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(This episode is marked as explicit because of strong language.)
Episode image is a detail from a photo by Charles Adrian.
Still living in a Tier 2 city, Charles Adrian talks about three slim books, all of which feature characters who are children.
You can read about The Good Immigrant on Nikesh Shukla’s website here. You can read Darren Chetty on the prevalence of white protagonists on Media Diversified here and you can download Beyond The Secret Garden by Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor here.
Correction: Charles Adrian spoke to Iskandar Sharazuddin about Saga (Volume One) and other books in 2016, not 2015.
If you, like Charles Adrian, are confused about comic book terminology, there is an article about Trade paperbacks on Wikipedia here. If you are near Angoulême in France, meanwhile, and interested in comics and graphic novels, the Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image is well worth a visit; their website is here.
Also mentioned in this episode are the Asterix comics by René Goscinny and Albert Underzo, which you can find out about here, and the Tintin comics by Hergé, which you can find out about here. You can find some thoughts on the racism present in both Asterix and Tintin comics on the Nashville Public Library blog here and some thoughts on the continuing racist depictions of black Africans in Asterix in Publisher’s Weekly here.
Books discussed in this episode were previously discussed in Page One 115, Page One 116 and Page One 117.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 29th October, 2020.
Episode released: 24th November, 2020.
Book listing:
Beside The Sea by Véronique Olmi (trans. Adriana Hunter) (Page One 115)
Cloud Busting by Malorie Blackman (Page One 116)
Saga (Volume One) by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (Page One 117)
Links:
You Can’t Do That! Stories Have To Be About White People in Media Diversified
Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image
Tackling Racism in Children’s Books: What Asterix Taught Me About Parenting
Race and Representation: Relaunching Asterix in America
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 188th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 30th Page One In Review. Today is Thursday the 29th of October. London is still in tier 2 of this new pandemic action plan.
I got the tier system wrong when I described it in the previous episode. I thought we were in tier 2 heading towards tier 1, which would be a more serious state of affairs. But in fact it's the other way round: we're in tier 2 heading towards tier 3. So, basically, it doesn't go “3, 2, 1, blast off!” where “blast off” is “stay the fuck at home” - which is what I thought - but it goes “1, 2, 3, go!” where “go” is “we have no idea what happens if this doesn't fix the problem of raising infection rates”. Although “go” might also be “4” as it turns out. So it might go “1, 2, 3, 4”. There's a discussion of a fourth tier being applied to certain regions, where “4”, apparently, would be more like the lockdown we had earlier in the year.
So I thought 3 was lockdown. I thought 3 was like [pouf]... you know, bars on the windows, full lockdown but apparently that's not true. So 3 is a, kind of... it's just a more serious version of what we're in at the moment - less mixing with people... I think you can still go out to eat with people from your household or people from your bubble but maybe you can't see other people when you're out and about... and I'm not sure what happens to, you know, working in offices and things. And then 4, I think, would be really... yeah, “stay at home”. Although I've also heard that there's a possibility that we will go back into a, kind of, national lockdown, which would, I think, be like the lockdown we had earlier in the year. So at the moment we're in this regional tier scenario where, yeah, it's different depending on where you are in the country but we might all... yeah, we might all go back into lockdown. Who knows?
Anyway, the point is I'm obviously not the best person to explain how any of this works. I have read about it and I... you know, I have a sense of what the rules are where I live but I don't have a sense of the whole system.
In any case, yeah, this is a book podcast. Hello, welcome, for anybody who's new to the podcast. Page One is a book podcast. These Page One In Review episodes are episodes in which I'm talking about all of the books that I've been given over the last eight years of doing the podcast by guests on the podcast.
[page turning]
So, moving away from disease but not away from death, I'm afraid, the first book that I have to talk to you about today was given to me by Antosh Wojcik during the 115th Page One. We had that conversation in Henley where he was living - and may still live, I'm not sure. Antosh gave me Beside The Sea by Véronique Olmi. This is a French novel originally, translated into English by Adriana Hunter.
It's a... Yeah, it's a very sad story, this story. Really.... Yeah, really grim. Beautifully told. It's the story of a woman who is at the end of her resources, essentially. She has two young sons, not very much money and is really struggling with her mental health. She just doesn't see any light on the horizon, essentially. She... You know, the tunnel is dark all the way through for her. And I mean, it's... yeah, it... this was... I found this really devastating, this book. There's something about the... the juxtaposition of bleakness and tenderness that really gets to me. She loves her children, this woman, and that love... [sighs]... it mea... it... She wants to protect them and her idea of what it means to protect these boys is... is twisted. I mean, not by her own... you know, the... You know, in terms of the way she sees the world it makes sense - or it makes sense most of the way through the novel - but, yeah, it's... it's really grim what happens.
And there's... It's interesting. Flicking back through this yesterday, I noticed that there's... there's this really insistent, piston-like rhythm in the narrative that contains very little futurity. There's almost no sense of the future. In the... In the section that I'm going to read for you today there is a sentence about the future but that future is... is so bleak. It's al... You know, it's almost impossible, the idea is. And mostly the narration is just... it's concerned with what is happening in the moment: there's this thing, and then this thing, and then this thing, and then this thing, and then this thing. It's narrated in the past tense but it might just as well be in a, kind of, everlasting present. She's... Yeah, it's her... It's what's happening around the narrator and then her fears and her feelings and her perception of danger everywhere. And everywhere the threat of loneliness, which is... yeah, or I found really affecting.
She really struggles - also with her relationship with her children. She loves her children but she's terrified of what will happen to them if they are alone but also what will happen to her if they abandon her. Again, in the section that I'm going to read for you I think you get a sense of the... the ambivalence of her feelings towards them, which I think is a function of her own struggle with life. Yeah, it's just... It's... She's really trying to do the best for them and the best is not what she thinks it is. But then, yeah, there's... there's a really... also a sense of: there's no one she can ask for help. Which... yeah, again, it's very much a function of poor mental health, I think, but it may also be a reflection of the... of the reality of living in a society such as we live in. So, yeah, it's a tough... it's a tough book to read but, as I say, it... it's very beautifully written and full of empathy for their situation.
So it's... Yeah, this is published by Peirene. Apparently it's title number one in their FEMALE VOICE SERIES. It's 105 pages long altogether and I'm just going to read you a little section from... so it's on pages 39, 40 and 41. Oh, what I haven't told you is that... So this woman takes her children to the seaside for... essentially for one last day. It's not... Yeah, it's not exactly a holiday but they... yeah, they spent some time on the beach and later on they go to a fairground. They sit in a cafe for a while. They have a room in a hotel. But this is... this is a little section from their time on the beach. Okay. And her children are called Stan and Kevin. Stan is the older and Kevin the younger. Okay. So from page 39:
Stan was a little way away now, running all over the beach like something was chasing him. He's not right, that lad, I thought, it was like he was trying to get away from something, the rain, the cold, some imaginary creature, it was strange, he'd run with his head down, then stop suddenly as if there was a wall, then set off again, just as quickly, turn to the right, turn to the left... what was he thinking right then, what sort of world was he in, I couldn't say. I would have liked him to stop but I didn't have the strength to run after him, my head was spinning horribly, I sat down on a rock, Kevin started playing with the wet sand at my feet, he'd lost interest in the sea. I couldn't help looking at it, though, wanted to be like it, self-contained, not giving a stuff about anything and taking up as much space as I liked. It's conceited alright, it isn't friendly, it's conceited, we come all this way to see it and if it could it would grind us into the ground, freeze the air in our lungs and fill our mouths with water if we got too close, and the waves were like huge mouths snapping at the empty air, waiting for us, just us.
Stan! I cried, Stan! Come back now! But he carried on running into his walls, so I went over to him, tripping on stones but not taking my eyes off him, while the waves smacked at the empty air behind him. Stan! I cried again, but even when I reached him he acted deaf, carrying on with his turns and half-turns, it drove me mad, I grabbed him by the hood of his jacket and then something terrible happened, Stanley raised his hand and thumped my arm, and I let go of his hood. He'd never done anything like that to me, There's the future, I thought, misery goes on forever. I didn't recognize my little boy, we looked at each other in silence, he was red in the face, exhausted, wide-eyed, breathing heavily, like he was crying without any tears. Go home now! I shouted. And he looked me right in the eyes [sic]. Go home, go home, obviously that was stupid, there was nowhere to go home to, I knew that and I was the one who ended up looking away. We stayed there like that without a word, catching our breath, trying to recognize each other while behind us the sea battered the sand. We weren't out for a stroll on this beach, we were hunting each other down, that was all.
I went back over to Kevin, Stan followed. We both felt ashamed. We didn't speak. Kevin was making sandcastles, I sat back down on the rock, Stan just stood there with his hands in his pockets, staring at the waves, exhausted, he'd been fighting with the sea too
It's an enchanted castle, Stan! said Kevin, tugging the bottom of his brother's trousers, it's an enchanted castle! The older boy didn't look at the littl'un, still staring at the ocean, like they had unfinished business. Find him a seashell, Stan, I told him, just to say something, to show him I was there, even if I was worried he would walk away. He heard me. He didn't answer, but as he walked off along the sand he looked so alone, I felt like calling him back, how could he cope so well without me?
Yeah, there we go. That's from Beside The Sea by Véronique Olmi.
Yeah, I didn't talk about these three characters. I mean, the children, I think, are really interesting and, yeah, very touchingly drawn. There's that relationship of older and younger child, which feels very true to me. And the older boy also has to look after his mother and he has that... yeah, that weight on his shoulders that - I think he's ten or eleven, something like that - that children his age can get when they have too much responsibility and have... you know, have, in some senses, to become the adult and do some of the parenting or, yeah, carry some of that burden. Yeah, it's a desperately sad book. But recommended all the same. May... Yeah, maybe... I don't know, it depends when you're listening to this. There may be a limit to the sadness that you can deal with right now, in which case I wouldn't recommend it, but if you are in a place where you can deal with that I do recommend it.
[page turning]
Right. Okay. [laughs] The second book that I have to talk to you about today was given to me by Joseph Paterson during the 116th Page One. We had that conversation here in my flat, I think - at least if we didn't I don't remember where we did have that conversation. This is also a sad book. It's described as “The moving story of an extraordinary friendship”. It's Cloud Busting by Malorie Blackman, who is, I think, famous for her Noughts & Crosses series, which I haven't read but have heard a lot about.
This is... it's extraordinary in all sorts of ways. It's a novel made up of poems - I mean, I call it a novel, that may not be quite the right description but it is... it's narrative. It's a story in which each chapter is a poem and a different... they're different types of poems. So it is... it's a very beautiful demonstration of what you can do with poetry, very simple poetry - or, you know, apparently simple poetry - and... Yeah, it's very... It's gripping, it's... Obviously, it's a book for children but it's... yeah, it's wonderful. I reread it yesterday because, yeah, it doesn't take very long to read and there's so much in here about, again, being a child and figuring out... I mean, these children don't have the... you know, the struggles that Véronique Olmi describes Stan and Kevin having to deal with but they are... they're... they're dealing with the struggles of being a child: of being at school, of navigating friendships, of coming to terms with difficult emotions like envy and fear and that, kind of... I don't know... [musing] Hmm. I don't know if it has a... if there is a word for the particular fear of one's peers. You know, people talk about peer pressure - that's part of it. But that fear that if you are friends with the wrong person then people will look at you differently and then your life will become substantially worse. That's, kind of, at the heart of this novel - or this book.
Another thing that's extraordinary about it is that the main character - the protagonist - is a black child, [a] black boy. It's not mentioned in the book but there are illustrations throughout and it's very clear that he's a boy of colour. And, yeah, that makes me think... So there's... yeah, there's a chapter in The Good Immigrant by Darren Chetty - so The Good Immigrant is a book of... a collection of essays about the immigrant experience to which my very good friend Vera Chok also contributed, it's edited by Nikesh Shukla, well worth looking up, it's a wonderful collection of essays - and Darren Chetty included an essay about how little space there is for young black people and young people of colour to see themselves in literature. Almost all protagonists are white - or at least are assumed to be white - and I think he writes about how, when you ask young black people and young people of colour to write stories, they also write white protagonists. It's... Yeah, it's... That's devastating in its own way, I think. So I'll try to either link to a version of that article or there's also another article that I found that Darren Chetty wrote with Karen Sands-O'Connor called Beyond The Secret Garden, which is well worth reading, along the same lines.
And here we have, yeah, very straightforwardly, a person of colour... young person of colour, a boy, who is simply the... the protagonist of this story - and not a simple protagonist either. This isn't a simple story. It's quite... Yeah, it's a... it's a complex situation. Most of the book is this kid, Sam, coming to terms with what he's done and... I mean, it's... yeah, it's... I find it really interesting. It's... It's not one thing that he did and... And you could say that the thing that happened was not done by him necessarily but he understands and takes responsibility for his part in what happens in a way that I found very interesting rereading it. And also, I think he takes responsibility for... for the complex feelings that he's been having. Yeah.
So it's about Sam and this guy Davey, who's also called Fizzy Feet, and then there's a kid Alex, who's very important, and then there are some other people around - teachers, for example. And, yeah, I'm just going to read you... So I won't tell you too much about what happens but I'm just going to read you a very short poem which is number 15 in this book. And on the page... I mean, the illustrations are gorgeous. Let me have a look... They're by Helen van Vliet. They're absolutely beautiful and they're really... you know, most of the book is text but the illustrations are so important, I think, to the... to the atmosphere of the book and the way that I understand the story as I read it. And so on, you know, the title page for number 15 - poem number 15, as it were, or chapter 15 - you've got Sam in the foreground looking over his shoulder and in the background you have two white kids whispering to each other. And this is... so the poem is about, you know, how that makes him feel. It's on page 97 of this book, which is [sound of pages turning]... oh [tuts]... which is 161 pages long. Oh, and I've just noticed in the back - I think I'd forgotten this - there's a note from the author in which she talks about the different poem forms that she's used. That's so great. This is published by Corgi Yearling. So this is a poem called Too Hot, which is, yeah, Chapter 15 of Cloud Busting:
TOO HOT
My world was too hot.
The country was too hot.
The city was too hot.
The street was too hot.
The school was too hot.
The classroom was too hot.
My clothes were too hot.
My skin was too hot.
My blood was too hot.
Watching Alex whisper and laugh
With Pete, was making my insides
Too hot.
There you go. So, yeah: Cloud Busting by Malorie Blackman.
[page turning]
Right, the... Yeah, the third and last book that I have to talk to you about today was given to me by Iskandar Sharazuddin. So that was the 117th Page One, my conversation with Iskandar. We had that conversation somewhere outside in a... in a square somewhere in Bloomsbury, I think. I'm not... I don't know Bloomsbury very well. I mean, I know it to walk through but I don't know the names of the squares and so on. It was surprisingly noisy in the middle of this greenery. Perhaps not surprising if you think that we were in the centre of London but nevertheless I was expecting it to be quieter for some reason.
Iskandar gave me Saga, Volume One by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. Brian, I think, wrote the words and Fiona drew the pictures. So this is a graphic novel or... I think Iskandar might have explained a little bit about the world of graphic novels and the terminology that's used - so I think this might also be called a trade paperback. Anyway, I don't remember. It's not a world that I'm very familiar with. Which is strange because I love this format. I love this way of telling a story. I don't know why I'm not more into graphic novels and I think I said that at the time. I am very familiar with Asterix but apart from that I think I read one Tintin and found it just hideously offensive. And, you know, there's a whole world of other... [laughing] other universes really described in graphic novels that I'm, kind of, semi-aware of but, as I say, don't know anything about.
And this is a series that... So Saga... I loved this book - this... you know, Volume One - and for some reason, again, I didn't buy any more of them but I should and I... and I will because I want to find out what happens in the rest of the story. I think possibly, like with series that I watch on TV, I, kind of, want them to finish before I get started so that I know that there will be some kind of ending. I get very frustrated when I have to wait for the next part. You know, when I've read a trilogy, for example, and the... you know, the next book in the trilogy hasn't been written yet and in order for the story to continue I need the next installment and it's not available, I get so frustrated. So perhaps that's what it was - I was waiting for this to be... for the series to be completed. I don't know if it has been completed in the intervening time. When did Iskandar and I have that conversation? Two thousand and... Presumably [uncertainly] 2015. I think that's right. So, yeah, there's been a few years for more of these to come out since then.
This is a Romeo And Juliet story. The... Yeah, the story is great, the world-building is wonderful. It's a sci-fi story. It's described on the back as a “sexy, subversive ongoing epic”. It spans the galaxy, I think. We d... I don't know which galaxy. And the drawings are just wonderful. I mean, apart from anything else, the guy... So there's a... yeah, a man and a woman who... at the beginning the woman is in labour and she gives birth to a girl who is the narrator of the whole thing. So she's talking about her parents and, you know, how her parents met and her upbringing. Her father is just so hot. I mean, he's just, yeah, really attractive. So that obviously helps. They are... Yeah, they're from different places, as you will discover in this little bit that I'm going to read for you now.
It's a wonderfully... yeah, wonderfully efficient way of setting up their backstory. It's just two pages somewhere towards the beginning of this volume. Oh, there are no page numbers but I can probably work it out for you. Hang on. Give me a second. [sound of pages turning and quiet counting] 1... 3... 5... 7... 9... 11... 13... 15... I think... So I think this is on pages 17 and 18 - who knows - of this trade paperback, which is an unknown number of pages long. This is published by Image Comics.
Okay, so on this page we've got four images. So the page is, kind of, split into four but the top image is slightly... so they're all the same width but the top image is slightly longer than the others. And we have... So we're looking down... In the top image we're looking down on some buildings and we can just see a bit of a street here, some... an archway with some steps going up to a doorway, there are some street lights, it's nighttime. On the top of the building nearest to us is a huge spanner outlined in what looks like red neon. And the narration says:
I was born on a planet called CLEAVE,
an ancient ball of mud circling a
faded old star.
And then in the next image we... we have zoomed out - we've pulled out - as if we're rising, perhaps, up and you can see more of a... yeah, you can see... like you would... kind of... the kind of view that you might see out of the window of a plane when you're coming in to land. So you can see roads - a network of roads - with buildings in between and some lights again. And the narration says:
It never had much strategic value, but
the place still mattered. To me, anyway.
And then we pull out again and now we're in orbit around the planet, which is a, kind of, reddish planet and... So on the right you've got... you can see most of the planet and towards the left of that picture you can see this blue light that might, I suppose, be the sun - the light that the planet receives seems to be coming from the left. And the narration accompanying that picture says:
See, this is where
my parents met,
but it's not where
they were from.
And then we pull out again and we see the whole galaxy and there's a... yeah, there's an arrow pointing to a star quite far on the right of the galaxy. The galaxy has, kind of, a centre of yellow white light and then there are some reddish patches and some blue greens. In this section where the star is it's, kind of, blue green dust, I think. And there are stars - it's got a scattering of stars all over. And here the narration says:
They grew up way over here, back where the war began.
And the arrow pointing to that star and then you turn over the page and then the whole of this page is given over to this image where the top of it is... you can just see a bit of a planet with clouds and there's a suggestion of a continent there but then, you know, shadow and then space with stars and then towards the bottom third of the picture what is apparently a moon - and, again, it's a crescent moon because the top half is in shadow... at least the top half is in shadow. And here the narration says:
This is LANDFALL, largest planet in the galaxy,
and also my mother's home.
That's underneath the planet. And then around the moon is written:
Its one and only satellite is WREATH,
my father's native moon.
And then down at the bottom of the image it just says:
If there was ever a time
these two got along, nobody
remembers it.
I love that. I love the... the way it takes us from one place to another through these five images and at the same time tells us about where these characters are from. I mean, obviously, that's important for the... you know, for the, kind of... the story of the war but it's also important... origins are important, I think. And, yeah, so the... the narrator was born in this place where these two people happen to be - where they're fighting, I guess - but they've come from this other [sound of page turning] planet... Yeah. There's a sex scene over the page between two people with screens for heads, which is quite fun.
Yeah, there are some wonderful characters in this and some really wonderful situations. And it's very funny also. Yeah. Okay. I... Yeah, I'm definitely going to look up more volumes in that story and I'm also... yeah, I'm very much in the frame of mind where that's the kind of thing I want to read. It's... It's just... It's so rich. You get the narration and then you also get the imagery that Fiona Staples has... has provided and then there's still mystery, there's still space for imagination and for the, kind of... the reader's contribution, I think... the viewer's contribution.
Okay. Right. Thank you so much for listening to this today. I'll be back very soon with three more books. Please look after yourselves and each other until then. Yeah. Okay. All the best. Bye.
Jingle
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[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]