Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; John Banville: The Infinites

This evening or gather for a reading with john them from his latest novel The Infinity's introduces Mr. bandos first novel since his Booker Prize winning novel The Sea. It is a story of mortality and immortality and a family gathered for the death of its patriarch with a pantheon of Greek gods hovering unseen. The Sunday Telegraph calls the Infinity is quote a Beethoven string quartet a novel. It deals with huge ideas and in doing so breaks new ground in its own medium. The book has also been called a beautiful immersive read by the Sunday Business Post and The same review goes on lyrical fastidious and occasionally hilarious. There's no doubt that the author's imagination is an infinity of worlds where all possibilities are fulfilled. Mr. vandal is the author of 14 previous novels. He's also written several plays in a non-fiction book about Prague because of wars in addition to the 2005 Man Booker Prize for the sea including the Allied Irish banks prize the American Irish foundation literary worlds and literary awards and the Guardian Prize for

fiction. His book The Book of evidence was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Many of you know Mr. Benvar also publishes amazing thrillers via his alter ego Benjamin Black and Mr. Black will release his fourth thriller entitled elegy for April later this spring. It isn't. Gentlemen thank you so much for joining us this evening. Please join me in welcoming John Vandel. Hello. Thank you all for venturing out on this. Cold. Hard winter. Shorter. Has had from the book become. Rather complicated narrative and you would love to know that this is a very. Simple passage. The central character is. Called Adam Gardley. He's a. Mathematician who has made some extraordinary discoveries. But in this passage he is. Remembering a much simpler past.

His memory his childhood. Adam was a proud diver in the craft. Going down deeper with each dive. There is a lost world there. He sees the sunken roofs and spars the streets recurrent glide to people phosphorescent fish drifting in and out of houses through the rooms. The Seahorse her eyes wide open. He is frightened. He doesn't want to drown because they have drowned. He knows that he soon will. He fears the tide drawing him on. Throwing him on. The grass or turn roads but they slip through his hands slimy and cold. There was a gleam in his Gravel's in the sun. He finds nothing

on this and jagged horrible bits of ball and all around him is soon obscured. His breath is running and. He feels his heart beat. Here's the blood in his veins a hollow rushing roar. He struggles. When the water calls around him heavy chains and ungraspable. Great Bubble burst from his mouth. Mother. He wakes. He wakes to is not working. He is once again in the humpbacked home but the estuary. With its church on her steep roofed jostling house as. He sees it in raw April weather against blue sky was much of the cloud. Eyes wide blue gray fall. From all the chimneys clouds of smoke fly back. His overcoat packed were putting out to sea from here. The wind Ruffo's the widening river

breaking up like. It is all there. Concurrently. I could Toytown the snow globe. He is a child trudging up a hill beside a high great stone wall. He wears a tweed coat with a half of the back and the peaked cap. And pink stockings and tops which are turned down to hide homemade soiled white stick. He has his shirt on his back. It is four o'clock. There are houses on the other side of the shop. It took two streets. Each one said a step higher up than the other. On the front door of one of black crape Boas tied to the knocker with a baseball card attached with the name on it and date written in black. The door is a job. Where someone has died and any one may go into view the course. The town drunk. So was there a first for a free drink

in which to toast the dead man on his way. He stops and stands on looking at her as. He could go in. He could just push open the door and walk straight into the parlor. And there would be someone there a woman wearing black standing with her hands folded in front of her her eyes pink and her nostrils inflamed along the edges. He would shake her hand and murmur something in the not even the words. He will cross the room the school shoes squeaking and gazed down St.. The third person laid out in the coffin in his own will suit his waxen knuckles white and round with a rosary. And there would be that smell of lilies and the ashes which the recently dead give or which he placed is always there when someone has died. The woman would offer him cake on a plate and come with tepid lemonade. There will be others there before him sitting in the gloom and straight chairs ranged against the wall gripping whisky

glasses and red fists or dancing cups and saucers on their knees sighing and shifting murmuring pious complacency that set his teeth on edge. But he does not cross the road. Instead he turns and walks on up the long hill towards home. Spring winds flowed through the streets like weightless water. In the blude air of a pole. The trees tremble. The were black branches pounded with puffs of green. The tarmac shines. A strong gust pummels the window panes making them shiver and throw off masses of light. In the priest's car passes its tires fizzing on the wet road. The boys salutes dutifully in return as gravely blast. As a reflective cloud slides smoothly fishlike over the windscreen. Of an old black coat and corduroy trousers that are bald on the knees comes out of the

Churchgate with a spade over his shoulder without stopping. He leans sideways and shoves one nostril with a finger pressed along the side of it from the other expertly. Injectables are not. All lost or were all. The house stones in a crooked straight wedged narrow alley between its tall neighbors as if it is decided in there one day and stayed put. He slides his hand through the letterbox. It gives him a sheer terror of it. And finishes up the key that hangs inside on the string. In the hall. The familiar smells medium. For Polish blacklead So gas from the kitchen stove. He hangs his coat and cap on who throws his satchel on the floor. His mother in her apron. A strand of hair come loose from a bone. Why was the back of her hand across her cheek. She gives him the look that she always does suspicious skeptical and desperate.

He walks his fingers on the table. His father is in the back room propped against pillows on a makeshift bed made up for him in a brown leather sofa in the corner. His big hands spread out flat in front of him on the blanket. The boy. Thinks of the crate both on the locker. And. Himself. Standing in the parlor here in this Sunday suit and with the smell of ashes and lilies. His father stirs sighs and makes a slithering sound in his throat. The band car in the grate has a frightening glare. It's hard and the cokers of a hot stick caught. In the window there was a touch of late afternoon sky. Between blue and the. The most wore on top of which is mother's hands making this nest and hind end is. The gooseberry bushes or the potato drills. Cabbages gone to seed and grown as

tall as Casco candles. Then the fields behind them the rocky hills and then beyond that again elsewhere. The first president that he can remember getting is a clay pipe. It must've been his birthday. His sister took him to the back in a shop and voted for him with money. The mother had given her. It came with a box cardboard part of so pissed off for blowing bubbles. In the garden by the hen house. He tried. At first he could not get the hang of it. Then suddenly did. The bubbles hesitate on the rim of the pipe pole wobbling flat belly then broke free floating sedately away. They seemed to be rotating inside themselves as if the top was always too heavy and the iridescence surface kept cascading down the sides. Sometimes two of them stuck together and form the fat trembling shape. Something like an hourglass only

squawker. When they were made when an earthly substance a transparent Quiksilver impossibly fine and volatile rainbows. Propped against his skin like a wet cold cases. They were another kind of those were. His father died at Christmas time. In the back from the dead in the corner was dismantled leaving the script. So standing in what seemed a gaping hole in the air and no more fires were lit the December days went down. The light in the room congealed and grew steadily dimmer. At the end the man had suddenly lifted himself up from the pillows with starting eyes and called out something in a voice so strong and deep shock to everyone. It was not his voice but said someone else had spoken through him. And Adam's sister burst into tears and ran from the room and his two brother with her grace and bloated dumb looking faces glanced at each other quickly and

seemed to swell. What their father had shouted had seen the name but no one had been able to make it out. He kept on glaring upwards his head shaking and his lips thrust out like a trumpet players and then would fall back and there was a noise as if he were rolling. His mother said the master Christmas usual. She said his father would want it so that Christmas was his favorite time of the year. She baked a cake. Adam helped her measuring out the ingredients on the black and weighing scales with the brass waves that were cool and heavy as he imagined the blues would do. It was night. All outside of Rose and Stone was leaning Rose purplish gray with hoar frost and the jagged stars glittering splintered eyes and the moon high up in the middle of a glistening blue black sky and the small As if shrunken by the cold. His mother stood at the table with their sleeves rolled

mixing in a brown all the dry ingredients he had laid out for. Her head was bent. And he did not realize she was crying until he saw the tears fall into the bowl. First one and then quickly two more making three tiny great craters in the white mixture. Without a word she handed him the wooden spoon and went and sat down by the fireplace with her face turned away from him making no sound. He held the bowl by the rim. Encircling it with his forearm in the way that he had seen her do. When he swallowed the spoon in the Mr.. The tears became three great pellets. The two were quickly absorbed. He did not think he'd ever seen his mother crying before. Him beside his father's grave. She had stood dry. But now he felt embarrassed and uneasy and wished she would stop. And neither spoke. They were

all in the house. He wondered how long it would take before everything in the boat was completely mixed. But what did that mean. Completely mixed. Every Grain of the ingredients would have to be distributed perfectly. The particles of salt and baking soda space just so throughout the flour each one a fixed distance from all the rest. He tried to picture it a solid three dimensional feel supporting a dense and uniform that is a part of those of other shades of white. But what about the flower itself. No two grains of which are alike. How can that be completely mixed. Even if there were no other ingredients present it making their own pattern. And how would he know when that moment of perfect distribution had been achieved. How would he know the instant to stop mixing in order not to upset the equilibrium and throw everything back into disorder. He watched the spoon

going round and round making troughs and peaks and crumbling cliffs and the soft pale powdery mixture. Where were those three tiers now. How well into the mixture were they mixed. Was everything in the world so intricately linked to it that persistently despaired. His mother stood up and blew her nose on her apron without a word took back from him the bowl. And the wooden spoon and began mixing again. His aunt came down from the city for the funeral and stayed on for Christmas. She took over the house direct to the putting on putting up the decorations and the trimming of the tree ordered in a crate of stout bottles of port wine whiskey. Always told the distribution of presents even carved the turkey. By his mother Goch tightlipped and watchful saying nothing. His aunt was not married and worked in the city for a solicitor. She

worked on a great coat with a fox for car and Fox fur trim on the ham. The black tolk with a pearl pinned piece of like they were the front and big shoes with chunky high things. She had an air about her or was angry sorrow. She was lavishly ugly. With a long horse face and a mouth full of outsized teeth. The front ones of which were always packed with lipstick. Her Christmas present to me was a box of. Puzzles made from Langsam shiny steel went into intricate shapes and linked together seemingly inextricably. And so it took him only a moment motionless concentration to see the trick of each pair and to separate them. Which causes them to sniff and frown and make her humming. So. It was voluptuous dissatisfy the way the two dreamings skeins of metal slid apart so smooth with what seemed an oily. And his mind would become

for moment to limitless blue space. Calmly radiant in which transparent forms moved and met and locked and unlocked and passed on to each other in a vast silence. And Lester. His mother not to be outdone by his aunt gave him a little clothbound book of curious and amusing facts about numbers. Here. He first encountered magic square. How strange it was to add up the numbers in the boxes along each side and down each diagonal and covered every time with the same result the same and yet for him Orman's somehow knew. This impression of novelty among identical values he could not account for. How could 15 be different from 15. And yet the difference was there a sort of aura unseen but felt like air. Like warm. Like the breath he breathes the breath sometimes cold and was suffocating in his lungs. So was he for

more fact more conundrums more solutions. He bought books in the library by people with letters after the unpronounceable names. He tried to devise puzzles and problems of his own. The terms eluded him squirmed and rise slipping through the mesh of his mind. He would close his eyes and seemed to be saying if you can dance with figures then too many which don't have grasped nothing but shards shards undersurface and all become clouded and sick with man. He. Counts. The steps it takes him to walk to school. How many times in the course of a class the teacher will say a certain word. On the way home he comes how many cracks there are on the pavement. How many MANY will meet and how many women how many counting beats it will take to get from one telegraph pole to the next. How often that bird and the power chirp before is passed underneath the tree. At night and then he counts his heart beats. The possibility of

accuracy torments him. So many deaths so many die but what before anything is the unit. And then there is the question of time. What for instance is an instant. Hours minutes seconds even. These are comprehensible since they can be measured on a clock. What is meant when people speak of a moment while I take that you see. There are only words of course if they hang about soundless day. Does time flow or is it a succession of stimuluses instance. Moving so swiftly they seem to us to join in an unbroken way. Or is there only one great stillness stretching everywhere in all directions to which we move like swimmers best in an infinite distance see. It isn't very. Wise to take time so different from the time when he's eating a sweet. One of the so many switches in time will cause another cavity.

There are lights in the sky that set out in their sources a billion years ago. But are their lights. No only light. Flowing endlessly moving every instant. Everything blurs around the edges. Everything seeps into everything else. Nothing is separate. The waters of time muddy. The figures flicker and silence. As I've. Mentioned. People and figures. My previous books take chances are getting old. I forget what I have done before. Well you know it's an ongoing process. There's only one book and there are volumes and the one large volume. I think every artist is aware that. What. He or she is doing is assembling a. One great volume of one great. Series of

paintings and one great. Symphony great string quartet. The notion that we keep track of. What we're doing and separate things. To do it. As I say we're getting old and I forget. Holeman forget half of it. I think that this is this is always a. Team by market we imagine the way that we live that we act that we make decisions that we are in control of I guess. Whereas in fact. Life is drift. Gloriously it's drift. We are. Constantly deluded that we are living our life. But in fact our life is living US. I suppose when I was younger I thought this was a scandal. Now I think. It's. Wonderful. Life becomes more. I can assure you you're a lot younger than the old one

gets more life becomes dreamlike. This is quite. Quite sweet. I mean my brother who is eight years old at the time I remember about. 10 years ago him saying to me that his dreams of becoming more and more powerful and he felt that these dreams were. The ante room to death. They were way of gentle way of life leading him. Out of life. And. At the time that seemed to me very fanciful but now. 10 years later I think that it is true to a certain extent. Who said. My brother is. No I saw it for lunch the other day he's still saying the same thing. He's only 77 which nowadays is no noise at all. So he'll be dreaming for a long time that there is. A softening and I think. An increasing tenderness in one's life in one's. Attitude towards oneself

one forgives oneself more than one dead woman's hair. So you. Must be a young person so we're in the road you know be reassured. Getting old has its. Company and its consolation. Well you see I was quite surprised when people began to read the book and told me how funny it was because I got all my books is quite funny. I mean I don't you know I don't get a love from them but I think they are. I think the Novum form essentially is a comic form. Even the most tragic of novels is still a comic form. I suppose because of a certain. Fundamental level. Novels are about our delusions about ourselves. And delusion is always comic. And I'm not quite sure that that's something I'm still. Thinking about. But.

Yes I suppose this is. More. Or I hate to use but I suppose a more lighthearted book is more playful. I like the notion of the gods playing with our sandbox playing with the gods. I mean for those of you who haven't read it the book is. Mezuzahs fall in love with. Adam Garveys daughter in law girl my sexy. It was my agent. This. Agent is this I'm in love with her and I think he comes to earth to spend a night of passion with her. Bringing Hermes and Hermes is the narrator in the book. And then turned and some of the gods are there throughout the book. I. Love this conceit. I love the notion of the gods being here because I. Think this is where I have to be very careful I mean I'm not mystical I'm not religious but I do feel.

Constantly the presence of the gods and I've always felt this when I was. Young I remember taking my dog for a walk. Talking about my dog my dog died in 1980 nice to dream about. He was one of the guards. And he's in his books and this book was as the dog Rex. I remember taking my dog for a walk and. I was walking through kind of what you'd call it in. America sort of gully between. High trees on both sides and when. Suddenly went through. And I can see exactly where the gods why the Greeks invented gods. This was a garden on his way somewhere else. And. I love the notion that the Greeks did this extraordinary thing. Are. Three four five thousand years ago. They invented a system. That would explain why explain. But that would account for and accommodate

all our human preoccupations our fears our hopes our choice in the gods the gods. There is a God for everything. Is. An account among the gods and among the myths for everything we feel as human beings. This has never been achieved again. You know monotheism as we know certainly know our time. Perfectly as the notion of monotheism. Is one vengeful God watching over us and making us do so. So really then that is your argument for bringing that paganism. Bring back bring back the gods. I mean I you know I can only be frivolous about this but yet at a certain level I believe that it's in my bones I feel. Again it's very hard to talk about if I say I feel the presence of the gods it makes it seem. Either sentimental or silly or sentimental dingo's and

I don't mean to be any of those things but I do feel that. I'd better not say what I feel. Is a danger to say put down the podium like this and start to say what I feel the voice inside that says John. Shut up. Shut up. Now. Why badging a blog as well as a simple answer to it. I about four five six years ago I began to read or simply know who might not read before. Not many great books which I don't like. I've never actually succeeded in finishing one of them. Got what he called his will among his hard his hard novels. Such as dirties no more than banishes tropic. All of which had been reissued by New York Review Books published in the New York Review books and I recommend them highly to. Extraordinary books that republished about a dozen or so extraordinary books. I think some of the best. High art with the

twentieth century is written by Simoneau under the guise of cheap little novelettes. And I was greatly taken by this. And I thought that I would try to do something like it myself. I haven't got. Some Gnome's. On earthly grasp of. Economy and brevity. I mean he can set a scene in. A line that one of his books to him which opens with. Wish I could call her directly. But you know the commuter crowd is coming out of the station and she was the only one walking in. And immediately you were there you see it. I haven't got that gift I couldn't do it but I thought that I would try to do something like that. I would write a simpler kind of fiction that the world. Would. Be fluent and fluid that would. That I would write with a certain amount of ease and spontaneity rather than.

The hideously. Slow and tortured way which I write these books. When I say Of course I say I hate saying that because people think I was slow tortured. The books in Oslo torture. The slowness in the torture has to do with trying to get them to light. And. Playful. As they can be. I mean that's what art is aimed at is making things simple. So that's why I became French and black at the time I thought that it was kind of. Shooting spree. I thought that I was just. You know going off on a frolic of my own. But looking back I think. I. Think Daniel needed some kind of radical. Shake up and kind of change. And you know it's an experiment it's ongoing I don't know whether you know I may be making a total fool of myself or maybe falling slowly flat on my face. It

doesn't feel that way. The bench and like books are quite proud of their. Craft and. I hope well-crafted Because most. Crime fiction dwarf actually is written with the blunt end of a burnt stick. You know when I try to write. As well as I can it's a good long answer to a short question. But I think that when I started being black I made a pact with myself that I would not write in cliches. Which is probably the reason that books are successful as they should be. Because well you know there is a point that I think I like the process of reading I do it myself I don't like being harassed for certain intervals of a book you know and I want to be the rest in the middle of the page. My brain doesn't not keep churning away. When you read it on dandle book you have to read every line of it. You don't get the point or. I try. And then I'd like to write a book that you could write books that you could. Read with relative ease. But unfortunately when I gave the first letter to my

publisher. He shook his head and said. You know this is no crime fiction. And I said why you said this is this is an art and I thought Christ was. Wasting my time here you know I want to make money and be cheap. Neither of which but I've certainly haven't succeeded in making money. Whether I've been cheap or not expect me to say. More about the state budget literature all Lawrence terrorism. I don't know what you mean. Oh somebody did it. Somebody put something on the web about. Some young guy saying he didn't. I am. I mean there's always some young turk coming snapping at his. Side. People like me. That's quite right and they should come. Actually he did the Guardian wrote me about it.

I remember now he was a young guy who lives in Berlin. He's the son of. Irish people living in England so he's a son of the diaspora essentially and he said that he didn't read you know people like me he didn't name it but it was quite obvious to most people that means being so sad old farts that you should really give up. But that's what that's what the young should be doing was doing it myself and I was his age but he had some points to make. Unfortunately that is. Very crude and scatological language which is unfortunate that the children of the diaspora think that if they use for that her words are. Crudely. Stuff to do with your digestive systems that somehow they would seem you know. Authentically Irish. Of course the Irish don't speak like this at all. Unfortunately it's it's. No point in going over. But

he did have a point and he was saying that that Irish novelists don't write about the current state of Ireland. And I think that's true. And my answer to the Guardian newspaper and they wrote to me about this is to say that. The problem or the glory of your lack of restriction is that you know Irish novels tend to be poetic rather than prosaic. The original was always trying to aspire to the condition of poetry. So are those in most part not interested in you know there's no there's no war and peace is in Doctor Zhivago those rabbit trilogy and we don't seem to be interested in doing that which I find strange. I mean I think that in the present generation there would be somebody angry enough and driven enough to try to write some of the great Irish novel that hasn't been attempted. I can't do it. People

come to be and are. Still writing the sort of the pastoral novel of the 1950s. Did you really want an answer in this the. Boring beyond belief. We do our best. We'd like what we can. We make the best books that we can all we can do. It's after that it's for you to decide whether we're. Worth reading or not. Well when I talk about the way I I'm putting in quotation of something I wrote a great novel what they are. You know John Dos Passos as you say or. Even the sort of bellows. Adventures of Augie March or March in many ways. I think Martin Amis is right. I think it is the Great American Novel or time for good or bad. We don't do that kind of book. You know we don't write that kind of big. All

encompassing novel which is still a literary work but is still you know concerned with. Social political moral issues of the day. We don't do that. We try to write. Poetry. In prose. John McGahern always this is. A verse prose and that is poetry. Point you can happen in either. Since John was a novelist is that it happened more often than prose than it did in poetry and so on. And that's true. So we but you see I can't regret. The absence of the great novel because. I don't. See the point of literature. Showing itself in with political social moral concerns. I think that. The task of literature is to. Here we get into very murky water and data the task of literature is to produce beautiful objects. Beauty has

become one of those. Words that makes us. Blush and stammer. Nowadays it's you know it's. It's like what we think of the word sex or the Victorians. It embarrasses us but I think that still is the duty of the artist is to make beautiful things not to come on. 9/11 or the Boer War you know over the great issue of the day. That's not the sort of the task of the audience is Tuscans the journalist. The task of the historian artist. Knows who my voice is getting. Lower and lower because I realize. Practically none of you is agreeing with me. Initially we are talking to myself. That this is you know this is what I believe and this is what I think that that artist should do is that the program for us is to make. Beautiful things beautiful things. A very strong duty is.

Built into us. Emerson has a wonderful passage which I wish I could. Quote verbatim racing. You know we we profess to despise poetry and art and all that stuff. You know we've got ourselves as people of action so he says. Right on the end of a stick. You know for some. Boundary way off trackless desert. Well we'll try to tears. You know he's talking like he says without knowing it we are all committed to poetry and beauty. And I think this is absolutely true. This is this seems to me. If the artist has any dignity to anything other than making it hard. Then it's that has to make beauty and to assert. The sensuality and beauty in our lives. You know and Pete is not with Muslims and Jews and all that stuff is a hard thing. It's it's.

It's at the basis of all of our times. So I am beginning to feel like a preacher by my snake oil. Anyway that's that's what it is worth. That's my pathetic belief. The duty of the artist is not going to win me the Nobel Prize. I'm never going to be a. Mover and shaker. I'm not going to never be things back in my books. You know addresses the great questions of the day. Because I don't think that's what art is for. I really don't. And I think that you know the greatest novel about say the Boer War which in its time was you know as important as 9/11 or Vietnam or Iraq or anything that was written about the war and all this is said had to write about war. We've now been deservedly forgotten. The war was a terrible terrible thing cruel war. But

the novelist wasn't doing anything about that it wasn't any adding to any of her knowledge about the bomb. And I don't believe that the writers is writing about current great events are. Adding to our knowledge either. They just simply amusing us. They again for those who haven't read it the book is intended is. Originally I was going to base the book quite. Closely on the fun of great. Drama tension and fiction as one of the kind that is not known in the English speaking world. Except to a very small number of people with a great tragedy. It has completely eclipsed him. Christ was certainly pitching as is his masterpiece his masterpiece of European literature or world of nature. It's a strange dark comedy of Christ's ambition was

to blend. Greek drama with Shooks Shakespearean burlesque. In the picture and he succeeds Absolutely. The God uses the Roman names gone Jupiter falls in love with our community. The. Wife pitching the team in general. He comes and spends the night with her. In the guise of her husband. Next morning. It's wonderful life. And it's not quite as old as me Moliere has done it. But in the morning pigeon comes home and expectedly and warms. Up and he says to potholing so soon. He says What do you mean I've been away for nine months and she says that last night. He says what about her husband. And she says I love the people together. So that then begins the hideous. Comedy that. Goes on through an extraordinarily intricate plot beautiful plot

and then pinchin it's tragic in the sense that she loses everything. Lose his wife lose his identity. So I was going to base this novel quite closely on that. And then of course fiction has its own demands and interest in the way but inside the book there is a skeleton of. This play baptized Christ and picture. I do think Kleist is. For those of you who don't know him and maybe you than I am here Harvard scholars for all I know. That we're talking to a had. But for those of you who don't know him I really do recommend There are three or four quite good translations of him to train his marbles marvelous. As I said dark comic deeply disturbing. And. Christ wrote in I was talking to

David Rice about Christ in his essay and I said which is by three or four pages long. He wrote one of the great. Novelists pre-modern documents texts that say more about. The naive and sentimental. Post about Shinoda and a much longer text. Anyway you did ask me to say something about Christ and that said those of you who are falling asleep can wake up and stop talking. But. The question is I'm writing a novel about a novel ice don't hold liking the characters do I end up liking them or I'm. It's a good question an interesting question because curiously in this book I said to my intense surprise. This may simply be. I can't do with age I felt at the end of the book that I.

Kind of missed them when they were when they were gone. I never found that before. I realize. That they praised myself for a moment. I'm almost enough to admit that all the characters are me. They have to be me. I'm the only material that I have to work with. I could be you or my wife or my children. I can only be me so I have to generate them myself in the way that we generate the creatures of our dreams. And as we know the creatures in our dreams can be extraordinarily persuasive but strange. I mean strange to us and familiar. But in this kind of formless grow in me for these characters I quite like them. And I felt. That. I felt a kind of. Nostalgia for them. I felt kind of sadness for them. There's a

character called Petra. She's 19 years old. She's a. She cuts herself you know she's a self-harmers his. She's in a lot of trouble and there's a terrible sentence in it which I didn't really want to write but. Hermies the and said you know she would soon be with us because we love her. So she's obviously not going to live for long on the end of the book. I'm quite sad about that which is a new. Sensation to me because they say it may simply be you know because we have found old man haven't got the stuff at the end of the year you know just a silly old prosper. Always completely different. I've been told that those scratches there's a page for. The whole day and we'll have a couple of hundred words and he's lucky. Most of which she will change next day. I would like.

To know. The hoarding. Or he just. Writes away like blazes. No that's not true. Like as a craftsman he writes. What I hope is a good clean. Solid prose. Crafting prose. And you know in a way. There's more need for craftsman than the rest for artists in the world. So I've been to black. I've invented a craftsman I quite like and I quite like Benjamin Black Books. I hate those books. I really do. I mean people always think. That I'm striking pose. I'm not really low on those books they're standing in front of me that I a series of. Terrible sins behind me or tombstone or something because they're all wrong. Or wrong. There's a wonderful finish on this. There's a wonderful cartoon by Guy Larson which is in two parts. I get it ourselves. Great Genius

great genius. He should be getting the Nobel Prize. It's both things are bad. Talking to as far back and the flowers are all you know wonderful. They have human faces all smiling and beautiful. And it says you know how we see flowers in the bottom of the flowers or snaggletooth across how flowers see themselves. And that's why my books are to me. You may see them as beautiful and I hope you do. I see them was horribly botched. One last thing I should add. Of course I think my books are better than everybody else's. I'm just not good enough for me.