Backlisted - The Victorian Chaise-longue by Marghanita Laski

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953) is a terrifying short novel by the writer, broadcaster and lexicographer Marghanita Laski. Joining Andy and John is the novelist Eley Williams, author of the awarding winning Attrib. and Other Stories and this year’s wonderful novel of mendacious lexicography, The Liar’s Dictionary. The episode also features Andy’s report back from the summit of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and John excavates an old Puffin anthology called Authors’ Choice which contains ‘The Tower’ (1955), another deeply unsettling story by Marghanita Laski story, chosen and introduced by Alan Garner.* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Where are you calling from, Paula? It is foothills of Alexandra Palace. It's N8 Crouch Hill.

N8. Can you see Alexandra Palace from there? I can. If I crouch weirdly and look through my neighbour's garden, I can see the spire. What's the word? The tower. That's why it's called Crouch Hill.

That's it. That's it. Everyone is just gently winching themselves so they can see and through people's hedges about a 20 minute walk away from alexander palace and i did ice skating last january there to try and learn how to ice skate and i was dreadful at it does that feel like last january or does it feel like yeah right january 600 years ago. Yeah, yeah. It really does.

It really does. I went ice skating once. It's not straightforward at all, is it? I'm glad you said that. It looks so easy to do. You just put the skates on and off you go. Just go on some ice and glide. Like, surely I should be able to.

I found it was, you know, the most likely thing was that if I kept doing it, I would break an ankle. Right. Break an ankle and embed a skate in a toddler's face. Like that was pretty much. And slice off your fingers and the fingers of those around you. That was my main. No natural aptitude for the. It's very hard.

It's one of those things that you can't look good at the first time. You have to hold on desperately to the side of the edge of the ice rink and sort of shuffle around it's annoying it's like unlike badminton or table tennis where you can actually feel like you're really quite a good player quite quickly even though you're not but you know you sort of feel that you're getting to the most of the shots and you know you you can serve quite quickly and now it's badminton on ice where I'd really feel I'd come into my own. Finally, true mastery of my physical form and sport. Well, something to aim for when all this is over.

How surprising. It's exactly this kind of activity that the author of the book we're going to be discussing believed people found ecstasy in. Right. Did she? Yeah. Did she? Yeah, yeah. Did she? Childbirth, badminton on ice, those were the two.

Sports. Art and literature came a long way down the list. Oh, my God. This is already, you haven't told me this before we've even started. I hate her even more. I'm only joking. Joke, joke, joke. Joke, joke, joke.

I think that's sufficient jollity. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us, well, I'm not exactly sure where. We were dozing off in a sun-filled room in a terraced Regency house near the canal in London. It was sometime in the late 1940s and we were staring at shiny silk curtains decorated with huge pink roses. But now we appear to be in a very different room. The curtains are dark red brown plush. The sky is a leaden grey. I'm John Mitchinson,

the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading is Dangerously, and joining us today for the first time, well, actually the second time, because this is officially the haunted episode of Blacklist, where a number of mysterious gremlins afflicted us on Friday, so we reconvened today. So far, we exorcised the Zoom, and it all seems to be working okay now. So joining us today for the first time publicly is the writer, and it all seems to be working okay now. So joining us today

for the first time publicly is the writer Ellie Williams. Hello Ellie Williams. Hello, thank you for having me. Thank you for coming and thank you for choosing this particular book. I have a series of questions about it coming up. Just put you at your ease, don't worry. Pick up your pens. Just put you at your ease, don't worry. Pick up your pens. Yes, pick up your pens. The Liar's Dictionary, Ellie's debut novel, is published this year by William Heinemann.

Her short story collection, A Trib and Other Stories, published by our friends at Influx, won the James Tate Black Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and we featured it here on Backlisted, though. I can't remember off the top of my head which episode it's on but I we both absolutely love that book and I love the Liars Dictionary as well one of my questions about Liars Dictionary is were you partly inspired by Marganita Lasky's career as a lexicographer to write that novel? I was not. But the fact that dictionaries have these secret lives and these networks of people who submit to them on a kind of a basis of some kind of anthill, that they're all working away for it rather than it being

the kind of monoliths of dr johnson or merriam-webster or anything like that that we have like the dictionaries are in the modern sense really cultural artifacts that draw upon the work of often anonymous people that are sending in their histories of words, how they've first discovered a word, a strange word, an obscure-to-them word, and people like Lasky, who I think I'm right in saying it was a quarter of a million words. Yeah, a quarter of a million. She provided the original

text for them or examples of use I'm gonna I've got a little bit of a memoir she wrote about working on the dictionary for later on the podcast um but and also the other thing I thought I thought the liar's dictionary was really really funny um and I wondered whether it had been inspired, I please say yes, at any level by one of the funniest books of the 20th century and one of the most important lexicographical tones of the late 20th century, which is The Meaning of Lith by John Lloyd and Douglas Adams. Between The Meaning of Lith and Uxbridge Dictionary on, I'm sorry, I haven't a clue. Those are the two icons, the two pillars that really,

the idea of bringing humour and the dictionary, I think it started with those two, certainly. But also that's the brilliant idea of how many things that aren't words for, which is obviously what Lyf is about. But you weave that so brilliantly into the novel. I haven't finished. This is still the introduction. We're still going.

Frit, a chatbook of poems by Elias, published by Sad Press. This year she was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award for a short story scrimshaw concerning walruses, miscommunications and ellipses. She lectures at Royal Holloway, University of London. And you are on Twitter, Ellie, as you've got a very memorable Twitter handle, which is at GiantRatSinatra. And could you tell the boys and girls the derivation of your twitter handle it will something related to it will come up later in the program so imagine if i said well yeah that's my actual name that's my full given name um that is uh that's to do with a case that is referred to canonically in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

And we never are, as readers, given an experience of the case. We're not given who the villain is or really what the storyline or crime that's been committed. That's never divulged. But in a kind of offhand gesture, Sherlock Holmes refers to the case of the giant rat of Sumatra and says that the world is not yet ready for that story to be told.

And it's kind of dangled there as something for readers to speculate about. I know they have. And I've always just liked the idea of that giant rat, that mischievous, huge, hulking Godzilla of the rodent world somehow being part of Sherlock Holmes' life and his ill. That's very of a piece for the liar's dictionary, isn't it? This idea that something's in an interzone of it's canon but not canon.

It exists but it doesn't exist. Anyway, before we call the doctor in from the next room, Andy, what have you been reading this week? John, when I was a child, I spake as a child. I understood as a child. I read Lee Child. But when I became a man, I read Thomas Mann and I put away Lee Childish things.

That's, as you will know, a quotation from the Book of Books, chapter 13, verse 11. I was inspired on this show because The Victorian Shows Long is an extremely short book about TB. To talk about an extremely long book about TB, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Thomas Mann, I should say. Thomas Mann, German.

And I read this last month, and I wanted to talk about it for several reasons today. I was inspired to read it because when my book, The Year of Reading Dangerously, was first published, one of the first reviews it got on social media was three stars out of five. And the entire review ran, this is a good idea, but where is the magic mountain? And because I hold a grudge, as Nikki pointed out last week,

that stuck in my mind for the last few years, forever. And I thought, well, I really ought to read The Magic Mountain. A stone in your shoe. Go back and write my book again and put The Magic Mountain in it and go, I read The Magic Mountain. And you know what? It was alright. Anyway, so. Can you now make

a comment on that good read? Thank you for your useful addition. No author should do that not even not even me i'm gonna be roasted over the coals for this i i know there are people uh for whom the magic mountain is their favorite novel and the intellectual high point of the 20th century but i have to say as a reading experience i found it a bit of a curate's egg there's some incredible sections of it um the famous set piece in the snow quite near the end of the book was really incredible and it was definitely worth reading the whole thing funny enough johnny in

fact the last third is where things really um pick up exactly i don't think there's no point in the magic mountain sorry i was thinking of lee child yeah well you're gripped you're not gripped you grip the magic mountain you climb you don't you don't get on thomas marm doesn't provide you with a ski lift to take you to the top you know it's uh it's it's uh you need the crampons. No walking poles for you. It's very funny. There are some bits which are very funny and some really brilliantly turned characters, but there's also quite a lot of symbolic characters

standing around elucidating at great length philosophical or medical points of view or to give it the technical term mansplaining boom very good but all that said i still think it's worth the effort to read a big book like this because the truth is you don't know what you think until you've read it. I thought I knew what it was going to be and it wasn't what I thought it was going to be and it was more challenging in some ways

but also lighter and funnier and, as I say, with these little moments of clarity. But there's just one bit here that I thought I would share with you because it seemed to fit what we're talking about today. This is a character called Herr Settembrini who represents, broadly speaking, represents humanism, my notes tell me. And he's talking to the hero, Hans Kastor, and they are both residents in the TB sanatorium near Davos, in which much of the action

of this novel takes place. Herr Sertembrini is speaking. But first, he says some quick background information. He's a member of the League for the Organization of Progress, and he says, the League for the Organization of Progress has resolved in barcelona to publish a multi-volume work which is to bear the title the sociology of suffering and in which human sufferings of all classes and species will be treated in detailed exhaustive systematic fashion it sounds a bit like a dictionary doesn't it that's the thing so and he says this is the purpose of our sociological pathology an encyclopedia of some 20 or so volumes that will list and discuss all conceivable instances

of human suffering from the most personal and intimate to the large-scale conflicts of groups that arise out of class hostility and international strife in short it will list the chemical elements that serve as the basis for all the many mixtures and compounds of human suffering, taking as its plumb line the dignity and happiness of humankind. It will supply for each and every instance of suffering the means and measures that seem most appropriate for eliminating its causes. Renowned scholars and experts from all over Europe, medical doctors, economists, psychologists. This is the ant of which Ellie was speaking,

will participate in drafting this encyclopedia. And the general editorial and offices in Lugano will act as the reservoir into which all articles will flow. I can read the question in your eyes. What will be my role in all of this? And he says, he goes on, he says says he's been asked to be the editor this immense work he says does not wish to see bell lecture neglected either at least to the extent they will speak of human suffering literature is therefore to have its own volume which is to contain as solace and advice for those who suffer a synopsis

and short analysis of all masterpieces of world literature dealing with every such conflict. This is a very complex task, demanding much prudence and vast reading, especially, he added now, his gaze seemingly lost in the immensity of his mission, because, especially because literature has regularly chosen suffering as its topic. Even masterpieces of only second or third rank have been concerned with it in one way or another. But no matter, he clapped his hands together. All the better. And I was thinking about that and I was thinking, well, yeah.

Well, I was thinking the Victorian Shades Long is uh is a small masterpiece of we can decide which rank but it is about suffering so fair play to Setembrini on that uh Ellie have you read the Magic Mountain John have you read the Magic Mountain I never have I've dallied in the foothills but I've never committed to the full ascent I I find whenever I'm I come across extracts of it I love it I enjoy it uh I think in part there's the the kind of frisson to know that it's still there um to be enjoyed yeah and from that reading perhaps now I feel I'm ready um do you though I'm not sure I have to say Andy you made it to say, Andy, you made it sound more appealing than I was expecting it to be.

I don't know. I feel I've talked it down a bit now. I don't know. I have a man-shaped hole in my reading. Mom. A mom-shaped hole. And I've picked up and looked at Death in Venice several times. I have a copy of it at home that I never committed. Well, that's a book about suffering.

Much shorter. I think you only did that whole thing just so you could get the mansplaining gag in there. It was very, very good. Nicky, why do I do anything? Why do I do anything? It's only to drop in one tiny gag. It was brilliant.

It was worth it. Yeah. But my favourite ever quote about writing is the one attributed to him, which is, you know, a writer is someone who finds writing more difficult than other people. So I've always felt that he's definitely somebody who I would be disappointed if I hadn't read anything of

within the next 10 years, let's say. He started off writing this as a novella in 1912. Did you know that? It's true. In 1912, he started it as true in 1912 i got some good news i got some bad news yeah and he finished it and he finished it in 1924 so anyway i read the translation i should say translation by john e woods uh which was written i think about 20 years ago that's enough about thomas marne john what have you been reading this week? Well, I've been reading a very small, in comparison, a very small, very lovely treasured book that I discovered when I was fishing in the ice upstairs to try and find my copies of Susan Cooper.

I found this book, which has got the stunningly kind of descriptive title, Author's Choice. That's a puffin, isn't it? From when? It's a puffin. It was published originally in Harbach in 1970 by Hamish Hamilton, published in Puffin in 1973, which was when I bought it. It might have been a Puffin Post special. But it's 17 distinguished authors choosing stories. And I had completely forgotten about it, except that one or two of the stories lived in

my mind and by extraordinary coincidence the story that most lived in my mind from it was a story called The Tower by Marganita Lasky which was chosen I mean this the choosers by the way are quite interesting when you think now I mean Alan G chose it, but there's Leon Garfield, Noel Stritfield, Ursula Morey Williams, Iren Seralia, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Geoffrey Treese, Barbara Willard, and a marvellous writer I'd never heard of called Hester Burton, who I have since bought two books by, because it turns out she lived in Oxford and she wrote historical novels. She wrote a book that won the Carnegie called Time of Trial. Oh, look at that.

And an amazing little book about Otmore, which is near Oxford called Otmore Forever, which is something I'm interested in. I mean, I was really doing some research into the Otmore riots. I think this is the only work of fiction it's ever produced. And she chose for this story, the other one that I really remember, which links back to another backlisted, which is The Foghorn by Ray Bradbury. If you remember, I think Jan Allen read an extract from that.

And it's one of those things, it's what Puffin used to do really well. Hamish Hamilton did The Book of Goblins and there was that series of anthologies. There's no theme to it whatsoever, except that the stories are all good. There's a marvellous Catherine Mansfield story. There's a great bit about the Philly Jonks from Tova Janssen. So it must've been the first time I came across the Moomins as well, I think.

There's a marvellous Arthur Ransom story from his old Peter's Russian Folk Tales. I just wanted to read what Alan Garner said about the Tower. And then I'm going to read you a little bit of a Franco, very short bit of a Franco Cano story. But what he said about the tower was this. There are certain stories that present ideas and emotions with a force that's never forgotten. The tower is one of those. It is all the more remarkable for not being perfect. I find the slow beginning, the finicky background of plot

very irritating. But as soon as Caroline arrives at the beginning, the finicky background of plot very irritating. But as soon as Caroline arrives at the tower, the author turns relentless and the result is simply the most terrifying story I know. Now, I'd love to read it, but I can't. But we'll find a way of... Ellie, have you read it? I've read The Tower. I think I first came across it as a radio production of it, just a straight reading. And I don't think my goose pimples have gone down since then. It is a real way of exhibiting how the psychology of a person who's so hopeful and so curious can end up being this trap. You know how in films, when you're aware of the soundtrack building up to this terrible moment, and it's always a disappointment when the moment happens, you're like, okay, here comes the arterial spray,

here comes the alien, whatever. The fact that you would never get there, that you would never have the release of the terror being shown or the monster monster being revealed you're just as a reader suspended in that moment forever with the character and um i mean that's not too much of a spoiler to say i don't think so it's it's a it's a really brilliant story the other one that i really remember is just i'll just read a little a little bit which is uh called first confession by Frank O'Connor, chosen by the Irish novelist, Ilyas Dillon. And it's about a little kid who's decided he wants to kill his grandmother. And that's what he came to his first confession to tell the priest. The priest says, in what way were you going to kill her?

Asked the priest smoothly. With a hatchet, father. When she was in bed. No, father. How so? When she ate the potatoes and drinks the port as she falls asleep, father. And you hatchet, father. When she was in bed. No, father. How so? When she ate the potatoes and drinks the port as she falls asleep, father. And you'd hit her then. Yes, father. Wouldn't a knife be better? Twould, father, only I'd be afraid of the blood. Ah, yes, of course. I never thought

of the blood. I'd be afraid of that, father. I was near hitting Nora with the bread knife one time. She came with me under the table. Only I was afraid. You're a terrible child, the priest said with awe. I am, Father, said Jackie noncommittally, sniffing back his tears. And what would you do with the body? How, Father? Wouldn't someone see and tell? I was going to cut her up with a knife and take away the pieces and bury them. I could get an orange box for threepence and make a cart to take them away. My, my, said the priest. You had it all well planned. I tried that, said Jackie with mountain confidence. I borrowed a cart and practiced it myself one night after dark. And weren't you afraid? Ah, no, said Jackie half-heartedly. Oh, only a bit. You have terrible courage, said the priest. There's a lot of people I want to get rid of,

but I'm not like you. I never have the courage. And hanging is an awful death. Is it? Asked Jackie, responding to the brightness of a new theme. An awful blooming death. Did you ever see a fellow hanged? Dozens of them and they all died roaring. Gee, said Jackie. They do be swinging out there for hours and the poor fellow's lipping and roaring like bells in a belfry and then they put lime on them to burn them up. Of course they pretend they're dead, but sure they don't be dead at all. Gee, said Jackie again. So if I were you, I'd take my time and think about it. In my opinion, it isn't worth it, not even to get rid of a grandmother. I asked dozens of fellas like you that killed their grandmothers about it and they all said,

no, it wasn't worth it. Nora was waiting across the yard. The sunlight struck down on her across the high wall and its brightness made his eyes dazzle. Well, she said, what did he give you? Three Hail Marys. You mustn't have told him anything. I told him everything, Jackie said confidently. What did you tell him? Things you don't know. He gave you three Hail Marys because you're a cry baby. Jackie didn't mind. He felt the world was very good. He gave you three Hail Marys because you're a crybaby. Jackie didn't mind. He felt the world was very good. He began to whistle as well as the hindrance in his jaw permitted.

What are you sucking? Bull's eyes. Was he that gave them to you? Twas. Oh, mighty God, said Nora. Some people have all the luck. I might as well be a sinner like you. There's no use in being good. That's a Frank O'Connor story, right?

sinner like you there's no use in being good that's a frank o'connor story right so in but in january this year about the time that ellie was learning to skate i read an anthology of frank o'connor i'd never frank read frank o'connor before and that was one of my favorite stories and when you and when i didn't recognize by title but when you started reading it, I was like, oh, I know this one. Great. Brilliant choice. And that was in a book for children. Yeah, look, it's a little author's choice. It's like a little, honestly, it's an amazing compilation of stories.

And there's not a bad, there's two very good, one brilliant Kipling, which I'd never read before. Also, we should say, because new facts have come to light all the time, not least since we recorded the Molesworth episode. So this is a classic example of a piece of Puffin Publishing's overseen masterminded by Kay Webb. Do you want to share with the boys and girls what the fact is? We learned about Puffin andb since the since the last show so we discovered that k-web was the second wife of ronald searle and that ronald searle the martin rosen mentions

ronald searle abandoning his family to go and live with somebody else in France. And the family that was abandoned was Kay Webb and her two children. And it was out of that absolute devastation, because she was devastated, that she decided that she'd have to, A, she had to do something to, I mean, it was basically, Puffin was one of the thing that she did. She'd got the job at Puffin and never looked back and built the most famous children's list in the world, I guess, certainly at that time. And had an effect on the lives of thousands and thousands of readers. Probably millions of children.

But what we're doing today is a result of... You know what Searle said about that act, which is clearly a bad thing to do. When challenged on it, he said, words to the effect of, well, this is how I, I suppose it's how I survived the Burma railway. I suppose it's how I survived being a prisoner of war. It was self-preservation. It wasn't noble or pretty or glorious,

but it was what I had to do. So I did it. I mean, you know. But out of that came, this is interesting, isn't it? Because out of that came his art and puffing books, arguably. So, well, what a thing. What a thing. I think it's time to talk about the Victorian chaise longue.

I mean, I was very keen to run that all the way through the rest of the show. And I just start rocking back and forth and just all the metramones go backwards in my house. That is the sound of a grandfather clock that was manufactured in 1864, the year in which Victorian Shows Long was partly set. I thought that was sufficiently nice. Very nice. I like it. Fortuitous, meant to be. Authentic.

So you should hear a bit of that. So the Victorian Shows Long, a short book. It's not even 100 pages. It's published in 1953. It's terrifying. Where did you find this book or hear about Marganita Lasky, whichever came first? Well, I first heard of Lasky, my first part of my undergraduate,

I applied to do theology and I quickly saw the error of my ways and wheeled back to english literature um but for that first bit where i was terribly diligent and i was reading about notions of this goes to show what kind of student i was when it's like oh out-of-body experiences i didn't do the fun stuff i was reading about centuriva of avila and what is it to have an ecstatic religious experience um and as john mentioned that um lasky was uh as well as many things a literary critic and sociological critic really of the notion of ecstasy what does it mean to have an ecstatic experience whether through art through religion or various other means um and first of all her name coming up on that as one of the few women writers that was on the syllabus and so i i think there was an interview um that mentioned that she first had the idea or was prompted by friends or acquaintances of hers

to write about ecstasy because someone had read her novel and had felt that how she framed the ecstatic or notions of ecstasy in that book would perhaps inform a certain conversation or a certain kind of critique of what ecstasy was and at that time I very diligently went to what was then Borders and bought a copy of the book. I then summarily ignored it and only came across the as you say very slim volume much later more

as kind of curiosity I'd forgotten about any of the kind of background for it. And as you say, it starts as quite a kind of fussy, kind of futsy book. And then becomes this really strange, time-travelling, locked-in syndrome, horror novella. And it just stayed with me for that reason. I think in part because of that negotiation within such a short text um you you feel like there is humor at the beginning there is a kind of turn to a yellow wallpaper psychological treatment of um a woman oppressed by society and choices. And then this theological element to it, this kind of sense of rapture but also stasis and body horror. And to get all that in 99 pages, I think it's something you don't forget. Were you, are you, to the extent to which this book does conform to genre,

did you read much horror fiction or many short stories of the uncanny? So did you have that background to it or was it a bit of an exception? I think I feel that short stories, often the ones that I'm drawn to, are either the ones that have that kind of taste in the head, this idea of nothing really happens, but this mood is evoked or something like that, or a ghost story and horror story where the ending is crucial and where the reader is positioned and how they're treated by the end is just administered with such panache and kind of gall.

So I do tend to find, especially kind of this post-Halloween coming up to Christmas stretch of time, those are the short stories that I seek out. But I wasn't expecting it with this one. So maybe that's why it affected me the most. What kind of authors are we talking about then for those short stories of the uncanny? Which writers do you particularly admire? I think in that bracket, Saki, because there's a gentility there

that then becomes cruel and weird. I guess to a lesser extent, but in that world, Arthur Macken, Algernon Blackwood. Shall I just read the blurb on the not on the persephone edition because that's not how they do it but um um i've i've got the the paint the 60s or 70s penguin edition here and i thought it might be useful just to hear the blurb of that to set the book up for listeners uh the victorian chaise longue in this short eerie

novel by the author of little boy lost a young mother who is recovering from tuberculosis falls asleep on a victorian chaise longue and is ushered into a waking nightmare of death among strangers that's it there's a couple of review quotes but but that's it. Death Among Strangers. I thought that was really good. I mean, the epigraph that she uses, a line of T.S. Eliot. I think it's from T.S. Eliot's Song for Simeon. That's the one. The epigraph is, I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me. Setting up this idea of kind of Banquo's ghost,

this infinite regression of death that you have to face or encounter and how that is, again, as with the tower, a trap that you're suspended in. And what is it to be frozen or trapped in aspic and to yet still experience the world rather than be a kind of voyeur on it as with the tower the ending of this book is is not clearly determined it doesn't come up with a big rolled doll like kind of you know tied up with a bow sort of it's it's much cleverer i think when she's trying to explain she's thinking if i could only

explain to people about things about the future that i have seen they'll understand my predicament but it's like the words the words just sort of die on her lips don't they she's trying to talk about aeroplanes and she's trying to talk about gramophone records and penicillin, but she can't actually because she's in this strange indeterminate place between being one character who's called Melanie and another one who's called Millie. It's about as brilliant a presentation of that feeling that you sometimes get between sleep and waking where you're not quite sure where you are or who you are.

It's interesting that epigraph from Eliot, I think is very helpful, that idea, I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me. The sense that the thing she's suspended in, she's in a loop. Yeah. She's in a loop, but by extension, we're all in the same loop, that we're all about the same loop that we we we're all about to hand on the next thing to the next generation which and history will repeat itself

because history is a loop time is a loop i hope the listeners will forgive us because we're going to enter some pretty um metaphysical zones which was a 99 page book but before we do that let's hear a clip of lasky in 1983 talking as an author of ghost stories as you said ellie marganita lasky did several different things and she she was very well known in the 50s and 60s as a tv pundit and cultural critic. This is quite a late appearance, but this clip and the next one will give you a sense of what a pro she was. Does the ghost story have a valid place in literature as we know it? Everything has a valid place in literature,

if you can bring it off. It must chill you. It must send shivers down your spine. It must make you afraid to be alone. Do they still have the power to chill and to alarm us? I think they don't. I think what is coming up, and has been coming up for 60, 70 years, and really has the power to chill and alarm, is when real life slips, when there's some slippage in real life. In my own story, The Victorian Chaiselong, it was a piece of furniture that created the terror,

something that was there and real. Or the famous story by Shirley Jackson, the American story, The Lottery. That's terrifying, because though it's an imagined real life, it's real life. Or earlier still, John Buchan's story, The Watcher by the Threshold, where the perfectly ordinary man on an ordinary holiday in Scotland meets people who have somehow survived, terrifyingly, from another time, but a real time. I remember reading in the newspaper

of two old women who died in a provincial city. And when they died, people went into the house and they found chained in the attics the naked bearded son that one of them had born and hidden 60 years before. That's frightening. That's entertainment. She's wonderful, Lasky. She is, isn't she? I mean, she was Brains Trust and she did What's My Line?

And then she made a clear decision. She decided she didn't want to become a media personality. And we already said she was a really serious lexicographer. I mean, you know, a serious amateur lexicographer sending in sort of definitions. She'd read detective novels and she read Victorian store catalogues. You know, she's really interested in the reality, the words that people use in their real lives. It's really interesting.

Well, what about that thing she was talking about in that clip, Elia, the idea that you start with the object, the object remains the same, but you shift all the other furniture around so it becomes terrifying. And I think that's all the more frightening for a reader because it's not that some esoteric rune has been discovered or some kind of obscure geometry that has been patterned together that only one person has been able to scrape away the the soil um to uncover that it is something recognizable it is something um in the book it's something quite it's ghastly but in a kind of upholstery kind of uh damp and you you've seen one in your grandmother's attic and you you kind of don't like to be near it but you're you're not chilled to the to the to the bone, to have to encounter it. That sense of, you said, uncanniness before, of it being familiar but unfamiliar suddenly, becomes all the more

frightening because it is present. It is just out of your field of vision and inescapable for that reason, again, a trap. And it reminds me with that interview that in the introduction to the Persephone edition, an introduction by P.D. James, she writes, I had the pleasure of speaking to Marganita Lasky's daughter and granddaughter and was told an interesting story about the writing of the novel. Miss Lasky, in order to frighten the reader, needed to frighten herself and went away alone to a remote house the family owned in Somerset. There, without company, she was able to induce in herself

the fear which she so effectively evoked in her writing. I mean, that's a nice idea of a writing residence. Like, sorry, I have to leave all my responsibilities. I must go to be truly frightened. But I think you can see that, this sense of isolation, but within comfort, where that should be a support that should be a relaxation or recuperation a bit like the kind of sanatorium open spaces you're allowed to relax on your own terms um and yet that's not possible for the protagonist yeah i mean and it's

it's doubly sort of uh sinister because of course that's exactly what the Doctor is suggesting. Move on to the chaise longue because, you know, you can move out of the room and you can look out of the window and then, yeah, she dozes off. Are we saying novel, novella or short story? I don't know. Show your hands. I'm saying novel. I'll say novel. Yeah, that's novel. I'm going to say novel.

If So Long, See You Tomorrow is a novel and The JLK, A Month in a Country is a novel, I think it's a novel, isn't it? The thing I liked in the early part of the novel, which I came to think was part of the element of why the shift works so brilliantly, the element of why the shift works so brilliantly is the description of how Melanie and her husband come to buy the chaise longue in a self-consciously modish interaction

with a rather crap antiques dealer in North London. In Marylebone High Street. No, there's something that it's, how can something so naff be the source of such horror? It's part of the wonder of the book, isn't it? She plants it in quite shabby ground and then allows it to find its way out. And she even says, in terms of how Melanie, the protagonist,

comes across the chaise longue, on Saturday mornings dressed so they believed, like people who haggled not from pleasure but because they must, they would leave the car well away out of sight and wander up and down Chalk Farm Road. And you're like, these people are kind of grotesque and a little bit vulgar and annoying. And it's definitely not that our sympathies are with her

from the start and that we're invested in her wellbeing. Not that we want her to suffer, but we feel that she is, at the beginning, quite a one-dimensional character. Shallow. Shallow. And she doesn't seem intrepid she seems kind of willing to be fussed over and to be spoiled yeah spoiled the word sports the word

spoiled but but also as the book goes on you come to realize that her being spoiled is a different is is a just a different means to subjugate her right that when you meet whoever we meet in the second half of the novel and we can talk about that in a bit too it's oppression by different means more obvious means but we go back to the beginning of the book and we perhaps think well that character's agency is very used very contemporary term she doesn't have much more agency but she's more of a a conspirator in her own subjugation right i feel like she the the moment in the second half where she is able to say to a medical doctor like i know what i need to do you need to open the window you need to let me have a breath of fresh air and I might get better. I will get better in this body. That's what you need to do.

And that for me is the moment where she's kind of shushed and told, I know you think that. You really need to lie back down and maybe take this syrup. You just see how she's realising I've always been this fussed over, reclining, weak character. And I played a part in that. I was happy to have that role. And it's at that moment you realize that she needed to have broken out of that.

She needed to have assumed her responsibility and her ability to think for herself, to marshal her own power. And it's too late for her. Um, it's, it's ghastly and it makes me think, you know, um, some research about, about dictionaries and encyclopedias, the idea that at the time when she's in the 1890s in that body trapped there, um, she knows, as you say about penicillin about refrigerators about the atomic bomb um she knows how tv might best be recovered from terrible syntax there but um and uh it reminded me um there's an 1890s uh it's called the new encyclopedia um and it defines it has

the word malaria there and it defines it as being this distemper or this disease that tends to occur near swamps, near swampy, marshy ground. Mal area, bad air, it's the air around the swamp. You're so close, you're so close to seeing the connections there, but it's not knowledge yet. So of course it's not in the encyclopedias. there but it's not it's not knowledge yet so of course it's not in the encyclopedias um so this idea of being tethered to one's timeline and um having to be sequestered to that moment and the fact that that melanie here the protagonist is able to for whatever reason find this porous time and embodiment. She's a victim of that rather than able to say,

oh, tell you what, the national lottery numbers for that week and kind of sail away happily with all that poor knowledge. It's also that horror thing. It's interesting that Alan Garner chose the other story. It's something he does really well, which is that sense of that things happen. They have a way of repeating themselves that connect to objects. Anybody who's ever slept in an old house on an old bed is probably laying there at some point wondered, I wonder if anybody's died on this bed. I wonder, you know, the sense of kind of objects lasting longer than human beings. Well, Ellie, you were talking about marshes, and that is another eerie coincidence. If we listen now to Marganita Lasky, again from 1983, discussing a recently published novel.

Science fiction, which was so excellent 20 years ago, has rather got into the doldrums. There came up then already a story of fantasy, as it was told by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. We've lately had the semi-poet, semi-fiction writer Angela Carter. I'll say one other thing, though it may be a little rude. We're still living in a youth culture, and ghost stories are of special appeal, I think,

to young people, something to do with the heyday and the blood, something to do with the need for this particular grew-up-the-spine. Now, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, what did you think of it? I wished it were better. It's a difficult length to sustain a ghost story in a full novel. Even Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights had only one really ghostly chapter, and how superb that is. But to tell me that something is frightening isn't to frighten me. I think these days it has to start where we are, in the life we are, where in our sceptical times nothing is less likely. That, I think, is the thing.

Nothing must be less likely. If you go down to the fence, what do you expect? Marvellous. Well, history has judged otherwise, we should say, hasn't it? But I thought that was very, very interesting. And what she does, it appears to me, is she reads crime fiction, which she then finds phrases which she shares with the OED. I believe she made 25,000 submissions to the OED.

Quarter of a million. Quarter of a million. 250,000. 250,000, wow. But she also reviews batches of crime novels for the TLS while she's going on. So she's reading them, chucking them over her shoulder when she's finished them, filling out the cards,

sending those in and filing reviews. And I've got one of her reviews here of one of those crime novels for the TLS. And it's for a novel by Oswald Wind. And it's called Sumatra 7-0. We promised you Sumatra content. I'm safe again here it is and if you can hear as i read it in the in the voice that we just listened to oswald wind is among the really good thriller writers who take asia for their field he follows his last excellent walk Softly, Men Praying, set in Japan, with this one set unusually for these days in Burma, and a pretty horrible Burma at that.

The hero is an elderly Scottish baronet farmer, travelling at the request of our side back in London with an elderly, well-preserved, mundane English woman who is looking for her difficult daughter. modern English woman who is looking for her difficult daughter. There is also a baby, a cunning young CIA man, and several traitors to almost everything that is susceptible to treachery. What is more, and how refreshing, there is virtually no sex. To everyone but those who demand the last, this book will appeal for sustained interest and originality of invention brilliant that particular style of ruthless reviewing we we've somewhat lost i think she doesn't muck about this is what i think it's quite challenging

to hear somebody say about the woman in Black, I wished it had worked better. But that's how she felt. So that's what she said. She writes about fiction in the reading public by Queenie Leavis. What Mrs. Leavis and her magnificently austere fiction in the reading public entirely fail to realise is that the great tradition in fiction simply isn't big enough to satisfy the compulsive reader of fiction. It is the relative paucity of fiction as art, as compared with a plethora of art objects, good and bad in the

other disciplines, which inclines me to treat fiction as art as a happy accident rather than a desideratum. I think if you can just kind of deploy desideratum into a sentence and then just walk away. Perfect perfect do it again tossing it over the shoulder as she goes now one of the things about marganita lasky is in fact her fiction writing career doesn't last much over 10 years no she she writes six novels a short story short story between the ages of 30 and 40, between 1944 and 1955. And she lived a long and productive life. So in fact, the idea of her as a lost novelist is true, but it's also clearly a thing that she worked on intensively for quite a short period. Ellie, what are the hallmarks of the prose of the Victorian Ches Long? And how do they differ, do we think, from her other books?

I think what stands out for me in terms of the writing, as I say, I don't think it's the characterisation, because I think quite purposefully, a lot of the characters here are quite one-dimensional. I think, again, in the introduction by P.D. James, she describes the book as a one-act play. And I do feel that often some of the other characters, apart from the protagonist, are there as devices, they're there as foils rather than necessarily rounded. But I think that what she does with a kind of stream of consciousness, a scream of consciousness, that's telling, that where her experiences of having two lives bound up in one body, there's this moment towards the end where she's looking at her hands and she's not recognizing

them, but she's starting to recognize the life that could have made these hands possible. but she's starting to recognise the life that could have made these hands possible. And you kind of feel that even as she's messing up, whether her name is Melanie or Millie, and she's hearing people saying Mellie to her, and she's not sure who's being appealed to, which of her realities is being brought to the fore. Pronouns trip over themselves, experiences of what a body could be used for or has been used for, start to overlap and winch together. And this sense of an identity that is both fracturing, but being forced to be compiled and be justified, even in the act of dying, is very powerful and weird. The thing about Marganita Lasky's novels,

there are six of them, and they are called variously Love on the Supertax, then To Bed with Grand Music, which she published under a pseudonym because it's fairly racy, then Tory Heaven, Little Boy Lost, The Village, The Victorian Chaiselon. They're all it's so different from one another yeah they really are and you know none of us are experts but i mean it's very hard to recognize the author of the victorian chaise longue in little boy lost but they're

both wonderful books little boy lost Lost is a tremendous novel. It's interesting, isn't it? She writes some novels and then she stops writing novels and she starts to write books of psychological inquiry. She writes two books about ecstasy. The first one where she sent questionnaires to 60 of her friends and said, have you had any of these experiences? But you can see in Little Boy Lost, can't you,

that there's a philosophical question is, without giving the whole plot away, a man has been separated from his child through the war, and he goes back thinking that he will be reunited with the child, that the child has been found, that the mother was killed by the Gestapo, the child is... And you realise it's almost impossible. There's this amazing section, isn't there, John?

Yeah. This is my little bit of reading from Little Boy Lost. This description of the protagonist arriving in France after the war. France, which to our hero represents a cultural apex, has represented a place of gastronomy and philosophy. And he arrives on a train. She never knows the town. It's 50 miles from Paris.

At last, after half an hour's shunting and puffing through a landscape of slag heaps and bombed factories, the train had left Hillary on the platform and jerked slowly away. The station was on the very perimeter of the town. Carrying his bag, he walked away down the wide, shabby boulevard facing him. The town was clearly one of those that had been grossly damaged in the First World War and rebuilt with that haphazard disregard for appearance so characteristic of modern France. Now a second war had come to shatter the grimy ironwork facade of the garage, pit with bullet holes the walls of the gaudy

scarlet and yellow brick villa. Overhead the wires of the tram lines hung in tangled confusion and underfoot the tarmac was broken and potholed most people were presumably relaxing after lunch so the streets were almost empty well he's wrong his presumption is wrong as we find out and i think one of the things about this novel that really struck me is it's written four years earlier than Victorian Cheslong. It's in a totally different register. It draws on different properties of literature. The characterisation is actually fully rounded.

So if she wants to do that, she can do it. rounded if she so if she wants to do that she can do it and um the pathos without being sentimental is really brilliantly deployed everyone who reads this novel to the end never forgets the last couple of pages and she makes you makes you holds you right to the last couple of pages the the thing that connects it to shows long and indeed to the other book of hers that I read which is very very different which is a Tory heaven which is a satire but in all the books there's a sort of there's the familiar being

defamiliarised the France that he knew has gone and he finds himself in a France which is only superficially familiar and she's so good at objects and textures, as in the Victorian Shays Long. She's in a room that she describes,

and then the room has changed. Yes, so the landscape is familiar but wrong. How do we know what we feel? How do we know where we are? Do we even know that we're in the same body? How will I ever know that this child is even know that we're in the same body do we you know how will i ever know that this child is mine is the big question in the book how will he ever be able to tell that this child is his ellie can we hear um another bit from the victorian shows long please

sure um of the two bits should i do the one that starts with time had been blotted out? Is that the ecstasy one? Yes, yes it is. I tried to add ecstasy to my point. Yes. Okay, that's how far it goes. That's 11 on my scale. So this is, time had been blotted out while he listened to the lark. That was what her mind said in the desolation, and in the instant while the vicar stood waiting, she had recalled the story that ended with those words, the monk wandering out into the cloister garden to hear the lark, and returning to find that a hundred years had gone by. spring, she remembered. I was in ecstasy as I fell asleep, ecstasy one experiences perhaps once, twice, half a dozen times, when to be human is no longer a lonely terror but a glory, when time is blotted out by perfection. Ecstasy is timeless. Is that perhaps the clue, she said, is ecstasy existence in all time and none, and the return into time a random chance, one

moment in time's duration as likely as another? But prayer should be ecstasy, she thought, religious ecstasy. And she answered herself that this time she had failed to achieve ecstasy through religion, that the simulacrum of ecstasy she was trying to achieve while the vicar prayed, a total withdrawal into timeless selflessness, the transfiguration of the burden of self into its apotheosis, all this, though sincerely sought, had been feigned. So when prayer works, the magic is in the books. It is not in the words of the prayer. It is not even the prayer, but the ecstasy that is the instrument. It must be the ecstasy, for if it is the prayer or the

words of the prayer, then I have tried that magic and it would not restore the pattern, a useless magic, a magic that failed. I always suspected ecstasy, she said. I knew that it was evil. I said so to Guy. Well, not quite so surely as that, but I wondered, I asked him. It was the first time we slept together. No, not the first time, that was all wrong, she admitted, but the second time, remembering the shabby four-poster bed in the hotel in the Forest of Dean and afterwards it was like coming back to life from death and I said to Guy, it can't be right, we can't be meant to endure such bliss and he was nearly asleep and he laughed and he said I was a Puritan at heart and I asked him if religious people said it was all right to feel ecstasy through God and he said yes that was the only kind they thought

was right and then he went to sleep and outside it was a grey rainy dawn and I remembered that time when I was 16 and I was walking alone down South Audley Street and I went into the chapel there was no one else there and the the organ was playing. I sat down, and my mind became flooded with God, ecstatic with God, and that time too, coming back, was like coming back to life, exactly the same as when I lay with Guy, the ecstasy identical, whether from man or from God. It is the ecstasy that is to be feared, she said with shuddering assurance. It is separation and severance from reality and time, and it is not safe. The only thing that is safe is to feel only a little, hold tight to time, and never let anything sweep you away, as I have been swept, and perhaps that is how,

only how I can be swept back. She had not heard the steps coming up to the front door, but she heard the fall of the knocker and the bell clanging down in the basement. That will be Mr Charters, said the vicar. He had risen clumsily from his knees and was smiling down at her benignly. I told him to call for us here. Lizzie's feet were thumping up the stone stairs. The vicar was turning to the door. With desperate strength, Melanie caught at his coat and held him.

I can prove it to you, she cried. Only wait and listen to me. I can prove it to you, she cried. Only wait and listen to me. I can tell you what will happen in the future. Machines and horseless carriages and wonderful materials. If only the words would come out right, the words that should say refrigerator and plastics and atom bomb. If only you will listen, I can prove it to you, she entreated. For if only he would understand and believe then surely then the prayer would be efficacious but he only said absently not even turning to look at her

you've been reading old mother Shipton I see and with an expectant smile he cocked his head towards the door listening to Lizzie's footsteps along the hall that were joined by Adelaide's coming now Melanie strained to listen to coming not up or down the stairs but from the bedroom behind the communicating doors.

It's so chewy. Oh, yeah. It's great to read. That momentum develops. You reminded me that there are sections of the book which work, like we say, as melodrama and sections which work as almost kind of pure philosophy. How can I extrapolate from the situation into which I've put my protagonist

into something more cosmic? And it shows the mind kind of having to ricochet from memory to assertion to tentative kind of horror to action, and she's just trapped again. Yeah. So I'd like to say a bit about her contribution to the OED, which we talked about earlier. This is really what she spent much of the later part of her life doing, as we said, submitted a total of around 250,000 quotations to the OED,

where, Ellie, she would find a particular, I mean, the Liars Dictionary is built around a similar faithful and fictional process, in that case, of locating uses of words in particular quotes and submitting them to the dictionary. But also, I think backlisted listeners will appreciate how she did this because it was fundamentally about reading. In order to flood the OED with such an abundant accumulation of linguistic booty, I'm reading here from a a memoir of her contribution. Birchfield tells us she dredged numerous bulky Edwardian sales catalogues for the names of domestic articles. She read much of the crime fiction published in the 20th century and reviewed it for the TLS, and she scoured the whole rich literary world of the 20th century and some older books and magazines for their unregistered vocabulary. Elsewhere, he specifies 19th century

works such as the novels of Charlotte Young and Dickens as her special hunting ground, along with the letters of George Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell, the general field of the domestic arts, old catalogues, books on gardening, cooking, embroidery, etc., and various modern newspapers and journals. and journals. Lasky herself mentions George Bernard Shaw, Beerbohm, Hemingway, McNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Ogden Nash, John Osborne, Dorothy Wordsworth journals, and George Manley Hopkins prose as sources she read in their entirety for the dictionary. One of her special enthusiasms was the writing of Charlotte Young. As a result, this novelist's representation in the OED rose sharply between the first and second editions. And that's really interesting.

You were talking earlier about how in order to present to their users the appearance of objective authority. Dictionaries are reliant on the contributions of thousands of quirky individuals. Right. I mean, there's a brilliant book, I'm sure you've read it, by Simon Winchester about one particular correspondent who sent in... The surgeon of Crowthorne.

That's right, he sent in words from Bedlam. And I think that that links to my mind very well with the themes and the motifs of the Victorin's Chaison, in part because what we're seeing there is Lasky ensuring that the language being used as a resource is a living language, is one that is coming from Vogue catalogues, it's coming from detective novels as much as it's coming from the 19th century, that she's reading voraciously and ensuring that the words and their definitions are coming from all of these different usages and pointages, rather than a strict, narrow canon that is only kind of used in a cloistered, scholastic kind of way. And it's very pleasing to know that not only is her relationship with the dictionary dictated by how much she was able to offer to it

and allow that anthill to grow in such a way, but she's also then become the source of texts that have been submitted as examples of usages and one of them um is from tory heaven uh 1948 uh it's used an example of the word women's so the women's colleges at oxford became reserved for bees this idea of um the society and the satire being kind of sequestered into A, Bs and Cs. It's nice to know that her work is also being plumbed and enjoyed as a resource for the OED.

Can I ask you before we wrap up? I felt there was a real – I read the Victorian Shows about four or five years ago, so I was coming back to it, and I feel I got a lot more out of it reading it a second time. I can imagine reading it again. Did it speak to you here in 2020, for better or worse? I mean, being stuck in a room and considering the confines of a room. Yeah, yeah, it does.

It also, you know, my wife, Mel Stevens, is currently pregnant. And the idea of how long through time women and rearing children, but also being with child, was a trap. It's certainly reading that put a new spin on the narrative for me in 2020. It's a lockdown novel. It's a locked-in novel, isn't it? It's one of the best novels of its kind I've ever read, I think. Like Andy, I will definitely reread it. If you're interested in how time leaks and consciousness leaks and our sense of self is not firm, it's so odd because her prose is so

precise and so neat and so beautifully expressed. She's not somebody who goes on for sort of Laurentian kind of tone poems. And yet somehow she manages to capture that sense of mounting ontological fear that we might not know who we are. It's a brilliant short book. It's a great choice. I felt it had a lot in common with the Magic Mountain. Ah, yes, good evening. The time has come for us to leave you to ponder the mystery. Huge thanks to Ellie for shining light into the dark corners of the sick room, to Nikki for connecting our past and present so seamlessly,

and to Unbound for the barley water. For the syrup. You can download all, I think it's more than this, John, isn't it? You can download dozens of these things. You can download all 127, eight, nine episodes of Backlisted, plus follow links, clips clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at backlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter or Facebook.

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And also we have, as always, a list of our latest lot listeners who, again, thank you for your generosity in making it happen. So I'll kick off. Thank you to Brendan Chisholm, to Sarah Wiss, to Michelle Waters, to Sarah Morgan, to Ashley Harrison, to Jane Downey, to Ronan Hessian, wonderful writer, to Ben Metcalf, to Charlotte Thorne, to Paul Isaacs, to Robert Shearman. Never heard of him. Thanks, Robert. To Elizabeth Irvine and to Alex Watts.

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Simon Haynes. Bernard Quatermoose. His or her real name, I have no doubt. John Brown. Timothy Natman. Tony Dempsey. Anthony Dugan. Anne Ristick. Stephen Booth. And Richard Sully. out john brown timothy natman tony dempsey anthony dugan and ristic steven booth and richard sully thank you all uh were you to sign up listeners to our patreon which remember is how we fund making

backlisted we are having a backlisted christmas drinks on de December the 21st to which everyone's invited in the fashionable 2020 manner. That's to say it'll be a webinar. Bring your own drinks, but we're really looking forward to it. It's going to be an actual episode of lot listed that we're recording, but you'll be able to see us do it. You'll be able to ask us questions and set,

ask us questions and also set questions in a quiz, which all of which John Mitchinson will answer and none of which I will be able to ask us questions and also set questions in a quiz, all of which John Mitchinson will answer and none of which I will be able to. So if you want to humiliate me, now's your chance. Marvellous. And thank you to Ellie and obviously to the people of Sumatra. Ellie, thank you so much and all your Sumatran friends. Oh, thanks for having me. It's been mentioned that apparently the Tamil,

which is one of the languages spoken in Sumatra, the Tamil for rat is Ellie. So there's another connection. They keep on coming. Brilliant. Thank you for having me. The Liars Dictionary is available in paper form, e-form, audio form. Any other forms yet?

Ecstatic form. It is ecstatic. It is a totally brilliant book. It's a wonderful book. Thank you. We'll be back in a fortnight. You can choose to listen to Backlisted with or without adverts.

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