Francis Spufford

That seems to me to be just radically untrue to human experience.

Books about work come in too.

Yeah.

Henry Green's Living from the 1930s is one of the few novels to try and treat a factory seriously as a setting for human life.

More recently, I mean, there's the socialist classic, The Ragged Trouser Philanthropist, which one of my characters, Alec the Socialist, actually quotes.

He's not enjoying working in his son's plastering business after typesetting has kind of gone bung on him.

And he says, oh, one of the few novels that's got plastering in it.

Mind you, that could have been a mistake.

He was trying to plaster a wall at the time.

There's

good writing from Scotland in particular about work.

James Kelman does work really well.

A Scottish writer called Agnes Owens wrote a book called Gentleman of the West, which is about building and construction.

I mean, there's good stuff out there, but in some ways it involves reaching back often into kind of political, slightly old-fashioned political models that thought that work had a dignity that was worth rendering.

But work does have dignity, but work has everything else as well.

Work also has

absurdity and satisfaction and human relationships of a particular kind so for example then we came to the end by joshua ferris ferrin oh looking at my shelves now ferris um yes is about is about an office and office work matters just as much as the kind of macho heavy lifting stuff what you do with a stapler and a pc is just as much something that literary writers should be ambitious about

I don't know.

They are so large and at the same time so gradual that there are marvellous novels for each of the individual periods I'm writing about.

But it's rare because I think it's difficult for somebody to try to do many of the changes.