Book In

A.S.Byatt wrote Possession as a completely self-indulgent project, with no thought of commercial or critical consequence. It sold millions and won the Booker Prize in 1990, introducing her to a mass audience and turning her into a literary superstar. It tells the story of a fictional Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash, who is mostly Browning with a dash of Tennyson; Ash falls in love and eventually has a child with another fictional minor Victorian poet, Christabel LaMotte. But their affair remains unknown to posterity until a young researcher in the 1980s discovers by chance some letters they had written to each other. He teams up with another academic, Maud Bailey, to find out what really happened, and like the Victorians, they too fall in love. Part detective story, part love story, part literary tour de force, Byatt herself composes the poetry through which Ash and LaMotte express their feelings for each other, and the letters they write. It is a brilliant, wordy, baggy, exciting, moving and above all literary book, covering Victorian sensibility, London in the mid 19th century, the absurdities of competitive academics in the modern age. Join Rupert and Charlie as they delve into this wonderful and heartwarming novel. 

The Siege of Krishnapur is set in India in 1857 during the Indian Rebellion (or what used to be known as the Indian Mutiny). The small British community are besieged by the rebellious Indians, and as food and medicine gradually run out, and casualties rise by the day, their instinctive recourse to the social and hierarchical structures by which they have lived their lives is tested to breaking point. Their leader is the Collector, an essentially good and thoughtful man, who tries to maintain discipline, ensure the defences are manned, and keep up morale by promising that relief is near at hand. But his belief in progess and the ability of science and technology to improve the human condition is shaken to the core. Based on letters written by people involved in the sieges of Cawnpore and Lucknow, J. G. Farrell's brilliant novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1973, is thriller, satire, love story and history all at once - funny, informative and deeply moving. Farrell died young in a tragic drowning accident; another of his novels, Troubles about the British presence in Ireland, was awarded the Booker Prize for 1970 after his death. Join Rupert and Charlie as they look at this often overlooked masterpiece, and place the story in the context of the rule of the British in India. 

In the second part of the Book In episode on Midnight's Children, Charlie and Rupert look at the way Salman Rushdie places the novel in the context of the extraordinary political and social changes created by the birth of the Indian nation. How will India change after independence? How is Pakistan different? How did the dreams of independence give way to the chaos of Partition, the creation of Bangladesh and the nightmare of Emergency Rule under Indira Gandhi? Why is Rushdie so brilliant at writing about women? And how is the style like Dickens on acid? Join us as we conclude our discussion of Rushdie's masterpiece. 

On the stroke of midnight of August 15th 1947, the nation of India became independent from Great Britain. Saleem Sinai, the central character of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, is born at exactly the same moment, and in this monumental book, Rushdie tells the story of Saleem's family background, his childhood and his early years as an adult. Saleem's story is also India's story, and it plays out against the background of the birth of this vast and teeming nation. The creation of Pakistan, the subsequent emergence of Bangladesh, the death of Mahatma Gandhi, the emergency rule of Indira Gandhi in the 1970s - all profoundly affect the lives of the central characters. Yet Rushdie's story is rooted in the family and friends of Saleem in all their generosity, pettiness, scatological excess, dishonesty, bravery and humour. The nature of India, the effect of British rule, love, adultery, materialism, spirituality, success and failure are all explored in a kaleidoscopic and often chaotic panorama which reflects the nature of India itself. Has independence been a success? What does Rushdie, a Muslim, feel about partition, the dominance of Hindus and the creation of Pakistan? What is magic realism? And why is there so much snot in the novel? Join Charlie and Rupert as they take on Rushdie's masterpiece, which won the Booker Prize in 1981. 

Jesse Norman joins Book In to talk about his brilliant novel The Winding Stair, about the rivalry between Francis Bacon and Edward Coke as they battled for power in the court of King James 1st. In this special edition of Book In, Jesse talks to Rupert about the novel – what inspired him and how he wrote it. Bacon was described by Thomas Jefferson as one of the three greatest men who had ever lived, and in his belief in the potential of the human mind and spirit to create a better society and a richer life for people, he was a prophet of the enlightenment. But for much of his career he was outwitted by Coke, frustrated in his ambition to attain an office from which he could create the institutions which would provide the modern and rounded education that he believed were necessary. Meanwhile Coke was the leading lawyer of his day, immersed in precedent, and prosecuting the greatest trials of the time, including the Gunpowder Plotters. And also present in the novel is the fascinating character of James 1st – perhaps the most intellectually accomplished monarch Britain has ever had, but also self-centred, suspicious, paranoid, indulgent of his favourites, and a passionate believer in the Divine Right of Kings. Join Rupert and Jesse as they discuss this extraordinary and formative period in British history, and what parallels there might be with politics today. 

Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey has been the blockbuster cultural event of the summer. Within a few weeks of release, it has already grossed nearly $1bn, putting it on course to become one of the most successful movies of all time. But is the hype justified? Does it matter that while Homer’s hero was interested in glory and honour, Matt Damon’s Odysseus is a traumatised war veteran driven by grief at the loss of his men, and the damage and pain he has inflicted? Why is there so little sex in the movie? Is it too woke? Is it too long? What has happened to the Gods? And who dresses up as Batman? Join Rupert and Charlie as they review the film of the year. 

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” – the famous lines from W.B Yeats’ visionary and apocalyptic poem The Second Coming are as resonant today as they were when he wrote them in the aftermath of the First World War, with Europe decimated economically, spiritually and culturally. He wrote that  “The best lack all conviction, and the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”, and as he grew older, his poetry articulated the worries and anxieties of the age. But he remained a private as well as a public artist, and in his later poems he explored the role of the artist in society, and confronted old age, illness and mortality in some of the greatest poems he ever wrote. But why did W.H.Auden call him silly? Was it OK that within the space of a few hours he proposed not only to Maud Gonne, but also her daughter? And what was automatic writing? Join Rupert and Charlie in the second part of the Book In episode on W.B.Yeats. 

In the early 20th century, as the nation of Ireland emerged from the turmoil of centuries of struggle, oppression, poverty and famine, one figure above all others was  both prophet and judge of the tumultuous process. In his early years, William Butler Yeats created a mythology of Ireland, and later, with poems like Easter 1916 and The Second Coming, he wrote of the ambiguity, the "terrible beauty", that was explicit in the uprisings and civil wars which preceded the creation of the Irish Free State. But he was not just a poet; with Maud Gonne, the actress and revolutionary with whom he fell hopelessly in love and who he compared to Helen of Troy, he became involved in the creation of an Irish Theatre, and in direct political action with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the forerunner of the IRA. On its creation, he became a public figure as a Senator in the Dail, and with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923 became world famous. But he was a man of contradictions, a Republican who detested violence, a Protestant who supported Irish freedom, an intellectual who believed in magic. Join Rupert and Charlie as they look at W B Yeats in a 2 part series. 

W H Auden wrote some of the most beautiful and complex poetry of the 20th century. Best known to modern audiences as the author of “Stop all the Clocks”, read by John Hannah in Four Weddings and a Funeral, he grew up in Yorkshire and the Midlands, and his parents were a psychiatrist and a nurse; this provincial, professional background pervades his poetry with its images of industry and science. Like many of his generation, he was on the left and went to Spain to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. But when World War Two started, he left for America, from where he observed the carnage with a combination of detachment and guilt. Like his contemporaries Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and T.S Eliot, he converted to Christianity as an adult, and his later work is an extraordinary fusion of private love, public engagement and religious exploration. There are many recordings of him on TV chat shows in his later years, and his extraordinary,Rembrandtesque appearance and gravelly voice convey a public intellectual of a kind which no longer exists in the modern world. Join Charlie and Rupert as they explore the poetry of this brilliant and underestimated poet. 

In the second episode on T.S.Eliot, Book In looks at the poems he wrote after The Wasteland, as he moved towards a conversion to Christianity. In the Hollow Men, he returns again to the desolation and spiritual emptiness of the West after the First World War, weaving together Dante, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Gunpowder Plot amongst other themes. By the time he wrote Ash Wednesday three years later he had fully embraced the High Anglican church, and the poem tells of his need to renounce the pride and arrogance which he felt had characterised his behaviour in the past. The language in these poems is incantatory, chanting, rooted in the bible and the prayerbook. Marina is a beautiful meditation on sin, death and redemption, immersed in images of the sea and the coastal New England landscape of his youth. Join Charlie and Rupert as they explore this critical phase of Eliot’s life, and the exquisite religious verse he produced, perhaps the finest in the English language sine the metaphysical poets of the 17th century.