Backlisted - Grinny & You Remember Me! by Nicholas Fisk

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

Sam Leith, author of The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, returns to Backlisted to discuss two novels by Nicholas Fisk, Grinny (1973) and its sequel, You Remember Me! (1984). Fisk's ...SF thrillers were tremendously popular with young readers during the 1970s and 1980s but his work is now rather forgotten, an error we wish to correct as a matter of urgency. The plot of You Remember Me! may be summarised as follows: a TV celebrity becomes the head of a mass populist movement in the UK, leading their country into fascism at the behest of an alien power. As such, Fisk's novel has something to tell us (and our children) right now, which is why we have released this episode early. Our conversation was recorded on Friday 8th November 2024, in the immediate aftermath of the US election results; in addition to Grinny and You Remember Me!, Sam, John and Andy offer suggestions of other books written for young people that warn of the reality of life under fascist regimes, including The Once and Future King, Watership Down and V for Vendetta. Just don't call it an emergency podcast. In the words of Timothy Snyder in his book On Tyranny: 'When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books.' * 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 and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today you find us standing in the kitchen of an English suburban house in the early 1970s. A tall, eager man is filling up the glasses of his wife and two young children with sherry. At the centre of the room stands a very short but neat elderly woman wearing a hat with a veil and gloves. She removes both, takes out a pack of gold bars from her pocket and smiles. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people pledge to support the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously.
Starting point is 00:00:46 And today we are joined by returning guest Sam Leith. Hello, Sam, how are you? I'm all right, thank you. How are you both? It's a great pleasure to be invited back. Thank you. I am quite well. How about you, John?
Starting point is 00:00:59 I am good. In fact, better than good. Not traumatized by the week's election. It's funny you should say that Sam, because that may come up during this podcast. I think more inspired to think a little deeper and listen a little more carefully to the people around me. I refuse the option of trauma. Very good, John. Sam Leith is the literary editor of the Spectator magazine.
Starting point is 00:01:23 His new book is The Haunted Wood, a history of childhood reading. And he's also the author of You Talking to Me, rhetoric from Aristotle to Trump and beyond. Gulp. And Right to the Point, that's right, the W everybody. Right to the Point, how to be clear, correct and persuasive on the page. He has joined us on previous episodes dedicated to Ray Bradbury in 2019 and Thomas Pynchon in 2022. Sam, how is it going with The Haunted Wood? A wonderful book as listeners to Batlist did know. Well, thank you. I think it's going okay.
Starting point is 00:02:02 I mean, I'm doing what every author of a new book does, which is checking my Amazon rankings far more often than is good for my mental health, though, no doubt it's good for Jeff Bezos' clicks, but so far it's holding up. I think, I mean, I've been very lucky. Have you got a window open while we record this so you can just keep an eye on it? I beautifully closed it. And as I was saying, I think it's going to actually, you know, vastly improve my outlook on life.
Starting point is 00:02:27 Not to check it for an hour and a half. Um, but no, it's going all right. I think it seems to have found or had as much publicity, thanks in part to backlisted that those people who might want to know about it probably do. And now let's just hope the bastards buy it. I think one world have done a great job I have to say. Looks great. Looks it's a really nice bit of bookmaking. It is beautifully published and I can't take credit for that. I think it's a Christmas
Starting point is 00:02:53 gift. I was gonna say Sam, will it be available in the run-up to Christmas? I very much hope it will. That's good. You're talking about having and checking your Amazon ranking. One of the things that really makes me laugh in the world in which we now live is I'm forever seeing authors drawing attention to the fact made it to number one in any niche charts? It has found itself at the top in various niche charts. I think it was doing quite well in histories of children's literature, number one, because there aren't that many haven't been for about 30 years. So, you know,
Starting point is 00:03:43 well, that's, you know, that's a triumph. Now we are recording this episode of Batlist on Friday, November the 8th, 2024. It's been in the diary for some time. We've been talking for several months about finding the time to discuss the books we're going to discuss, but in the light of events in America this week, we wanted to get it out to you as early as possible. We wouldn't stoop to calling this an emergency podcast, as the American historian Timothy Snyder writes in his book on tyranny, when we repeat the same words and phrases that
Starting point is 00:04:11 appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. Instead, and this being backlisted, I like to believe this quick response show is in the tradition of John Lennon's instant Karma, a single written, recorded, and released in a matter of days in early 1970, which of course makes Sam our Yoko Ono, which is a compliment, which is a compliment. I love Yoko. Andy, does that mean Nicky's our Phil Spector? Hey, hey, Spector did a lot of good things, a lot of good things.
Starting point is 00:04:47 Well anyway, after the US election result, it dawned on us that a book we are here to discuss, Grinny, my Nicholas Fisk, has a sequel entitled You Remember Me, the plot of which may be summarized as follows. A TV celebrity becomes the head of a mass populist movement, leading the country into fascism at the behest of an alien power. Fancy that. Literature is news that stays news, as Ezra Pound memorably said, but sometimes the news is literature you wish had stayed literature. Very good. Also, it's about time we stopped quoting Ezra Pound. So on this show we'll be discussing both Grinney and You Remember Me, plus other books written for children that warn of the reality of life under an authoritarian
Starting point is 00:05:31 regime and how to resist it. Quoting Tim Snyder again, When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. Here, here. Before we get into the wider discussion, let's give you a quick introduction to the two books we're discussing. Grinney, one of Nicholas Fiske's many novels of science fiction written primarily for children
Starting point is 00:06:11 and young adults, was first published by William Heineman in 1973. Set in the suburban home of the Carpenter family, it is told mostly through the diaries of the 11-year-old Timothy Carpenter. It covers the unexpected arrival of his mysterious great aunt Emma. Nicknamed Grinny because of her difficult-to-shift smile, she quickly ingratiates herself into the rhythms of family life, but her eccentricities and odd questions soon arouse the suspicions of Beth, Tim's seven-year-old sister. It turns out that Grinny is not at all who she appears to be, and Tim and Beth's clever unveiling of the terrifying threat she embodies, and their even more clever
Starting point is 00:06:50 strategy for disarming it, have helped to make the book a children's classic. Indeed. But perhaps less well known is You Remember Me, a loose sequel published over a decade later by Viking Kestrel in 1984. Timothy Carpenter is now 15 years old and working as a cub reporter at the local Gazette. He has plenty to write about. The whole country seems to have fallen under the spell of the smart and charismatic TV celebrity Lisa Treadgold, whose popular movement Rule of Law aka The Rollers is dedicated to a moral crusade built around the three D's decency discipline dedication. As the movement gathers pace it is once again Beth now 11 years old who spots the uncanny resemblance of the seemingly irresistible Lisa Treadgold to their previous nemesis,
Starting point is 00:07:47 Grinny. Can it be happening again? But this time around, her brother Timothy seems unwilling or unable to help his sister. We'll discuss this and much else besides in the course of the next hour, but first here is a message from our sponsors. Chris Evans. It might just go back to the car. Let's save Christmas. I'm not gonna say that. Say it. All right. Let's save Christmas. There it is.
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Starting point is 00:09:37 And we're back. So let's start with the usual question. Sam, where were you? Who were you? What were you when you first encountered a book or books by Nicholas Fisk? And which book was it? Well, I'm pretty sure it was Grinney. And Grinney is certainly the one that I think made the most profound impression on me when I was a kid, because I mean, this isn't a very literary judgment, but it scared the shit out of me. And everybody I've ever met in adult life who read it as a very literary judgment, but it scared the shit out of me. And everybody I've ever met in adult life who read it as a kid, when you mention it, they go, oh my god, yes, that scared the shit out of me. So it's had a profound effect, I think, on my generation of
Starting point is 00:10:17 puffin club members. And Grinney had a huge impression, not just because of the scariness of the plot, but the sort of texture of the language. I mean, because it's in diary form, it's got that strange to the moment happening in real time found footage quality about it. And it sort of does sound like a precocious 11 year old diary or whatever he is, he's 11 or 12, I think, isn't he? For example, I remember he was in sentences, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which I thought was pronounced, et, et, et.
Starting point is 00:10:50 And I think my own diary writing practice started to mimic that, you know, my diary entries were in et, et, et. But it's kind of like he's slightly in love with long words and aphorisms, and he pontificates on things, and he takes his father's sayings and recycles them. And the needle with his sister, it's all very recognizable, which I think grounds the fantasy
Starting point is 00:11:11 of it. Yeah. They call Grinny, Grinny, obviously as a pun on granny because she's grinning all the time. And it's doing a thing that they loved doing in Dr. Who in this era, which if partly for budgetary reasons as well, which was setting horrible things in recognizable domestic settings. It's a trope of early seventies SF on TV and, and in literature. And I think Samuel writes, I think one of the reasons that Grinney still works so well, which having just reread it for the first time since the 1970s, I was delighted to find that it does, is it's not just the domestic setting of it, is it? It's
Starting point is 00:11:59 the sense that because it's found a found document, it can't be changed. Do you see what I mean? It's like it's a report of something that has happened and is happening in the moment for the reader. ALISTAIR Yes, exactly. You're experiencing it forwards. Also, I think there's something about that domestic setting that really sort of snags me and why I think it's so profoundly horrifying is because it's a home invasion fantasy. And you know, vampire stories and zombie stories also tend to be home invasion fantasies. So much horror is about the home, the safe place being under threat, the calls coming from inside the house.
Starting point is 00:12:43 And when you're a kid, and so much children's literature is about home being the sort of safe place from which you sadly fall through your wardrobe or through, you know, a rabbit hole or whatever to have your adventure. And then you come back, but home is the safe place. And here, you know, it just opens on page two, this weird old creature presents himself at the door. And you as a kid go, what the hell? Who's this? to this weird old creature presents himself at the door. And you as a kid go, what the hell, who's this? And the parents go, what the hell, who's, oh, oh yes, I remember you, come on in. Why don't you come and stay? And so the parents who are protectors,
Starting point is 00:13:19 you know, you would get the parents out of the way in children's stories one way or another. But in this case, they're there, but they're just useless because something's going on that has washed their minds. So I think that's a really profound digging into a particular sort of childhood terror. The people who are supposed to protect you are in fact incapable of protecting you. John, I had a memory of Grinney being read on Jack and Ori, but a trip to the BBC Genome, the amazing BBC Genome site confirms in fact that it was not read on Jack and Ori, but it was serialized on ITV's program, The Book Tower, in probably 1979 or 80. Sam, you're a few years younger than me. I wonder whether
Starting point is 00:14:08 you got to it via that route could be or just on the shelf in the library. I think on the shelf. I don't remember hearing it dramatized. Nicholas Fisk, we should emphasize was one of the reasons this is such a perfect backlisted is such a perfect backlisted subject, John, is Nicholas Fisk, who is probably quite an obscure name to anybody listening to this under the age of 30, possibly 40. But if you grew up in the 1970s, he was a really popular writer, wasn't he? I think he was kind of the entry level for a lot of us for sci-fi before you went on to Asimov or Heinlein or some of the other stuff. It was, there were big ideas, but as Sam has said with that, the domestic, very, very,
Starting point is 00:14:57 it's a very 70s setting. The mum and the dad are both in their 30s. He's kind of doing a Roman dig. He's a bit of an archaeologist. It's a classic seventies family. And as you say, the feeling is very, very much Doctor Who, but there's also quite a bit of Molesworth in the diaries. I mean, I think, you know, he's always hemming and harring and et cetera and et cetera-ing,
Starting point is 00:15:17 which only makes the horror, as the horror begins to ramp up even more. There's a particular scene in this book that lives with every, everybody who read it in their sort of early teenage years, which is when I read it, I think remembers it. Like I remember him being a feature of my childhood and obviously it was for yours, but he was, I mean, there's a book called Twentieth Century Children's Writers, which described him as the Huxley Windham Golding of children's literature.
Starting point is 00:15:42 So, you know, it's like depressing to think that he's now completely forgotten. We haven't made an episode about all this Huxley Windham Golding of children's literature. So, you know, it's like depressing to think that he's now completely forgotten. We haven't made an episode about Aldous Huxley, have we? But we have made episodes about William Golding and about John Windham. And Windham, certainly, he's, Fisk's earlier book Trillions seems to me to owe quite a lot to John Windham. That was my first Fisk Trillions. Again, it's this sort of alien invasion idea. It's about the world being kind of, you know, invaded by these sort of strange kind of particles Yeah Nicholas Fisk was so well known and
Starting point is 00:16:29 Preeminent even by the publication of Grinney that this book was reviewed in 1973 in the Times by Philippa Pierce, the author of Tom's Midnight Garden who described it as disarmingly informal, brilliantly controlled and unfailingly exciting. And would you like to know the three other children's novels, or can you guess the three other children's novels alongside which Grinney was reviewed in the Times? Oh, I couldn't begin to guess that sort of level of specificity. Okay, no. Are they were famous. That this is how famous. So we're talking about Grinney by Nicholas Fisk, the ghost of Thomas Kemp by Penelope Lively.
Starting point is 00:17:11 Wow. The dark is rising by Susan Cooper. Wow. And Charlie and the great glass elevator by Roald Dahl. What a roundup. Right. In the same week or month. All by Philippa Pierce.. All by Philippa Pierce?
Starting point is 00:17:26 All reviewed by Philippa Pierce. Did she give old Dahl a kicking? I mean, she doesn't say this is the worst sequel ever written, but she is noticeably chillier towards it than she is towards Grinney and indeed towards The Dark is Rising. She particularly likes The Dark is Rising. But anyway, this is the point I'm making. We have all heard, everyone listening to this has heard of the three other books.
Starting point is 00:17:56 They may even have read all three of those other books, but Grinney for whatever reason and Fisk for whatever reason for a writer who was concerned with the future, seems to have been locked Sapphire and Steel-like in the 1970s. Another reference you'll have to explain on the website. Yes. He's like, no, Alan, hey, Alan Garner, no lesser figure than Alan Garner has said how influenced he was by the final Sapphire and Seal story, which if anybody hasn't seen it, I know spoilers, but you know, it doesn't end well for our heroes. So Sam, would you care to speculate why then we are able to treat this as a kind
Starting point is 00:18:39 of archival book rather than a contemporary one? Well, that's a good question. I wonder whether it's the case that science fiction dates faster than fantasy. I don't know whether that's true, but I think actually 60s and 70s SF, I don't think people... I mean, you were talking about Asimov and Heinlein, I wonder whether millennials and Gen Z read those either. I wonder whether SF does have a danger. I remember talking to William Gibson about science fiction, the futurism in it. And he said, oh, writing a science fiction novel is like carrying a kind of ice cream cone in your kind of predictions of the future just sort of melt as you go through it. So maybe it's that. I mean, the odd thing about Fisk, I think, and one of the things that's captivating about him is that he's not sort of straight SF. His world building is wackier than that and more off-beam. John, you mentioned trillions, which there's no real
Starting point is 00:19:48 explanation for what's going on with the trillions. And there's a lot of extraordinarily strange and suggestive work on, are they sort of alien hive minds? And there are sort of weird existential things. I mean, you've got these soldiers shooting them with guns and tactical nuclear weapons and so forth, which reminds me nothing so much as that bit in Heart of Darkness where there's the warship just firing, shelling the jungle. And in his other books, Ragabonahanker Hare, which starts as a science fictional premise, there's some cloned characters who are set in some tiny little 1940s to a apartment. I read that this week.
Starting point is 00:20:31 I'd never read it before. God, that's fantastic. And you think it's one sort of science fictional thing, and then it sort of shifts gear. And you get a character appearing who appears to have been willed into existence by some sort of collective act of fictional imagination. And in Grinney, I think the stuff that stays with you is the stuff that's deeply unheimlich on a kind of Freudian line. It's not like there's an explanation for,
Starting point is 00:21:00 oh, she's an alien or she's a robot or this is the setup. I mean, the details are things like she doesn't have a smell and the top's first shoes aren't creased. All of the sort of stuff about her with no explanation is just odd in a sort of dream-like way. So I think he's halfway between science fiction and kind of outright horror. Do you want to read us a bit, Sam? Okay. He has an example of where one of the probably two moments in the book that everyone who was terrified by it as a child will remember. But we know that there are lots of strange things about Guiney, these
Starting point is 00:21:37 uncreased shoes, the fact she smokes cigarettes to constantly to conceal the fact she doesn't smell like a human being. She appears to be frightened of electricity. She's got all sorts of sort of strange characteristics. Beth sees her walking out across snowy, icy paving stones and she slips and falls. And Beth, who's constantly trying to convince Timothy that something is not right.
Starting point is 00:22:05 Eventually confesses Timothy what she saw that upsets her so much. Grinney slipped on the ice and broke her wrist. And Tim, again, this is in his diary, so it's mediated, records Beth's horrified witness to the incident. The skin was gashed open, but there was no blood. The bones stuck out, but they were not made of real bone. They were made of shiny steel.
Starting point is 00:22:29 She said there was no blood, no blood at all. The skin was just split open. I asked her what color the skin was, and she said the same color outside as in. I said, well, there must have been meaty stuff where the bones were, but she said no. There was nothing but the steel ribs, ribs and the skin was just a thick layer like the fat on a mutton chop before it's cooked but with a tear in it. I know it's so good.
Starting point is 00:22:58 I love that. And those spokes it's like the spokes umbrella. She's a sort of kind of collection of rods in her arm, rather than even just a single metal bone. But again, where's that come from? It's funny she said a collection of rods, because these Fisk novels most reminded me of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. They take a what if and run with an idea. Fisk wrote a really interesting essay called One Thumping Lie Only in which he says what you can do with a SF story is present one thing that is untrue to your child reader and then ensure that everything else
Starting point is 00:23:47 that flows from it feels totally authentic. And I think for what it's worth, that sense of terror, what we would come to call body horror in a David Cronenberg way is right there in Grinney, isn't it? And as you say, Sam, the decision to compare that non-body to a piece of animal meat is very, very full on for a 1970s novel, supposedly for children. AC It is. It's dramatic. CB They pick up the animal analogy in the extraordinary final sequence of the book. But the other thing, I think, the visceral Unheimlich is also, feels like a very 1970s thing.
Starting point is 00:24:35 It's kind of language and attention to language. And Beth in particular spots that she does inappropriate things. She offers a cigarette to Timothy, do you smoke, Timothy? She tells Beth that she's, she asks her about having babies and that she can't have babies at nine or 10 in a way that, and then there is the great scene where she assumes
Starting point is 00:25:04 when they're talking about a cast iron Conker, very 1970s, people still playing Conker, that it is actually made out of cast iron. So in the context of the conversations we're having about AI, what machine learning can do and what it can't do, this book is absolutely brilliant on human beings being able to sniff out a constructed. Grinney is a machine learning experiment, you know, a large language kind of program that is, is able to write itself quite quickly, but it's still vulnerable to actual human intelligence. I mean, everyone can tell this podcast is AI, but in a couple of years time, you
Starting point is 00:25:41 won't be able to tell that this is all gone on a computer, right? This will be like, you know, indistinguishable from human frailty. Can I read you the blurb on the back of the original edition of Grinney, 1973? Grinney appears from nowhere in the station taxi and says she's great Aunt Emma, but Tim and Beth soon realize that she isn't even human, that she is as dangerous as a time bomb and has some fearful tasks to perform, which involves them. Another highly original, exciting science fiction story by the author
Starting point is 00:26:19 of space hostages and trillions. That's it. That's it. No messing about. They it. No messing about. No messing about. And what's Sam, what's on the cover of this original puffin edition? It's an image of another of the seeds, but they, Timothy at one point goes in to try and wake Grinney up, I think because they've just seen a flying saucer and they want as many witnesses as possible. So typically goes up to Grinney's room in the middle of the night. A classic 70s moment. I should read this little bit because it's another of the indelible bits. Grinney was lying flat on her back on the bed with her arms by her side above the covers. She was
Starting point is 00:27:01 rigid and still like a corpse or an Egyptian mummy. But she was luminous. There was even a faint glow through the bedclothes. I went closer. I wasn't frightened yet and saw another thing. Her eyes were wide open. She was staring at the ceiling, staring at nothing. And her eyes were lit up from inside, like water when you put the lens of a lit torch in it. eyes were lit up from inside, like water when you put the lens of a lit torch in it. Her mouth was open. She was grinning. I don't mean she was making the movement of smiling. I mean her mouth was set in a grin. And from her open mouth, I thought I heard a slight fluttering, twittering sound, but it might've been my own pulses. I think it was the reflection of her luminosity on her teeth that made me give a sort of scream.
Starting point is 00:27:49 Yes, it's so good. The teeth, the teeth, the teeth are wrong. It was the wrongness and the image of the torch in water. I mean, you can see that so clearly. And you know, that's the point at which I think Timothy's fully on board with the idea that all is not strictly okay with great aunt Emma. Hey,, Sam, you write about this section, I think, in the haunted wood itself in your rock. I'm going to ask you to share that with us in a moment. But could you just for listeners say, say what the haunted wood is in your conception of this book and how it applies to Fisk? Well, I argue in the book that children's writing has always been closer to those original
Starting point is 00:28:24 forms of storytelling, fairy tale and folktale and myth. And of course, in folktale, certainly in European folktales, the wood is the place that the protagonist goes in order to face danger. It's the wood at the centre of which is Baba Yaga's chicken-legged hut or the wolf or the candy house. It's Hansel and Gretel's wood. The idea was that in children's writing, very often one way or another, the protagonists are going to head into a place, a haunted wood, which is at the same time exciting and a little bit scary and that you come back from back from changed. And I think for Fisk, which is the connection I make with that concept of the haunted wood, I think outer space is his
Starting point is 00:29:14 idea of the haunted wood. It's somewhere really alien and dangerous and transformative. And one of the oddest subplots of trillions is that there's an astronaut in it who's a sort of retired astronaut who has been completely traumatized by his experiences when his mission went wrong and he was drifting in space. And he tries to explain to the child protagonist, you know, space is just, you know, you think there's nothing there, but it's not just nothing, it's alien. It's completely, what do you mean by alien? Just alien, I can't understand it. It's too radically different for us to understand.
Starting point is 00:29:52 And I think that's sort of what he does with his science fictional world building is that the creatures he brings in from the beyond are just beyond understanding in any real way. That section Sam really reminded me of Nigel Neal and Quatermass. You cannot underestimate the influence of Quatermass on the British creative psyche from the 1950s onwards into which we put Doctor Who, but all sorts of other things. But that idea of being suspended in space and space doing things to the human body and mind that cannot be truly expressed, only the symptoms can be witnessed, and often the symptoms are dangerous and menacing, that's very, very of its era. IAEA 100%, I think, yeah. And And actually there's stuff like that in Ray Bradbury.
Starting point is 00:30:46 There's a wonderful Ray Bradbury story in which I think three people are in a spaceship that breaks up and they're heading in opposite directions and still talking to each other as they realize that they're drifting off. Sam, there's a bit in The Haunted Woodway specifically you talk about for Nigel Neal and for Nicholas Fisk's generation who have been children during the Second World War. There's a section in the Haunted World where you write about Fisk and you write specifically
Starting point is 00:31:13 about how this may have affected his writing. Oh, well, I think undoubtedly, you know, in the same way that when you read J.G. Ballard's memoir, Miracles of Life, you could suddenly see that all the things you thought were surrealard's memoir, Miracles of Life, you could suddenly see that all the things you thought were surreal, the empty swimming pools, the abandoned airplanes, that were his childhood. And there is a sense in which if you read Fiske's really interesting memoir, Pig Ignorant, which is a memoir of his late adolescence and young adulthood,
Starting point is 00:31:41 it's suddenly a lot of what- And when was that published in the early 90s? Is it? That was published in 92, that's right. Fisk, we should say, incidentally, his real name was David Higginbottom. So Nicholas Fisk was a sort of, wasn't even mentioned himself. But yeah, in 1992, he looked back and he described his wartime experiences, some of which go very directly into Ragabonahankerpare, and one of which I think goes into Grinney. And I'll read this bit. In a short memoir published as part of Walker Books' teenage memoir series,
Starting point is 00:32:10 Pig Ignorant, Fisk describes his adolescence and young manhood in the run-up to the Second World War. It has as its epigraph a line from Victoria Wood, I believe we all have a certain time in our lives that we're good at. I wasn't good at being a child. Much of that short book narrates his attempt to leave his child and find a secure identity as a young adult. For Nick, school is over. He's free.
Starting point is 00:32:32 He's his real self at last. But the child is never quite left behind. Fisk's narrator self introduces us to his adolescent self as a walking, talking, breathing, solid ghost. Not the ghost of someone dead. I'm still alive. His flesh is my flesh. His heartbeat is my heartbeat because he is me, but so long ago. This Nick, tall, gawky, pink-faced, both is and is not the boy jeered out by bullies as a mother's darling, like the protagonist of Monster Maker. But the furniture of his identity is unstable.
Starting point is 00:33:08 He affects to smoke a pipe because a girl he fancies, pig ignorance, seethes with remembered lust, doesn't like men who smoke cigarettes. He gets a job as a receptionist and typist with theatrical agent. He finds his shy faltering way into the jazz clubs where he would come to moonlight as a guitarist and witnesses frightening eruptions of a world still alien to him, a fight with a cutthroat razor, sex, gin, but over all this hangs the war. One image from the aftermath of an air raid,
Starting point is 00:33:38 a fisk and a warden finding someone half buried in the rubble, chimes with that horrible scene in Grinney. It was an elderly man, very thin, wearing a sort of striped waistcoat. The ghastly face is masked in plastic dust. A butler? There you are mate, coming along nicely soon, have you? Are you alright? But the man is not alright. There is only the upper half of him left.
Starting point is 00:34:04 Shiny wet tubing. Yes, on that cheerful note, we will just take a break and when we come back, we will hear an excerpt from an adaptation of Grinney from the early 1980s. But in the meantime, here's word from our sponsors. At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. You're free to discover your way. And that's what running's all about.
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Starting point is 00:35:36 has. Experience the Cajun Ranch McCrispy today for a limited time only at Participating McDonald's in Canada. Hi, I'm Bob Keishen. Welcome to CBS Story Break. Usually it's fun when a relative comes for a visit. But what would you think if a relative showed up whom nobody remembered? That's what happens to Tim and Beth when great-aunt Emma arrives at their house. And that is when the trouble starts. Today's story is about a close encounter of a dangerous kind. Based on Nicholas Fisk's book, here is Rinny.
Starting point is 00:36:14 Instant reaction. That's when the trouble starts. I think it's more jocular, really. I'd have preferred for the book that traumatized my childhood. Put some respect on her name. As we've established this week, they do things differently in the States. So now we're going to move on to discussing Nicholas Fiske's sequel to Grinney, which was published in 1984 and it's called You Remember Me!
Starting point is 00:36:47 And we should just say that you remember me are the magic words that in the first book Grinney uses to hypnotize any adults that she comes into contact with. She says, you remember me? And they go, yes, of course, come in. So this book repeats that phrase. You remember me, not question mark, exclamation mark. And I'll just read you the blurb on the back here. And then I'll ask John, I think, to comment on this novel. So this was published in 1984. Timothy Carpenter is a junior reporter
Starting point is 00:37:24 on his local newspaper. His lucky break is a chance to interview the famous TV personality Lisa Treadgold. Her effect on him is so hypnotic, it's not long before Timothy and his friends are persuaded to join her new political party. Yet, as Timothy is to discover, Lisa has some very odd traits, like constantly eating chocolates. When boiling water is accidentally spilt over her, she seems to feel no pain. And Timothy's young sister Beth and her friend Mac seem to hate Lisa and all she stands for. Why are they so desperately opposed to her?
Starting point is 00:38:01 And what on earth are they so frightened of? A tense, exciting science fiction story by the author of the immensely popular Grinney. John, what did you think when you were reading this novel this week? Well, I'd not read it before. I'd never even heard of it before. It's fairly early on in the book you get the feeling that you're revisiting familiar ground. Sam's rather brilliantly used the word Unheimlich and there is a visit early on in the book to Lisa Treadgold's house, which is full of these little hints and guesses that Lisa Treadgold is not all that she appears. And the eating of chocolate, but it's not just the eating of chocolate, it's the disappearance of the rappers that really plays on Timothy's mind.
Starting point is 00:38:49 But I think the thing that really grabs you by the lapels is the opening, which is a rally for this, what we would now call a sort of far right populist movement. The very opening of the book gives you, they've already got a song that's, they're called the rule of law party or they're ROL or rollers for short. It sounds strangely familiar, doesn't it? Rolling along side by side and they love that there's kind of people singing at the seat. The police are kind of complicit because these people, these are just a bunch of people out having fun and the 3Ds, you know, decency, what is it, decency, dedication and...
Starting point is 00:39:25 Discipline. Yeah. It's very much not a 70s novel now. You feel this is definitely the 80s where TV celebrity is suddenly the thing that is going to get into the homes of millions of people. Everybody loves Lisa. They just, you know, she looks great. They love the way she talks.
Starting point is 00:39:44 She talks a lot of common sense. She's brilliant. There's a lot of very good stuff about when she's asked about these policies, she makes them sound rather kind of reasonable and sensible. As the book gathers pace, it becomes more and more sinister. It's an unbelievably prescient book for this moment. She actually says we need to put Britain first. That's the thing she says in 1984. She says that she believes in conscription for young people. I don't know if anybody remembers the election in Britain a few months ago where Rishi announced that as a policy. There's all sorts of resonances, which I found thrilling and really quite disturbing.
Starting point is 00:40:22 Sam, I think we can agree that You Remember me isn't as good a book in literary terms as Grinney, but you must concede that reading it now is a is a slightly unheimlich experience in its own right. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it's got that. I mean, it does nail that kind of populist, you know, bring back the birch, of course, is no longer a great catchphrase. But not yet. No, but the but not only the content of what she's saying seems familiar, but also as John says, the form the fact that it's, it's all about tele celebrity, and it is literally through the television, rather than as in Grinney on the doorstep, that she, you know, hypnotises and brainwashes her supporters. Yeah. There's a very telling bit at the end of the book. For those who are listening, I'm sorry to spoil it, but it turns out that Lisa Tchegold isn't human either. But one of the reasons this book is not as good as Grinney is there is one of those kind of bond villain confessions
Starting point is 00:41:30 where she gets all the main characters together into a room and explains to them exactly what the cunning plan has been. But one of the things that she does say is that we got it wrong the last time around. Families are too, they're too close knit and there is too much kind of essentially phatic communication in families which makes them very, very difficult to pass as a family member. Whereas the implication is that on television you can gole huge numbers of people. Nicholas Fisk was writing this book considerably before social media, but everything that he says about the ability of television to manipulate people, thought processes, is even more relevant to a world as we have just seen where social media is able to make people respond. Another other confession she makes is she realized,
Starting point is 00:42:27 last time we didn't bother with children. She says, we didn't bother trying to hypnotize children because they were no threat. And we've realized they are more of one. And I think a thing that's interesting that he does in this book is that because Timothy is because Timothy is on the cusp of adulthood, he half is and half isn't hypnotized, and he can't remember what happened about Grinney. And so Beth, who was his great ally in the first book, she can't quite rely on him. And she goes, you remember Grinney, remember this happened? It all kind of floods back to him. She gives him a shock and he kind of can remember, but he has to constantly make an effort to stop the brain fog seeping in. And so he goes sort of in and out of hypnosis in the course of the book. I'm going to take on the chin what John is saying about it not being as a good a book as Grinney,
Starting point is 00:43:21 but my goodness, it is an extremely effective and interesting book to read right now. And I think one of the things that really struck me is that thing you were talking about, about brain fog and memory and forgetting as you get older, Sam, the book is called You Remember Me, because A, you remember this, it's fascism, it's coming back. But also you have to remember fascism, because if we don't remember it, its lessons aren't learned. We have to keep reminding ourselves of it. And that seemed to me powerful and depressing this week. Also, there's a fantastically witty thing in it,
Starting point is 00:44:07 which I'm sure you, Sam and John, and many of our listeners would greatly appreciate, which is it contains a letter from Nicholas Fisk to Timothy. So Timothy writes to Nicholas Fisk saying, hmm, something's up, but I'm not quite sure what. And Nicholas Fisk, the author Nicholas Fisk replies to him and he says, Dear Timothy, many thanks for your letter. I'm very pleased to hear from you that you are applying yourself seriously to your journalistic work. I know that your real concern in writing to me is to elicit my opinions regarding Lisa
Starting point is 00:44:41 Treadgold. I am not in the least surprised that you find her impact disturbing. So are the reactions experienced after being inoculated against smallpox and other unpleasant diseases. One must endure discomfort in order to achieve a long-term protection of future benefit. You are passing through the discomforting stage. I passed through it some time ago. My first opinion of Ms Tregold was that she was another artificially created television personality and a woman of no importance. I now consider her to be a wholly admirable phenomenon. All the more so since I have had the privilege
Starting point is 00:45:15 of reading her written words. My publishers are to produce her forthcoming book. She is astonishingly clear and frank about the implications of the three Ds. We must strive to restore decency to our personal, local and national lives, discipline ourselves to accept various restrictions. What these restrictions are, as she points out, really are freeways to a greater liberty. And above all, we must dedicate ourselves to a concept of obedience. With cordial regards to yourself and your family, your sincerely, Nicholas Fisk. Come on, that's very witty. It's very funny. It also plays on the fact the frame story of Grinney is that Nicholas Fisk, the writer friend, helps Timothy to publish his diaries, the first
Starting point is 00:46:05 book. So Nicholas Fiske has kind of forgotten. Yeah, well, so it's an extra level of talk there as well. But it's lovely that he kind of sends himself up. Sends himself up as being you can't trust me either. And his publishers up. I might just read this little section, Andy, just going back to your point, it is quite, it is quite remarkable to read a book that is written in 1984 that is as kind of on point as this.
Starting point is 00:46:31 It's early in the book when Fanny, the reporter who's a kind of left leaning kind of feminist reporter for the Gazette, is upbraiding young Timothy for not seeing that Lisa Treadgold is potentially operating the fascist playbook. I mean, it's a conversation that's being run in kind of social media and households across the world at the moment. But I think it's very well done. You should read some history, Sonny Boy. Read about the black shirts and the Gestapo and concentration camps. That's not the same thing as Lisa Treadgold.
Starting point is 00:47:09 Hitler was a fiend. Lisa's just a very beautiful woman with strong opinions. Do you mind her being so beautiful? Timothy asked innocently. These words made Fanny so angry she stopped the car. Listen, Dumbo, she said, glaring. I realize I'm no oil painting and I'm not rich and I'm not rich and I'm not famous and no one wants my autograph. And you smoke too much, Timothy said cheekily, trying to make her smile. Really, he was quite afraid of her at that moment. She looked fierce.
Starting point is 00:47:34 And I smoked too much, Fanny agreed. But there's one thing I'll tell you, and it's this. Learn to be frightened. When you see some magic type person, a person, hogging the media to talk about bringing back the birch and hanging, it's time to get a little nervous, because the person who gets beaten or hanged might turn out to be someone you know. Are you with me so far? Timothy said, okay, so far.
Starting point is 00:47:56 But when that sort of person talks about action groups and banded together brotherhoods of citizens and vigilantes, get terrified, because the person who gets dragged away in the middle of the night for a flogging might turn out to be you. Yes, you, simply because you're a decent, normal, pleasant, dim human being. The sort of person who just happens to get in the way of the bully boys and bully girls. Do you understand, Timothy? And so on. It's good, you know. Sam, I wonder whether you would care to comment on the female roles in Grinney and You Remember Me?
Starting point is 00:48:29 Well, as our former Prime Minister used to say of his religious faith, I think Fisk's feminism is a bit like Magic FM in The Chilterns. The reception kind of comes and goes. Oh, glorious. Beth, in some sense, is the hero of both books. Absolutely. And that's absolutely terrific. But on the other side of the ledger, in Trillions, there's a very sort of disturbing subplot,
Starting point is 00:49:02 which has to do with a good- know, a good looking nine year old who's constantly flirting with the soldiers that I think would tend to be red penciled in almost any publication. Different times, Sam, different times. And Fanny's not being as attractive as Lisa Treadgold is, you know, it's very frequently referred to, but you know what, you know what I'm going to, again, I slightly stick up for Nicholas Fisk here, right? It seems to me, one of the things that he's very interested in and gets energy from is challenging a stereotype. So a little girl is supposed to be sugar and spice and all things nice, but the little girl in both
Starting point is 00:49:46 Grinney and You Remember Me is the most switched on and the most bloodthirsty and the one most willing to see through what she's being sold. Grinney herself, the central idea of that book is you take the sweet little old lady and you make them a demon, you know, a robot demon, inhuman, you make them inhuman. And Lisa Treadgold in You Remember Me, we're constantly being told how beautiful she is. You can't trust these women, clearly is the unfortunate message coming through. But at the same time, you can, because as you say, he gives agency, you know, the dad in these books and Timothy kind of blunder along. Feckless.
Starting point is 00:50:36 Unseeing. And it's down to the women to help them see the truth. So I don't know, I think it goes both ways. But you know, Timmy and his dad have this whole thing, Timmy pops through Pete's dad's maxim, women always win, W-A-W. And there's a whole series of riffs on how the problem with Beth is that you try arguing with her at one point and she's completely irrational and comes in on another, and you can't really have a proper argument with a woman, which feels like straightforward old 1970s sexism to me. But you're right, Beth is the heroine. I also would like to say, Sam, I think it's so true what you were saying earlier about
Starting point is 00:51:14 science fiction being the dominant storytelling mode of a particular era of the 60s into the 70s. And we know it goes above ground, don't we? In the mid to late, well, probably starting with 2001, a space Odyssey, but then it becomes massively popular in the mid to late seventies when we're kids because of Star Wars. It was about a decade and a half, isn't there? Where it's basically, it's the respectable genre. Grinney got a fantastic review when it was published in the TLS.
Starting point is 00:51:45 But then a few years later when A Ragabone and a Hank of Hair is published, that too is reviewed in the TLS. And this is the first paragraph of the TLS's review of this book and a couple of others. And it's fair to say by this point SF fatigue has set in. Young readers, possibly already somewhat infected by gathering gloom about their continuing future on this planet, can hardly be expected to welcome novels which simply reiterate that the worst is indeed going to happen without also having something a little more consoling to offer as well. In some futuristic stories,
Starting point is 00:52:21 for example, most humans are seen to have reverted to a brutish type of feudalism. Another favourite vision describes a more orderly but arid universe closely overseen by passionless arbiters. Children today, putting such books down at the end, therefore, can at least be grateful that they are still in the 1980s, warts and all, rather than living in much worse conditions during the centuries to come. So while all three novels under review here assume that there will at some time be a nuclear
Starting point is 00:52:48 holocaust, what remains of the future after that is usually shown to be an unpalatable, dreary business. I mean, I think that says it all in terms of what was shiny and new in 1970 is terms of what was shiny and new in 1970 is dystopian hack work as far as critics are concerned 10 years later. It's interesting dreariness is what they pick out. I mean, there's always been a sort of twin strand, hasn't there, in science fiction? There's the sort of post-Moon landings, rocket ships to the stars, colonizing Mars, adventuring in foreign planets like 19th century tales of Imperial adventure gone interstellar. And then there's been the post-bomb type of
Starting point is 00:53:34 science fiction, which relies very heavily on the idea that we're all screwed. But that's not that itself. Ordinarily, those futures are sort of exciting, but horrible. You think of them as sort of Mad Max-y rather than... I mean, look, in cinema, you go from say, 2000, Biner Space Odyssey, where you're overwhelmed by the technology that's being presented to you, the mystical vision, right? Whereas by the time you get to alien, everything is dingy and boring, right? The march of pseudo realism into sci fi seems to me quite a significant thing or sci fi noir.
Starting point is 00:54:19 I think that's well put. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Sci fi noir. You could call it. Yeah. Now, Nicholas Fisk was the editor of the Puffin book of science fiction, which is notable for two reasons. First of all, because he complains in his introduction about the term science fiction. He says it really should be
Starting point is 00:54:37 called not SF, but I F imaginative fiction. He said it was miserable. And science fiction writers complain about it nowadays, don't they? They also have speculative speculative fiction, exactly. And in a sense, that's what Fisk is all about. Right. It's speculative fiction. He says here, what if an old woman turned up at your doorstep who turned out to be a robot? What if the world is going to end next Tuesday? What if we are about to swap high tech for mystical powers? That's the one big lie he talks about. And then from there, you build the speculation about what that world will be like. But I thought you would both be amused by what Fisk included in the Puffin book science fiction and remember this was published by puffing
Starting point is 00:55:29 An extract from the Clipper of the clouds by joule verne an Extract from the war of the worlds by HG Wells an Extract of the horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle. He's just warming up Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Confluence by Brian Aldis. Of Polymorph Stock by John Christopher. The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clark. And There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury. You know, Nicholas Fisk was not mucking about. No, I don't think one of those is a children's story. No, none of them are.
Starting point is 00:56:08 None of them are children's stories. Those puffing anthologies are amazing though. It's like Alan Garner's Book of Goblins. It's got poems by Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams in it. I mean, the idea of an anthology for, you know, of stories that you would read to your children at night. No, that's not what the, none of these guys were into that at all. Now listen, I think what we also want to talk about here very, very lightly and briefly
Starting point is 00:56:36 is just to say, picking up what Timothy Snyder said in On Tyranny about the importance of being surrounded by books. And certainly in a world where book banning is becoming increasingly common in schools, I wonder whether we could, in addition to urging our listeners to read Grinny and You Remember Me and certainly sharing them with their children, I wonder, Sam, are there other books for young people
Starting point is 00:57:08 that would be good to read at the moment? You mentioned before we did this, is it unusual for children's books to deal with totalitarian and fascist movements, things like that? I find myself thinking, no, it isn't really. I remember from my own childhood reading Morton Roo's book, The Wave, which I think is now very much out of print, which was about a high school club, a high school society, which was pretty much like the rollers and they had their own
Starting point is 00:57:37 armbands, it was quite on the nose. And it turns out it's all an experiment by their social experiment by their geography teacher who organizes a rally at the end. And he says, at last, you're going to meet the leader. And then they open the curtains and it's an enormous picture of Adolf Hitler. Now I see now. Yeah, this isn't very good. We're going to disband the wave, I think. It's a very tense and because it tries to inhabit from the inside out, the attraction, particularly to young people, of an organization which allows you to feel a sense of belonging, of empowerment, and licenses you to kick the stuffing out of the people who aren't getting with the program. But in more oblique ways too, you know, water shipped down,
Starting point is 00:58:26 I think, was definitely something of the fascist dictator in general, Windward, the great villain. It's brilliant. They also have that, which isn't quite a sort of straightforward fascist setup, but there's that section in it, if you remember, where they initially, before they come across Windward, they find their way into what seems like this sort of utopia, where all the rabbits are fat and happy, and there's plenty to eat, and food seems to be raining from the sky. I mean, it's patterned as that book is on the Odyssey, and that's the Lotus Eaters section. And what they discover is that actually this isn't a wild worm, but they're all being fattened up for the pot. And so,
Starting point is 00:59:07 they just have to accept or turn their eyes away from the fact that every now and again, a certain number of them will vanish. The author of Warship Downwich Adams was himself shaped by his wartime experiences. And so, I think for writers of that generation, it's quite natural that they thought this is a very, very, very frightening and dangerous thing we've been through. And we need to, as you say, remember. We should say with Richard Adams, again, the horror, the body horror element of Watership Down is not to be dismissed. And certainly if you go on to Plague Dogs and Shardic, they are both horribly visceral texts about things that can go wrong with the body through disease, through experiment, through corruption.
Starting point is 01:00:03 The only other one I was going to mention, and I want to mention just because it's such a direct look at fascism and because he's a writer who I think is not as appreciated now as he deserves to be, is T.H. White's Once and Future King sequence. And in that first book, which is describing it, it's a riff on Mallory's morp d'Arthur, and the first book describes the future King Arthur, mort as he is, getting his education at the hands of Merlin. And Merlin educates him by turning him into different animals. So he gets right fisk-like a sense of the alterity of the animal life. So amazing descriptions of him spending a few hours as a fish or as an owl.
Starting point is 01:00:51 And finally, he becomes an ant and he goes down an ant burrow and he hears these sort of loud speakers in the ant's nest describing how they have to kill the next door ant tribe. And it's absolutely straight fascism written like it's all about when the other blood flows, then everything will be fine. We need all their resources and we need to kill the others. And that was written, I mean, it's from 1938, he was writing, it was absolutely directed towards the Second World War. Wow, wow, wow. As Tolkien, obviously, after the war did. Can I ask a question? All these great books, these sort of disturbing children's books, written post-war, terrible influence. If you think about what people have been through during COVID in the last five years, why are there not those similar books now or coming now? Why is children's literature now not so dark?
Starting point is 01:01:48 I think it takes a while, Nikki, honestly. I think that if you look at the 60s generation, that was 15 years after the war ended. They were writers who were probably under the age of 10 you know, under the age of 10 or between sort of, you know, eight and 15 who witnessed the war. All that generation, I'm particularly thinking about Alan Garner and Susan Cooper and Ursula Laguna, who, for whom the war was an important part of their childhood experience. It operates, and it's not on a, maybe in the direct way of them writing directly about conflict. Yeah. What John's saying is come back in 20 years time. I think there's a lag. Children's writers are so often, you know, they're imagining child protagonists and the only thing they've got to draw on is their own childhood. So I think
Starting point is 01:02:42 there's a 20 year lag normally when you start writing more directly about that stuff. And what you see after, for instance, the First World War, is all the people who were traumatized by the First World War write about anything but. You can see the effect of the First World War on AA Milne or on Hugh Lofting, the Dr. Too Little stories, by the fact they create these completely hermetic worlds in which the war never happened and nothing like that could ever happen. Talking too. Tolkien is a book about the rise of authoritarian regimes is still an incredibly valid read. I would also like to say just to pick up the point that my colleagues were making here, Nikki, that it means
Starting point is 01:03:23 we can blame millennials for the craze for books called things like Dr Poo Poo's book of wee-wees, which seems to be the dominant literary form in children's literature. Thanks millennials for your contribution there. Anyway, we look to Gen Z and the generation that follows it to create fiction. Generation Alpha. Informed by the experience of COVID. Generation Alpha, yeah. John, do you have any recommendations for books written for young people that cover this topic? I think if you read The Weird Stone of Brisingham and-
Starting point is 01:03:54 By Alan Garner. A lot more by Alan Garner. There's a lot more going on than just the sense of threat. It's actually in Garner's later work, I think that there's some beautiful writing about, particularly in Tom Fobble's day, which is the last bit of the stone book quartet, where the kids are collecting shrapnel.
Starting point is 01:04:11 They're watching the bombing raids on Manchester, and they also find a pilot of a German plane. And I think The Dark in The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. Well, Susan Cooper wrote that autobiographical novel about her experience as a child in the Second World War. That's another book, I think, that has that sense of children against fascism. Well, you're laughing, but if there is hope, it lies in the children against fascism.
Starting point is 01:04:39 Indeed. Youth against fascism. It relies on the best of this world. I mean, it's a great book to be giving a young child now. I would like to recommend to people the following texts in whatever form you find it. You should watch the Daleks. Yes. Or Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor Who serials written by Terry Nation novelized respectively by Robert Whittaker and
Starting point is 01:05:05 Terrence Dix because they are directly informed Daleks as a metaphor for Nazis is complete with experimentation. I would love to recommend to listeners you need copies if you don't already have a copy of the tiger who came to tea, which of course you do. And when Hitler stole pink rabbit by Judith Kerr, you need those in your house. They need to be in your house so that anyone who visits, be they children or adults can pick those up, read them and understand what they were informed by. And finally, I would very much like to say that if you have not read or the children in your life have not read both Viv Vendetta and Watchmen by Alan Moore, different artists, David Lloyd and Dave Gibbons respectively, they are fascinatingly deep,
Starting point is 01:06:06 intelligent explorations with no easy answers. This is the point. So anyway, everybody, thanks so much. We hope you've enjoyed this discussion. And that's where we must leave it. Huge thanks to Sam for reminding us that as far as ideas are concerned, the past isn't even past.
Starting point is 01:06:23 And also to Nicky Birch for turning our loose talk into a tight, broadcastable discussion. If you would like show notes with clips, links, and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 225 that we've already recorded, please visit our website at Radio Free Europe, sorry, at battlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our
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Starting point is 01:07:15 forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits. You subscribe at the lot listener level. For rather less than the subscription fee for joining a political party, you get not one, but two extra exclusive podcasts every month. Locklisted features the three of us talking, recommending the books, films and music we've enjoyed the previous fort night. For those of you who enjoyed our What Have You Been reading slot, that's where you'll now find it. It's an hour of tunes, musings and superior book chat. Plus, Lock listeners get their names read out accompanied by lashings of praise like this. Kate Inglis, thank you. Lottie Clark, thank you. Robin Perra, thank you. Louisa Boe, thank you. David Proud, thank you. Joe Duddy, thank you. Nicola Pouasi, thank you. Philip Eskenazi, thank you.
Starting point is 01:07:59 Michael Ross, thank you. Stu J Allen, thank you. Sam, is there anything, is there any last nugget of wisdom or Cassandra-like warning regarding these books or Nicholas Fisk you would like to leave us with? Well, I don't have some nugget of wisdom, but I remember reading Alan Moore saying once that he had people come up to him in the street saying, I love that character Rorschach. He's the best. And more just wandering away in absolute horror. Taken entirely the wrong message from this book about this violently inadequate psychopath and you're identifying with him, which I guess shows that, you know, everything's available to the reader's interpretation.
Starting point is 01:08:44 Thanks Sam. Yeah. Also we should add Timothy Snyder, certainly in these troubled times, the more you read, the better you get at decoding what's happening. Yeah. I know that On Tyranny book is a handbook for the next year. Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny, indeed it is. We'll put a link to that on the website as well.
Starting point is 01:09:04 Thanks very much everybody. We have so enjoyed this discussion and we have so enjoyed doing this tiny, tiny, tiny thing to let you know that life goes on and so do we and join us in Fortnite's time when we will be quizzing somebody not about authoritarianism but celebrity, Hollywood celebrity and that's all I'm going to say. That's all I'm going to say. A different show. Thanks Sam, thanks John, thanks Nikki. Good. See you next time everybody. Bye. Thanks for listening. Bye.

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