Start the Week

04/07/2011

Andrew Marr talks to the science fiction writer China Mieville, whose latest planetary creation explores the links between language and thought, and asks what it means to have no concept of lying. AN Wilson explores a world closer to home, but no less alien, medieval Florence, as he tries to uncover the life and work of Dante. Jonathan Bates' play, Being Shakespeare also attempts to bring to life the work of the Bard and the real man behind the legend, by placing him in his historical context. And the prize-winning poet Jo Shapcott argues for the transformative nature of poetry. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 43m
Broadcast on:: 04 Jul 2011
Audio Format:: other

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The comprehensiveness of the program prepared me so well for medical school. Explore over 300 programs at asuonline.asu.edu. Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, it's our last program of the summer, and I'm joined by some wonderful writers today by the poet Joe Shapcott, whose latest collection of mutability won the Costa Prize this year, and by the science fiction writer, China Mievil, who's been compared with Kafka and Orwell, and whose new novel features creatures who cannot lie. But we're going to start with one of the great perennial questions. How much, if anything, do we need to know about the lives of great writers to fully appreciate their work? Jonathan Bate is one of our best Shakespearean scholars, and he's written The One Man Show Being Shakespeare, currently being performed by Simon Callow. But we're going to start with one of the very few writers who rivals Shakespeare, Dante, subject of A New Biography by A. N. Wilson. Andrew, your proposition is to understand Dante, but particularly Paradise Lost. You've got to, sort of the comedy, I should say, you've got to understand the medieval world, and the medieval world is slipping away from us. I think that's true. I mean, Dante was a very extraordinary figure in the history of Europe, because he was arguably one of the great poets, such as Shakespeare and Jota, but he was also one of those figures, one thinks of it this week, particularly in, in Radio Four terms, because of Ansan Suu Kyi's Reeth lectures. He was one of those figures who stood out alone against a totally corrupt political system, but like Solzhenitsyn did in the Soviet days. And people read this poem, The Divine Comedy, partly as a political thing. So that, I think, unless you understand what the setup was during his lifetime, it is quite hard to grasp why he was so angry and why he'd been chucked out of Florence. And it's again very topical, because at the basis of it all was the question of the European currency. That was the central fact that the emperor alone could license money, could mint money. And there hadn't been an emperor since 1250, Dante was born in 1265. So for the first half of his life, when he was a rising politician, as well as a great young poet, Florence, hence Florence, was the place where money was minted. So who controlled Florence, controlled Italy and Europe and ultimately the world. And that's why the popes and the would-be emperors were fighting to get the Florentines on side. Because all the money in Europe, the only coin which anybody could exchange for value, was the Florin from Florence. That's why Florence was the richest, biggest, most important city in Europe. And that's why he felt with his rather old-fashioned, foliation Christian views, he felt that Florence had given itself over to gold and money and been utterly destroyed and lost its soul. And in the course of that, of course, he lost his own position in the extremely... I didn't realize until I was reading a book, I'd forgotten quite how violent and extreme the politics of Florence were, not simply between the pro-Papal party and the pro-Emperor party, but within the parties as well, the black and the white. Within the parties which were complicated, but actually the story of Dante is quite simple, namely that his father, who was a money lender, in fact he kept pretty dark, married him off when he was about 12 years old or betrothed him to one of these big mafia-style families, the Donati. And that was both the mating of them, the Dante family, the Alidieri. But it was also the undoing of Dante Alidieri when he grew up, because he quarreled with this man, they called Il Barone, the Baron, who was a very nasty piece of work indeed, Donati, who was his cousin, his wife's cousin. Other members of the family, who also come into the poem, he loved the... Forreza Donati, who was one of his best muckers, as a rising young writer, and he swapped Donati jokes and sex poems and jokes about their impotence or otherwise, and so forth. I mean, it's wrong to think of Dante as two Solomon figure. He wasn't. And tell us about Pope Boniface VIII, because he's the allegrates sort of villain of the figure. Well, he is down to his bet noir. He was the pope at the time when Dante, who was a very serious politician, when he was in his 30s, wanting to control Florence, Corso Donati and the Pope stitched Dante up. The Pope, all the popes in the Middle Ages, except one, were canon lawyers. The Pope wanted to control not only the Italian peninsula, but Europe itself, and he was a very smooth operator Boniface VIII. He'd done all sorts of things. He'd been to England, he'd been to Portugal, he'd been all over Europe, with his finger in every pie. Very tall, gay, probably an atheist, which I think probably helps if he'll poke, which is otherwise totally cynical. And Dante abominated him. The poem is set in the A1300. They just invented the idea of poetry about 50 years before, and Dante makes the idea of poetry into a very beautiful one, and the most catholic idea of poetry doesn't really come from the church. It actually comes from Dante that I didn't realize there. But the Pope suddenly saw the enormous cash value of this. You couldn't get to the holy loungers of the Crusades going on. He quarrel with the Eastern church, so in order to save your soul and get time off poetry, come to Rome for the holy year, and in that year A1300 at Easter, when Dante went with the pilgrims and he distrives it all, they were priests in the main pilgrim centers with rakes, literally raking money off the office. And that was an image which stays in your head, I think. For the modern reader, Dante, I mean, you remind us how intensely important the politics of the time are the European politics, but also the great religious questions of the time. For a reader who is not a Christian, how much is there in Dante? Well, there's everything, because what he's writing about is human experience. This journey he makes through the three regions, which are mythological regions. Hell, poetry, heaven. It's the journey that we all make. The poem doesn't begin in the middle of my life, it begins in the middle of our life. Now, let's all come in Dinostra, Vita, and we all have the experience of total disillusionment and possible hell. In the dark wood. In the dark wood, we all do through a poetry, and we all hope to get to some kind of self-fulfillment and realization. And for Dante, it was a revisitation of his childhood friendships and loves, and a rediscovery of what love is, and that's the central quest of his poem, to rediscover the love that he knew as a child for this little girl called Beatrice. And if that's not important and central to everybody, I don't know what it is. Use Proust a lot as a comparison. He's very like Proust. He's very like Proust, indeed, in that his personal vision is used and generalized to become the vision that we all share. So, although, of course, he's one of the great features of Christian literature, you don't have to be a Christian to understand what he's writing about, anymore than you have to be a Hindu to understand the body of our Deeta. Jonathan Begg. Yes, you call the Bible Dante in love, and when I picked it up, I thought, or maybe if it's going to be a novel trying to imagine what it was like for Dante being in love, and although your conversation with Andrew has mostly been about the public historical side of the poem, you are actually trying to get a sense of what love meant to Dante. But isn't that a problem in the ideas of being in love and what love means, and particularly being in love with a little nine-year-old girl, these are things that change through time. How did you set about trying to get inside the mind of Dante? One of the fascinating things about Dante, unlike Shakespeare, on whom you're an expert, is that he tells us so much about himself, and all the early work of Dante were either love poems, either the Joti love poems that I've described, or very serious love poems about what is the nature of love, and was Plato right about love, or they were prose commentaries on these works in which he tells us the story of his life over and over again. So he was an arch-80ist, and there's an awful lot of material, as a matter of fact, for a modern investigator. So the funny thing about him, you say surely the ideas of love change over the years, well they do, but on another level, when you listen to instead of Radio 4, Paris thought, if you were listening to Radio 1, most of the songs you'd have heard this morning would have been love songs, and many of the ideas in pop songs and rock music about love actually stem from Dante, in many ways he invented the idea of romantic love as something that can shave our lives, and most people do think that the important thing in our journey through this dark wood is to find somebody to love, and to find somebody who will help us to know what love means, and you could say he was the inventor of that idea, certainly the popularizer of it. Joe Shapkont. Yes, and he was also the inventor of the verse form that he uses in the comedy, and I was fascinated by how you described it as a verse form which allows you to say and another thing, and another thing, because it's those three line stanzas interlocking with a rhyme carried over to each stanza, it's hard to do in English because we have so many a smaller proportion of rhyming words, and I wonder how far you thought that gets in the way for the English reader that translations can't really express what you would find in Italian? I think that that's a very important point, and on the whole the best translations of Dante for the English reader are the ones that don't try. Her own Dorothy L, Dorothy L says, who wrote a jolly good effort in Tatsarimo in this first form that Dante invented, it's pretty excruciating after a few pages. So I started, I used to put me off Dante when I was young. Many people who think he's awful actually are hating Dorothy L. Sorry, I was just wondering, you stress very much the importance of the social context in understanding him, and I'm wondering about the elision between understanding him and appreciating him at the level of poetry, because you also talk about how he's been reinvented for every era, and I was really interested in his reclamation by Elliot and Pound as the first modernist, for example, and I was wondering whether you would see that as a misprision or a violence to Dante or perfectly reasonable readings, but that you want to also add this focus on context or whether they pull against each other? Well that's a central question actually, isn't it, about any kind of reading, because are we making up the text that we read, and that obviously one of the great things about traditional theory was that we the readers are the people who invent the text in some ways, that there must be some element of truth in that, on the other hand you've got to balance this against what did the author intend, sometimes you can't tell what the author intended, but in Dante's case you can, because he writes so clearly and so often about what the actual intention is. Well let's move from Dante about whom, as Andrew Ruchen has said, we know so much, to Shakespeare about whom conventionally we're told we know almost nothing at all, but Jonathan Beit, you've been made a lifelong study of Shakespeare, and in this performance by Simon Callow, which you've written, being Shakespeare, you argue pretty vociferously that actually we know more about Shakespeare's life than we think we do. Yeah that's right, we know more about Shakespeare than we think we do. The problem is that the documents about Shakespeare's life that survive are basic stuff to do with records of birth, marriage, death, property transactions, business deals, being late on his tax return, that sort of thing, they don't really take us to his interior life, so how do we get to Shakespeare's interior life? Well we have his works, which must at some level be a witness to his interior life, but the problem, the trick, is that plays are not confessions or dairies or autobiographies, that the ways in which the plays reveal the interior life are indirect, and that's why there are so many puzzles and questions, and why in a way we have to come up the question from a sort of odd angle, although having said that, for me the starting point in writing the play and trying to sort of dramatize the journey of Shakespeare's life was the realization that there is a character in Shakespeare, in The Merry Rives of Windsor, who is a clever schoolboy called William, who is given a Latin lesson by a Welsh schoolmaster. William Shakespeare was a clever schoolboy called William, who had a Welsh schoolmaster, and that scene, lovely little sort of comic Latin scene, was my starting point for thinking, yes, there is a way of extracting William the Man from the play. Well it's very interesting, because in your play that's a very crucial part, the moment when Simon Callow goes through for us the grammatical education of a young grammar schoolboy at that time, and then starts to relate it to the structure of Shakespearean speeches. Yeah that's right, I mean what I did in the player, and Simon had done this one-man play about Dickens, which was very successful, he asked me to do something similar about Shakespeare when he read my book Soul of the Age, which divided Shakespeare's life into seven ages, as in the famous Seven Ages of Man's speech, and in doing the research for the play, I asked some really basic questions, like what was it like to be a child in Elizabethan England, and of course what you quickly discovered is that young children, boys, were reared entirely by women, by mothers and nursemaids, indeed they wore dresses, but then at the age of seven they would be breached, which meant put into trousers, they would be made male, made masculine, and that would be the moment when they would start having Latin lessons and go into the male environment of the schoolroom. So already there in the just a sort of fact of social history, combined with a detail in a play, you begin to see a pattern of the development of Shakespeare's life. What you don't try to do is to answer or fill in some of the great gaps and questions in Shakespeare's life, the huge period when we know nothing at all about him, after he got married and before he appears as a fully fledged actor in London, but you do, for instance, point to the vast amount of interest in things military in Shakespeare, which is not often talked about, but there's endless armies in fighting and so on, which must lead you at some level to think that missing period must have had some military and possibly traveling part to it. Yeah, that was a sort of discovery for me, having decided to structure the play around the seven ages, the infant, the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the sort of the world of the law, the old man. The soldier sort of seemed to be the one where there was least relevance to Shakespeare's life, but then as you say, the plays are just full of soul, it is not just those history plays that are full of battles, but also, you know, Benedict and his friends in the comedy Much Ado about nothing, they're coming back from the wars. And then also the scene that I think together with that schoolboy scene, the other scene that feels to me most autobiographical in Shakespeare, it's the extraordinary scene in Henry IV part two, where the recruiting officer, Sir John Follstaff, is down in Gloucestershire, on the borders of Gloucestershire and Warwick, which are absolutely in Shakespeare country, recruiting for the militia. And I started doing some work on this and found that the there was something approximating to compulsory national service in the number of people who were in the militia in Elizabethan England. I was astonished by this. Yeah, I mean, there were there were sick on the on the so-called muster roll. There are 600,000 names. Now, given how small the population was compared with how it is now, that in modern terms would be the equivalent of about eight million people, sort of the modern equivalent would be sort of, as it were, compulsorily signed up for the territorial army. I bet you Shakespeare was one of them. Yes. And in terms of the the cloudy area, which is what happened to his marriage and what happened to him in London again, there there being a lack of evidence, probably, for this and the plays, you've by and large skated over there. Yeah, I have, I mean, I didn't want to kind of go too far into, you know, I leave to my wife my second best bed, that sort of thing, because the the question of Shakespeare's marriage is one of those areas where the evidence can be interpreted in diametrically opposite ways. He's very young. She's considerably older. Exactly. And but you know, they have three children before the age of 21. They remain married for the rest of his life, but no more children, subsequently. He's in London working a lot of the time. What he's doing in London, there are rumors that he that he that he has a first, there's a pretty strong likelihood that there was a bisexual element, certainly to his imagination, if not to his behaviour. But the fact is a lot of the other dramatists at the time tended to leave their wives and move on, whereas Shakespeare did always go back. And then returns, of course, right at the end to Stratford, where there's another strange period where he he's basically given up writing. He's slowed down. I mean, we in the play where you're dramatising the life and covering a lot of material in a short space, we we'd like we rather had to compress this. But but actually the idea that Shakespeare retired to Stratford in 1611 and, drowned his books like Prosper and The Tempest, that's not quite true, because what he did was he appointed a successor younger dramatist called John Fletcher as dramatist to his his acting company. And he and Fletcher actually co-wrote some plays into 1613, 1614, that we see Shakespeare in London only a year before his death. It makes me think that Shakespeare regarded the question of being an author as something that was very different from how authors regard themselves. Now his job was to provide the material which kept the company going. And once the company was ticking over and was going with somebody else, the job had been done. So it wasn't a question of I must I must leave for posterity in my works. That's absolutely right. He wasn't at all precious about being an author. He was a consummate professional. The modern equivalent would be the screenwriter, the scriptwriter. And the best business decision of his life was to form a joint stock company. He became a shareholder with his actors and he got a share of the box office. That's the great dream for him. Got a percentage. He got his percentage. Gishap got it. Yeah. Of course we know Shakespeare was an actor and that's a huge part of his life and imagination. And I just wondered what it was like working with an actor like Simon on the play, whether he had special insight or affinity with the language and just the whole sensibility of the fellow actor Shakespeare. Yeah, no he did absolutely. I mean for me it was a a thrill and a fantastic learning experience to develop this in rehearsal with Simon. Precisely for that reason that he always brought an actor's view to it. And in the end the thread that unites all those different ages, all those different aspects of Shakespeare's personality is the idea that we are all players. We are all actors. And sometimes I mean there was a wonderful moment in the rehearsal room when we were doing the famous Henry V once more onto the breach speech. And suddenly Simon saw something that I'd never seen that if you actually look at what King Henry is saying to his men telling them what to do as they go into the battlefield, they are like instructions to an actor. He's telling them what to do with their eyes, their nostrils, exactly, their nostrils. I thought when he said that that was Henry V teaching them how to act. How to act. And the other bit that really struck me was where Simon Callow is saying Shakespeare had the greatest clown of the age and then he does a bit of clowning as well as the young boy actor who was the greatest portrayer of women on the all male stage and so on. It's that bad idea. He's a member of the company so he writes each of those parts knowing who is the actor who's going to create that part. Well following directly on from that I'm wondering about the the form of this piece for you because you're also an academic and a teacher and so on and so is it I mean is this even an answerable question to do you think of this piece as a piece of pedagogy that is performed or did you think of it very much as a performance because there are certain sections where a lot of information is kind of given in a fairly straightforward ways. Shakespeare was this, this, these were the events. I mean the genre was decided for me as it were by Simon Callow asking me to do it. It's a genre that he's very interested in. It goes back to a great actor called Michael McLeermore who performed a thing about Oscar Wilde called The Importance of Being Oscar and in this genre it's a kind of one man show that you just tell the story of the writer's life but then you become their characters. Now I wanted to do something a little more creative at the end of that in my original draft in the final age Simon was actually going to become Shakespeare and speak in Shakespeare's voice. It was going to be the meeting of Shakespeare and Ben Johnson on the last night of Shakespeare's life where Shakespeare would give a kind of apologia for his work and Simon actually liked it but the director didn't the director felt actually risking speaking Coddle, Elizabethan wasn't going to work so we lost that. Very interesting experience because you've all those drafts and you know losing work that you've kind of presumably enjoyed. I've certainly learned about the difference. I appreciate it for himself. One of the things I really like about it is you've brought out the, it's almost actually kind of marks this point in a way that none of these straight Elizabethan writers after the age of patronage has drawn and Philip Sidney, who had done their work unless there had been it's very obvious points unless there had been a theatre and it was this family at all Burbage, which you bring out brilliantly in this play, that they were carpenters and builders and they actually saw the potential of building this dirty great building. I mean it's a huge building in which plays could be performed for profit, hitherto they've been out of doors and so forth. But then you have to get the punters in. They have to arrive with their pennies and you have to give them spectacle. It's a extraordinary new opportunity for a new form of literature to come. I mean it isn't an accident. Well you have the professional entertainment industry for the first time. But it isn't an accident. It's an economic inevitability that there will be great dramatists once you've crossed a great theatre. Well let's move to another professional entertainer now, Joe Shopcard. I don't often describe that way, Joe. But your latest collection of poems of mutability, which won the cost of Book of the Year in 2010, is heavily based on your period of illness. And yet you would argue very strongly against reading biographically back from poems into some sort of biographical truth. You like very much the poem as a separate entity to hang outside the life of the poet? I think that's right. I think actually Jonathan described it very well when he was saying that for Shakespeare the plays are not autobiographical confessions. And I would say that's certainly true of my poems. And he went on to say they're better described as the experiential DNA of the author. And I think that difference is really important and quite interesting. Is that the difference between a poem as being something that is as it were open to attracting many many different personalities, ages, people of both genders and so forth, as against something which is a closed part of one person's experience? I think that's essential. And I think one thing that puts readers off poetry is they think it's a kind of personal code that if they don't have the key they won't ever be able to crack. And I think the more a poem is private confession, a private world, the more the readers are perhaps right to think that. And so I think for my book, although yes you're right, it was obviously informed by the period I spent having treatment for breast cancer. The book never mentions those words while it's breast cancer. But it's more like a series of meditations on mortality, obviously informed by that experience. But I hope it's open to any of us and that's nearly all of us who have shared that experience, whether personally or whether someone we know has died or been very ill. Once a sense of mortality hits you, you don't lose it and I hope the poems express that and that people can relate to them in that way. And these are poems about mortality which emphasise freshness, greenness, life, geography, openness. They're not in any sense, it's not a dark book. It's strangely cheerful, which surprises me even. The title of Mutability was chosen really, in tribute to an artist whose work sort of is a presiding spirit of the book called Helen Chadwick. It was a title of one of her exhibitions. But more than that, the word mutability expresses change and yes, change in terms of decay and mortality. But also as you say, it's kind of green shoots, freshness, could be anything. You're very interested in the notions of geography and a lack of geography. You've said yourself, you don't come like Seamus Heaney from one of those landscapes which were full of loam and clay and which can be reflected in the syllables and the vocatives of the language. But for you, it seems that there was a sort of epiphany moment around the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. And I'd just like you to tell us a little bit about her and that. That's right. I still envy that in Seamus Heaney that he can equate language with landscape. He talks about Val Meadows and there's a sense of rootedness in the poems which is fascinating. But my experience was really as a traveller and it would be too grand in a way to say that I'm a poet of exile like Dante. I couldn't say that but I have travelled, moved around a lot, had a lot of different kinds of English. And certainly when I was younger, I thought perhaps that then meant that I didn't have the qualifications to be a proper poet. So finding a poet like Elizabeth Bishop who also travelled and in fact made that the essence of her aesthetic. So her books are called things like Questions of Travel, Geography 3. And that was a kind of illumination, my kind of light bulb moment that you could actually make a strength of what I previously seen as a disadvantage. And it's a modern, I mean we see it in Dante as an exile too, but it's a kind of modern sensibility. We all move around now. We all hear lots of different English. Very few of us are rooted to one spot for much of our lives. In a way we all stand in front of the mirror in the morning and make ourselves up for that day and it's more than one way. These are poems. They're like being in front of a mirror. They are quite short. They are about a moment and a thought around a moment and perhaps a particular landscape. I'm going to ask you to read one in a moment. But I just wanted before that to ask whether you think that the kind of poetry produced by Dante, that is long, omnivorous, gregarious political poetry about ideas with lots of headlines and characters coming in and out of it. Whether that notion of poetry has really gone for the modern world? No, I would dispute that. I think that kind of poetry is essential. It just so happens in this moment in history that we tend to write shorter poems. But you'll find something that relates to the long poem in that many poetry books are, if you like, like the concept album in music. They are linked and themed and the poems wind around each other and that's something that's relatively new and to that extent I think you can say in a way we're still performing the long poem but it just looks different. I was going to ask you to read a poem now but actually China wants to come in so let's keep the conversation going for a moment. Well just picking up directly on that point. I presume that you spend a long time not just sort of collecting the poems together but thinking about things like order and so on. For me, for example, there's one poem in this collection, Scorpion, that sat there like a strange tooth in a mouth and this is a compliment by the way. There was something so extraordinary about that poem not just in itself but visibly the other poems around it and so on. I'm wondering about that process of how long you spend saying let's put this one here, this one here, swap them around, that sort of thing. It takes ages. In a way, for a book like this the book becomes like a big poem and the sense of ordering the other poems is akin to putting together a short poem and I think a poem like Scorpion is one of those kind of fulcrum poems in which perhaps the whole collection turns so when you read the next poem you will have changed because of the experience of that one and it kind of leads you in. It is like shaving book or like hanging an exhibition actually. You were talking about the importance of Helen Chadwick but it's like creating an exhibition. I think that's exactly right. I mean I think what Joe Shepcroft saying is very important actually in relation to her own work but also to to nowadays and the understanding we have of poetry. Wallace Stevens said that poetry is part of the structure of reality and I think a lot of people who don't read poetry aren't really aware of this. They think that poets are people on the fringes or the margins of life rather than having essential things to say about the actual nature of reality and one of the things about this book is that yes it's all the things that have been said around this table holding up a moment of reality but it reminds us of our mortality through the particular experiences and the particular articulations of each page. To that extent it's just as important an analysis of mortality and mutability as a medical textbook would be. They're both reflecting on the same thing or as a geographical textbook or as a piece of journalism. It's not a kind of a pretty extra poetry. It is actually trying to get to the heart of things. I think that's right and what people forget too is that poems are full of ideas and should be and that we can feel as passionate about ideas as we do when we're in love. I mean you can be in love with an idea and I think Holmes realized that. Wallace Stevens is that sometimes there's a moment in life to put ideas to one side and to understand experience in terms of language. That's right and not always to have notions. That's absolutely true and that even though some of the events in these poems are made up in the sense that doesn't matter because there's a sense of that DNA of experience, to use Jonathan's words. Jo, if you don't read a poem quite quickly I'm going to start to read them for you so you better get going. Which poem are you going to read? I'm going to read a short poem called "I Go Inside the Tree". Indoors for this ash is through the bark. Notice its colour, asphalt or slate in the rain. Then go inside, tasting weather in the tree rings, scoffing years of drought and storm, moving as fast as a woodworm who finds a kick of speed for burrowing into the core, for mouthing pith and sap until the oh my god at the heart. And that reminds us about one other thing before we move on. These are very much bodily poems, aren't they? They're poems about flesh and taste and sense. Very much so and I think perhaps all the works we're discussing today share that kind of interest in creating a texture of a time or an individual and I'm concerned to do that too. Well let's move on to textures and individuals and indeed time of a very different and alienating form. China Mievel's latest book, Embassy Town, takes place on the edge of a vast part of space through which people move in ways we as readers struggle to fully understand. And I'm going to come on to the Ariechi, is that how I say it? That's how I say it, I don't really mind how people say it. Ariechi, who are the key aliens in this science fiction book in a moment but before we get to those, China, somebody picking up this book is going to be confronted quite quickly within the first page and then certainly the first 30 or 40 or 50 pages by many words they won't understand by concepts which seem to slip away and you make the reader work quite hard and that's something that's deliberate presumably. It is and I know that, I mean I would know anyway but I'm not one of those writers who pretends I don't read reviews so I know very much that there are some readers who don't like this at all and you know that fair enough it's to each their own but I do think there tends to be two different sort of kind of wings in a lot of modern fiction which is books that work by essentially kind of recognition and those that work by estrangement and you know you can do really interesting things with both kinds but I think within the science fiction tradition and the fantastic tradition paradoxically quite like the modernist tradition actually although in a very different way that part of the draw is to try to estrange the reader and then speaking for myself as a reader I not only do I not mind that I genuinely like that as long as I don't feel that as long as I feel that the right well what's the point of estrangement? Well I think it I think defamiliarization is a is a well worn and you know well understood sort of technique for kind of potentially radically recasting the everyday and to shake people out of their comfortable notions of reality and I wouldn't want to sound too sort of too sort of self-aggrandizing about it but there it but certainly as a reader it has a similar effect that for example some surrealist texts have I think for me is this you know a sense of the ground underneath your feet being completely unsafe and as long as I trust the writer that either I will come to understand or that it will be part of the effect that I won't understand and that that's okay to me that's tremendously exhilarating well let's turn to the Ariake then who are two headed alien monsters we don't see them full on they're glimpsed more often but the crucial thing about them is that they they have no sense of metaphor they cannot therefore lie because the word is the thing itself just talking to this well I'm for a very long time been very interested in both kind of theories of metaphor and philosophies of language in general but also sort of the crossover of theology and linguistics and these arguments about the Adamic language and you know the language in the Garden of Eden where the word is the thing and this notion essentially that human you know is human language a fall and if it is a fall what kind of fall is it maybe it's maybe it's maybe it's rather a maybe it's rather a good fall you know and so I don't think that the idea of a language without symbolic thought and lying and so on is probably possible in the real world as it were but it struck me as a really interesting way in to sort of taking this notion very very seriously for that for the length of the book to try and kind of examine ideas of consciousness and and personality and symbolism in general because certainly there's a vast difference between the pictogram kind of language where where that where language starts as a drawing of the thing and the language that we all use which is syllabic and the Phoenicians gave it to us and so forth and what you're trying to say is a try to imagine a third form of language outside both of those exactly yes and I think I think I mean I I very much wouldn't want the language of the area okay to be read as code for some particular human language it seems to me to be very importantly not radically different from that and the idea of the there is no difference between the word apple and an apple and therefore and this passes through everything and that that's why they can't lie it's why they can't lie and it's why if they want to use figurative speech at all they have to construct a situation which they can then refer to so you know if you wanted to say oh I feel you know I feel like an angry lion today you would have had to get a lion and make it angry so that you could then say I feel like the angry lion that that exists there you know otherwise you couldn't say it because it didn't exist and one of your characters is assimilate she is assimilate yeah that's what that's so kind of minor celebrity sorry but it is absolutely essential to all the things we've been talking about up to now actually this because there are an awful lot of people who hold the floor in public discourse in the West who are like the ariety I know it's not a satire I know that but it is alien because they think that because the world is out which is the case that language can automatically destroy but if you just get it right and of course that's not the case language is metaphor and we are all as the late of it can shine realized we're all imprisoned in our in language games you can't get outside the language who speak language is metaphor metaphor is our way of understanding the world but of course it's not true and that's where theology and philosophy and all these other things come into your book I mean it is it's wonderfully interesting the the confrontation between the ariety who who are in this blissful innocent world that people at Richard Dawkins or Jonathan I think you can be in and the world of metaphor that the rest of us belong to Jonathan yeah I I must say to begin with I found your book quite difficult and the moment that I kind of got it was when I thought oh what you've done is you've taken an idea from the third book of Gulliver's travels where these people travel around and instead of using words they actually have a bag of things and there so there's no gap between the words and the things and then you've taken an idea from the fourth book of Gulliver's travels these other characters these horses the winners who cannot lie can only speak the truth and you put the two together and I just wondered if that was if you were aware that that was what you're done well I'm very glad you mentioned Gulliver's travels because absolutely I mean you don't write a book about strange creatures that can't lie without the winnoms in your head but there is also a very strong sort of within genre tradition of examining questions of language writers like Ian Watson and various others and the overlap of language and concept concepts and symbolism and so on and so yes that was very much something I wanted to do and sort of cross fertilize it with a with a science fiction or tradition and I was fascinated to by the way you inverted so much of what we experience in terms of metaphor for example the Aureki having two mouths for us that's double and that equals lying but in your construct that's that equals truth and I began to see them almost as walking metaphors they have both the tenor and the vehicle of the metaphor inside them working at the same time although they can't see it because they're they're attached to the concrete yeah well I'm obviously partisan on this question but I think that science fiction is uniquely well placed to examine questions of metaphor and literalizing metaphor and having its cake and eat it that it does metaphor is very well but also sort of glories in the surplus of metaphor the fact that metaphors always escape the symbolic intent of the of the speaker or writer which for me is part of the whole point and what makes them magic in a way that similes and and and allegory is not they wasn't straight but we don't that's that that's well and that's what's so brilliant about this book and we also love we also love metaphors which stretch the furthest the ones which are most unlike in comparison to the thing they're being compared with they excite us most of the bigger the lie the better there's a there's a note to end on we've been stretched as far as we can the BBC Complaints desk is already in meltdown from course and yahoo's around the country but thanks for all my guests china meeville's embassy town and a n wilson's dante in love are both out now and you can see Jonathan Bates being Shakespeare performed by Simon Callow at the Trafalgar studios in london right up until july the 23rd joe shapcot meanwhile is at the leadry pertery festival on saturday this week and that is it from start the week until the autumn we're back on the 12th of september with a special program on russia and the extraordinary life and work of the wonderful writer Vasili Grossman if you want to know how you can come along and hear the recording of its of the program in oxford please visit inevitably the start the week website but for now have a good summer and goodbye at sprouts our shelves are filled with new exciting and delicious discoveries like a new oat milk that's gluten free and sustainable this is that sprouts feeling at Arizona State University we're bringing world-class education from our globally acclaimed faculty to you ranked number one in innovation for 10 consecutive years and number two among public universities for employability ASU isn't just ahead of the curve it's creating new paths to success earn your degree from the nation's most innovative university online that's a 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