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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
Speaking minutes after he has finished recording the previous episode of the podcast, Charles Adrian revisits the last books that were given to him by guests on the 4th season of the podcast.
You can find information about the National Theatre in London here and about the Liverpool Empire Theatre here.
Also mentioned in this episode is Dracula by Bram Stoker
You can find Phoebe Judge’s podcast Phoebe Reads A Mystery, series 6 of which is a reading of Dracula by Bram Stoker, here.
You can find out more about Charles Adrian’s alter-ego Ms Samantha Mann here and you can find her advice videos, which were filmed and edited by Polis Loizou, on YouTube here.
You can watch a video trailer for the show Angels’ Share by Nico And The Navigators here. It was made in collaboration with a group calling themselves Urban Strings.
You can find out more about Scottish Country Dancing on the RSCDS website here.
Scottish Fiddlers And Their Music by Mary Anne Alburger is also discussed in Page One 192.
Books discussed in this episode were previously discussed in Page One 124, Page One 125 and Page One 126.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 17th November, 2020.
Episode released: 15th December, 2020.
Book listing:
The Keep by Jennifer Egan (Page One 124)
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams (Page One 125)
Scottish Fiddlers And Their Music by Mary Anne Alburger (Page One 126)
Links:
Royal Scottish Country Dancing Society
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 191st Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 33rd Page One In Review. Today is Tuesday the 17th of November, 2020. It's just a few minutes after I finished recording the previous episode, the 190th Page One. I don't normally record two episodes in a single day - just because my brain can't handle it - but today I'm doing it. I.. Yeah, I'm starting to run out of episodes to put out in the future and I want to... yeah, I want to stockpile some.
I'm really hoping that this is going to be a short episode - let's see, let's see how it goes - but we're definitely talking about the last two books that I have on my shelf that were given to me during the 4th season of this podcast, Page One - which, for anybody joining us for the first time, is a book podcast. These... And these Page One In Review episodes are episodes in which I'm going through all of the books that I've been given by guests on the podcast.
So I've been talking about mostly the books that I still have. Some of the books I don't have any more. So in the previous episode I talked about one of those books - I describe them as ghost books. So that was a book that was given to me by Miriam Gould and which I have given away. In this episode I have two books that I have and then a ghost book which... it wasn't exactly given to me but, again, I'll talk about that when we get to that point in the episode.
[page turning]
The first book that I want to talk to you about today was given to me by Polis Loizou during the 124th Page One. We had that conversation in the foyer of the National Theatre in London, on London's Southbank. This also actually, I suppose, is not a book that Polis gave me. He didn't have any books with him when we had that conversation but he is a bookseller by profession - or one of the things that he does is that he's a bookseller. He's also a writer and... He's a playwright and a... and a novelist. I mean, that I know of - he may be other things as well. But, in any case, he didn't have any books with him to give me but he had all kinds of books in his head. And so he told me about this book, The Keep by Jennifer Egan, and he made it sound so wonderful that I... that I went out and bought my own copy.
I really did enjoy this book. It's, kind of, riffing on Dracula to some extent and... I mean, I'm going to read you the beginning of it because Polis didn't get a chance to and there's a... there's a similar... I mean, first of all it's set in a castle somewhere in Central Europe and it's... you know, it has this, kind of, Gothic shading to it. It's a bit scary. It's... So it's a lot of fun. It's set entirely in the present day so it's not... you know, it's not, kind of, harking back to the time of Dracula but that... yeah, that, I think, sets up a really nice... what's the word... juxtaposition between this, kind of... what we expect from a Dracula story - you know, the scary nineteenth-century castle, dangerous creatures and so on - and then... you know, and then this very, kind of, modern setting that is... yeah, that, kind of, undercuts that, I think, in really interesting ways.
So I don't remember everything that happens in this book but I remember that... So the main... the main character is called Danny and his cousin Howie is... is doing up this... this castle. It's... You know, he wants to turn it into a luxury hotel. But, yeah, it's got... it's got, kind of... The castle itself - the building - has... has secrets - including people, secret people living there, which is rather odd.
I mentioned a few episodes ago - I don't remember when this was - that I'd been listening to Phoebe Judge read Dracula by Bram Stoker for her Phoebe Reads A Mystery podcast. I... What I think I didn't say was that... So I read Dracula probably when I was a teenager and I'd forgotten how absolutely enjoyable that first chapter of Dracula is. Having listened to, you know, the... Phoebe Judge's reading of the whole novel, the first chapter is still the bit that I love the most: this journey to the castle. It's... It's so great and it's in really interesting stages - and, again, plays with what... you know, what would have been contemporary modernity. But in that case you've got this train journey - which is... you know, it's not scary because that's the modern world, it's things that... you know, it's... it's rational... you know, rational engineering, human beings imposing their will on the natural environment and so on - but you've got a train journey that becomes a coach journey and the coach journey is already a little bit more unsettling because it involves, you know, animals - you can't always completely control animals, they have brains and wills of their own - and then also weather, and then... and then this other... you know, the Count himself takes - it's Jonathan Harker, isn't it, going to the castle - on the last bit of the journey in an even smaller carriage I think - they're not on horseback, are they, they're in a carriage - and then... you know, and that goes into the forest. So you've got this, kind of, going away from what is known in geographical terms - because, you know, Central Europe is an unknown area... you know, society, civilisation exists in... in Western Europe in the imagination of Victorians - and... You know, so you go away from Western Europe into... into the east and then from a town that has a railway station and a post office and so on you go off into the mountains and then from... you know, [and] then into the forest.
Anyway, that progression is wonderful and there's something, I think, similar happening... or at least, I feel... it's not quite the same but I feel as though Jennifer Egan has a... has half an eye on that in these first couple of pages here. And I think this... Yeah, so I think this gives you a very good sense of the tone of the... of the novel and why it is so much fun. So this is The Keep by Jennifer Egan. This edition is published by Abacus. It is altogether 242 pages long. Okay:
CHAPTER ONE
Fo... Oh, this is on pages three, four and five that I'm reading.
THE CASTLE WAS FALLING APART, but at 2 a.m. under a useless moon, Danny couldn't see this. What he saw looked solid as hell: two round towers with an arch between them and across that arch was an iron gate that looked like it hadn't moved in three hundred years or maybe ever.
He'd never been to a castle before or even this part of the world, but something about it all was familiar to Danny. He seemed to remember the place from a long time ago, not like he'd been here exactly but from a dream or a book. The towers had those square indentations around the top that little kids put on castles when they draw them. The air was cold with a smoky bite, like fall had already come even though it was mid-August and people in New York were barely dressed. The trees were losing their leaves - Danny felt them landing in his hair and heard them crunching under his boots when he walked. He was looking for a doorbell, a knocker, a light: some way into this place or at least a way to find the way in. He was getting pessimistic.
Danny had waited two hours in a gloomy little valley town for a bus to this castle that never frigging came before he looked up and saw its black shape against the sky. Then he'd started to walk, hauling his Samsonite and satellite dish a couple of miles up this hill, the Samsonite's puny wheels catching on boulders and tree roots and rabbit holes. His limp didn't help. The whole trip had been like that: one hassle after another starting with the red-eye from Kennedy that got towed into a field after a bomb threat, surrounded by trucks with blinky red lights and giant nozzles that were comforting up until you realized their job was to make sure the fireball only incinerated those poor suckers who were already on the plane. So Danny had missed his connection to Prague and the train to wherever the hell he was now, some German-sounding town that didn't seem to be in Germany. Or anywhere else - Danny couldn't even find it online, although he hadn't been sure about the spelling. Talking on the phone to his cousin Howie, who owned this castle and had paid Danny's way to help out with the renovation, he'd tried to nail down some details.
Danny: I'm still trying to get this straight - is your hotel in Austria, Germany, or the Czech Republic?
Howie: Tell you the truth, I'm not even clear on that myself. Those borders are constantly sliding around.
Danny (thinking): They are?
Howie: But remember, it's not a hotel yet. Right now it's just an old -
The line went dead. When Danny tried calling back, he couldn't get through.
But his tickets came the next week (blurry postmark) - plane, train, bus - and seeing how he was newly unemployed and had to get out of New York fast because of a misunderstanding at the restaurant where he'd worked, getting paid to go somewhere else - anywhere else, even the fucking moon - was not a thing Danny could say no to.
He was fifteen hours late.
He left his Samsonite and satellite dish by the gate and circled the left tower. (Danny made a point of going left when he had the choice because most people went right). A wall curved away from the tower into the trees, and Danny followed that wall until woods closed in around him. He was moving blind. He heard flapping and scuttling, and as he walked the trees got closer and closer to the wall until finally he was squeezing in between them, afraid if he lost contact with the wall he'd get lost. And then a good thing happened: the trees pushed right through the wall and split it open and gave Danny a way to climb inside.
There you go. I'm going to leave you with Danny just inside the wall. So yeah, The Keep by Jennifer Egan. Very much recommended by me. She also wrote A Visit From The Goon Squad, which lots of people have told me about and I still haven't read that. I'm told it's quite different from The Keep and I feel like I really need to read it. So one day I will.
[page turning]
Right. The next book that I have to talk about was given to me by Natalie Flynn during the 125th Page One. We had that conversation in Liverpool at the Everyman Theatre where Natalie was working. Natalie gave me The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams with original art by William Nicholson. Yeah, the art is wonderful. This is actually titled The Original Velveteen Rabbit. I don't know what knockoffs there have been.
This is a book that Natalie gave me because... So Natalie and I met because our families went to the same church when we were growing up in a town called Amersham in Buckinghamshire and at that church, St. Michael's, there would very often be readings from The Velveteen Rabbit. And I had never... Until Natalie gave me this I had never read The Velveteen Rabbit in its entirety but I'm very familiar with this one passage that was... yeah, that I must have heard, I don't know, quite a few times growing up. And Natalie did read some of this passage that I'm going to read for you now but I want to read... I want to read more of it. And it's the passage that is about becoming real. And I think it's the reason, probably, that this book has so much power.
It's a... It's a lovely book. And it is of course about... it's about love and about... I want to say about imperfection. That's not quite what I mean but that the message of the book is that ‘perfection’ is the opposite of ‘reality’, in the terms they use it [sic] here. You don't have to be flawless - in fact, if you are flawless there's something about forbidding about that. To have flaws, to be, kind of, crumpled and used and maybe a bit broken is a sign that you've engaged with the world and that the world has engaged with you and that's... that's the special thing that life can give us. Yeah, that's... that's my gloss on this anyway.
So I'm not going to tell you very much about the plot of the book. It's a children's book about this rabbit, the Velveteen Rabbit. Something... Yeah, I guess it has themes in common with with the Pixar film Toy Story, I suppose. But yeah, anyway, this is 44 pages long this edition. It's... Oh, I c... Yeah, the subtitle of the book, I see now, is called: [sic] OR HOW TOYS BECOME REAL. It's called The Velveteen Rabbit OR HOW TOYS BECOME REAL. That's really nice. It's published by Egmont.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn't how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn't happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
“I suppose you are Real?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.
“The Boy's Uncle made me Real,” he said. “That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again.”
There you go. Oh, I think that's gorgeous. I love that passage from The Velveteen Rabbit. Yeah, that's a very short book, a very easy read. Also, yeah, very much recommended.
[page turning]
Okay. And then, yeah, so the last thing - the last book - that I have to talk to you about today was given to me - or not - during the 126th Page One. That was my conversation with Ms Samantha Mann. Ms Samantha Mann is my alter ego so, yeah, in a sense it was me talking to myself. It was a piece of theater - a piece of audio theatre, if you like. I had so much fun making that episode - in this room, in fact - and I... So I had Ms Samantha Mann give me a book called Scottish Fiddlers And Their Music by Mary Anne Alburger.
That was a book that I bought because I was preparing for a show that I was making with a company called Nico And The Navigators in collaboration with... oh... Oh, I can't remember the name of the... [tuts] the... the musicians that we worked with, what their group was called. They were just extraordinarily wonderful and talented musicians. And it was a... it was a show called Angels' Share, which was about fiddle music, basically. Violin music... so both courtly and [laughs] uncourtly. [laughing] I don't know. Popular, perhaps. And they... So they used a lot of Scottish fiddle music in that show.
I love Scottish fiddle music. I mean, it's dance music, I think, on the whole and when I was at university I was a member of the university Scottish Country Dance Society. And we... yeah, we used to meet weekly and learn dances and then we would go to Ceilidhs and dance those dances. They were quite snooty some of the Ceilidhs that we [laughing] went to but there is something wonderful about being in a room where everybody knows these dances - and some of them are very complicated and they make beautiful patterns.
You're... You know, you're in sets - you're in groups - but each group... So... I can't really describe why I find it so beautiful. But there's a... there's a, kind of... there's an egalitarian-ness to these dances: everybody in the group eventually does all the steps. They're very much organised according to a binary - so most of the dances need a man and a woman to be a couple. I'm sure now there are single sex couples and people of different genders dancing these dances. I hope so. Because it was a fairly conservative environment when I was a member of this society. Nevertheless. I mean, you know, you would have got eyebrows raised if... if two men danced together, for example. Two women dance together very often because there's always a shortage of men in these kinds of [laughing] dance environments, certainly in the UK.
Anyway, you have... you have different couples: each couple dances all the steps so although there is a kind of hierarchy of the couples - often one, two, three and four - you switch around so after the first go round couple one becomes couple four and everybody else moves up. And I like that. I think that's really nice. But beyond that just the... yeah, when you see a room full of people all, kind of, bouncing and moving towards each other... And it's... it's flirtatious: you're... you're making a lot of eye contact - or... or not. There's contact: there's, you know, you touch hands, you sometimes put your hand around somebody's waist and it is...
So it's flirtatious but also - and I... I really like this about it - because people of all ages in the community have always danced these dances it's not... it doesn't have to be flirtatious. People dance these dances throughout their lives - so at times when they are looking for partners... you know, life partners but also at times when they're not looking for life partners. You dance with your friends, you dance with your relations but, yeah, you also perhaps dance with people that you are attracted to - as I did when I was a member of this society - and it's... that is a... that's a special thrill. It's very exciting when you know that the other person is attracted to you too and you can, kind of... you can play out a flirtation using the very rigid structure of these dances. And... Yeah, and as I say, also, the music is wonderful.
So I bought that book to prepare for this show, Angels' Share, but... and I found it... yeah, I really enjoyed it. It's a great book. It's very, very interesting. All kinds of things that I didn't know about fiddle music - music written for the fiddle - and the people who wrote that music. So I don't have that book anymore. I either sold it or gave it to Oxfam, I don't remember now. I didn't think I was going to need it anymore. I was wrong but there it is: I'm wrong about so many things. I recommend that anyway: Scottish Fiddlers And Their Music by Mary Anne Alburger.
Okay. This is... Yeah, I think this is going to be quite a short episode, isn't it? Finally achieving my goal of a return to the twenty-minute episode. Or less! Who knows when I've edited it. Anyway. [laughing] I will... I'll blow it if I keep talking. Thank you so much for listening to this. So, yeah, in the next episode we'll talk about books from the 5th season of the podcast. Thank you. I have a feeling these two episodes - 190 and 191 - that I've recorded today are both, kind of, frantic and hurried in some way - I feel a bit pressured for, you know, various reasons, including the... the noise from next door - but I hope they've been okay. I hope you're all okay and I'll speak to you all again very soon. Thank you. Thank you. Goodbye.
Jingle
Thank you for listening to Page One. For more information about the podcast, please go to pageonepodcast.com.
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]