Look Closer: with Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Dominic welcomes back one of the most celebrated guests of this series Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst ... 

Robert’s latest book Look Closer: How to get more out of reading (published by Penguin) is an invitation to all of us to go deeper into our reading, and find greater joy and meaning in the works of great writers from all ages and backgrounds. With examples from Dickens (of course!) but also George Eliot, Shakespeare, Margaret Attwood, Samuel Becket, Jane Austen and many more … 

Since they last spoke Robert has also published Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces : a deeply powerful biography of his life and career, set against the backdrop of shock diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis in 2017.

Here are links to purchase Robert's books:

Look Closer: How to get more out of reading

Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces

The Turning Point: A Year That Changed Dickens and the World  

A Christmas Carol & Other Christmas Books 

Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist

Transcript

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SPEAKER_03 0:16

Hi everyone, a happy new year to you all. It is a thrill today to welcome back one of the most celebrated guests of this series, Robert Douglas Fairhurst, Professor of English literature at Oxford University and a fellow of Maudlin College. He is one of the world's most prominent Dickens scholars and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Robert's latest book, Look Closer, How to Get More Out of Reading, published by Penguin, is an invitation to all of us to go deeper into our reading and find greater joy and meaning in the works of great writers from all ages and backgrounds, with examples from Dickens, of course, but also George Eliot, Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood, Samuel Beckett, Jane Austen, and many more. Since we last spoke, Robert has also published Metamorphosis, A Life in Pieces, which is a deeply powerful biography of his life and career so far, set against the backdrop of a shock diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2017. And by the way, if you haven't heard our previous conversations on his books The Turning Point, A Year That Changed Dickens and the World, and A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books for Oxford University Press, you really should go back and listen to those episodes after this. Also returning to the series is the wonderful Sophie Reynolds, who will be assisting me with some of the extracts that are read in this episode. It's time to invite Robert into the room. Robert, hello, and welcome back to Charles Dickens A Brain on Fire, and Happy New Year to you. And to you too, it's great to be back. Thank you. I'm thrilled to have you back. I've just read Look Closer, and I've also read in the interim Metamorphosis. So I feel pretty up to date with what you've been doing and what you've been thinking. I suppose my first kind of question to you, I'm so struck by the cover of Look Closer, and it's such a brilliant way to get us into it. And I wondered if you could start with the cover for us.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Absolutely. So Look Closer is uh in bold red, but also sideways. Uh so already then the cover is asking you to kind of think about how we do read and whether we might need to read at a slight slant uh to kind of the everyday world and the way that we understand our surroundings. Uh the cover also contains a picture of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses. Monroe was a big reader. When she died, she had several hundred uh books. And I suppose what I wanted to get across was that idea of the familiar world, for instance, us assuming that Marilyn Monroe is just a sort of sexy film star, um, not being one that we should perhaps take for granted. And instead we should rethink a lot of what we think we know, because that's what literature gives us, that's what books do to us and do for us. That uh a book can be a lens that refocuses the world around us, that makes us look at it in sharper, more interesting detail. Uh a book can be a kaleidoscope that twists the world into interesting new patterns. So I suppose that what I wanted was for the uh the cover to um instantly kind of beckon the reader in and sort of show them that happening.

SPEAKER_03 3:43

I really loved reading your previous book, Metamorphosis, is I have a strong sense, and I read them rapidly together, maybe that's partly why, but I have a strong sense that they're quite linked. And you say something very which I like very much in Metamorphosis, where you describe your child an impression of books like TARDICE. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Yes, exactly. Yes, um we we we tend to think that a a book can be like a TARDIS in that it's much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, but also it can transport us. Books transport us um in time uh and in space. What any book does, what any act of reading does, if it's taken seriously or perhaps is treated playfully, is that it stretches our minds, it stretches our imaginations, uh, but also it it's good for us. It cultivates social values like like curiosity, like empathy. It allows us not just to uh imagine being somewhere else, but imagine being someone else. It lets us work out who we are by by playing at being other people. So so what what books do then is a bit like a TARDIS, it makes the world a bigger place, but it also makes the world a more intimate place.

SPEAKER_03 5:00

Yes. And um another key connection to Metaphorphosis, and look closer, there is this George Eliot quote that really chines with you very, very personately, and you which is Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Yes. It's the last line of this uh of this most recent book. Uh because I want readers to think of the book as a whole as a sort of springboard rather than a um an open and shut case. Proust says in one of his essays, and again I think I quote this towards the end of the book, we like to think that our own wisdom begins when the author's leaves off, but what readers can do is they can use an author's words to stimulate their own thinking, their own reflections. So it's not that books tell us what to think, they show us or encourage us how to think.

SPEAKER_03 6:01

In look closer, you you you identify obviously novels, but of course poems, but also plays and comics as well. So it's it's a wide scope of reading that you're encouraging us to take in.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

Yes, um, and I suppose comics, partly because that's what really attracted me when I was younger. So uh it reminds us that um we are all, as the critic I Richards said, we're all learning to read all the time. These days, if I go back to reading a comic or a graphic novel, uh it reminds me of where I came from as a reader and maybe where I've got to. But also, when you're reading something like a comic, what you're seeing is an ongoing dialogue between the words and the images. And it reminds us that what a lot of the best writing does is put ideas in dialogue with each other, that it encourages us to see things from more than one perspective simultaneously, to include different attitudes towards the same kind of set of ideas. I I know um Tom Stoppard, I again I I may mention this in the book. Um, Tom Stoppard uh in an early interview was asked why he wrote plays, and he said that writing theatrical dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself in public. Um but you might think that all kinds of writing, any piece of writing that isn't just like a kind of megaphone shouting at you, is going to offer different voices, different perspectives. And something like a comic shows that because it allows you to physically see things from different angles, and then encourages you to not just visualize the world from different angles, but to imagine the world from different angles of approach.

SPEAKER_03 7:45

You're saying this about the different angles. There's a fantastic moment that I didn't know about where you talk about uh Wordsworth's poem I wandered lonely as a cloud.

SPEAKER_00 7:54

I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills, when all at once I saw a crowd, a host of dancing daffodils. Along the lake, beneath the trees, ten thousand dancing in the breeze. The waves beside them danced, but they outdid the sparkling waves in glee. A poet could not but be gay in such a laughing company.

SPEAKER_03 8:24

And you also jot down the fact that his sister was with him as well, during the same trip, and she she writes her own reflections on on witnessing that same famous thing, and that that's extraordinary to have those two points by each other.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

When we were in the woods beyond Gobarrow Park, we saw a few daffodils close to the waterside. We fancied that the sea had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along, there were more and yet more, and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

And in the case of Wordsworth, he wasn't alone when he said he was wandering lonely as a cloud. But even when he was on his own, back at home, he had that other perspective of his sisters that he could draw on when he wanted to. He could put himself in dialogue with her on the page, and indeed with himself, his own earlier self, on the page as well. So we can keep ourselves company on the page by drawing on our own past memories as well as on uh uh the perspectives of of other people. And that's what that particular poem does. It's a poem about how we draw on uh our memories to try and offer a more rounded view of something.

SPEAKER_03 9:54

It's interesting though, because you you're also pointing out that writers have the right to edit. Um, they they search for the truth of something or insight into something. But I wandered with my sister as two clouds. I mean, it's not the same, is it? It's not going to work. So he has to cut his sister out of the picture, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

I I think that's right. Um he also um slightly later adds an extra stanza. So uh it's a way of showing that as he carries on reflecting on that scene, um, he discovers he has more to say about it. It means more or it means something different to him. Just as um you or I, if we go back and we reread a story or a poem, which we read, you know, months or years earlier, we will realise that it's a bit like a mirror in that you never see quite the same face twice. Yeah. You you you you will reread uh the poem or or the story, but because reading is a relationship between you and the words on the page, the thing will have changed, because you will have changed slightly. So just as you can never step in the same river twice, you can never um step in the same story twice.

SPEAKER_03 11:03

To me, they feel like diary entries, actually, some of these books and plays that you return to, because you can connect with your younger self, can't you? It's a marker of how you've changed, even though the words on the page haven't at all.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

That's right. I I I often think that um rereading something, it's a bit like bumping into an old friend. That they're the same, but not the same. Just as you're the same, but not the same. But if they're a good friend, of course you pick up exactly where you were. Maybe after years apart, as if nothing has changed at all.

SPEAKER_03 11:33

Yes. Hamlet, being one that I've come back to quite a lot of times. And I in my one of my worst recent readings of Hamlet, there are two things that sort of jumped at me, two ideas. One, I'm so struck how awkward Hamlet is talking to the gravediggers.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 11:46

He doesn't know how to speak to these working people. Exactly. What man dost thou dig it for? For no man, sir. What woman then? For none, neither. Who is to be buried in? One that was a woman, sir, but rest her soul, she's dead. I'd never quite seen that before because sometimes we focus on the bigger questions of the play very often and the main drive of the plot. And and another thing is the difference, I just put this to you as an idea, the difference, or a potential difference, between truth and honesty. And it's one tiny reference where Hamlet is talking to Polonius and um he's reading something about men having weak hands, and he says, I I count this to be true, but I count it as dishonest to have it set down. In your rereading over time, are there things that have jumped out at you perhaps recently from something you've read a long time ago that you've come back to?

SPEAKER_01 12:41

Yes, so so one of the um stories I do talk about in in my book is um Edith Wharton's story, The Pretext, uh, which is about a lopsided love affair between an older American woman uh and a younger Englishman who may just be playing her along. Now, I first read the story when I was much closer to his age, and at the time I just didn't think too much about it. Um then I reread it when I was much closer to her age, and suddenly, very, very different. Uh it unpicked all the the frustrations, the disappointments, the the small indignities of a midlife crisis or a lopsided love affair with someone who may or may not be in love with you. So, yes, the story again was the same, but not the same. Just as of course I was the same, but not the same.

SPEAKER_03 13:34

Today is Blue Monday, apparently.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

Happy Blue Monday, everyone.

SPEAKER_03 13:39

Something that from one of our previous conversations that you'd said is that as a ritual, you like to reread a Christmas carol every Christmas. And obviously we're quite close to Christmas, just gone, but obviously we couldn't be further away from the next one coming. So it's a strange place to be. But in your rereading of that one, did anything jump up? Did you reread it this Christmas?

SPEAKER_01 13:55

I d I did actually, because um I was I I I I wrote a piece for um the Sunday Times uh about how um strange a story it is, and how we tend to think of it through a kind of lens of familiarity, but to realise just how kind of weird uh a story it is. Um Yes, in in some ways um it struck me as uh even more kind of strained and awkward as an appeal for uh kind of loving kindness and sympathy and generosity. You can see all the kind of cracks showing in the story, perhaps more now than before. Um Yeah. Yeah, I I've read little more to say about it because then I'll end up thinking about Tiny Tim and I'll start crying.

SPEAKER_03 14:49

Obviously, of course, you do mention that as well. You mentioned that that emotional in your chapter about feelings about why why does this happen to us when we read? But you know, you mentioned just on Dickens again, we mentioned the ending of a Tale of Two Cities. Yes. So, you know, and maybe it's the pileup of events and the sweep and the just the rhythm by the time you get to that point in the book that it causes that release of emotion, or the fact that Pip's story for me feels like my story, and it's very, very different from my story. But I have his same desires and aspirations, and I'm on his side, you know. What is that? How is that possible?

SPEAKER_01 15:26

I I think perhaps it's because um we tend to use language um in ordinary life in pragmatic or referential ways. So we use language to do things, to get things done, uh which are immediate, such as please open the window, or would you like a cup of tea? Um what those moments do in Dickens is that they are both instantly effective. They have to do with plot, they have to do with uh kind of ticking a particular box at a particular moment in the story, but they also um stretch out much, much further through the story that we've read. They set up shock waves in what we've read. They they they remind us what Dickens says um towards the end of his career, about uh him being the storyteller at his loom, where all the threads are connected, and suddenly you touch on one of those threads, and it's a bit like a a kind of spider's web, the whole thing kind of trembles into life. So that particular moment um it's drawing you into a whole kind of network of ideas and assumptions and associations and yes and emotions that suddenly kind of um are brought to a head at that moment. So that that that's why it's so effective, I think. It it reminds us that the great bits of writing join the world together for us in in different patterns. They let us show to see the world uh in different patterns.

SPEAKER_03 16:58

Yeah. I've never asked anybody this about Dickens. But one thing I wondered with Dickens's use of repetition, it strikes me that often his use of repetition is is deeply painful, almost kind of unhinged, a bit OCD in some ways. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

It it it it's interesting, isn't it? Because um repetition can be used for entirely opposite purposes, can be used um as a sort of uh comic tick. The French philosopher Henri Bergson said that what the essence of comedy was was something mechanical encrusted on the living. So things like catchphrases, for instance, uh or slapstick, uh, where the clown always gets smacked by the plank of wood and never learns how to avoid it, always uh puts his foot in the paint pot. It it's funny because it it makes the world seem that um it is uh predictable and controllable. However, it's also central to tragedy. It's central to uh that idea of things being inescapable, of being caught up in a world of pure cause and effect which you you you you you can't get out of. Um Dickens um s situates himself on the seesaw between the tragedy and the comedy. So when you've got Little Nell those passages about her death sinking into a form of prose blank verse, it just seems to be so rigidly structured, so predictable. It either catches you your your your heart and you think this is like a a piece of Shakespearean tragedy, or you're like Oscar Wilde and you think you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at to death of Little Nell, precisely because it seems mechanically predictable. And and is the fact that he does both simultaneously, like like someone um flipping a coin, and you can't tell whether it's heads or tails. That that's what's so astonishing about his writing.

SPEAKER_03 18:58

Yes. A personal experience from reading look closer, is how the chapters in this one they branch into each other. So you'll finish one chapter and you'll you'll have an extra branch to say about what you were saying in the previous chapter that interlocks and then moves on to the next topic. Was that a was that a conscious thing you were doing when you were writing? Because in Metamorphosis, it's a different structure altogether, and I love the reverse chapter of falling and all of that. Metamorphosis. Chapter 42. Falling. It was a day like any other until the trapdoor opened. We all have trapdoors in our lives. Sometimes we hear the hollow sound of our feet treading on the wood and jump off just in time. We diffuse the argument with a joke. We swerve to prevent the traffic accident that would have left our car crumpled up like a giant tin can. But sometimes we are unlucky enough to be on the trapdoor when the lever is pulled. We remain frozen in mid-air for a fraction of a second, like wily coyote running off a cliff. And then we plummet.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Yes, so with uh with Metamorphosis, I wanted to get that sense of um a kind of slow measured descent, followed by a more hopeful uptick. So that's why the chapters kind of uh tick down, like uh like a clock, and then uh you reach zero, which is um the day of my stem cell transplant, which is often called day zero by doctors and by patients, and then there's a kind of gradual kind of uh tick up again. So so but the structure of that it was deliberately fragmentary, uh kind of bitty, to try and capture that sense of your life falling apart, um, and and the struggle to try and put it back together again in writing. Whereas with Look Closer, I wanted to get that sense of individual kind of angles of approach to individual works being deliberately different, and yet what links them all together is the figure of the reader. It is the same person who is reading all these works. You bring everything you have to the act of reading. So that's why I wanted uh the chapters to be linked, just to remind readers that um this was only me, this is only my version of these books. Their versions might well be different. They will bring their own associations and assumptions and histories to the act of reading. They will make different links between them. So it was a way of, I suppose, stamping my own, not authority, but personality on them to remind that that's what they will do as well.

SPEAKER_03 21:41

Yes. And in choosing. I mean, it must have been agony for you. Was it agony to choose and not and to leave things out? What was that process like of the thing?

SPEAKER_01 21:49

There was a lot of juggling, certainly, that went. It turns out that when I had made the final decision, when I'd fact written the first draft of the book, I realized that I'd given exactly 400 years worth of um examples. The first example chronologically is uh the first folio of Shakespeare, 1623. Uh the last example is a queer Canadian short story published in 2023. So it turned out it was 400 years worth, but that was a comparison. Complete fluke. What I wanted to do was, I suppose, just to capture the full range of uh of my interest, but also of what is out there from um popular fiction to plays to poems, uh to more kind of high literary texts, to uh potboilers. Um and obviously it's a deeply personal selection, but I wanted it to be, I suppose, representative in terms of I don't know, uh, gender and kind of period and um uh sexuality and all the other things that might encourage a reader to go and find out their own path for it.

SPEAKER_03 22:55

Obviously Dickens features in the book many times. You're so associated with Dickens with becoming Dickens and the turning point. Was there a need to kind of put him back in his box a little bit and say, Well, you know that I can do Dickens?

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Look at some others. Yes, there was and and and there was there there was for a long time I thought maybe I shouldn't have any Dickens in here at all. It'll be seen as um you know preaching to the choir. Um But then I thought, well, maybe the best way to do this is to have Dickens pretending to be someone else. Uh so that's why I chose Umfanny Squeers' letter from Nicholas Nickleby, which which is him acting as a sort of triloquist, using her as the dummy, um, and showing his ability to manipulate a character's voice for for comic effect, to make it clear that what she is saying is not what he is saying. That there is a kind of clear gap of irony between those two perspectives. So that was a way, I suppose, of using Dickens but making it disguised in some ways.

SPEAKER_03 23:56

And I love that letter from Fanny Squiz. It's so funny to have that brought back. It's brilliant, isn't it? Just the her spelling of the word language. Yes. And what it does to the mouth and the tongue. Yes. And how you she's you know what she sounds like.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

Language, yes.

SPEAKER_03 24:10

Do the boys haul Thursday morning. Sir, my pa requests me write to you, the doctor's considering it doubtful whether he will ever recover the use of his legs, which prevents his holding a pen. When your nephew that you recommended for a teacher had done this to my pa and jumped upon his body with his feet and also language which I will not pollute my pen with describing, he assaulted my ma with dreadful violence, dashed her to the earth, and drove her back home several inches into her head. A very little more, and it must have entered her skull. But of course I I was very aware too when I this this question formulated my mind, uh Robert, when um I was reading the chapter entitled Atmosphere, I think. And you start talking about fog, and I'm thinking, oh here we go, bleak house then where Oh no, it doesn't happen. No, it happened in the turning point. I suppose if you focus on him a lot, it's easy to sort of start to just keep having his lens come over your eyes.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

It is interesting that I mean that he does tend to sort of like fog, seep in where you least expect him to. So there is uh a chapter called The Attraction of Repulsion, which is about um disgust uh and what happens when you read a novel like Dracula, and you're both kind of drawn to the very thing that you want to flinch away from, and how often horror requires that kind of um double helix of feelings. And of course that phrase the attraction of repulsion is taken from The Life of Dickens by John Forster. It's the phrase that Forster uses for Dickens' um attitude towards the slums of Saffron Hill in the 1830s and 1840s, which he then writes about uh in novels like um Oliver Twist. You're drawn to the very thing that that most repels you. So so yes, he he does he does creep in even when he's uh not named.

SPEAKER_03 25:55

Yes. You mentioned Dracula a moment ago, and I I did jot down a few impressions of books I've reread and what it meant, you know, decades later. And in 1984, I thought it was really funny in places. Uh where Orwell talks about the character of Parsons and talks about the neat handwriting of the illiterate.

SPEAKER_01 26:12

Yes. That goes back to something we we touched on earlier, which is that um your reading of those works will be framed um and informed by your own life up till this moment. Uh and and as you change, therefore you'll notice different things in those works. I had the same thing actually. So and one of the uh poems I talk about in this book is Wendy Cope's The Orange, which uh when again when I first read it, I thought it was um rather kind of flat, rather platitudinous, uh rather kind of dull. Um and and then after being in a relationship for many, many years, I realise it's a love poem. It's a love poem which takes what seems to be flat and obvious and realizes that those are the very routines of being in love with someone where you can make those things unexpectedly special because you are sharing them with someone else.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange. The sides of it made us all laugh. I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave. They got quarters, and I had a half.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

That's what it's like to be in love, where everything in the world seems to glow with extra meaning because of the relationship you have with someone else. But when I first read it, I didn't understand that. It's only now I think, oh, a bit like Wordsworth. It seems so flat and obvious because I was reading it in a way which itself was kind of flat. And now I understand what's kind of going on under the surface of what seems to be kind of predictable.

SPEAKER_00 27:40

I love you. I'm glad I exist.

SPEAKER_03 27:45

Yes, I think it's easy sometimes, isn't it, to to assume something is simplistic because it's simple in its layout or its language. But um you do say on this-I'm on the chapter of Wendy Cope's the Orange, and you say, exactly the same words can be found in the greatest literature as in the most ordinary conversations. I was really taken by that poem, and I think reading the book helped me see this poem because I think I would have probably just dismissed it. Yes. But later on, there's a and I don't know if I can find the quote quick enough, but this this really spoke to me, this quote from a a Russian uh author or critic who talks about um Kishlovsky? Yes, and he's talking about reading and talking about how there's this kind of uh tension in the language where you have to work or it's the reason why I think I like reading 19th century literature, because it's both familiar. You're not back four or five hundred years, it's familiar and relatable, but there's enough there's enough quirkiness in there. You've got words like thoroughfare or notwithstanding.

SPEAKER_01 28:39

That's right. It's um it's a Russian critical Viktor Shlovsky. Uh he wrote an essay called Art as Technique, in which he argued that what literature does, uh what literary language does is defamiliarise our world. It takes words uh and uses them as kind of uh sort of filters, so that the world that we thought we knew looks slightly different. And because the language is often slightly overpitched or underpitched, or even if it seems to be kind of flatly obvious, like the Wendy Cope pile, the very fact that it's in relation to something which is as high-falutin as love makes us kind of rethink, recalibrate the relationship between feelings and language that we'd otherwise just take for granted. So, yeah, exactly. And and it's something which 19th century literature is especially good at doing. But it's reminding us that just because um we all have a voice, that's not to say that we all have something to say for ourselves. And it might because some people can put our own thoughts better than we can, which is what a writer like Dickens or George Eliot does.

SPEAKER_03 29:44

What I particularly love is is when you feel an author from a long time ago that are able to just reach across time and grab you. So I I will never forget being 17 years old reading Great Expectations for the first time, and Dickens says, pause you who read this. And I'm like, I'll never get back that first feeling of, you know.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

That that that that's that there's the line from um uh Alan Bennett's play, The History Boys, isn't it? He says that that there are moments when you're reading, you come across a thought or a feeling or a way of looking at things, which you had thought was particular to you, peculiar to you, and he says now you see it being set down by someone else, and it's as if a hand has come out and taken yours. And it could be something very, very tiny. I I mean there's a very famous, very short story, which everyone thinks was written by Hemingway, and it wasn't actually, it was um published um about 20 years earlier. It's just six words long. It's for sale, baby shoes, never worn. That's it. For sale, baby shoes, never worn. And it's like a literary dum-dum bullet. It it goes into your head and just carries on expanding.

SPEAKER_03 30:54

Yes. You mentioned Beckett, Samuel Beckett obviously comes up in in in the book as well. I remember not thinking I understood Beckett that it was too I couldn't get a grasp on it. Then I remember seeing Crapp's last tape and this line about these young lovers being out on a boat. That's right. He's recounting it, and he talks about how let me let me see, I've got it. Uh I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed without opening her eyes. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 31:25

It's extraordinary. It's absolutely extraordinary. And what's what's especially powerful about that when you're watching it on stage is that you are watching the disappointed older crap, listening to the kind of hopeful voice of his younger self. And you see, you don't just hear, you see a kind of failure and disappointment being kind of marked out in front in in front of you. It's extraordinary.

SPEAKER_03 31:51

Yes, and I see John Hurt's face always as crap. Always. It can never be anywhere else. But and and actually, sorry, I forgot to say, you you you played crap, didn't you?

SPEAKER_01 31:59

I did, I did when I was uh a very ridiculously young age, when I was about 17 uh uh at school, that's right, with a um white winkle pickers and a lot of aging makeup and a lot of talcum powder in my hair, and yes.

SPEAKER_03 32:12

Well, this is a very interesting aspect of you because like Dickens, gotta just flag him up again just for a second. But you know, you you definitely had aspirations to be an actor, didn't you?

SPEAKER_01 32:21

I I did. It was only when I was at university and surrounded by really good actors, you know, people like Tom Hollander or Rachel Weiss, and I thought, oh, oh so that's oh so that's what really good acting looks like up close. Ha ha. Okay. I I I I can I can learn my lines and I can you know pretend to be someone else, but not with the same kind of conviction or skill that that they could.

SPEAKER_03 32:41

We've talked about that diary feeling of you you know going back, or or the or a moment when an author from a different time can reach across and and and take you by the hand. Another moment that I l I love is when an author can see can see their own time objectively and kind of almost look ahead to our time. I mean you know, you mentioned the time machine, that's one of your books as well, which I absolutely love, and you talk about the fantastic descriptions of of the actual time travel jump that happens. And first of all, his descriptions of the of the changing London around him. And he talks at one point and he says, I saw great and splendid architectures rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist. And you think, well, yeah, you can stand on London Bridge today, first thing in the morning. Um, but also when he's further in the future, he talks about meeting these people in brightly clad clothes, and he says, I was dressed in dingy 19th century garments.

SPEAKER_01 33:41

I mean, what is that? Well, what I get when I when I read that passage is um the realisation that the book itself is a time machine. The time machine is the time machine, um, uh in that uh it it it takes you back to the world of 1895, a time where there is a balance between uh optimism and pessimism, between hopes for progress and fears that everything is uh coming to an end, where um uh the Industrial Revolution uh is is uh causing what seems to be a separation uh of the classes, which is then kind of uh parodied really in the Eloy and the Morlocks. But but the language, yes, the language which which he uses is trying to strike a balance between what is uh kind of rich and poetic and meaningful and what is brisk and purposeful and down to earth. As if that battle between Eloh and the Morlocks is kind of being fought out on the page. So that you as a reader then have to try and situate yourself in that world linguistically and try and work out whose side of the fence you are on. Or is it that the the reader is the only one who can kind of negotiate between these different classes, these different worldviews?

SPEAKER_03 35:00

Yes. Metamorphosis ends on this most breathtaking cliffhanger where you're about to go for a walk up a hill in Oxford, and and I understand that the answer is no, because it might spoil something, but are you willing to tell us what actually happened as you stepped out that as I stepped for that one one summer's morning?

SPEAKER_01 35:21

Um uh so uh obviously to some extent the ending of that book is as much a metaphor as it is a kind of memory. So I I talk about um going for a walk to go to the st the top of the nearest big hill in Oxford um and and sort of being able to kind of look down uh and and and sort of see see uh kind of the world in perspective, which clearly is what I wanted the treatment I had to do for me. Um I I would say that these days there is not a chance I'd be able to walk up that hill. Uh that my walking sadly is uh has gotten much worse in the last couple of years. However, everything else remains um as it was. So I still feel as if I can see things in perspective, just maybe not kind of visually from the top of that particular hill.

SPEAKER_03 36:16

Yes. I have to say, I mean, the power of your book, Metamorphosis, because I'm I'm mentioning it because you'd mentioned it to me over the years. Yes. And I'd felt wholly unprepared to do any justice to what you were saying or what you had to say, and I kind of an experience that will be familiar to you, I'm sure, where people sort of just back off a little bit because you don't want, you know. Did it make you smile? It did, I loved it. Oh, oh Robert, I loved it. You notice I keep shoehorning it into this conversation. Okay. Like all brilliant books, you carry the reader through. Because you described it to me in our chat as a misery memoir. Um, but anyone picking that up, don't think for one moment that you're not going to have a fantastic, informative, interesting ride. Now, I I know from my own experience as well in my life, I I know what pitch lines are, and I know about platelets and neutrophils and you know, in certain injections. And but for readers that don't, it it's it's laid out so powerfully and and profoundly and with such courage, and that that leads me to this question. How does it how does it ever feel for you, not just in Metamorphosis, but also in In Look Closer, where you share personal experiences that are then packaged in a way that can be in a book that a reader takes on. How does that feel for you? What what happens to that memory and that feeling and and how you've expressed it?

SPEAKER_01 37:31

I would say, well, it it's a new thing. Um so Metamorphosis was the first time that I'd I'd been brave enough to write about myself or use my experiences to write about other things. And I think before that, maybe I treated a book more like a a pulpit. And now I I prefer to think of it as a confessional booth. I I I'd rather feel that I'm talking to one person who is right next to me rather than lecturing to a group of people from from a distance. Um and that means then that like any relationship where you're close to someone, you are likely to be more open, more honest, more vulnerable. It's something I've noticed in my teaching as well that uh as you get older, you become more willing to be vulnerable and open with your students because you're not trying to uh convince them that you're clever uh or kind of hide what you don't know. It becomes a mark of strength to admit the things you can't remember or have never heard of. Um and then it becomes much more sort of collaborative. And the same is true of writing and reading, I think. That if if you treat the reader as an intimate, an equal, as the other half of a conversation, then they're more likely to feel involved and more likely to uh feel kind of listened to as well as uh spoken to. So that it does feel like a a relationship. When I was writing um Look Closer, I had a um a post-it note uh which I'd written and I stuck on my computer, and it just said, remember, you are talking to one person. There wasn't any one particular person I had in mind, although sometimes I did, but it was the fact that it I didn't want to be talking at people. I wanted to be kind of talking with them.

SPEAKER_03 39:21

What I wondered though was whether you lose control of how you feel or think, or your your take on something you lose control of in a good way. Maybe you send it up into the sky like a kite, like uh the character in David Copperfield, or whether it's something where people start telling it back to you, and you go, well, no, it wasn't quite that actually.

SPEAKER_01 39:37

It's both of those things. Um I mean, most of the time, it's a bit like that lovely line in one of um John Dunn's poems where he he he's writing about unhappiness, about grief, uh, and he writes he tames it at fetters in verse. And the same is true of of prose as well. You you tame it you by by putting it into organized sentences, that writing becomes a way of putting uh unhappiness in its place, and its place is on the page, which allows you then to look at it from a distance and to share it with other people. That's the theory. But in practice, of course, it doesn't always work like that, not least because when you try to uh transform uh something personal into a public uh form, there is always going to be the interference of uh public forms, of grammar, or of sentences, or of allusions to other writers, uh ways in which uh your feelings, your your ideas won't only be your own.

SPEAKER_03 40:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:44

So so you you're always going to lose some of that intimacy, but I don't know. I th again there's something about the the tone, as much as the words, which tries to bring some of that back.

SPEAKER_03 40:57

I was really taken with both books. So actually, uh just to say obviously our conversation was meant to happen before Christmas and it was delayed because I got the flu. Um but I would say though, it's just I will admit to you that I I felt a reluctance to explain to you that I was ill, thinking, my god, don't say to Robert. And then I had the next thought was, of course, why would you want to be treated differently and not be privy to that information?

SPEAKER_01 41:20

And if I tell people I'm I'm I'm ill, you know, they they're they're likely to assume I've got the flu rather than that, you know, I have a crippling life-limiting disease.

SPEAKER_03 41:28

So yes, absolutely. My parting question is uh, how is your novel coming?

SPEAKER_01 41:34

Ah well if it's coming, it's coming slowly and painfully and cautiously. Um there are a couple of scenarios I've sketched out. Like like a lot of people who've who write a lot that isn't fiction, I worry that I won't be able to switch off my critical brain, which means I will never be able to write one word after another, rather than one word replacing another. I worry that I'll be trapped in this endless kind of fidget of uh of editing and re-editing rather than allowing myself to go on the page.

SPEAKER_03 42:09

That's so interesting because how would you advise somebody else to write the novel? And can you then follow your own advice?

SPEAKER_01 42:16

It's it's a good question. Uh and and again, I I'd have advised former students on on their fiction. Um it yeah. I have a feeling what I might do is write a uh another book which is thoroughly based on the kind of research I want to do, but has a like looser relationship with facts. Let's put it that way. A bit like Flow Bear's Parrot, some something which um would allow me to play around with history rather than be committed to it.

SPEAKER_03 42:44

Yes. Thank you so much for your time, Robert. I've I've loved speaking to you again. And listeners, there is a link to buy look closer, there is also a link to buy metamorphosis, and why not, there's also one for the turning point and becoming Dickens as well. So thank you so much for your time again. It's been wonderful to talk to you.