Start the Week

04/10/2010

Andrew Marr talks to Jonathan Franzen, hailed as a 'Great American Novelist' for his latest book, Freedom. Amidst the backdrop of the war on terror, environmental disaster and class war, Franzen chronicles the lives, choices and compromises of one family. The playwright Shelagh Stephenson also explores family tensions in her new play, about what happens when a missing child returns home. Philosophy is under attack as advances in neuroscience question many of its assumptions, and yet Barry Smith argues that the science of the mind needs philosophers now more than ever, to make sense of its new discoveries. And Robert Douglas-Fairhurst celebrates the great Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew and his captivating portraits of life on the streets of London.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 41m
Broadcast on:: 04 Oct 2010
Audio Format:: other

Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Freedom. We blather on endlessly about it, but do we can we actually have it? What does it mean? Later on, I'm going to be talking to Jonathan France, an author of Freedom. Hailed as a great American novel, but making headlines over the past few days when it was withdrawn for corrections. A non-final draft had been published by mistake, and since the novel which made Jonathan France and globally famous was The Corrections, the newspapers were a gape. We'll find out more about that. But I really want to concentrate today on the idea of freedom. Sheila Stevenson's new play Enlightenment is about a couple trapped in time by the possible death of their son by Islamist terrorists. It's also a play about terrible liars. Robert Douglas Fairhurst has edited a new edition of the great Henry May Hughes, London Labour and The London Port, which is still a gripping account of lives pinched and deformed by the pressures of staying alive, not much freedom for them. The philosopher Barry Smith challenges the very notion of an autonomous free consciousness making its own decisions in his new radio series on philosophy and neuroscience. Sheila Stevenson, let's start then with this play which is about a relatively ordinary middle-class couple to whom something extraordinary and terrible happens. Yeah, it's about a pretty ordinary comfortable middle-class couple whose son goes off on a gap here. So there's this enormous freedom to travel the world that kids have now, which we didn't have when we were young. Got off around the world. There has been a bomb in Jakarta six months ago. They haven't heard from him since. So they guess he's probably been blown up in the bomb, but as there's no trace of him, they don't know. So the play is actually about people being trapped in a moment, but with no... No way of going forward. They can't go forward and they don't know where he is and they feel they're never going to find him. I don't even wear the whole play, but somebody turns out who they think is their son. Well, they get a message that they found their son and that's the hinge of the play, which is at the end of that one. But the problem with the play in terms of talking about is that it's actually a thriller. It works as a thriller, although it's actually quite, it's more complicated than that obviously. Well, we'll do our very best not to spoil it for anybody. How complicated was it to create a play in which everybody is talking, but everybody is at least potentially lying as well? Difficult for the audience. I mean, in terms of sort of people's idea of what the characters really are like slips constant. Yeah. I mean, one of the characters is... Well, she calls herself a sensitive. I suppose she's we might call her a clairvoy into a medium and I personally didn't believe in medium. So I've made it so that everything she says, she can actually pick up from what they're giving her. I think she believes what she's saying though, if you see what I mean. I don't think she thinks she's lying. I think she actually believes that she's in touch with the other world or something. Everyone is trying to create stories, create narratives, whether it's the main couple trying to make a story which fits, makes a sort of tolerable reality for them about their missing son. Yeah, because I think that, I mean, I've said before, I think human beings are hardwired for narratives so that you give us a situation, you give us a blank piece of paper and what we say is, what does this mean? What's going on here? What's the story? And they have no story about their son, so what they're trying to do is create a story that makes some sort of sense. But all the stories they invent slip away from them because none of them are. There's no facts for them. No facts for them. And then trying to impose a new kind of narrative on it all. There's a very bumptious, intrusive television producer. Yes. You're clearly quite critical of this sort of genre of television docu drama or reality documentary. It's also because I've been interviewed by people before where you sit down and have an interview, add a stencil for you to talk about to play. And their first thing they say always is, hello Sheila, how old are you? Which is completely throwing because you think, what else that got to do with anything? But they're quite particular about it. And they do say, don't worry, I'll look it up. So they start off on a very, very personal level. So it's basically me just getting back at people who've been rude to me in interviews really. But they are the interview, the television woman in this thing is ghastly, really. ghastly. And it's also again about telling stories and creating fictitious stories because in these kinds of television docu dramas or whatever you call them, we're constantly told that so and so is on their own or we're given an authentic meeting between two people bursting into tears. And in fact, people are never on their own because there's always an entire television crew there. And people, if they've been bursting into tears, have done it several times for different angles. And what she does say at one point, maybe we could do reconstruction later when you later on when it's a bit easier for you. So I think that those people don't start off like that. I think the nature of the work they do makes them like that. Thinking about freedom and reading your play, I came to the conclusion that your notion was that while we may think we have freedom, we are all of us, most of the time trapped inside stories that we are constantly writing and over which we don't have control. Yes. And I also think we're trapped because we don't understand the fact that the world is interconnected and much more so than it was before. We don't know what affects things on the other side of the world are having on us at any given moment because we only live in our own little personal bubble. So what did the rest of us make of this? I was interested in that notion of the freedom of telling stories in the theatre as opposed to television. There's that wonderful opening image of the bouncing tennis balls, which gradually become more and more else of sync. It reminded me of that line in the Duchess of Malphie, "We are merely the stars tennis balls struck and banded, which way pleased them." But of course here it's not fate, it's physics, isn't it? It's those tiny, ungovernable forces that make it impossible to know exactly what's going to happen. And I wondered what about the theatre? Is that why you're attracted to these ideas in the theatre because the theatre always allows the same set of events to have a slightly different outcome? Yeah, but I think I'm just quite interested in science really because I didn't really know anything about science so it's a territory, I'm interested in it. But it is very interesting that sort of quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, all of that, have infected fiction, drama, storytelling, and are now as important to us as the old sort of optimistic progress, wig-ish ideas that used to infect things. I mean, you call the play Enlightenment, but it's an ironic title. It's an ironic title though, it is about a form of enlightenment, not an 18th century form of enlightenment. Mary. Yeah, no, I'm interested that at the end of the play you've got somebody who's rather skeptical about enlightenment, she's skeptical about the woman whose life she's been reading about and thinking about, was searching for peace, wanted enlightenment, and now she says, "Well, it's really not like that. We can't make sense of things in a rational way. We actually realise there are a lot of contingencies, a lot of sort of separate facts, and they all somehow just have to be born rather than made into an intelligible separate story." And that seems to be part of the play is the idea that there's something very familiar, very comfortable, and it feels as though it's inevitable, and then suddenly it's rendered apart, you tear away the surface, and something enters their lives that make them feel what was so familiar is actually very, very fragile and very vulnerable. Yes, but I think that she does reach a form of enlightenment, and it's an enlightenment of acceptance. You mentioned, Robert mentioned earlier on Webster's Duchess of Malphie, I'll throw at you another Jacobian Middleton. This is also a play about a changeling, isn't it? Yes. Someone who comes in from outside, and is the cuckoo in the nest, and that is, I'm interested in how not just Shakespeare, but the Jacobians still hang over quite a lot of our, you can't quite get away from their influence anywhere, can you? You can't, I mean even Pinter, because it's to do with people coming in from the outside, uninvited. Well, let's move to another great, great writer. Henry Mayhew, who's London Lives in the London Poor, is one of the great Victorian works up there with early Dickens and certainly with Thackeray and all the rest of it. Robert Douglas Fairhurst, you've edited this new edition, a very attractive new edition with lots of nice pictures and stuff in it as well, of the great book, and in your introduction you paint a portrait of Henry Mayhew. I had no idea what Henry Mayhew was really like, and he's not an entirely admirable figure is he? No, I mean there were many Mayhew's, the problem that we haven't tried to pin him down is that lots of different Mayhews inhabited the same skin and sort of fought for space and fought for people's attention. There was the establishment man, the sober man, who wanted to divide the world up into nice orderly categories. There was the maverick, the outsider, who took pleasure in those quirky little details, the eccentric individuals. The problem we've got in trying to pin him down is that he couldn't quite do it himself. He spent most of the first half of his life flitting from one thing to the next, never really settling on anything. He was born in 1812, which we now associate with overtures. Most of his life was a series of overtures, a series of full starts that fizzled out. He started off being an editor, a journalist, a playwright, a novelist, he tried almost everything. He failed at almost everything and it was only when he was asked to write a letter for the Morning Chronicle, a liberal campaigning newspaper in 1849 that he found some kind of direction for himself. And what is wonderful about this is the immediacy and the sort of stench of the street with the ham sandwich sellers and the one legged Italians and the vagrants and the rat catchers and the dog collar sellers and all the rest of it. But it struck me that Victorian London, a sort of pollulating, very, very unfair place with not much freedom for people who didn't have a lot of money, was nonetheless sort of varied and colourful in a way that London isn't anymore or any great city isn't anymore because there are simply more trades and more varieties of humanity. No, that's absolutely right. One of the oddities of the book is that all the work, as it evolved, as it mushroomed out of control, was that it reflected in economy in which people were trying to find some kind of niche for themselves. Another course meant that they had to diversify, to specialise, to find something increasingly specific within an increasingly complex. And what I was also struck by is the sort of arc of Henry Mayhew's life. So he's, this work is wonderful, most of it that in any way is wonderful, early reportage going out, actually reporting what he sees and writing in a very, very vivid way. So you get the voices and smells of the streets, which is like early Dickens. And then later in his career, he has this Victorian urge to moralise and sentimentalise everything again. You think of Dickens a bit. And I don't wonder what there was that created that arc, that period, because you can look at Thackeray, you can look at Dickens, you can look at one of my great favourites is the newspaper man, Georgia Gusta Sala, so like Henry Mayhew. And again, ends up as a sort of pompous moraliser. What was it about the Victorian life that turned them all in? Turned them all bad. It's a good question. I mean, he starts off with London Labour and London Paul writing something close to a huge Victorian novel without a plot. It's full of characters and details. This extraordinary kaleidoscopic picture of ordinary life, but without any sense of any kind of organising drive, any purpose, any, any, any end in sight. The only thing that links it all together is Mayhew himself. And in fact, one of the reasons he was so attracted to these, these nei-dew worlds, these, these low lives, is that he was so terrified of becoming one himself. He was only ever a few pounds away from slipping through the cracks of respectability into this world. And one's respectability happens. Maybe that's when the sentimentalising happens along so I've just been slipped into the BBC. I should read this out. BBC would like to apologise to lovers of late Dickens novels for any suggestion that they are terrible or bad. This is not corporation policy. I'm sorry about that. What did the rest of us make of? What were the rest of Barry Smith? Yes, I'm interested in several of the things that we get out of this fascinating detail. We know we know what people ate and drank. We know all the different jobs and trades. But it's his attention to language that's really fascinating. I mean, he's, he takes a long time decomposing what he thinks. Are they the rules that make the special street argo that people use to disguise their talk and their meaning from the police? And he tells you that they reverse the first and second syllables of words. And that's fascinating because in contemporary Paris now in the Boulieu, they do exactly the same. They take the word fam and make it meth. And you know, is this a universal of language? It's very strange. But on Mayhew himself, I'm very puzzled because this is a guy who's writing about the dispossessed, the cheated of sunlight, you know, people down there at the very lowest start of society. But he was also the editor of Punch, very different milieu. And I just wonder how you walk between those two different lives. Well, he was kicked out of Punch after only a short time as the editor. You do get a sense of humour. You get a sense of that same drive for stories and for slightly cartoonish caricatures of people, which obviously you get in early Punch. You get that too in London, Labour and London, poor. And if one thing joins them together, perhaps it's this interest in the occult, in the secret, in the strange, in the hidden world, that a lot of satire involves trying to unpick what people normally take for granted and seeing the opposite side surface and below exactly. And when Gissing talks about the nether world, and when Mayhew talks about the undiscovered country of the poor, they're talking about the same thing. It's not this this world which is strange because it's so far away. It's strange precisely because it is so so close to us. It's just that we it's been beneath our notice. Sheila Stevenson. I think what I found extraordinary about it was that he all this exposure to the poor in London, and it was extraordinary the deprivation. Absolutely extraordinary. There were effects on his social conscience whatsoever. If someone was doing this now, it would be not a very good documentary because it would be quite short and it wouldn't be as wonderful as this. But it would be with the purpose of saying this is dreadful and something must be done. That is interesting. He has no answer to any of this. He is simply an eye roving around and telling you stories. I mean, it's completely different from Booth doing his great survey of the London poor, or Roundtree doing his book on poverty, or indeed Karl Marx and Engels. I mean, bad or good, they've all got solutions of one kind or another. He doesn't and he doesn't seem to be interested. He's a lot more like Boz than he is like Booth. He's much more interested in being this roving consciousness. And you're right. He's not a theorist like Engels. He's not a reformer like Booth. But if we talk about the building of the welfare state, he's part of the foundations. He raises money, but he also raises consciousness. He raises awareness. He's not a theorist, but he's almost an ontologist, a sort of metaphysician of social strata because he's got these categories and he believes that they're exclusive and exhaustive. He's very careful about dividing everybody up into their role, into their strata. He reminds me a little bit of new society back in the 1970s, if anyone remembers that magazine. When they used to go out and they used to have lots and lots of straight reporting, I mean, there was the sort of politics on one side, but there was the straight reporting. And it was also in London, which was just drunk on words, wasn't it? I mean, almost like, we're talking about the Elizabethans and Jacobians, in the same way, this is a society drunk on print. Well, the categories, which you're talking about are extraordinary because the more he tries to divide the world up, the more it starts to slip away from his control. It's like a jigsaw puzzle with an infinite number of pieces, but there's no picture. There's no picture that emerges, which means that every time you try to divide people up into those that can work, those that cannot work, those that will not work, his eyes instantly drawn. First of all, to those who slip between the cracks and secondly, to those picturesque individuals like the man who's terrified that you won't be able to join the army because he's going bold, who are not part of statistically significant proportions. But it's just a much more fun and much more interesting. Yeah, for example, it's always looking for the country example. Absolutely. Well, this takes us very, very neatly on to Barry Smith's wonderful series on neuroscience and philosophy, which is going out on the World Service, well so it's educating the world in these matters. And I suppose the first place, we were talking about things slipping away from us, and the underlying theme of the series seems to me to be that our very notions of self and autonomy and consciousness slip away when you start to investigate them with the inside of the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience. And in making this series, you spend quite a lot of time looking at brain damage of one kind or another. Just start by explaining just why for a philosopher, brain damage and brain problems are so interesting. I think they're interesting because you think as a philosopher, and lots of philosophers certainly have said this, that the starting point is our own experience. This is the thing we know best. We know ourselves best. We might wonder whether our picture of the world is right, but the contents of our own mind, Descartes thought, were so well lit, so well documented to us that there were no shadows in which anything escaped our notice, we saw everything. And the one thing Descartes that you can rely on is what is your thought and your experience, exactly what's in your mind. And of course, this turns out to be largely false. I mean, we are as mistaken about our own experience, as our experience sometimes gives us mistakes about the world around us. And it's neuroscience, and it's often looking at patients with neurological damage that brings this to light, because we realize that something that looks simple, familiar, very easy to comprehend is in fact composite. It's got a number of different parts, and it's sustained by different neurological systems that have to cooperate to produce a single feeling of an integrated experience. If any one of those goes wrong, the experience is radically different. So there isn't autonomous taste that's different from sight and different from smell, and up to a point even from hearing. No, taste is a really good case. In fact, that's what got me into this as a philosopher, because we think of taste as what we get from the sensations on the tongue. In fact, it's nothing like that. Taste is always an amalgam of taste, touch and smell. Probably you're using sight and hearing as well to give you the sense of what you're enjoying. I mean, most people who lose their sense of smell report to the doctor they've lost their taste. And when they're examined, they have salt, sweets are bitter. So you say to them, look, you haven't lost your taste. And they say, yeah, well, that's all I get. That shows you that about 80% of everything else is smell. Now that means that our own experience as we examine it doesn't give us clues as to how it works, where it comes from, and what it's based on. And what about, as it were, the higher integrated levels of consciousness? Well, I think when we're looking at decision making, we have a view of ourselves as conscious choosing agents. We've got our freedom. We decide what to do. And then we instruct the the limbs and then we move. In fact, it's not like that. We start to make preparations for movements many seconds before we ourselves know what we've consciously chosen to do. In fact, I looked at a study with John Dylan Haynes in Berlin. He asked people to choose to press a button left or right at will just make their own choice. And he can tell by scanning them repeatedly, seven seconds in advance, seven seconds advance, which, which way they're going to go with 100% reliability. And so in our daily life, we think we're moving through the day brushing our teeth and getting dressed and going out and getting buses, whatever we're doing. And the story that we are telling ourselves is that we think about something and then do it. But this is an untrue story. We don't have that kind of freedom. Well, there's a question for the philosopher about whether we do have freedom. We don't have the freedom we think we have, namely consciously deciding and choosing and putting everything into operation. It doesn't mean we're not free. It just means that the bits of us that decide are not the conscious bits that we're already starting to make decisions, very often what you say to yourself that you're deciding is a bit of self PR. You've already actually started to move in a certain direction and then you catch up and you narrate it. So we have this tendency to put our own experience together into a certain form that's very familiar and very convenient. When you look at the cases of people with neurological damage and you see how this goes awry, so sometimes they feel their arm is under the control of someone else, that it moves of its own, its own will. Sometimes they feel their arm isn't even theirs. You realize that you need all of these parts collaborating and cooperating to give us that familiar sense of self and agency and self control. And just before we open this up, another very important component of this is simple sort of biological questions like the quantity of dopamine and the extent to which one is thirsty, affect very much consciousness and affect decision making. In fact, you have a suite of decision making systems. You've got the very high level one where you think you're reasoning and weighing everything up and then you've got much more basic sort of Pavlovian systems where you're drawn to something that motivates you in the landscape around you. And actually, being a good reasoner isn't living at the high level. Being a good reasoner is being able to switch appropriately to use the right system in the right time and in the right context. I was interested in this process of mirroring, which you talk about in one of your programs, the way in which the same parts of my brain will fire up if I see someone else doing something. I was wondering how neuroscience then might explain something like the different responses to pornography in which one person might feel desire, one might feel disgust and another might feel some rather uncertain, queasy mixture of the two. Is it that different people's brains are wired differently? Is it that there is some kind of moral sense which might master, might overwhelm the other senses? So the mirror system's interesting because there you've got neurons that fire when you perform an action or you see somebody else perform monkey, say monkey, do neurons as we call them? But these neurons also give you a sense of empathy. So when you smile, I find myself smiling and then I have some of the same feelings inside. And you wonder, well, if this happens so automatically, neural mimicry, why don't we empathize with everybody all the time? And the answer is we sort of do at a low level, but we actually veto that. There are various controlling factors that kind of cut off our tendency to feel with other people so readily. Sheila Stevenson. I think what I was, I was also fascinated in this mirroring thing, but what, because I've got a nasty mind, I suppose, what I interested me was I thought, what about the opposite? If it makes you, is it just empathy? Or is it an explanation of why the idea that you can be that you pick up disgust from people? But you could, that mean you could mirror someone's disgust for an entire section of humanity? You can mirror disgust and disgust is very interesting, because here's a very basic low level system where, you know, if you see somebody smelling something and wincing, you feel a sense of disgust. But that disgust, that sense of tuning into someone else gets modulated. And in fact, you start to metaphorize it. So you start to talk about certain groups of people as disgusting, you start to talk about certain behaviors, disgusting, you move out, but you're mobilizing these really very elementary processes. And because of contagion, emotional contagion, you actually can get yourself into a state that was not of your choosing. Does it have to be real people? I mean, what if I watch a violent computer game? Am I likely to mirror those responses? Yes, exactly, because it's animate and we look at agency in the brain as drawn to agency straight away. I'm not sure whether we can discuss it on the radio, but there is a moment in Jonathan Francis' new novel, which certainly will produce extreme feelings of disgust among people reading it, I think. She said Jonathan Reyes has just joined us. His freedom to come here at the beginning of the program was violated by the London tube stripes. So it's very good that he's made it at the end. The theme of the program has been freedom and the book is called Freedom. It's already been hailed as a great American novel. I have to say, making headlines over the last few days because it was withdrawn for corrections. And since Jonathan Francis' last global success was called corrections. Lots of people said this is very strange, very bizarre. They must start by asking, it isn't some kind of PR stunt list. I mean, the really work corrections that needed to be dealt with. No, no PR stunt. And apparently, not a PR stunt that caused my car not to have materialized this morning. Highlighting the London tube strike. No, no, everyone is tearing their hair at the publisher. And I've read the book. We've already read the book, but how much have we read the wrong book? What was read was what all the editors and book reviewers got. So it's not, it's not really deeply different, but I made maybe 250 changes that were important to me. And important enough to prompt and total recall. You've called this book Freedom. And it's the story of an American family, rather like Sheila Stevenson's play on the surface, relatively normal Midwestern family, whose lives unravel in all sorts of ways. And we won't, again, we won't go through the story because it spoils it. We're going to read it later on. But suffice it to say that this seems to me to be a book in which people are constantly creating their own narratives, writing their own stories as it were in their heads, and indeed in the central case, the book writing her own narrative as part of psychotherapy. Well, yes. And I do uphold the narrative tradition. Listening to Barry, I was trying to think about some of the decisions that are made in the book. And there is one character who essentially takes exactly the line that the decision is made and the decision is made in his pants. And his conscious faculties trot along afterwards, he describes one part of himself knowing long before the rest of him does what he's going to do. At the same time, you do have other characters who are inhabiting. He's the rocker. And he would think that there are other characters who are inhabiting a much more complicated moral world. And there the decisions are stretching over years. And that's when you get into the strength of narrative and to my mind, the weakness of neuroscience in helping explain us to ourselves. Well, you have, I mean, as often in a novel, one of the most interesting and complicated characters is somebody Walter who wants to be good, who thinks of himself as a good man with very strong environmental and liberal principles. And one is constantly questioning throughout this novel, because in some respects, he is sort of physically rather a weak man. Or he's certainly not as impressive as his friend, the rocker. And one wonders the extent to which people use an idea of themselves as the good person, the thinker, the intellectual to compensate for other problems they've got. Well, he's not a completely unattractive man. I think he's a nice person because people who grow up in the Midwest in a certain kind of family have niceness inculcated into them. But like a lot of Americans and both the left and the right in the last decade, he becomes extremely angry. And at one point, he is in fact liberated to try to do something about the things that make him angry. He's given essentially $100 million by a very rich man to try to fix these things. He's previously only been able to get angry about. It's an environmental project in West Virginia, the place I know. And you mention anger because that's another interesting theme. And it's a big issue in American politics. And at certain times, it washes over here as well. The sheer quantity of only vaguely directed anger seems to be sloughing around the American political and media world, probably accelerated by the internet and new technology. I don't know. But everybody seems to be so angry all of the time. And I wonder why you think that is? Well, there are complicated reasons. But certainly one of the theories that crops up in my book is that people who come over to a land to be free and encounter these absolute limits to their freedom. We have no more Wild West, and we also no longer have the hegemonic position in the same way we did 50 years ago. And you've been promised all your life, oh, you can do whatever you want. You're free to invent yourself in whatever ways you like, and you come up against the limits. And everybody gets very angry, particularly on the right, because there's a sort of, you know, don't touch me. Let me carry my gun. Let me drive at high speeds on the wide open roads. And the roads aren't wide open anymore because the country's clogging up with people and in an ever deepening economic crisis. You clearly have great ambitions for the novel as a form. And one of the things that we expect from a big novel is that it raises some uncomfortable big issues that aren't sufficiently discussed elsewhere. And in this case, I suppose we're talking about overpopulation as being central to the environmental problems, something that no politician will ever talk about. You're absolutely right about that. You said in the novel, it's something that apart from the extreme deep greens, any mainstream politician keeps a million miles away from. And yet even in this book, the characters discussing it are hugely morally challenged as they do so. Were you consciously thinking this is actually something we ought to be talking about as a society? And I would like to use the novels one way of launching it into public discourse. Novels are a machine for me for taking people I find lovable and putting them in the most uncomfortable possible situations. And I do that in their emotional lives, but also I have an interest in taking issues that really are intractable, but central, such as the limits to growth, something that no politician, except on the far fringes, is able to deal with, no economic theory is able to deal with. And so yes, certainly overpopulation is this intractable a problem and as untouchable a problem as there is. And that was part of the program to drive my characters to dramatic heights, yes. Reminding me a bit of Wendell Berry, I don't know the great American economist and tobacco farmer and Kentucky writer who deals with this in very similar circumstances to West Virginia. Anyway, what did the rest of us make of this? Barry? Yes, I was kind of struck not by it being the great American novel, which I know you don't like, but for me it was much more like Greek tragedy. You know, you had a feeling of these characters rushing to an inevitable end. You sort of see the ineluctible forces that are going to bring about their destruction. And I'm also interested that the beginning of the book opens with something like a chorus. You have people sort of talking about the characters and if I'm right and I'm on to you, I think that every character gets introduced by somebody else's description of them as if we're always eavesdropping on what somebody else thinks of them, which is a very powerful way of making us pay attention. So there's a sort of Greek drive here and of course just as the Greeks did, they take inevitably then, so then try to make them sensible to the general populace, not because they give an explanation, but they just sort of dramatize it and say, "Look, this is how things are." Yeah, you want an experience. Right. And the novel is not a soapbox. It's a way to provide an experience. It's a way primarily for the writer to have an experience, to figure out how to write it and then equally primarily but next in time for readers, perhaps, to share that experience. Roll it. Going back to freedom, I was interested in the way that the title seems to hang over the novel like a promise or like a threat and sometimes a bit like a curse, and the way in which that term is tugbed this way and that by different characters and different situations. So it becomes increasingly unclear whether it's a question of freedom from something or freedom to do something. And it struck me that there's that moment towards the end of the novel when Walter talks about the internet and cable TV and says there's no communal agreement, there's just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation. And I wonder whether you thought that's what the novel was for? The case for the novel. Exactly. That's what this novel is for, especially. It is. It reflects a sustained conversation and it invites that kind of conversation as well. I would be hard pressed to disagree with that wonderful reading. Yeah, absolutely. We are trying to fashion these large narratives in which you can take some sort of haven from that daily noise for however long it takes to read it and to be restored to the sense that there is the possibility of meaning in a world that seems increasingly resistant to anything more than momentary flickers of meaning. Well, except there is a great thirst for this, this sort of thing. I mean, you know, you could. Apparently, yes, and it's been incredibly heartening. I was not looking forward to the US tour and I came off at feeling perversely almost optimistic about based precisely on the evident hunger for a certain kind of sustaining narrative. Sheila. I think what I found interesting about the whole idea of this as being the great American novel because I completely agree that it's a distraction for a writer, but it's a huge inhibition for a reader and you've no freedom as a reader. You pick up a paper and it says the great American novel and it means that you read it in a very difficult way because your brain is completely split between wanting to enter into this narrative and the other bit of your brain thinking, "Kreiki, is there a theme here? Have I got the wrong theme?" And it's a terrible thing to do to readers as much as it is to do to writers, I think. No, I couldn't agree with you more. It's, I'm at pains to, I really have at several points in front of audiences just shouted out literally, "It's just a novel. It's just a novel. But you can't get it out of your head once it's there." What I suppose, if you take the great out, what a lot of well-made American novels do, which you don't find so often, I think in British novels or continental novels, is they have an intense sense of physicality. We were talking about Henry Mayhew's life, London Labor and the London Poor, earlier on, which is a very, you know, it's a book of smells and tastes and clinks and chinks and physical stuff. And in your novel, and this is why I do think of some American, other American writers like Bello and Updike and Edith Roth, there is a very strong sense of the material presence of characters. You know what one knows as a reader exactly what your characters look like, how they walk, their three-dimensionality, their sort of heft, the way they sit, as well as the details of what they're actually doing. And you build up a very strong material world around them. And I wonder whether that's something that you consciously do, or whether it's about how you envisage the characters in your mind before you start writing. I actually don't have a... I could not tell you how at least one of the main characters looks. I don't know what the main female character looks like. Oh, I do. Well, I'm glad you do. We have her height, but that's about all we have of her. But to me, it really goes back to wanting, before I even start writing, to feel that I love the characters and that the book is primarily character-driven rather than idea-driven. It's a certain kind of intimacy. And I don't know if that's particularly American. You certainly find it in the Russians as well. Yes. And who knows why that is? It could be when you have sort of empire-sized states at some remove from the rest of the world. With your character, Walter, the good character. I was very strongly reminded of Pierre Betsukoff in War and Peace, actually. I thought that, again, you have this business of the fascinating, compromised man who's trying to be good. There I will. Yeah, no. Okay. Go ahead with that. Barry. I wanted to come back to your optimism about people liking the narrative and the search for meaning, because in some way, that's good in another ways. It's likely to be a sort of false friend, because Sheila's play takes this up. We do search for narrative. We look for narratives, but the narratives are often fictions. They're convenient fictions that we have about ourselves. We disguise from ourselves some of the things that make us up and some of the things we depend on. And a crisis is a crisis because you have to rewrite your own story, and also because things pop out, things come through that you weren't seeing. And in your characters, it's very satisfying that we see them in this position, but they don't have freedom. I mean, the title "Freedom's Ironic." Most of them are not free at all. You can see the crisis coming from 100 miles because of their choices, their characters, their backgrounds, all the things that constrain them. And even though they're telling themselves a story that it's all up to them and that they can decide, it looks to me that they can't decide at all, and they just don't know themselves. I think they do come to know themselves. After the fact, though. Well, the Owl of Minerva does fly at dusk. The philosopher I go back to over and over is Nietzsche, and the notion that the mask, and the narrative is a kind of mask, that there's nothing underneath. And my resistance, my support of narrative has to do with this fact that things quickly, so quickly to nothing. But we now know there is something underneath. And neuroscience is actually better at that than you think it is. I mean, you're a little bit out of date. I think about 10 years out of date. I would have agreed with you. But now, we do know a lot of what's going on underneath. We know what's going on underneath. I'm not sure it helps us to live our lives better. We'll see. We'll see. There's been a nasty flutter in the room. The Owl of Minerva has now left, and we've run out of time. Thank you to all my guests today. You can hear Barry Smith's science series on neuroscience, The Mysteries of the Brain on BBC World Service, and there's a link on the start of the week website. Sheila Stevenson's play Enlightenment is on at the Hampstead Theatre in London until the end of October. Robert Douglas Fairhurst's edition of Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, and Jonathan Francine's new novel Freedom, duly corrected, are both out, as they say, in all good bookshops. Now, next week, we're at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, where we'll be discussing history in all its guises, through the literature of Bernard Schlink, author of The Reader, and Sebastian Forks, through the lives of a war hero with Peter Snow, and how history is abused with Margaret Macmillan. But for now, thank you and goodbye.

Producer: Katy Hickman.