Episode Five: Catherine Menon

Episode Five explores the hypothetical shelf of the fabulous Catherine Menon. Catherine is Australian-British, has Malaysian heritage and lives in London. She is a University lecturer in robotics and has both a PhD in pure mathematics and an MA in Creative Writing. Fragile Monsters is her debut novel.

Her short story collection, Subjunctive Moods, was published by Dahlia Publishing in 2018. Her short stories have won or been placed in a number of competitions, including the Fish, Bridport, Bare Fiction and Short Fiction Journal awards. Her work has been broadcast on radio, and she’s been a judge for several international short fiction competitions.

If you're looking for an episode that examines the combined efforts of readers and writers, this is for you. Listen to find out Catherine's top five choices for her hypothetical shelf. And for those who listened extra hard, the book whose title I couldn't remember when discussed the first person plural voice, it was The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello and welcome to the Hypothetical Bookshelf, a kind of desert island discs for books. Inspired by Talo Calvino's essay Whom Do We Write For or The Hypothetical Bookshelf, this is a podcast that asks writers what other works their writing is in conversation with, looking for the ways new work can make connections between different books on a writer's and reader's hypothetical shelf. I'll be interviewing a different author each time and asking them to name five books of fiction or non-fiction that can be put beside their own on that imaginary bookshelf. Calvino also writes about how this juxtaposition and conversation between different works can question the established scale of values and code of meanings generally accepted by the wider culture. And I'm keen to test that theory asking authors about different approaches to storytelling techniques and traditions to inspire listeners with new reading lists and new creative practices. And today I'm delighted to be speaking with Catherine Menon. Catherine Menon is Australian British, has Malaysian heritage and lives in London. She's a university lecturer in robotics and has both a PhD in pure mathematics and an MA in creative writing. Fragile Monsters is her debut novel, and uh Hilary Mantel says of it takes an immediate grip on the reader's imagination and doesn't let go. It is fantastic. Her short story collection, Subjunctive Moods, was published by Dahlia Publishing in 2018. Her short stories have won or been placed in a number of competitions, including The Fish, Bridport, Bear Fiction, and Short Fiction Journal Awards. Her work's been broadcast on radio, and she's been a judge for several international short fiction competitions. And if you haven't read her work, you have a real treat waiting ahead of you. So welcome, Catherine. Thank you, Rebecca. It's great to be here. Yes, thank you so much for joining me. Let's start with your first choice, uh, which is Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson. Um, do you want to say a little bit about why you picked this book?

SPEAKER_02 2:07

One of the things that really intrigued me about this book is the way the story is told in a form that seems very slippery, a form that seems very elusive. It's all about the details. The meat of the story, if you will, is almost happening off-page. And that's in part due to the isolation of the child narrator, the isolation of her family, but in part it's also due to the way the setting and the characters are so intricately bound up with each other. So one character has knowledge of the town in which it's at fingerbone, but of course doesn't know what's going on behind closed doors. So what we get is this kind of shifting between omnipotence and almost complete blindness on the part of the narrator. The people that she's closest to, for example, her aunt Sylvie, are always an enigma. It's in this novel, Sylvie is perhaps the central question. She's the person the narrator is closest to, and the narrator doesn't have any insight in into her, whereas she does have insight into the town, into the setting, into the people around her. And it's Sylvie's own transience. She's a train hopper or someone who travels uh from one town to another by train. Um, so Sylvie's own transience reflects some of that slipperiness because she doesn't have a setting, and so she cannot be known within the context of the novel. It's an absolutely phenomenal achievement.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

Well, that's a very exciting introduction. Um so it was first published in 1980 uh by Faro Strauss and Giroux, and I'm going to just do I'm going to read a short passage which which Catherine picked. So um here we go. During those days, fingerbone was strangely transformed. If one should be shown odd fragments arranged on a silver tray and be told that is a splinter from the true cross, and that is a nail pairing dropped by Barabbas and that is a bit of lint from under the bed where Pilate's wife dreamed her dream. The very ordinariness of the things would recommend them. Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon, and finally everything is left where it was, and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground, as if there were no other pleasure in that world but brown leaves, as if it were deck, clothes, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on. So fingerbone, or such relics of it as showed above the mirroring waters, seemed fragments of the quotidian held up to our wandering attention, offered somehow as proof of their own significance. Um Marilyn Robinson really is something, isn't she? It's the it it's interesting that you mentioned the detail and the the small things being the focus and the stories sort of happening. I like the way you described that as the story happening off scene. How do you think that this has kind of influenced the way you write? Because you're also very good at detail. Do you think there's something in that?

SPEAKER_02 5:46

Can I think it has actually? So um I'm I'm torn with when I write, I'm torn between these two desires to put as much detail under the page as possible, very mathematical, very precise, and also to avoid overwhelming the reader with facts because reading is a two-way process. We rewrite, but I think the real bulk of the work is done by the reader. It's the interpretation. Reading is not a symmetrical division of work. I actually think we writers get much the easiest side of that. So her Ramolyn Robinson's attention to detail is something that I really admire. It's something that I think has greatly influenced my work. One of the things that I think is demonstrated in this quote that I try to reflect in my work almost as a representation of value is the way this excerpt is all about things. If you look through it, there are lots and lots of nouns. There's splinters, there's lint, there's nail pairings, there's an orchard, there's leaves. It's all about very, very tangible, mundane things. But the actual sentiment that it's conveying about what we can see and what we can interpret and how we know those from the things is almost hidden underneath that. So that's something that I've tried to reflect in my writing. This idea that it's very um something can be very readable, very legible, very understandable on the surface. Um, but the meaning is more elusive. The meaning is almost happening underneath the words itself, um, or indeed, as I said, off the page, off-screen.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

Yeah. Um, I I mean, I was looking at um your short stories and I was going back to them, and I was looking at something that I wrote about them a very long time ago. And one of the things I picked up on was one of the first stories in the collection. There's this description um of the what the people are like in this dining hall and then in this hotel, and they're described as lumpish and cream fed. And instantly you know what they look like, you know, and it's it's it's and it's about the light. It's I think the description is about how the light that's casting sort of in the room makes them all look that way. But it says a lot more, you know, it sort of describes what they might be eating, kind of the sort of person that might be going to this hotel, what kind of hotel it might be. You know, there's an awful lot packed into that short. So I think what you're saying is very true. That, and that's the beauty of picking the right details, isn't it, to some extent?

SPEAKER_02 8:35

Yes, it's almost as though, particularly in short stories, where you're so constrained with word limits, every sentence has to have not a double meaning. This isn't a game of Pludo or anything, but but uh a double resonance. So it has to be understandable, it has to move the story along, it has to fulfill all of those things that creative writing tutors love to tick, like plot and pacing and narration and dialogue, but it also has to be conveying something more fundamental than that. Otherwise, readers would simply go off and read a shopping list. That has plot and pacing and narration as well. But there needs to be something underneath if you're describing the people sitting in a dining hall. There needs to be a reason that you're describing them and something else that you're telling them, telling the reader about them as part of that description. It's it's something that Marilyn Robinson certainly does, and it's something that I definitely try and do, particularly as I said, in short stories where space is just so constrained.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Yeah. Um Marilyn Robinson, actually, Lila is one of my favourite books of all time. And I think one of the things that she does so well there that it sounds like she also does very well in this novel is um the way that consciousness is so straightforwardly almost laid out on the page. You know, the sense in which the mind exists in many different places at once. You know, you're looking out the window, um, you're feeling slightly hungry, but you're also thinking about what happened to you 30 years ago when X, Y, or Z, you know, and she's able to kind of convey the way that all of those things kind of flow into each other very well.

SPEAKER_02 10:24

Yes, exactly. And I think particularly with characters who could otherwise have been regarded as simple or simplistic, um, your your mention of Leela is exactly right, because some in someone else's hands, that character could have come across as a very uh simplistic character, very, very easy to write, very mundane. So I think that there is something in that duality of consciousness that you can be looking out the window, remembering, looking forward to what you're going to have for dinner, that she manages to capture really well in that kind of rather bare stream of consciousness laid out on the page.

SPEAKER_00 11:05

Yeah, and I I think it's interesting that you've mentioned characters that could potentially be, you know, handled less well. I'm just thinking in in Homecoming, you're you're talking about the child, but then also in your own work, in Fragile Monsters, there's a real interest in giving voice to characters who struggle to be vocal. So do you think there's a bit of do you think there's an influence coming through there for your Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 11:31

I I there are a lot of characters in Fragile Monsters who are mute for one reason or another, which is obviously the the definition of voiceless. Um I think I am interested in in writing, in the people who are not in the spotlight for various reasons. And sometimes that can be for unappealing reasons. So, for example, if a character is unable to speak, they are harder to write. You can't engage the reader by by any any dialogue or anything like that. But I think it's these people offstage, these extras almost, that are perhaps the perhaps where the most interesting stories happen, in a sense, which I think is something that we might return to again and again through the excerpts, the idea that the the interest is happening just outside that spotlight, not in a different theatre, but just somewhere to the edge of where the leading lady is is is going through her motions.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

I like that. Who is the real protagonist? We could ask ourselves. Um okay, so do you and do you remember when you read Housekeeping? Was this a long time ago? Was it before you sort of started to get your books written?

SPEAKER_02 12:53

It was definitely before I wrote Fragile Monsters, and I I would like to think, I would hope that the the influence on Fragile Monsters is very positive. It was during the time when I was really focused on writing uh short stories for my uh first collection, subjunctive moods, and it did change how I wrote short stories. It made me understand how much of a text, how much of the meaning doesn't need to be said, how much of the meaning can be happening somewhere underneath the surface while the story is being told.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

Yes, the description of a true master, I think that's it's very impressive that you're thinking about what you're implying as much as what you're actually saying. That it's very hard to do that, I think, you know. Um and that you're consciously thinking about how to do that is is really inspiring. Um, tell us about your second choice. So your second choice is So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. And um, I feel embarrassed that I've not read this because I I read the description of it and I was like, gosh, I I wish I had read it. But it was originally published, wasn't it, in two parts in the New Yorker magazine. Interestingly, around a similar time to the Marilyn Robinson's homecoming, sort of so that was in 1979. Um and Michael Ondacci says it's one of the great books of our age. It is the subtlest of miniatures that contains our deepest sorrows and truths and love. Um, and again, it sounds like that word miniatures interests me and subtle as well. So please tell me more about this choice.

SPEAKER_02 14:36

So this is a choice that um came upon me gradually, actually. So the first time I read this, I was probably perhaps too young to understand. It I was uh intrigued because, again, although it's told from the perspective of someone looking back, it's uh events that happen in childhood. And as a child, you're naturally drawn to um texts, novels, uh short stories about other children. I will say that while being perfectly appropriate for children, this is not uh a novel that can be best appreciated by children. So when I came to it as an adult, I had that fascinating experience of uncovering layers, not just of the novel, but of my own reading experience. So being able to hold my interpretation, my current interpretation as an adult of the text together in my mind with my childhood interpretation of it, was an absolutely compelling experience. It really made me think again about how much we, how much work we as readers do when we interpret. And this particular choice, this is um William Maxwell, so long see you tomorrow, is something that I picked again because of that slipperiness. Now he doesn't uh he doesn't, you know, uh mince his words about it. Um he is absolutely forthcoming that this is slippery, that memory is not fixed. And it's one of those novels that tells you up front that what you're about to hear may or may not be true, but at the same time makes you absolutely believe that version of events. And again, this is a novel, a novella, in fact, perhaps it is it is very short, um, that is told from the perspective of an outsider. So it's the the story of a murder, but this isn't anything like a uh police procedural. Uh this is told from the perspective or the protagonist is the best friend of the son of the murder victim. Uh sorry, the murderer. So it's very, very um a very long chain of relationships. And it's essentially a novel about guilt, and a novel about the way guilt can lodge in our memory, irrespective of whether or not the guilt is deserved or the facts are true. So again, there's that slipperiness, and again, because it's told from the perspective of looking back, we have also within the novel, we have that duality. Uh, so I was, I think I was very lucky to be reading it as an adult, remembering myself as a child, because of course this is exactly what the narrator is doing. It was absolutely a mind-blowing experience.

SPEAKER_00 17:44

And and so in the novel, is am I right in saying, I hope this doesn't give any spoilers, that the narrator's best friend of the time as a child also dies? Is that right? Yes.

SPEAKER_02 17:55

So um it's it's it is a sad novel, but in a way, it it for a novel that's about a murder, it's really not very much about the murder. You know, you you would have thought the general literary advice is, you know, start with the the car crash or the fire or something that that claims the reader's attention. But oddly, starting with potentially one of the most violent things that you go, or or centering it around one of the most violent acts possible, um this story is nonetheless very much not about murder. It's a story about memory, it's a story about guilt, it's a story about slipperiness, it's a story about stories, really, quite honestly.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

Yes. Um I think I think that comes across a little bit in the quotation that that you've chosen. Do you want to read it to us? Uh yes.

SPEAKER_02 18:52

So this is from William Maxwell, so long, see you tomorrow. What we, or at any rate, what I refer to confidently as memory, meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion, is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for large effort to be wholly acceptable. And possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to the end. In any case, in talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw. So you can see he's really not pulling his punches there when he tells you you can't rely on what's being told in the book. You can rely on the truth of the emotional undercurrent, but not necessarily on the truth of the um recollection of events and the weight of the guilt that the narrator feels is his to bear.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Yeah, the idea of you know, too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable. It's really interesting, isn't it? Like we can't really accept our own lives without retelling them. I don't know. It's it anyway. I read the quote and I was like, oh my gosh, okay. And I read about the book and I thought, right, I really need to read this because I'm so interested in in that need that we have as human beings to narrate ourselves.

SPEAKER_02 20:33

Yes, it it reminds me a little of the Edna Saint Vincent Millet poem, actually, uh Dirge Without Music, where she she again is talking about death. And the last line is I know. I'm going to get this wrong now. The last line is I know, but I do not approve. And I am not resigned. And I really like the there's there's a similarity there, finding life acceptable and and whether you are resigned to it ending. I really like the idea that you can convey in literary terms that actually no, this is unacceptable. I will not have it, and it doesn't necessarily obviously change anything. But it is a a way of putting forward an extremely powerful, insistent, uh almost polemic uh about how you regard life in the very quietest of terms. So this William Maxwell book is extremely quiet, but it's it's saying so much that's powerful at the same time. It's it's such a it's such an amazing achievement again.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

And that interest in childhood and things that happen in childhood that the child themselves can't really fully make sense of. And yet they have an emotional hold is something that comes out in Fragile Monsters a little bit, isn't it? Uh, were you conscious of that, do you think?

SPEAKER_02 22:10

Yes, I I do tend to write quite a few um short stories and of course Fragile Monsters from the perspective of children, because there is that sense of a child not necessarily being able to process the understanding, but nevertheless having their own understanding, they have their own interpretation, they have their own influence, they have their own perspective on things. Um, in fact, as Margaret Atwood has shown us in the novel Cat's Eye, children can be life-size. We as adults tend to think of them as diminished, small, uh reduced in the capacity to understand. But when you tell a story, a novel or a short story, from a child's perspective, it actually gives you so much more to uh to play with in terms of the scope of what the child can and can't think about the world. And we see exactly this in the William Maxwell, because the the narrator carries this burden of guilt for essentially not making things better for the teenage son. And as adults, we can see that there is absolutely no way this could have been been avoided. But the guilt is still real. It's that sense that something is inaccurate, but nevertheless real. It's wrong, but it's true that that is something I wanted to get at, particularly in Fragile Monsters.

SPEAKER_00 23:44

Yes, it's interesting that you say that because uh one of the quotes that I like from Fragile Monsters is um where the grandmother says to her uh granddaughter Durga, all this mathematics, isn't it? Always wanting for it to be right instead of true, which is actually very similar to what you're saying there.

SPEAKER_02 24:03

Oh goodness, I'm just recycling my own work now.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

No, it's obviously what interests you.

SPEAKER_02 24:09

It is, it fascinates me, this complete dichotomy in that that so many different interpretations of the same events can be fundamentally true, even if they're incorrect. There's that absolutely uh uh mythical quote that that uh I believe has been completely made up, that um uh he lies like an eyewitness, which is of course not uh not necessarily a real quote from anywhere, but is actually substantiated, I think. Again, by the way we remember things. You know, if you look back on a particularly vivid image from your childhood, it will be different from the way your sister remembers it. It will be different from the way your parents remember it. But the emotional resonance, the emotional weight of that story is for you, nevertheless, completely true, even if you've misremembered everything about it. So childhood is a particularly slippery time to recall, I think.

SPEAKER_00 25:13

Yeah, and I I find it very interesting, the sense in which we establish a kind of emotional bedrock around certain things in our childhood. That e when we're adults and we, you know, we learn things, we you know, we learn that a certain thing might not actually be the way things work, or you know, we might question our early childhood beliefs in in religion or whatever, but those kind of bed that bedrock of emotional kind of understanding of the world actually stays. And I find that really interesting that you can have all of these kind of like intellectual kind of thoughts that can sit on top of sometimes quite guttural responses to things that you have less control over.

SPEAKER_02 25:58

Absolutely, yes. And and these these not only is the bedrock a sort of beyond our control as adults, it's not something that you can change. It is just going back to something you said earlier, it's built on miniatures because often the the events of a child's life are, at least some of them, you know, for for for some children, uh are the sort that seem trivial to adults. You know, they are things in miniature because children, we we we do try and provide them with a controlled environment, which means that the events that happen there, to the best of our ability as adults, we try and reduce in size. But nevertheless, we can't reduce someone's emotional response. So we end up as children with these outsize emotional responses to miniature events, which is again the kind of thing that we're seeing in the William Maxwell book, and the kind of thing that I'm trying to reflect in my writing that the murder can be happening offstage. But actually, we're interested in the construction of the house being built next door because that's more relevant to us. And therefore, our emotional response is all about that, and not about the person getting murdered one street away. It's it's a a time of very shifting realities and a time of miniatures that have blown up into really outsize responses, reactions, and interactions.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

Yes, and there's that also that a very clear under clear is not the right word, but that emotional resonance, I think, they're very sensitive to that. So you might be writing about the house next door, but they're they know how all the adults are behaving differently, even when they're trying to behave the same. They sense the shift in the way that you know so, and I think that's interesting that they recognize those kind of emotional landscapes in a way that I think we sometimes spend less time thinking about as adults. Um, and I think that's something which is very interesting to write about because of that awareness is often something which which, as a reader, you're able to read that the child's responding to something being different. But because you're the grown-up, you get to know what it is. Do you know what I mean? You understand what it is they're reacting to, even though they're not always sure, even though they pick it up, then they don't know what it is. So there's lots of kind of interesting things in writing about those, that reflection on those early experiences, aren't there?

SPEAKER_02 28:38

Absolutely. Yes, childhood is necessarily a time of intuition, because as an adult, you can ask what's going on. As a child, you're not really empowered to do that. And there's something so slippery and from a literary perspective, wonderful about writing about that kind of intuitive feeling things out. Because, of course, there's the um possibility that it's wrong. And the the idea that your protagonist is wrong about something is, I think, possibly the genesis for quite a lot of really good writing out there. I thought it was this, but it was actually that. It's an amazing writing prompt, actually. I might use it with some of my students.

SPEAKER_00 29:21

It's what we do all the time, though, isn't it? I mean, I have lots of conversations with conversations with my children about this, this idea that you you you imagine what it is the other person is thinking, which is effectively what you're doing in creative writing all the time, isn't it? Imagining your way into your characters' worlds. But actually, when we do it in the real world, we often get it wrong, but we might think we're getting it right.

SPEAKER_02 29:42

Yes, yes. Again, you've got those layers then of your own interpretation of what's going on and the real interpretation. And it, I think it takes quite a skilled writer like William Maxwell to ensure that the reader can keep both of those in their head at the same time, that can respond emotionally to the emotional weight and heft and truth of the story, while at the same time reserving some part of logical judgment to say, but the narrator themselves has actually told me that this isn't true. It's there's a sort of juggling seven different seven different balls at once, I think.

SPEAKER_00 30:23

Yes, yes. It's fun when you're the reader, though. And sometimes it's hard when you're the writer.

SPEAKER_02 30:30

Absolutely, yes, I would agree 100%.

SPEAKER_00 30:33

Um so I mean there's there's two different directions that that I would kind of want to go in because one of them is that this kind of sense of atmosphere holds very true in a slightly more uh teenage in in the next book that you're choosing. But before we get there, I do want to ask about maths because you didn't give me any maths books. Now, I mean, you know, this is perhaps why would you? But as a uh mathematician, roboticist, even, you know, you I think that maths has definitely been a very clear influence, I think, on um on your writing. And I wondered if you could tell me a little bit about that, because there is that sense of kind of you know something tangible. Maths is sort of in a way quite tangible, isn't it? And then there is this interest in the slippery, the nuance. So tell me a bit about that.

SPEAKER_02 31:24

So it's a it's a really interesting question, actually. Um, my branch of maths is is category theory, which is is the the sort of towards the furthest end of pure maths that you can get. Even other other mathematicians call it abstract nonsense. So it's it while it is very much about the the theorems, the axioms, the lemmas, the the proofs. There's also this sense of creativity in it. So the feeling in my brain, which is a very non-scientific term, but the feeling in my brain when I create a mathematical proof, uh within category theory at least, um, is the same as when I'm putting together a short story. There's that same sense for the need of the need for precision, there's the same sense that it's got to end up there, because if it doesn't end up there, then I have told it incorrectly. Um there's the same need for it to be surprising in a way. There's the same need for it to have a certain hinge, there's also the same need for it to convey something larger to a reader. So a mathematical proof is never just intended to be, well, this is used in this specific context, is meant to say something much wider about the mathematical world, the world of the category that you're in, for example. And that was something that I really enjoyed. Essentially constructing categories which had their own internal reality, internal consistency, in which you could apply certain rules, form certain conclusions, and then try and extrapolate them to the world outside. Now, if you replace in that sentence the word category with the word story, I think you could just use the sentence as it is anyway. So I find that they're actually really connected in a way that I think isn't immediately apparent and possibly is less so for the kind of maths, um the sort of arithmetic type maths, for example, I think possibly holds true less for that than for this abstract nonsense, as people would say. Because quite honestly, you could say the same about writing, couldn't you?

SPEAKER_00 33:52

Abstract nonsense. I think was it? I think I get I get told it's navel gazing. There we go. Oh, wonderful. Um, but no, just looking at back at that quote from uh the William Maxwell, there's this idea of the work of the storyteller is to rearrange things so that they can form um this idea that you know the individual making the story is trying to make sense of something, you know, trying to make whatever that might be, the character is trying to make sense of their world. And yeah, it does seem to me that writing tries to do that in, and maybe perhaps in a very different but comparable way to your wonderful mathematical brain.

SPEAKER_02 34:34

It it is because you choose the way to arrange the story. This is something that Paul McVeigh talks about a lot. Having the having the story, but not knowing how to structure it, where to approach it, what perspective to tell it from. Are you actually telling the story that lives next door to that one? Something like that. Um, and I think that is what we do as writers, and in fact, as mathematicians, it's the same with a a proof. You have the idea, you have the fact which holds true within one context. But how you arrange that to convince the reader, or how you arrange it to convey some knowledge, obviously you're doing very different things when you're writing a story to create a creating a mathematical proof. But there is that that sense about of rearranging things to conform, to make it acceptable, which is sadly a thing we can't do in life.

SPEAKER_00 35:35

No, that's true. And I think that's another, in a way, tension, isn't it, between or about what makes stories quite exciting is when they are pulling towards a shape. You can see the shape, but there's also a kind of push against it. And I think I get quite excited when I feel like there's both of those things going on because if it's too neat, it stops feeling real, doesn't it? It stops having that sense of kind of believability, maybe, or rawness.

SPEAKER_02 36:07

Exactly. You need to feel that somewhere, again, possibly off the page, the story is bulging out at the sides. It it I think it really needs to feel as though. I suppose it goes back to this idea that there's something more. The story is not just the you know, sequence of events and then it all ends up tied up with a pretty little bow, um, which is really, I suppose, the sense you get from from fairy tales as well. On the surface, they are um lovely, uh, very simplistic. It does all end up with things tied up in a bow. And that is how, again, going back to our previous discussion about children and adults, that's how you read them as a child. But even as a child, you're often aware that these are disturbing in a way that you can't articulate and don't understand. And as an adult, obviously we know that fairy tales are vehicles for commenting on sexuality and death and life and relationships and all sorts of big concepts that bulge out of the sides of this nice little almost fable that we tell each other.

SPEAKER_00 37:20

Yeah, you've made me think of, I think it's the combination of fairy tale and bows. You've made me think of that wonderful short story by Carmen Maria Machado. Um, oh gosh, and I can't remember the name of it. But in it, um, the women have a body part uh which can detach and which is kind of tied on with a bow. Um it's extraordinary. And if you pull, if you pull the ribbon, if you pull that ribbon of the bow, then that limb will just come off. And it's like it's this is an amazing story. And yeah, and I just I love the way that I think because there is that sense, you know, you've got some kind of mythical creatures moving through your short stories, you've got, you know, vampires, and I can't remember the Malaysian name for the vampire. Oh, the Pontianak. There we go. Yes, uh, and you know, these different creatures that um, you know, they have a hold over us because they are tapping into those things that we struggle to really get to grips with, aren't they?

SPEAKER_02 38:20

Yes, I mean they're the representations of us, of course. You know, nobody invented a fairy tale monster that wasn't, in some sense, essentially human, sadly. Uh, but they're the representations of us that we we do want to shove out into the margins that that don't fit into the nice um the nice tale that that that can't be the protagonist of the hero's journey. So they're uh they're the outsider. I think what we fear in them is is is ourselves, you know, the the idea of this. The I I've also read that Cavern Maria Machado uh story and again thought it was absolutely amazing. And I think the original it's based on is this uh girl who has the ribbon tied around her neck. And of course, you know, um when when it's removed, you know, well, the obvious happens. And I think there's something in that. Um interestingly, I just thought if you filmed that, it would be a very gory sort of horror type film. But I think the horror in writing, the the real terror is what isn't being seen. It's underneath the ribbon, and there's something very powerful there that I think um Cameron Ria Machado also pulled on about with fairy tales where the the power of them is also hidden. There's there's many layers to unpack there.

SPEAKER_00 39:47

Yes, I think, I think is the story called the husband stitch.

SPEAKER_02 39:53

Yes, it is. Yes, which is is also uh a reference to again a medical uh particular procedure.

SPEAKER_00 40:03

Yeah, I mean there's so there's so much going on in it, but so um thanks for talking to me about all of the mathematical side of things, which has led us down some other fun, interesting paths. Um, but let's get back to that sense of atmosphere, which is very much kind of like I don't know, it's almost like when I think about your next choice, which is the Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, that's what I get from. I get atmosphere. I just get the feeling that I'm in that kind of oppressive, overblown space where you know what the world is and what its parameters are are very intensely made up of a group of people that are somehow influencing, you know, I that's the feeling I get. So, yes, so you picked The Virgin Suicides, which was first published in 1993 by Ferrar, Strauss, and Girou. And of course, many people will know it because it was made into the film by Sophia Coppola, which is also excellent. Um, but yes, please tell us a little bit about your reasons for choosing the Virgin Suicides.

SPEAKER_02 41:09

Oh, with this one, the thing that really drew me in initially was the the narrator. So this um yeah, I I think that this is possibly the uh the best example of this kind of narration. It's very, very difficult to write from the perspective of we. This this uh idea of of um the first person plural narrator is very, very difficult to pull off successfully. And with this, what it again gives us is that idea of shiftiness. You never know which of the boys has seen which specific thing. They're describing things that obviously they haven't seen. You know, they're describing there is very much a narrator, but they are describing what goes on inside the house that they can't see. And this comes up again and again. It's something I try to use in um very explicitly in Fragile Monsters, this idea of an omnipotent narrator who is very much there, they're not the author, but their powers are slippery. So again, we have here this absolutely lovely admixture of um looking back on childhood, uh a slippery narrative perspective, and of course, this absolutely wonderful atmosphere that isn't just uh invoked here. It's it's almost become a trope, this kind of early um mid-century American suburbia. It's it's it's very, very familiar to us visually, which I think is one reason why the film actually works so well, uh, because it it draws on our knowledge of what suburbia ought to look like, even though we're sitting here in in rainy London where it most definitely does not. And I think that um it's really the narrative style, the the we and the fact that these again child narrators, they're looking back, they are very definitely not childish. So you can only do this, I think, in certain types of uh novels, certain texts. If you have a narrator that is inconsistent in terms of their voice and their age, or their voice and their experience, um, it can be just a glaring mistake. People could say, well, I don't believe that a child would know that word. But by giving us that distance, those dreamlike layers that actually um remove the narrator from their physical, you know, their characteristics, their 14 year old boys. Um I think Jeffrey Eugenides is able to give us some of that authorial input that's even there in the quote, which are very definitely not words of a child, but they're words of someone reflecting on what it would be like to be a child. It's almost in the sense of something similar to what I've heard about people say about AI. It gives you, it doesn't give you an answer to your question, it gives you something that would sound like an answer. And I think Geoffrey Eugenides has very deliberately chosen not to evoke childhood in this or teenagerhood, but to evoke something that sounds like teenagerhood in a way that really taps into some of our interests and some of our knowledge and some of our own emotions about it.

SPEAKER_00 44:55

Well, let's hear the quote that you chose, uh, because I think that does bring out some of those um ideas. Uh, do you want to go for it?

SPEAKER_02 45:04

Uh yes, shall I go for it? Um, so this is from Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts. A clock ticking on a wall, a room dull at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. Her brain going dim to all else, but flaming up in precise points of pain, personal injury, lost dreams, every other loved one receding as though across a vast ice flow, shrinking to black dots waving tiny arms out of hearing. Then the rope thrown over the beam, the sleeping pill dropped in the palm with the long, lying lifeline, the window thrown open, the oven turned on, whatever. They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us. We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. And we had to smear our muscles in their last traces of mud marks on the floor, trunks kicked out from under them. We had to breathe forever the air of the rooms in which they killed themselves. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them and that they hadn't heard us calling.

SPEAKER_00 46:43

Thank you for that. I think it's such a good uh extract just because it's doing a lot of what you were saying, that we voice is able to achieve. It's sort of explaining why, you know, they have to rethink their thoughts in order to try to understand it. But it's also, isn't it, about that exactly that idea that in a way we we're looking at the world through our own consciousness, but all the time we're the protagonists in our own lives, aren't we? And we're kind of like going, I'm here. Hello, hello. It's like this book is all like, but we're the boys, you should love us.

SPEAKER_02 47:21

Why you know why aren't you absolutely you don't want to live because of us? Yes, it's it's amazing, deliberately amazingly limited, isn't it? It's it's you know, absolutely um very young male entitlement, but in a way that doesn't necessarily make us think we should go along with it. It's not trying to persuade us of that, it's showing us that.

SPEAKER_00 47:48

But I mean, I think it's very true to being a teenager, you know, that sense that the world revolves around you, you you know, that feeling that people are looking at you, you know, there's that kind of over-self-consciousness, um, and a and a yeah, and a kind of intensity of imagining that that over-self-consciousness that they're obviously experiencing, these girls, why doesn't it somehow interact with mine? You know, what's going on there?

SPEAKER_02 48:15

Exactly. I I think what's really interesting about this book is that the the children, the teenagers in it, exist within a very adult-controlled world, you know, world. This isn't skins or some sort of of street drama. All the children live at home, they're all very tightly controlled, the five sisters in particular, they go to school. And yet there are so few mentions of adult characters. It's that teenage self-centeredness, isn't it? It's the boys and the girls. And the adults are very much on the periphery, even though you can imagine this story told from the perspective of one of the adults, would not even mention the boys. Very little, with the exception of one specific boy who um takes one of the girls to a dance and and thereby precipitates some of the events. With the exception of that, you could really remove the boys from the story and nothing would be different. And yet, reading it, you have to consciously remind yourself of this. This is very much centered on those boys and those girls. And of course, as comes across in the excerpt, the sheer unknowability of the girls from the boys' perspective. In fact, I would go further and say that perhaps it's a reflection of teenagerhood, the sheer unknowability of anyone else. There's that tribal we. But beyond that, everything is completely dark, everything is a mystery. They don't know what's going on with their parents, and they certainly don't know what's going on with these girls who just live across the street.

SPEAKER_00 50:00

Yeah. Yes, it's these kind of amazing worlds that live just inches away from us.

SPEAKER_02 50:06

Yes. And and again, this really illustrates something I like, which is uh two things really, which is the achievement, the art of writing stories from the perspective of someone who is not the protagonist. So obviously, the great Gatsby is the most famous example of this. You know, it's it's not told from Gatsby's perspective. It's not even told from Daisy's or Tom's, it's, oh, the guy who lived next door. Um, Bernard Cornwall also does this really well in there's some historical fiction about Arthur, and it's told by a made-up character who actually is not a main figure in the Arthurian legends. This idea that it's told by someone who is out of the spotlight is really interesting. I think there's a double layer here because the boys, of course, believe the spotlight is on them the whole time. So not only is it being told by someone out of the spotlight, it's being told by someone who has this kind of dual belief that we as a reader can see is incorrect.

SPEAKER_00 51:13

Yeah. I'm just thinking, yes, there's so many interesting uses of it. I was thinking of The Heart of Darkness, um, which you know has got issues in many ways, but nonetheless, uh it, you know, is a very powerful book and that kind of side person telling that story. Or, or even, you know, um often I get, I don't know why, I'm quite obsessed with the ancient mariner. And that's the story is told to us not by the ancient mariner, but by the person at the party who the ancient mariner grips.

SPEAKER_02 51:45

Oh, exactly. Yes, it's it's the person who might as well not be there in terms of their impact on the story. And it's such uh it really is an amazing device. I don't know why more people don't use it, but it is, of course, incredibly hard to do. It's it's something that I've sometimes tried to do in short stories, and it's immediately obvious how hard it is to sustain it from a practical perspective. And I think Geoffrey Eugenides to a certain extent dodges this by making them so self-centered, so absolutely sure that they're the center of the universe, that you never sort of question why are these people getting involved in everything? You know, what what what's their importance here? Because they're teenage boys, quite frankly, and they believe their importance is is very central.

SPEAKER_00 52:36

That's yeah, it's interesting because I've noticed the we has cropped up, I feel like, more in the books that I've read, um, you know, more contemporary novels. Um, it's in Heidi James's The Sound Mirror. Um, and it's in uh and that's where that's the mitochondrial DNA speaks as a we. Uh and then it's also in oh my golly gosh, I'm going to get this wrong. But of course it's in the years by Annie Erno, but that's slightly different because it's that's a kind of you know, I suppose sort of auto-fectional, but that sense of a generation holding a we I find quite interesting. Um, but then it's it's also been used in um a novel whose name I can't think of right now, but where um a country's voice speaks with a we um as a kind of against the white man. So there is the we of that. So it's you know, there's I think there's some really interesting uses of we as a way of kind of like in a way making a claim. There's something about it that sort of says, you know, that that asks you to question who is in power and who holds power, who can speak, who can't speak. And this, I think that's working here as well, isn't it? In this we of the uh the virgin suicides. But yeah, so tell me how it's how it's influenced your writing.

SPEAKER_02 54:05

I'm working on a uh a project at the moment that is in fact told from the this first-person plural. Um, and I have found that it lets you do a lot of things, um, which you can't do with a first-person narrator. It gives you a lot of scope because you have more personality to play with. You can hive off certain sections of that we when you need to, as indeed Jeffrey Eugenedes does it. You can say Joe Smith said this uh to the rest of us, and then at later Joe Smith can be amalgamated back into this collective consciousness. It also gives you the opportunity to uh to play with the reader's expectations about how much this collective we is really empowered to speak for all of them. So as a reader, I think we we again um inherently question when we hear a narrator, uh a plural narrator using the we, our instinctive response is to wonder whether everyone in that nebulous and shifting group really did think that, do that, want that, desire that. And in that sense, it gives us that immediate sense that you spoke of before of the story pushing against itself. It's been told from something that ought to be a very solid collective ground. It's interesting you said about this novel, which I haven't read, told from the perspective of a country, which we think of as being an inherently grounded entity. But as well as sounding grounded, it gives us this slight uneasiness that actually not everybody in the we is necessarily thinking that. The we is going to disagree, how much again it goes back to who gets to tell a story, you know, who in the we is actually dominating this narrative. It's a great way to instill a sense of uneasiness in the reader. And I think uneasiness is what comes through very much in the Jeffrey Eugenides novel. It's it's an amazing read, but it's never comfortable. In part, obviously, because you know what's going to happen. Um, but it is also this shifting we. So it has possibly this this book itself, Virgin Suicides, um, has actually motivated me to try and do this this collective we project. And as I said, it's it's great fun, but you have to make an allowance for the fact that the reader is inherently going to be questioning what you're saying. We're not carried along as a reader the same way we might be with a first-person child narrator, for example. So, with the, for example, it's a contrast to the William Maxwell, where we know that things didn't happen. The narrator tells us those things didn't happen, but we're carried along anyway. Here we're instinctively reacting against that, which is a really disconcerting and unsettling place to be as a reader. It's a place where you want to sit with it and just hold that unsettlingness in your mind. It's phenomenally hard to write as well, or maybe that's just me.

SPEAKER_00 57:32

No, no, that sounds tricky to me. I think, though interesting that it also pushes against the kind of omnipotent third person, right? That kind of distant third person narrator that we're supposed to trust, you know, by choosing because in a way that's a we, isn't it? That narrator is also saying, you all agree with me that I think this, you know, there's in a way. And so I think that this we sort of like acknowledges the fact that it doesn't take that same level of authority. It's saying we, but we instantly question it. Whereas, do you question, you know, um, I don't know, Hardy's wonderful descriptions of a village before you enter into it. You know, I mean, probably not. I mean, one, maybe, maybe we should, but um, yes, there's so yeah, I think it's but it's also very, it's it's very engaging, isn't it? I mean, that's the I mean, obviously it in in the Virgin Suicide, you're just you know hooked.

SPEAKER_02 58:33

Absolutely, and I think it almost shows how we've changed what we value in books, because you're absolutely right about Hardy, or Trollope, for example, who just elbows his way as the author into every single book, quite speaking directly to the reader, telling them this is how it is, acknowledging condescendingly that they may not agree with with something that he's set out. But he is very much there, he's very much the author, he's very much the person who gets to speak for the novel. Um, and we're expected to go along with that. And it's a very, very sort of uh uh Victorian way of writing almost. It's yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:16

At the same time, you know, you you can you get Jane Austen is universally acknowledged, and you instantly there's there's a sense of self, there's a kind of irony there. There's a sort of like, I'm being fun with this, isn't there? There's a sense of kind of tongue in cheek.

SPEAKER_02 59:29

Yeah.

unknown 59:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:31

Yes. I wonder if it's a sense of writing from somewhere where you feel yourself to be with power or without power in a way. Interesting, but yes, we we are very explicitly given an invitation not to believe these narrators. We're not told that it's wrong, and that's why it's so interesting, because it's not like the William Maxwell, where he says, This is going to be wrong, this is memories, this is rearranged. We're never told that anything in the Virgin Suicides is uh is false in any way, and yet we come away from the novel with a sense, not of the falsity of the writing, but of a falsity of the recollections of the characters.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:17

Yeah. Um gosh, I I kind of yeah, so much to think about. But we don't have forever. So let's move on to the next choice, uh, which is Waterland by Graham Swift. Um, and that was first published in 1983 by William Heinemann. Um and interestingly, I mean there's some parallels here, aren't there? I'm going to read the I'm going to read the extract that you've chosen and then ask you to kind of talk a bit more about why you chose this. So this is Waterland by from Waterland by Graham Swift. But man, let me offer you a definition, is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes, he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker boys and trail signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's alright. Even in his last moments, it said, in the split second of a fatal fall or when he's about to drown, he sees passing rapidly before him the story of his whole life. And when he sits with more leisure, but no less terror, in the midst of a catastrophe, when he sits in his fallout bunker, or when he only sits alone because his wife of over thirty years who no longer knows him nor he her has been taken away, and because his school children, his children, who once, ever reminding him of the future, came to his history lessons are no longer there, he tells, if only to himself, if only to an audience he is forced to imagine a story. Yes. So tell me about your choice.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:10

This is almost the the opposite of the Jeffrey Eugenadies, isn't it? I didn't notice when I put them together in my choices, that here we do explicitly have have an author, quite honestly. This is an author, although there is a protagonist telling the story, this is very much an authorial voice rather than a protagonist voice. We have the authorial voice telling us explicitly what we're about to hear is the story, quantificating almost, if you like. And I one of the things that I really like about this is again this emphasis on story, this emphasis that what this this what someone sees passing before their life is before their eyes when they die is not, in fact, the truth. This whole novel is a collection of digressions, a collection of stories which weave and interlink and come together. It's again, it's very, very reflective of the setting, which is the the fens in the east of England, where again you have these waterways that cross and recross and come together and and part, and the stories. It's one of the examples of a novel where I think the structure very is very, very explicitly constructed to reflect that, because it is structured, I imagine, very deliberately to evoke the image of crossing waterways, things coming back, things looping back onto each other. And this is the way that he's he's implemented that by explicitly telling them as stories. So it's really it's really interesting to read. And again, it's interesting because although this isn't the story of the fec, this is a novel that I think if you took out of the fence and put in the middle of London, put in Islam, it wouldn't work because people would say, Why have you written it in this way? This this doesn't reflect the setting. This doesn't, why have you chosen to to use these digressions? So it's a really interesting example of structure, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:27

And uh interesting that you're saying uh the structure reflects the place. I mean, I'm I think your writing is very good at giving a sense of place. Do you feel that that was one of the things that was kind of sort of were you inspired in any way by that, that sense of kind of uh giving bringing to life the world in which your characters live?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:55

Yes, very much so. So in particular, although this I would say if I were, of course, this is a novel of place first and story second, you don't actually get very many descriptions of the place, descriptions of things in this novel. It's the absolute contrast to the Marilyn Robinson, where that that that excerpt is all about the thingness of fingerbone. And in this, you get very few explicit descriptions of the fens. What you get is an idea of how the fens make the character feel. So you you get the sort of very mundane, you know they're waterways crossing and canals and things like that. But we move in this novel very, very quickly into the sort of symbolism of the place. And I think that's quite an effective way to evoke a place for a reader. So um although readers do there there's a tension here because readers do need. If a place is unfamiliar, they do need to know the basic details of it. But again, nobody wants to sit down and read the post office was on the left of the pharmacy, or the pharmacy was on the right of the bakery, and they're not drawing a map. Um, what we want to know is why something was set in a particular place. So, what is it about the history or the landscape or the geography or the culture that means again that this is the only place that the novel could be set. So, for example, I think in in Fragile Monsters, although obviously it deals with the history of Malaysia, and so it literally couldn't be set anywhere else. Um I think also what I've hoped to convey in that is part of how the different generations and the generational interactions and the way that the history has been divided forcibly into segments without necessarily very much about the trauma of those divisions being publicly known, I think is also something that could be quite quintessentially Malaysian. So this real essence of what setting means rather than what setting looks like is something that this novel, I think, um, Waterland particularly brings out.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:19

And how setting feels as well, I think, you know, in terms of how your body feels in a particular place. I don't know if that's happening in Waterland, but that very much happens in Fragile Monsters.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:30

It does. And I mean, Waterland is a very bodily novel. Again, it's it's about either one the one of the female characters gets pregnant, it's about that sense of fluid, of heaviness, of water flowing, of nature. Um, it's an unwanted pregnancy, it's about how you you turn against nature. I'm making it sound quite quite superficial, which it isn't, but it's very much a novel about the ways in which our bodies interact with the body of nature in that specific setting. It's it it it really it's something that I try to to evoke again in Fragile Monsters, because it's not the setting obviously isn't just what can you see, it's what do you smell, what do you feel, what's important, and also what are you choosing to describe. So, for example, um, if you write a uh a novel, you know, I've written a couple of short stories set in England, and there things like if you're describing an English country garden, um, smell is very important, the smell of the flowers, the smell of the roses, or all of that. But of course, in the tropics, these amazing flowers with their colours don't smell by and large. There's no smell, or at least none that I can perceive, uh, to a hibiscus or a burgen villa. And so you have to choose what senses you're going to use to describe things. And that also tells you more about how someone there is experiencing the events. Couldn't have Proust and his Madeline, for example, uh smelling a rose in in or smelling a hibiscus in Malaysia and being transported back. It wouldn't evoke anything. So there's a real sense of needing to know how your characters and how your readers would respond to the setting, I think. That, and that really does come across in waterland.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:33

History as well is important, isn't it, in Waterland, which is important, as you're saying, also for you. Um, and how history relates to place seems important. Uh, do you think that that's one of the reasons you've also chosen? Because there is this idea of storytelling and history, they go hand in hand, don't they? Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:55

And so, in fact, although I've said this isn't necessarily a story of the fence, I think it says explicitly in Waterland at some point. In fact, it says explicitly that this is not a story of the fens, which to a reader immediately makes you prick your, you know, well, if it isn't, then why did you tell me that? You know, there's there's a lot of things it's not a story of. Why are you picking on that? Which means obviously that it is. So there's a real sense in which the history of the fens, as well as the history of this specific town and the history of the narrator and his family is bound up in this setting. So one of the things I really like about it is the way that it deals with history on that multi-layered level. It's not just the big set pieces, you know, the the war, the time things flooded. And it's not just the mundane, you know, he caught his girlfriend yesterday. It's the way it interlinks all of these layers of history and also the way that it very deliberately, I think, does not differentiate in size between them. Which goes back to the the what we were talking about with William Maxwell and the miniatures. Um the idea that from the perspective of the narrator, who again is during a lot of the events, is a teenager, that something like his girlfriend getting pregnant can be absolutely as big as something like a town getting flooded. So there's a beautiful sense of how when we remember things, when we look back on history, um we remember them out of scale, which in fact we do in real life. You know, we we we tend to remember the bits of history that are the story rather than necessarily the most important battle. We remember the one person, the plucky person, the story of that. And that comes through in Waterland, which is is one of the reasons why it really spoke to me, these layers of history and the way the reader is is allowed to see how they are represented in ways that don't reflect their real scale in the mind of the narrator.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:11

Yeah. And family history and its interrelationship with national history, say, or global history or whatever you want to call it, is quite different too, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:23

Yes, it's it I think it's where the I think it's where where personal lives really do intersect with global history because suddenly it's not just you know states and nations and and treaties. It's it's very personal. It's it's it's the grandmother to whom this happened, or the the the um father who was separated from his sister. It's it's those kinds of uh things that can lead to this idea that I think is uh makes a really interesting topic to write about. This idea of inherited trauma, this this concept that things, even if they're not spoken about, in fact, especially if they're not spoken about, when they're passed down in families, they lead to uncertainties, to traumas, to secrets. Whereas almost you think if they were brought out and it was was discussed, they might lead to fewer. But then there's that sense of having to uncover what's happened, how to uncover what the trauma was when you don't even know what the event was.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:28

And that's going on very much so in Fragile Monsters, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:31

It is, yes. It's it's very much the there. The grandmother does does not want to speak about it at all for you know fairly obvious reasons, and the granddaughter is uncovering what's going on, but again, obviously from the perspective of an outsider. So I think there's very much that question there about whose story it is. So, because of this inherited trauma, it is Infragile Monsters Julga, the granddaughter's story. But the events didn't happen to her. She's not critical to any of those events. She's the observer, she is essentially the reader of that story. And there's the sense in which she's unpicking it almost like a detective story. Um, you know, we'll unpick an Agatha Christie or a Sherlock Holmes or whatever. But in fact, you could tell every one of those stories from a perspective that's absolutely horrifying, which is the one of someone going through it, not the detective who comes along afterwards. So this this idea of who in in a family, whose stories are whose to tell, is something that absolutely fascinates me.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:41

Uh, me too. I'm totally with you on that. Um, so so let's have a look at your final choice, which is Salt by Jeremy Page. And this was first published by Viking in 2007. And it's also it's not it's not the Fenz, is it the Fenz? It is actually, yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:01

I did realise there were two that were were very much set in the Fenz. And I don't know what that what that says, whether it's whether it's I I think it's because the Fenz is a strange liminal place.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:13

You know, it's it's part land, part water, and you never know which is going to be which at some point. You know, there's a kind of blurring. Maybe I don't know. I'm throwing that out there. No, I think you're absolutely right. Uh so yeah, tell us about why you chose this book.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:29

So, although it's not reflected in the quote I chose, because I couldn't find a quote that did reflect it in that wasn't basically the entire book. Uh the reason that I chose this was again the slipperiness of the narrator. So here we have a narrator who is narrating what happened when his grandparents met, uh, or the people, as he says, who would become his grandparents. Now, at no point is he ever told this. So his grandmother never shares this information with him. He sees thoughts that were in his grandfather's head who left immediately, you know, the the whom he never knew. Um and at no point are we given an explanation for how he knows any of this. It's it's not a story that allows the narrator to make those sorts of um, those, those, those sorts of logical leaps. It's not like, for example, Virgin Suicides, where the narrators are positioned as being omnipotent or omniscient. Here the narrator is not positioned as being omniscient. And yet, or in an almost playful way, we're just presented with the fact that he knows all of this, that he can describe the story, that he can tell the story. It's almost as though the author is simply challenging us to reflect on what makes our understanding of the form and rules and constraints of a novel. He's saying, no, this guy isn't omniscient, no, there's no way he could know that. And yet sit down and listen while he tells you that. And I found that so audacious, the idea that you could do this, that it was absolutely something that I thought, I have to try and do this in Fragile Monsters. We're just breaking the rules in such an amazing way.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:22

It's it's also um, because this is a book that um I also have read. Um, and I I think when I when I went back to look at it when you chose it, I realized one of the things that I found so compelling about it was not only this interest in in the past and how you retell those stories of the past and how they live on in your mind, but also the descriptions of the landscape. And at one point there's um and and just of what's going on there. And at one point there's a whale that gets beached. And and he the the the narrator talks about how uh the story of the whale is inscribed on the skin of the whale, you know, and this idea that every encounter that it's had in the in the seas is somehow on its skin. Um yeah, and I just I don't know, for me thinking about that book, I I have a feeling of salt, I have a feeling of shifting. There's something is always shifting. There's nothing is settled, nothing is still. Um, yeah, it was a lovely, uh very again, actually in some ways quite quiet. Like I think some of your choices have been, you you've, you know, in a way contemplative, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:38

Yes. They're the I think probably all of them pretty much have have been extremely quiet, extremely restrained, extremely contemplative reflections on things that are actually sometimes quite shocking. So obviously, Virgin Suicides and So Long See You Tomorrow are the primary examples. But there are things going on in Salt as well that are absolutely shocking. I mean, parts of it are set during the war. And it's it's almost this act of toning them down, this act of saying to the reader, no, this isn't what you what you came here for. This is not a novel about events. And I think I like that none of these novels are really about events at all, are they?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:27

I think you've you've chosen very literary novels. Maybe that's what I mean. So you know, sometimes people say, What is a literary novel? What is literary fiction? And I wonder whether that's part of it. It's not, it's not that there aren't things happening, as you say, but it's a reflection on those events. It's a reflection on those things happening that have happened and how they live in the characters, how they change the way that those characters see the world afterwards. You know, they've the the impacts that those events have rather than necessarily the events themselves, maybe. I don't know, I'm throwing that out.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:04

No, I think you're absolutely right. So it's a really good definition you you just just come up with on the spirit at the moment. It's it's what the novel or what the events imply and mean, and um what not not even what impact they have. So again, it goes back to this idea of the spotlight. If the event is normally the thing in the spotlight, I want to write about the things that aren't, the sort of ripples afterwards, or the the the cat that was walking down the street while the you know murder was happening. I want to write the story of that cat, not the the fact that an you know someone was solving world hunger or fixing something amazing in in the house next door. It's it's the thing that was happening off screen.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:54

So interesting. So, yes, let's have uh do you mind reading your very short little quotation from Salt?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:04

Yes, so this is from Salt by Jeremy Page. Often, inexplicably, Lil woke to find herself standing on the back lawn in the middle of the night, escaping some dark shadow of that house. Or in the morning, when George had breezed off to the estate, she might find herself frozen at the kitchen sink, watching soapsun strip one by one from her hands. Sometimes she might catch her reflection in the newly polished curve of a soup spoon, and in it she'd see a life bent beyond recognition for her. So, one thing which I think again comes across in that, and which goes back to what we were talking about before, is the idea that these characters are explicitly contemplating life. So they um they're thinking about their lives and they're telling the reader constantly what they're thinking about their lives. We're not just watching them, we are immersed in their stream of consciousness. And she's having these complex thoughts when all the time she's actually not presented in this as a very complex character, but I really like that this allows characters who could be reduced to stereotypes. Oh, that's the you know, peasant working in the field, that's the the low-income earner. I really like that that again this novel is audacious in saying, actually, I'm not going to make their character and their thoughts and their modes of speech reflect that. It's it's allowing them to be surprising in that way, which I think is one of the things we see here in Lil. She's not just thinking, oh, my life is sad, or I didn't think I'd end up here. She is explicitly thinking, we're in Lil's head, she's thinking that just as her reflection is twisted in the spoon, her life has been bent beyond recognition. And this is again, there's a thing, and we're we're, you know, looking at the reflection in it, but what's really going on is something underneath about her how her life has been twisted like that. So it's almost similar to the Marilyn Robinson. We're hearing about the thinness of things, but we're expected to infer a lot about the meaning of what's going on as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:25

And I suppose we're also being given an example of how you might do that through the thinking of the character. Um, yeah, I love the way we've kind of come full circle. I I I'd like to ask you sort of a slightly some slightly more general questions. I'm interested to know if when you set out to write something, you have in your head a kind of reading list. Do you think you you sort of, you know, certain books come to the surface when you're building a a story?

SPEAKER_02 1:24:00

They do. Um, so much so that I I often have to, in the the story when I've written it, I often have to jump very hard on the books to make sure that they haven't broken through the surface of the story. I once described it, uh heard someone describe it as a pumpkin patch, and you have to make very sure that all the pumpkins are are buried, so it's not just a pastiche of Steinbeck or or Dickens or whatever. But yes, I I very much do. And the interesting thing is that I couldn't necessarily logically justify why some of the books are on the reading list for that story. I mean, some obviously are when when I started writing this project that's in first-person plural. I went deliberately looking for novels written in that. I went looking for this elusive we. That's obviously very understandable when I was writing Fragile Monsters. I read a lot of novels set in Malaysia during the war. But sometimes it's just about a theme or an idea or a vague and elusive and elusive style, the way the novel makes you feel. So for some of them, I guarantee, if if if I gave people the books and a selection of the stories and said which one went with which, which was on my reading list for which story, I don't think anyone else would pick the ones that I picked. It's hard to explain exactly how they fertilize the pumpkin patch of the story, but they do.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:34

Yeah, it's interesting. It instantly makes me think, oh, there's a PhD in that. You know, this idea of kind of like given being given someone's inspirational novels and somehow trying to figure out how they work together. But I suppose, in a sense, that's one of the reasons I'm interested in this idea of the hypothetical bookshelf, is that I think sometimes surprising things sit next to each other and resonate with each other. Um, and I completely agree that it can be a feeling that you have on reading a book. It captures something around what you're trying to explore, even if it's a very different kind of book. Um, it kind of, you know, you can't stop thinking about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:16

Yes, and it's just sort of some perhaps the mood it evokes in you as a reader, which of course is intensely personal. You know, no one else can will will read a book and and have that same feeling, that mood, those images, those memories that I do. So there's something inherently personal about this, this hypothetical bookshelf that I've constructed. I think that that if I were asked to justify each book's place on it logically, mathematically, I could have done it.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:48

Although uh from your choices, I think we can see how they've influenced, and well, maybe they speak to what what interests you when you're writing. You know, this this interest in detail, interest in place, interest in who is allowed to speak, and and maybe that also influences your interest in the person who's out of the spotlight. You know, uh they're often the people that aren't given the voice. Um, but that doesn't mean they don't have anything to say.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:19

Exactly. Yes. In fact, looking at these these five books that I've chosen, they are all, although not similar in plot, they're all thematically very similar. So it makes you wonder what would have happened if I'd thrown in, you know, a thriller, a crime thriller, or or or something like that there. Um, but they are all about these people who who who don't normally tell stories, or they are about someone telling a story and getting it wrong, get it factually wrong, although emotionally right, which is something we've we've come back to again and again, just because that idea fascinates me.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:57

Yeah. And do you think you're reading? Has changed over the years?

SPEAKER_02 1:28:03

I think it has, yes. I I go through phases of reading. So as well as the usual sort of teenage enthusiasms when you read Bithead Revisited or Ivan Ho and you think, my God, who has been hiding these things from me? I've also gone through phases of trying to diversify my reading, but finding that I often do come back to authors who are underrepresented or authors who are excluded or books about people who are excluded in some way. I one of the things which I would really like to do is and which I'm moving more towards these days, is reading much, much more contemporary novels. There are, as I said, with Salt, which is one of the most recent novels on this list, actually, in fact, possibly the most recent, where I said that that is in some ways audacious. I think there are a lot of contemporary authors who are also being audacious with what's expected, audacious with form and command. And these are the sorts of things that we might have seen dismissed as too literary, you know. How dare there be a book written without any capital letters, for example, or something like that, or you can't tell this story from the perspective of this person, or this doesn't follow narrative rules. So I'm getting more and more interested these days in reading books that break narrative rules.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:46

I also like reading those kinds of books. So I'm going to force you to think now about if you had to pick one of these, one that you feel kind of most speaks to you in terms of inspiring your work, which one would it be? Do you think?

SPEAKER_02 1:30:07

Probably, although I think it might have been the shortest exercise. The William Maxwell. This is because I think this particular work actually brings together almost everything from all the other works. We have this uh sense that what the narrator is telling us isn't factually true. We have this delightfully limited child narrator, we have this sense of shifting, we have this sense of story, we have this sense of the people telling the story being the people out of the spotlight. Um and it's interesting, this is also the shortest one as well. I'm I'm not normally a fan of novellas, so there's something that I think transcends the form with this one.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:55

Yeah, I I do find the the idea of what a novella is quite interesting. Like I think often shorter works carry the weight of novels, even though they're short. You know, I don't know, I mean, yeah, these things, you know, what is a piece of string, you know, in a way, how long is it? I think sometimes they can be quite arbitrary, but at the same time, you're someone who writes short stories and you've written a novel, so you obviously have a sense of how the form can be different.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:26

Um I also have an inherent and very uneducated, so I I unlike you, I haven't done a PhD in this area, and so perhaps what I'm about to say is going to be academically incorrect. I have a sense that there would be a difference between a 35k short story and a 35k novella somehow, other than one would be too long for a short story, but but I have a sense that they would be doing different things. I don't know what, but I I I to me a novel isn't just a longer short story, and a novella isn't just a mini novel. So I feel instinctively that a short novel and a long short story would be very different animals, but I'm not able to articulate why. Again, there may be a PhD in that.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:15

There probably has been one written, no doubt. Uh yes, well, we can go away and investigate that. But um for now, I just want to thank you so much for um coming and speaking to me today and sharing all of your novels and everything that you know inspires you as a writer. And I think I've certainly gone away thinking about lots of things to that you know I might want to read, I might want to, you know, in uh experiment with. So, yes, thank you so much for for coming and talking with me. And um I look forward to reading what you write next, um, which I know I know there's something on the go, and I and I'm sure that um everyone will be excited to find out about that, and I will tell them when I can. So, um, yes, thank you so much for being here. You have been listening to the Hypothetical Bookshop with me, Rebecca Lasson Rostro, and guest with Menor. New episodes with more fantastic guests are released every two weeks wherever you get your podcasts. Do subscribe. You can also become a supporter of the show if you head to the podcast website or follow the link on Instagram. For as many of the books as are available, head to the podcast bookshelf page on bookshop.org. Thank you for listening.