Backlisted - Ulverton by Adam Thorpe

Episode Date: September 17, 2018

For a special episode recorded at the End of the Road festival in Dorset, John and Andy are joined by author and critic Tom Cox to talk about Adam Thorpe's 1992 debut novel Ulverton. Other books discussed include Sally Rooney's new novel Normal People and Mott the Hoople singer Ian Hunter's recently reissued Diary of a Rock'n'Roll Star. Further details can be found via our website at backlisted.fm.* 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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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Hello, everyone. Andy here. Thanks for tuning in to this special episode of Backlisted, which was recorded a couple of weeks ago at the End of the Road Festival in Dorset.

We had a fantastic time at the festival, and this episode is about a book that we love, Alberton by Adam Thorpe. We had a terrific guest, Tom festival, and this episode is about a book that we love, Alberton by Adam Thorpe. We had a terrific guest, Tom Cox, a really great audience, and we had a brilliant time. The only thing that slightly went wrong is we had a few gremlins in the recording.

So when you listen to this, it probably doesn't achieve our normal high standards of fidelity. But on the other hand, it's quite a rock and roll venue and there's some rock and roll in this episode, so maybe you could think of this as like volume one of the Bat-listed bootleg series. So we hope it doesn't affect your ears too badly. For those of you who weren't at the live recording

at the End of the Road Festival, you'll have missed out on the most remarkable pair of trousers I think i've seen for a long time that tom cox was wearing they were they were flared quite heavily flared and were made out of some strange yellow and gray embroidered fabric um very very stylish which is really just a way of introducing you of course to the uh our esteemedoke, also renowned for their stylish, well-cut trousers. Spoke are a smart online menswear company. They design men's trousers and now shorts and polo shirts as well with a difference. They fit you rather than the other way around. In fact, with their online fit finder, you just enter a few simple details and under a

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Just use the code BACKLISTED20. Terms and conditions apply. Now, join us on a new life to old books. You find us today at the end of the road festival on the high chalk downs of Dorset, warming ourselves in the fading embers of a long hot summer. My name is John Mitchinson. I'm founder of Unbound, the website where readers get to fund the books they really want to read. My name's Andy Miller.

I am the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Does anybody know what that special area-specific piece of theme music was? Any rock critics in this audience? I can see at least three of you from where I'm sitting. What was that piece of music? Does anybody know? Tell us, Andy.

It was called Avebury, The Arranged Marriage of Heaven and Earth by Queen Elizabeth, a.k.a. local hero Julian Cope. And that is a half-hour extract from Avery, The Arranged Marriage of Heaven and Earth. If you see me later, we can take some psychotropic drugs and listen to the rest.

We are very pleased to be here at End of the Road. We're joined by Tom Cox, everybody. And has everybody been having a good time at the festival? Did anybody see Billy Childish yesterday? So I had a conversation with my son who's here. All right. He's already looking cross at me from over there. I said, I want you to come and see Billy Childish and you've got to stay for the whole thing. And he went, oh, I've listened to the records.

Can't I listen to one song? And I went, no, you've got to stay to the end. And he did stay to the end. And did you think it was all right? Yeah. It was brilliant. Did everyone see it? It was fantastic, wasn't it?

Have you seen anything good while you've been here, John? I have. I've seen the OCs last night. I thought they were very good. I'm just a sucker for two drum kits. It was brilliant. Very loud. Very fast.

Very weird kind of guitar style that the guitarist has. What was he called? Nick Thingy from Level 42. Mark King. Mark King, that's right. Not a good look, but he rocked it out. He styled it out. I could watch two drummers play.

I don't know what it is about two. It's just sort of something about them being synchronised. And that's a very, very loud sound. As you say, American drummers hit the bloody... The skin's hard, man. Tom? Well, I live in 1969 to 71, musically, but I'm surprising myself by finding some new things here

that I've really liked. Piss, Golden Messenger were great, and Josh T Pearson, who's got very dark songs but tells great jokes between songs. Yeah, they were both great. I just want to say a bit about Tom. Tom is a critic and author who's written about nature, music, folklore, golf and cats.

His most recent book, 21st Century Yokel, might be described as not quite a combination of all of the above. I think that's, yeah, that's about right. Yeah, no golf in it, though. Yeah, now I'm really interested with your books Tom because your first book was about golf wasn't it and then about 10 years later you wrote another book about golf and now apparently you're working on another you're like a salmon returning upstream to spawn at a clubhouse yeah and each time I come back I hate golf a little bit more that's that's

what happens the the new one um which is already four years late, it's kind of like a golf book for people who dislike golf intensely. And I sort of don't play anymore. I'm still officially a pro, ridiculously. I'm like Britain's worst golf pro. I'm not allowed to play amateur golf. But I just... Who enforces that?

I don't think anyone's going to come along and check, but if I were to join a club again, which I won't... You're going to stand out on the golf course, let's be honest. I do. It's that guy in loom pants out there. Yeah, people can't see this on the podcast, can they? I'm wearing patterned cord flares and um a straw hat that i bought from a car boot sale in lincolnshire in 2009 for three quid and i'm hanging on to despite the fact that it's a bit

moth-eaten the weird coincidence is that's exactly what as byatt wore when she came on you you've written about golf though though, Andy, haven't you? Well, hang on. Hold on, John Mitchinson. I've written about miniature golf, and that is not the same thing. Do you know that Andy represented the UK at miniature golf? His first book, brilliant, very funny book called Tilting at Windmills. If you haven't read it, about a man who hates sport, tries to make peace with sport and fails,

but succeeds in making an entertaining journey, I think. I was fortunate enough to represent the UK at the European Miniature Golf Championships in Riga, Latvia in 2000. I had to march... No, why are you laughing? I think you know why are you laughing? I had to... I think you know why we're laughing. I had to march through the middle of Riga in the team kit, the UK kit.

No, shut up! Right? In the team kit behind teams from all over Europe. And, like, there were two teams from Germany and a team from Switzerland and they brought our coach and uh uh they kept the balls in temperature controlled uh attack this is all true temperature controlled attache cases and uh uh the first round that I played I went around 18 holes in like 38 that's pretty amazing yeah the guy I went around with went round 18 holes in like 38.

That's pretty amazing. Yeah, the guy I went round with went round in 20. And when he took three at the last hole, he fell to his knees and wept. It's true. That's how tense it was. And a man from the Baltic Times came to interview me as this useless

idiotic Brit who'd qualified to take part by paying his own airfare. And when the article appeared the following day, it referred to me as the Eddie the Eagle of miniature golf. And here I am doing a literary podcast. I was going to say, all the Adam Thorpe fans are pressing fast forward.

Sorry, Adam Thorpe fans. Andy, what have you been reading? I have been reading a book called The Diary of a Rock and Roll Star by Ian Hunter. Wow, not normally you hold up a book and it gets a round of applause. It is fantastic do you know who Ian Hunter is okay so for anyone who doesn't know Ian Hunter was the singer of the group Mott the Hoople Mott the Hoople in the early 70s were on the verge of splitting up and then their new manager Tony De V said, I've got another of my clients who's got a song for you. It's called All the Young Dudes, and his name's David,

and he'd be willing to produce it for you. So they record David Bowie's All the Young Dudes. They had a massive hit with it. And so they're sent on tour to the States at the end of 1972 to capitalise on their hit single. And Ian kept a diary while he was out there. When this book was republished in the 90s, Q Magazine said, this may well be the best rock book ever.

And maybe it is because it has this thing, certainly revisiting it now here in the 21st century there's some bad behavior and there's some amazing gigs but mostly there's just an awful lot of hanging around in airports and hotel rooms and like they amuse themselves by going out to porn shops to buy cheap guitars that they can then ship back to the UK, sell at a massive profit and live on those proceeds. Right. So it's a brilliant mixture. It's very funny. It's kind of boring, but sort of glamorous at the same time. But it's also it's like it's from another era completely now, 1972 to here. He starts the book by saying,

well, I'm writing this diary. I don't know where it's going to appear. I know what would be good. I'm going to write a lot about being on a plane because I know lots of you read this, but we'll never get the chance to go on one. So I really love this. Tom, you were saying you I thought you might have read this book. You haven't as a former rocker. Yeah. The thing is, I'm as nuts as I am love this. Tom, you were saying you, I thought you might have read this book. You haven't as a former rock critic. Yeah, the thing is, I'm as nuts as I am about music. I have a bit of an allergy to music books and I've only really enjoyed a few. That is one that I actually fancied. And weirdly, although I say that, I'm listening to Keith Richards' autobiography at the moment

and actually really, really enjoying it on audiobook. It's a bit weird because Johnny Depp reads like the first sort of quarter of it and then kind of gives up. And then some other guy takes over. I've forgotten his name, but he's like and he's doing a Keith Richards impression, like like an impression of Keith Richards drunk as well. Right. It's quite odd, but it's really good, particularly the bit where um

he um he's talking about when they actually had no money and they were just playing blues and brian jones had elected himself the leader of the band and the excitement really comes through it it's made me go back to sort of early stones and listen to them with with whole new ears even though like my favorite era like a lot of people, is sort of 68 to XL and Main Street with the Stones. It's sort of made me love early Stones more. I love Mott the Hoople anyway, and I've got a very special place in my heart for Mott the Hoople.

Does anyone know the song Saturday Gigs by Mott the Hoople? Saturday Gigs is the last Mott the Hoople single. And there's stuff in the book where Ian sort of says, God, this business is, and I'll read a bit in a minute. He says, the business is terrible, but what makes it work is when you have one of those gigs. And he says, like, I always remember this gig we had in Croydon. Now I come from Croydon.

I'm very, I'm militantly pro-Croydon. As regular listeners to the podcast know, but there's a beautiful emotional line in Saturday Gigs where he goes, in 72, we were born to lose. We slipped down snakes into yesterday's news. I was ready to quit. But then we went to Croydon!

I did it! It's every podcast, isn't it? It's either Bruckner or Croydon if I could hey hang on Anita Brookner's coming up in about five minutes I'm gonna do the double here at a rock festival Anita Brookner and Croydon so this is a bit from Diary of a Rock and Roll Star by Ian Hunter they've just met David Bowie David Bowie's playing the same venue they're playing in the following night. He's just popped up. This is 1972, remember? So David Bowie's been a star for about a year at this point. David looks tired, but great. And he looks like he's not been eating again.

He's the only star I know who regularly suffers from malnutrition. The charming, disarming urchin from Brixton who never misses a move or a point. Innocence, cruelty, the nearness yet the distance, all the qualities of the star he is. Only he knows what he pays for this coveted title. Back to the hotel and David, although knackered from his trip, troops down to the local all-night hamburger cafe with our lot. Tony puts Al Jolson on the jukebox. We talk of tours, the eternal problem of Ziggy being Ziggy and Mott being Mott. Anybody who thinks musicians work barely an hour a day is a mug. I've worked 16 hours a day for Mott since Mott's creation. So have Mick, Pete, Buff and Fallie. Mott's been our lives. Our love life

centres around it. Inconveniences and long separations are demanded by it. A day can be ruined by a 10-minute interview or photo session and 100% cooperation is required at all times. Attitude is a big word if you really want to make it. In a group, you're a diplomat, nurse, word if you really want to make it. In a group, you're a diplomat, nurse, confidant, taxi driver, labourer, electrician, tailor, designer, and a few other things I can't mention. Before you even get on stage. It may look flashy, but it's over and you're finished before you know it. If you aren't already broken by one thing, it will be another. They come and they go, is the old saying, and you see it. Eyes. Record companies' eyes. Promoters' eyes. Agents' eyes. Media eyes. They are all watching for that slightest slip, which will get around like wildfire. If this

sounds like self-pity, it's not meant to. You have to be realistic, and the rock business is a dirty business. Full stop. So, yeah, right? So that's Ian Hunter, Diary of a Rock and Roll Star. That's just been reissued by Omnibus. It's the first time it's been in print for about 15 years, so go out and buy that. It's a wonderful book.

John, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading Normal People by Sally Rooney, which is on the Book Along list. Conversations with Friends, her debut novel, was published last year, which got massive coverage,

books of the year choices from loads of different people. So there's a certain amount of pressure on the difficult second novel. But I have to say, I haven't read Conversations with Friends, but I think Normal People is an amazing book. I was prepared to be sceptical because I had a lot of people say to me, kind of Emperor's New Clothes, a bit middle-brow, nothing really happens. The story is very simple.

It's two characters, Connell and Marianne, who live in a small town in County Sligo in Ireland. Connell's mum cleans for the rather richer, more middle-class family that Marianne, her mother anyway, her father's dead. And it's basically a teenage relationship that goes through into university. They both are star students. They both end up getting scholarships at Trinity College Dublin. They fall in and out of a relationship to begin with. Connell doesn't really want to admit he's having a relationship with Marianne at school for all kinds of reasons. They both see other people, but without giving the ending away.

So, you know, this is not a massive plot driven novel. What it is, is as immaculately, I think, precise a book as I've read about two young people and their relationship. It's a relationship that's taking place with Facebook, with both of them, I think, various levels of incipient mental illness and depression. It's very contemporary. The people who don't like it, I can't really see what they're objecting to. It's so carefully done. And the ending, you wonder how she's going to get out of this, this to-ing and fro-ing, this pendulum. Suffice to say, she does it wonderfully. The fuss that's being made about Sally Rooney, I think, is probably justified. I can't imagine.

You'd have to be a very odd kind of reader not to be involved in these characters. It isn't showy. It isn't, you know, she's not trying to imitate Beckett or Joyce or Virginia Woolf. She's telling a story, but she does it with, as I say, with a delicacy and an honesty that is, I think, is still amazingly very rare in fiction. I read this as well last month. I really, really love this book. How many people here have read Conversations With Friends? Yeah, quite a lot.

I would say about 5%, 10% maybe of the people here. So I think the thing with Normal People by Sally Rooney is, first of all, Sally Rooney is 27. So this is her second novel. She's 27. She's Irish. The backdrop of it, in part, is about the financial crisis in Ireland. Yeah.

Which, as John says, because it seems to be a novel about relationships, actually you could be forgiven for not realising that there's all sorts of other interesting things going on. And partly it's a kind of socio-economic investigation of what financial conditions did to the young people of Ireland in the period that we're talking about. other thing is as John says I saw one esteemed middle-aged male critic refer to this novel as middlebrow yeah right now middlebrow as is a thing that middle-aged male critics say about young female writers.

Here it comes. Alex Preston, our former guest, when he read Conversation With Friends, said to me, it really reminded me of Anita Bruckner. I think you'll like it, Andy, because it's like Anita Bruckner. And, of course, Anita Bruckner, that's the thing people used to say about Anita Bruckner. She was middlebrow, right?

People said it about Jane Austen. It's a really, really good documentary about, right? And just a few weeks ago... People said it about Jane Austen. It's a really, really good documentary about Angela Carter on BBC Two a few weeks ago. I don't know if anybody saw that. On that, the novelist Jeanette Winterson had a go at Anita Bruckner for winning the Booker Prize 35 years after Anita Bruckner won the Booker Prize. You know, there's a certain intellectual mistrust

of things that are not, to quote a brilliant phrase, dutifully literary. And Sally Rooney's prose is the sort of prose that does not draw attention to itself. And in that lies the excellence of it. I would expect in a year's time when we all get together again, that many of you will have all read Normal People because I think it's going to be huge and we'll all have a nice chat about it in a year's time. I'll read you a very short bit. It gives you just a bit of flavour. Also, it works for this podcast, I think.

This is Conall. Conall goes to Trinity College Dublin and feels out of place because he feels that he is surrounded by a lot of people who have got a lot more money than him and he is, although he's cleverer than most of them, he doesn't fit in. He knows that a lot of people who've got a lot more money than him and he is although he's cleverer than most of them he doesn't fit in he knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured when someone mentioned the austerity process that night in the stag's head Sadie threw her hands up and said not politics please Connell's initial assessment of the reading was not disproven he's's been to see a reader. He basically goes to a reading and is not very impressed. Sort of can't really see the point of why somebody would

want to listen to a writer, although he's writing his own stories. Connell's initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance. Literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they like to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person and even his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything.

Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he'd been making for a new story and he felt the old beat of pleasure inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy, despite everything. It's not often you get to have Ian Hunter and Sally Rooney sharing the bill, but that was great.

And the more ludicrous segue you could not have going on to this, to Olverton, which we should now really talk about. So Olverton by Adam Thorpe. This novel was published in 1992. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about what the book is about if you haven't read it. But first, I would like to ask Tom. Tom, where did you first encounter the book? Well, actually, my dad recommended it to me. It's one of his favourites. But I had

several runs at it. And what I do, so the first time that I tried to read it, my car had broken down in Norfolk. And I pulled it into a gate gap. And I sat in a field and I read the first chapter and it blew my mind. and I immediately knew that I was going to love this book but for some reason I didn't get into the rest for like it was years later I just reread the opening chapter the opening chapter is perfect it's about the kind of witchy legend that runs through the background of all the stories in this book, because they are stories. It's sort of a collection of short stories as well as a novel. But actually, there's a weird thing. So I was telling this story about breaking down in this field to my friend Becky, and whilst recommending Overton to her. And then a bit later, she said something

which made me realise she thought I meant I'd had a nervous breakdown in a field. Not that my car had broken down. And I corrected her on this. But I realised, like, if I hadn't have corrected her, that could have run and run. And lots of people, that could have run and run and lots of people that could have been gossip people could have and become part of history my nervous breakdown in a field

in Norfolk and in a way that's sort of relevant to the book because I think there's lots of um the stories in the book it's there's quite a bit of folklore in the book I suppose about this this village that it's about and the story about the witch slightly changes over the years, even though it's sort of in the background of stories about lots of other things. So I eventually properly read it. I went beyond this first chapter that I'd read so many times in about, I think it was about 12 or 13 years ago. And it was just amazing. And I'm still finding more more in it it's got so

many layers like Adam Thorpe I think he said that he had the idea when he was walking in Berkshire because it's set in West Berkshire and that the the story was coming up to him through the soil he felt and that's sort of what what I feel the book is like. There's so many layers. And I reckon I could read it like another seven times and just find new bits in it. The novel takes the form of, if it is a novel, and I think it is a novel, as you say, it's like a collection of stories or excerpts from a timeline. It's about a place called Alberverton, the village of Ulverton and the area around Ulverton. And it starts in 1650 and ends 12 chapters later in 1988. And each chapter is narrated by a different person or persons.

And we hop forward in time 30 years with every chapter. we hop forward in time 30 years with every chapter. So the novel isn't held together like a story in the traditional sense because the humans, the human characters are not the protagonists. The landscape and the village is the protagonist of the novel. We'll be back in just a sec. Now, in a sense, I think, John, this is something that's probably we're more familiar with now after 20 years of the great nature writing boom yeah than we were in 1992 when this book came out

I mean it's it's amazing to think I I read this book in uh 1992 when it came out read it in proof got sent it by the editor Robert Robinson in fact I was going to bring my proof along. I found a memo from Robin Robinson, who incidentally is on this year's book-along list as well for a first novel that he's written. But amazing editor. He was at SECA at the time. And it's a note to all reps saying, you know, we've got a quote from John Bandel,

which gave me a real jolt because that's how you used to communicate in those days. You'd write a memo and it would be photocopied and sent to people. I mean, you know, it's pre-email. So that was one thing. Well, sort of early email anyway. I mean, I remember reading it and feeling that this was a book that was doing something that hadn't happened in English fiction for a long time.

And I think it's had an influence on a whole generation of writers. I certainly think it was published before influence on a whole generation of writers. I certainly think it was published before W.G. Sebald had written, which is, again, another kind of a fiction, doesn't feel like a fiction. In some ways, it's looking backwards to the great modernist kind of masterpieces of Joyce. In other ways, it's coming out of found documents, local histories, diaries.

You could see it almost as 12 essays in different styles. I like to think of it as a... If you were a ham radio operator in this little place, Ulverton, on the Berkshire Downs, you're tuning into broadcasts from the past. It's almost like it's that kind of the quality. We'll read a bit from various bits of the book. And it gives you the full range of the social history of one small place in England.

You know, you can't not think about that and think about, as I say, on one hand, T.S. Eliot, but also just kind of those rural novels of writers like Mary Webb. It's an amazing book. My particular connection to it was I was so blown away with it. I was that year judged for the Best of Young British Novelists and the two other judges, well, Bill Buford from Granter, but it was Salman Rushdie and Tony Abayat.

And I still wake up at night sweating about the fact that I didn't manage to persuade them that this book was better than any of the other books that I'd read, really for all my time as a bookseller, it was that important. But Samuel Ritchie hated it, said that the pasture was a dead, no worse than that, actually. He said it was a moribund irrelevant form and I think about it now that that one comment of his has literally been the motivation for my whole life since I forgot I'd forgotten in I'd forgotten in this book and I didn't even know this but those of you who followed the podcast at all know I'm obsessed with shepherds and shepherds memoirs

but Adam Thorpe says in this book that's what he was doing he was he was reading shepherds memoirs and it was and I'd forgotten so much. I mean, I feel slightly emotional because so much of what I still feel fiction can do and doesn't do enough of is contained in this book. So I'm not going to give you a balanced lit crit evaluation of it. Like I say, I feel rather like the book we talked about. This book and Ridley Walker, I feel like bits of my soul, like a horc feel rather like the book we talked this book and ridley walker i feel like bits of my soul have like a horcrux for the harry potter fans you know as thomas said you keep go

back to it i haven't read it for 26 years and it's an even better book than i remember i i read this when it came out in 1992 we made it wall stone's book of the month um we did so although i failed to get him onto the promotion, which Adam was absolutely... I mean, I got to know him as a result of failing to get him into the promotion. And there were other writers that really didn't deserve to be on there anywhere near as much as him. I don't think he did that well at Waterstones overall.

Because I read a thing that he was booked to talk in Leeds at Waterstones and only one person turned up when it came out. So the event was cancelled. It's just shocking now. It's a shit business. It's Ian Hunter. It's Ian Hunter all over again. Then he went and tried to get a guitar from a pawn shop.

It reminds me of that great Richard Ford story where he was in his first signing session for a piece of my heart and he's in New York and there's a big pile of shining hardbacks and he's there for two hours. Nobody comes up to the table. And right at the end, a guy comes heart and he's in New York and there's a big pile of shining hardbacks and he's there for two hours nobody comes up to the table and right at the end a guy comes up and he said excuse me sir he said are you Richard Ford and he said yes I am he said that's my name too and then walked away without buying a book so so I read I remember reading this in 1992 i really loved it in 1992 but in 1992 i was like 24

or 25 and as you know john i i believe there's not really any point reading anything before you're 40 yeah so as it turned out uh i liked it in 1992 but i but i came back so I read it for this because Tom had chosen it and I just it I I I'm wary of pressing down on the accelerator for the hyperbole but this is a masterpiece I mean I thought it was good then but coming back to it now as I hope someone who's a more attentive reader than I was then I felt it was sort of you can't really get to the bottom of this book. It's so rich in how it's woven together. And the way, because it can't use character to pull you through the novel, he has to use all these different strategies of imagery,

tactics of imagery and landscape. imagery, tactics of imagery and landscape. And there's a tremendous amount of entertaining, defecating and fornication in this book as a way of pointing out that human beings change and they don't change. You know, as we read, as we meet those characters again at 30 year intervals. Yeah. One of my favourite chapters, stroke stories is it's called improvements and it Improvements and it's from 1712. It's the third one and it's kind of,

it's possibly the most sort of bawdy, but it's a guy, it's a farmer who's got 60 acres who's talking about all his new methods of husbandry in quite kind of nerdy terms, whilst also talking about his wife's mental breakdown, which ends in her suicide, and his affair, him carrying on with the maid at the same time. And he drops those things in.

And his wife's going crazy and sort of carrying this corn dolly around all the time. It's almost a bit folk horror at the same time. I've got a little excerpt to read here from that. This is just in his voice. And it's almost like, you know, it's almost a cliche now in nature books where you have a year, don't you? You have sort of someone going through the seasons. That's the structure of the book. And that's what this is. It's like a darker version of what you might get in a modern nature book. Being in the town this day, I viewed the new corn exchange, which is exceeding large and pretty and built after the manner of a Roman temple.

I did good business with a corn merchant from Salisbury and got a price for a winnowing machine, which I must consider, and bought two barley hummelers of improved design. I avoided the new toll gate by crossing a pasture, which amused my servant greatly. Returning through Ulverdon, the name of the village changes in this, which is interesting as well. Returning through Ulverdon, I met Mr Webb, the wainwright, who was cutting a mortise into the nave of my new wheel and who stated he would dish the wheel, it being large enough at little extra cost. He demonstrated to me his new brus, this being a chisel of the shape of a V for the mortise corners and much neater in action than his previous tool. It is of much concern to him that a man died owing to the splitting of a wheel he had made and fears for his reputation. I told him that I thought it more my doing than his because I did

not cover the wagon through storms of December and that the frostiness and dryness of the later winter was all to blame. At the bridge over the river, a vagrant with a mongrel begged for harvest work, but he had no passport. On stating that passports, certificates and such like were not required for harvest work, he placed me at a disadvantage as a Christian man. I had to resort to the truth, which was that I did not approve of his face. This being sharpish and of a gingery stubble cut through by a white scar. He cursed me then and there, which was discomforting as his curse was that of the magic arts and spoke of progeny to be blasted, et cetera, et cetera. My servant and a passing neighbour, Mr Hobbs, threw the man into the river.

And Mr Hobbs went to tell the warden that the justice might be informed of a needed removal. Oh, that's great. I think that just shows... Adam Thorpe must have been reading so many oral histories and kind of farming memoirs. Very good. So, John, some of this book is written in quite an intense, like almost like a street.

There is one chapter in particular, which is a... Folk rat. Yeah. A stream of consciousness, which you said full of piss and vinegar earlier. You said you were going to... This may not work, but I'll give it a go. I live in a small village and I have lived there for 20 22 years and when I arrived in the village there were three men Jack Bobbo and Edgar who had all

worked on the land one of them was shepherd one was a stonemason and the other generally did whatever was asked of them and they had the most incredible thick accents and they told the most incredible stories some of the stories not really fit for, not broadcastable. And this is from chapter nine. Yeah. Stitches, which is set in 1887. This is Jonas Perry, who is a ploughman and he is walking his plough across the land with the young son of a well-to-do family. The son has been sent off to Eton as a young boy and he's come back and he obviously adores Jonas and he adores Jonas's stories. Adam Thorpe said he wrote this with Molly Bloom's soliloquy The End of Ulysses in mind. It's a kind of dirty English rural version of that. So forgive me if I don't get it right.

Boy remembers it just like it were yesterday. Thy face clamped tight with these here blackberries at first this time, boy. I'll never be black and right for thee this year now. Oof, flatulence. Mr Perry, thy ma'am says, flatulence? And summit with your fancy name and a gastrix, Mr Perry thy ma'am says flatulence and summit with a fancy name of the gastrics Mr Perry I says edge fruit fruit be Adam's meat she says blowflies weren't in God's garden for one Mr Perry for two

I says where they be shit there be blowflies Mrs Holland why she were wonderful miffy at that and I lost my bit of garden on an account of. But you aren't eating out where it come out. Some place in the old Adamate of every darn tree in the garden it do say we out a drop of Diniford's bloody magnesia in sight. I says, he done his shits, he done his proper shits. Oh, well do I remember as the chock full of sweetness, Master Daniel. Dang, a lot of them bloody buggering held it do, catching a throat like a rag in a teapot

Blind leading the blind, thy mam would call it I says, opt ye ain't that bad, Mrs. Holland? Poaching eyes, she's poaching eyes As I'd watch her as she passed In her best pink toggery years back Now, just before she was wedded to that To your dad, Mr. Holland Oh, lovely and jimp

Aye, jimp and fresh and lovely a-holding onto her bonnet and that old gig as it pass out by as ain't worth a breast fardent to she. Nope, yet one time a-broadcasting barley seed like the sight of she rattling past to out church, stuck out dead and sending my hands all a-shake like so as I couldn't get my hands in and out of that seat lit proper

for a bit of them come growing time. Jonas, old man bar says, what be that rumpling crop atop a white sheep whore? Did stumble over flint when seeding, or be's he getting too agey for this kind of work and back-dropping off a limp wrist, eh? Well, old Jonas kept tight smug, for I couldn't rightly say as that rumple were a hankering

at her lady as were making me mazy like, and they'd have her eyes and mouth banging thee sometimes boy, then I feel like I did, I feel like I was strolling on air, like I let those horses drain my plough and have my smoke, and no clitting and no flinch between here and Doomsday. Look then, you are, howsomever some jolter out and lay into I about summit I ain't done and lo, behold, it will be druv deep again and lo. Whoa! Ladies and gentlemen, if you knew what that looks like written down,

that was one of the most amazing bits of reading we've ever had on here. John, that's why you were up until three in the morning, really, wasn't it? Annoying your neighbours with your... I mean, honestly, the thing is that rhythm, that was exactly what the old boys used to be like. They were hilarious. Bobbo had a game. He never actually showed me, but it's still legendary in the pub

that he was a shepherd, incredibly well hung, and people would come in with half crowns. And apparently he could sweep ten half crowns off a table with his membrane virile. And I'd say, well, why did you do it, Bobbo? He'd say, I get the key to money, boy. I get the key to money. They don't do that on open book. One of the other great things about the book is it's very funny,

but it's also very unsentimental. I mean, Adam Thorpe's written eight books since, and all of them incredibly different, many of them contemporary. Well, novels, but also volumes of poetry and nonfiction. Well, actually, the lovely little thing he says about the writing of Olverton, where it started, he was living in Oldbourne in Berkshire, which H.J. Massingham said was the truest down and village of them all. So I think it probably quite a lot of the place of Olverton. My front windows looked out on a duck pond and the house where Peggy, the local white witch, would swing her pendulum and lay on tingling hands for three.

13th century horse hair burst from my walls like stuffing from a mattress. I rehearsed, drafted poems, performed, struggled on a pittance, made bread, fell for a girl in Ramsbury, lost her, wrote some more, packed eggs, toured, walked the downs, laid my forehead on standing stones and tumuli even when sober, fed a flock of mank sheep, lived on porridge, oats, talked and listened.

And you get that feeling that he was living in a community, he was doing community theatre, a lot of community theatre based on local stories. It's a book that comes from a real place, I think. I mean, he is also quite often referred to as one of the most underrated novelists in the country. And I remember when, like for instance, the people who like Alberton really love it. This is, Alberton is Knausgaard's favourite British novel. Adam Thorpe is Hilary Mantel's favourite British contemporary novelist. When Alberton came out, we did an event with him because we love the book so much, Hilary Mantel's favourite British contemporary novelist. When Arlton came out, we did an event with him because we loved the book so much at the shop that I worked in, which fortunately we did get a few people to turn out for.

And Hilary Mantel came and did the Q&A for Adam at that event at Waterstones in Earls Court on a Tuesday night at 7.30 because she so passionately believed in the book and believed in his talent. They have another thing in common, which is certainly up until Hilary Mantel's two Tudor novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up Bodies. Famously, she never wrote the same novel twice. She feels her way back into a character and how that character would express themselves and writes a different novel in a different style every time. And that's exactly what Adam Thorpe does.

So he's never repeated himself. And of course, people who don't repeat themselves tend to pay the price for it in commercial terms, the exception to the rule being Hilary Mantel. But Tom, you had a thing, didn't you? Yeah, I've got in my copy of Overton is the Hilary Mantel's original review of it from, I think, is that the Independent typeface? Yeah, it's from the Independent in 92, which was a point before she was really Hilary Mantel.

And she was kind of, like Andy said, writing lots of different books. like Andy said, writing lots of different books. But also I remember, I think it was probably around this time that my mum and dad went to see her talk in Eastwood Library in Nottinghamshire, I think. And I think like three other people turned up. So she was like having the same problem as Adam Thorpe was at that point. But this is what she says at the end of the review. If you believe that English fiction is jaded, you must read Adam Thorpe.

There is hardly a page that does not offer some striking image or insight. Tender, precise, tragicomic and unsentimental. It draws the reader into its task of reconstructing the unrecorded history of England. its task of reconstructing the unrecorded history of England. And sometimes you forget that it is a novel and believe for a moment that you were really hearing the voice of the dead. I really, I really feel that about it. And I feel like, yeah, it could just be history. I mean, I'm reading Robert Toombs's History of England at the moment. And I'm like, you know, maybe it's just the same, England at the moment and I'm like you know maybe it's just the same really what what is history it's all it's all sort of um written anyway by kind of old wise people who are sort of losing their memory a bit anyway so you can't trust it can you so this this is probably as trustworthy

as anything you've um your next book uh Tom which declare an interest unbounded publishing you're doing a book of ghost stories but haunting is a theme in this book as well. But from the very first story, isn't it? Yeah. Where a civil war soldier comes back and his wife has assumed he's dead and she's remarried and then he mysteriously disappears. Yeah, definitely.

And the story that I just read the excerpt from, the ghost of the wife, appears. I think I realised when I was writing this book, Help the Witch, which is my first fiction, I think I realised how influenced I was by this book as well because every story in mine is really different as well. I think I'm quite creatively restless and I've had a similar sort of thing to Adam Thorpe

where I chop and change what I do. And it's not commercially the best thing to do, really. But you can see how creatively restless he is. We should remember this in his first novel. I mean, he was 35, I think. He's also, he's written seven volumes of poetry. And we've got a clip now, it's just a short clip of Adam Thorpe himself reading one of his poems and just to put this in some sort of context he is also a believer that perhaps very justifiably the planet is in dire straits and so his writing about nature and the march of progress in all his work is something you can see in Alberton that one of the things that

industrialisation is one of the processes he is writing about over a 300 year period. This poem is called Recent Summers and at the end Adam Thorpe adds just a little thing to leave you thinking about. Recent summers, this imminence, an English distillation of lowering hedges, a hammerweight of heat on the accomplishing ferns, everything tending to cataclysm, fiddling while even dawn burns. We wait, things might get worse, the hearse ticking by the cemetery gate, the silence of the birds we don't look up to now we're up to things the calm freight of clouds too late to count is it too late well if the

planet was a boat and there was a captain would no'd no doubt be leaving it now in a not-so-orderly manner. Not an optimist. Returning to Alberton now, the two books that it reminded me of, there's one earlier book and one later book. The earlier book is Aikenfield by Ronald Gale. Oh, yeah. Another one of my favourites. You know, the idea of the village. But Aikenfield is a non-fiction book about the year and the life of a rural community.

This is clearly taking something similar and finding different voices to tell that story with over a period of time. The other book, it seemed to me, the other novel that I assume quite a few people here will have read, that I think it was probably very influential on, although it's a very different book in many ways, is David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas. Absolutely, yeah. You know, Cloud Atlas does a similar kind of Rorschach thing with the structure of moving in and out of different time periods with different characters,

yet the unity is there through imagery particularly. With the birthmark in Cloud Atlas, it's the same as the story about the witch. It's the same as the burial site of the guy who is murdered in the opening chapter. And I remember reading Cloud Atlas probably like about a year after I read Alberton and everyone was raving about it. And it did make me think, well, why don't you talk about Alberton? He did the same thing, what seven years before the other book that uh that robert mcfarlane is very very good introduction and that gives you a sort of a sense it's a that all of the school i guess

you would say of which mcfarlane is probably the best known of of english writers about about nature in the countryside that have risen arisen over the last years, Elberton is a sort of a touchstone book for them. But he mentions a book that is one of my favourites, which I think I'm sure Thorpe would have read as well, which is a book called The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, which has a similar idea. Ginzburg reconstructs the cosmos of a 16th century miller from documents that are left behind.

He's basically, Ginzberg was a Marxist historian who was very cross with the idea of lacunae, that you couldn't tell the story of people from the past because there was no documentation. He said, well, actually, that's bullshit. If you get into the libraries, there is documentation. You just have to work hard and you have to have imagination to reconstruct. And that idea of reconstructing voices from the past i mean this book is a very angry book as well it's about there's a deposition one of the central chapters is about the um the breaking of machines and the the ridiculously harsh punishments from hanging to transportation that the rural poor who were really poor there's

a lot of poverty in the book, a lot of desperation. There's amazingly moving letters from a mother to her son who's in Newgate being faced with, being hung for stealing someone's hat. Injustice runs through it, the kind of anger. And right through to the end, which really resonated with me, where it's basically, the final bit of the book is a film script about a property developer who's from the village but

Is basically building the kind of ghastly, you know, tiki-taki Houses that property developers build in A1 rural areas and turning one of the old pubs into a gastropub with and again, the the anger the people in that film the people who are now who've been moved out of their pretty cottages into cancer states very similar to my village their anger their sense of their village traditions being lost so all of that is in there although it's as you say he's not an optimist he's incredibly generous because even the the dickhead who's building the houses is given a kind of a... I mean, actually, what happens is, without giving too much away,

they discover a skeleton. That chapter felt really modern to me as well, rereading it. It didn't feel like it was written in 1990. No, I'm just going to... We've got, like, five minutes left. I'm just going to read one bit because it's a Sunday morning. And, Tom, you were saying how funny the book is. The book is very funny. Chapter 2, Friends, 1689.

I'm going to read you a tiny bit from that the character talking to you is the reverend crispin brazier and he's referring to his clerk william scablehorn and his curate mr kissel and they have been stranded in a snowstorm and discovered naked and they've been huddling together, he claims, for warmth. And this is an extract from his sermon in which he is attempting to justify what really happened to the congregation. So you have to imagine that I am the Reverend Crispin Brazier

and you, ladies and gentlemen, are the congregation and you can respond to the piece I'm going to read because it's built into what Adam has written. All right, so here we go. Hell is but a tiny single thought away, my children. You may well shift. But you are looking agog at one who has felt the hot rasp and icy nip at once in his bowels and on his cheeks. The fires and frosts of hell's perpetual kingdom. Whatsoever be the talk of holy frauds. Whatsoever be the modish jabber of those inly lit up as by some angelic taper as by some luminous blossom

now this my children hear closely nay hear me out at the very moment of my despair and numbness in which the sudden inclement weather and its great gloominess all but obliterated my senses, my reason like our single-shielded lantern swung by my hand endured, and I reckoned that one amongst us was not feeling his suffering as he ought. Nay, let me proceed. Mr. Scablehorn and myself did make for the hummock, with our hoods held tight to our faces

that we might not be blinded by the snow and did crouch there it affording in the lee some shelter from the blasts then think my children what degree of horror came upon your minister when poor Mr. Scablehorn did lean across to me and did part my hood from mine ear and did whisper that our comforting protuberance was none other than that place

where certain of the spiritually distracted in our grandparents' time fell into unspeakable depravity and cavorted lustfully in nakedness upon its flanks, and that is called thereby, the devil's knob. So there are affairs. Thank you, Rob. So there are... So basically, it's hard to think of anything this novel doesn't do, right?

When it moves you, it's moving. When it's funny, it's funny. It funny it makes you think it's beautifully constructed in literary terms on his website it says that he's frustrated that it's the one he's known by but i think that's why because it does it does the whole job doesn't it and i would also say i mean it's not you know it's not you're not going to read it in a sitting it takes time you know that some of the chapters are quite hard to read because they're written in this tense dialect. But it's a book to reflect on. It's a book I think anybody who's interested in English history

is interested in how to get younger people engaged in English history. It's a kind of core text. I think it is also ageist. I can't see it going out of date. I mean, there are very few books that genuinely deserve to be called masterpiece i think it's the sort of book that we um started backlisted to talk about actually it's one of those masterpieces which you may or may not have heard of but you could go from here in fact i'm not even plugging now you could go from here to the

rough trade tent and buy it because they stocked it because they knew we were talking about it or you could walk into a bookshop and buy it. It's not like any other book. Most books are like other books. Ulverton is not like any other book. I thought that when I read it in 92, and coming back to it now, I thought the same thing. So listen, we've got to say goodbye to you.

You've been a fantastic audience. Thank you ever so much for listening. Tom, thank you very much for joining us and coming to talk. Thank you. Mitch, thank you very much for turning up on time. And thank you, Jack, for recording us. Most of all, thank you, End of the Road, for having us. We're backlisted. Thank you very much. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts,

you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight