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(This episode is marked as explicit because of strong language and sexual content.)
Episode image is a detail of a photograph taken by Charles Adrian.
Recorded on April Fools Day, Charles Adrian reflects on life a week and a bit into the UK’s first official lockdown.
If you would like to do Yoga With Adriene’s 30-Day yoga series along with Charles Adrian, you can find it on YouTube here.
You can listen to Charles Adrian’s now-married older sister Shanta in Page One 152.
Another book by John Wyndham, The Crysalids, is discussed in Page One 68.
Books discussed in this episode were previously discussed in Page One 21, Page One 22 and Page One 23.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 1st April, 2020.
Episode released: 19th May, 2020.
Book listing:
Seven Sweet Things by Shaun Levin (Page One 21)
Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham (Page One 22)
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (Page One 23)
Links:
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello, and welcome to the 161st Page One. This is the 5th Page One In Review. I'm Charles Adrian and I'm recording this, today, on the 1st of April 2020. Or am I? Yes, I am.
It's been... yeah, it's been over a week since I recorded an episode. It hasn't been an empty week. It's been a week of editing and transcribing and uploading, among other things. But there have also been empty days. The weather changed. It was very beautiful and sunny for much of the beginning of last week and then clouds arrived and the temperature dropped and it became a little bit windy and there was some rain. And I think that that affected, not just my mood but my motivation. I... But I have... yeah, I have, today, forced myself to get up onto my little wooden steps here and record another... Not that there's any time pressure to record these episodes. This one that I'm recording today won't go out for weeks. But I just... I don't know, I felt as though if I let too many days go past without recording anything, I would just sink into a kind of affectless funk. I also did Day 1 of Yoga With Adriene's 30-day yoga series today so I am feeling a little bit motivated [laughing] by that.
What else is new? Well, we went into lockdown, finally, last week, on Monday evening - so very soon after I finished recording the previous episode, in fact - and... I mean, there's nothing... you know, nothing very much changed, as far as I'm concerned. The instruction is the same - don't go out unless you absolutely have to - but it was given more sternly and from behind a desk in number 10 Downing Street.
One new and quite specific part of the instruction was that there are to be no weddings under any circumstances while lockdown is in force. So my oldest sister Shanta, who is my guest on the 152nd Page One if you'd like to hear her voice, and who was supposed to be getting married on Tuesday last week, got married immediately. I think there was a certain amount of panic after the announcement was made and then phone calls to the vicar and then she and her fiancé Jamie rushed over the road to the church and... and got married. Which means that they were able to go into lockdown together as man and wife, which is what they wanted to do. It strikes me as something of an intense start to a marriage but I'm very happy for them. And, this week, they... they finished the job, I think, of merging their households, which is to say that their cats now all live in the same place. Jamie has one cat and Shanta has two cats. And I think last week the cats were living separately, but on Monday Jamie moved his cat in. So I think... From what I heard, there was... there was a period when the cats weren't aware of each other, and then there was a certain amount of yowling, and then things calmed down. So that's... And that's the last information I had, which was... that's dated Monday night this week. So I don't know... I hope things were all right yesterday. I feel as though it's the kind of situation in which no news is good news.
So. Right. Let's get on with... Let's [laughing] get on with this episode. I am, kind of... I'm having to really push myself to do this today. The first book...
So, for anybody who's listening for the first time to... either to these Page One In Reviews or to the podcast in general: Hello! Welcome! What I'm doing in these Page One In Review episodes is to go back over all the books that I've been given over the last eight years of doing this podcast by guests who have come on the podcast, and just talking a little bit about them. I'm not reviewing them, despite what the title of these episodes might suggest. And, in fact, as we're discovering, I don't remember an awful lot about quite a lot of these books. So far, I've been talking about books that I was given, you know, right at the beginning of doing this podcast - so that really is eight years ago, or a little bit less perhaps - and it's... it's interesting to me how little stays in my brain. Sometimes I remember whether or not I enjoyed the book, which seems... I mean, that has a value, doesn't it? But I don't always remember the... [laughing] anything about the... the content of the book.
Still, the first book that I want to talk about today...
[page turning]
...is... isn't... isn't... I... it's not one of the ones that I don't remember anything about, but it is one of the ones that I don't remember an awful lot about. It was given to me by Steve Wasserman during the 21st Page One, which we recorded in Hackney at the Wilton Way Café. I think it was written by a friend of his. The author is Shaun Levin and the title of this book is Seven Sweet Things. Which refers, at least in part, to recipes, which are, kind of, interspersed... amongst? Is that the right preposition to use? Amongst the chapters. There's a recipe here for oatmeal cookies, a recipe for - what did I see just here? - lemon and poppy seed cake, there are some fudge cookies, I think... Chocolate coconut fudge bars, they are. I can't remember what the connection between the sweet things and the... the meat, as it were, of the novel - or the novella - is, but presumably the narrator likes to bake things...? Yes, actually, here on page 26, he says:
“I made some cranberry and raisin loaf,” I say.
There we go.
Anyway. [laughs] What I... What I remember about it is that it's... it's a story of a guy who is in some kind of passionately sexual relationship with another guy... When I say passionately sexual, what I remember is that there's a very strong attraction... he's very, very powerfully attracted to this other guy. I don't remember much about the other guy. What I'm going to read later suggests that the other guy is in the closet for most of this... most of this book... is not out and open about his sexuality. So I don't remember whether... whether the guy is... feels the same. [laughs] So I don't remember very much do I? But then... Yeah, so they're in a relationship and then the relationship ends and then, later on, he meets the guy again. And I did remember that later on he met the guy again. That's really the... the bit that sticks in my mind because what I liked about that was the realisation that this kind of powerful, powerful attraction doesn't necessarily last. You might feel it in the absence of the other person but then you meet them again and you realise: “Oh, actually, I... whatever we felt, you know, years ago, when we were... when we were doing this thing is not there anymore.” But nevertheless...
So, I'm going to read a little bit really towards the end of this book. It's a hundred... page 115 of 120 pages. I don't think it'll spoil the... It won't spoil the book if you... if you want to read it. It's still... You know, it's just a... it's just a moment at the end. I mean, I've already spoiled it as much as it can be spoiled. He's... So this guy... I don't remember the name of the narrator but the other guy is called Martin. The narrator is in a relationship with somebody called Greg. He says:
They were calm days, those days with Greg, none of the high drama of jealousy and infatuation and the constant state of clinging I was in with Martin.
So there you go. That gives you a, kind of, resume of the relationship with Martin. And he starts going to the gay sauna and he... he bumps into Martin again - and this, I think, must be a few years later. Little warning here that there's some fairly strong language and some very - what would I call that? - frank sexual content.
Here's page 115:
We are naked in a cubicle. There's a faint whiff of shit in the air, as if some guy's just been fucked, or maybe there's been an accident. Whatever the story, the air is full of pooh. It's repellent, as if the smell were a room in itself, as if you'd entered an altered space - the way the scent of a certain aftershave can transport you. The smell of shit is unnerving; the profoundly intimate in a public space. Aftershave aims for the opposite effect.
“You're not wearing Davidoff's Cool Water,” I say.
“I've still got a bottle at home,” he says.
I want to say that I don't like the scent he's wearing now, that the hint of apple is turning me off. Apples, I want to say, are for pies and fruit salads. But I don't say anything because I want to be here in the cubicle with him. So few of the men I land up having sex with, or bring home, or invite over - none really - are bulkier than me. And Martin is. He is broader and heavier, and even as I have increased in size through enthusiastic gym-going, he has put on weight through comfort and discontent. He's in a sexless relationship with a man quite a few years older than him (yes, he came out of the closet) and he's been working in a job he hates, a City job where they make you feel bad for going home before ten at night.
He is still handsome. But his arse is bigger.
There you go. I also really like the... the shit smell in the sex space. I think that's... there's something [laughing] very... I don't know.... very true about that. The... I don't know whether this is true of all sex spaces but gay sex spaces... they can be quite... there's something... there's a very thin line between erotic and repellent in those spaces because they're public but there is this intimacy of bodies. I think that's really... I think that's a really nice detail.
[page turning]
Okay. The second book that I wanted to talk to you today [sic] was given to me by Will Mackenzie in the 22nd Page One. This is a John Wyndham novel called Trouble With Lichen. This, I think, was the second John Wyndham novel that I'd ever read. I have now read three John Wyndham novels. The first one... So, when I was a teenager I read The Day Of The Triffids, which is probably his most famous book I would say. And then on one other Page One episode which I don't... I don't remember the number of I'm afraid I read The Chrysalids. If you go to... If you're curious, you can go to pageonepodcast.com and look up - there's a... there's a books menu - and if you look up John Wyndham you'll be able to see which... which episode I read The Chrysalids in... or talked about The Chrysalids in - or as part of.
This is Trouble With Lichen and it's... it follows the same kinds of themes that the other two have, which... I think John Wyndham is probably very interested in... first of all in a kind of Frankenstein effect - what happens if scientists create something that goes out of control, what effect is that going to have on the world? - and also just... I mean... I suppose, as part of that, what, kind of, huge - what's the word that we keep hearing...? exponential - what, kind of, exponential effects can a very small cause have? So I think in The Day Of The Triffids it's just... I think a triffid seed falls out of a plane somewhere over Greenland or something and then the catastrophe starts from there. Here, we're talking about some kind of lichen that has anti-aging properties - I think that's the story - and then how that changes the world... society... and so on.
So I think what I want to read is from page 40. This is a Penguin edition of Trouble With Lichen with a very, kind of... I suppose it's a lichen-colour green on the front - it's quite a swampy green - and then a face coming out of a bowl in which there seems to be some frondy material. I don't think of lichen as being particularly frondy but perhaps it is. And that's in, kind of, re... I was going to say ‘in relief’. That's not quite right. It's in... what's the word? It's in... You know, when the... [laughs] It's in negative. It's a negative image. Yeah. The... Anyway. Where... What should be dark is light and what should be light is dark.
So this is a part in the story where Diana, who I think is really the main character... she's a woman... I think there were possibly two moments of discovery. One is hers, which comes after her boss's discovery. Her boss is Francis Saxover and... I think she was working for Francis and I... I've a feeling he made the discovery that the lichen has this anti-aging property and then didn't reveal it. And Diana makes the discovery later - and I assume she does reveal it but I don't remember the details of that. But she's thinking here - or musing on - the ethical implications of revealing something like this.
I think what... what I find interesting about this is the question of, you know, the responsibility that scientists, for example, bear when they make a discovery. Is it up to the discover to think through all the possible implications. I mean, I think that would... that would be impossible, wouldn't it? But, you know, one thinks of nuclear fission or all kinds... you know, that's a... that's a very obvious example, isn't it? But I think artificial fertiliser is another example of a discovery that has changed the world, you know, in positive and negative ways. And so there's a question of whether one should share a discovery that one has made but also, I think, the question of whether one... whether it's possible not to. Whether one can keep that kind of a secret.
So here... Anyway. Here is Diana musing on these sorts of questions. I think Diana has just made the discovery and is wondering what to do about it.
So Diana decided to wait and see. ...
She felt troubled, too, by her ethical position which looked more than a little moot. Not the legal position; there she was fairly and squarely in the wrong. Under the usual clause in her contract any discovery made by her while in the employ of Darr House Developments Ltd became the property of Darr House. Legally, she was aware, she should have handed the whole thing over to Francis straight away. But ethically was different. ... Well, look at it. If she had not dropped the lichen in the milk there'd have been no discovery. If Francis had not brought in the saucer the effect might never been noticed. If she had not noticed it, he would have missed it. She had not stolen Francis's work in any way. Really, you could say, she had been prompted by curiosity into investigating a phenomenon which she had observed for herself. She had worked hard on it, and arrived under her own steam. It struck her as pretty grim to have to let it all go - unless it were really necessary. So she would temporize and see what move Francis intended to make.
Waiting gave more time for thinking; and thinking gave more grounds for uneasiness. She found herself able to stand back a little so that the trees merged into a wood, and a pretty ominous-looking wood it came to seem. Implications that she had never thought of before started to crawl out of it in all directions. Gradually she perceived that Francis must have perceived them too, and she began to have some understanding of the considerations that might be holding him back.
And, little by little, as she went on waiting, the wider view of the whole position built itself up like a jigsaw puzzle in her mind until the vista alarmed her. Only then did she begin to appreciate that this was not just another interesting discovery, but something cardinal: that they were holding one of the most valuable, and explosive, secrets in the world. And only after that was she gradually forced to the realization that Francis, Francis Saxover of all people, did not know what to do with it. ...
Years later she said: ‘I think now that I made a mistake in doing nothing then - in just going on waiting. Once I began to understand a little about the consequences, I should have gone to him, and told him what I'd done. At the very least, it would have given him someone to talk to about it - and that might have helped him decide how to deal with it. But he was a famous man. He was my boss. I was nervous because my position was - well, equivocal, to put it kindly. Worst of all, I was young enough to be badly shocked.’
That, perhaps, was the real barrier. Even back in her schooldays Diana had accepted as an article of faith the proposition that knowledge was no less a gift of God than life itself; from which it followed that the suppression of knowledge was a sin against the light. She would no longer have used such terms to express herself, but the sense of them held firm. The seeker after knowledge did not seek for himself; he was under a special commandment to deliver to all men whatever he might be privileged to learn.
[page turning]
The third book that I want to talk about today was given to me by Jessie Greengrass during the 23rd Page One. I think all these were recorded back in 2012 but... they... some of them went out in 2013 and it's quite possible that they were recorded then. I would record them and, kind of, stack them up, as it were. So this was given to me either in 2012 or 2013. And that's basically me excusing myself for really remembering almost nothing about this one. This is Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.
I remember that I enjoyed it. It's an apocalyptic novel - post-apocalyptic novel, I should say. It's about people living after the apocalypse has come. I can't remember what kind of an apocalypse it is but people are just scrabbling around trying to stay alive, essentially. And there's... I think there are themes of, you know, what is left after all of the systems have broken down - including, you know, what knowledge is left. What do we still know? What do we remember? What do we manage to pass down?
This is written in [laughing] a kind of Eng... well... it's non-standard spelling and I suppose you would say non-standard grammar. I don't know where it's set. It's set... I mean, in England for sure but I think... I think... I have a feeling it's set in the south of England somewhere, possibly Kent, but I don't know why I think that. Oh, here we go:
On March 14th, 1974...
… this is from the Acknowledgments…
I visited Canterbury Cathedral for the first time and saw Dr E. W. Tristram's reconstruction of the fifteenth-century wall painting, The Legend Of Saint Eustace.
There we go. So I... It's quite possible that it is set in Kent if Canterbury Cathedral was the place of the original inspiration, if that's [laughing] what that was.
Okay. Anyway. I think it was... Yes, despite the fact that it's described as “desolate, dangerous and harrowing” on the back, I think this was... I've a feeling this was quite fun, actually.
I'm going to read from chapter 11, which is page 71 in this Bloomsbury edition... Bloomsbury Paperback.
Oh goodness! There's actually a... There's a reproduction here of The Legend Of Saint Eustace. Oh that's interest... I don't think I remembered that that was there at all. [musing] Hmm.
People ask me...
Here we are. This is the Afterword. Sorry, I didn't plan to read this but...
People ask me how I got from St Eustace to Riddley Walker and all I can say is that it's a matter of being friends with your head. Things come into the mind and wait to hook up with other things; there are places that can heighten your responses, and if you let your head go its own way it might, with luck, make interesting connections. On March 14th 1974 I got lucky.
Right. I'm not going to read anything that gives any sense of the plot of this novel, I don't think, but just... I wanted to read you a paragraph that [laughing] ma... just... I felt like it reflected the way I've been feeling the last few days. Here we go. Page 71:
Raining agen it wer nex morning. Theres rains and rains. This 1 wer coming down in a way as took the hart and hoap out of you there were a kynd of brilyants in the grey it wer too hard it wer too else it made you feal like all the tracks in the worl wer out paths nor not a 1 to bring you back. Wel of coarse they are but it don't all ways feal that way. It wer that kynd of morning when peopl wernt jus falling in to what they done naturel they had to work ther selfs in to it. Seamt like a lot of tea got spilt at breakfas nor the talk wernt the userel hummeling and mummeling there wer some thing else in it. Like when you see litening behynt the clouds.
There you go. That just gives you a little taste of the... the prose of Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.
Thank you very much for listening to this, the 5th Page One in Review. I've no idea when I'll record the next one of these episodes but I have every confidence that, by the time you listen to this one, the next one will be in the bag, as it were. Best wishes to all of you and, until next time: bye.
Jingle
Thank you for listening to Page One. For more information about the podcast, go to pageonepodcast.com.
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]