately trying to make the best case for all of them, um, [Jessica: Hm.] and I don’t think whether characters deserve sympathy or are loveable really depends on them being likeable. [Jessica: Hm.] Um, and I didn’t think that their lives were– I mean, some spectacularly awful things happen in one of the five lives I’m following. Um, there’s a murder witnessed from close up, which is very unpleasant to write and I hope it’s very unpleasant to read [Jessica: Hm.] in the nicest possible way dear readers.

Jessica: Yeah.

Francis: Um, but I thought that all of the people in it, kind of, deserved sympathetic attention and I didn’t think it was tilted more towards darkness than the actual mixture of actual people’s lives. It strikes [Jessica: Hm.] me that darkness and light marbled together or mottled together is where we live really, um, and tragedy and comedy mixed together is where we live too and, kind of, hope and disaster is where we live too. I was trying for realism not for darkness and I was trying for love not for disdain. [Jessica: Hm.] None of my characters are people that I wanted to hold at arm’s length or that I wanted the readers to hold at arm’s length, even though getting close to some of them at some moments is going to be uncomfortable.

Jessica: I do think, um, Vern’s helplessness, um, goes a long way towards, um, securing a reader’s sympathy. Um, and there is something so pitiable about someone who on the hand can’t seem to help his reaction to music, to opera, um, but also he can’t seem to help these unsavoury aspects of himself either.

Francis: No.

Jessica: Um, he just is! [Laughs] Um…

Francis: He really just is, um…

Jessica: Yeah.

Francis: Um, yeah, he’s a bully and a conman and, um, and compulsively exploitative in pretty much all his relationships. But meanwhile the, kind of, signals from radio opera are being received and he’s struggling to know what to do with them [Jessica: Hm.] as, you know, some soprano sings about how they have lived for art and never done any harm to anybody, kind of– he weeps in his car as he’s on his way to rip, you know, somebody else off.

Jessica: Yeah! [Laughs] Um, you mentioned, um, the love you have for your whole cast. I wonder, um, did they all come to you in a similar way? Did you come to know them at once? How did you come to know your cast of characters?

Francis: I’m not being cagey here but I’m not sure I can answer that question…

Jessica: Okay.

Francis: …in a meaningful way because there was a kind of visible and conscious, kind of, planning part of it in which I thought, you know, I’ve got these decades of London life to cover, what interesting things have happened in London? What can I show? What unexpected angles can I show it from? What are the kind of things that happen to working-class kids who are born in about 1940? One of them is music and the kind of extraordinary way that, kind of, British popular music, um, and the kind of different ways in which– you know, rock and roll from America and then, kind of, all of the ways in which British music has been changed and changed and enriched and enriched by, kind of, the rhythms of those arriving in the city.

All of that, you– I could plan to have a character who was a musician and I could plan to have a character who was committed to, um, a, kind of, media technology, kind of, the hot metal typesetting on Fleet Street newspapers, which was going to go obsolete halfway through his life. And top down I could go it would be good to have some of that, but then at the same time, bottom up and not so visibly and certainly not so consciously, there was some kind of solidifying process, which felt more like getting to know some people who, kind of, stepped halfway out of the shadows in my head, as if they partly existed already and I just had to patiently let them introduce themselves. And I– you know, I’m blethering about this, I can find…

Jessica: No!

Francis: … fancy ways of saying, ‘I’ve said to be patient’ but the truth is I don’t know. I don’t know. They came along.

Jessica: I wanted to pick up on this, um, you mentioned the Linotype… [Francis: Hm.] You did mention that, didn’t you? [Laughs]

Francis: I did, yeah. Yeah, no, no, Alec the character who…

Jessica: Yeah.

Francis: Clever Alec, literally a smart Alec – although I did not realise that Alec was a smart Alec until I’d finished the book and it was too late [Jessica laughs] or I might have given him a different name – um, who follows his dad into what, in the middle of the twentieth century, is one of the, kind of, great aristocratic working-class occupations, the most highly skilled thing there is, which is printing newspapers on a vast hot metal machine. I can describe it as being like a metal grand piano stood on its end. Um, he is the king of a technology which then vanishes. Yes, go on, sorry.

Jessica: Yes, no, I was just going to, um… It was one of the things that I noticed, um, you must have done very thorough research on, um, how a Linotype machine works, how a V-2 warhead, uh, you know, the physics of that, how that works. Um, the, uh, oh, the pharmaceutical treatment of schizophrenia in the 60s! Um, you know, that’s just a few of the things that I noticed, uh, the detail you were able to bring, um, and not in a, uh, show-offy, look-at-the-research-I’ve-done kind of way. Um, but I guess I’m wondering if there was any of that research that especially surprised you or delighted you or moved you in some way?

Francis: I like knowing about stuff, I really do! I used to be a non-fiction writer and it probably shows, that I still really enjoy, kind of, the contact with detail and with the process of finding out how things work. Which feeds into, kind of, some of my convictions about what novels are supposed to do because I think it’s bizarre that novels on the whole don’t describe people at work when work takes up so much of our lives. Um, it’s as if, you know, novels were only about what people did in the evenings a lot of the time [Jessica laughs], which is weird. Um, so I had a good reason for being able to talk about those things.

But I’m glad it doesn’t feel show-offy because I tried to keep my nerdy pleasure within bounds here but I would go into each section of the book, because it kind of stilt-walks on through the decades in 15-year chunks, so every time I got to a new era I had new things to find out and I’ve had this bizarre shopping list going how does a 1970’s reel-to-reel professional quality tape recorder work? [Jessica laughs] Um, and luckily the world is full of other nerds who will tell you exactly those things. If you form the question he’ll– glad to be asked. Um, what delighted me? Um, [sighs] I liked the reel-to-reel tape recorder very much. I liked the way– and, you know, it’s a book about time so I was always look out for things where human beings were manipulating time one way and another, and musical time turned out to be very, very important.

And I loved discovering that your, kind of, um vast 70’s tape recorder had particular buttons – I’m sorry, this is so nerdy [Jessica laughs] – designed to abolish the otherwise audible minute time delay caused by having the two reels, so that my characters were engaged deep down but where I really enjoyed it, in a kind of little artificial musical thing that was very like writing novels, where you’re engaged in tiny bits of fakery in order to make it seem smooth and natural, um… Um, there were some things I didn’t enjoy finding out about very much. I did not enjoy being a late 1970’s neo-Nazi skinhead for the purposes of the book, um, ugh… Um, but yeah, it had to be done. I’m not sure I could quite explain why it had to be done but it had to be done!

Jessica: Well, the story begins with an unwitnessed moment [Francis: Mm-hm.] and throughout the book I feel invited to witness, to look here, to pay attention to this, really see it. This may be an impossible question to answer. What do you most hope a reader has witnessed by the time they finish the book?

Francis: That’s a good question but I don’t know if I can answer it. Um, uh, you know, close up that this is the recognisable mixture of woe and joy that makes up lives. Um, um, that there’s nothing ordinary [laughing] about ordinariness so long as you look at it properly and close up. There’s nothing ordinary about any of our individual lives to us. And novels are weirdly selective. Novels pick out a tiny spotlight and happen to put them on a very few people when we are surrounded by clouds and crowds and millions of protagonists. There’s nobody who’s not a protagonist and novels artificially will just snip out this one tiny thread of story from this vast unceasing – tapestry sounds too up itself – mat! This vast, unceasing mat of matted threads of all the stories going on at once. So I wanted to tell a story that made you notice that we’re all protagonists.

Um, what else? I wanted there to be– Some of the witnessing the book is doing is trying to be a little bit unearthly, from seeing the bomb in slower time than any human could manage at the beginning to following one of my characters as he dies at the end. I am trying to suggest without having the mad presumption to try to do myself that there are other perspectives possible on human life that aren’t quite just ours and, you know, I won’t go there but there is a religious aspect [Jessica: Hm.] to that. So I could give a theological answer and say that I wanted the book to remind– to get people to witness William Blake’s phrase ‘the love of eternity for the productions of time’, um, but much too fancy.

I also– I wanted people to notice that everything passes, that I wanted people to feel the, kind of, the– [frustrated sigh] No, all right, I don’t care whether I’m up myself here – whether the splendour and the, kind of, pity of our mortality, the way that it all goes, no matter how good or awful it is. I wanted to make you witness five people living in time and see how good and terrible that was.

Jessica: [Voice wavering] That’s a beautiful answer.

Francis: For asking it. [Exhales]

Jessica: I suppose because death has been foregrounded [Francis: Hm.], um, in the past year in a way that it isn’t always, um, for everyone, um, it’s one of those things that’s, sort of, in the background. Anyway, thank you for that beautiful answer. Um, I’m going to shift yours…

Francis: Do, do.

Jessica: …into something a little less deep, a little less profound! [Laughs]

Francis: Okay.

Jessica: And I’m going to seek your recommendations for those who are taking up our Audiobook Listening Challenge. [Francis: Hm.] Um, we’ve got a number of different things I’ve been asking every guest at the end, uh, to help us out with some recommendations. And the ones I chose for you I thought you might be a particularly good [Francis: Hm.] source for. So, um, one of them is to listen to historical fiction set before 1900. Now, obviously Golden Hill is a great example of that. Um, if people have already, um, listened to that do you have any other suggestions?

Francis: Yes, I do. Um, and I’d like– two in fact. I want frivolous but really good frivolous. Um, there is a really excellent series of, um, historical thrillers set in eighteenth-century London by Antonia Hodgkins [sic] with a hero who is a disgraced rake, um, and bookseller of dodgy books, um, who gets used as a kind of Georgian private eye. Um, the one I’d start with is called The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins but the series continues, there’s a new one out called The Silver Collar, which is also excellent and has just, um, won a crime-writing prize. Um, and those are really good. Those are, kind of, fruity and satisfying and full of incident and take you from the gutter to the palace and back again in a very pleasing way.

Um, less frivolously, in fact about as unfrivolous as you can get but still pleasurably, um, I want to point people towards Penelope Fitzgerald, who is one, you know, important to me partly because she started writing novels after she was 60, which is encouraging! Um, but also one of the great, kind of, recent masters of historical fiction as a work of high art: light and delicate and dryly ironic and full of a kind of graceful but tough-minded compassion. And the place to start with Penelope Fitzgerald is her bestseller The Blue Flower, which is set, again, in the eighteenth century, in eighteenth-century Germany, and begins with a scene of extraordinary laundry and then goes on from there. And it gives you the feeling that there is nothing she cannot do, no aspect of human life that she cannot find this, kind of, elegant, light, brilliantly perceptive way of getting into.

And if you liked The Blue Flower then you should rush onwards, um, from eighteenth-century Germany to early twentieth-century Moscow by Penelope Fitzgerald in The Beginning of Spring, um or to, um, 1950’s Italy in Innocence. Um, or, since she clearly liked finding out about things just as much as I do, um, to Edwardian Cambridge and romance among the physicists in a book called The Gate of Angels. And they’re all fabulous. Um, but I’m going to stop recommending with a mighty effort of will here [Jessica laughs], but Penelope Fitzgerald serious, Antonia Hodgkins [sic] not so serious but still a really good writer.

Jessica: Wonderful. [To podcast listeners] I'm going to include all of these recommendations in our show notes, by the way, so listeners, if you’re madly, uh, scrambling for paper and pen to write all these down I'm going to put them in the show notes so you can, uh, refer to those. [To Francis] Um, as someone who’s written quite a lot of non-fiction I think you’re well able to help with this next one [Francis: Mm-hm.] as well. Um, the challenge is simply to listen to a non-fiction book that isn’t a memoir.

Francis: Okay.

Jessica: And feel free to plug your own as well!

Francis: Oh no, that would be cheating but I’m going to cheat slightly because I’m going to suggest something which happens to be by a friend of mine. Um, a book called The Moon by, um, a brilliant science journalist called Oliver Morton, um, which came out for the fiftieth anniversary – is it fiftieth? –yes, the anniversary of the moon landing in 2019. Um, and it’s about that, um, and it’s about the science of the moon as a planet but it’s also about all of the ways in which the moon has, kind of, haunted human imaginations, um, and the way that, you know, no matter what humans have been doing in every civilisation we’ve managed, up there in the sky is this little white waxing and waning disc, which doesn’t alter depending on what we do. And he’s very, very good on the strangeness of that. Um, it’s really, really good non-fiction writing. Um, he loves his science, every now and again you’ll have to concentrate but to make up for it, um, you get to, kind of, get the boots of your spacesuit dusty in the Sea of Tranquillity and to do the moon in poetry and the moon in virtually everything else as well. The Moon, Oliver Morton.

Jessica: Wonderful. Well, um, Francis, I thank you so much for the time and attention you’ve given to this conversation. Those two things I have a renewed appreciation for after reading your book. Um, thank you so much.

Francis: Thank you for having me. You’re welcome.

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Jessica: [To podcast listeners] I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing from Francis as much as I did. Next month I’m excited to share a conversation with Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground, recently shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. If you haven’t already subscribed to the podcast, clicking that button will make sure you get the episode as soon as it’s released.

The Listening Books podcast is produced by Listening Books, a UK charity that provides an audiobook lending service for over 115,000 members who find that an illness, mental health, physical or learning disability affects their ability to read the printed word or hold a book. It’s simple to join. For more information, head to our website www.listening-books.org.uk.

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[End of Transcript]

David: The kayak gives this incredible perspective on the world, where you are really embedded in the worlds of other species, you’re surrounded by other animals. Um, they don’t respond to you in the way that they respond to humans on foot because obviously they are so much more skilled in and on the water than you are.

[Podcast theme tune begins]

Jessica: [Speaking to podcast listeners] This is the Listening Books podcast. For every kind of reader and especially for fans of audiobooks. I’m Jessica Stone and because this summer lots of us are staying close to home I wanted to bring some adventure, some voyage, some discovery to my reading, and to the podcast. So today I offer you this conversation with David Gange, author of The Frayed Atlantic Edge, a historian’s journey from Shetland to the Channel.

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[Speaking to David] Welcome David, and thank you for being here. The Frayed Atlantic Edge is an account of the year you spent kayaking the Atlantic coastlines from Shetland to Cornwall. You’re a historian, and I can’t speak for everyone, but I know when I picture historians I don’t generally picture them in a kayak battling the elements! So, can you tell me a little about how this project was conceived and how it came about?

David: Okay, great, thanks. So, um, I think historians more and more these days are not, kind of, stuck in the archives that we usually associate with them, uh, partly because those archives tend to record the stories of very particular people. So I think it’s a, kind of, general trend that you’ll see with the absolutely wonderful historian called Bathsheba Demuth, for instance, who’s written a great book called Floating Coast about the Bering Strait, again, spending loads of time outdoors, um, talking to people, collecting those stories, oral histories, rather than, um, archival ones. So, yeah, um, my approach to this came from, um, kind of dissatisfaction with what stories are told in the archives, so what stories historians have traditionally told about Britain and Ireland, which tend to be very urban stories, focused on London in particular but generally in big cities.

Um, so I was, yeah, wondering what it would look like to think about those histories from the perspectives of the coasts, from the perspectives of people whose stories aren’t usually recorded, um, rather than from the middle. Um, so that’s where the, kind of, impulse came from. Um, but other than that, just, um, I used to do loads of my reading outdoors, I used to do loads of reading in mountains and on the coast and that reading was never about the outdoors. Um, and then gradually, through doing that began to, kind of, see the stories in the places I was going, um, and a couple of people, including, um, the author, Adam Nicolson, began to just, um, push on me the idea that maybe the kayak would be a useful, kind of, tool for researching and writing and maybe I should take advantage of the fact that I did that, and stop reading books about cities on the coastline and start writing about the coastline itself too.

Jessica: Why the kayak specifically?

David: Um, okay, so the kayak gives this incredible perspective on the world, where you are really embedded in the worlds of other species, you’re surrounded by other animals. Um, they don’t respond to you in the way that they respond to humans on foot because obviously they are so much more skilled in and on the water than you are. So you’re, kind of, in their territory, um, and it gives you a really different sense of your role in the world, of your place in the world and one that I think is actually really historical. Like, um, the coastlines of the British Isles were, um, kind of, the main arteries of trade and transport. They were places that people lived much more than they do today. I mean, this is a country that really has turned its back on the sea in, kind of, practical ways [Jessica: Mhm.] and, yeah, most of the people out at sea in the past would have been in, like, tiny family boats, not in big ships or anything. So getting out in that little boat is a way of, kind of, finding connection to those pasts, to those– not just pasts but futures that we need as well. [Jessica: Mhm.] Futures where we don’t think of ourselves as quite so separate, where we imagine ourselves to be part of the natural world rather than different from it. Um, I love the kayak for that. Just this, kind of, sense of connection to so much, this sense of, kind of, getting out of the way the city separates us from things.

Jessica: Mhm. What expectations did you have going into this and how did those end up comparing with the reality?

David: Um, so I remember waking up in, kind of, total cold sweats one night, um, just before setting off on the journey, realising that I had signed a contract to do something that I had no idea whether I could do it all. Um, I’d never taken on a kayak journey on this kind of scale at all, and I was sleeping outdoors, um, in just a waterproof sleeping bag for most of the journey and I had no idea how long I could do that kind of thing for either. Um, and I was also going to some sea that is absolutely ferocious. I mean, starting from Shetland, where the sea is as wild as can be, um, that felt absolutely terrifying when I was setting off on it. Um, but then I quite quickly felt extremely guilty because I’d told people what a challenge this was going to be and then for the first couple of months the weather was just perfect, it was as still as could be, and I felt like I was just in an armchair at sea. [Jessica laughs]

It was as flat as could be and I’d told people this is going to be such a challenge and, I think I say in the book at one point that my biggest threat for those first couple of months was, like, sunburnt ears. Um, so, yeah, it was extremely fortunate. In a different year I would failed, I wouldn’t have been able to do it at all, but for some reason that year, um, the, kind of, September gales didn’t arrive till January and it was just so much more straightforward than I could have possibly have imagined it would be. And it just created that couple of months introduction [Jessica: Mhm.] to be able to get to grips with things, to be able to, kind of, build up some kayaking stamina, to get used to spending all that time outdoors, um, before things did get more difficult over the winter.

Jessica: Yeah, I was going to say that seems like a project you don’t want to start in the winter! [Laughs]

David: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it was really fortunate to have such pleasant conditions to start in. I deliberately made the first couple of legs of it quite short, like I spent a month on Shetland, which could have been kayaked in a few days [Jessica: Mhm.] if I’d have been pushing it. Um, just, yeah, making my, kind of, way as slowly as possible to really, kind of, absorb myself in the places. Then round Skye, um, in the winter, that was a really tricky part. It rained for nearly the whole month, um, and I was just constantly soaked through. [Jessica: Mmm!] That was a very, very, very different experience.

Jessica: Yeah. Are there any places that you went to that you’d definitely love to go back but in a more welcoming season?

David: [Laughs] That’s a really good question. Um, pfuh, so absolutely, I mean, and I guess– so I got to Ireland [Jessica: Mm.] just as the spring was beginning and I did the first few bits, like round Donegal [Jessica: Mm.] and down and across to Tory Island and things like that, um, when there were just, kind of, the first inklings of spring and when the water was still really holding winter. That was quite an ordeal because, um, I was having to launch through surf all the time and land in surf, which meant just quite a lot of bruises from falling out of the kayak when landing, things like that. Um, and I would love to do that bit again in flatter seas, in seas that I wasn’t having to worry about quite so often. Historically it’s such an interesting coastline and places like Tory Island, which has historically had this most incredible independence, um, like the islanders refused to pay tax for, um, decade after decade. Um, they were notorious for, kind of, fighting off tax collectors [Jessica laughs]. Tax collectors would, kind of, come back to the mainland saying that they’d been trussed up and thrown back in their boats and talking about the violent women of the island who’d sent them away, in a phrase from one of the reports, ‘much less of a man than I had arrived’. [Both laugh] So, yeah, going to spend a lot of time in places like Tory Island, um, socialising properly without the worry of, um, what bruises were going to appear as I hit the water again, [Jessica chuckles] that would be wonderful.

Jessica: This book contains so much. Uh, there is the adventure complete with danger as well. Um, there’s the history and geography. There’s poetry, there’s the natural world, there’s stories and folklore. I suppose because I work in audiobook production I have a natural interest in the spoken word and oral traditions. So I was wondering if you could say a little about what poetry and storytelling offer historians?

David: Poets are profoundly important on all of these coastlines, on all of these islands, for several different reasons. Um, one of them is that islands on the west coast of Britain have often been seen from the mainland as being, kind of, exotic or as being backwards. Um, they’ve been given these, kind of, urban-centred histories that really marginalise them and historians have not been good at reclaiming that. They’ve not been good at pushing back against that. Poets have been wonderful at it. So, for instance, there’s a poet called Christine Evans on Ynys Enlli, um, a little island off the coast of Wales, Bardsey Island, who has, kind of, devoted her career since the 60s to rewriting the, kind of, tropes that Bardsey has fitted into, to giving it a different role in history, um, to recreating the meaning that its given.

So it’s a place that used to be a site of pilgrimage, it’s supposed to have, like, 20,000 saints buried there, so it’s associated in the way that most people write about it, with death. [Jessica: Mhm.] And she really kind of reframes that and makes it a, kind of, living place of birth and of real, natural life in ways that are absolutely wonderful and it ways that no historian has tried or maybe no historian would try. And then there are poets in places like Shetland, like Roseanne Watt – whose work is absolutely glorious, came out just after this book was published, so it isn’t included in it but I wish it was – who, yeah, do lots of this rereading, make these islands central, give them the kind of meanings that they have for people who live there rather than the ones imposed on them from outside. [Jessica: Mm.]

Um, and yeah, there’s a real sense in which the, kind of, histories written in archives, the official documents, um, tell stories that islanders don’t recognise and the poets, um, who are really the inheritors of long oral traditions, so languages like Gaelic in Scotland or Irish or Welsh have much, much stronger oral, yes, storytelling traditions than, um, English tends to have. And the poets can, kind of, run back through those oral histories in ways that it’s more problematic for historians to do in prose. So I always, when writing about these places, try and make sure that the voices of those poets speak, that I’m not, kind of, um, trampling over that with historical prose, um, but instead providing some amplification for those absolutely astonishingly wonderful poets that occupy those islands.

Jessica: That reminds me. You mentioned in the Western Isles section that, uh, Robert Macfarlane had received some pushback, uh, for the way that he had described those communities, more the tone, the sort of lyricism, um, and that he had responded to that in later works by incorporating more voices, uh, from those communities. Um, but basically it made me wonder if you have – and you can set me straight if I’ve got that a bit muddled! Basically I’m wondering I’m wondering if you’ve had any feedback from readers from the communities that you’ve described in this book?

David: Great, yes, so first thing to say is I love Robert Macfarlane.

Jessica: Yeah.

David: Like, I’m not being, kind of, snarky about his incredible body of work or anything like that but, yeah, the thing you are referring to I think is the, kind of, really, really wonderful literary figure, poet and critic and, um, everything else, non-fiction writer, um, Kathleen Jamie [Jessica: Hm.], who wrote a really powerful review back in 2008 in The London Review of Books. Um, in which she challenged Robert Macfarlane for his first book about these kinds of things, called The Wild Places, for the way in which a lot of the difficult histories in these landscapes didn’t appear [Jessica: Hm.], how he was, kind of, um, yeah, writing lyrically about beautiful places and ignoring some of the histories. And I think it’s a really fantastic example of how a strongly worded, um, but very insightful review can actually, kind of, improve a whole field. [Jessica: Hm.] Like, I think it said– and a huge credit to Robert Macfarlane that rather than responding to what was quite a critical review in a, kind of, defensive way, that he really, really developed his writing and enriched it in extraordinary ways, um, for the later books. So, I tell that as something that’s supposed to be a, kind of, good story rather than one that’s critical of anyone at all really.

Jessica: Yeah.

David: And in terms of the second part of your question, um, I mean, I’m sure there are people along the coastlines who don’t recognise the picture that I give in the places that they live, it would be strange if there weren’t, but I’ve been so happy with the response to the book from those coastlines. Um, okay, most of the talks that I get booked to give are along those coastlines and places. I was really pleased that the Highland Book Prize responded so well…

Jessica: Yes.

David: …to the project and, yeah, the links that it’s, kind of, allowed me to make with people up there who do like the way that I’ve presented those things and, kind of, advocated for the voices from those coastlines. That to me has been the thing I’ve enjoyed most about the whole process really. [Jessica: Hm.] There was one writer from, um, Shetland who did ask me whether my whole method for writing is waiting in coffee shops or bars to ambush locals and, um [laughing] yeah, and learn about the places! That was after I’d ambushed him in a coffee shop.

Jessica: [Laughing] That’s lovely. I mean that seems like a good strategy to me! [David laughs]

David: It’s certainly a different one!

Jessica: You mentioned this earlier, that one of the striking observations that you made, uh, in the book is how our current understanding of place and our perceived connection or lack thereof to other places has been shaped by the dominance of cities in the interior, um, and how fundamentally our understanding may be altered when the focus shifts to the coastline. You did touch on this earlier but I wondered if you could say a little more about that, and what connections these coastlines reveal that might surprise us.

David: Um, the journey was, kind of, calculated to be both quite obvious, it was simple, it was just following those coastlines, but also to really, kind of, defamiliarise. So it was [Jessica: Hm.] all the way down, um, Britain and Ireland, um, but the first seven months of it were all in Scotland and only one month of it touched on England, the very, very last one. Um, and I’d travelled for, I think, five months by the time I reached the second town with more than 6,000 people in it, um, so it was…

Jessica: Wow.

David: …really, like, travelling for a long time without any sense that cities existed. Um, and, yeah, the coasts I was travelling along were not, kind of, port towns and beaches, so I think I’d been travelling for many months longer than that before I reached the first beach that you might, like, buy an ice-cream at. And so, a very, very different kind of perspective in that sense, and also linguistically as well. So, [Jessica: Hm.] a really extraordinary proportion of the whole journey was spent on coasts where English isn’t a really dominant first language, where the other languages are really significant and those languages give us really, really different perspectives on the world too.

Um, like, if you’re thinking about the stories that we tell about different bits of history, um, like a big concept like the Enlightenment, for instance, uh, that moment that for cities was this real kind of flourishing, um, but that I would think of as being quite a violent moment of cities beginning to dominate other places and taking, kind of, from other places. Like the Scottish coastlines, for instance, the west coast of Scotland had its enlightenment far earlier and the years that we think of as the Enlightenment were totally disastrous for those coastlines because [Jessica: Hm.] the cities tried to incorporate them into, kind of, this new political economy, this new way of doing agriculture, which led to the Potato Famine in Ireland being far worse than it should have been and led to the Clearances in Scotland.

So the Enlightenment was a dark age for the coasts, um, just as [Jessica: Hm.] the 70s were a kind of economic downturn for the cities, but a real moment of revitalisation on the coastlines. So, often the stories are opposite and I would like us to find ways of being able to tell British and Irish history without telling the stories that only work for cities and that still, kind of, continue to marginalise those coastlines in the way that they have been for so long. They really have, through so many periods of our histories, been the centre of the islands that we live on, um, and they’re so outward looking, so connected to other places, whether that be, kind of, other Celtic places, like Brittany, or whether it be, kind of, the whole north Atlantic world. Um, I mean Shetland has so many connections to Denmark and Germany as well as to, um, Scandinavia and to Iceland and Faroe, um, so they’re profoundly outward looking and cosmopolitan, but just really different geographical links than we usually associate, um, Britain with having.

Jessica:  Hm. I can’t help but note, um, that the year that you did this journey, um, in 2016, was also the year that the UK decided to leave the European Union and that strikes me as, um, something, which, again, we think of maybe from an understanding based on the dominance of cities rather than coastlines, maybe? I don’t know, um, but I’m wondering if that felt more or less removed for you while you were doing this journey?

David: Um, yeah, so that vote happened, I guess, about a month before I set off. So I set off in [Jessica: Mm.] July 2016 and kayaked till, kind of, July 2017. Um, so yeah, it was very– the sense of Britain trying to decide what direction it was going to go in was really quite palpable during that journey. So, um, a lot of the communities that I was travelling through, um, communities where fishing is a really important industry, um, a lot of those fishing communities did vote for Brexit and [Jessica: Mm.], um, were, kind of, really debating at that point whether this was going to be a good thing or not. There were some who were quite optimistic about that and others who felt that this was going to be a total disaster for the areas. Um, well, I mean we’ve seen how fishing has been treated over the last few months, um, in those terms. So it would be very, very interesting to go back now and see how the tone of those debates has changed.

Um, but yeah [Jessica: Mm.], there was a real sense of those coastlines reconsidering what their futures might be in the light of what had happened. Of course, for most of Scotland, most of those coastal regions of Scotland, um, the vote was really predominantly to remain, um, and there was, yeah, a kind of real sense of betrayal at the same time. So, yeah, we’ll see what happens with these coastlines. The thing I was trying to get towards, um, is the way in which the EU over the last, kind of, um, thirty years or so had been working to, kind of, reintegrate, um, these, kind of, coastal areas in some way. One of the seven EU cultural zones that they identified was the Atlantic Arc and lots of projects [Jessica: Mm.] were put together through that to bring, like, Galicia and Wales and, um, Gaelic-speaking Scotland together. And, um, that has produced some things that I think have been quite exciting and it would be interesting to see, um, where those kinds of projects go now that we are, kind of, severed from that Atlantic Arc in practical terms.

Jessica: Mhm. If I could ask you speculate a little [chuckles], um, do you think that this tension between what’s good for coastlines and what the, sort of, mainland decides is best for itself, are those always, uh, destined to be intention or can decisions be made that benefit both?

David: Um, yeah, I think– so there are ways in which organisational changes have worked for the benefit of coastlines over the last, kind of, thirty, forty years. Ways in which, um, kind of, local councils have been reorganised in ways that bring decision-making to the coastlines. Like that sounds like a, kind of, boring, mundane, kind of thing but it can actually be profoundly important for allowing some kind of self-determination on those coastlines. I would love to see a, kind of, increasing localisation of decision-making. Um personally [Jessica: Mm.] I think that the nation is the, kind of, most problematic organisational unit of all. Um, I think working in international terms or in very local or regional terms tends to operate quite well and the nation [Jessica: Mm.] can often, um, be really problematic, is this, kind of, middle ground, middle-, um, size structure. Um, so yeah, I’d just love to see the coastlines be given more power in that kind of decision-making. I’d love to see, um, more resources being put into the languages of the coastlines as well.

Jessica: Yeah.

David: Um, they’re under real threat at the moment despite the revitalisation of the last few years, and they contain, kind of, so many riches of perspectives on the world that we desperately need, as we come more and more to terms with how damaging, um, the kind of, mainstream culture that we’ve pursued for the last century actually is.

[Interval music]

Jessica: [To podcast listeners] You’re listening to a conversation with David Gange, author of The Frayed Atlantic Edge, here on the Listening Books podcast. Now feels like a good time to mention that David has a website that offers a lot of wonderful supplementary material to the book, including resources for language learning, if you’re inspired to take up one or more of the Atlantic languages highlighted there. The website is frayedatlanticedge.wordpress.com. I will, of course, link to it in the show notes. There’s also some stunning photography from his journey and some of those include encounters with wildlife, which is what we’re going to hear about next.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, there’s a few things you can do beyond listening, if you like. You can follow or subscribe, to make sure you always get the next episode. You can share a link with people you think would enjoy it. You can write a review on whatever platform you use. And you can engage with us on social media, @listeningbooks. We always love to hear from you.

[Music]

[To David] You mentioned earlier, you know, the benefit of the kayak and being, you know, relatively unobtrusive and quiet and how much closer wildlife is willing to get to you like that. So I wondered if you could just share some of the more memorable encounters with wildlife that you had?

David: [Laughs] Um, that’s a lovely question and thanks for saying nice things about the photography, um, [Jessica laughs] which it doesn’t really deserve! But, um, so, yeah, the kayak is just the best wildlife hide you can possibly imagine. Um, so a few of the things that really, really struck me wildlife-wise that I will remember forever. Um, one of them, the first one was, kind of, setting out from the very, very beginning of the journey, heading up north from the very north of Shetland up to the rock that is the northernmost part of the British Isles, um, a little rock just called Out Stack, which is right next to Muckle Flugga, which is a huge gannet colony. So, heading out and thinking, I wonder if this is going to feel, kind of, ceremonial and like a dramatic, kind of, start, and within a few minutes of leaving Shetland behind, um, was just absolutely surrounded of thousands of gannets, just in a big, huge circle overheard, this big, kind of, vortex of gannets. Um, they weren’t squawking or anything, they weren’t vocalising but still the, kind of, sound of their wings was immense. So just this immense sound of gannets overhead, to the point where I couldn’t hear the sea anymore at all, um, and just…

Jessica: Wow.

David: …you know, the scale of life involved in that was, kind of– with great skuas coming along and trying to pluck them out the air as well. Um, and just so dramatic, so unusual and just such a, kind of, beautiful moment for setting off, to feel that I had this, kind of, vast, orchestrated accompaniment. Um, really, really quite something. Um, then one thing I love to do, so I have a little, kind of, they’re not goggles but it’s like a mask; so not a full snorkelling mask but a kind of mask that allows you to see at 360 degrees. So I have that with me and if something really exciting comes along then I will put that on and tip myself up so I can see it in the water, and doing that with basking sharks if basking sharks approach [Jessica: Ah!] is just one of my favourite things ever. I love basking sharks a lot.

Uh, but another really memorable one that was almost disastrous, um, was, kind of, sitting in the kayak watching minke whales. So I was sitting watching them come up and, kind of, learning a little bit about the patterns. So they’d come up, like, once and then they’d go down for another five seconds or so and then come up, kind of, thirty/forty feet further onwards, um, and then go down for another five seconds or so, or ten seconds. Um, and then they do that, kind of, three or four times and then disappear for a while. And I suddenly out of the corner of my eye caught sight of one come up about the distance behind me that meant I should expect it to, five or ten seconds later, come up right underneath the kayak.

Um, so I held on to my paddle very carefully with one hand, making sure I could brace, and got the camera out with the other, and, kind of, held the camera up and it came up about ten feet to my right and I got this incredible view of this– there was quite a bit more swell so it was almost like the side of the wave was, kind of, museum glass and this, kind of, whale’s eye and throat pleats coming out [Jessica gasps] and I got my one photo, um, just before it went down again. And my whole kayak, just by the water it had displaced, just, kind of, shifting sideways, just about managed to stop the camera going to the bottom of the sea, and started paddling on and got the photo. So that’s one of my favourite photos I’ve ever taken just because the moment of it [laughs] and the fear of whether I was actually going to be able to stay upright through that was such a dramatic one.

Jessica: That’s amazing. You’ve got to have that framed in your home somewhere, right?

David: Oh, I haven’t, but I probably should at some point, but… [Jessica laughs] And then just the other little rarities you sometimes see. So I love little auks. So little auks are like cousins of the puffin but about the size of a sparrow [Jessica: Ah!]. They are really tiny and they spend their whole year just on the wing, out over the ocean. Obviously there’s these huge, kind of, stormy seas and you’ve got these tiny little, kind of, seafaring cousins of the puffin out, and every so often, especially after bad weather, um, a handful of them might, kind of, turn up on different bits of the coastline.

Jessica: I’d like to ask you about the audiobook now. Um, Ed Hughes narrates the audiobook and, um, I was just wondering, did you have much input in the casting and production of it?

David: Not really. He asked me for, um, some advice on some pronunciations and things and I was given a choice from four people…

Jessica: Oh, okay.

David: …to begin with, to read it. So, um, Ed was the one I chose from those four. I just got a brief snippet of each of their voices.

Jessica: Yeah. Were you ever tempted to do the narration yourself?

David: Um, yes. Yeah, I– there are many ways in which I would have loved to. Um, I was advised that when authors try and do audiobooks themselves, um, [Jessica laughs] they– [chuckles] the sight of them coming out of the studio, um, can often be quite a dramatic one of, like [Jessica laughs] people who look like they’ve been through quite some kind of ordeal, especially for people not used to doing that kind of thing. There is a benefit to having a professional [chuckling], um, do…

Jessica: Yes.

David: …that kind of thing.

Jessica: Yeah, I think it is true that, um, it’s a test of endurance in many ways to read an audiobook, especially if you’re not used to it. And, I think, especially if you’ve been out in the open air [laughing] enjoying yourself in a kayak, then to suddenly be in a very, small dark room [laughing] while you’re– for hours on end…

David: Yeah.

Jessica: …to read aloud. That does seem like it would be challenging.

David: Yeah.

Jessica: I wanted to ask you, uh, because I saw on your website that there are some other projects in the works. Would you like to say anything about what you’re working on now?

David: Yeah. So this is a book that because of the pandemic is taking, um, a fair bit longer than was originally planned, but the next book is called Afloat and it’s, kind of, casting off the kayak [Jessica: Oh.] and instead taking traditional boats, so wooden boats and skin boats, and it’s taking a much bigger geography as well. So, um, including Faroe and Greenland and Newfoundland and, um, then down to the Caribbean to finish, looking at the...

Jessica: Wow.

David: …stories that can be told, um, through the, kind of, small-boat traditions of those places. So at the moment I’m reading lots and lots of, um, First Nations and other Indigenous perspectives on boats and the, kind of, significance of boats to those kind of cultures. Which in some ways are incredibly different from the histories that I’ve written about so far but in other ways have quite a lot of parallels in terms of places that a bigger, um, kind of, commercialised culture has dramatically trampled, um, and, kind of, taken centre stage over, um, where there are many perspectives from those small-boat communities all round the North Atlantic that I think are really, really worth recovering.

So I’ve taken, um, ten individual small-boat styles and, um, have taken journeys– well, in fact I was going to say I’ve taken journeys so far in some of them, but in fact only in one of them so far. Um, so starting in Ireland with a boat type called the [?Bád iomartha 0:34:19.7], um, which is now entirely extinct, um, but that it was possible to find a boat that was going to become a sail boat, called a Púcán – where if it didn’t have a sail in it, it would be essentially a [?Bád iomartha 0:34:35.9] – and, kind of, use that, um, to explore the, kind of, ways of life that the [?Bád iomartha 0:34:43.9] had made possible in some, kind of, small parts of Connemara. Um, so, yeah, again [Jessica: Mm.], journeys.

Um, there’s a lot more kind of discussion with people who make and use boats in this book. There’s a lot more, kind of, portrait photography and things too, and a much more, kind of, black and white aesthetic rather than the, kind of, full-colour of The Frayed Atlantic Edge with its bright yellow kayak. Um, so, yeah, it’s a wonderful project to be doing, it’s just one that it hasn’t been possible to do all the planned travel for. [Jessica: Mm.] I was supposed to be spending the whole of 2020 travelling to places like Greenland, which has obviously been delayed but, yeah…

Jessica: Gee, I wonder what…

David: Yeah!

Jessica: …happened that could have possibly thrown off those plans! I want to shift gears now and ask you for some reading recommendations for listeners who might be attempting our 2021 Audiobook Listening Challenge. One of the challenges is simply to listen to a non-fiction book that is not a memoir, and you reference so many wonderful books in The Frayed Atlantic Edge that I figured you’d be a great one to ask for recommendations for this category.

David: Okay, great. I’m having a think. So, the book that I mentioned right at the beginning, if you want a really significant historical, kind of, re-reading of a place that is full of other species, full of really sensitive understandings of different cultures then Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast, it really is the place to go. It is wonderful. [Jessica: Mm.] Um, a book that, um, I think everyone, um, would benefit from some kind of engagement with, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweet Grass. Um, I know it’s very popular at the moment, so lots of your listeners might already have it on their lists, but it is really wonderful. Can I make a suggestion for poetry too? I don’t know if it’s available in a, kind of, full audiobook form, but most of the poems from it are available to listen to or even as, kind of, film poems too; um, Roseanne Watts Moder Dy is such, such a glorious book that, again, I think it can really help anyone understand those, kind of, coastlines that are so close to us. Um, Rebecca Giggs’s book called Fathoms, which is about whales, is also [Jessica: Mm.] absolutely brilliant. There are some great books about whales out there – whales with an H I mean.

Jessica: Wonderful, thank you for those recommendations. Um, you know that Listening Books is a lending service, um, for people who, for reasons of disability or mental health reasons or for a variety of reasons, find it difficult to read traditional printed books, um and when I first asked you about doing this conversation you mentioned that there was a link between this project and disability. And I just wondered if that’s something that you would like to talk about and share?

David: Yeah, so the person who the book is dedicated to, who was my partner for twenty years, um, who was the person who got me into, I mean, so many other things to do with books. So, um, she’s a first-language Welsh speaker, um, so that’s, kind of, where my interest in small languages comes from. So I didn’t grow up kayaking at all or reading anything to do with the sea but then back in 2009 she had a car accident, um, a kind of really life-changing car accident. So we used to do lots in the mountains together until then but since then she’s not really been able to walk for more than, like, five, maybe ten minutes a day, um, and, yeah, her mobility has been, kind of, drastically reduced by that accident.

Um, and yeah, it was shortly after that that we thought maybe boats are the way for us to still do lots of outdoors things, um, even though we can’t, kind of, get in the mountains anymore. Um, so we bought our first little inflatable two-person kayak and we, um, took it on some incredibly stupid journeys, some ones that [Jessica laughs] I can’t quite believe we did. Like, one of our first trips was to Bardsey Island, across some of the most dangerous tides imaginable! And it was terrifying, um, but we got the bug, um, we both absolutely loved it. Um, so, yeah, since then the kayak has been, kind of, her way of doing lots of outdoors things still. Um, she is now a Paralympic hopeful kayaker, she’s part of the, kind of, team, um…

Jessica: Wow.

David: …for those kind of events. She’s currently the reserve for the World Championships coming up and, yeah, I now obviously spend lots of my career writing about, um, kayaking. So it was a very, kind of, fateful decision. Um, yeah, but one thing that I’ve learned through, kind of, engagement with the Paralympic team and things is just how, um, amazing boats are for people with limited mobility, just the kind of freedom a kayak can give to some people with those kinds of conditions. So, yeah, it’s been quite an incredible journey.

Jessica: That's really an inspiring story and I thank you for sharing that with us. I think a lot of our listeners will appreciate hearing that.

David: Great.

[Music begins]

Jessica: [To listeners] And thanks to David as well for all those enticing book recommendations. I’ll put those in the show notes along with the all the usual links. If you want the book equivalent of feeling the salt spray of the Atlantic on your face this summer, The Frayed Atlantic Edge is for you. I’ll be back next month. In the meantime we’d love to hear how you’re finding adventure in your reading this summer. So come find us on social media, @ListeningBooks, we’d love to hear from you.

The Listening Books podcast is produced by Listening Books, a UK charity that provides an audiobook lending service for over 115,000 members who find that an illness, mental health, physical or learning disability affects their ability to read the printed word or hold a book. It’s simple to join. For more information, head to our website www.listening-books.org.uk.

[Music ends]

[End of Transcript]

Transcript

Caroline: I wanted it to look like how it feels like, and how it feels to be Irish sometimes is that you are in a murder mystery.

[Podcast theme tune]

Jessica: [Speaking to podcast listeners] This is the Listening Books podcast, a show for every kind of reader and especially for fans of audiobooks. Today I’m sharing a conversation with bestselling author and popular podcaster Caroline O’Donoghue.

[Music]

[Speaking to Caroline] Caroline, thank you so much for joining me here today. Um, I was introduced to your work actually though your podcast, um, rather than your books at first. A friend of mine was telling me that I had to listen to Sentimental Garbage, um, and I did and it was so warm and funny and insightful...

Caroline: Oh thank you, you’re so kind. Um, I love to hear that actually because that is a common– I hear that quite a lot, in that people hear of me through the podcast first and then they buy my books and, you know, then everyone’s happy! And what’s great about that is that it– like, because podcasts, you know, really don’t make very much money at all, um, what they are is, like, sort of– you know, they’re a labour of love for doing a thing but they’re also an exercise in, kind of, reputation building.

And sometimes when I’m at my desk at 1:00 in the morning, like, editing a show about a book that came out 30 years ago that is mostly out of print, I literally ask myself, I’m, like, what are you doing? Like, [laughing] why? You have so many things, why are doing this too? And then I hear something like that and its, like, oh, that’s why! Because, like, in the long run it actually does sell more books and it does bolster your career and it makes people feel connected to you in a way they maybe won’t if they just, you know, picked up a random piece of fiction.

Jessica: Yeah. How did you come to podcasting? Was it that sort of analysis, like this would be a boost or… What was the driving…?

Caroline: So I was working at a women’s website called The Pool a few years ago and, um, I met two girls there, Alex Haddow, who’s a comedian, and Hannah Varrall, who’s an audio producer, and we really made each other laugh and we really wanted to do something just ourselves. Um, and so it became just this thing that we did. It was called The School for Dumb Women. We still put it out occasionally, it has a little quote-unquote cult following [laughing], um, but it’s just, like, the three of us, like, you know, talking absolute trash for an hour. But it was really fun and it really taught me the basics of podcasting and, like, you know, and how it differs from a normal conversation and, you know, how to self-edit and all that kind of stuff.

And after that, I decided on Sentimental Garbage because I was reading a Marian Keyes book called Rachel’s Holiday and, um, I really loved it, I was really enjoying it, I love Marian Keyes’ work. And after I finished it I was like, oh, I really want some, like, meaty discussion of this book, I really want to read, like, an essay on, like, Marian Keyes’s Walsh sisters versus Little Women, you know, versus the Bennet sisters. Like, I wanted to, like, have this in-depth stuff. And then I realised it wasn’t there and then I found myself realising that kind of thing a lot of the time, which was like there’s so much discussion, you know, about so much literary fiction that’s very easy to come by, whether it’s, you know, you’re Zadie Smith or George Saunders or all these, like, fantastic writers.

But there’s this other pool of fantastic writing that gets very little magazine space, gets almost no newspaper space, gets no real discussion despite the fact that it’s the most widely read genre basically in the world, which is, you know, women’s romance and commercial fiction. It was one of those sort of moments where what you want to do and what needs to be done becomes a perfect Venn diagram, you know? Or it’s a perfect circle. I was like, oh, this is– people are going to need this and I’m going to love making it, so I’m really delighted that it paid off, you know?

Jessica: Yeah, that seems like such a rarity for that to happen, for the thing that you want and the thing that is needed and the thing that you can offer, all sort of coincides.

Caroline: Yes, totally! It happens really rarely. And I remember I tweeted it or something and I was like, I would love a discussion podcast for just these kinds of books, and the response was so immediately huge that I, like, messaged Hannah, who’s an audio producer, and I asked her if she would make it with me. And we made the first season together, with the intention it was going to be a limited series, like ten episodes, and that would be it and we, you know, one and done. Um, but then the feedback and the response was so immediately great, uh, that we– I just knew I had to continue doing it and that it was sort of like a weird calling in some way.

Jessica: I suppose I was wondering, do you feel like your own work has received that same sort of generous close attention from reviewers that you’re giving to other books?

Caroline: Oh, what a wonderful question. Um, I think the difference here is that I haven’t been publishing that long. I mean, my first book came out in 2018, it’s now 2021, um and so I feel like I’ve been really, really lucky in that I have had lots of, like, extremely thoughtful reviews, particularly from the Irish press. Um, I was especially thrilled when Scenes of a Graphic Nature, my second novel, came out. I was so nervous about how that would be received because there is some quite critical stuff in it about Ireland, while also being quite a fun piece of fiction in, like, it kind of melds genres together in a way that was very experimental and new for me.

And I just got this wave of support, and not– Actually support isn’t what’s important to me, like someone saying they loved something or whatever or just leaving a five-star Goodreads review and being like, ‘Yeah, I liked it’, cool, like that’s lovely but like when someone really understands what you’re trying to say. I mean that’s why you write, why you write to be understood and when you feel understood it is an incredible feeling, even if that understanding comes with criticism. However, I think for me to get the level of a– you know, someone discussing my work the way I discuss other people’s work, I think I do need the benefit of time.

Because one of the things I also love about the podcast is that we don’t just analyse the book, we analyse the context of the book as well. Um, like, you know, a lot of this stuff came out in the, like, mid-80s or early 90s and when you really drill down into what attitudes were at that time it really has– it just places it within a really interesting context. So I really would love, in, like, 20 years’ time, to have, like, you know, a 30-year old, when I’m 50, being, like, ‘Oh, God, well, of course, 2018 was the year of the blah’, you know? [Jessica laughs] So, I would love that one day, yeah.

Jessica: Yes, well I think they’d have a lot of material to work with. Um, the one that I listened to recently is, uh, Promising Young Women and I have to say I had to fight for the copy! Because…

Caroline: Oh, wow.

Jessica: Because as soon as we got it into the library, basically all the copies were borrowed.

Caroline: That’s great. [Over speaking].

Jessica: Um, it’s very popular! But I say that, um, that there’s plenty to work with just because you’ve got so many layers built into Promising Young Women [Caroline: Hm.] that allow it to really explore and examine, um, women’s desires and internal life. And I was just noticing how besides a very self-aware first-person narrator, you’ve also got, um, her job in marketing which is trying to exploit women’s…

Caroline: Yeah!

Jessica: …um, vulnerabilities and their fantasies and guilt trips and…

Caroline: Yes.

Jessica: And then you’ve got her moonlighting as an agony aunt as well, where…

Caroline: Yeah.

Jessica: …she also gets to analyse the underlying emotions and desires and whatever. Um, I mean, because these feel like very intentional choices to allow you to do that. I kind of wondered, were there other occupations that you considered for Jane, um…?

Caroline: Oh wow, that’s so interesting. First of all, thank you so much for that read and that lovely compliment, because it came out three years ago now and, um, yeah, it’s been a long time since anyone, sort of, talked to me about it directly and it’s just really lovely to hear. Um, because obviously, you know, it came out in 2018, I sort of finished writing it in 2016, so it feels like even further away and I was even younger then, and now it just feels, like, quite embarrassing or something but, um…! [Both laugh] Uh, the thing with– and this is something I tell all people who want to write fiction or novels or whatever and don’t know where to start, is you take something that you know really well and then you, sort of, change it and keep changing it and pretty soon it’ll be an entirely different thing.

I think a lot of women especially, they’re afraid of being accused of being– working autobiographically because, you know, that’s the thing like everyone dismisses female art as being, right? So, I meet a lot of young girls and they’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve, um– you know, I’m gonna, like, set my novel during the’, you know, ‘Albanian genocide’ or something, and it’s like, well do you really know that much about that or are you just, sort of, looking to be extremely serious and to be taken seriously? Um, and so what I always recommend is just, sort of, go back to the beginning, go back to what you really, really know well and just keep tweaking as you go. And what I really knew well was the world of marketing.

Um, I had worked in a large advertising agency for three years and then in a kind of smaller agency before that, um, and I found it a really interesting job because it’s populated by people who, sort of, commend themselves on how well they read humanity, right? That’s what marketing is. It’s a lot of people coming into rooms being, like, ‘Well, what’s a mum in Berkshire going to do with that?’ kind of thing! And they, sort of, they invent– It’s like almost a form of novel writing of itself, marketing, because it’s like they invent these people for you to sell to who don’t exist but who are supposed to be facsimiles of people who do exist! And, you know, it’s like a lot of 45-year-old men pretending like they know what a 31-year-old first-time mother knows, thinks about her kid or whatever and, um…

So it’s always interesting when people who think that they’re very aware of humanity have almost no self-awareness themselves and that’s always– like it’s just so fun to play with and that’s why those scenes in Promising Young Women, particularly when she’s at work and she’s in these big meetings, were so much fun to write because it felt like I was exorcising all these thoughts I’ve had over years. And I really wasn’t that concerned over whether or not it was going to be too autobiographical or whatever, um, because I was changing and tweaking so much as I was going and I had built this, kind of, magical realism plot into it where, sort of, Jane sort of loses her, kind of, grip on her sanity. And, yeah, and that’s– and so no, in answer to your original question, which I’ve just remembered! [Laughs] Um, I– There was never going to be another job for her because that was the job I had in my 20s and, you know, that’s it really.

[Interval music]

Jessica: [Speaking to podcast listeners] You’re listening to the Listening Books podcast. Coming up, we’re going to dive a little deeper into plot details of Caroline’s book Promising Young Women. If you want to avoid any hint of spoilers you can skip ahead about eight minutes to land safely in spoiler-free territory. If you’re enjoying this conversation, one thing you can do to help others find us is leave a review on our Podchaser page. That’s podchaser.com/ListeningBooks, which I’ve linked to in the show notes.

[Interval music]

Jessica: [Speaking to Caroline] The ending, which I won’t say too much about because, obviously, spoilers, um, but it surprised me. Um, it went in a less overtly triumphant way than I was expecting, um…

Caroline: Okay.

Jessica: …where it seemed less about winning and more about still standing. The resilience of Jane seemed to be the point rather than the typical, sort of, downfall of the [Caroline: Mm-hm.] big bad man, um…

Caroline: Yeah.

Jessica: And, um, I both appreciated that and wondered if you were ever tempted to go down the more obvious route?

Caroline: Yeah, I’m glad that you said that because the weirdest thing about Promising Young Women coming out– And I should say, just in case people are confused, there is a movie by the same name but it has nothing to do with this book. [Jessica: Oh!] Um, yes, there’s like a movie out right now called Promising Young Woman, it stars Carey Mulligan as, um…

Jessica: Oh! How dare they! [Laughs]

Caroline: I know, it’s deeply annoying [laughs] because people leave reviews for my book, saying, ‘This isn’t the movie’ [Jessica laughs] and I’m like, I know, [laughs] I know that! [Both laugh] Um, but, uh, yeah, no, so the strangest thing about it coming out was that it came out in June 2018 and a couple of months previous, maybe less than a month, I can’t quite remember the timeline, um, the Me Too movement happened. And, um, it sort of became this moment, this sort of– somewhere– I think that every woman of our generation is going to remember probably for as long as we live where– It was like everything changed but also nothing changed. It was this thing of, like, well, this man, you know– like this huge statue that was, like, Harvey Weinstein was pulled down in the town square and then all these smaller statues go pulled down as well.

It was all these people that were being, um, revealed as, sort of, abusers and not just people who had abused women but who had silenced them as well by, you know, these non-disclosure agreements, all these things, all this infrastructure that was there to protect these men. And you see– The weird thing is is that even though I had written this book by the time that had all happened, you see that in Promising Young Women as well. You see, um– so, Jane’s boss Clem sort of has a romantic relationship with her and then although the relationship is, sort of, totally consensual when it begins, it becomes this, sort of, like, closing cage of lack of options for her, within her workspace, and it’s this thing of, like, there’s this entire infrastructure that’s there to protect him.

Like, there’s a scene in it where they’re both called into HR because, you know, this kind of relationship is against the, sort of, policy of the agency they work at and they say to Jane, like, ‘You know, we’re going to have to give you a disciplinary hearing about this, um, but also, because we recently gave you a promotion, you’re still technically on, like, parole, so, uh, we’re going to have to suspend you’. And it’s like this sort of drilled– and she’s like, ‘What?’, like! And then meanwhile, he literally says– he’s like, ‘I’m going to come and get my disciplinary later’ [laughing] and then he walks out, he walks out of the room!

Jessica: It is the most infuriating moment in fiction I’ve experienced in some time, I have to say. [Caroline laughs] I was so indignant listening to it! And yet it was all, um, so very believable. And the entrapment as well by HR into getting her to, you know…

Caroline: Yeah!

Jessica: …in pretending to be her friend to get her to admit to this and it’s really…

Caroline: Yeah, and it’s this thing of like– And I remember I had a conversation with my editor when I turned in that scene and she was like, ‘You know, maybe we need the stakes to be a bit higher. What if they fire Jane? What if this, what if that?’ and I was like, no, it has to be a suspension because, a) of all she has to walk back in, which is– that’s an even bigger punishment than being fired. You have to walk back in after making a scene, after a week away where everyone’s talking about you. And second of all, like, it’s not– and this is the thing with all sort of sexual abuse within workplaces, it’s not as if everyone around you is evil. Like, it’s just that everyone is following a protocol that was built to not service you, you know? And that is more frightening, that’s way scarier! Um…

Jessica: And it’s also, everybody’s doing what’s easiest and it’s easier to continue along with the status quo and the narrative that has formed itself.

Caroline: Yeah!

Jessica: It’s easier just to, sort of, expel you as the woman who’s lost her mind, uh, than it is to confront this level of abuse that is actually going on.

Caroline: Yes, it is exactly, and to, sort of, go back to your original question, which I seem to love spinning away from! [Laughs] This ending, where I kind of thought about all these endings whereby, like, oh, we got rid of the bad man from the advertising agency and now, like– [laughs] now there’s a breastfeeding office! You know what I mean? [Both laugh] But whenever I, kind of, tried to write those scenes they never flowed naturally because I never– I don’t believe they would happen.

Jessica: Yeah.

Caroline: Uh, when I think about that character and where he is now I think, like, yeah, he probably got fired. Or no, he probably didn’t even get fired, he probably agreed to leave that agency and then he probably started an agency somewhere else that’s, like, small and edgy and boutique and in East London and the kind of place where people, like, swear at each other and point at each other a lot. [Jessica laughs] And he’s probably still doing the exact same thing, you know? And I was, like, I don’t– And actually the more I thought about it and the more, like, bummed out it made me I was, like, you know what, it’s not about him or what happens to him. It’s not about what happens at the agency. It’s about this woman realising that she doesn’t want to be in this system anymore and that there are other options and there are other things for her to do. And so that’s why it ends the way that it does.

Jessica: I like the ending and it felt like a real ending. And it also reminded me of the difference that– the older woman who’s more senior in the agency…

Caroline: Oh, Deb, yeah.

Jessica: Deb, sorry. Deb sort of draws a distinction between Clem’s kind of mentality, like where the emphasis is on winning, it’s just short-term wins that he’s focused on.

Caroline: Yeah.

Jessica: Um, and she’s there for the long term when things get difficult, you know, managing the relationships with the clients or whatever, and so she completely dismisses him because it’s so short-sighted to look at it, at just that win. And so the ending kind of reminded me of that because her…

Caroline: Oh, that’s such a great point.

Jessica: …because her triumph is not just the short-term win over win. Her triumph is the long-term resilience.

Caroline: Yeah, no, I totally– I agree with you and I’d never thought of it in that context before but you’re totally right and, um… Yeah, what I love about Deb is that, like, when Jane goes to Deb and is, like, ‘You know, he’s trying to steal your job, he’s trying to wreck your career, he’s undermining you at work. Like, do you know this?’ and, like, Deb is, like, ‘Duh!’ [both laughing], like, ‘Well, duh! Of course he is!’ You don’t get to 50 and be the head of a department without knowing that men are undermining you and trying to take your job! Like, wake up, smell the coffee!’

Jessica: Thank you so much for revisiting, um, Promising Young Women with me.

Caroline: I’m really enjoying it. Like, I just hadn’t thought about it in a while, so I’m really glad to be thinking about it again.

Jessica: Well, you mentioned that it felt a little embarrassing because that was the first one and that was a while ago.

Caroline: Yeah.

Jessica: Um, well, I know Scenes of a Graphic Nature you’re playing with different genres as well [Caroline: Mm-hm.], there’s a bit of a murder mystery in there, but [Caroline: Mm-hm.] is there something you feel like you really brought to Scenes of a Graphic Nature that you learned from your first experience, from your first novel or that you…?

Caroline: Yeah– God, that’s a really great… You’re a wonderful interviewer by the way. I really think they’re great questions!

Jessica: You’re so kind, thank you!

[Both laughing]

Caroline: Yes, yeah, uh, I do think there were a lot of, like, lessons learned from between book one and book two. Uh, and particularly I think– I realise that I’m someone who really loves borrowing from genre in order to… I think the main thing I’ve discovered about how I like to work is that I like things to look like how they feel like. So, Promising Young Women, um, has a lot of the same shapes as Gothic literature does. Um, it sort of has a… It’s vaguely similar to Jane Eyre in a way, like with the– that’s, kind of, why she’s called Jane, um, because, you know, if you think about Jane Eyre, it’s a workplace relationship, you know?

Jessica: Yeah!

Caroline: [Laughing] She’s, you know, and he– she’s this person that goes into this infrastructure that he completely runs. He’s already destroyed a woman before her, like, and it’s– so she’s got really very limited options and that’s why the imagery sort of borrows from Gothic literature so much. And then similarly with Scenes of a Graphic Nature, as an Irish person who’s been away from my home country for – I mean this year it’ll be ten years – I wanted it to look like how it feels like. And how it feels to be Irish sometimes is that you are in a murder mystery, and it’s…! [Laughs]

Jessica: Ooo, say more about that! [Laughs]

Caroline: It feels like– The thing about being Irish is that every six weeks to three months something horrible comes out in the paper [Jessica: Ah.] and you open your email from the Irish Times that you get every morning and it says, you know, um, ‘Bishop’, you know, ‘responsible for the cover up of the death of 13 children’, or something– or– or something like that. The big one that is referenced in Scenes of a Graphic Nature several times is Tuam, which is a…

Jessica: Yeah.

Caroline: …place in Galway where, uh, there was a mother and baby home where basically a mass grave of children’s remains was found near it. And, um, the weirdest thing about it, it was that the grave was discovered in the 70s and the police looked into and I think they told local people that, um, it was a mass grave left over from the famine and people built a shrine to it and people, like, you know, prayed to it and stuff and– People wanted to remember but they were remembering the wrong– People wanted to honour the dead but they were honouring the wrong dead [Jessica: Hm.] and for the wrong reasons. And I was really arrested by this image of, like, we’re so caked in all this trauma left over by both the British empire and the Catholic Church and because we’re so alienated from our own paperwork, like even, like, recently there was a really huge report, a really groundbreaking report happened over the Church and abuses in Ireland.

And it’s so sad because it took us so long to wrestle this data from the Church and now most of those women are dead, like [Jessica: Hm.] the women who were imprisoned in these laundries. And that’s way the, sort of, shape of a murder mystery was so important to me, is because, like, sometimes it does feel like you’re in a house that’s covered in blood and you don’t know where the murderer is and all you have is, like, these chalk imprints on the floor. And so I learned from Promising Young Women that, like, you can borrow these things from genre and because everyone understands genre, because it’s all… These tropes have existed within our, like, cultural narrative for hundreds of years and so you can use these things, you know, like the smoking gun, like, you know, the Gothic house, and you can use them to make bigger points about your art, and I realised that that’s something I love doing.

Jessica: Now, uh, you shifted genres again with your latest book [Caroline: Hm.] All Our Hidden Gifts.

Caroline: Yes.

Jessica: And now it’s supernatural and it’s young adult or teen fiction.

Caroline: Yeah.

Jessica: Um, what was that like, to switch into that genre?

Caroline: Well, you know what’s interesting actually, because I just mentioned that, you know, with Promising Young Women it was a nod to Gothic literature, uh, with Scenes of a Graphic Nature it’s a nod to, you know, murder mysteries. But with both those genres I don’t know a ton about them! [Both laughing] Like, and that’s what’s embarrassing! Like, I’ve read, like, the big Gothic novels, like Rebecca, Jane Eyre, [Jessica: Hm.] but I’m not, like, a scholar in those things, like I’m not– So, I’m sort of, you know, it’s not that [laughing] authentic or it’s not coming from that deep a well of knowledge. Um, same with Scenes of a Graphic Nature, it’s like I actually don't read murder mysteries because it’s like maths for your brain, sort of [Jessica laughs] to the point where– it’s like narrative maths where it’s like, okay, well the butler was here and the thing was here and the rectory only has two doors and it’s, like…! [Both laughing] And it’s really confusing and I’m like quite dumb! Like, I don’t have a very good logic brain so, um, so I…

Jessica: Do you feel like you need to solve it before the author does, before it’s revealed?

Caroline: No, it’s not even that…

Jessica: Okay.

Caroline: It’s not even, like– I don’t even have that level of God complex. It’s more that, like, [Jessica laughs] I can’t– I literally, when someone– when, you know, Poirot or whatever reveals that, like, ‘Oh, and so-and-so had stains on his shoes!’, I'm like, u-huh? [Laughs]

Jessica: Did we know that? [Laughing]

Caroline: Yeah, did we know that already? [Laughing] Did we know? It’s like… [Intake of breath] Um…

Jessica: Yeah, I’m terrible about that as well actually. I can’t keep track of those kind of details but the way that I try to solve it is by looking at what I think the author is trying to do, like where they’re trying to, like, point me in a different direction.

Caroline: Yeah, yeah.

Jessica: Like, I’m trying to second-guess the author more than I’m trying to keep up with the clues I think! [Laughs]

Caroline: No, very that– Yeah, I completely agree, um… So, yeah, so those two genres, like, despite the fact that I was playing with them, I don’t actually have very deep knowledge of them but with, um, All Our Hidden Gifts– I’m actually a huge fan of young adult supernatural fiction. It’s probably one of my favourite genres to read, um, because I, like– particularly stuff that came out in, like, the late 80s and early 90s, like Margaret Mahy and Diana Wynne Jones, this sort of really, like, complex, sort of spooky, haunted narratives that generally have a huge amount to say about– particularly the ones that deal with witchcraft, sort of female development and female– the inherent witchiness of being born a girl, of, like– you know, like, there’s nothing witchier than bleeding for five days and not dying, you know?  [Laughing] Like, it’s amazing! [Jessica laughs]

And with more modern stuff as well, uh, Leigh Bardugo I’m a huge fan of. I’m a huge fan of Sarah J. Maas and Naomi Novik. There’s a lot of– There’s such good work in this area. But what I wanted to specifically play with for All Our Hidden Gifts, in the same way I did with Scenes and with Promising is that, you know, when you’re a teenage girl and you fall out with your best friend it feels like the end of the world.

Jessica: Yeah.

Caroline: And in this book it is, kind of thing! So, these two girls– Um, our main character is Maeve Chambers and she is a teenager and she has done that thing that either so many teenage girls have done or have had done to them, where they dump their best friend from primary school because they have an opportunity to ascend the ranks of popularity but their friend is, kind of, dead weight on that goal. [Jessica: Hm.] And so she cuts off her friend, she cuts off the only person who’s ever really understood or loved her and then there’s this horrible year where they don’t speak, and we meet Maeve at the end of this year and we feel this loneliness radiating off of her and, uh, she’s done these horrible things to her friend that she can’t undo.

And then she finds these tarot cards within her school and she gets really good at them and then, you know, she’s telling everyone’s cards and, like, every– she, kind of, has that– I don’t know if you’ve gone to a girls’ school but, like, girls’ schools love fads and, like, just, kind of, you know, things that just, you know, make you popular for three days.

Jessica: Oh yeah.

Caroline: And towards the end of this fad, all of the girls in her class are, like, ‘You know who hasn’t had a reading yet, your ex-best friend who you were mean to, and we all know about that’, kind of thing! [Jessica laughs] And so she gives her friend a reading. This, sort of, horrible, traumatic thing happens during that reading and then Lily quickly goes missing. And not only does Lily go missing but Maeve has, sort of, unintentionally, like, torn a hole in the fabric of the magical lining of the world…

Jessica: Oh wow.

Caroline: …and it invites…

Jessica: Those are some high stakes!

Caroline: There’s high stakes, yeah! And it invites all this other, um, sort of– these people who, kind of, prey on magic and prey on weakness, um, it summons them to this place where they live and that becomes, sort of, the narrative arc of the series. Um, so, yeah, sometimes when you fight with your best friend it is the end of the world! [Laughs]

Jessica: Wow, and it’s a series? It’s not a standalone?

Caroline: It is, yeah. I just– I’m finishing the sequel right now [Jessica: Ah.], um, and I’m hoping there will be three books in the series.

Jessica: Do you have much of a hand, um, in the casting of the audiobooks of your works?

Caroline: Yeah, surprisingly, yes. I think because I’m a huge audiobooks fan, um, from the beginning, I was very, like, okay, um, by the way, this is not going to be something I’m going to sit still for, I’m going to have a big say in this. Um, and so I had the really amazing opportunity with both Promising and Scenes. Promising was actually narrated by a friend, Tessa Coates, um, which was great because I literally– She, I mean…

Jessica: I enjoyed her narration.

Caroline: She’s an actress anyway, and she’s a podcaster, um, and a writer and she was just in my house one day, I was cooking her dinner and the paperback for Promising came in the post and she started reading it to me while I was cooking and I remember this feeling. I was, like [intake of breath] this is the first time I’ve liked this book since I wrote it, you know! [Jessica: Ah-ha!] And I was, like, ‘You have to do it, you have to do it’. And so, I immediately got on to the producers and I was, like, ‘She’s an actress, so can we get her in?’

Jessica: Make this happen! [Laughs]

Caroline: Yeah, make this happen, yeah! And, um, and she did an amazing job and, you know, I hope she gets more audiobook work through it because she’s so good at it.

Jessica: Yeah.

Caroline: Um, and it’s so weird as well, because when I was listening to it back and, like, there’s a couple of sex scenes in Promising and she, sort of, does his voice, I’m, like, it’s so weird being like, okay, I find this weirdly hot, even though [Jessica laughs] it’s my friend reading my work: it’s so weird! [Both laugh] Um, and then for Scenes, I basically did the same thing again where, um, my friend Esther O’Moore Donohoe, she was also a voice actor and she, she does radio in Ireland as well, she did the voice for that. So it was– yeah, in both instances I got to choose.

Jessica: Ah.

Caroline: Yeah.

Jessica: That’s great, yeah.

Caroline: Yeah, it’s really great, I love it.

Jessica: And have you ever undertaken a reading challenge? You know these reading challenges that come around?

Caroline: No, don’t care for them.

Jessica: No? Don’t care for them!

[Both laugh]

Caroline: No, I don’t like it, I find it very stressful! Um, yeah, and I– But I do use Goodreads, uh, like…

Jessica: Yeah.

Caroline: …I like reviewing, you know, books as and when I read them, um, and I– it really stresses me out to see all these people who are, like, ‘Book 39 of 50’, and it– I don’t know. I’m sure they’re getting something out of it but it’s just not… Like, I go through phases where I read, you know, three books in a month and then I might not read for two months and, like, [Jessica: Hm.] the idea of, like, being that regimented frightens me!

Jessica: Yeah, I’m with you on that actually and I’ve never done one of the numbered ones. Like, I…

Caroline: Yeah.

Jessica: I never set a number of the year and try to reach it, because…

Caroline: Yeah.

Jessica: …I’m always afraid that that’s just going to encourage me to read just shorter books so I can reach the number quicker.

Caroline: Yeah, tot–…

Jessica: Yeah?

Caroline: No, you’re completely right. I remember when I was a kid and we had this, like, it was like a readathon thing and we were, like, raising money– we'd be sponsored about how many books we would read and raising money for MS or something. And, uh, I remember cheating the system by– I was, like, 12 and I was reading loads of books that were eight and up [Jessica laughs], and I remember one of my neighbours, who was a schoolteacher, looking at the list of books I’ve read and she just looked at me and she went, ‘Come on’!

[Both laugh]

Jessica: See, I was the opposite. I think I was… Um, I would try to read, like, um, Tale of Two Cities. I’d have tried to read, like, a Dickens book when I was, like, nine.

Caroline: Wow.

Jessica: And it was way above my reading level, I was not comprehending it…

Caroline: Yes.

Jessica: …like you would want to. Um, but basically I was lobbying the teacher to count it as multiple books because it was…

Caroline: I agree!

Jessica: [Laughing] I know, right?

Caroline: Well, in terms of the reading challenges thing, I do think– I’m sorry, I feel like I’m being very dismissive. I think those…

Jessica: No, you’re not.

Caroline: …things where it’s, like, you know, a volume of books, I’m like, I don’t really know how helpful that is. But when it’s, like, people who are making an effort to read from non-white authors or from–…

Jessica: Yeah.

Caroline: …or love stories that aren’t straight love stories or basically any kind of, um, fiction that is not as read as it should it because of the infrastructure of publishing in bookshops or whatever, they’ll get the publicity they should. And I think those are great.

Jessica: Good, um, because as you know, Listening Books has an audiobook listening challenge we’re running this year. We’re running it a little bit different than we did last year where I think it was a challenge per month and this one is a bit more– it allows a bit more flexibility. So we’ve got, sort of, ten, uh, main challenges and then a few turbo challenges in addition for the people who really want to up their game. But it really is just about, uh, encouraging people in a playful way to read more widely and more diversely. So one of the items in our listening challenge this year is to read not just a romance but a book featuring an LGBTQ+ romance, um, and I feel like you have a pretty good, like, survey of the romance genre.

Caroline: Yeah.

Jessica: So I wondered, do you have any recommendations for this challenge?

Caroline: Oh, tons, yeah, um, I– Okay, there’s one book that’s come out recently. I don’t know whether we would call it squarely a romance but it’s definitely about romantic relationships [Jessica: Mm-hm.] called Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters. Wow, it’s so fantastic. It’s basically about this, um, uh, this trans woman, this, uh– this man who’s recently detransitioned, so he used to be a trans woman and now he’s decided to live as a man, and his cisgender girlfriend… Sorry, it’s much– you know, it’s not actually as confusing as I’m making it sound. Um, and basically he gets his sister and her girlfriend pregnant and then they want to raise the baby with his trans ex-girlfriend who’s the main character.

And basically it’s, like, this amazing book about relationships and motherhood and looking at mothering in a new way and it’s just– it’s an incredible– it really, like, blows up the binary in terms of what we think that relationship dramas should be. So that’s one. Uh, another one that I love, and everybody read this because it won the Pulitzer, uh, is Less by Andrew Sean Greer [Jessica: Mm-hm.], which I think is just a stunning, gorgeous book. It’s so funny. If people love, like, Muriel Spark, it’s, like, written in a very similar style to that, like it’s very short but it’s very dense and very funny. Um, what are more of them? Have you read, uh, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl? 

Jessica: No, I haven’t.

Caroline: Yeah, by, um, yeah, Andrea Lawlor. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor. Um, and it’s about this boy Paul who’s a shape-shifter and he can shift and look any way that he wants and, um, falls in love with a lesbian girl. And, uh, you know, he can sort of change his shape into a woman’s shape for periods of time but he can’t do it for very long, and, you know, it’s just a wonderful look at gender and, yeah, our shifting perspectives on it. Yeah…

Jessica: I love the sound of that.

Caroline: Yeah, they’re all, like, fantastic books and, uh, yeah, I really recommend any one of them. The– Less by Andrew Sean Greer is the only one that I have on audiobook, so that’s the only one I can definitely confirm it’s a great listen.

Jessica: Okay.

Caroline: Oh, also! Sorry, another one.

Jessica: That’s okay! [Laughs]

Caroline: Uh, Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.

Jessica: Oh, yes. Yeah.

Caroline: Love– That– So I really, really love and respect Sarah Waters but I cannot read her books because they are big and heavy [both laugh], um, and I have very weak wrists, uh, so I listen to all of her stuff on audiobook and Fingersmith is my favourite.

Jessica: Um, I don’t think I’ve listened to any of them. I’ve read a couple of them [Caroline: Mm-hm.], um but, yeah, love her work.

Caroline: Yeah.

Jessica: So that’s a good shout. Um, we also have– as I mentioned, we have some turbo-level challenges and one of them is to listen to an audiobook from your least favourite genre…

Caroline: Okay.

Jessica: …uh, which I do find quite challenging actually. Um! [Caroline: Mm-hm.] I think for some people, um, so-called chicklit…

Caroline: Yeah.

Jessica: …um, falls into that category and I just wonder as a champion of chicklit…

Caroline: Yeah.

Jessica: …if you might have some gateway recommendations for sceptics?

Caroline: Sure, um, so, okay, Circle of Friends is one of my favourite books of all time, by Maeve Binchey, um, and I think, like, if anyone– like, people who have read, like– If you read Normal People or whatever or, sort of, Sally Rooney, this is the urtext for that I think. It’s, like, this incredibly deep and beautiful exploration of just, like, these friends going to college in Dublin and all the various, sort of, class collisions and love story within that and I just think it is one of the most beautiful books of all time and everyone should read it. [Jessica: Ah.] So if you’re a person who normally loves a kind of literary fiction sort of thing, like Sally Rooney, uh, I would really recommend that book.  

Jessica: You’re such a good book matchmaker! [Caroline laughing] I love how you’re, like, thinking specifically of the…!

Caroline: Thank you! I think about books always, so I [laughing], um, I’m– I love doing it. Um, I then– okay, if people are, like, quite into sort of– if their guilty pleasure tends to be more celebrity based, like, you know, looking at celebrities’ Instagrams, uh, I would really recommend Who’s That Girl? by Mhairi McFarlane because it’s a really, really fun romantic comedy about a woman who has to write, uh, ghostwrite a celebrity memoir and falls in love with the celebrity, and he’s like a Kit Harrington type. And it’s really, really funny. It’s got really funny things to say about celebrity and about that kind of, um, celebrity profile writing that everybody hates, [laughing] you know?

Jessica: Oh, yeah! [Laughs]

Caroline: Um, and yeah, I really love that book.

Jessica: Thank you so much for such thoughtful recommendations and thoughtful answers and, um… You’ve been such great company, I– which I really appreciate… [over speaking].

Caroline: Oh, thank you! You too. No, you too. This has been a lovely morning. It’s a lovely way to spend a Friday morning.

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Jessica: [To podcast listeners] Caroline O’Donohue’s books Promising Young Women and Scenes of a Graphic Nature are both available as audiobooks to borrow in the Listening Books Library, and we’re looking forward to the release of All Our Hidden Gifts in May. You can hear more from Caroline on her podcast Sentimental Garbage and I’ll be back next month with acclaimed actor and audiobook narrator Kobna Holdbrook-Smith. You won’t want to miss that, so make sure you subscribe to the Listening Books podcast through your favourite podcast player and it’ll be waiting for you as soon as it’s published. Don’t forget to leave a review on podchaser.com/ListeningBooks and you can also find us on Twitter @ListeningBooks. We’d love to hear from you.

The Listening Books podcast is produced by Listening Books, a UK charity that provides an audiobook library service for over 115,000 members who find that an illness, mental health issue, physical or learning disability affects their ability to read the printed word or hold a book. It’s simple to join. For more information, head to our website http://www.listening-books.org.uk.

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