Book In

Another from the archives while Rupert is away scaling mountains. We'll be back soon!

Emma is one of only six novels that Jane Austen completed, and yet she is among the very greatest of all English writers. How did an obscure spinster living in a modest house in Hampshire come to create these extraordinary books, and what is it that is so special about them? Rupert and Charlie look at arguably the greatest of them all, the story of Emma Woodhouse. Set in the modest provincial town of Highbury, and charting the day to day lives and concerns of ordinary people, she explores the very depths of human nature, and how we relate to each other. But is Emma a sympathetic heroine or a manipulative schemer? Why can’t she see that the man for her isn’t the smooth chancer who dazzles her for a while, but the solid and kind friend who has always had her interests at heart? And why is she so rude to poor old ladies on picnics? Charlie will explain it all. 

Our first ever episode re-released: Rupert and Charlie discuss The Great Gatsby, Scott FitzGerald’s wonderful novel of love, loss and broken dreams. Published 100 years ago, the book is extraordinarily modern and speaks to a contemporary audience as powerfully as it did to the jazz generation of the 1920s. Charlie talks about the multi-layered nature of the book with its time shifts and multiple viewpoints. Was Gatsby really a good guy who lost his way? Is Daisy a murderess? Did FitzGerald himself really believe in the American dream? Are the film versions accurate? And is The Great Gatsby the elusive Great American Novel? Join Charlie and Rupert to find out. 

Two brothers live in a squalid bedsit in west London. The room is crammed with junk. They befriend Davies, who is homeless and a tramp. He moves in with them, and they offer him a job as a caretaker for the property. But the job falls through, because Davies can’t get his papers, which are in Sidcup. Harold Pinter’s brilliant play tells the story of these three lost men, and how power shifts between them over time. They are hopeless and damaged, but they variously have dreams of getting a job, refurbishing and letting out the property and engaging with life in a normal manner. Pinter explores issues of homelessness, mental health, dealing with trauma and male relationships in a way which was groundbreaking for its time and resonates strongly today. He was a remarkable man - he came from a humble Jewish background to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and his marriage to Lady Antonia Fraser propelled him into the highest echelons of British society. He loved cricket and parties, and mixed freely with the establishment of the time, but nonetheless remained resolutely attached to left wing causes and campaigned against what he saw as American imperialism throughout his life. 

Join Charlie and Rupert as they discuss this fascinating man and his early masterpiece, The Caretaker. 

Tom Stoppard was glamorous, charismatic and brilliant, and his plays are among the finest written in English since the Second World War. Perhaps his most accomplished work is Arcadia, first performed in 1993, with a stellar cast including Rufus Sewell, Felicity Kendal, Harriet Walter and Bill Nighy. The play contains two separate groups of people, one from the early 1800s, and the other from the present day, but performing in the same room in a country house in England. Stoppard explores a multitude of themes including mathematics and chaos theory, landscape gardening, entropy, the nature of knowledge, and literary criticism. It is dazzling, funny, witty and deeply moving, and the connections between the two groups are revealed as the play unfolds. But is it too clever by half? Can Stoppard's unashamedly intellectual exploration of ideas come across as all artifice and no heart? What role does Byron play in all this? And has there ever been a better name for a tortoise than Plautus? Join Rupert and Charlie as they discuss Stoppard's great play and celebrate his long and distinguished life.

Tune in for Book In’s review of Emerald Fennell’s film Wuthering Heights. The advance publicity promised a modern and original take on Emily Bronte’s classic novel - does the film deliver this? Fennell is well known for her fondness for portraying themes of repressed sexuality and sado-masochism - does this work in Wuthering Heights? Do Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi capture the extraordinary combination of innocence and passion that Cathy and Heathcliff have in the novel? Is Elordi a convincing villain? And could this be the start of a major career revival for Martin Clunes? Join Rupert and Charlie to get their take on Fennell’s blockbuster movie. 

The Great Tradition - which are the greatest novels we have done in the podcast? 

What are the greatest novels in the English language? On Book In, we’ve covered quite a few over the last few months, and now we take a step back, and try to assess their quality. The critic F R Leavis, who we have referenced frequently in the podcasts, had his views, trenchantly expressed in his famous work The Great Tradition. We look at his criteria and discuss whether or not they are relevant or useful today. And we come up with our own rankings and ratings for the major novels we have done. Is Heart of Darkness a better book than Jane Eyre? Is it possible to say? Does it matter? Join Rupert and Charlie to find out, and see if you agree. 

Charlie and Rupert continue their discussion of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. What effect had the First World War had on the rarefied circles in which Clarissa Dalloway moved, and were those experiences different to the rest of society? The novel ostensibly takes place within the confines of a single day in June 1923, but within this framework, Woolf tells the stories of her characters over many decades. How does she do it, and how does it reflect the way in which we all experience time and memory in our everyday lives? What is the influence of the modernist giants James Joyce and T.S.Eliot, whose seminal works Ulysses and The Wasteland had been published only two years before? And what is the best film made of this book, which on the face of it would appear to be unfilmable? Join Book In to find out. 

At the age of 40 Virginia Woolf was a prominent figure in post first world war London. She had published several novels, and was a well known commentator and critic. She came from literary aristocracy - her father was Leslie Stephen, who had married William Thackeray’s daughter, and with her husband Leonard Woolf, she was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, which included her sister Vanessa Bell, Vanessa’s artist husband Clive, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant.  But then in 1925 everything changed; she published Mrs Dalloway, in which she told the story of the experience of one woman’s life for one day in June 1923 in London. The New Yorker described it as “one of the few great innovations in the history of the novel”. The text uses modernist techniques of multiple viewpoints and cinematic sweeps and takes us in and out of the minds and feelings of a group of individuals whose lives intersect during the day. Beautiful, haunting and superbly executed, it explores issues of memory, regret, the appalling mental suffering experienced by WW1 survivors and the brittle nature of British society in the 1920s. In another two part episode, Rupert and Charlie look at this seminal work of twentieth century English fiction. 

In the second part of Book In’s episode on Thomas Hardy’s great novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, Rupert and Charlie look at the character of Michael Henchard - the qualities which enabled him to rise, and the faults that led to his fall. But is he the victim of his own downfall, or is it the case that in Hardy’s world the universe is random and cruel, and tragedy and misery are the inevitable conditions to which human beings are bound? Why dies the young Scotsman Donald Farfrae succeed where Henchard does not? What was going on in agriculture in England in the early 1840s, before the Corn Laws were repealed? Why are clothes so important to Hardy? What happens when Henchard starts drinking again? And why did friend of the show Henry James describe Hardy as “second rate”? Join Rupert and Charlie to find out. 

Thomas Hardy lived an extraordinary life. He was born into poverty and obscurity in rural Dorset in 1840, yet when he died in 1928, he was rich and world famous. His funeral at Westminster Abbey was a quasi-state occasion, with all the leading politicians and writers of the day attending, and thousands of people lining the streets of London in tribute. As a child, he remembered his grandmother recalling the French Revolution, yet he lived through the first world war into a world of motor cars, radio and television, and mass democracy. He was unhappily married to his first wife, Emma, yet when she died, he was consumed with grief and remorse, and the poetry he produced in the two years after her death is some of the finest love poetry ever written. In a two part episode of Book In, Charlie and Rupert look at one of his greatest novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge, the tragic story of Michael Henchard, who rose from rural obscurity to being the richest and most powerful man in the area. But his past catches up with him; the terrible thing he did when he was young comes back to haunt him, and his fall is public and complete. As in so many of his books, Hardy takes us back to the rural world of his youth, and shows us the lives that the people he knew as a young man were living. But even when he was writing the novel, it was a world that had passed; we see the emergence of new men, new ideas and new technologies, and the destructive effect these have on the old way of life. What is the role of the town of Casterbridge in the story? How is Henchard like Hardy? To what extent is Henchard brought down by his own actions, and to what extent is he a victim of the remorseless fate in which Hardy believed? And what on earth is a skimmity ride? Join Rupert and Charlie to find out.