This Writing Life

This Writing Life

By James KiddArtsBooksFiction
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This Writing Life episodes

  • Episode 49 - Writing Life Trailer: David Gates on Donald Trump
    As a taster for our next guest, the fine American novelist David Gates, who talks about his classic debut, Jernigan, his new story collection, A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me, and throws in a little analysis of the architectural politics of Donald Trump for free.

    ----more----
    We battled a loud fan in Serpents Tail's offices, which needed a little post-production doctoring. I hope it doesn't spoil your listening pleasure.
    3 min
  • Episode 48 - Harry Parker: Part 3

    Harry Parker begins the

    third and final part of his conversation with This Writing Life by
    considering the emotional effects of his tours in Iraq and
    Afghanistan. ----more---- From there we moved onto: 

    • writing about the war from the
    perspective of the occupied and the insurgency

  • 'All I wanted to do was tell a good
    • story'

  • 'There is this idea that laying mines is
    • a really unfair way to fight wars. I always thought dropping a hellfire
    missile from a drone was also unfair.' 

  • futility and waste: 'War is just shitty'

  • how much is a life worth: occupiers vs
    • occupied?

  • 'You can't just do these things with
    • military force...'

  • ISIS, Assad, Iraq: the future of the
    • world

  • 'If there are any themes they are
    • compassion, recovery, but also trying to reframe how we view conflicts'

  • what next for Harry Parker?

    • 16 min
  • Episode 47 - Harry Parker: Part 2
    The second part of our chat with Harry Parker about his debut novel Anatomy of a Soldier begins with a cheerful discussion of decay and destruction of both objects or people. ----more----Parker prefers the word entropy while discussing his own recovery after the bomb blast that destroyed his legs. From there we moved onto: 
    • can fiction resolve trauma?
  • questions of identity: what Parker sees in the mirror
  • 'fetish of the possible': prosthetic limbs as objects of hope
  • value and cost: how much is a human life worth?
  • anger and mourning: recovery and resolution
  • would Parker shake hands with the man who blew him up
  • 'If you are going to be stupid enough to be a soldier, then you have got to expect that this stuff might happen'
  • empathy or hatred: Parker's view of the insurgents
  • the Parker family's relationship with the British army
  • why did he join up
  • 'The best soldier is anti-war...'
  • 'It's bloody difficult': the challenges of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan
  • did the occupying armies make life better or worse?
  • fear and boredom: life as a soldier on duty
    • 19 min
  • Episode 46 - Harry Parker: Part 1
    Harry Parker is a painter and, thanks to his debut Anatomy of a Soldier, a novelist. Before he was either of those, he served in the British Army, first in Iraq and later Afghanistan. ----more----His experiences form the basis for his first book - above all the day he stepped on a landmine planted near his camp in Helmand Province. Parker lost both his legs and endured years of intensive physiotherapy. These absorbing and moving scenes tell only part of Tom Barnes' fictional story. Anatomy of a Soldier is a courageous novel is all sorts of ways. It is narrated from the perspective of over 40 objects, ranging from shoes to bombs, infections to a handbag. It also attempts to present the occupation from the point of view of the occupiers - insurgents and moderates alike.


    When we met at Faber & Faber's London offices, we began by discussing the challenges of writing a first book. 'I definitely felt like a beginner...I am not that well read.' Parker recalled dictating sections using transcription software in an attempt to get the story moving. From there we moved to:

    • his first attempts at writing
  • undertaking an Arvon course with Toby Litt
  • to autobiography or not to autobiography
  • the power of inanimate objects
  • 'I tried to write a book about animals and it was pretty knickers'
  • life v fiction: Harry Parker v Tom Barnes
  • 'Is it memoir? Not for me...'
  • a precis of Anatomy of a Soldier
  • occupiers or the occupied?
  • how autobiographical is Anatomy of a Soldier
  • 'I didn't want to write about conflict in a way that sentimentalised it...but I did want to capture some of the excitement'
  • 'I made a mistake': Parker's injuries
  • how war objectifies
    • 20 min
  • Episode 44 - David Mitchell and Michel Faber in conversation: Part 4

    In the fourth and final episode of our conversation with David Mitchell and Michel Faber, we kick off by talking author events and public readings with reference to The Bone Clocks and Mitchell's performative self. ----more----From there we move to bad readers: 

    • 'I have been to see very eminent, Booker Prize winning people at the Edinburgh Festival who are just ticking off another engagement in their tour, and you could tell they would rather be anywhere but there. I vowed I would never allow myself to get into that state of jadedness and alienation from the people who are actually buying my books' Faber
  • Paul McCartney, Yesterday and intimacy 
  • 'I hate hotels' Faber 
  • 'We did stay in a brothel in Greece...' Faber 
  • what do Faber and Mitchell have in common...
  • cities v countryside 
  • 'seem' and 'tranquil': words novelists should never use
  • Ezra Pound's marginalia in The Waste Land
  • 'If you are in a bad mood, it is difficult to read DH Lawrence' Faber
    • 18 min
  • Episode 43 - David Mitchell and Michel Faber in conversation: Part 3

    In the third, and penultimate, part of the David Mitchell and Michel Faber double-header, we start off by talking immortality and the status of fiction in the 21st century.----more---- 'I am something of an optimist,' Mitchell says before quoting the Rizzle Kicks' 'Skip to the Good Bit'. 'I like to think that starvation sharpens the appetite', he continues, arguing that the demands of the novel might seem more attractive the faster culture moves. 'The novel's imminent death, that bell has been rung so many times...' 

    From there, Faber talked final lines, starting with The Book of Strange New Things: 

     

    • Mitchell asked about naming chapter titles after the final lines of each chapter
  • 'I think we are both concerned with the depth of the thing and layers, but we are both concerned with surface readability' Faber
  • Faber vs 'serious literary writers'
  • 'I think one way that serious literary writers have increasingly let down their readers and driven them into the arms of comfort fiction is by being insufficiently mindful of a reader's needs to fun and thrills' Faber
  • Faber vs Joyce, Woolf and Modernism: 'If you weren't smart enough to get it, you were the Molochs or whatever...'
  • Faber on John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses
  • 'I think in old money we are talking about elitism and snobbery, self-promotion over those beneath you' David Mitchell
  • Faber and Mitchell on science fiction (The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, Isaac Asimov) v 'high-brow' fiction 
  • reading as young people vs adults, Stephen King, pet cemeteries, Last Rites and Resurrections
  • genre, cliché and fresh forms
  • 'One thing that makes me uneasy is when reviewers talk about the stunning originality of our ideas' Faber
  • 'Where have you come from, matey!' Mitchell
  • Faber v VS Naipaul
  • 'It's alarming if serious literature remains closed off to the potentials of narratives in recent times' Faber
  • how they deal with being called incomparable, original etc
  • 'I am happier than being called shite and a waste of space' Mitchell
  • Ken Kesey, Mr Bean, and reading reviews... 
  • 'Reviews are not relevant to the work...' Faber

    •  

     

    29 min
  • Episode 42 - David Mitchell and Michel Faber in conversation: Part 2

    In part two of my interview with Michel Faber and David Mitchell, we begin by talking big books and the attempt to say everything in fiction. ----more---- As Mitchell puts it: 'I feel clobbered by the impossibility of translating into words as much of this enormous world we live in – the world itself and the human world with its subtly complex and sprawling Periodic Table of human emotions.'

     

    After trading Freddie Mercury and Ringo Starr quotes, we returned to the idea that Faber had written his last novel and from there to: 

     

    • the consolations of poetry

     

  • improvising The Book of Strange New Things

    •  

  • Faber talks about caring for his wife, Eva, and the impact that her illness had on the novel's composition

    •  

  • love letters and how letters transcend space, time and grief

    •  

  • inciting the reader's emotions for certain characters

    •  

  • the hubristic insanity of online Clouds. 
    • 27 min
  • Episode 41 - David Mitchell and Michel Faber in conversation: Part 1

    I interviewed the novelists David Mitchell and Michel Faber for the Sunday Independent. Mitchell had not long since published The Bone Clocks, and Faber The Book of Strange New Things. ----more----They were old friends, something that was apparent from the moment I met them both at Durrants Hotel in central London. Before the interview proper, Faber asked to speak with Mitchell privately. They had not seen each other since Faber's partner Eva died only a few months before. 


    Faber would talk about his grief and the effect it was already having on his writing - he was writing poetry rather than prose, and indeed saw fiction, to which Eva was central, as a thing of his past. 'The Book of Strange New Things is my last novel, and we both knew that.'

    You can hear Mitchell's tender, but firm response in part one of this lengthy conversation. The subjects under discussion also included Mitchell's re-mix and match approach to writing, their differing views to the contemporary world and readers, posterity and poetry.

    We began by talking music - Miles Davis, playing Bartok, Late Junction, and listening to Krautrock while writing The Crimson Petal and The White. 

    I hope you enjoy. Part Two will be posted soon.
    20 min
  • Episode 40 - David Mitchell and Michel Faber in conversation: Trailer

    As a trailer for thisWriting Life Extra Special, Michel Faber and David Mitchell discuss their firstmeetings, before Faber pulls a mix-tape out of the bag.  

     

    I will post the rest of the interview -without doubt one of the most memorable ones I have ever been involved with -over the coming couple of weeks. 

    You can hear excerpts from Ohrwurm, Michael Faber's collaboration with Andrew Liles: here.

    You can buy the album from Andrew Liles' website: here.

    3 min

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