Joyce, this is a dictation of the draft of Dalgleish, Finding The Body.
Double spacing as usual, please.
SHOUTING EXPLOSIONS
That's it? Oh, that's nice.
ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYS
Vietnamese communists here...
The '70s and Eighties were a time of profound and often dislocating change.
I do think fiction ought to be asking great, unanswerable, adolescent questions.
Why are set upon this planet? For what purpose?
Reagan's years are beginning to show.
Holding a mirror up to these convulsions was a new wave of writers.
If I spend a day writing something violent, or something terrible, at the end of that day,
what I will feel, if I think I've achieved what I've set out to, will be elation and pleasure.
You're all dressed up, looking lovely.
The novels were a celebration and a condemnation of a world in flux.
You write out of the society, and the society changes.
And if you read newspapers, or look at the television, things are bound to come in to you from that society.
Their fiction was as diverse and unsettling as the society it reflected.
Things are...perhaps are in flux and change at the moment, but we're not quite clear what's happening.
Some of the biggest one day falls...
They were irreverent, fanciful and provocative.
The important thing about writing is that it's not true.
The Evening Standard comes up with, guess what?
"Skipper Ted, Full Ahead".
Go out and fight for a better Britain.
Fight, like you have never fought before.
Right from the start of the decade, political unrest typified the '70s.
Long-held assumptions about society were being called into question.
Nothing Sacred was Angela Carter's motto.
One of the most vocal groups was the Women's Movement.
Why are you dressed like this?
This is International Woman's Day today, and you send a male to interview me, and a male cameraman.
Where are your women cameramen at the BBC?
Feminism's spreading influence soon came to be reflected in the novels of the '70s.
Fay Weldon worked in the advertising industry before becoming a full-time writer.
In her novels, she often portrays women whose lives are constrained by biology and domesticity.
It was a protest against Miss World that opened her eyes to the politics of feminism.
Women had been protesting, they were outside the Albert Hall, about Miss World.
I think they'd actually thrown a smoke bomb.
And this was seen as the most extraordinary piece of madness.
Nobody could understand what on earth they were going on about.
And they were presented as being neurotic, jealous, ugly,
probably lesbian women, who had failed to get a man,
and that was why they were angry, ah...and trying to upset their pretty sisters.
I realised that, it was quite sudden really,
like a penny dropping, that the protesters were right, and that you could look at the world differently.
You could see that it was not inevitable, or natural,
that women should want to be pretty or beautiful, and that the women who were protesting were reasonable,
what's more, it was the beginning of something that you could see would almost change the world,
that, er, everything could be looked at differently, once you started looking at the relationship
between men and women differently and didn't just believe that it was as it was, and couldn't be changed.
"It is nature, they say, that makes us get married.
"Nature, they say, that makes us crave to have babies.
"You must breastfeed, they say, it's natural, best for baby.
"Eat raw carrots, yeast tablets, sea salt, honey and so on, natural.
"Eschew white sugar, chemical salt, artificial sweeteners, preservatives. Unnatural.
"It's nature that makes us love our children, clean our houses,
"gives us a thrill of pleasure when we please the homecoming male.
"Who is this Nature?"
Angela Carter's feminism took a different tack.
She drew out the sexuality latent in traditional folk tales,
to create stories that subverted the dominant male view of sex and power.
In her reading from The Bloody Chamber, the language is provocatively direct.
"The Count got off his horse, unfastened his britches,
"and thrust his virile member into the dead girl.
"The Countess reined in her stamping mare and watched him, narrowly.
"He was soon finished.
"Then the girl began to melt.
"Soon there was nothing left of her but a feather a bird might have dropped,
"a bloodstain, like the trace of a fox's kill on the snow, and the rose she had pulled off the bush."
Em, Arthur Marshall, we're listening to Angela Carter read her story.
Did you manage to get to grips with that? Yes, I've read the whole book.
I thought her stories are beautifully written, but, on the whole, I don't really like stories of fantasy.
I like to know where I am. I like stories that begin,
"Mrs Henderson walked slowly into Sainsbury's and purchased a pound of cod."
Then you know exactly where you are.
Just to say, I'd like to know the Sainsbury's where you can buy cod.
The Exeter one, dear. You fantasist!
Angela Carter's fiction is distinctly undomestic.
In novels like The Passion Of New Eve and Nights At The Circus,
an awareness of the power relations between the sexes goes with a taste for the fabulous and fantastical.
The questions I ask myself, I think they're very much to do with reality.
I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on
to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS.
But I...I haven't.
They're dull things.
I mean, I'm an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose.
So fucking what?
She's the most imaginative of the post-war writers,
linguistically and in registers of different moods.
You pick up a page of Angela Carter and the flashing of her wit and her intelligence
and her imagination just happens in every sentence.
In Wise Children, her interest in gender politics was cloaked in a playful theatricality.
I've been writing a great deal about women who are in "showbusiness".
Nora and Dora in Wise Children are emphatically not actresses, they're...they're hoofers.
And they're useful people. It sounds beastly to talk about my characters in this way,
but they're useful people because, of course, their whole livelihood
is based on the public presentation of certain kinds of aspects of sexuality,
certain kinds of aspects of femininity,
which they're quite conscious about.
Being a showgirl is a very simple metaphor, simply, for being a woman,
for being aware of your femininity,
being aware of yourself as a woman, and having to use it to negotiate with the world.
"It took an age, but we did it.
"We painted the faces that we always used to have
"on the faces we have now.
"From a distance of 30 feet, with the light behind us,
"we looked at first glance just like the girl who danced with the Prince of Wales
"when nightingales sang in Berkeley Square, on a foggy day in London town.
"The deceptions of memory.
"That girl was smooth as an egg and the lipstick never ran down little cracks and fissures round her mouth,
"because in those days, there were none.
" 'It's every woman's tragedy,' said Nora, as we contemplated our painted masterpieces,
" 'that after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator.'
"Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators in our time."
The characters seem often to be drawn from the world that we recognise.
But there's something faintly gothic and grotesque going on.
When you read a page of Angela Carter, it's a tissue of different quotations, illusions and echoes.
You know she's read them, she's got an amazing sort of love and festive appetite for the past.
So she's got, you know, Keats in there, and Shakespeare in there
and numerous, you know, Japanese and Indian and god knows what.
I mean, it's all part of her, of the music of her, of her language, and she wants us to see that.
"They'd often pry the children loose from the ground.
"They wouldn't have to travel far to find little girls,
"but often they'd have to dig deep to get boys."
She was also, you know, a great weaver of brocade, beautiful linguistic brocade.
And she was absolutely irreverent and completely blasphemous,
and that, I think, is very much a characteristic of this period, the '70s and the Eighties.
Until she came out on the other side of the earth.
Well, a very good evening to you from Stationer's Hall
in the City of London, when literature comes face to face with stardust.
The announcement of the winner of the Booker McConnell Award for Fiction, for 1983.
The televising of The Booker Prize, fiction's equivalent of the Oscars, began in the 1970s.
The cash prize awarded to a novel written in English by a writer from the Commonwealth or Ireland
was sponsored by Booker McConnell, an industrial conglomerate.
For the first time, literary novelists were thrust into the spotlight.
Does it make you feel a particular sort of author,
having written a prize-winning book?
Well, it makes you think that some people must have enjoyed reading it,
and that's worth it in itself, you know.
I enjoy writing anyway,
and I imagine most people do and that's why so many novels get written.
But, um,
I am writing one now about the BBC, so we'll just have to see how it turns out.
Well, in the hall is a who's who of publishing.
But television didn't always know its way round the literary world.
When Selena Scott tried to get a comment out of a guest,
she appeared to have no idea that she was speaking to Angela Carter, one of the judges.
Madam, can I ask you what you think of the choice of the winner?
I was one of the judges, does that exclude me from this?
I'm sorry about that. What, ah...what's your name?
Angela Carter. Hello. Yes, tell me, what do you think?
I think it's a very powerful and impressive novel, um...
Was it your choice? Em, you shouldn't ask a question like that.
Why not, why not? Ask Fay, ask Fay, because we have... we have a consensus.
I see, all right, Angela, thank you.
Without doubt, the televising of the Booker helped popularise
novels which might otherwise have struggled to reach an audience.
But the prize was nearly derailed by the 1972 winner, the radical art critic and novelist, John Berger.
John Berger, this evening you will be handed £5,000
as a prize for this book. What are you going to do with the money?
The prize is...is given by Booker's, Booker O'Connell,
who are a firm...
..who have extensive trading interests in the Caribbean for 130 years.
The extreme poverty is the direct consequence of the exploitation
of companies like Bookers and others.
And so I intend,
as a revolutionary writer,
to share this prize
with people in and from the Caribbean.
People who are involved in a struggle to resist such exploitation,
and, eventually, expropriate companies like Bookers.
I am actually going to give half the prize to the London-based Black Panther movement.
CHANTING: Free Bobby Seale! Free Bobby Seale! Free Bobby Seale!
Free Bobby Seale! Free Bobby Seale!
Radical public activism was nowhere to be found in the work of two rising stars of the time -
Ian McEwan and Martin Amis.
Their theme was the thrills and spills of adolescence.
In Amis' first novel, The Rachel Papers,
he captured the self absorption of youth
with a fastidious attention to language, and a filthy sense of humour.
The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis is about a young man in London,
cramming hard to get into Oxford to read English literature,
and learning fast about life in the metropolis.
Sex and scholarship seem to be the two drives in this book,
but what did you find were the dangers of writing about adolescence?
The first one, perhaps, was the same as any first novelist feels,
the fear of being no good,
not being...having any talent, can't make it come alive.
The second one, intensified by that, perhaps,
was the danger of making it boring in the way adolescence is boring.
Hysterical, winsome, grotesque, a sort of pimply rant.
So I found I had to detach myself,
although I was very near to adolescence, I wrote the book when I was 22.
I had to get some sort of perspective on it to make it interesting to non-adolescents.
There's almost a convention of novels about adolescence,
they should have a go at what you'd call the oldsters at some stage or other, about something or other.
What particularly do you think you were having a go at? Um...
well, the...the narrator is... is physically very self-conscious
and actually treats his body as someone of 60 might worry about their bodies.
So naturally the world of the oldsters is sort of Grand Guignol, decay and horror,
and that's just to indulge the adolescent disgust that is very prevalent at the moment.
What depressed me in a way, and what I wanted to ask you was
why the hostility towards women in it?
It really made me feel a bit creepy sometimes.
Well, it was about a special sort of adolescence,
at the point where sex has become fundamentally unmysterious.
I tried to exaggerate this. I mean, I wouldn't like you to think I felt that way about women.
That's really what I wanted to know.
No, not at all. No. I'm much more gallantry than my hero.
But he, as Melvyn said, it's about sex and scholarship, in a jokey way,
and he's scholarly about sex and sexual about scholarship.
He's read up on sex.
I thought this was just the only way to make it funny,
to make actually carnal, rather than erotic sex funny, rather than boring or disgusting, or whatever.
With The Rachel Papers what you get... I mean, the first line,
you get "the big cocked, well-travelled Charles Highway".
You get a sense of humour and chutzpah that is utterly unique,
that is entirely full of the kind of cruelty...a cruel sense of humour that I think is wonderful,
and you get a cruelty towards all forms of cliche basically.
So you get sentence after sentence that is being more watched over, more policed
than I think certainly I'd ever really seen in contemporary English fiction.
POP MUSIC PLAYS
It's a measure of the excitement generated by young writers
that when The Book Programme in 1979 first featured Ian McEwan,
it was prepared to travel to his flat in south London,
rather than requesting him to slog out to Television Centre.
After two collections of short stories, McEwan had just published his first novel, The Cement Garden,
in which four children play bizarre, Freudian games after the death of their parents.
A lot of people have thought that the world of your stories
is a very nasty world.
Horrible things are being imagined and horrible things are being done.
What do you think about the complaint that that's just voguish nastiness?
I suppose if you just talk about it in the simplest way possible, and that is if I'm sitting down,
facing an empty sheet of paper, what is going to compel me into writing fiction
is not what is nice and easy and pleasant and somehow affirming,
but somehow what is bad, difficult and unsettling.
That's the kind of tension I need to start me writing.
Beyond that, erm...
I suppose I've always been...
trying to assert some kind of slender optimism in my stories,
and I don't think I can do that unless I can do it in a world that seems fundamentally threatening.
So what I really worry about is gratuitous optimism, not gratuitous violence.
I know you wouldn't want to be typed as the adolescence man,
but you write about that particular hallucinatory clarity of one's physical self and masturbation.
Yes. Adolescents are a sort of extraordinary special case of people.
You know, they are close both to childhood and yet they're constantly baffled and irritated
by the initiations into what's on the other side, the shadow line, as it were.
They are perfect outsiders in a sense.
It got off on getting the reader sort of,
you know, sucking your teeth at the, you know, what you were reading
because the edge of it was so sharp that you sort of couldn't take it.
But he made you take it. This was sort of like sadistic writing.
I mean, not just the...not just the representing sadistic acts,
but also acting sadistically a little bit on the reader.
When I'm working, when I'm writing I do feel extraordinarily free.
Even when I'm trying to put together the most, un-free situations, I do feel colossal freedom myself.
There's nothing more exhilarating than to be writing again.
Your food tastes better, your step has more spring,
there's, um...the air that fills your lungs seems that much cleaner.
28, take two. End board.
SHOUTING
McEwan made no explicit connection between the social breakdown in The Cement Garden
and events in '70s' Britain.
But the country had experienced its fair share of chaos.
There was a further wave of strikes towards the end of the decade
that became known as The Winter of Discontent.
It gave the Tories the break they were looking for.
In May 1979, Mrs Thatcher ousted the beleaguered Labour government.
I'm just aware of the very great responsibility, very great responsibility.
But it's very exciting,
and somehow one is very calm about it.
She promised change, but the full extent of what she had in mind wasn't yet apparent.
Fiction wasn't immediately interested in Mrs Thatcher, that would come later.
It was changes in the literary landscape that preoccupied critics.
In the '70s and '80s, Malcolm Bradbury,
a novelist and Professor of English at the University of East Anglia,
regularly appeared on television as literature's weatherman,
pointing out the warm fronts sweeping in from the feminist movement,
or the fresh southerlies, blowing up from the post-colonial world.
I think there are two great experimental forces at the moment.
One is the new language that's coming from women's fiction -
it's not just the presentation of characters,
it's like this is happening in language itself, the impact is on language itself.
The other big impact is actually the kind of new voicing
that's coming from third world writers, from writers in other countries, male or female,
who are actually disputing our possession of the English language.
In 1981, a hugely ambitious novel
stole the crown from English English, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.
The winner of this year's Booker Prize is Salman Rushdie.
Salman Rushdie had been born in Mumbai into a middle class Muslim family,
but was sent to school in England.
Midnight's Children is the fictional autobiography of Saleem Sinai,
born at the moment of India's independence in 1947.
In this reading, he's played by Ben Kingsley.
I was born in Dr Nalika's nursing home on August the 15th 1947.
And the time? The time matters, too.
Well, then, at night.
No, it's important to be more...
On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact.
Clock hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came.
Oh, spell it out, spell it out.
At the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world.
I was born two and a half months before the British left and there was this family joke
that there was some relationship between the two events.
When I sat down to compose the book, I just thought it would be funnier to make it exact.
And so the book really does arise out of that insane coincidence,
and then suggests that there's something magical in that
and that the child and the country become twins.
It was really a device for discussing the relationship
between private lives and public lives, or public affairs.
And Saleem believes, comically, that history is his fault
and sets out over the course of a quarter of a million words to prove it.
People of my parent's generation all say that independence represented a time of hope.
The argument of the book is that during the course of the next 30 years, that hope was betrayed.
This is why optimism occurs in the book as a disease.
I mean, people catch it like an infection
and it keeps...they keep getting cured of it in various ways, but it keeps recurring.
And the Children of Midnight themselves are basically, I think, a metaphor of hope,
and when they get destroyed, that to me was a symbol of the destruction
of the good things about independence.
The real achievement of Midnight's Children is the setting
because there are so many competing perspectives, so many competing tribal interests,
so many competing political factions,
that India is almost a reflection of the speaker.
And it's a perfect match.
It might sound a simple formula, but no-one had tried this before
and to use the formula, if you like, of magic realism and place it in India,
it's a beautiful marriage.
The novel is not an indigenous form in India.
I mean, there's not really a long history of prose fiction.
Um, it more or less arrived with the British.
And now there are language... English language and Hindi and other language novels in India,
but it's not really... I mean, it's a grafted form, rather than one that grew there.
Um, the form that is indigenous is tale telling, storytelling, fables, and that's been there forever
because I think, you see, the realism in the novel, even in England, is relatively recent,
and realism in story telling in India never existed.
There was a sort of belief that stories should clearly be lies and they should clearly be untrue.
They should be wonderful tales and that they didn't have to...
conform to the descriptions of the literal world.
BOLLYWOOD SOUNDTRACK
Rushdie's love of rich, visual imagery
owes a lot to another vigorous tradition of Indian storytelling - the Bollywood Movie.
So it's easy to laugh about these films because they're relatively melodramatic and corny.
But the thing that's important about them is they try and be sort of compendiums of human experience.
They have to have something of everything,
so they have funny uncles and villains and fight sequences and romance.
In a way, because I grew up with these films around me,
I've tried to do a literary version of that in the book and also try and bring sort of all human life in.
The book is basically a tragedy,
but it's a tragedy written like a comedy.
Um...
I mean, the book ends badly, you know, or sadly anyway,
and it's a kind of elegy for...childhood.
Well, I was just bowled over because I read it in the manuscript.
Rushdie was a neighbour of mine at the time
and it's almost impossible to remember, but he was unsuccessful.
And...and he asked me, rather, you know, sort of ruefully, if I would read his latest effort.
And I remember my heart sank, it was very long, but I thought,
"Oh, well, I must help this poor, struggling writer." And, erm...
But I read it, and I remember the atmosphere in the book was so vivid and so exuberant and colourful
and alive, and this book just bowled me away and I couldn't wait to read some more of it.
And I said, you know, "This is stunning, you've done a stunning thing."
And then I had about a week when I was the person who had helped him and after that I was forgotten.
Competition for the 1981 Booker was fierce.
Rushdie had been up against D M Thomas' White Hotel,
but in the end the prize went to Midnight's Children.
We feel it's a very notable winner, a brilliant book...
Malcolm Bradbury was chair of the judges,
but behind the scenes, it had been a different story.
Malcolm actually argued for the White Hotel, and he also,
I remember, argued he should have a casting vote
so he could double his vote at the last moment
whereby it would be...it would come out for the White Hotel.
And we all said, "No, you can't do that."
So, Midnight's Children won and Malcolm then spent the rest of his life saying,
"I was the person who gave Midnight's Children the Booker Prize."
Salman Rushdie has a phrase from an essay, The Empire Writes Back,
and that kind of sums up...
a certain kind of touche quality of his writing. It was, you know...
the British went to India, colonised the place,
gave India railways and a bureaucracy, and English,
and India started to own English,
and now English is being spoken back to the mother country.
It's almost chicken or turkey lib night tonight,
because almost everything has a chicken or a turkey in it.
I'm not talking about chickens or turkeys...
The promotion of Midnight's Children was helped along by Rushdie himself,
who turned out to be a dab hand at off-the-cuff speaking.
Has it been a jolly and exciting and hectic year for you?
Yes, it's been... it has been very pleasant.
I must say that I'm extremely relieved it's all going to happen to somebody else in a few minutes. Why?
Well, I think one can only be Miss World for so long.
There are benefits to being Miss World, however peripheral they may be.
You were invited, I gather, to Downing Street immediately after last year's...
That was probably the juiciest thing that happened actually.
I had a very strange phone call, from a very posh female voice,
which revealed itself to be speaking from the office of the Prime Minister,
and said - this was at the beginning of the Festival of India, when Mrs Ghandi was coming over -
and said that Mrs Thatcher was having a lunch,
at Downing Street, in honour of Mrs Ghandi, and wished for me to come.
And I thought it was a hoax, and I said, "Is this a hoax?"
The voice got very cross, it was a perfectly genuine invitation.
So I said it just seemed peculiar that of all people they should ask to a lunch in Mrs Ghandi's honour
somebody who'd just written a book that was extremely rude about her.
LAUGHTER
And the voice at the other end of the phone displayed symptoms of terminal panic...
LAUGHTER
..and said, "Oh...gosh."
She said, "Oh, well, you see, it was the Foreign Office that recommended you...
"..and you'd think they'd have read your book, wouldn't you?"
SCATTERED APPLAUSE
Though Rushdie had made London his home,
Midnight's Children is essentially a love letter to the India of his childhood.
A younger writer, Hanif Kureishi,
created characters who are largely indifferent to their Pakistani legacy.
They're usually London-born, like Kureishi himself, who wrote plays first, then films,
such as My Beautiful Launderette, before turning to fiction with The Buddha Of Suburbia.
Hanif Kureishi is a suburban London boy, mixed marriage,
a British guy.
He was a London lad, he wasn't a new immigrant,
with plastic shoes and a cardboard suitcase, turning up fresh off the boat.
He was a geezer, he was a punk, he was interested in being part of this metropolitan life.
But there he was, he was a Pakistani guy also,
and he started writing about that,
and The Buddha Of Suburbia, with all this comic absurdity of that position,
was in many ways the first expression of that.
"The front door opened, Helen's dad stood there.
"He was a big man with a black beard and thick arms.
"I imagined he had hairy shoulders, and worst of all, a hairy back like Peter Sellers and Sean Connery.
"I kept a list of actors with hairy backs, which I constantly updated.
"And then I went white, but obviously not white enough,
"because hairy back let go of the dog he was holding, a great fucking Dane.
"And it padded towards me, its mouth hanging open like a cave."
He allowed himself to do with people who shared his background
the sort of things that it would have been politically incorrect for a white, English writer to have done.
Great. It works very well.
In my life, people used to throw that book at me about once a week, "Hari, have you read this book?"
And I'd be like, "Yeah."
But it was an important book, because it was a book so many of us recognised,
we understood ourselves from that.
But for years, Hanif had to stand around drinking warm white wine at parties,
talking to earnest people with wooden earrings about multiculturalism.
Well, mostly it's liberals who get all tangled up in all of that
because liberals want to see black or Asian people as a homogenous group,
often as the beneficiaries of their attention and worthy goodness.
But as far as I'm concerned, all my characters are equal in my eyes.
If you're writing about an Asian businessman, he may or may not be corrupt.
If he's corrupt, then he's corrupt.
Because he's Asian, it doesn't mean that you can draw a line around him and say,
"You can't satirise him."
I don't understand that line at all, and it's never been anything that's interested me.
Though in the '70s there was much talk about how do we represent women?
How do we represent the working class? How do we represent black or Asian people?
Should we do it this way, that way, or the other?
Well, if you try to write according to those rules,
you'd be so inhibited, you'd never be able to write anything.
You just have to write as you feel, and hope that some sort of humanity, in the end, emerges.
That there was such a thing as a literary establishment,
and that it spoke with an English accent, and that London was its headquarters,
and that the Booker Prize dinner was its tribal gathering, angered many Scottish writers in the '80s.
As you a Glasgow writer, or a Scottish writer, or is there a difference?
Was Dickens a London writer, or an English writer, or...
That question, sir, was unworthy of you.
The old industrial heartlands of Scotland had been hit hard
by the restructuring of the British economy in the early years of the '80s.
Heavy industries slid into terminal decline, and unemployment rocketed.
James Kelman, a writer from Glasgow, gave Scotland's working class a literary voice,
in stories and novels like The Busconductor Hines.
He spoke about identity and language on The Late Show.
If you're a writer from the working class, or if you're black,
from the Afro-Caribbean community, if you're Irish, from Yorkshire,
if you want to write about your own culture,
from within your own experience,
you have to find a way of getting of the values that say your culture is rubbish, right?
And that means working your way through language.
You know, if you write in English normally,
you can't help but take on the values of the English upper classes, because that's what language is.
That's language as it gets enforced in the education system.
No-one, from my culture, is allowed to have an inner life at all.
There is no being within our existence, we are kind of...
the behaviour is cut out.
James Kelman was choosing to write about
those people in a language that they would use,
and the language which is most vital in him,
and where he could put his passion.
And particularly the reaction when he won the Booker
was just nauseating, because it was all about how often he swears, and it's like, grow up,
just fucking grow up.
It's not about that, it's about you don't like the people that he chooses to write about
and you don't like knowing that people who come and mend your plumbing
have the same interior life as you, and are as worthwhile
and as mysterious and extraordinary as you, and get over it.
I became aware of oppression when I was about, I think, 11.
You know, going to school and continually being told
that you speak incorrectly and your language is not fit for decent people to hear.
And if you use words like "aye" in the classroom,
then the teacher would perhaps belt you, or tell you you shouldn't do that.
And if you say "doon" instead of "down", or, "Are ye gaun doon the road?"
If you spoke in a normal way, then you were punished.
"Things aren't always as clear as they sometimes appear.
"You can have a way of moving which you reckon has to be ahead
"in a definite sense, and then, for some reason,
"What happens is fuck all really, nothing, nothing at all, nothing at all is happening, yet there you are,
"in strangely geometric patterns, wherein points are arranged, have been arranged,
"in a weird display of fuck knows what,
"except that it's always vaguely familiar, whatever that means."
It's finding the storyteller's voice, rather than saying
that you want to write stories about certain people.
You want the voice in which the stories can be told, you know?
So that's why you have to subvert the standard narrative voice,
you have to find a way in which that standard voice becomes the ordinary Glasgow speaking voice, you know?
We're so keyed in to language, and how you know what class somebody is,
and how you know you think how bright somebody is, is how they speak.
And what he's offering is a much more subversive way of looking at the underclass.
You get lots of portrayals of the working classes, but it's always people who are helpless,
and people who are dysfunctional, and people who are funny,
and people who are not like us, because they're out of control.
And he's like, "No, these are bright people,
"but they talk the way they talk cos they're from where they're from,
"and they're not mucking about pretending to be somebody else."
It's a fundamental and revolutionary thing.
The majority of British novelists seemed to have watched the Thatcherite transformation
of British society in the early '80s with a kind of appalled fascination.
The one thing that novelists seemed to be absolutely sure about
in the mid-1980s was that they all hated Mrs Thatcher.
And in novel after novel of the time, she becomes a sort of pantomime villain,
she becomes a sort of flat existence.
And there's almost no attempt in the novel at the time
to account for the kind of allure
that she clearly must have had over the electorate.
Martin Amis wasn't particularly dismayed by the carnival of consumption in the early '80s.
He recognised it was in all of us, an inclination to binge.
His novel Money, published in 1984, pinned down the convulsive energies
unleashed by the new economics in London and New York in blackly comic prose.
Money is narrated by John Self, a porn and junk food enthusiast.
Self is shadowed through the text by its author, Martin Amis -
he even makes an appearance in this dramatised extract.
"Today, I made a break with habit and tradition, took my lunch at the Newborn Restaurant.
"The Newborn's a hot little grotto of plastic panels and Formica tabletops,
"half cheap bistro, half yob's beanery, run by an elite squad of Italians,
"together with some straggly irregulars.
"You get all sorts in here, from dustmen to middle management.
"The menu is chip-orientated.
"The place is licensed - well, how else could it seriously expect my custom?
"I was sitting there, waiting for the grub to show, when Martin Amis came through the open door,
"you know, the writer I was chatting to in the pub the other night.
"The place was pretty full and he hesitated, until he saw the empty bench at my table.
"I don't think he saw me.
"And Martin sat down opposite and quickly flattened a book out in front on him.
"This kid's going to ruin his eyes."
Fate. "He looked up with a flash of panic."
"He recognised me - people usually do, it's one of the kickbacks you get for looking like I look."
I, in common with many writers, I think,
feel that there is a...
and this may be again just something that every writer feels in every generation,
that there's a great convulsion of stupidity happening in the world.
Mostly to do with television.
People know a little about a lot, and put very little effort into accumulating knowledge and culture,
and when they do, it's almost like a consumerism of culture.
If this is happening, then...
perhaps what I'm trying to do in that book is to write
as interestingly and, as you say, with as much literary effect as possible,
about a landscape in which there is no literature or culture.
He comes across it, he encounters culture, in various forms, in art galleries, in opera houses,
and when he meets me, I'm a minor character in the book, sent to perplex and bedevil him even more.
But he can't...make known sense of it, he has nothing to fall back on to interpret it.
But he doesn't have to.
I suspect you have a much more 20th Century view
than the one you're putting to me now.
Well, I think this is a new 20th Century view.
But you're talking to me like Martin Amis, the character in the book, who's rather prissy. Yes, indeed.
And I would have said that in the Martin Amis that I know slightly, there's a good slice of John Self.
You want a drop of this? Ah, no, thanks, I try not to drink at lunchtime.
Yeah, so do I.
I never quite make it.
I feel like shit all day if I drink at lunchtime.
Me too - I feel like shit all lunchtime if I don't.
Yeah, well it all comes down to choices, doesn't it? It's the same in the evening.
Do you want to feel good in the evening, or do you want to feel good in the morning?
It's the same with life. Do you want to feel good old, or do you want to feel good young?
One or the other, not both.
When Money came out, that seemed to me the novel that really did engage
with contemporary political realities, contemporary economic realities.
I don't suppose it set out to do that, but it's become more and more topical,
as it were, more and more able to speak about its period as time's gone on.
The materialism and greed, and the exaggerated selfishness
of John Self in Money really reflects the era.
That brings us to the crux of the thing, because the book is about money.
Money is...
in shorthand, money is the opposite of culture.
Money is the...is the first value that gets to you, unless you've got culture to stave it off.
One of the strongest impressions of the author in this book is of his ecstatic disgust,
especially with things like the street culture, 42nd Street of New York.
Would you say you suffer from disgust?
With regard to disgust, er...
I think every writer, even the blackest writer, actually, loves it all.
You walk towards it, rather than turning away?
I'm fascinated in distortions and distempers.
I suppose it is temperamental, but I don't sit around feeling disgusted at all, I feel...enthused.
I'm really interested in your indignation, because it strikes me
no-one could write the way you do, you're a really brilliant hater,
with an eye for what is horrible, what is grotesque, that that indignation is profoundly moral.
It involves a sort of rejection of 20th Century-ness and the areas of waste and fatigue.
All writers think the world has reached its nadir, its low point.
And, in fact, this age will be lamented just like the last, that's the paradox.
What you can say about the world is while it may not be getting better,
it's getting infinitely less innocent all the time.
It's like, it's been to so many parties, it's been on so many dates, had so many fights,
got its handbag stolen so many times,
so the accumulation is what makes the world seem at its worst always.
Because it's never been through as much as it's been through today, the earth.
I think that Amis is full of class anxiety,
Amis is an interesting figure really in that he's connected back
to a very grand and much older tradition of English letters.
You know, there he was, he was the son of a famous writer father,
he'd had this reviewing job when he was very young,
he's very high cultural, very kind of impeccably Oxbridge, yada yada yada.
And into this world, where we knew who were the top people and we knew who weren't the top people,
came the new money of the 1980s, and the new money drove a train
through these fine class distinctions that people like Amis were kind of invested in.
Throughout Amis' writing, there's an instinctive disgust at a kind of hyper-virile working class male,
who's probably likely to beat up the young, velvet-jacketed poet.
It's very interesting, you see that in a lot of the white male writers
of that particular gang, that sort of generation.
There's some real class anxiety stuff happening,
the guy in the tracksuit is going to turn up
and beat your door in and maybe have it off with your wife.
If Money stands the test of time by being an oblique, comically grotesque portrait of the '80s,
there were other, more sombre, responses to Thatcherism.
I think we forget, young people forget,
the violence of Thatcherism.
And I think there's something in my novels of that period
that called for realism, because life was violent, confrontational, very dirty.
You went round Sheffield in those days, everything was for sale -
you went round London, the streets were filthy. We've forgotten that, because we have cleaned up a bit.
Everything was filthy under Mrs Thatcher, dirty.
And I think dirty realism was what was called for.
And I didn't want to escape from what I was looking at with my own eyes, I wanted to say, "This is it!
"you may think you're living in a very fine, cosmopolitan city, with very grand restaurants,
but if you just look under your feet, this is the garbage you're walking over without noticing."
And I think realism seemed a very good mode for describing that, to me.
Some writers didn't damn Thatcherism outright.
For Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit,
who grew up in a working class town in Lancashire,
the issue was whether the new wealth would be used for the public good.
People often talk about economics and spirituality,
the cultural life, as being separate,
that business is dirty and rather mean, and that culture is elevated.
But I don't really see that there has to be any contradiction, I think you can make money
and do good things with it, and you can regenerate a culture with that money.
The Tories, if anybody could, and if anybody should,
might have harnessed all that money and vanity to a national good,
and said, "OK, we're encouraging industry,
"we're encouraging enterprise, show us what you can do, build something.
"Let's have some new buildings, let's have some glamour, let's have some glory in London."
What the Tories did, though, was to make money itself into an end, rather than a means.
This is going to be the biggest commercial development in the world.
Private capital was only in it for private gain,
there were no philanthropic gestures, there was no sense of national pride, or community.
I think we need to have a much more vital connection in London, our capital,
between the city we'd like to live in and the city we do live in.
We can change things, we're not powerless.
This city didn't drop from the sky on our heads, and we've got to put up with it, it's not an act of fate,
the city - it's something that we choose and we make.
The more powerful our dreams are, the more beautiful our city will be.
The city, as a place of possibility, formed the backdrop to the most provocative novel of the decade.
It's easy to forget, given its subsequent history,
that Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses largely takes place in '80s London.
The novel lampooned Mrs Thatcher, in the guise of a character called Mrs Torture.
It also included a thinly veiled portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini,
then the Iranian head of state and the country's religious leader.
Yet other characters acquire wings, horns, hooves.
It dealt with a contemporary world, in a defiantly unrealistic fashion.
But it wasn't for its political satire, or lack of realism, that The Satanic Verses became notorious.
It was Rushdie's conviction that a novelist had the right to examine Islamic belief,
by playing with its texts.
The reason the novel is called The Satanic Verses is that there is such an incident,
called the incident of the satanic verses,
which is a kind of apocryphal, quasi-historical incident from the life of the prophet Muhammad,
which I first came across when I was studying Islamic history
at college 20 years ago.
In which,
it seems that momentarily he brought down verses from the mountain
in which three pagan deities were recognised at about the level of the archangels,
by God, via the angel Gibreel.
And then, at a later point, said that the devil had appeared to him, in the guise of the archangel,
and that these were not genuinely Qur'anic verses, they were satanic verses,
had to be removed from the Qur'an, and were replaced by other verses, which repudiated these goddesses.
Rushdie was careful to retell the story of the satanic verses
in the form of a dream, in a fictional place, with fictional characters.
They're visionary sequences, they're not intended to have the validity of kind of historical event,
because they happen in somebody's dream.
And so obviously in a dream things change, names change,
places change shape, nothing is as it really is in life.
I wanted those sequences to have that quality, and so deliberately did not call the city Mecca,
did not call the leader of the city by his true name, Abu Sufyan,
it's changed in the novel to another name, Abu Simbel, like the temple in Egypt,
and did not call Muhammad Muhammad, because I didn't want it to be a picture of him, but a dream of him.
CHATTERING
In this reading, Rushdie ascends his own fictional mountain.
Avatar it isn't.
At the end of his wrestling match with the archangel Gibreel,
the prophet Mahound falls into his customary exhausted, post-revelatory sleep.
But on this occasion, he revives more quickly than usual.
When he comes to his senses, in that high wilderness, there is nobody to be seen,
no winged creatures crouch on rocks, and he jumps to his feet, filled with the urgency of his news.
"It was the devil," he says aloud to the empty air, making it true by giving it voice.
"The last time it was Shaitan."
This is what he had heard in his listening, that he has been tricked,
that the devil came to him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorised,
the ones he recited in the poetry tent, were not the real thing,
but its diabolic opposite - not godly, but satanic.
When Rushdie was writing the book,
this kind of question about the limits of language and the possibilities of meaning were...
that was a common question in universities,
that was the sort of thing that one talked about in graduate seminars.
However, by using this material from the Qur'an as a way of talking about language and meaning
and the limits of meaning, he placed himself in the faultline
between the part of the world that believes in the literal truth of words,
and the part of the world that is interested in the play of language.
ANGRY CHANTS
Rushdie's fictions were taken literally by many Muslims.
India and several other countries banned it.
In Britain, The Satanic Verses was burned in public.
When WH Smiths threatened to remove copies from the shelves of its stores,
Rushdie went on television to defend his position.
Now, you are a political writer, in a sense, yourself. I mean, the wonderful thing about your fiction
is that it's this wonderful, imaginative rollercoaster, but there is political bite behind it.
And it's clear, not just in this book, but in other books, that you have satired Islamic fundamentalism.
In a sense, is it a surprise that you've had the depth of reaction from the community?
Certainly, the scale of it is a surprise to me, and also is of great distress to me.
What's true about the book is that it does break a number of taboos
which, in my view, are very important to break.
The first is the idea that Muhammad's life cannot be discussed as if he was a human being.
Muhammad himself always insisted not to have divine status,
and yet nowadays we talk about him as if he was a perfect being.
There are other taboos, there's taboos about the discussion of Islam as a historical phenomenon.
So, yes, it's very important, if the culture of a religion is to have an intellectual life,
that such things should be discussed.
And the people who wish to control thought,
the thought police, that's who's responsible, don't wish one to do that.
What I love about it is the way it is attacking all received opinion.
And it really takes seriously something that I think novels are fantastic at,
which is to be a kind of free play of investigation.
And so The Satanic Verses, I think, is an excellent example of something,
of refusing to take seriously what everyone else takes seriously.
29 days later, Ayatollah Khomeini issued his infamous fatwa.
Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, has said the author Salman Rushdie, who lives in Britain,
has been sentenced to death for blaspheming the Muslim faith in his novel The Satanic Verses.
In a message broadcast on Tehran radio, the Ayatollah also said...
Rushdie disappeared into a John Le Carre world of safe houses and round-the-clock police protection.
It just opened a kind of range of responses
which even the most blaspheming of the enfants terrible of the '70s had not imagined,
which was, of course,
an outraged response from the people you are defending.
Rushdie had been a brilliant advocate for multiculturalism,
but the people who burnt his books were the people he thought were his followers.
That was just, I think, totally unprecedented and unexpected.
I mean, we thought we were living in a stable, secular age,
but that was something we all missed.
CHANTING AND APPLAUSE
Five months later, and events in Europe were dominating the news.
Scenes like these were described as representing the triumph of democracy, and the end of history.
But as The Satanic Verses affair demonstrated, history refuses to end.
Nevertheless, for the baby boomer generation, who'd only known a bitterly divided Europe,
it felt like an era was drawing to a close.
Ian McEwan witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and, at the time,
realised it marked the beginning of a very different world.
I came here with my mind filled with a novel I was just completing.
Coming back a year later, everything is completely transformed.
And my time here last year has become part of a vanished past,
and has more in common, I suppose, with the mid-'50s, than with now. We stand in a new time...
ECHOING
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