1 00:00:03,400 --> 00:00:07,880 Joyce, this is a dictation of the draft of Dalgleish, Finding The Body. 2 00:00:07,880 --> 00:00:09,960 Double spacing as usual, please. 3 00:00:09,960 --> 00:00:13,000 SHOUTING EXPLOSIONS 4 00:00:13,000 --> 00:00:15,000 That's it? Oh, that's nice. 5 00:00:15,000 --> 00:00:17,320 ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYS 6 00:00:19,720 --> 00:00:22,040 Vietnamese communists here... 7 00:00:22,040 --> 00:00:29,040 The '70s and Eighties were a time of profound and often dislocating change. 8 00:00:29,040 --> 00:00:34,880 I do think fiction ought to be asking great, unanswerable, adolescent questions. 9 00:00:34,880 --> 00:00:37,880 Why are set upon this planet? For what purpose? 10 00:00:43,320 --> 00:00:46,520 Reagan's years are beginning to show. 11 00:00:46,520 --> 00:00:50,440 Holding a mirror up to these convulsions was a new wave of writers. 12 00:00:50,440 --> 00:00:55,480 If I spend a day writing something violent, or something terrible, at the end of that day, 13 00:00:55,480 --> 00:01:00,280 what I will feel, if I think I've achieved what I've set out to, will be elation and pleasure. 14 00:01:03,040 --> 00:01:05,320 You're all dressed up, looking lovely. 15 00:01:05,320 --> 00:01:09,640 The novels were a celebration and a condemnation of a world in flux. 16 00:01:09,640 --> 00:01:14,480 You write out of the society, and the society changes. 17 00:01:14,480 --> 00:01:20,320 And if you read newspapers, or look at the television, things are bound to come in to you from that society. 18 00:01:22,880 --> 00:01:28,360 Their fiction was as diverse and unsettling as the society it reflected. 19 00:01:28,360 --> 00:01:32,960 Things are...perhaps are in flux and change at the moment, but we're not quite clear what's happening. 20 00:01:32,960 --> 00:01:35,400 Some of the biggest one day falls... 21 00:01:35,400 --> 00:01:39,760 They were irreverent, fanciful and provocative. 22 00:01:39,760 --> 00:01:42,480 The important thing about writing is that it's not true. 23 00:01:52,600 --> 00:01:55,600 The Evening Standard comes up with, guess what? 24 00:01:55,600 --> 00:01:58,000 "Skipper Ted, Full Ahead". 25 00:01:58,000 --> 00:02:01,160 Go out and fight for a better Britain. 26 00:02:04,520 --> 00:02:08,520 Fight, like you have never fought before. 27 00:02:11,000 --> 00:02:17,080 Right from the start of the decade, political unrest typified the '70s. 28 00:02:17,080 --> 00:02:20,760 Long-held assumptions about society were being called into question. 29 00:02:20,760 --> 00:02:25,960 Nothing Sacred was Angela Carter's motto. 30 00:02:27,080 --> 00:02:30,520 One of the most vocal groups was the Women's Movement. 31 00:02:30,520 --> 00:02:32,440 Why are you dressed like this? 32 00:02:32,440 --> 00:02:39,240 This is International Woman's Day today, and you send a male to interview me, and a male cameraman. 33 00:02:39,240 --> 00:02:41,760 Where are your women cameramen at the BBC? 34 00:02:41,760 --> 00:02:49,080 Feminism's spreading influence soon came to be reflected in the novels of the '70s. 35 00:02:53,800 --> 00:02:59,000 Fay Weldon worked in the advertising industry before becoming a full-time writer. 36 00:03:00,800 --> 00:03:07,280 In her novels, she often portrays women whose lives are constrained by biology and domesticity. 37 00:03:07,280 --> 00:03:12,960 It was a protest against Miss World that opened her eyes to the politics of feminism. 38 00:03:14,880 --> 00:03:20,600 Women had been protesting, they were outside the Albert Hall, about Miss World. 39 00:03:20,600 --> 00:03:22,800 I think they'd actually thrown a smoke bomb. 40 00:03:22,800 --> 00:03:26,520 And this was seen as the most extraordinary piece of madness. 41 00:03:26,520 --> 00:03:29,400 Nobody could understand what on earth they were going on about. 42 00:03:29,400 --> 00:03:36,080 And they were presented as being neurotic, jealous, ugly, 43 00:03:36,080 --> 00:03:40,240 probably lesbian women, who had failed to get a man, 44 00:03:40,240 --> 00:03:45,040 and that was why they were angry, ah...and trying to upset their pretty sisters. 45 00:03:45,040 --> 00:03:48,720 I realised that, it was quite sudden really, 46 00:03:48,720 --> 00:03:56,080 like a penny dropping, that the protesters were right, and that you could look at the world differently. 47 00:03:56,080 --> 00:04:01,520 You could see that it was not inevitable, or natural, 48 00:04:01,520 --> 00:04:07,040 that women should want to be pretty or beautiful, and that the women who were protesting were reasonable, 49 00:04:07,040 --> 00:04:14,680 what's more, it was the beginning of something that you could see would almost change the world, 50 00:04:14,680 --> 00:04:19,880 that, er, everything could be looked at differently, once you started looking at the relationship 51 00:04:19,880 --> 00:04:26,880 between men and women differently and didn't just believe that it was as it was, and couldn't be changed. 52 00:04:26,880 --> 00:04:30,240 "It is nature, they say, that makes us get married. 53 00:04:30,240 --> 00:04:34,480 "Nature, they say, that makes us crave to have babies. 54 00:04:34,480 --> 00:04:39,360 "You must breastfeed, they say, it's natural, best for baby. 55 00:04:39,360 --> 00:04:43,440 "Eat raw carrots, yeast tablets, sea salt, honey and so on, natural. 56 00:04:43,440 --> 00:04:49,440 "Eschew white sugar, chemical salt, artificial sweeteners, preservatives. Unnatural. 57 00:04:49,440 --> 00:04:53,240 "It's nature that makes us love our children, clean our houses, 58 00:04:53,240 --> 00:04:57,120 "gives us a thrill of pleasure when we please the homecoming male. 59 00:04:57,120 --> 00:04:58,760 "Who is this Nature?" 60 00:05:02,760 --> 00:05:06,040 Angela Carter's feminism took a different tack. 61 00:05:07,560 --> 00:05:11,480 She drew out the sexuality latent in traditional folk tales, 62 00:05:11,480 --> 00:05:17,120 to create stories that subverted the dominant male view of sex and power. 63 00:05:19,640 --> 00:05:24,920 In her reading from The Bloody Chamber, the language is provocatively direct. 64 00:05:24,920 --> 00:05:28,120 "The Count got off his horse, unfastened his britches, 65 00:05:28,120 --> 00:05:31,960 "and thrust his virile member into the dead girl. 66 00:05:31,960 --> 00:05:36,520 "The Countess reined in her stamping mare and watched him, narrowly. 67 00:05:36,520 --> 00:05:38,760 "He was soon finished. 68 00:05:38,760 --> 00:05:41,200 "Then the girl began to melt. 69 00:05:41,200 --> 00:05:45,920 "Soon there was nothing left of her but a feather a bird might have dropped, 70 00:05:45,920 --> 00:05:53,440 "a bloodstain, like the trace of a fox's kill on the snow, and the rose she had pulled off the bush." 71 00:05:53,440 --> 00:05:57,160 Em, Arthur Marshall, we're listening to Angela Carter read her story. 72 00:05:57,160 --> 00:06:01,120 Did you manage to get to grips with that? Yes, I've read the whole book. 73 00:06:01,120 --> 00:06:08,040 I thought her stories are beautifully written, but, on the whole, I don't really like stories of fantasy. 74 00:06:08,040 --> 00:06:11,120 I like to know where I am. I like stories that begin, 75 00:06:11,120 --> 00:06:16,360 "Mrs Henderson walked slowly into Sainsbury's and purchased a pound of cod." 76 00:06:16,360 --> 00:06:18,080 Then you know exactly where you are. 77 00:06:18,080 --> 00:06:22,280 Just to say, I'd like to know the Sainsbury's where you can buy cod. 78 00:06:22,280 --> 00:06:25,520 The Exeter one, dear. You fantasist! 79 00:06:25,520 --> 00:06:28,480 Angela Carter's fiction is distinctly undomestic. 80 00:06:31,760 --> 00:06:36,240 In novels like The Passion Of New Eve and Nights At The Circus, 81 00:06:36,240 --> 00:06:42,400 an awareness of the power relations between the sexes goes with a taste for the fabulous and fantastical. 82 00:06:43,920 --> 00:06:47,720 The questions I ask myself, I think they're very much to do with reality. 83 00:06:47,720 --> 00:06:53,400 I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on 84 00:06:53,400 --> 00:06:59,040 to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS. 85 00:06:59,040 --> 00:07:01,360 But I...I haven't. 86 00:07:01,360 --> 00:07:02,920 They're dull things. 87 00:07:02,920 --> 00:07:08,360 I mean, I'm an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. 88 00:07:08,360 --> 00:07:10,400 So fucking what? 89 00:07:11,640 --> 00:07:15,720 She's the most imaginative of the post-war writers, 90 00:07:15,720 --> 00:07:20,280 linguistically and in registers of different moods. 91 00:07:20,280 --> 00:07:26,200 You pick up a page of Angela Carter and the flashing of her wit and her intelligence 92 00:07:26,200 --> 00:07:29,320 and her imagination just happens in every sentence. 93 00:07:32,000 --> 00:07:39,040 In Wise Children, her interest in gender politics was cloaked in a playful theatricality. 94 00:07:39,040 --> 00:07:44,480 I've been writing a great deal about women who are in "showbusiness". 95 00:07:44,480 --> 00:07:50,160 Nora and Dora in Wise Children are emphatically not actresses, they're...they're hoofers. 96 00:07:50,160 --> 00:07:54,760 And they're useful people. It sounds beastly to talk about my characters in this way, 97 00:07:54,760 --> 00:08:00,120 but they're useful people because, of course, their whole livelihood 98 00:08:00,120 --> 00:08:04,360 is based on the public presentation of certain kinds of aspects of sexuality, 99 00:08:04,360 --> 00:08:07,720 certain kinds of aspects of femininity, 100 00:08:07,720 --> 00:08:09,600 which they're quite conscious about. 101 00:08:09,600 --> 00:08:15,560 Being a showgirl is a very simple metaphor, simply, for being a woman, 102 00:08:15,560 --> 00:08:18,600 for being aware of your femininity, 103 00:08:18,600 --> 00:08:24,400 being aware of yourself as a woman, and having to use it to negotiate with the world. 104 00:08:27,320 --> 00:08:30,320 "It took an age, but we did it. 105 00:08:30,320 --> 00:08:33,920 "We painted the faces that we always used to have 106 00:08:33,920 --> 00:08:36,440 "on the faces we have now. 107 00:08:36,440 --> 00:08:40,200 "From a distance of 30 feet, with the light behind us, 108 00:08:40,200 --> 00:08:45,600 "we looked at first glance just like the girl who danced with the Prince of Wales 109 00:08:45,600 --> 00:08:51,880 "when nightingales sang in Berkeley Square, on a foggy day in London town. 110 00:08:51,880 --> 00:08:54,920 "The deceptions of memory. 111 00:08:54,920 --> 00:09:00,800 "That girl was smooth as an egg and the lipstick never ran down little cracks and fissures round her mouth, 112 00:09:00,800 --> 00:09:03,840 "because in those days, there were none. 113 00:09:03,840 --> 00:09:10,520 " 'It's every woman's tragedy,' said Nora, as we contemplated our painted masterpieces, 114 00:09:10,520 --> 00:09:16,840 " 'that after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator.' 115 00:09:16,840 --> 00:09:23,200 "Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators in our time." 116 00:09:24,200 --> 00:09:30,440 The characters seem often to be drawn from the world that we recognise. 117 00:09:30,440 --> 00:09:34,440 But there's something faintly gothic and grotesque going on. 118 00:09:34,440 --> 00:09:40,200 When you read a page of Angela Carter, it's a tissue of different quotations, illusions and echoes. 119 00:09:40,200 --> 00:09:47,720 You know she's read them, she's got an amazing sort of love and festive appetite for the past. 120 00:09:47,720 --> 00:09:51,400 So she's got, you know, Keats in there, and Shakespeare in there 121 00:09:51,400 --> 00:09:55,000 and numerous, you know, Japanese and Indian and god knows what. 122 00:09:55,000 --> 00:10:02,400 I mean, it's all part of her, of the music of her, of her language, and she wants us to see that. 123 00:10:02,400 --> 00:10:06,120 "They'd often pry the children loose from the ground. 124 00:10:06,120 --> 00:10:09,440 "They wouldn't have to travel far to find little girls, 125 00:10:09,440 --> 00:10:12,720 "but often they'd have to dig deep to get boys." 126 00:10:12,720 --> 00:10:18,320 She was also, you know, a great weaver of brocade, beautiful linguistic brocade. 127 00:10:18,320 --> 00:10:22,000 And she was absolutely irreverent and completely blasphemous, 128 00:10:22,000 --> 00:10:27,680 and that, I think, is very much a characteristic of this period, the '70s and the Eighties. 129 00:10:27,680 --> 00:10:30,680 Until she came out on the other side of the earth. 130 00:10:32,960 --> 00:10:35,880 Well, a very good evening to you from Stationer's Hall 131 00:10:35,880 --> 00:10:40,160 in the City of London, when literature comes face to face with stardust. 132 00:10:40,160 --> 00:10:44,440 The announcement of the winner of the Booker McConnell Award for Fiction, for 1983. 133 00:10:44,440 --> 00:10:50,160 The televising of The Booker Prize, fiction's equivalent of the Oscars, began in the 1970s. 134 00:10:50,160 --> 00:10:56,120 The cash prize awarded to a novel written in English by a writer from the Commonwealth or Ireland 135 00:10:56,120 --> 00:11:00,080 was sponsored by Booker McConnell, an industrial conglomerate. 136 00:11:00,080 --> 00:11:06,720 For the first time, literary novelists were thrust into the spotlight. 137 00:11:06,720 --> 00:11:09,680 Does it make you feel a particular sort of author, 138 00:11:09,680 --> 00:11:11,920 having written a prize-winning book? 139 00:11:11,920 --> 00:11:16,080 Well, it makes you think that some people must have enjoyed reading it, 140 00:11:16,080 --> 00:11:18,440 and that's worth it in itself, you know. 141 00:11:18,440 --> 00:11:20,640 I enjoy writing anyway, 142 00:11:20,640 --> 00:11:25,080 and I imagine most people do and that's why so many novels get written. 143 00:11:25,080 --> 00:11:27,080 But, um, 144 00:11:27,080 --> 00:11:32,720 I am writing one now about the BBC, so we'll just have to see how it turns out. 145 00:11:32,720 --> 00:11:35,280 Well, in the hall is a who's who of publishing. 146 00:11:35,280 --> 00:11:38,600 But television didn't always know its way round the literary world. 147 00:11:38,600 --> 00:11:41,600 When Selena Scott tried to get a comment out of a guest, 148 00:11:41,600 --> 00:11:46,840 she appeared to have no idea that she was speaking to Angela Carter, one of the judges. 149 00:11:46,840 --> 00:11:49,960 Madam, can I ask you what you think of the choice of the winner? 150 00:11:49,960 --> 00:11:53,200 I was one of the judges, does that exclude me from this? 151 00:11:53,200 --> 00:11:55,480 I'm sorry about that. What, ah...what's your name? 152 00:11:55,480 --> 00:11:58,840 Angela Carter. Hello. Yes, tell me, what do you think? 153 00:11:58,840 --> 00:12:01,840 I think it's a very powerful and impressive novel, um... 154 00:12:01,840 --> 00:12:05,920 Was it your choice? Em, you shouldn't ask a question like that. 155 00:12:05,920 --> 00:12:11,320 Why not, why not? Ask Fay, ask Fay, because we have... we have a consensus. 156 00:12:11,320 --> 00:12:13,480 I see, all right, Angela, thank you. 157 00:12:15,920 --> 00:12:19,280 Without doubt, the televising of the Booker helped popularise 158 00:12:19,280 --> 00:12:22,960 novels which might otherwise have struggled to reach an audience. 159 00:12:22,960 --> 00:12:30,360 But the prize was nearly derailed by the 1972 winner, the radical art critic and novelist, John Berger. 160 00:12:30,360 --> 00:12:33,960 John Berger, this evening you will be handed £5,000 161 00:12:33,960 --> 00:12:36,560 as a prize for this book. What are you going to do with the money? 162 00:12:36,560 --> 00:12:41,480 The prize is...is given by Booker's, Booker O'Connell, 163 00:12:41,480 --> 00:12:43,400 who are a firm... 164 00:12:44,400 --> 00:12:51,080 ..who have extensive trading interests in the Caribbean for 130 years. 165 00:12:51,080 --> 00:12:56,400 The extreme poverty is the direct consequence of the exploitation 166 00:12:56,400 --> 00:12:59,760 of companies like Bookers and others. 167 00:12:59,760 --> 00:13:01,960 And so I intend, 168 00:13:01,960 --> 00:13:04,400 as a revolutionary writer, 169 00:13:04,400 --> 00:13:07,400 to share this prize 170 00:13:07,400 --> 00:13:12,960 with people in and from the Caribbean. 171 00:13:12,960 --> 00:13:18,920 People who are involved in a struggle to resist such exploitation, 172 00:13:18,920 --> 00:13:22,960 and, eventually, expropriate companies like Bookers. 173 00:13:22,960 --> 00:13:28,840 I am actually going to give half the prize to the London-based Black Panther movement. 174 00:13:28,840 --> 00:13:35,360 CHANTING: Free Bobby Seale! Free Bobby Seale! Free Bobby Seale! 175 00:13:35,360 --> 00:13:38,840 Free Bobby Seale! Free Bobby Seale! 176 00:13:38,840 --> 00:13:45,200 Radical public activism was nowhere to be found in the work of two rising stars of the time - 177 00:13:45,200 --> 00:13:47,960 Ian McEwan and Martin Amis. 178 00:13:50,800 --> 00:13:54,680 Their theme was the thrills and spills of adolescence. 179 00:13:54,680 --> 00:13:58,000 In Amis' first novel, The Rachel Papers, 180 00:13:58,000 --> 00:14:01,400 he captured the self absorption of youth 181 00:14:01,400 --> 00:14:06,320 with a fastidious attention to language, and a filthy sense of humour. 182 00:14:06,320 --> 00:14:09,880 The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis is about a young man in London, 183 00:14:09,880 --> 00:14:12,600 cramming hard to get into Oxford to read English literature, 184 00:14:12,600 --> 00:14:15,120 and learning fast about life in the metropolis. 185 00:14:15,120 --> 00:14:18,320 Sex and scholarship seem to be the two drives in this book, 186 00:14:18,320 --> 00:14:21,400 but what did you find were the dangers of writing about adolescence? 187 00:14:21,400 --> 00:14:25,240 The first one, perhaps, was the same as any first novelist feels, 188 00:14:25,240 --> 00:14:27,320 the fear of being no good, 189 00:14:27,320 --> 00:14:31,080 not being...having any talent, can't make it come alive. 190 00:14:31,080 --> 00:14:33,880 The second one, intensified by that, perhaps, 191 00:14:33,880 --> 00:14:39,040 was the danger of making it boring in the way adolescence is boring. 192 00:14:39,040 --> 00:14:43,360 Hysterical, winsome, grotesque, a sort of pimply rant. 193 00:14:43,360 --> 00:14:46,560 So I found I had to detach myself, 194 00:14:46,560 --> 00:14:49,600 although I was very near to adolescence, I wrote the book when I was 22. 195 00:14:49,600 --> 00:14:53,400 I had to get some sort of perspective on it to make it interesting to non-adolescents. 196 00:14:53,400 --> 00:14:56,000 There's almost a convention of novels about adolescence, 197 00:14:56,000 --> 00:15:01,200 they should have a go at what you'd call the oldsters at some stage or other, about something or other. 198 00:15:01,200 --> 00:15:04,560 What particularly do you think you were having a go at? Um... 199 00:15:04,560 --> 00:15:09,520 well, the...the narrator is... is physically very self-conscious 200 00:15:09,520 --> 00:15:13,760 and actually treats his body as someone of 60 might worry about their bodies. 201 00:15:13,760 --> 00:15:19,680 So naturally the world of the oldsters is sort of Grand Guignol, decay and horror, 202 00:15:19,680 --> 00:15:24,960 and that's just to indulge the adolescent disgust that is very prevalent at the moment. 203 00:15:24,960 --> 00:15:29,200 What depressed me in a way, and what I wanted to ask you was 204 00:15:29,200 --> 00:15:32,720 why the hostility towards women in it? 205 00:15:32,720 --> 00:15:35,440 It really made me feel a bit creepy sometimes. 206 00:15:35,440 --> 00:15:39,920 Well, it was about a special sort of adolescence, 207 00:15:39,920 --> 00:15:44,360 at the point where sex has become fundamentally unmysterious. 208 00:15:44,360 --> 00:15:49,160 I tried to exaggerate this. I mean, I wouldn't like you to think I felt that way about women. 209 00:15:49,160 --> 00:15:50,880 That's really what I wanted to know. 210 00:15:50,880 --> 00:15:54,560 No, not at all. No. I'm much more gallantry than my hero. 211 00:15:54,560 --> 00:16:00,080 But he, as Melvyn said, it's about sex and scholarship, in a jokey way, 212 00:16:00,080 --> 00:16:03,720 and he's scholarly about sex and sexual about scholarship. 213 00:16:03,720 --> 00:16:05,400 He's read up on sex. 214 00:16:05,400 --> 00:16:08,280 I thought this was just the only way to make it funny, 215 00:16:08,280 --> 00:16:13,800 to make actually carnal, rather than erotic sex funny, rather than boring or disgusting, or whatever. 216 00:16:13,800 --> 00:16:16,760 With The Rachel Papers what you get... I mean, the first line, 217 00:16:16,760 --> 00:16:19,560 you get "the big cocked, well-travelled Charles Highway". 218 00:16:19,560 --> 00:16:25,080 You get a sense of humour and chutzpah that is utterly unique, 219 00:16:25,080 --> 00:16:31,200 that is entirely full of the kind of cruelty...a cruel sense of humour that I think is wonderful, 220 00:16:31,200 --> 00:16:34,480 and you get a cruelty towards all forms of cliche basically. 221 00:16:34,480 --> 00:16:39,680 So you get sentence after sentence that is being more watched over, more policed 222 00:16:39,680 --> 00:16:44,160 than I think certainly I'd ever really seen in contemporary English fiction. 223 00:16:44,160 --> 00:16:46,600 POP MUSIC PLAYS 224 00:16:50,840 --> 00:16:54,120 It's a measure of the excitement generated by young writers 225 00:16:54,120 --> 00:16:58,440 that when The Book Programme in 1979 first featured Ian McEwan, 226 00:16:58,440 --> 00:17:01,360 it was prepared to travel to his flat in south London, 227 00:17:01,360 --> 00:17:04,760 rather than requesting him to slog out to Television Centre. 228 00:17:10,000 --> 00:17:15,520 After two collections of short stories, McEwan had just published his first novel, The Cement Garden, 229 00:17:15,520 --> 00:17:21,040 in which four children play bizarre, Freudian games after the death of their parents. 230 00:17:21,040 --> 00:17:24,280 A lot of people have thought that the world of your stories 231 00:17:24,280 --> 00:17:25,800 is a very nasty world. 232 00:17:25,800 --> 00:17:29,680 Horrible things are being imagined and horrible things are being done. 233 00:17:29,680 --> 00:17:34,240 What do you think about the complaint that that's just voguish nastiness? 234 00:17:34,240 --> 00:17:41,040 I suppose if you just talk about it in the simplest way possible, and that is if I'm sitting down, 235 00:17:41,040 --> 00:17:48,280 facing an empty sheet of paper, what is going to compel me into writing fiction 236 00:17:48,280 --> 00:17:53,840 is not what is nice and easy and pleasant and somehow affirming, 237 00:17:53,840 --> 00:17:57,400 but somehow what is bad, difficult and unsettling. 238 00:17:57,400 --> 00:18:01,720 That's the kind of tension I need to start me writing. 239 00:18:01,720 --> 00:18:04,680 Beyond that, erm... 240 00:18:04,680 --> 00:18:08,040 I suppose I've always been... 241 00:18:08,040 --> 00:18:13,760 trying to assert some kind of slender optimism in my stories, 242 00:18:13,760 --> 00:18:19,760 and I don't think I can do that unless I can do it in a world that seems fundamentally threatening. 243 00:18:19,760 --> 00:18:25,040 So what I really worry about is gratuitous optimism, not gratuitous violence. 244 00:18:25,040 --> 00:18:28,400 I know you wouldn't want to be typed as the adolescence man, 245 00:18:28,400 --> 00:18:34,320 but you write about that particular hallucinatory clarity of one's physical self and masturbation. 246 00:18:34,320 --> 00:18:40,520 Yes. Adolescents are a sort of extraordinary special case of people. 247 00:18:40,520 --> 00:18:46,880 You know, they are close both to childhood and yet they're constantly baffled and irritated 248 00:18:46,880 --> 00:18:52,440 by the initiations into what's on the other side, the shadow line, as it were. 249 00:18:52,440 --> 00:18:55,280 They are perfect outsiders in a sense. 250 00:18:55,280 --> 00:18:58,760 It got off on getting the reader sort of, 251 00:18:58,760 --> 00:19:03,760 you know, sucking your teeth at the, you know, what you were reading 252 00:19:03,760 --> 00:19:07,960 because the edge of it was so sharp that you sort of couldn't take it. 253 00:19:07,960 --> 00:19:12,200 But he made you take it. This was sort of like sadistic writing. 254 00:19:12,200 --> 00:19:16,240 I mean, not just the...not just the representing sadistic acts, 255 00:19:16,240 --> 00:19:19,200 but also acting sadistically a little bit on the reader. 256 00:19:19,200 --> 00:19:24,520 When I'm working, when I'm writing I do feel extraordinarily free. 257 00:19:26,080 --> 00:19:33,600 Even when I'm trying to put together the most, un-free situations, I do feel colossal freedom myself. 258 00:19:33,600 --> 00:19:37,000 There's nothing more exhilarating than to be writing again. 259 00:19:37,000 --> 00:19:40,960 Your food tastes better, your step has more spring, 260 00:19:40,960 --> 00:19:46,800 there's, um...the air that fills your lungs seems that much cleaner. 261 00:19:46,800 --> 00:19:49,320 28, take two. End board. 262 00:19:49,320 --> 00:19:51,320 SHOUTING 263 00:19:55,000 --> 00:20:00,080 McEwan made no explicit connection between the social breakdown in The Cement Garden 264 00:20:00,080 --> 00:20:02,480 and events in '70s' Britain. 265 00:20:04,200 --> 00:20:08,600 But the country had experienced its fair share of chaos. 266 00:20:10,960 --> 00:20:14,760 There was a further wave of strikes towards the end of the decade 267 00:20:14,760 --> 00:20:17,800 that became known as The Winter of Discontent. 268 00:20:17,800 --> 00:20:20,880 It gave the Tories the break they were looking for. 269 00:20:21,880 --> 00:20:27,280 In May 1979, Mrs Thatcher ousted the beleaguered Labour government. 270 00:20:27,280 --> 00:20:33,240 I'm just aware of the very great responsibility, very great responsibility. 271 00:20:33,240 --> 00:20:36,240 But it's very exciting, 272 00:20:36,240 --> 00:20:39,680 and somehow one is very calm about it. 273 00:20:39,680 --> 00:20:46,200 She promised change, but the full extent of what she had in mind wasn't yet apparent. 274 00:20:48,080 --> 00:20:53,240 Fiction wasn't immediately interested in Mrs Thatcher, that would come later. 275 00:20:53,240 --> 00:20:57,440 It was changes in the literary landscape that preoccupied critics. 276 00:20:59,560 --> 00:21:02,600 In the '70s and '80s, Malcolm Bradbury, 277 00:21:02,600 --> 00:21:06,520 a novelist and Professor of English at the University of East Anglia, 278 00:21:06,520 --> 00:21:09,880 regularly appeared on television as literature's weatherman, 279 00:21:09,880 --> 00:21:12,720 pointing out the warm fronts sweeping in from the feminist movement, 280 00:21:12,720 --> 00:21:16,840 or the fresh southerlies, blowing up from the post-colonial world. 281 00:21:18,920 --> 00:21:21,880 I think there are two great experimental forces at the moment. 282 00:21:21,880 --> 00:21:24,080 One is the new language that's coming from women's fiction - 283 00:21:24,080 --> 00:21:26,600 it's not just the presentation of characters, 284 00:21:26,600 --> 00:21:32,360 it's like this is happening in language itself, the impact is on language itself. 285 00:21:32,360 --> 00:21:35,960 The other big impact is actually the kind of new voicing 286 00:21:35,960 --> 00:21:40,240 that's coming from third world writers, from writers in other countries, male or female, 287 00:21:40,240 --> 00:21:44,160 who are actually disputing our possession of the English language. 288 00:21:48,480 --> 00:21:51,480 In 1981, a hugely ambitious novel 289 00:21:51,480 --> 00:21:57,240 stole the crown from English English, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. 290 00:21:57,240 --> 00:22:00,920 The winner of this year's Booker Prize is Salman Rushdie. 291 00:22:08,720 --> 00:22:13,360 Salman Rushdie had been born in Mumbai into a middle class Muslim family, 292 00:22:13,360 --> 00:22:15,600 but was sent to school in England. 293 00:22:15,600 --> 00:22:20,840 Midnight's Children is the fictional autobiography of Saleem Sinai, 294 00:22:20,840 --> 00:22:24,880 born at the moment of India's independence in 1947. 295 00:22:24,880 --> 00:22:28,280 In this reading, he's played by Ben Kingsley. 296 00:22:28,280 --> 00:22:33,760 I was born in Dr Nalika's nursing home on August the 15th 1947. 297 00:22:33,760 --> 00:22:36,520 And the time? The time matters, too. 298 00:22:36,520 --> 00:22:38,960 Well, then, at night. 299 00:22:38,960 --> 00:22:41,280 No, it's important to be more... 300 00:22:42,800 --> 00:22:47,080 On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. 301 00:22:47,080 --> 00:22:51,760 Clock hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. 302 00:22:51,760 --> 00:22:55,080 Oh, spell it out, spell it out. 303 00:22:55,080 --> 00:23:01,640 At the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. 304 00:23:01,640 --> 00:23:06,480 I was born two and a half months before the British left and there was this family joke 305 00:23:06,480 --> 00:23:09,400 that there was some relationship between the two events. 306 00:23:09,400 --> 00:23:15,400 When I sat down to compose the book, I just thought it would be funnier to make it exact. 307 00:23:15,400 --> 00:23:19,600 And so the book really does arise out of that insane coincidence, 308 00:23:19,600 --> 00:23:22,840 and then suggests that there's something magical in that 309 00:23:22,840 --> 00:23:26,760 and that the child and the country become twins. 310 00:23:26,760 --> 00:23:30,000 It was really a device for discussing the relationship 311 00:23:30,000 --> 00:23:33,640 between private lives and public lives, or public affairs. 312 00:23:33,640 --> 00:23:37,440 And Saleem believes, comically, that history is his fault 313 00:23:37,440 --> 00:23:41,520 and sets out over the course of a quarter of a million words to prove it. 314 00:23:44,480 --> 00:23:50,720 People of my parent's generation all say that independence represented a time of hope. 315 00:23:50,720 --> 00:23:57,240 The argument of the book is that during the course of the next 30 years, that hope was betrayed. 316 00:23:59,120 --> 00:24:01,720 This is why optimism occurs in the book as a disease. 317 00:24:01,720 --> 00:24:04,200 I mean, people catch it like an infection 318 00:24:04,200 --> 00:24:09,240 and it keeps...they keep getting cured of it in various ways, but it keeps recurring. 319 00:24:09,240 --> 00:24:14,320 And the Children of Midnight themselves are basically, I think, a metaphor of hope, 320 00:24:14,320 --> 00:24:21,320 and when they get destroyed, that to me was a symbol of the destruction 321 00:24:21,320 --> 00:24:24,040 of the good things about independence. 322 00:24:24,040 --> 00:24:28,480 The real achievement of Midnight's Children is the setting 323 00:24:28,480 --> 00:24:34,880 because there are so many competing perspectives, so many competing tribal interests, 324 00:24:34,880 --> 00:24:38,760 so many competing political factions, 325 00:24:38,760 --> 00:24:42,960 that India is almost a reflection of the speaker. 326 00:24:42,960 --> 00:24:45,840 And it's a perfect match. 327 00:24:45,840 --> 00:24:49,920 It might sound a simple formula, but no-one had tried this before 328 00:24:49,920 --> 00:24:56,160 and to use the formula, if you like, of magic realism and place it in India, 329 00:24:56,160 --> 00:24:58,160 it's a beautiful marriage. 330 00:24:58,160 --> 00:25:00,880 The novel is not an indigenous form in India. 331 00:25:00,880 --> 00:25:04,400 I mean, there's not really a long history of prose fiction. 332 00:25:04,400 --> 00:25:07,200 Um, it more or less arrived with the British. 333 00:25:07,200 --> 00:25:12,480 And now there are language... English language and Hindi and other language novels in India, 334 00:25:12,480 --> 00:25:17,480 but it's not really... I mean, it's a grafted form, rather than one that grew there. 335 00:25:17,480 --> 00:25:24,320 Um, the form that is indigenous is tale telling, storytelling, fables, and that's been there forever 336 00:25:24,320 --> 00:25:30,160 because I think, you see, the realism in the novel, even in England, is relatively recent, 337 00:25:30,160 --> 00:25:33,200 and realism in story telling in India never existed. 338 00:25:33,200 --> 00:25:39,200 There was a sort of belief that stories should clearly be lies and they should clearly be untrue. 339 00:25:39,200 --> 00:25:42,480 They should be wonderful tales and that they didn't have to... 340 00:25:42,480 --> 00:25:46,120 conform to the descriptions of the literal world. 341 00:25:46,120 --> 00:25:48,560 BOLLYWOOD SOUNDTRACK 342 00:25:51,280 --> 00:25:53,560 Rushdie's love of rich, visual imagery 343 00:25:53,560 --> 00:25:58,840 owes a lot to another vigorous tradition of Indian storytelling - the Bollywood Movie. 344 00:25:58,840 --> 00:26:03,800 So it's easy to laugh about these films because they're relatively melodramatic and corny. 345 00:26:03,800 --> 00:26:09,320 But the thing that's important about them is they try and be sort of compendiums of human experience. 346 00:26:09,320 --> 00:26:11,400 They have to have something of everything, 347 00:26:11,400 --> 00:26:16,080 so they have funny uncles and villains and fight sequences and romance. 348 00:26:20,120 --> 00:26:23,520 In a way, because I grew up with these films around me, 349 00:26:23,520 --> 00:26:28,960 I've tried to do a literary version of that in the book and also try and bring sort of all human life in. 350 00:26:32,600 --> 00:26:34,960 The book is basically a tragedy, 351 00:26:34,960 --> 00:26:37,800 but it's a tragedy written like a comedy. 352 00:26:37,800 --> 00:26:39,320 Um... 353 00:26:39,320 --> 00:26:43,880 I mean, the book ends badly, you know, or sadly anyway, 354 00:26:43,880 --> 00:26:48,440 and it's a kind of elegy for...childhood. 355 00:26:48,440 --> 00:26:53,520 Well, I was just bowled over because I read it in the manuscript. 356 00:26:53,520 --> 00:26:57,400 Rushdie was a neighbour of mine at the time 357 00:26:57,400 --> 00:27:00,200 and it's almost impossible to remember, but he was unsuccessful. 358 00:27:01,720 --> 00:27:08,200 And...and he asked me, rather, you know, sort of ruefully, if I would read his latest effort. 359 00:27:08,200 --> 00:27:11,920 And I remember my heart sank, it was very long, but I thought, 360 00:27:11,920 --> 00:27:17,520 "Oh, well, I must help this poor, struggling writer." And, erm... 361 00:27:17,520 --> 00:27:23,640 But I read it, and I remember the atmosphere in the book was so vivid and so exuberant and colourful 362 00:27:23,640 --> 00:27:29,880 and alive, and this book just bowled me away and I couldn't wait to read some more of it. 363 00:27:29,880 --> 00:27:34,120 And I said, you know, "This is stunning, you've done a stunning thing." 364 00:27:34,120 --> 00:27:39,280 And then I had about a week when I was the person who had helped him and after that I was forgotten. 365 00:27:42,600 --> 00:27:46,240 Competition for the 1981 Booker was fierce. 366 00:27:46,240 --> 00:27:48,360 Rushdie had been up against D M Thomas' White Hotel, 367 00:27:48,360 --> 00:27:51,680 but in the end the prize went to Midnight's Children. 368 00:27:51,680 --> 00:27:55,360 We feel it's a very notable winner, a brilliant book... 369 00:27:55,360 --> 00:27:57,760 Malcolm Bradbury was chair of the judges, 370 00:27:57,760 --> 00:28:00,760 but behind the scenes, it had been a different story. 371 00:28:00,760 --> 00:28:04,120 Malcolm actually argued for the White Hotel, and he also, 372 00:28:04,120 --> 00:28:06,400 I remember, argued he should have a casting vote 373 00:28:06,400 --> 00:28:08,880 so he could double his vote at the last moment 374 00:28:08,880 --> 00:28:12,400 whereby it would be...it would come out for the White Hotel. 375 00:28:12,400 --> 00:28:14,560 And we all said, "No, you can't do that." 376 00:28:14,560 --> 00:28:19,520 So, Midnight's Children won and Malcolm then spent the rest of his life saying, 377 00:28:19,520 --> 00:28:24,160 "I was the person who gave Midnight's Children the Booker Prize." 378 00:28:24,160 --> 00:28:29,240 Salman Rushdie has a phrase from an essay, The Empire Writes Back, 379 00:28:29,240 --> 00:28:32,440 and that kind of sums up... 380 00:28:32,440 --> 00:28:37,480 a certain kind of touche quality of his writing. It was, you know... 381 00:28:37,480 --> 00:28:39,920 the British went to India, colonised the place, 382 00:28:39,920 --> 00:28:44,240 gave India railways and a bureaucracy, and English, 383 00:28:44,240 --> 00:28:48,040 and India started to own English, 384 00:28:48,040 --> 00:28:53,640 and now English is being spoken back to the mother country. 385 00:28:53,640 --> 00:28:56,160 It's almost chicken or turkey lib night tonight, 386 00:28:56,160 --> 00:28:58,840 because almost everything has a chicken or a turkey in it. 387 00:28:58,840 --> 00:29:01,480 I'm not talking about chickens or turkeys... 388 00:29:01,480 --> 00:29:05,240 The promotion of Midnight's Children was helped along by Rushdie himself, 389 00:29:05,240 --> 00:29:08,600 who turned out to be a dab hand at off-the-cuff speaking. 390 00:29:08,600 --> 00:29:11,800 Has it been a jolly and exciting and hectic year for you? 391 00:29:11,800 --> 00:29:14,240 Yes, it's been... it has been very pleasant. 392 00:29:14,240 --> 00:29:18,480 I must say that I'm extremely relieved it's all going to happen to somebody else in a few minutes. Why? 393 00:29:18,480 --> 00:29:22,480 Well, I think one can only be Miss World for so long. 394 00:29:22,480 --> 00:29:28,080 There are benefits to being Miss World, however peripheral they may be. 395 00:29:28,080 --> 00:29:31,760 You were invited, I gather, to Downing Street immediately after last year's... 396 00:29:31,760 --> 00:29:34,120 That was probably the juiciest thing that happened actually. 397 00:29:34,120 --> 00:29:39,000 I had a very strange phone call, from a very posh female voice, 398 00:29:39,000 --> 00:29:43,120 which revealed itself to be speaking from the office of the Prime Minister, 399 00:29:43,120 --> 00:29:48,160 and said - this was at the beginning of the Festival of India, when Mrs Ghandi was coming over - 400 00:29:48,160 --> 00:29:50,800 and said that Mrs Thatcher was having a lunch, 401 00:29:50,800 --> 00:29:54,840 at Downing Street, in honour of Mrs Ghandi, and wished for me to come. 402 00:29:54,840 --> 00:29:58,800 And I thought it was a hoax, and I said, "Is this a hoax?" 403 00:29:58,800 --> 00:30:02,080 The voice got very cross, it was a perfectly genuine invitation. 404 00:30:02,080 --> 00:30:07,680 So I said it just seemed peculiar that of all people they should ask to a lunch in Mrs Ghandi's honour 405 00:30:07,680 --> 00:30:09,720 somebody who'd just written a book that was extremely rude about her. 406 00:30:09,720 --> 00:30:11,760 LAUGHTER 407 00:30:11,760 --> 00:30:16,720 And the voice at the other end of the phone displayed symptoms of terminal panic... 408 00:30:16,720 --> 00:30:18,760 LAUGHTER 409 00:30:18,760 --> 00:30:22,200 ..and said, "Oh...gosh." 410 00:30:22,200 --> 00:30:26,600 She said, "Oh, well, you see, it was the Foreign Office that recommended you... 411 00:30:28,600 --> 00:30:30,880 "..and you'd think they'd have read your book, wouldn't you?" 412 00:30:32,600 --> 00:30:35,160 SCATTERED APPLAUSE 413 00:30:38,200 --> 00:30:40,720 Though Rushdie had made London his home, 414 00:30:40,720 --> 00:30:45,360 Midnight's Children is essentially a love letter to the India of his childhood. 415 00:30:51,560 --> 00:30:54,040 A younger writer, Hanif Kureishi, 416 00:30:54,040 --> 00:30:59,480 created characters who are largely indifferent to their Pakistani legacy. 417 00:30:59,480 --> 00:31:05,320 They're usually London-born, like Kureishi himself, who wrote plays first, then films, 418 00:31:05,320 --> 00:31:10,760 such as My Beautiful Launderette, before turning to fiction with The Buddha Of Suburbia. 419 00:31:10,760 --> 00:31:15,720 Hanif Kureishi is a suburban London boy, mixed marriage, 420 00:31:15,720 --> 00:31:17,080 a British guy. 421 00:31:17,080 --> 00:31:20,800 He was a London lad, he wasn't a new immigrant, 422 00:31:20,800 --> 00:31:25,120 with plastic shoes and a cardboard suitcase, turning up fresh off the boat. 423 00:31:25,120 --> 00:31:30,880 He was a geezer, he was a punk, he was interested in being part of this metropolitan life. 424 00:31:30,880 --> 00:31:34,400 But there he was, he was a Pakistani guy also, 425 00:31:34,400 --> 00:31:36,560 and he started writing about that, 426 00:31:36,560 --> 00:31:40,720 and The Buddha Of Suburbia, with all this comic absurdity of that position, 427 00:31:40,720 --> 00:31:44,440 was in many ways the first expression of that. 428 00:31:44,440 --> 00:31:48,160 "The front door opened, Helen's dad stood there. 429 00:31:48,160 --> 00:31:51,840 "He was a big man with a black beard and thick arms. 430 00:31:51,840 --> 00:31:56,400 "I imagined he had hairy shoulders, and worst of all, a hairy back like Peter Sellers and Sean Connery. 431 00:31:56,400 --> 00:31:59,720 "I kept a list of actors with hairy backs, which I constantly updated. 432 00:31:59,720 --> 00:32:04,080 "And then I went white, but obviously not white enough, 433 00:32:04,080 --> 00:32:09,360 "because hairy back let go of the dog he was holding, a great fucking Dane. 434 00:32:09,360 --> 00:32:14,320 "And it padded towards me, its mouth hanging open like a cave." 435 00:32:14,320 --> 00:32:18,400 He allowed himself to do with people who shared his background 436 00:32:18,400 --> 00:32:25,640 the sort of things that it would have been politically incorrect for a white, English writer to have done. 437 00:32:25,640 --> 00:32:27,840 Great. It works very well. 438 00:32:27,840 --> 00:32:32,920 In my life, people used to throw that book at me about once a week, "Hari, have you read this book?" 439 00:32:32,920 --> 00:32:34,960 And I'd be like, "Yeah." 440 00:32:34,960 --> 00:32:39,000 But it was an important book, because it was a book so many of us recognised, 441 00:32:39,000 --> 00:32:41,040 we understood ourselves from that. 442 00:32:41,040 --> 00:32:45,320 But for years, Hanif had to stand around drinking warm white wine at parties, 443 00:32:45,320 --> 00:32:49,520 talking to earnest people with wooden earrings about multiculturalism. 444 00:32:49,520 --> 00:32:53,200 Well, mostly it's liberals who get all tangled up in all of that 445 00:32:53,200 --> 00:32:58,880 because liberals want to see black or Asian people as a homogenous group, 446 00:32:58,880 --> 00:33:04,760 often as the beneficiaries of their attention and worthy goodness. 447 00:33:04,760 --> 00:33:10,000 But as far as I'm concerned, all my characters are equal in my eyes. 448 00:33:10,000 --> 00:33:13,920 If you're writing about an Asian businessman, he may or may not be corrupt. 449 00:33:13,920 --> 00:33:15,480 If he's corrupt, then he's corrupt. 450 00:33:15,480 --> 00:33:21,160 Because he's Asian, it doesn't mean that you can draw a line around him and say, 451 00:33:21,160 --> 00:33:22,840 "You can't satirise him." 452 00:33:22,840 --> 00:33:28,080 I don't understand that line at all, and it's never been anything that's interested me. 453 00:33:28,080 --> 00:33:30,920 Though in the '70s there was much talk about how do we represent women? 454 00:33:30,920 --> 00:33:35,080 How do we represent the working class? How do we represent black or Asian people? 455 00:33:35,080 --> 00:33:37,360 Should we do it this way, that way, or the other? 456 00:33:37,360 --> 00:33:40,600 Well, if you try to write according to those rules, 457 00:33:40,600 --> 00:33:43,240 you'd be so inhibited, you'd never be able to write anything. 458 00:33:43,240 --> 00:33:49,680 You just have to write as you feel, and hope that some sort of humanity, in the end, emerges. 459 00:33:53,880 --> 00:33:58,040 That there was such a thing as a literary establishment, 460 00:33:58,040 --> 00:34:03,520 and that it spoke with an English accent, and that London was its headquarters, 461 00:34:03,520 --> 00:34:10,280 and that the Booker Prize dinner was its tribal gathering, angered many Scottish writers in the '80s. 462 00:34:10,280 --> 00:34:15,040 As you a Glasgow writer, or a Scottish writer, or is there a difference? 463 00:34:15,040 --> 00:34:20,000 Was Dickens a London writer, or an English writer, or... 464 00:34:21,520 --> 00:34:24,160 That question, sir, was unworthy of you. 465 00:34:28,680 --> 00:34:31,960 The old industrial heartlands of Scotland had been hit hard 466 00:34:31,960 --> 00:34:36,760 by the restructuring of the British economy in the early years of the '80s. 467 00:34:39,280 --> 00:34:43,520 Heavy industries slid into terminal decline, and unemployment rocketed. 468 00:34:45,680 --> 00:34:51,160 James Kelman, a writer from Glasgow, gave Scotland's working class a literary voice, 469 00:34:51,160 --> 00:34:55,000 in stories and novels like The Busconductor Hines. 470 00:34:55,000 --> 00:34:59,400 He spoke about identity and language on The Late Show. 471 00:34:59,400 --> 00:35:02,800 If you're a writer from the working class, or if you're black, 472 00:35:02,800 --> 00:35:06,960 from the Afro-Caribbean community, if you're Irish, from Yorkshire, 473 00:35:06,960 --> 00:35:09,200 if you want to write about your own culture, 474 00:35:09,200 --> 00:35:11,240 from within your own experience, 475 00:35:11,240 --> 00:35:16,920 you have to find a way of getting of the values that say your culture is rubbish, right? 476 00:35:16,960 --> 00:35:19,880 And that means working your way through language. 477 00:35:19,880 --> 00:35:22,640 You know, if you write in English normally, 478 00:35:22,640 --> 00:35:27,200 you can't help but take on the values of the English upper classes, because that's what language is. 479 00:35:27,200 --> 00:35:31,120 That's language as it gets enforced in the education system. 480 00:35:31,120 --> 00:35:35,800 No-one, from my culture, is allowed to have an inner life at all. 481 00:35:35,800 --> 00:35:39,240 There is no being within our existence, we are kind of... 482 00:35:39,240 --> 00:35:41,440 the behaviour is cut out. 483 00:35:41,440 --> 00:35:44,080 James Kelman was choosing to write about 484 00:35:44,080 --> 00:35:47,120 those people in a language that they would use, 485 00:35:47,120 --> 00:35:51,760 and the language which is most vital in him, 486 00:35:51,760 --> 00:35:55,280 and where he could put his passion. 487 00:35:55,280 --> 00:35:58,840 And particularly the reaction when he won the Booker 488 00:35:58,840 --> 00:36:06,000 was just nauseating, because it was all about how often he swears, and it's like, grow up, 489 00:36:06,000 --> 00:36:09,080 just fucking grow up. 490 00:36:09,080 --> 00:36:14,240 It's not about that, it's about you don't like the people that he chooses to write about 491 00:36:14,240 --> 00:36:19,680 and you don't like knowing that people who come and mend your plumbing 492 00:36:19,680 --> 00:36:23,440 have the same interior life as you, and are as worthwhile 493 00:36:23,440 --> 00:36:27,920 and as mysterious and extraordinary as you, and get over it. 494 00:36:28,920 --> 00:36:33,640 I became aware of oppression when I was about, I think, 11. 495 00:36:33,640 --> 00:36:37,480 You know, going to school and continually being told 496 00:36:37,480 --> 00:36:41,640 that you speak incorrectly and your language is not fit for decent people to hear. 497 00:36:41,640 --> 00:36:44,800 And if you use words like "aye" in the classroom, 498 00:36:44,800 --> 00:36:49,200 then the teacher would perhaps belt you, or tell you you shouldn't do that. 499 00:36:49,200 --> 00:36:54,440 And if you say "doon" instead of "down", or, "Are ye gaun doon the road?" 500 00:36:54,440 --> 00:36:59,400 If you spoke in a normal way, then you were punished. 501 00:36:59,400 --> 00:37:02,520 "Things aren't always as clear as they sometimes appear. 502 00:37:02,520 --> 00:37:05,360 "You can have a way of moving which you reckon has to be ahead 503 00:37:05,360 --> 00:37:08,480 "in a definite sense, and then, for some reason, 504 00:37:08,480 --> 00:37:15,720 "What happens is fuck all really, nothing, nothing at all, nothing at all is happening, yet there you are, 505 00:37:15,720 --> 00:37:21,320 "in strangely geometric patterns, wherein points are arranged, have been arranged, 506 00:37:21,320 --> 00:37:23,880 "in a weird display of fuck knows what, 507 00:37:23,880 --> 00:37:26,720 "except that it's always vaguely familiar, whatever that means." 508 00:37:26,720 --> 00:37:30,120 It's finding the storyteller's voice, rather than saying 509 00:37:30,120 --> 00:37:32,880 that you want to write stories about certain people. 510 00:37:32,880 --> 00:37:36,720 You want the voice in which the stories can be told, you know? 511 00:37:36,720 --> 00:37:41,560 So that's why you have to subvert the standard narrative voice, 512 00:37:41,560 --> 00:37:48,040 you have to find a way in which that standard voice becomes the ordinary Glasgow speaking voice, you know? 513 00:37:48,040 --> 00:37:52,600 We're so keyed in to language, and how you know what class somebody is, 514 00:37:52,600 --> 00:37:57,120 and how you know you think how bright somebody is, is how they speak. 515 00:37:57,120 --> 00:38:03,640 And what he's offering is a much more subversive way of looking at the underclass. 516 00:38:03,640 --> 00:38:07,240 You get lots of portrayals of the working classes, but it's always people who are helpless, 517 00:38:07,240 --> 00:38:10,400 and people who are dysfunctional, and people who are funny, 518 00:38:10,400 --> 00:38:13,760 and people who are not like us, because they're out of control. 519 00:38:13,760 --> 00:38:15,920 And he's like, "No, these are bright people, 520 00:38:15,920 --> 00:38:19,640 "but they talk the way they talk cos they're from where they're from, 521 00:38:19,640 --> 00:38:22,680 "and they're not mucking about pretending to be somebody else." 522 00:38:22,680 --> 00:38:25,320 It's a fundamental and revolutionary thing. 523 00:38:34,920 --> 00:38:40,280 The majority of British novelists seemed to have watched the Thatcherite transformation 524 00:38:40,280 --> 00:38:45,760 of British society in the early '80s with a kind of appalled fascination. 525 00:38:45,760 --> 00:38:49,920 The one thing that novelists seemed to be absolutely sure about 526 00:38:49,920 --> 00:38:53,280 in the mid-1980s was that they all hated Mrs Thatcher. 527 00:38:53,280 --> 00:38:59,320 And in novel after novel of the time, she becomes a sort of pantomime villain, 528 00:38:59,320 --> 00:39:03,080 she becomes a sort of flat existence. 529 00:39:03,080 --> 00:39:08,320 And there's almost no attempt in the novel at the time 530 00:39:08,320 --> 00:39:11,680 to account for the kind of allure 531 00:39:11,680 --> 00:39:16,320 that she clearly must have had over the electorate. 532 00:39:17,840 --> 00:39:23,560 Martin Amis wasn't particularly dismayed by the carnival of consumption in the early '80s. 533 00:39:23,560 --> 00:39:27,880 He recognised it was in all of us, an inclination to binge. 534 00:39:29,920 --> 00:39:35,120 His novel Money, published in 1984, pinned down the convulsive energies 535 00:39:35,120 --> 00:39:40,920 unleashed by the new economics in London and New York in blackly comic prose. 536 00:39:42,600 --> 00:39:47,360 Money is narrated by John Self, a porn and junk food enthusiast. 537 00:39:47,360 --> 00:39:52,160 Self is shadowed through the text by its author, Martin Amis - 538 00:39:52,160 --> 00:39:55,160 he even makes an appearance in this dramatised extract. 539 00:39:58,240 --> 00:40:03,080 "Today, I made a break with habit and tradition, took my lunch at the Newborn Restaurant. 540 00:40:03,080 --> 00:40:08,240 "The Newborn's a hot little grotto of plastic panels and Formica tabletops, 541 00:40:08,240 --> 00:40:13,240 "half cheap bistro, half yob's beanery, run by an elite squad of Italians, 542 00:40:13,240 --> 00:40:16,080 "together with some straggly irregulars. 543 00:40:16,080 --> 00:40:21,360 "You get all sorts in here, from dustmen to middle management. 544 00:40:21,360 --> 00:40:23,600 "The menu is chip-orientated. 545 00:40:23,600 --> 00:40:28,960 "The place is licensed - well, how else could it seriously expect my custom? 546 00:40:35,800 --> 00:40:41,160 "I was sitting there, waiting for the grub to show, when Martin Amis came through the open door, 547 00:40:41,160 --> 00:40:45,000 "you know, the writer I was chatting to in the pub the other night. 548 00:40:45,000 --> 00:40:49,880 "The place was pretty full and he hesitated, until he saw the empty bench at my table. 549 00:40:49,880 --> 00:40:52,280 "I don't think he saw me. 550 00:40:52,280 --> 00:40:56,360 "And Martin sat down opposite and quickly flattened a book out in front on him. 551 00:40:56,360 --> 00:40:59,760 "This kid's going to ruin his eyes." 552 00:40:59,760 --> 00:41:03,280 Fate. "He looked up with a flash of panic." 553 00:41:03,280 --> 00:41:09,120 "He recognised me - people usually do, it's one of the kickbacks you get for looking like I look." 554 00:41:09,120 --> 00:41:13,520 I, in common with many writers, I think, 555 00:41:13,520 --> 00:41:15,600 feel that there is a... 556 00:41:15,600 --> 00:41:19,280 and this may be again just something that every writer feels in every generation, 557 00:41:19,280 --> 00:41:24,640 that there's a great convulsion of stupidity happening in the world. 558 00:41:24,640 --> 00:41:27,520 Mostly to do with television. 559 00:41:27,520 --> 00:41:34,480 People know a little about a lot, and put very little effort into accumulating knowledge and culture, 560 00:41:34,480 --> 00:41:37,480 and when they do, it's almost like a consumerism of culture. 561 00:41:39,000 --> 00:41:42,080 If this is happening, then... 562 00:41:42,080 --> 00:41:45,880 perhaps what I'm trying to do in that book is to write 563 00:41:45,880 --> 00:41:50,040 as interestingly and, as you say, with as much literary effect as possible, 564 00:41:50,040 --> 00:41:54,520 about a landscape in which there is no literature or culture. 565 00:41:54,520 --> 00:42:00,760 He comes across it, he encounters culture, in various forms, in art galleries, in opera houses, 566 00:42:00,760 --> 00:42:07,880 and when he meets me, I'm a minor character in the book, sent to perplex and bedevil him even more. 567 00:42:07,880 --> 00:42:13,640 But he can't...make known sense of it, he has nothing to fall back on to interpret it. 568 00:42:13,640 --> 00:42:15,680 But he doesn't have to. 569 00:42:15,680 --> 00:42:18,600 I suspect you have a much more 20th Century view 570 00:42:18,600 --> 00:42:21,000 than the one you're putting to me now. 571 00:42:21,000 --> 00:42:23,840 Well, I think this is a new 20th Century view. 572 00:42:23,840 --> 00:42:28,120 But you're talking to me like Martin Amis, the character in the book, who's rather prissy. Yes, indeed. 573 00:42:28,120 --> 00:42:34,320 And I would have said that in the Martin Amis that I know slightly, there's a good slice of John Self. 574 00:42:37,680 --> 00:42:41,800 You want a drop of this? Ah, no, thanks, I try not to drink at lunchtime. 575 00:42:41,800 --> 00:42:43,520 Yeah, so do I. 576 00:42:45,520 --> 00:42:47,640 I never quite make it. 577 00:42:47,640 --> 00:42:51,560 I feel like shit all day if I drink at lunchtime. 578 00:42:51,560 --> 00:42:56,000 Me too - I feel like shit all lunchtime if I don't. 579 00:42:56,000 --> 00:42:59,880 Yeah, well it all comes down to choices, doesn't it? It's the same in the evening. 580 00:42:59,880 --> 00:43:02,680 Do you want to feel good in the evening, or do you want to feel good in the morning? 581 00:43:02,680 --> 00:43:06,280 It's the same with life. Do you want to feel good old, or do you want to feel good young? 582 00:43:06,280 --> 00:43:08,520 One or the other, not both. 583 00:43:10,880 --> 00:43:15,120 When Money came out, that seemed to me the novel that really did engage 584 00:43:15,120 --> 00:43:20,080 with contemporary political realities, contemporary economic realities. 585 00:43:20,080 --> 00:43:27,560 I don't suppose it set out to do that, but it's become more and more topical, 586 00:43:27,560 --> 00:43:34,360 as it were, more and more able to speak about its period as time's gone on. 587 00:43:34,360 --> 00:43:40,960 The materialism and greed, and the exaggerated selfishness 588 00:43:40,960 --> 00:43:45,560 of John Self in Money really reflects the era. 589 00:43:45,560 --> 00:43:50,080 That brings us to the crux of the thing, because the book is about money. 590 00:43:50,080 --> 00:43:51,800 Money is... 591 00:43:51,800 --> 00:43:55,440 in shorthand, money is the opposite of culture. 592 00:43:55,440 --> 00:44:01,280 Money is the...is the first value that gets to you, unless you've got culture to stave it off. 593 00:44:01,280 --> 00:44:07,240 One of the strongest impressions of the author in this book is of his ecstatic disgust, 594 00:44:07,240 --> 00:44:12,960 especially with things like the street culture, 42nd Street of New York. 595 00:44:12,960 --> 00:44:15,160 Would you say you suffer from disgust? 596 00:44:17,040 --> 00:44:19,680 With regard to disgust, er... 597 00:44:21,200 --> 00:44:26,560 I think every writer, even the blackest writer, actually, loves it all. 598 00:44:26,560 --> 00:44:29,320 You walk towards it, rather than turning away? 599 00:44:29,320 --> 00:44:33,120 I'm fascinated in distortions and distempers. 600 00:44:34,640 --> 00:44:40,840 I suppose it is temperamental, but I don't sit around feeling disgusted at all, I feel...enthused. 601 00:44:40,840 --> 00:44:44,600 I'm really interested in your indignation, because it strikes me 602 00:44:44,600 --> 00:44:49,640 no-one could write the way you do, you're a really brilliant hater, 603 00:44:49,640 --> 00:44:57,200 with an eye for what is horrible, what is grotesque, that that indignation is profoundly moral. 604 00:44:58,200 --> 00:45:04,520 It involves a sort of rejection of 20th Century-ness and the areas of waste and fatigue. 605 00:45:04,520 --> 00:45:10,000 All writers think the world has reached its nadir, its low point. 606 00:45:10,000 --> 00:45:16,600 And, in fact, this age will be lamented just like the last, that's the paradox. 607 00:45:16,600 --> 00:45:20,640 What you can say about the world is while it may not be getting better, 608 00:45:20,640 --> 00:45:24,360 it's getting infinitely less innocent all the time. 609 00:45:24,360 --> 00:45:30,280 It's like, it's been to so many parties, it's been on so many dates, had so many fights, 610 00:45:30,280 --> 00:45:33,040 got its handbag stolen so many times, 611 00:45:33,040 --> 00:45:38,640 so the accumulation is what makes the world seem at its worst always. 612 00:45:38,640 --> 00:45:43,360 Because it's never been through as much as it's been through today, the earth. 613 00:45:43,360 --> 00:45:46,320 I think that Amis is full of class anxiety, 614 00:45:46,320 --> 00:45:51,360 Amis is an interesting figure really in that he's connected back 615 00:45:51,360 --> 00:45:56,280 to a very grand and much older tradition of English letters. 616 00:45:56,280 --> 00:46:00,800 You know, there he was, he was the son of a famous writer father, 617 00:46:00,800 --> 00:46:04,000 he'd had this reviewing job when he was very young, 618 00:46:04,000 --> 00:46:08,520 he's very high cultural, very kind of impeccably Oxbridge, yada yada yada. 619 00:46:08,520 --> 00:46:14,200 And into this world, where we knew who were the top people and we knew who weren't the top people, 620 00:46:14,200 --> 00:46:18,280 came the new money of the 1980s, and the new money drove a train 621 00:46:18,280 --> 00:46:23,440 through these fine class distinctions that people like Amis were kind of invested in. 622 00:46:23,440 --> 00:46:29,720 Throughout Amis' writing, there's an instinctive disgust at a kind of hyper-virile working class male, 623 00:46:29,720 --> 00:46:35,000 who's probably likely to beat up the young, velvet-jacketed poet. 624 00:46:35,000 --> 00:46:38,080 It's very interesting, you see that in a lot of the white male writers 625 00:46:38,080 --> 00:46:40,840 of that particular gang, that sort of generation. 626 00:46:40,840 --> 00:46:43,600 There's some real class anxiety stuff happening, 627 00:46:43,600 --> 00:46:45,920 the guy in the tracksuit is going to turn up 628 00:46:45,920 --> 00:46:51,640 and beat your door in and maybe have it off with your wife. 629 00:46:58,200 --> 00:47:04,320 If Money stands the test of time by being an oblique, comically grotesque portrait of the '80s, 630 00:47:04,320 --> 00:47:09,600 there were other, more sombre, responses to Thatcherism. 631 00:47:09,600 --> 00:47:12,360 I think we forget, young people forget, 632 00:47:12,360 --> 00:47:15,080 the violence of Thatcherism. 633 00:47:15,080 --> 00:47:18,000 And I think there's something in my novels of that period 634 00:47:18,000 --> 00:47:23,080 that called for realism, because life was violent, confrontational, very dirty. 635 00:47:23,080 --> 00:47:26,320 You went round Sheffield in those days, everything was for sale - 636 00:47:26,320 --> 00:47:31,920 you went round London, the streets were filthy. We've forgotten that, because we have cleaned up a bit. 637 00:47:31,920 --> 00:47:35,160 Everything was filthy under Mrs Thatcher, dirty. 638 00:47:35,160 --> 00:47:38,840 And I think dirty realism was what was called for. 639 00:47:38,840 --> 00:47:45,640 And I didn't want to escape from what I was looking at with my own eyes, I wanted to say, "This is it! 640 00:47:45,640 --> 00:47:51,320 "you may think you're living in a very fine, cosmopolitan city, with very grand restaurants, 641 00:47:51,320 --> 00:47:57,320 but if you just look under your feet, this is the garbage you're walking over without noticing." 642 00:47:57,320 --> 00:48:01,760 And I think realism seemed a very good mode for describing that, to me. 643 00:48:03,440 --> 00:48:07,440 Some writers didn't damn Thatcherism outright. 644 00:48:07,440 --> 00:48:11,000 For Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, 645 00:48:11,000 --> 00:48:13,840 who grew up in a working class town in Lancashire, 646 00:48:13,840 --> 00:48:18,520 the issue was whether the new wealth would be used for the public good. 647 00:48:19,520 --> 00:48:24,280 People often talk about economics and spirituality, 648 00:48:24,280 --> 00:48:26,400 the cultural life, as being separate, 649 00:48:26,400 --> 00:48:31,880 that business is dirty and rather mean, and that culture is elevated. 650 00:48:31,880 --> 00:48:37,080 But I don't really see that there has to be any contradiction, I think you can make money 651 00:48:37,080 --> 00:48:40,800 and do good things with it, and you can regenerate a culture with that money. 652 00:48:45,480 --> 00:48:48,560 The Tories, if anybody could, and if anybody should, 653 00:48:48,560 --> 00:48:53,440 might have harnessed all that money and vanity to a national good, 654 00:48:53,440 --> 00:48:55,800 and said, "OK, we're encouraging industry, 655 00:48:55,800 --> 00:48:59,680 "we're encouraging enterprise, show us what you can do, build something. 656 00:48:59,680 --> 00:49:04,280 "Let's have some new buildings, let's have some glamour, let's have some glory in London." 657 00:49:04,280 --> 00:49:11,280 What the Tories did, though, was to make money itself into an end, rather than a means. 658 00:49:11,280 --> 00:49:16,600 This is going to be the biggest commercial development in the world. 659 00:49:19,480 --> 00:49:22,000 Private capital was only in it for private gain, 660 00:49:22,000 --> 00:49:27,440 there were no philanthropic gestures, there was no sense of national pride, or community. 661 00:49:30,160 --> 00:49:33,960 I think we need to have a much more vital connection in London, our capital, 662 00:49:33,960 --> 00:49:37,760 between the city we'd like to live in and the city we do live in. 663 00:49:37,760 --> 00:49:40,160 We can change things, we're not powerless. 664 00:49:40,160 --> 00:49:45,960 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, 665 00:49:45,960 --> 00:49:49,560 the city - it's something that we choose and we make. 666 00:49:49,560 --> 00:49:53,920 The more powerful our dreams are, the more beautiful our city will be. 667 00:49:59,400 --> 00:50:05,520 The city, as a place of possibility, formed the backdrop to the most provocative novel of the decade. 668 00:50:07,280 --> 00:50:10,560 It's easy to forget, given its subsequent history, 669 00:50:10,560 --> 00:50:15,760 that Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses largely takes place in '80s London. 670 00:50:15,760 --> 00:50:22,360 The novel lampooned Mrs Thatcher, in the guise of a character called Mrs Torture. 671 00:50:22,360 --> 00:50:25,400 It also included a thinly veiled portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini, 672 00:50:25,400 --> 00:50:30,200 then the Iranian head of state and the country's religious leader. 673 00:50:31,720 --> 00:50:35,800 Yet other characters acquire wings, horns, hooves. 674 00:50:35,800 --> 00:50:40,200 It dealt with a contemporary world, in a defiantly unrealistic fashion. 675 00:50:42,560 --> 00:50:49,000 But it wasn't for its political satire, or lack of realism, that The Satanic Verses became notorious. 676 00:50:49,000 --> 00:50:54,160 It was Rushdie's conviction that a novelist had the right to examine Islamic belief, 677 00:50:54,160 --> 00:50:56,880 by playing with its texts. 678 00:50:56,880 --> 00:51:01,520 The reason the novel is called The Satanic Verses is that there is such an incident, 679 00:51:01,520 --> 00:51:03,720 called the incident of the satanic verses, 680 00:51:03,720 --> 00:51:08,400 which is a kind of apocryphal, quasi-historical incident from the life of the prophet Muhammad, 681 00:51:08,400 --> 00:51:13,040 which I first came across when I was studying Islamic history 682 00:51:13,040 --> 00:51:15,560 at college 20 years ago. 683 00:51:15,560 --> 00:51:17,280 In which, 684 00:51:17,280 --> 00:51:22,880 it seems that momentarily he brought down verses from the mountain 685 00:51:22,880 --> 00:51:28,280 in which three pagan deities were recognised at about the level of the archangels, 686 00:51:28,280 --> 00:51:31,040 by God, via the angel Gibreel. 687 00:51:31,040 --> 00:51:36,840 And then, at a later point, said that the devil had appeared to him, in the guise of the archangel, 688 00:51:36,840 --> 00:51:39,920 and that these were not genuinely Qur'anic verses, they were satanic verses, 689 00:51:39,920 --> 00:51:45,680 had to be removed from the Qur'an, and were replaced by other verses, which repudiated these goddesses. 690 00:51:45,680 --> 00:51:49,600 Rushdie was careful to retell the story of the satanic verses 691 00:51:49,600 --> 00:51:56,040 in the form of a dream, in a fictional place, with fictional characters. 692 00:51:56,040 --> 00:52:00,480 They're visionary sequences, they're not intended to have the validity of kind of historical event, 693 00:52:00,480 --> 00:52:02,280 because they happen in somebody's dream. 694 00:52:02,280 --> 00:52:05,280 And so obviously in a dream things change, names change, 695 00:52:05,280 --> 00:52:08,560 places change shape, nothing is as it really is in life. 696 00:52:08,560 --> 00:52:15,040 I wanted those sequences to have that quality, and so deliberately did not call the city Mecca, 697 00:52:15,040 --> 00:52:18,720 did not call the leader of the city by his true name, Abu Sufyan, 698 00:52:18,720 --> 00:52:22,640 it's changed in the novel to another name, Abu Simbel, like the temple in Egypt, 699 00:52:22,640 --> 00:52:28,840 and did not call Muhammad Muhammad, because I didn't want it to be a picture of him, but a dream of him. 700 00:52:28,840 --> 00:52:30,640 CHATTERING 701 00:52:30,640 --> 00:52:35,040 In this reading, Rushdie ascends his own fictional mountain. 702 00:52:35,040 --> 00:52:36,960 Avatar it isn't. 703 00:52:36,960 --> 00:52:40,480 At the end of his wrestling match with the archangel Gibreel, 704 00:52:40,480 --> 00:52:45,440 the prophet Mahound falls into his customary exhausted, post-revelatory sleep. 705 00:52:45,440 --> 00:52:48,280 But on this occasion, he revives more quickly than usual. 706 00:52:48,280 --> 00:52:52,040 When he comes to his senses, in that high wilderness, there is nobody to be seen, 707 00:52:52,040 --> 00:52:57,440 no winged creatures crouch on rocks, and he jumps to his feet, filled with the urgency of his news. 708 00:52:57,440 --> 00:53:02,280 "It was the devil," he says aloud to the empty air, making it true by giving it voice. 709 00:53:02,280 --> 00:53:04,560 "The last time it was Shaitan." 710 00:53:04,560 --> 00:53:08,320 This is what he had heard in his listening, that he has been tricked, 711 00:53:08,320 --> 00:53:12,520 that the devil came to him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorised, 712 00:53:12,520 --> 00:53:16,040 the ones he recited in the poetry tent, were not the real thing, 713 00:53:16,040 --> 00:53:20,720 but its diabolic opposite - not godly, but satanic. 714 00:53:20,720 --> 00:53:22,640 When Rushdie was writing the book, 715 00:53:22,640 --> 00:53:29,280 this kind of question about the limits of language and the possibilities of meaning were... 716 00:53:29,280 --> 00:53:31,760 that was a common question in universities, 717 00:53:31,760 --> 00:53:35,280 that was the sort of thing that one talked about in graduate seminars. 718 00:53:35,280 --> 00:53:42,120 However, by using this material from the Qur'an as a way of talking about language and meaning 719 00:53:42,120 --> 00:53:46,200 and the limits of meaning, he placed himself in the faultline 720 00:53:46,200 --> 00:53:49,880 between the part of the world that believes in the literal truth of words, 721 00:53:49,880 --> 00:53:54,600 and the part of the world that is interested in the play of language. 722 00:53:54,600 --> 00:53:57,040 ANGRY CHANTS 723 00:53:59,880 --> 00:54:04,040 Rushdie's fictions were taken literally by many Muslims. 724 00:54:04,040 --> 00:54:07,720 India and several other countries banned it. 725 00:54:12,400 --> 00:54:16,280 In Britain, The Satanic Verses was burned in public. 726 00:54:19,480 --> 00:54:24,840 When WH Smiths threatened to remove copies from the shelves of its stores, 727 00:54:24,840 --> 00:54:27,880 Rushdie went on television to defend his position. 728 00:54:27,880 --> 00:54:32,920 Now, you are a political writer, in a sense, yourself. I mean, the wonderful thing about your fiction 729 00:54:32,920 --> 00:54:37,800 is that it's this wonderful, imaginative rollercoaster, but there is political bite behind it. 730 00:54:37,800 --> 00:54:42,760 And it's clear, not just in this book, but in other books, that you have satired Islamic fundamentalism. 731 00:54:42,760 --> 00:54:47,880 In a sense, is it a surprise that you've had the depth of reaction from the community? 732 00:54:47,880 --> 00:54:51,920 Certainly, the scale of it is a surprise to me, and also is of great distress to me. 733 00:54:51,920 --> 00:54:55,560 What's true about the book is that it does break a number of taboos 734 00:54:55,560 --> 00:54:57,920 which, in my view, are very important to break. 735 00:54:57,920 --> 00:55:02,440 The first is the idea that Muhammad's life cannot be discussed as if he was a human being. 736 00:55:02,440 --> 00:55:06,240 Muhammad himself always insisted not to have divine status, 737 00:55:06,240 --> 00:55:10,800 and yet nowadays we talk about him as if he was a perfect being. 738 00:55:10,800 --> 00:55:15,680 There are other taboos, there's taboos about the discussion of Islam as a historical phenomenon. 739 00:55:15,680 --> 00:55:20,120 So, yes, it's very important, if the culture of a religion is to have an intellectual life, 740 00:55:20,120 --> 00:55:22,520 that such things should be discussed. 741 00:55:22,520 --> 00:55:25,040 And the people who wish to control thought, 742 00:55:25,040 --> 00:55:29,040 the thought police, that's who's responsible, don't wish one to do that. 743 00:55:29,040 --> 00:55:32,840 What I love about it is the way it is attacking all received opinion. 744 00:55:32,840 --> 00:55:37,160 And it really takes seriously something that I think novels are fantastic at, 745 00:55:37,160 --> 00:55:41,040 which is to be a kind of free play of investigation. 746 00:55:41,040 --> 00:55:47,000 And so The Satanic Verses, I think, is an excellent example of something, 747 00:55:47,000 --> 00:55:49,640 of refusing to take seriously what everyone else takes seriously. 748 00:55:49,640 --> 00:55:55,320 29 days later, Ayatollah Khomeini issued his infamous fatwa. 749 00:55:55,320 --> 00:56:01,520 Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, has said the author Salman Rushdie, who lives in Britain, 750 00:56:01,520 --> 00:56:08,040 has been sentenced to death for blaspheming the Muslim faith in his novel The Satanic Verses. 751 00:56:08,040 --> 00:56:10,920 In a message broadcast on Tehran radio, the Ayatollah also said... 752 00:56:10,920 --> 00:56:17,280 Rushdie disappeared into a John Le Carre world of safe houses and round-the-clock police protection. 753 00:56:20,120 --> 00:56:25,880 It just opened a kind of range of responses 754 00:56:25,880 --> 00:56:32,360 which even the most blaspheming of the enfants terrible of the '70s had not imagined, 755 00:56:32,360 --> 00:56:34,920 which was, of course, 756 00:56:34,920 --> 00:56:38,200 an outraged response from the people you are defending. 757 00:56:38,200 --> 00:56:42,160 Rushdie had been a brilliant advocate for multiculturalism, 758 00:56:42,160 --> 00:56:46,840 but the people who burnt his books were the people he thought were his followers. 759 00:56:46,840 --> 00:56:51,920 That was just, I think, totally unprecedented and unexpected. 760 00:56:51,920 --> 00:56:56,880 I mean, we thought we were living in a stable, secular age, 761 00:56:56,880 --> 00:56:59,640 but that was something we all missed. 762 00:56:59,640 --> 00:57:02,640 CHANTING AND APPLAUSE 763 00:57:02,640 --> 00:57:07,960 Five months later, and events in Europe were dominating the news. 764 00:57:12,400 --> 00:57:17,720 Scenes like these were described as representing the triumph of democracy, and the end of history. 765 00:57:17,720 --> 00:57:23,640 But as The Satanic Verses affair demonstrated, history refuses to end. 766 00:57:23,640 --> 00:57:30,320 Nevertheless, for the baby boomer generation, who'd only known a bitterly divided Europe, 767 00:57:30,320 --> 00:57:34,480 it felt like an era was drawing to a close. 768 00:57:34,480 --> 00:57:38,680 Ian McEwan witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and, at the time, 769 00:57:38,680 --> 00:57:43,080 realised it marked the beginning of a very different world. 770 00:57:43,080 --> 00:57:47,000 I came here with my mind filled with a novel I was just completing. 771 00:57:47,000 --> 00:57:51,960 Coming back a year later, everything is completely transformed. 772 00:57:51,960 --> 00:57:58,000 And my time here last year has become part of a vanished past, 773 00:57:58,000 --> 00:58:04,160 and has more in common, I suppose, with the mid-'50s, than with now. We stand in a new time... 774 00:58:04,160 --> 00:58:06,160 ECHOING 775 00:58:06,160 --> 00:58:08,400 POP MUSIC PLAYS 776 00:58:08,440 --> 00:58:12,920 For a free Open University booklet, featuring some of our best-loved writers, 777 00:58:12,920 --> 00:58:17,120 or to explore the connections between authors, call... 778 00:58:19,280 --> 00:58:21,880 Or go to... 779 00:58:24,360 --> 00:58:27,200 Follow the links to the Open University. 780 00:58:39,360 --> 00:58:42,400 Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd