Backlisted - Darkness Falls from the Air by Nigel Balchin

Episode Date: May 2, 2016

Journalist, broadcaster and former editrice of The Erotic Review Rowan Pelling joins John, Andy and Mathew on the show to explain her love of Nigel Balchin's novel of the London Blitz, Darkness Falls From The Air. Timings: (may differ due to adverts)4'00 - Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield,8'47 - The Stone Book Quartet by Alan Garner16'55 Darkness Falls from the Air by Nigel Balchin* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I don't think it's... I've got a friend who's a chocolate... Gritty a bit crazy for me, Green and Black. I don't think it's... I've got a friend who's a chocolate... Gritty and dirty, that's the texture of Green and Black. There's a really good website called Cocoa Lovers, which if you're really into chocolate, they send you a sampler box every month. Truly amazing chocolates with fabulous packaging from all over the world, and it's all single estate.

The best. Once you taste that, Green and will actually realise it's crap. I know. It's just not very good chocolate. I remember when I was growing up, my parents, who were middle class, started drinking La Piadour. Remember that wine? Yeah, yeah.

Very classy. J'adore La Piadour. Yeah, J'adore La Piadour. They didn't J'adore it for very long. It was sort of beyond Mathieu's Rose, wasn't it? Yeah, a little bit beyond it. That's what Julie Birchall said about erotic review readers when Chris Hart, for some reason, phoned her up and asked her to do a book review.

So she took great delight in turning it down and getting a column out of it and saying they were like DHSS snoops who drank Piat D'Or. And I thought the only possible retort to that was, yes, we love Piat D'Or. We frankly drink anything. But at the end of the party, we are the people going into your parents' drinks cabinet and emptying it of every revolting... But you're Piat Dora-ing my green and blacks, aren't you?

They're like yesterday's news. Well, I'm just saying that it's... It's that thing, isn't it? It's just ordinary chocolate with a nice packaging on it. Yeah, I mean, the idea of a chocolate-tasting menu, which is Coco Runners say we can organise a chocolate tasting event, you just think, it's just madness, isn't it? This is very good. This is very good.

I like the... Guilty package. Oh! Oh, chocolate. Oh, my word. It's right that we should be talking about chocolate on this particular podcast, as we will soon discover. Oh!

Yeah, I didn't even think of that. Should we start? Hello and welcome to the Backlisted podcast. Once more we're gathered around the kitchen table of our sponsors Unbound, the website that brings authors and readers together to create good things to read. I'm John Mitchinson,

publisher of the aforementioned Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And this is Backlisted, a podcast where we aim to give new life to old books. We're joined, as usual, by author and working father, Matthew Clayton. Hello, Matthew.

And joining us for this edition of the show is columnist, broadcaster, occasional stand-up, and the Daily Mail's resident sexpert. Actually, they've just got rid of me. Did they? It's a tragedy. Joining us on this edition of the show is columnist, broadcaster, occasional stand-up,

and until very recently, Daily Mail's resident sexpert, until she decided to go off and pursue interests... No, that's even worse. Rowan Penning. Rowan's book choice, which we'll be talking about in a moment, is Darkness Falls from the Air by Nigel Bolkin, or Bolchin, we don't know which, and we will probably interchange between the two

during the course of the podcast. But again, we find ourselves face-to-face, Andy, and the question I feel I must ask you, always slightly depressingly more than anyone else has ever read in the history of the world but what have you been reading this week? It's an interesting conundrum with doing

this podcast now where I keep discovering writers we've done on previous months or weeks that what I actually want to do is be reading another JL Carr or another Jean Rees or another Shirley Hazard. But I have to find new things outside the back-listed category. Are we perverting your reading programme in some sort of dramatic way?

It seems to be. Yeah, well, you'll see why in a minute. So this week I've been reading Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield. Have you ever read the Diary of a Provincial Lady? No, I haven't. I feel as often with these books, I feel sort of I have. Yeah. Was it adapted for television at any point?

It has been adapted for television. It was also adapted for radio about six or seven years ago with Imelda Staunton in the role of the Provincial Lady. It's very funny. Which has honestly got to be a huge plus in its favour. So I read Diary of a Provincial Lady. You can probably read it incial Lady. It's very funny. Which has honestly got to be a huge plus in its favour. So I read Diary of a Provincial Lady. You could probably read it in a day. It's very funny. Everyone who's ever recommended it to me

has recommended it to me saying, you'll love this book, it's just incredibly funny. And it is incredibly funny. And it was written in 1930. It has all the, what we would now perhaps think of as the Bridget Jones diary style. Oh yeah, I wondered about that. And it's clearly in a line.

She said it's clearly in a line from Diary of a Nobody by Grace Smith as well. So you can see it in that tradition. I'm just going to read a couple of bits. There's loads of really funny book bits and pieces in Diary of a provincial lady. For instance, November the 11th. I'm asked what I think of Harriet Hume but I'm unable to say as I have not read it have a depressed feeling that this is going to be another case of Orlando

about which was perfectly able to talk most intelligently until I read it and found myself unfortunately unable to understand any of it there's another one here November the 14th arrival of book of the month choice and am disappointed. History of a place I am not interested in by an author I do not like. Put it back into its wrapper again and make fresh choice from recommended list. Find on reading small literary bulletin enclosed with book

that exactly this course of procedure has been anticipated and that it is described as being, quotes, the mistake of a lifetime. And much annoyed, although not so much as having made possibly mistake of a lifetime as that depressing thought of our all being so much alike that intelligent writers can apparently predict our behaviour with perfect accuracy. So it's got that really chatty and funny thing going on.

But I hadn't realised as well, it's beautifully, like all good comedy, perhaps, apart from that of Jerry Lewis, it's very melancholy. Yeah. That it has a real, quite modern, I think, sense of, we would say that the provincial lady

suffers from low self-esteem and a neglectful husband and servants that she can't quite control and feels awkward with constantly. So there's the kind of comedy of social embarrassment as well. But also I hadn't realised that this is a properly feminist text, that it was commissioned by the feminist journal Time and Tide in 1930. And you can read it as an absolutely fascinating account of a kind of

self-deprecating English woman's struggle to be valued for the things that she was good at with laughter and with a kind of melancholic thing shot through it um I really loved it I really loved it and the sadness of it is because it's called Diary of a Provincial Lady, and, you know, it has a kind of feminist subtext to it, it's hard to think that many men pick it up and read it and enjoy it. But they love it. The rhythm of... Good comic writing is all about rhythm, and the rhythm of it is fantastic.

Really, really wonderful book. So that's what I've been reading. John? It's a lovely idea that the... Going back and visiting these narratives, though, don't you think, like you did with the Priestley book? Yeah. There is something extraordinarily vivid.

Maybe the diary form is good as well. I just was thinking that Bridget Jones, which is coming out, the new movie that's coming out, it's hopelessly nostalgic now. The 1990s feels like a very long time ago when your worry was finding a man who was prepared to make a commitment. I mean, in the age of Tinder and sort of Snapchat, Bridget Jones seems almost as kind of quaint as E.M. Delafield.

It's that sort of speed of whether it's something about writing stuff down and making a book out of it. I love Bridget Jones's diary, you know. I think that is actually a very underrated book as a piece of comic writing, that it can be massively commercially successful. But also, again, the rhythm of it is absolutely terrific. And knowing what Helen Fielding's

background was, is. No, it was a properly funny book. I went to the launch party. Did you? Yeah, there were 17 people there. Did you pull? As I just come back from my honeymoon, no. Units of alcohol consumed. Yeah, quite,

yeah. What have I i been reading is that what you were asking me sorry i was going to ask you that i tell you what i've been rereading because this is a little bit of a plug but we're publishing in in about a month's time an amazing book called first light which is a celebration of the work of alan garner who is 80 or has just turned 80 and one of the things about reading all these extraordinary essays, and they're essays from Philip Pullman and David Armand and Stephen Fry, but also archaeologists like Richard Morris and Mark Edmonds who've worked with them.

Rowan Williams has put a poem in there. Neil Gaiman's written a brilliant piece. It's a great collection. But the thing that struck me is the book that comes up again and again. I mean, if you say Alingana, most people will say Weird Stone of Razingham, or they might say The Owl Service, or if they're kind of real Garner fans, they might say Redshift. But the book that comes up again and again in the essays is a book called,

it's actually four books, The Stone Book Quartet, which was published in the late 70s, between 76 and 78. And it's actually, it is the book that I kind of go back to with Garner. It's a completely remarkable sequence of four stories, taking four young people's stories that are really members of his family. Over the course of a century in rural Cheshire, his grandfather and his great-grandfather were stonemasons. And the book starts, the stone book of the title,

starts with an extraordinary story. Mary, the character in the story, her father is a stonemason. He ends up taking her under the ground and they descend and find these extraordinary Paleolithic cave paintings down there. He shows them. It's a special place. It's a beautifully written thing

and she is desperate to want to read she was a maid in the Stanley's house, the Stanley's up in Cheshire with the big knobs of the area and there was a sort of presumption that women wouldn't learn to read so it's a beautiful passage towards the end of the book where

her father, taking a kind of a pebble, a cobble, fashions a book out of stone and gives it to her. I just read this little beautiful little piece. He weighed them in his hand, tested them on his thumbnail until he found the one he wanted. He pushed the others aside and took the one pebble and worked quickly with candle and firelight, turning, tapping, napping, shaping, twisting, rubbing and making, quickly, as though the stone would set hard if he stopped. He had to take the picture from his eye to his hand before it left him. There, said Father, that'll do.

He gave Mary a prayer book, bound in blue-black calfskin, tooled and stitched and decorated. It was only by the weight that she could tell it was stone and not leather. It's better than a book you can open, said father. A book only has one story. That making of an object and that sense of craftsmanship is kind of what these stories are. They're incredibly simple, going through the generations

and ending up in Tom Fobble's day, which is the last one in the sequence, in the Second World War, where they find shrapnel from a crashed bomber. Each story has got an object in it. One's going underground, another is going up a steeple where there's an extraordinary clock, another's where there's a forge. And they're all linked. He achieves in it, I think,

something that is almost impossibly difficult to do. Total simplicity of language, there's quite a lot of Cheshire dialect in it, but the sense of a family history passing down things that matter from generation to generation Philip Pullman writes brilliant about him being a craftsman you know it's often said

there's not one word out of place this feels exactly like that passage that he's made something incredibly beautiful and luminous and it is utterly timeless we were talking about weren't we the current popularity of books about nature. Yeah.

And Garner is kind of one of the godfathers, isn't he, of that movement? I mean, his connection with the land and with the traditions of the land. Yeah. I mean, it is an extraordinary thing. He took himself out of... He still likes to boast that he's in Statue Pupillary

because he didn't finish his degree at Oxford because he decided he wanted to write stories and he left Oxford at the end of his second year and found this house in Cheshire which being Ghana turned out that Oddfellows, the Manchester Oddfellows had a fund and he bought it for about £510. And then it turns out that of course it was a medieval longhouse

and it turns out that a medieval longhouse was built on a Bronze Age barrow. It turns out, anyway, that this... And I've gone, I've done archaeological digs with Alan in this place. It's incredible. So it's been inhabited for at least 10,000 years, this place. So you know that thing where people look outside for inspiration for their stories?

All Alan's ever done is drawn complete inspiration. Every single potserd, every little flint, everything that he's dug up in his garden has been collected. He also did this other mad thing, which he moved a medieval apothecary's house from across 20 miles away, which was going to be demolished. And he managed to persuade an architect. He managed to persuade Billy Collins to fund it,

the publisher of William Collins. Yeah. And they took it down beam by beam and then reconstructed it and it is the most incredible place. It's the only place I know where you can sit inside the fireplace. There's a fireplace where you sit inside and look right up. I mean, everything you would imagine Alan Garner's house to be. And he's also famously struggled.

There were most of 15 years where he wrote very little because of his depression. And the story of how he got out of his depression is too long for here. But the Stone book is the one, if you ever want to say to anybody, here's the Alan Garner,

the later books are complex and difficult and brilliant. The young books, the earlier books, Ellador and the Weird Stone, are very much still going to be read mostly by kids. But he never really thought about it when he was writing for kids. We were talking about, we watched the TV adaptation of The Owl Service, late 60s adaptation, with Gillian Hills in it. And we said when we were watching it,

not only is it impossible to think of it being made for children then or now, it's impossible to be thinking of it being made for adults now. It is the most peculiar, scary, psychosexual thing. And we were also talking about how Alan Garner... She wants to be flowers and they are picking her feathers. Flowers, they are picking her peppers. We were talking about how Alan Garner, though, comes out of a period now long gone for children's literature where, probably this runs from the 60s through to the early 80s, where educationalists and librarians are in charge

and have links to what gets broadcast on TV and Jack and Norrie, and there's a kind of raise-your-game-children element to it. But also, that extraordinary generation were all, and this is why I also wanted to talk about Stonebook, because there is a sort of Vulcan link, is that they were all children during the war. This immense, you know, whether it's Leon Garfield, Joan Aitken, Alan Garner, Penelope Lively,

this huge, outpouring, extraordinary explosion of brilliant writers, Susan Cooper, brilliant writers for children that come into their own in the 60s because they were children themselves during the war years. You kind of feel that in Ghana, that there is definitely a sense that there is something about the experience of war meant, and maybe it was because they were being sent off.

Sent away around the country, your parents disappeared, your father went abroad. You were a genuine jeopardy in your childhood, and it kind of forced you to... You know I had an owl service made for Angus? No. Yeah, I commissioned, I have eight extraordinary i've got one i have one of the original plates on my wall that alan gave me which is among my most treasured possessions it's just a it's actually it was his wife's griselda well we've got the dvd we've talked about books enough now for some capitalism when you're working out at planet

fitness it's a judgment-free zone so you can really step up your workout that's why we've got treadmills and our team members are here to help so you can be carefree with the free weights they're also balance balls bikes cables kettlebells and t-rex equipment but like no pressure get started for one dollar enrollment and then only fifteen dollars a month hurry this one dollar enrollment sale of planet fitness end july 18th 49 annual fee applies see home club for details rowan nigel balkan darkness falls from the air do you want to say a little bit about why you selected this for us yes this book was given to me at a very sort of formative stage of my reading. I was 25 and I suppose some had been a bit self-selected,

you know, I was an English lit student, so I read Jane Austen and George Eliot and all that sort of thing. And there's this sort of period of writers that you've missed because they're just not books your parents have. They weren't canonised. Yeah, and they're not in the canon. And when I met my husband-to-be, this was the first book he gave me, which is curious choice, considering that what this book is largely about is about a man

who lets his young wife have an affair with someone else set against the backdrop of the Blitz. Yeah, I suppose the irony of that didn't quite escape me at the time. But more than that, it's an absolutely brilliant bit of writing. And what I've sort of come to think of it as, it's like Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, except it's a bloody brilliant book, rather than a slightly overwrought, ridiculous one. I put the two... Try and compare them. No, no, no, I'll make a case for this. I think the end of the affair with all its sort of, you know,

passion over talking about onions and, you know, no-one can be real in a love unless they're sort of consumed with jealousy. And then the absolute ridiculous thing. I mean, both of them concern the same love triangle, really. You have the civil servant husband who seems a bit sort of dull when you first meet him. You're certainly sort of conscientious. Then you have an attractive writer who's, you know, the sort of, you know, devilish lover, the man who appears on the scene and tempts the young and beautiful wife into having an affair. Now in Graham Green, that's all pretty standard business. And the lover is the hero and he's a writer, don't you know. And then later there's this absolutely absurd deviation when the husband

thinks the wife's having an affair with someone else. And do you know who that someone else is? It's God. It's bloody God. If you don't know what I'm talking about, just read it. But it's sort of ridiculous. And then you read Darkness Falls from the Air, and it's so much more interesting and subtle a book. But people don't tend to think that because it's also funny. There's this wonderful strain of sardonic humour that runs through it, which always means a book is taken less seriously.

this wonderful strain of sardonic humour that runs through it, which always means a book is taken less seriously. But it's, to me, an extraordinarily moving book about very British emotion, which means that it must be suppressed and you have to read it between the lines. But here, the voice that you're most with is the civil servant, the conscientious husband, who could be dubbed as actually fascinating and rather heroic and defends himself with humour.

And there are a lot of sort of duels that are really conversational duels between him and the lover. And then you have the younger wife who is a little bit sketchily drawn. I have to say that's probably the weakness in the book is that Marsha, you always feel you're a little bit outside her and maybe all her motivation but it's a fantastic triangular relationship against the Blitz Putting aside just for a moment the ad hominem attacks on The End of the Affair which is one of my favourite novels

I'm going to move it really is but I'm going to interrupt you just for a moment so I can for people listening we do a thing on Backlisted where we read the blurb on the back of the book just as a way of not giving away spoilers, but just giving people the setting of the book. This is and I'm reading off the back of an edition, which, John, are you responsible for this edition of Dinosaur from the Air? This is really amusing. We just have a bit more background. Before Rowan's husband-to-be was Rowan's husband-to-be,

he went out with my wife. My now wife. Not at the same time. I wasn't married to my wife. My hands are shaking, listeners, as I realise what we've stumbled on. Just to add more kind of mystery to the whole tale, he also gave Rachel, my wife,

Darkness Falls from the Air. And she also completely fell in love with it. So Rowan and I sort of weirdly I read it for the first time at Rachel's recommendation, just as you read it. But the Fonzit Origo of all our love for Vulcan comes from Angus MacKinnon, who

was also the military editor at Castle, when I was running Castle. And when we were doing the Castle paperbacks, without any hesitation from either of us, we brought back into print. And I think, Angus, what that blurb you wrote, I'm almost certain that was a bad blurb. OK, I'm going to read this blurb.

I'm going to read this blurb. So this edition... Because it's a really good blurb. So I'm holding an edition, which is published by Castle Military Paperbacks. Castle. Castle. Balkin Castle.

Balkin. The military paperbacks. Pub. Castle. Balkin Castle. Kitchink. The military paperbacks. Published and brought back into print by several people who love the book. Why, then, did you decide to put this hideous cover on it? Honestly, you have no idea. Don't let me... All right, we'll come back to it. It's a terrible jacket.

We'll come back to it. This isn't much better, to be honest. This is the blurb. Here we go. As the classic novel of the London Blitz, Darkness Falls From The Air captures the chaos, absurdity and ultimately the tragedy of life during the bombardment. Bill Sarratt is a civil servant. With an ostentatious lack of concern,

he spends the war whining and dining expensively, occasionally sauntering out into the Blitz with witty remarks about the shattered nightlife of London's West End. But beneath this cheerful facade lies the real strain of war. As the bombs begin to fall closer and closer, Sarat's wife Marcia takes on a lover, a manipulative literary poseur, is there any other kind, named Stephen. Sarat tries to laugh off the affair, but while his cynical wit may crackle and spark, the bombs continue to fall, and his life begins literally

to crumble around him. Literally to crumble around him. Are we sure? No, I don't think Angus Moody, couldn't have written that. I don't think that's quite right, because in fact, it's not ostentatious, sort of. He's not going around just jollying it up during the Blitz. He's acutely aware of the

tension of you know buying fine wine during that time and he talks about that a lot doesn't he? I think that's a serviceable blurb. I don't think it's that good it's better than this one which I'm not going to read but look I think that you have two really remarkable things here and I have to say I again

really enjoyed it because I could remember almost nothing except for the at one point the word uxoriousness is used the husband who loves his wife too much but the point is it's it's an extraordinary it was written and published in 1942 so it's a it's a novel that was not the war recollected in tranquility this was written when you know the blitz was still happening it has that incredible immediacy I love the the fact that you get no background. I mean, terse description is, it's not even terse. I mean, there's just nothing. You're just thrown into this. On one side of the book, it's, yes, minister. You know, it's just all about the

ludicrousness of trying to get anything done in a country that is at war. And the bureaucracy that has served it perhaps well in the interwar years is now creaking horribly. And Saras is a young Turk. I mean, you feel he's the kind of, you know, he's definitely the coming man, wants people. But you have no real idea what the scheme is that he's trying to... There's no detail given you.

So it's an amazing, I think, amazing and moving book about the sort of casualness with which people kind of... War happens and gradually the raids get longer and bigger and more violent. And we should say as well that I mean, I felt the descriptions of the raids themselves are completely extraordinary. Yeah. To be to be written in the moment, as it were, and be so evocative and so powerful about bringing home the experience of the blitz and the way he ramps that up i think is extraordinary that the fact that you know they get the two main characters marcia and and bill get more concerned they're very blasé and going out to restaurants to begin with but actually there's not that much whining and dining it gradually

becomes darker and darker but it's that and then it is this incredibly um it seems to me incredibly this is not brief encounter i mean this is a really modern grown-up kind of attempt to deal with a problem that afflicts i should imagine many marriages which is that you know one one partner's having an affair and the other one's trying to deal with it the guy you, Stephen, I would say, is not a terribly brilliantly written character. He's a sort of slightly... Oh, I think Stephen's... I think he's a great comedic creation.

I think he's totally recognisable. It's like a grown-up Fotherington Thomas. You see him in Soho every night. Yes, true. Just, you know, at the moment. He's completely contemporary in many ways. That's true. But also I do think that Bill, his put-downs are great

and the way he teases out his kind of own complexity of feelings about what's going on, where you think he can't really think this is good. But also I think you are supposed to think that under other circumstances, had there not been a blitz, had there not been that idea you could die at any second, he might not have been so lenient. He might have reigned her in a bit. He might have made more protest. I mean, I think this is the thing that this affair has played out against the Blitz

is also one of the explanations. I mean, clearly he's a man who talks about, I'm not going to lock the doors. They're always going to be open for you. But I think that you're also supposed to see this as a product, too, of circumstances. That gives him a sort of, you know, he just feels, what's the point? What's the point under this circumstance to suddenly, you know, try and limit someone's life, which might be limited anyway? We should also say that so much of this, of the character, is conveyed via dialogue. The description is applied to buildings and bombing raids.

It's very good on buildings, isn't it? There's a brilliant quote here. L.P. Hartley, author of The Go-Between, reviewed one of the later novels and said, Balkan's characters only have to open their mouths to reveal a personality, which is true and is also a great trick if you can pull it off. Very difficult to get right,

but actually that's one of the things in this novel that I really loved. I thought the way that Stephen... You can see Stephen without actually being told at length what he looks like. In many ways, the best scenes are just two people talking. It's normally Bill. He might be talking to Marsha. He might be talking to Stephen. He might be talking to his friend,

to one of his friends from the ministry. When you're in that tight situation, everything you need to know is revealed then, isn't it, in those exchanges? There's a really brilliant, and I recommend, it's available on his website and i recommend it to anyone listening here who wants to to find out more about balkin there's a brilliant essay by clive james which was written in 1974 called the effective intelligence

of nigel balkin and he says he brilliantly says several really interesting things. In fact, I'm going to say these both now, Rowan, because I think you'll want to respond to both of them. And given the Graham Greene thing, it's fine. So Clive James says, first of all, he says, the wartime novels were built to an artless-looking, highly refined formula of naturalistic conflict taking place within a thriller plot. Conflict on top of puzzle on top of background.

And what James says in that essay is that if you read the novels that Borkin wrote before Darkness Falls from the Air, Small Bat Room and Mine Own Executioner, they're nothing like those novels and if you read the novels after that, very few of them are like that, this is a formula that he

hits upon accidentally in Darkness Falls From The Air and then subsequent books are attempts to reproduce that, very successful, these books sell literally hundreds of thousands of copies, they're very very successful I question thriller because it has elements of that. They're never chased up

and there's a moment when someone, there's an implication that someone in the ministry is a spy and they have to everyone who uses this particular sort of typewriter has to give a sample. And then it never goes anywhere. It never goes anywhere. So I think it's a kind of anti-thriller. As Matthew said to me this morning, nothing bloody happens in it.

I think that was my, if I may express, a reservation. My reservation about this novel and about Small Back Room is that they are, the thrills are deferred. You know, you're right, Rowan, that he makes you wait

for the thrills, and a lot of time is spent with quite interchangeable bureaucrats sitting in offices I think I've got it all wrong with this I think this is like a chess game and it's like watching tiny little moments happen between people and what you really wonder it's really about will Marsha sort of will she be totally conned by Stephen will she move in with him will she not come back or is Bill's very long game,

which becomes increasingly like this bit of elastic that might snap, he lets her go and lets her go a bit more and a bit more. Will that tactic work? And I find that fascinating to watch because she keeps on asking for more when she knows she's in just another weekend. There's also the brilliant sense, isn't there, that Bill, and it's true of the character

of Sammy in the small back room as well that they are not as in control of themselves or the situation as the way they talk That sort of assumed confidence that Bill has

is very, because the scene without giving too much of spoilery stuff away, but the kind of dramatic scene of assumed confidence that Bill has. Because the scene, without giving too much of, you know, spoilery stuff away, but the kind of dramatic scene rests on him surprising Marcia by asking her to stay. And there's that.

I thought that was brilliantly written. Again, I think the dialogue in this is great. Because of that sense of, exactly that sense of, he's always trying to be smart and flip and come up with the good one-liners. And then quite often he doesn't, he never quite bests Stephen. He gets quite cross with the fact that his emotions actually prevent him from... But actually there's a fascinating duality because when he says the wittiest thing

or the best thing or the truest thing, either to Stephen or in the ministry, when he's saying it to a minister, when he sort of forgets himself and doesn't cover up the fact that he has this sort of aim that he wants to best the person he's talking to, then he loses. And he knows he should pretend to be a bit more stupid in order to win, and he can't do it.

And I find that very, very true to life. Yeah. I'm just going to give you this other quote because it really made me laugh when i was reading this clive james essay written in 1974 as discussed clive james quotes a brilliant bit of balkin uh one of balkin's heroes from one of these books complaining about uh how if only um if only more women had been to public schools instead, more male public schools instead of wearing skirts, they'd be a damn sight easier to get along with. And Clive Jones says,

it is said that intelligent women dislike Balkin's books, and reading stuff like that, you can see why. There's quite a lot of talk about being spanked on the bottom, isn't there? There is, yes. The sort of misdemeanours and women being... And his flirtation with his secretary, you know, kind of saying, put your hair behind your ear, wear your hair behind your ears.

And yet, I think he... The reason why it doesn't... When you read it now, the reason why it seems old-fashioned but not offensively so, I think, anyway, is that gap between what the character is saying and his inability to manage his emotions at all times. So the surface is one thing. It's a very interesting, kind of very British,

almost hard-boiled thing. The surface is telling you one thing, but everything underneath is pulling in the other direction. I think that's what I love, because you could say, and when people don't like this book, and if you look at Goodreads or something, people go, well, this man's letting his wife have an affair, and they really

just cannot comprehend this. So therefore they despise him or think his emotions aren't deep. And in fact, it's very clear that his emotions run incredibly deep, that he loves his wife with all his heart, that she is the centre of his life and yet he also knows that to love her properly he wants to give her the freedom that he feels she

needs at that moment and that's seems to me the most generous thing one human being can do for another to give them freedom i mean i think that's i think that's absolutely true there's there's a couple of scenes in the book where he he, you know, the scene with the Germans. I love that scene. Which is kind of brilliant. And there's this great bit where he says... It's well worth reading out. He says, we have no small virtues at all.

He's talking about the English. We have no small virtues at all. We're lazy, complacent, undisciplined and generally deplorable. We only manage to carry on at all because we've got a certain genius for living in the world. It must be very irritating for other people who have to work hard for their effects which is sort of weirdly kind of i mean i think i think that scene and then the scene at the boho the bohemian party where you know he the guy with the red jacket and the bright yellow mustard trousers on and it's it the thing is bill sherratt is he's trying to win the

war you can feel there's that thing we if we this is serious and why are you lot just sort of prancing around being being idiots it's not good enough or why are the minister still you know slightly kind of on the book slightly corrupt slightly inefficient i mean i i and i think at the same time he's he's not he's not as smart as he thinks he is. He's trying desperately hard to make that relationship work under terrible circumstances. What I found was interesting about it was the words in it that he uses, that Bill Sharratt uses.

Is that his name, Bill Sharratt? Yeah. It's the same language my father uses, my 86-year-old father uses. So lots of the words, like to grouse about something, that's a word my dad would use on a daily basis, to be bucked about something. He's bucked about a lot, isn't he? But there's also a kind of...

Bung-ho! There's a kind of attitude of that generation which is to do with the frustration with bureaucracy. So it's a kind of non-political frustration with government that doesn't manifest itself in being kind of overtly left-wing or overtly right-wing. It's just a kind of fed-upness with the way things are. You get that with Bill Sharratt.

He's kind of like fed up with the civil service. We all hit that point. We all eventually become grumpy Telegraph readers and we all hit this point of grumpiness. I thought some of it was extraordinarily well most of this book i think still feels to me exactly the sort of you know emotionally the core of it feels very contemporary and i think that is what's so remarkable about it yeah and you have this thing that he was working in a ministry the ministry for food himself so he

was dealing with all this absolute horseshit. And there's this lovely little passage where he's talking to Lennox, who is his arch enemy, supposedly. He's the man who blocks all his plans. I think we might possibly get this through, he said. The secretary seemed quite oncoming. I didn't say anything. Have you left him something that he can disagree with, said Lennox?

You always want to do that. Something obvious that he can cross out. He'll like it much better then. I don't think so, I said. Pity, said Lennox. You should always remember to do that. I said, I sometimes wonder if this is a war or a nursery romp. But you sort of think that's just pure yes, minister.

And there's this idea that you can't get things through you can't get them to happen and it will be compromised you have a brilliant idea you put it through various committees and there's this key thing that happens which happens now when you sort of think about almost any policy that people try to sign business up for that someone goes oh we don't need to make it compulsory it can be a voluntary code i mean they're all gentlemen everyone going to say they can regulate that themselves. Yeah, no, it's, I mean, they're pretty hard to read those passages. Shall I say a bit about Borkin?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Nigel Borkin was born in 1908. He seems to have been good at everything. He excelled at school. He went to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he was an exhibitioner and prizeman in natural science. He graduated and then worked for the National Institute of Industrial Psychology

for five years in the early 30s, during which time he was a consultant to J.S. Roundtree and Sons, the chocolate manufacturer. And he claimed to be responsible for the success both of the Aero and Kit Kat brands. He wrote four books of non-fiction based on his punch columns, and he wrote 15 novels, the first of them in 1934.

Then this trilogy, we were talking about darkness falls from the air at the small back room and my known executioner and then in 1947 all of which were huge commercial successes and critical successes um and then in 1947 he wrote um and a novel called lord i was afraid um which was his favourite book in his work. Also, he's least accessible. Completely unlike anything he'd written before. An analysis of British society between the wars told by seven characters almost entirely in dialogue.

One critic reviewed it and says, Mr Borkin's dynamic is elbow grease and the sooner he realises it, the better. Which is a bit brutal on old knowledge. And Anthony Burgess loved it, however. And then he writes several more novels. He carries on writing novels. The last of his novels is published in 1969.

It's called Kings of Infinite Space, and it was commissioned by NASA. That's how far he'd fallen. That he could generate sales of about 30,000 copies per book, which now would be extraordinary. But NASA approached him and said, well, you're a jobbing writer. Knock us out a novel to celebrate ten years of the space race.

And he did it. He did well with writing school as well, wasn't he? He was, yes. A very dubious writing school. His first marriage broke up following a partner-swapping arrangement. So there may be elements of truth in... Hardly surprising. But also, when this book was written,

when Darkly Salt and the Air was written, she was having a fair... That was with an artist, wasn't it? Yeah, that's right. Michael Ayrton. There was a composer. So you can see why he didn't like these kind of smarmy, charming, artsy types.

But also, Borkin was a very public author as well. He was a regular panellist on things like Any Questions and The Brain's Trust. So people... I'm going somewhere with this. I'm quite fascinated by this. But he also wrote a lot of screenplays. He wrote the screenplay for Mandy,

the incredible Alexander McKendrick Ealing film. Incredibly sensitive and it's a wonderful film. He wrote the screenplay for the extraordinary film The Singer, Not the Song, which listeners may be familiar with because it's a peculiar Spanish western with John Mills as a priest and Dirk Bogart as an outlaw who wears exclusively leather.

The Singer, Not the Song. He also wrote the first draft of the screenplay for Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Cleopatra. I love that. The point being that we are... He wrote The Man Who Never Was, too. He did. He did which won a BAFTA.

So he has this career, these extraordinary careers as a personality, as a very critically and commercially successful novelist, as an award-winning screenwriter, all these things. And yet, if you said to somebody now who wrote Darkness Falls from the Air, they probably wouldn't know that he clearly was very successful in his own lifetime and then that seems to have vanished. That's like the Clive James point, isn't it?

He says, you know, he was called a brilliant, popular novelist. And that's always here, it's a very damning phrase. It's like we were talking about Anita Brutner last week, she'd written a book every two years instead of every year. She'd have been a lot more fated and successful. Well, like Brutner, I mean not all

Balkan's books are great, I mean there are ones I can really leave. So I'd say there's about four or five I love. He also wrote an old didn't he call it way through the wood yeah which is also because like this is like the end of the affair that's like if you took the great gatsby and said but what happened afterwards because someone's run over there's a rich man's car that isn't brought into the frame a love triangle but but that completely follows the next step, you know, how it unfolds, who's guilty, what the repercussions are.

I must say, I'd love to read Lord I Was Afraid. I was petrified. I was really bad. It sounded fantastic. Sounds like a crazy book. You get to do one of those once, as it turns out. And it's on his gravestone. Lord I turns out. And it's on his gravestone.

Lord, I'm Afraid is the inscription on his gravestone. Is that right? Because his gravestone is an open book, isn't it? Is it? In Hampstead, isn't it? Yeah, in Hampstead. There's so many great... Maybe, Rowan, we should get you to read some of the other stuff that you like in it. I just love... This is a really great bit of dialogue.

This is Marcia talking about Stephen to Bill Sarrett. Stephen's so damn good at making you feel helpful. One of the things I quite enjoyed doing was trying to read out in sort of, in kind of 1940s clipped. Deborah Kerr. Deborah Kerr. Should we all talk like that? Yes, rather.

Darling. Stephen's so damn good at making you feel helpful, said Marcia. He's completely shameless about it. He talks as though I were Mary, Queen of Heaven and so on. Of course I fall for it. Of course you do, I said. What you don't realise is that whoever's being Stephen's damp shoulder at the moment is Mary, Queen of Heaven. There's no patent involved.

I think I must be mad, said Marcia. It's the war, I said, or the weather. I mean, there's great dialogue and all the way through shot through with some and as I say that kind of sense that behind all the wisecracking you know there's real pain

in it. Probably the best dialogue I think is between Bill and Stephen when they're kind of having that fight and there's lots and lots of stuff about Stephen being in profile you know and sort of always putting his handsome profile on the thing, or, you know, working up some kind of mood that everyone can decipher, you know, that he's gloomy or dour or lovelorn. But I think the first chapter, actually, in a way,

is something you could almost teach to people who wanted to write as a way of plunging you straight into something. The total immediacy, but all the little clues are there about everything you could have bill introduced and you know he's been at the ministry for ages you have him looking at barrage balloons then you have him going for a drink with his best friend i love this line when he says i had a drink while i waited for ted and it went down very well and I had another and that went down very well too I told myself that I was beginning to drink too much and ordered another

you think yeah that's what you do wouldn't you there's a Hemingway quote though isn't there saying that people don't drink enough in his books they're always only having one or two and they're acting stupidly and in fact Hemingway thinks he should be having a lot more and obviously it turned into a problem

for him as well, the drinking did as he got older this is a recurring theme on Backlisted the drunken writers those poor agents those poor agents he only had two agents, he wasn't one of those people who got through loads and loads of agents

he had two agencies he changed from David Hightam to A.P. Peters A.D. Peters when his marriage broke up so he swapped agents just after that and then stayed with them for the rest of his career

he was very well liked, Balkan, as well I was reading about him it's fascinating, again he's well liked Balkan as well. I was reading about him. It's fascinating. Again, he's well liked. He's well reviewed. He sells quantities of books.

He wins BAFTAs. And yet when he goes, he dies in 1970 and then he's, he's, he's gone. But he's kind of gone before that, isn't he? And even if you look at his film career, he won a BAFTA.

He went to Hollywood. He drank an awful lot in Hollywood. He never had real great success there his name wasn't on the final screenplay of Cleopatra he never really sustained that it kind of sounds good on paper but when you picketed a bit you realise

actually it didn't quite work out for him as well as he'd hoped I'd just like to read a bit from near the end of the book this is Bill has to get across London during a bombing raid. And I'm just going to read a bit, which is a fascinating mixture of all the things we've been talking about, the economy of style, the cinematic element of it,

and the very British attitude to it. So I'm just going to read this. The breeze was blowing as though the whole thing was a blast furnace. I tripped over a hose, shoved out my hand to save myself and cut it on a broken window. It was nothing much. A shower of sparks came down and I had to brush them off. I missed one and smelt it singeing my hair.

A bobby shoved a man in a raincoat and knocked him into the gutter. The man's hat fell off. He was bald. I don't know what it was about. I have worked right round the centre... That's great, about. I have worked right round the centre of the city. I reckon if I cut in soon, I should be about right. There was a terrific wallop quite close. I thought it was a bomb, but it was a gas main.

I saw the fireman run back from it. It made a sort of triangle of flame about 20 or 30 feet high. There was a lovely smell of violets for a bit. I should think it was a scent factory. My hand was bleeding, so I put my handkerchief around it and held it in my hand. The air was very hot and there was a sort of steady roar. I thought the whole place was done for. Now, the brilliance of that, in my opinion, is the, first of all, the speed, the short sentences, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, but also being willing to use really straightforward language.

The air was very hot and there was a sort of steady roar. You don't listen to that and think, that's too basic. You think, yeah, get to it, get to it. Really, really brilliant writing, I think. I love the bit at the beginning when you first meet Marsha and Stephen because you don't know at that point. You don't know what Bill's relationship to Marsha is. And I love that.

I love that your kind of little clues are given to you. He's having a drink with Ted and he says, how's Marsha? And Bill says, I knew what he meant, but I just said, oh, flourishing. And that ended that. And you sort of think, what's that about? And then he phones. He doesn't say, he doesn't say I phone home. He says he phones the flat. He gets gets marcia he asks her out for supper and then there's a pause and he says oh is steven there so he has to ask him too and they're sort of sitting in this uh

restaurant when when he looks up and sees them marcia and steven turned up up marcia and steven turned up i've left out a word here, sorry. Marsha and Stephen turned up after about five minutes... Oh no, I haven't, sorry. Sorry, sorry. Marsha and Stephen turned up about five minutes after I got there. I thought they made a pretty pair and didn't much like it. Marsha was all smoothed

out and sparkling like women are after that sort of thing. It's just, isn't that brilliant if there is a better description of a woman who's just had sex i really i honestly don't know it and steven was looking big and handsome and haunted and so like a creative artist that you wouldn't have thought you'd have the nerve to go around looking like that. They were very much together and I felt like a stockbroker uncle

taking the engaged couple out. And you think, what a brilliant, heartbreaking, poignant way to describe seeing your wife with another man. Can I do just a little bit? I love this. This is kind of a climactic scene where he says goodbye. Goodbye, said Stephen Bowie.

He looked incredibly handsome. I got a fit of the giggles going back to the office. As a matter of fact, I was rather angry. He does that all the time. Yeah, yeah. That's great. Somehow, my real cracks at Stephen never came off properly. You couldn't hang Stephen. You could only

give him a hell of a lot of rope and leave it to him. It was the handkerchief business which was giving me the giggles. That's when Stephen takes his handkerchief out and dabs his eyes. I kept saying to myself, there's richness and giggling some more. But it wasn't really satisfying. I was always alright with Stephen until I

wanted to hit really hard. And then somehow it never worked. And it just felt rather vulgar. He was funny alright. But he ought really to have been funnier than I ever found him. In a queer sort of way, he was a natural. And naturals always have some sort of dignity, even if they're only natural skunks. It's so good, that.

It is. He's got such a great... I was thinking a lot about Charms, though, when I read this. I think there is definite similarities. That sort of, you know, because hard-boiled, tough, the gut, but, you know. But underneath it, there's a very vulnerability. Absolutely. We just watched, yesterday, we re-watched the Powell and Pressburger. Small Back Room. Small Back Room film.

So good. And I have to say that the, it's fascinating how true they are. They change the ending of the book, but they're so true to the dialogue and the spirit of the dialogue. And David Farrow, who plays the Balkan hero. I have a signed

photograph of David Farrow. I'm one of David Niven, and they're my two great treasures. Oh, yes. The author, David Niven, and they're my two, you know, great treasures. Oh, yes. The author, David Niven, the author of the single most entertaining book ever written. Yeah. Moons Balloon. Moons Balloon.

May I take the opportunity to recommend, as strongly and forcefully as I can, David Niven's audiobook reading of The Moons Balloon. Marvellous. I have it. I have it on cassette. I bought it at the service station. Oh, my God. I did it on cassette. I bought it at the service station. I did it on the way to Scotland. I'm going away with David Niven.

I wish you wouldn't. Listeners, you will literally laugh. I was angry and then sad. You will literally cry when he reads the genius. It's a great recording. Ava May. Perhaps Michael Jarvis reading Joss William. Martin Jarvis. Martin Jarvis.

Sorry, Martin. As we've veered away from Balkan for a moment, Matthew, do you have a tenuous link that might bring us back? So I have. I've got the tenuous link here, right here next to me, which is a box of Black Magic chocolates. Because the other thing that Nigel is well known for is for the creation of Black Magic chocolates. That's true. 1933 1933 so help yourself everyone

and what's really interesting about black magic chocolates is the box chocolates up until this point were advertised with pictures of country cottages with bucolic pictures of the english countryside then all of a sudden you've got this box which is saying have these chocolates and come to bed with me that's what black magic's all about it's they were created for and he haven't had the chocolate that's what it's all about they were created for men to give his presence to women and nigel was the he did all the research on it so he was they did yeah they're the result of market research so they asked men what kind of chocolates they would like to be seen with and women what type of chocolates they would like to receive. And also the other thing about Black Magic, which is brilliant,

Nigel Balkin was the first person to come up with the idea of including a little map to the chocolate box. No. No. Is that true? Well, then he's a genius. Absolutely. He wins BAFTAs,

he writes novels. That's like the great Cesar Ryan, the guy who invented a wheel. He was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three. He was a genius. Anyone can make chocolate, but to put a little map inside the box. But black magic is fundamentally unchanged then since the 30s.

Yeah, so the original box had 12 different flavours in it. Speaking of things to go change, was anyone else struck while reading the book by the all-night boots on Piccadilly? Being there during the Blitz. How often has that place always been open when you need it? You know, you're desperate,

you've got, you know, some terrible sort of fungal infection and the only place in London you can go is the you're desperate you've got you know some terrible sort of fungal infection and the only place in london you can go is the all-night booth you think you can probably buy a box of black magic there so you know this book was not um available from the boots lending library because it was considered too adult for just those reasons you know the book that this did um remind me of bring this full circle, is a different Graham Greene novel. It really reminds me of The Ministry of Fear,

which is one of the more obscure Greene novels written during the war. They're tremendously good at evoking a London which is at the beginning of the Blitz, where the railings have been taken away around the parks, where people are still going to pubs because they haven't quite worked out what else to do, how dangerous it's going to be.

It's like this novel, it's on the cusp of the phony war and the real bombardment. And that's one of the brilliances, I think, of this novel. Actually, perhaps... and that's one of the brilliances I think of this novel actually perhaps I mean we can't say the extent to which it's deliberate because of when it's written but it's fantastic how as it goes on

London becomes more and more heavily bombed. It unravels and the things, wandering the streets becomes a difficulty and suddenly there are huge pits and as you say the, wandering the streets becomes a difficulty and suddenly there are huge pits and when, as you say, the difference between the West End and the East End of London

there's a great line where he says that when he goes over to Stepney, it was far worse than anything I'd seen so far. In some of the really slum streets, the places hadn't waited to be hit, they'd just fallen down at the thought of it which is, you know, quite dark humour when you're writing that in the middle of

but it's it's um i think i don't think i've read a book that's that's that's carried that sense of gathering kind of um jeopardy in quite the same way that you're it starts off like they're going as tourists and watching and isn't it sort of it's yeah you know they feel in control of it but then gradually as that as the narrative gets darker so does the bombing raids get longer they're working in offices where all the windows have been blown out sort of madness

of trying to continue everyday life in an office, everybody's tired because they've all been kept up all night through the stress and the bombing Rowan, could you give us one last little bit to read before we before we wind up i mean actually i don't think this is particularly archetypal i just love the exchanges between uh stephen and bill and i actually i sort of feel like i should probably assign them to two men because they're just so they're just so funny

i think um and so this is, we'll start with Stephen. Marsha came to me this afternoon, he said in his lovely, deep voice. She said it must end, at once. I knew she was right, of course. But I fought. Damn it, a man must fight for his own life. Yes, I said, it seemed a reasonable idea. It was no good, said Stephen. Marsha's strong, stronger probably than you know. I knew I'd lost. He threw up his head and pointed his chin defiantly at the beer pools. I did my best to face it, so did she. For a while we talked about it quite calmly, even happily in a way. It was only after quite

a long time that we broke down. Both of you, I inquired. We sat beside one another on the sofa holding hands like a pair of frightened children. It's so brilliant. I just love the way he takes part. The person who'd be so easy to make

the hero of this, the handsome torture poet and he just renders him ridiculous well on that frightened children in the middle of the blitz i think we should probably pull this to a close thanks to ron pelling and of course to matthew clayton and of course thanks once again to our sponsors i'm bound you can get in touch with us on twitter at at backlisted, on Facebook on the backlistedpod page and on the Unbound site at unbound.co.uk forward slash

backlisted. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Until then, it's goodnight from me. And I'd like to personally apologise to Graham Green. I think at the end of the affair. After this, I can never like the end of the affair. Has everyone told you?

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