Backlisted - The Children of Men by P.D. James

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Novelist Andrew Hunter Murray and biographer Laura Thompson join us to discuss The Children of Men (1992), a dystopian thriller by the late P.D. James. The author is probably best remembered as one of Britain's greatest exponents of detective fiction, an heir to the Golden Age of female novelists such as Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers et al. In The Children of Men, however, James depicts a nightmare near-future in which the world is literally coming to an end. The book became a bestseller; in 2006, it was adapted for the big screen by the Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón. We look at the ways in which James explored issues that seem eerily contemporary: the societal impact of an uncontrolled virus, falling fertility rates, an ageing population, the rise of populism and accompanying exploitation of migrant labour. She also knew how to grip her readers to the very last page. Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, lived a long and remarkable life and it was a pleasure for all of us to revisit her work and biography in this episode.  *Tickets are now on sale for our LIVE show in London on Wednesday May 14th where we will be discussing The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford, with guest Alex Michaelides. * 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 Patreon 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

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today you find us in the ancient forest of Witchwood in northwest Oxfordshire. In a clearing there stands a wooden shed, shadowed by a solitary silver birch. A tall woman emerges, her tight black curls dusted with white. She surveys the scene briefly before striding across towards a narrow tree-lined lane. From inside the shed there is the sound of a baby crying. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher on Bound, where people crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously.

And today we are joined by two guests, one new and one returning. Our new guest is Andrew Hunter Murray. Hello, Andrew. Hello. Hi, Andrew. Andrew is a writer and broadcaster. He writes for Private Eye magazine, spent 14 years writing BBC Two's QI, you get less for a murd, and co-hosts the podcast Page 94 and No Such Thing as a Fish. His first novel, The Last Day, was a Sunday Times bestseller and one of the top ten fiction debuts of 2020. His second novel, The Sanctuary, was a Waterstones thriller of the month.

His third, A Beginner's Guide to Breaking and Entering, has just been published by Hutchinson Heinemann. Andrew, you have made the transition from the physical realm into that of the print realm. from the physical realm into that of the print realm. What has been the most unexpected in a pleasant way, because we like to keep this upbeat, in a pleasant way about having your books published and seeing them in shops and things like that? Oh, I didn't have any expectations going in. I mean, I had a nice breaking in because, you know,

QI writes lots of books, obviously. So you get very excited the first time you're in someone's acknowledgements. I think the first acknowledgements I was ever in was a book by Mitch and colleague John Lloyd for The Book of the Dead, which we wrote so many years ago. Sorry, which you wrote, Mitch and John, many years ago. And then from then on, it's just been increasing excitement. I think the thing no one tells you about writing a book is that people think publication day is going to be exciting and or very little happens actually on publication day unless you've made sure to arrange a party you know you you wait for the world to turn on its axis right there's a new murray in print everything is different and it is it's not really it's not quite like that

have you yet to see a member of the public reading one of your books in, say, a branch of Greg's? I did. I ended up on the train opposite someone who was reading one of my books, and she was giving me a look, and occasionally I would give her a look, and we were both slightly aware that we knew who the other one was. Hi, Mum. Yeah.

And we had a little word about it, and that was unbelievably exciting. That's the only time it's ever happened. Oh, that's really nice though. That's good. And we're also delighted to welcome back Laura Thompson, our lovely friend, Laura Thompson. Hello, Laura. Hello, Andy. Lovely to be here. How nice to see you. Laura won the Somerset Maugham Award with her first book, The Dogs.

She has written biographies of Agatha Christie and Nancy Mitford, as well as the New York Times best-selling group biography of the Mitfords, The Six, and has published two books of true crime, A Different Class of Murder, about Lord Lucan, and Rex vs Edith Thompson, about the 1922 Thompson Bywaters case. She is also a proud author of two books with Unbound, The Letters of Edith Thompson, published last year, and The Last Landlady, a memoir of her publican grandmother, her favourite of her books. And, of course, Laura, you've also been on twice before this podcast,

including right back near the very beginning. You are one of the founding fathers. It's episode three, I think, wasn't it? One of the council of Backlisted. You were on at the beginning to talk about nancy mitford and then you came back to help us talk about frost in may by antonia white so what i want to ask you is like your range as a backlisted guest obviously is considerable but your range as a as a writer as well you work in several different genres is that what you intended when you first started out? Or have

you just sort of followed your instinct as you've gone along? It does sound very eclectic when you read it out. No, I intended to be a ballet dancer, but that bit the dust. But when I... Didn't we all, Laura? Didn't we all? No, they're things I'm interested in. They're things I'm passionate about. That is an edited biog. Anyway, you missed out the weekly column for the Racing Post.

Can I ask then? Sorry, when you were writing your weekly column for the Racing Post, did you do horses and dogs? No, I did the flat season and then I had six months off or whatever. And I was known as a controversial columnist because I didn't like drugs and drink at the race courses. For the people or for the horses? Good question, Andrew. Both. I think both would be the correct answer. So in other words, they're all things i'm just keen on passionate about your biography

reminds me of my favorite quentin quist quote which you must know laura which from the his brilliant book how to have a lifestyle it's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying really what i was meant to be is a daddy dancer by then pigs will be your style i use that all the time by now pigs are definitely my style I've never really wanted to be a ballet dancer. Right. The book we're here to discuss is The Children of Men by P.D. James, first published in 1992 by Faber in the UK and Knopf in the USA. It is a dystopian fantasy set in 2021.

A catastrophic fall in the male human sperm count means no children have been born anywhere in the world for 25 years. Since the last election in 2006, England has been governed by a council headed by the self-styled Warden of England, with Parliament reduced to an advisory role, law and order enforced by the Grenadiers, a private army, and the state security police. The Isle of Man has become a self-sufficient penal colony run on Darwinian lines by the criminals themselves. Mass drowning ceremonies for the elderly are becoming more popular, and a network of state-run pornography centres has been set up to encourage people's libidos. In the absence of human children, kittens and puppies are given elaborate christening ceremonies

and are dressed in children's clothing and pushed around in prams. The book's hero, whose name is Theo Farron, is an Oxford Don, a cold and distant man who was responsible for the accidental death of his own daughter while she was still a toddler. He is also the cousin of the warden, which is just one of the reasons he finds himself becoming involved in a resistance organisation called the Five Fishes, more about whom later in this episode. The Children of Men was P.D. James's 12th novel and was something of a departure from the detective

fiction with which she had made her name. It received overwhelmingly positive reviews, including one from Alan Jacobs, which claimed that, quote, of all James's novels, the Children of Men is probably the most pointed in its social criticism, certainly the deepest in its theological reflection. And also another last year from the novelist Andrew Hunter Murray, who called it PD James' masterpiece in times, and a short, beautiful shocker. Well, we will be interrogating Andrew on what he meant by that when we come back after this short break. This is an advertisement from BetterHelp. Everyone knows therapy is great for solving problems, but turns out therapy has some issues of its own. Finding the right therapist, fitting into their schedule, and of course, the cost. BetterHelp can help solve these problems.

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Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. And we're back. And we're back to talk about The Children of Men by P.D. James. We also want to say we are backlisted. We're very excited. We've got a residency coming up in the West End of London. So if you live in London or the South East and you want to come and see once a month a show being recorded, you will have that opportunity to do so.

The first of them is taking place on the top floor of Foyles in Charing Cross Road. We will be discussing Ford Maddox Ford's novel, The Good Soldier, with our guest Alex Michelades and perhaps someone else, we're waiting to confirm. And you can find a link to tickets, to purchase tickets, in the show notes for this episode. The date for your diary is Wednesday,

the 15th of May, 2024. We start at 6.30pm and we will actually be recording two shows on that night. First of all, an episode of Locklisted to go out on our Patreon. And then secondly, the discussion of Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier. And that's the first of a regular residency we will be recording

one show a month so we'd love love love it if um some of our loyal listeners feel like coming along and joining us uh for that particular show and the shows that follow so let me start with the question we ask all our guests let me begin with then with you, Andrew. Where were you? Who were you? What were you doing when you first read The Children of Men? Well, I had a quick look in the spreadsheet before the recording. And it was December 2014

that I first read The Children of Men and P.D. James herself died in November 2014. So I can only assume that I saw the news and thought, oh, well, I've seen the film. I really must give that a go. Because it was the first of her novels I read. I'd never read any of her detective fiction before that. I've read several since then.

But this was my introduction to P.D. James. It's published in 92, isn't it? So you got to it in 12... No, no, no, no, sorry. A mere 22 years late. That sounds like I'm being rude. I'm just doing the maths, the careful maths. But you'd seen the film.

I had. Children of Men. Yeah, yeah. I'd really enjoyed it, but I've never gone back to watch it since. And in fact, I find it quite hard going back to the book as well. I mean, because I really love the book, but I find it so cold and I find it so sharp. It's quite tough to get through it because of this awful, fragile, beautiful nastiness that she writes.

It's amazing. Yes. Well, we'll discuss whether this citric sharpness was what led you to call it a masterpiece in the times. We'll see. Stitch up. Laura, when do you remember first reading one of which we call her phyllis or pd let's say pd james for now and then we'll call her phyllis later on the episode when did you first read a novel by pd james i can barely remember not knowing about her and almost not

having read all her books but i'm pretty sure the first one was a Cordelia Gray. I think it was an unsuitable job for a woman. And I think I was probably about the same age as Cordelia when I read it. And I was very compelled by this character. You know, the idea of this very young woman with this intelligence and ability to solve crimes. And I imagine when she was first conceived in 72, quite a pioneering figure. Well, the title, everyone says to her, this is an unsuitable job, which one hopes they wouldn't say today. Yeah, I love that book. And I wish there were more Cordelia Grays. There are only two. The Children of Men, I read, I was far too young to appreciate. men I read I was far too young to appreciate I was um far too jolly it didn't it didn't bed in it didn't bed in at all but when I read it again for this it it absolutely did bed in wow

particularly the first half of it to me it almost reads like a state of the nation novel which is a bit of a downer i suppose but it does almost read like that and i agree yeah we'll come on to how relevant it is to to the times that we live in i'm sure what i was thinking when i was reading that first half not the second half so much was if i didn't know that pd james had written this would would i think that she had? And although it has her rigour and her kind of conscientious style, as it were, I don't know that I would think it was her. It's a whole other aspect to her writing for me. Yeah.

Andrew, if you didn't know this novel was by P.D. James, do you have any ideas about who you think you would think it was you think it was very distinctive wouldn't you but you'd be i i find it terribly hard to put my finger on if not pd james then who will it combine it because it combines the the brilliant dystopian style with what james brought to the crime novels which is this very literary element i think the only book i've read that really reminded me of it tonally was um doris lessing's the memoirs of a survivor which is again it's it's a bit more high concept as in doris lessing doesn't go into detail about what is happening but there's a kind of foreboding sense about it and again a little bit jg ballard as well

although not quite because it feels like pd james is really trying to make this world real you know and with ballard when you know when the entire jungle is turning to diamonds you're not worried that this is real but there is a similar sense of this creeping horror i'm very excited at the thought that perhaps J.G. Ballard and P.D. James were the same person. Just even if P.D. James and Ballard were kind of at dinner together. Yeah, yeah. I bet they were.

She's more or less had dinner with everybody, as you find out from her autobiography. Any advance on J.G. Ballard and Doris Leighton? A touch of the Le Carre carre is just a little maybe a little bit of yeah i'm lobbing eric ambler in and walking away my pockets whistling maybe jeffrey household let's just throw that in yeah absolutely nice just for us, just put P.D. James in the lineage of British crime writers for us? Well, she was only born 30 years after Agatha Christie. So to her first novel, which is Cover Her Face, which is 1962, when she's relatively mature because of course as i'm sure

we'll talk about she had a life before she became a writer um and it's incredibly christian there's there's no doubt about it the the the it's it's the christy template but then um i think of both pd james and Ruth Rendell in a sense as the end of the Golden Age, the end of that particular template. Right, and the writers of the Golden Age, we've never done an episode on Christie, but we have done an episode on Dorothy L. Sayers and we have done an episode on…

Josephine Tay. Tay? Is Tay Golden Age? Yeah. I'll say so. Yeah. Allingham, Nioh Marsh. Yes. Okay, so it's Allingham, Nioh Marsh, Christie,

and you would say P.D. James and Ruth Rendell slash Barbara Vine are the end of that line. Ruth Rendell would have been not pleased to hear me say that because she really did not like Agatha Christie. You know, that ridiculous place at Merrymead and that frightful woman Marple and all this kind of thing. But I do think of Ruth Rendell almost as Christie turned inside out with the workings and the, you know, the dodgy synapses of the criminal on show rather than hidden. I do think of her like that. You know, it's one of those disgusts, really.

It's a huge question, as is the fact that they're mostly women, which is amazing, really. Thank you so much. That is establishing what I want to do, which is that this, we might to some extent now see the Children of Men as part of the scenery, not least because of the success of the film. And people know what the story of the Children of Men is because it's become quite well known separate from P.D. James' work. But I remember this book being, I was a bookseller when this book was published in 1992, and I can remember this being a big deal. John, did you read it then?

No, I didn't. I didn't read it then, but I did read, I was a regular P.D. James reader. I think I didn't read it because, you know, I like Dalgleish. This felt to me a little bit like it was a unwelcome departure did it oh and even even more astonishingly for me i'd never put together that the film was based on it because i had only the vaguest notion of the plot uh so it's been quite interesting fusing all those things together and i have to say hugely pleased to have the chance to read it yeah from a distance i well for my part i read the first i did what all good booksellers do which is i read the first 50 pages and then

based my opinion on that um in 1992 and stuck to that rigidly for the next 32 years but so i'd never read this andrew i'd never want to say to you i'd never read this all the way through until you suggested we read it so i want to say to you, I'd never read this all the way through until you suggested we read it. So I want to say to you, Andrew, thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to actually read it. Hear, hear. I really found it incredibly both enjoyable and stimulating and flawed at the same time.

I think I want to talk a bit about that later on. Yeah. But the thing that really strikes me, guys, about The Children of Men is it is such a weird novel. It's so odd. For somebody who was orthodox in many ways, this is a very peculiar, personal, encrypted novel. It's a mixture of dystopian fable, social critique, Christian allegory, old-fashioned whodunit, and famous five novel.

Now, there's a group in this novel called the Five Fishes, Andrew. I don't know whether this had struck you. Five Fishes Go Wild. Yeah, yeah. So they're like the famous five of Insurrection, right? And they're called Julian, Rolf, Luke, Miriam and Gaskell. Oh my God, there's a Julian. Right?

Julian. Also, but Julian is a girl, like George is a girl in the famous five, right? Miriam is Anne and presumably Rolf is Timmy the dog. What a strange book. Thank you so much. Oh, wow. It doesn't seem strange to me because it's the first of pd james's books that i read so i sort of thought of this as the norm and then i i heard oh she's written a lot of crime novels as well interesting so i only see the crime novels through the lens of the crime elements of the children of men if you like or that's how i started out

but it is very weird it's it's extremely odd i i and again i grew up a lot of things like john wyndham and this feels again to be borrowing from that tradition as much as it does that's who it's like that's very good wyndham is good wyndham is very good yeah yeah yeah all the elements of the golden age of crime are there but pd james the difference is you really see the splinters of bone and you see you know faces that have been smashed to jelly and there are such upsattering visceral images all the way through that certainly you know Wyndham never went to this territory and neither did Christie or Tay or Sayles or anyone like that you know so there's a kind of this is a more degraded age that we're living in that James was expressing anxieties about I think saying, saying this kind of... I agree. She liked to describe in forensic detail dead bodies.

She said she would never do torture, but she said it's very, very important, the first reaction that people have to finding a corpse. And I think those connections with the crime genre in this book, the more you go back and look at Children of Men, the more you see that she is co-opting quite a lot of her her kind of crime chops into the the storytelling huh yeah let's hear a clip from 2015 of pd james's great friend val mcdermott our former guest val mcdermott recalling for matthew paris on great lives how feels P.D. James will be remembered and what she was like. I think Phyllis, I wouldn't have described her as having a bleak outlook.

I think she had an unsentimental outlook. And she also had a very strong sense of privacy. She talked eloquently and at great length about her life as a writer. But when it came to talking about the lives of others whose lives touched hers, she was very reticent. And would you say that being a woman, as she believed, gave her a particular eye for the sort of thing a crime writer needs to know? I think there is something about the social conditioning

of growing up as a woman that teaches you you don't get what you want by direct confrontation. You have to develop what the Buddhists call subtle means, come at things by a circuitous route. And as you grow up learning to behave in this way, I think it gives you the kind of mindset that works very well for the detective novel that has at its heart puzzles, clues, complicated motivations. And so, yeah, I think there is some truth in that. I think men tend to write slightly more linear novels. And so, yeah, I think there is some truth in that. I think men tend to write slightly more linear novels. I'm not going to disagree with Val there. I would not be so presumptuous.

But Laura, you were talking about the, you know, Val offers a theory there as to why the Golden Age and Ruth Rendell and P.D. James, why women are the so-called queens of crime. I met P.D. James. I think I'm not the only one of us who did. I met her to talk about Agatha Christie, in fact, and she was absolutely marvellous, as you would expect. But her own theory was along the lines of it's a way for women to contain what they most fear within the genre, a way for women to resolve what they most fear within the genre, a way for women to resolve and contain, you know, the fear of violence, which obviously men have as well. But she was a great believer in the genre, wasn't she?

I had an interview where she said, I've never felt the need to prove myself better than detective fiction. I almost got the impression that if she could have done The Children of Men as a crime novel, she would have done. Because my feeling about it was, wow, what might this woman have done if she hadn't been confined to the genre? But she saw it the other way around. So there's some sort of consolation in being within the genre that presumably is appealing to women.

But that's a very vague answer. I'm very aware of that. We must theorise. Well, quite. It's a huge question. She compared the form towards the end of her life quite explicitly in a really interesting interview she gave in St. Paul's Cathedral. She was a very committed Anglican, and she talked about parables and the power of parables,

this idea that the apparent simplicity of the story and the clarity of the language enabled people to bring comfort, almost the simplicity of the form. Because I think she was being questioned is, once you've read a detective story, surely you don't want to read it again. And she was saying, well, it's a little bit like a parable. These things have got kind of hidden depths. So, I mean, I think that doesn't really connect back to the being a woman bit that you were talking about, Andy.

But I think it does connect to this idea that she didn't feel that the form was somehow, you know, second rate. I mean, some writers and some readers, Andrew, it strikes me, enjoy the constraints. Constraints is the wrong word. I don't want to say limitations but you know what i mean the rules of genre because you get to both bend them and break them and one's expectation and familiarity with the genre be it crime fiction or country music is built around what you do with

those chords that steel guitar you know that that it seems to me that's the pleasure. And even within what we would call literary terms, the foundation of a movement like Ulipo is about setting a number of apparently random parameters around which you then create and react with your writing and i wonder whether you found in your work that such stuff as you borrow from genre you find stimulating oh what a question i think i do i mean the the first two books i wrote were the first one drew a lot from children of men the last day it drew a great deal from that and i think what i admired and this is something that applies to the crime fiction as well is a convention that james breaks because at the end of a lot of detective stories and i'm talking really classic you know real golden age ones you christies and so on and your tase as well there is order chaos breaks out order is restored by the end by the detective you know that we are led

once more back into the safety of a safe world and i don't think i get to the end of many of james's novels and feel like order has been entirely restored i think there is a little survival of chaos whether it's whether it's in the plot or whether it's in the the nature of the resolution or whether it's in the character of the detective. Because James' protagonists are often strangers to fulfilled, happy lives. You know, they have not made it to harbour, if you like, in their own lives. They're kind of outcasts.

I think that's the case in Children of Men, it's the case with Dalglelish who's not yeah easy with himself um and so those are the conventions that i do like to draw on but also muck around with a bit yeah that's fascinating and it's also very true of the children of men we're going to talk later on about the ending of the children of men um and don't worry listeners when we get to that point there will be a massive uh red flag wave to ensure that you can listen or not listen as you see fit we have a clip here of pd james or phyllis as she was known if you met her when laura met her um you you met her didn't you john i met her uh many times i would say that she represents for me a kind of, when people talk about the literary establishment in a slightly disdainful way, I always think, P.D. James, that she is the literary establishment.

Absolutely interested. I think morally kind of unimpeachable. She was the president of the Society of Authors. She was governor of the BBC. She's so conscientious i always found her her energy was was incredibly compelling and interesting she had a moral authority and a kindness which is not always the case in the nasty back-boaty world of literature i don't know what you're talking about i don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about, you little bitch.

Thank you, friend. Yes, dear colleague. Dear colleague. I met her at a do in the 90s, and I was carrying, I come from work, and I was carrying a copy of Whiz for Atoms by Searle and Willans. Yeah. A Molesworth novel. She was at school. Did she tell you the story?

And she did. She said to me, what's that you're reading? And I said, oh, it's Wiz for Atoms. And she said, oh, I'm terribly glad people are still reading Atoms. She saw me as a representative of the young generation then

who were mad about Molesworth, which I hope she... I wouldn't want to disabuse her of that idea. Before we hear the clip, Andrew, did you ever meet Phyllis? No, and can I say, I can't believe that I'm the only person here who didn't get to meet her and I'm gutted. The closest I've got is I went to Southwold to a beach hut because she had a hut on the beach at Southwold

and she wrote a lot of her books there and there's this great scene in The Children of Men. I call it a great scene. It's a horrible mass drowning of the elderly, but that is set on the front at Southwold. Southwold. Who else but P.D. James would do that? I know, exactly.

I think she might have liked you, Andrew, but I don't know. I don't know. I can't presume. I wouldn't presume, no. She would have loved you, Andrew. I can tell you that she really would have done. Well, look, here's a clip of her talking about the relationship between her crime novels and the then newly published novel

Children of Men. I hate to think of it as science fiction but if one were sort of ascribing it to a genre that is undoubtedly the genre that one would choose. It's very different from the other books. I can see the influence of the crime novels there. When I had that idea which I got from reading a scientific article which pointed out how the human race is now much less fertile than it was. I realised that there was a wonderful plot there, a story to be told, but it really wasn't very suitable to twist it to make it into a detective story. So I wrote it as a straightforward novel.

Phyllis had one of the most blessed pods, not in her early life, but to publication, didn't she? Yes, she did. Amazingly, I just went to this exhibition of the history of crime writing at Cambridge University Library, and they had the letters between her and Faber about the publication of Cover Her Face, which were marvellous to read. But it did read in a very serendipitous way. You know, they asked her to make some cuts and she made the cuts and then they said, great, we'll publish it. She wrote this very characteristic letter of thanks saying, oh, thank you. And I hope you don't lose any money on it. You know, very sort of Phyllis. Your analysis of her, John, I think is so beautiful. She really was one of the

great and good in a very meaningful way, wasn't she? So that was the beginning. And yes, she was published quickly and immediately, quite rightly. I think it's fascinating Faber are seeking a younger woman novelist to continue what they see as a profitable line of publishing literally to fill the gap you know they i think jeffrey hare who had done legal thrillers nobody now reads had died and they they needed to plug the gap this is the advice one should give young writers now just see who's died on a publisher's list she writes she in her Time to Eonis, she writes that the fact that Charles Monteith,

the great editor at Faber, you know, who published, amongst others, Golding, and, you know, we've talked about him, but he just liked it,

read it, took it on. She says that her daughters, I think this success produced some unease among my daughters who had read that any writer of real talent

could paper his or her walls with rejection slips they tactfully pointed this out anxious to army against future disappointment i retorted with some tartness that children with no faith in mummy's talent would not get new bicycles out of the proceeds a couple of extremely good bicycles as well as other small treats constituted for me financial success oh you know when we come back after the break um we're gonna see how faber dealt with the challenge of presenting this um strange novel to phyllis's adoring public back in the 90s but first here's a word from our sponsors and we're back and um And as promised before the break,

The Children Men is a very unusual novel. It's quite hard to place in the bookshops. If you go in and buy a copy today, you'll find it in the crime section. But that's just because that's where all the other P.D. James novels are. You won't find it in sci-fi. You won't find it in fiction. You won't find it in pop science. That would be great.

But I've got the blurb, the original blurb here, and I would ask Laura and Andrew, would you pick up this book, friends, if you read this blurb? In this astonishing novel, an entirely new departure in her writing, In this astonishing novel, an entirely new departure in her writing, P.D. James imagines a future England where human infertility has spread like a plague. By the year 2021, no babies have been born for a quarter of a century, not since year Omega, anywhere in the inhabited world. The very old are being driven to despair and suicide and the final generation of the young are beautiful but violent and cruel the middle-aged are trying to sustain normality

and can i just say this is what life is like though isn't it that is why that's what the old that's what the old the young and the middle-aged are doing now this just sounds like yeah 2024 the middle-aged are trying to sustain normality under the absolute rule of Zan Lippiat, the charismatic dictator and warden of England. Theo Farren is an Oxford historian and cousin of the warden, living a solitary, self-regarding life in this ominous atmosphere. By chance at Evensong in Magdalen, he meets a young woman, one of a small group who seek to challenge the power

of the warden's regime. Theo's life is dramatically changed and he is drawn into almost unimaginable horrors. P.D. James brings the unrivaled qualities of her acclaimed detective novels to bear upon this frightening yet plausible scene. The conviction and sheer excitement with which she resolves the story are overwhelming the children of men is an unforgettable experience andrew sold half yeah yeah you see why i didn't read it right you can see why i didn't read it well it's it's such a longer blurb than you get these days it's it's nearly american in its length you know they they run to they often go to the second page of their blurbs you know and i weirdly i've got because i've got a much more recent copy of one i bought about 10 years ago it retains a lot of the same elements but does it much more crisply because this one starts the year is 2021 no child has been born

for 25 years the human race fears extinction you know and that's uh but it maintains lots of like it has the older despairing and the young cruel. I mean, this version is sort of, is a stripped-back version of the original. This is one of the things that happens over 30 years. The original blurb gets winnowed away. What did you think, Laura?

I would have been possibly a bit unnerved by that, you know. But I love detective fiction. Yeah, yeah. And that's why there's that that that very eager last paragraph saying listen don't run away it's exciting it's exciting yeah it's special pleading and actually i think there's a lot about it that is is very like a crime novel well let's let's come on to that john i've got a quiz for you. I know you like a quiz. On the inside front jacket, there are quotes from three critics or writers. Would you care to hazard a guess at those three critics or writers?

Marcel Berlins, Ruth Rendell, and then a third writer who says this. She is an addictive writer whose own acquisitive attitudes are passed on to the reader. It seems to me that she has gained authority. The quality of intelligence was always there. But now, in addition, we have a genuine curiosity about character and an ability to describe the density of little known lives. Above all, there is that sense of place. P.D. James takes her place in the long line of those moralists

who tell a story as satisfying as it is complete. Who do you think wrote that? Ooh. Ian McEwan. Close. It was, of course, Dr. Anita Bruckner.

Ah! Wow! The Bruckner trap was lying in front of me. It was there all along. Yeah. We've talked a lot about the genre elements. We've talked a lot about positioning. We've talked a lot about Phyllis and what have you.

Andrew, we haven't actually heard anything from the novel yet. I wonder if you would be kind enough to read us a sample extract. Yes, all right. I've got to, I promise it's one paragraph it'll seem longer when i'm reading it but it's it's from the opening pages of the book and it's about this is from theo farren the narrator's point of view it's spring when he's writing this he says i can still find pleasure more intellectual than sensual in the effulgence of an oxford spring the blossoms in bellbroughton road which seem lovelier every year, sunlight

moving on stone walls, horse chestnut trees in full bloom tossing in the wind, the smell of a bean field in flower, the first snowdrops, the fragile compactness of a tulip. Pleasure need not be less keen because there will be centuries of springs to come, their blossom unseen by human eyes. The walls will crumble, the trees die and rot, the gardens revert to weeds and grass, because all beauty will outlive the human intelligence which records, enjoys, and celebrates it. I tell myself this, but do I believe it when the pleasure now comes so rarely, and when it does, is so indistinguishable from pain? I can understand how the aristocrats and great landowners, with no hope of posterity, leave their estates untended. We can experience

nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life. But our minds reach back through centuries for the reassurance of our ancestry, and, without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all the pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin. fences shored up against our ruin i'm gonna ask what an almost partridge-esque but now why is that so good i think i picked it and i think i think it's so good because it combines so much of what this book is which is about beauty mixed with the pain of

mortality and that's the element of the sci-fi which touches the real which touches our world because we know that we are going to die, we know that we are not going to see endless springs to come and I think she's kind of that we are going to die we know that we are not going to see endless springs to come and i think she's kind of dealing with and grappling with that understanding and pain and what makes

things beautiful and what makes them painful and very perceptive i think yeah i i i had that hadn't occurred to me but yes i think you're right right. Laura, you said, and I agree with you, so this isn't a trap, you said you thought the first half of this book is better than the second half, and that's indeed what I feel. So let's talk about what's so good about the first half. Why is she so good at setting the dystopian scene? First of all, can I say how wonderful I think what Andrew just said was? I hadn't really taken that turn and seen that identification with it that you bring out there,

Andrew. I'd seen it almost more literally as not an exercise exactly, but a very, very brilliant rendering of what it would be to live, not just without the belief in a future, but to live without hope. How would you live? Yeah. And that I just find so brilliant, almost intellectually brilliant, that I hadn't taken that final turn like Andrew just brought out for me. So thank you for that because I do think it's a deeply religious book really and that really is what connects it for me with the rest of her books. It has a lot in common in a sense of a taste for death, devices and desires. It has themes in common with those books.

But the brilliance of the first half, I was sort of gasping at the completeness of her vision. It seems to me she does the male voice very well. I don't know whether you guys can agree with me about that, but it seems to me that Theo is a very convincing- Completely. I agree this kind of taught horrific aridity of the first half which is so sustained and enlivened with these brilliant tableau like the the quietus the thing you referred to at south world which I think is as good writing as I've encountered in a long while the way she describes that yes I almost don't feel that the turn of the second half the more plotty second half i i almost wish she'd had the courage of her convictions and and carried on in the same

vein oh my god i i couldn't agree any more vehemently you are lovely statement oh no it's true it's true so i when I started reading the book, I thought, oh, the prose is so, I felt my shoulders go down because I thought, oh, here's someone who can turn a beautiful sentence, one beautiful sentence after another, intelligent but easy to read, sort of articulate, not trying to show off. It's so, that bit you read andrew is so perfect any writer would be delighted to be able to turn a paragraph that neatly and and um evocatively and i agree with you laura

as the book went on when we got into the second half and we got into the what I felt was a rather mechanical dispatching of bodies. I kind of thought, oh, no, here's the plot now. Oh, there's no space now to do the world building or the rumination. The plot is beginning to overwhelm the qualities of the of the prose and i will come back to you on that because i would like to get your take on that john is that how you how did you feel about it as you read through it yes i felt i i really really enjoyed the book and i i didn't feel i didn't feel maybe quite as offended as you were by the to me me, it's fairly obvious that she's going to have to sort some stuff out plot-wise to end the novel in any kind of, you know, she's not writing

an existentialist track, but what she is writing, self-professed Christian fable that she's writing. And I do think there's an ambiguity at the ending, which I really like, which I don't, which perhaps we will talk about a bit more. There's something that you can do in a crime novel that's harder to do in a more literary novel, which is, you know, she needs, without any spoilers here, she needs Julian, the woman, and Theo, the protagonist, to fall in love. She needs that to happen for the book to work. There isn't, to my mind, any real evidence of how or why that happens other than her telling you that it has happened, which is the kind of thing you can get away with in a crime novel,

but I think is harder. I admire P.D. James hugely, and she would be the first to say, you know, that she's not comparing herself with Flaubert either. You have to take it on trust a little bit that this relationship is a real relationship. Having said all that, you know, by the end, it is kind of touching.

I just didn't quite buy it. I'm laughing, John, because I can hear Phyllis saying you think I'm not like Flaubert I'm not so sure I think she'd cross you on that anyway yes I think that's fair we have a clip now funnily enough you mention

the motivation of the characters and the need for them to fall in love. Here's a clip of P.D. James talking about those very things. I don't think you can be a good novelist unless you are able to look at the whole of humanity and enter into people's thoughts. So that, you know, to write a book when you feel

the only possible permissible form of love would be between a husband and wife, between mother and child. It's not only contrary to all one's experience of life. Love is a most fascinating thing because it can lead to such happiness, to such great deeds, and also, of course, to horrific deeds. I think in one of my books, Dalgrish remembers the advice that was given to him by um the sergeant he was working for about motive and he said you can sum up motive in with the letter l love lust loathing and lucre and people will tell you that the most dangerous is loathing but it isn't boy the most dangerous

is love isn't that brilliant? Andrew, how do you feel about us hoity-toity literary types? Stamping all over a good plot. I understand it. I think they are very different halves.

I feel, this is not true, but I feel like all the dialogue happens in the second half. You know what I mean? I think if the book was just the first half, it probably wouldn't have sold, probably wouldn't have been adapted. If it was just the second half, it wouldn't be one of the greats. You know, it's excellent. The only one of her books not to earn out its advance, which she's rather pissed off about in her autobiography. Yeah, yeah.

So I haven't been able to find out what it did or didn't that's not true it would have now sold out but in i think it's fascinating in i think it was 20 years ago which huh yeah so i take it all back sorry i just i just want to clarify for civilians listening that when we say a book doesn't earn out its advance a writer is often paid a sum of money by the publisher ahead of publication and then the book has to sell enough copies to pay the publisher back for that advance on royalties before it then in turn starts making money so you know in then, for the children of men, may still remain in the red, but I find it hard to believe. Unlikely. I mean, she wrote that in 1999,

when Time to Be in Earnest was written in 1999. So it was seven years after the book had been published, which is still, for her, a long time. But I want to go back to Andrew's point, because I don't think this novel, if it were only in one mode, would have resonated as it clearly did at the time and continues to do so now. When I was reading it, I don't remember feeling the first half was slow, though, because the quality of the writing is so good and the picture of the world is so finely drawn. drawn and you're seeing a and we should just say that the two halves just gorgeously the first half is called omega it's the end of everything the second half is called alpha something begins anew and that is so beautifully done it's so simple the vision of the world is what keeps

you going for the first half and it's about and it again the character of theo you know he's the book is about him thawing out. And again, that's something I completely have nicked. I think everything I've written so far involves the central character in some way reconnecting, in some ways reserved and withdrawn. And he is so reserved and withdrawn for really good reasons, you know. You, in your review that we mentioned earlier, you talk about the sliver of ice in the heart, the great Graham Greene line,

and you say he's got a whole cube of ice in his heart. And the thawing of Theo, I think, is kind of, I think, for me, the challenge with the book is that he is the most realised character in the book. And when Andy is goofing around with Famous Five, there is a little bit of the other characters. Goofing around? How dare you?

That's literary Christian. Goofing around? I think she is massively interested in Theo's transformation, to some extent, the rest of the characters. The other character i think that is brilliantly drawn and i think that is why this book is for me much much more satisfying than the film is that the that character of the warden of england and the fact that there is a actual she really takes some time remember she was a tory peer she's Tory peer. She's a small C conservative, probably more of the

one nation persuasion. But she really gives the authoritarian angle due weight. I mean, she doesn't just say, oh, they're a bunch of fascists. We hate them. It's really interesting. Laura, one of the things I found slightly eerie reading this novel, in the knowledge it was written in 1992, is although there are things she couldn't know, so that this is a world without the internet, but on the other hand, the way she depicts a kind of complex of populism, the effects of a virus, and immigration felt really, really perceptive. Did you find something similar? Oh, God, so much, Andy. I mean, as a prophet, she was pretty good. Yeah. You know, the ageing population, you know, in the 90s, none of us had kids or I didn't.

And it was a choice. And then you sort of think, oh, gosh, maybe that wasn't the right. I don't mean in a personal sense, but for the world, for society, this sense of the young as having nothing to lose and no stake in society. And therefore, why shouldn't they be violent and terrorizing the tremulous nature of democracy? Though what you said, John, about it's a fascist state effectively, but it's portrayed in a very reasonable way.

Parliament meets once a year. There's a king, but he's very ineffectual. And how you live in those circumstances. You know, Theo in the first half with his, he says, I have my consolations. I have that brilliant passage that Andrew read about trying to find the consolations of nature and then saying, oh, shall we lay down some wine at the college? And oh, is it worth it? Well, yeah, it's kind of worth it. And you just are so aware all the time of, is it worth it?

How do you live? And what you said about the immigrant labor, yeah, the sojourners and how they deal with crime. They send people to the Isle of Man, for God's sake. I found it almost terrifying sometimes, yeah. Yes, yeah, yeah. I tell you what, John, you mentioned the film adaptation. I saw the film when it came out and I watched it again before we did this

and I felt, I'm sorry I'm going to break some hearts, but that film has not stood the test of time as well as her book has, in fact. And one of the things that's particularly egregious about it is when it was filmed and michael cain is cast as a hippie pensioner in a performance great every bit as good as muppets christmas carol that's genius the director was imagining a world back then 20 years ago where pensioners would do something as incredible as listen to Neil Young and smoke dope. Well, we now know that future did come true.

They do smoke dope and listen to King Crimson. And stylistically, there's lots to enjoy in the film, but there's a coarsening of the vision that Phyllis presents in the first half of the novel. To go back to Andy's defensive plot, the plotting in the film is, I mean, lame, right? I mean, it really is. It's not good, is it?

I mean, all the subtlety of what she manages to achieve and the tension. Just a little bit of defence of the second half of the book, by the way. I really thought, you know, it becomes a page turner and you think this is, you know, you keep having to pinch yourself that you're, you know, the prose is so good all the way through, but you're, you know, she does the plot, she does keep you guessing,

she keeps the plot turning forwards. But, I mean, I think the movie is, you know, the fact that they get rid of the warden as a character. They flip the, you know, it's women who are infertile, you know, not men. I mean, Cuaron, Alfonso Cuaron. That's a weird move. That's a really weird move. It's a weird move.

It doesn't make really any difference to the future that we're facing. You know, it was an odd choice. You've now really got me stuck on the idea of a muppet children of men where clive owen remains the same and everyone else is played by a muppet andrew which muppet for warden of england oh i think gonzo the great is he's got he's got the title so don't you gotta be gonzo it's brilliant pd james is in the film you know she makes a little cameo no No, didn't know that. So there's a scene right at the beginning where Theo is in a coffee shop.

He gets his coffee, he leaves, and a few seconds later, a sort of pipe bomb blows it up and he's narrowly avoided being killed. She's the old lady queuing up in the cafe. Is she? I didn't know that. I couldn't find anywhere where she said anything other than, you know, it was fine. And to be honest, she's very, very, if you read her autobiography,

there are lists of how to adapt things for television, you know, a seven-point plan for how to do it properly. So it's not like she didn't have opinions. She had, you know, well, interesting. Laura, you will have chosen a section of the book for us to read. Did you choose from the first or second half of the novel? Well, I think you probably can guess that it's from the first. Which part are we going to hit?

Well, the reason I picked this is because I think it's, I don't mean for the first half to sound too much like an intellectual dissertation on how do you live when there's no future. It's so enlivened by these little tableaux, which usually have a religious context. So it's just that. It's just a tiny little vignette that I felt was just written unimprovably, really. So he is Theo. He reached the chapel just as the service was about to begin. They go in for christenings. There's always this religious yearning, but they christen kittens. Pets.

Yeah. Okay. He reached the chapel just as the service was about to begin. The choir of eight men and eight women filed in, bringing with them a memory of earlier choirs, boy choristers, entering grave-faced with that almost imperceptible childish swagger. Theo banished the image, wondering why it was so persistent when he had never even cared for children. Now he fixed his eyes on the chaplain, remembering the incident some months previously when he had arrived early for Evensong. Somehow

a young deer from the Maudlin Meadow had made its way into the chapel and was standing peaceably beside the altar as if this were its natural habitat. The chaplain, harshly shouting, had rushed at it, seizing and hurling prayer books, thumping its silken sides. The animal, puzzled, docile, had for a moment endured the assault and then, delicate-footed, had pranced its way out of the chapel. The chaplain had turned to Theo, tears streaming down his face. Christ, why can't they wait? Bloody animals. They'll have it all soon enough. Why can't they wait? That's it. But I just think that is a perfect... It's great.

Perfect. Yes, yes, you're right. I agree with you. Yes, Laura. The idea that those tableaux are the things that keep it moving along and that each tableau, like all good dystopias, each tableau deepens and enriches the next one as you build up this patchwork of a broken world. It's very, very powerful that, I think.

And just showing you... Sorry, sorry. We're just showing you little bits of it as well. She is very explicit. You know, page one, the last person born on Earth has just died. I mean, she couldn't technically be making things clearer, but what she chooses to see...

I'm sure you remember the scene in the first few pages. There's a woman walking along the street with a pram. Pram, yeah, yeah. And you lean in, and she's got one of these very realistic ceramic dolls. And it's a kind of shuddery moment. Yes, yeah. And then another woman reaches into the pram

as if to admire the doll. Oh, yes. And then smashes it against the pavement. And the woman who's had the pram is driven out of her wit. She screams. It's this awful scream she gives. And again, tiny tableau, just like Laura says, but so telling and so rich.

Yeah. Everything turned up. The hysteria and the ennui and the disaffection, all kind of turned up a notch. Like being kettled. It's like the whole of society is being kettled. There's no way, there's no exit. So we have to wind up soon.

Before we do, I would like to read from the second half of the novel, deep into the second half, in fact, the very end of the novel. And so listeners, if you've yet to read The Children of Men or you're planning to after listening to this, please fast forward, use the fast forward button on your devices to skip the next few minutes because we are going to hear the ending and we are going to discuss the ending. So join us again after that in about five minutes' time, all right?

So to those of you still remaining i'm just going to read one paragraph and then leap ahead to the final paragraph and i'm going to assume that most people listening will um at this point be familiar with with what's happening but to say a baby has just been born to julian theo has shot through the head or heart, I think, his cousin, the Warden of England, and has removed from Zan's finger the Ring of Power, which does sound a bit like the Lord of the Rings, doesn't it? But it isn't. So this is a heavily symbolic moment, and this is the very, very end of the book. Theo thought it begins again with jealousy, with treachery, with violence, with murder, with this ring on my finger.

He looked down at the great sapphire in its glitter of diamonds, at the ruby cross twisting the ring aware of its weight. Placing it on his hand had been instinctive and yet deliberate, a gesture to assert authority and ensure protection. He had known that the grenadiers would come armed, and the sight of that shining symbol on his figure would at least make them pause, give him time to speak. Did he need to wear it now? He had all Zan's power within his grasp, that and more. With Karl dying, the council was leaderless. For a time at least, he must take Zan's place. There were evils to be remedied, but they must take their turn. He couldn't do everything at once, there had to be priorities. Was that what Zan had found? And was this sudden intoxication

of power what Zan had known every day of his life, the sense that everything was possible to him, that what he wanted would be done, that what he hated would be abolished, that the world could be fashioned according to his will? He drew the ring from his finger, then paused and pushed it back. There would be time later to decide whether, and for how long, he needed it. The towel between Julian's legs was heavily stained. He removed it without revulsion, almost without thought, and folding another, put it in place. There was very little water left in the bottle, but he hardly needed it. His tears were falling now over the child's forehead. His tears were falling now over the child's forehead.

From some far childhood memory, he recalled the rite. The water had to flow. There were words which had to be said. It was with a thumb wet with his own tears and stained with her blood that he made on the child's forehead the sign of the cross. That's pretty good. Laura, time for that mic drop. John, what does that ending mean?

Well, it is a moment of hope. She thought of it as a moment of hope, but it's heavily tempered by the, the realization that Theo slightly against the, the better judgment of Julian, who's just given birth to that hope. The new child has put on the ring of power. Andrew mentioned earlier that moral ambiguity, she doesn't really do happy endings

in the way that uh a golden age crime writer would do okay you you filled the time brilliantly and i would like to thank you for that john it's ambiguous andy there it does there's no no simple meaning no simple meaning right i'll go to you next, Andrew. What do you get from that ending? The same moment of, you know, it should be the crowning moment of the novel, some pun intended. Very good.

That slipped out easily. Please. But instead, there's a sense of disquiet, and you can feel the corruption beginning within Theo's heart, which has only just been rescued from the pit of ice, and it's extraordinary. As I think you said, the idea that the protagonists are not left in a world where resolution is achieved,

but are set on a new path of a different kind of existential crisis. Laura, what's about the Christian element to that ending? You said you found the novel very Christian, as did I, in fact. What do you make of the ending in those terms? Well, in the first half, this death of hope, the sin of despair, if you like, inevitably, but you're feeling the need for hope, the urge toward hope all the time. And then in the second half, that becomes explicit. And the birth of the child is explicitly Christian. Where it happens, how it happens, it's the equivalent of the stable, et cetera. That religious sensibility that she had, that hinterland that's steeped in the

King James Bible, all that. I just think more and more how much solidity and weight that does give to all her books. Because it's unusual today, isn't it? We're living in a world of secular art. They are written with a moral code and, to some extent, an orthodox moral code, aren't they? Yes, and even more than that, I think, she's not moralistic. She's an adult. She's not judgmental in an easy way. But I just feel that religious backdrop,

which is unusual. It's unusual in a 20th century novelist, I think. And I just feel, because her novels do have this weight and density and everything, and solidity and consolation, even when they are morally ambivalent, et cetera. And I just keep thinking how key that is. I wanted to say one thing just because I'd hate for it not to be the astonishing suffering that she lived through. Her husband died in his early 40s. He was in a mental institution. Her mother had been in a mental institution.

A lot of the deep kind of moral faith in Phyllis's work comes from a place of incredible pain and suffering. this work comes from a place of incredible pain and suffering. And I think that is what, in the end, distinguishes this book and her work in general from your average thriller. It's a very, very powerful novel. I'll give you my gloss on that ending very quickly, which is I was nonplussed by it when I first read it. And while I was reading it again there, I think what I take from that ending is the ending actually recasts

everything you've just read, including the trustworthiness of the first-person narrative in the diary. And I think you're perhaps supposed to realise that Theo himself is a wrong-un all along. That you are, wait a minute, you're seeing someone who thinks they haven't been corrupted by their proximity to power, but what you're actually seeing is not the ice melting, but the ice hardening.

You're actually seeing somebody being corrupted, even in the face of a moment of beginning again. Because he's there because of nepotism. He is an unpleasant man. He is an elitist. He is accidentally responsible for a death. So his hands are bloody already through, if not malice, neglect. And I think part of the ending is to say to you, you know,

not just don't don the ring of power, but, you know, anyone who seeks to wear the ring of power is, of course, totally unsuited to seek to do so. Donald Trump isn't in this book, but I'm saying, you know, kind of, sorry. Sorry, Republican listeners to this show. Now, it's time for us to leave. Oh, smooth. Smooth as always.

Now it's time for us to leave, Theo and Julian, and the testing moral universe of Phyllis James. Huge thanks to Andrew and to Laura for giving us the chance to explore it, and to Luke Eldridge for turning our journey into an actual podcast. If you want show notes with clips, links, and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 207 that we've already recorded, please visit our website at batlisted.fm. If you want to purchase the books discussed on this or any of our other shows visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose backlisted as your bookshop and we're still keen to hear from you on twitter facebook instagram blue sky uh um

i don't know stone tablets you know you know. Stone tablets, yes. Yes, if you're listening, please chisel away and get in touch with us. If you want to hear Backlisted early and ad-free, subscribe to our Patreon, www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits. If you subscribe at the lock listener level for a monthly fee that's about the same as a paperback novel, you'll get not one but two extra podcasts every month.

It features the three of us talking, recommending the books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. And 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, a lot of listeners get their names read out, accompanied by lashings of praise like this. Susan Dillon, thank you. Lucy Harold, like this. Susan Dillon, thank you.

Lucy Harold, thank you. Mike Slee, thank you. Muriel, thank you. Martin von Mirbach, thank you. Diane Aston, thank you. Nick O'Pray, thank you. David Proud, thank you so much. Rebecca Jacob, thank you.

Liz Moran, thank you. Before we wind up completely, I would like to ask, first, Laura. Laura, is there anything else you would like to add on the subject of P.D. James or the children of men? I'm really glad John said that little bit at the end about her life. An incredible woman she was. Incredible woman. the end about the um her life an incredible woman she was incredible woman and also um i just put in a quick mention of a book we haven't uh alluded to which is her other non as it were detective fiction book um innocent blood which i also think is a bit of a masterpiece and would highly recommend thank you very much uh andrew is there anything else

we didn't touch on that you would like to bring to our attention just to echo what everyone said about the cordelia gray books because i think you're so right it's so sad there are only two you read the first one an unsuitable job for a woman you think right i'm set i can't wait to read the next half dozen of these and then you find there's one more um but they are both jewels they're both absolutely worth reading even if um even if there are no more well i find it hard to believe that that phyllis is 10 years gone john yeah it's astonishing 1999 just check this out soon we shall get to the stage where a bestseller will be written by a computer with all the necessary ingredients of sex and violence fed into the machine.

The publisher will then find a young man or woman with a fashionable face, appropriate body measurements and a sensational emotional and sexual life and place his or her name on the title page. I suppose the book could then be sold on the internet and would no doubt cause a literary sensation. Yeah, AI. Phyllis got there first. Andrew, rename yourself AI James and get on to the publishers. Listen, thanks very much, guys. Thank you so much for giving up your time to talk to us. I loved reading and thinking about this book so much.

And I know listeners will do the same. It's a treat. We'll see you again in a fortnight, everybody. Thanks, Laura. Thanks, Andrew. See you soon. See you soon, mate. Bye-bye. thanks Laura thanks Andrew see you soon bye bye