Robert Lukens

speaker

541 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2018 last heard Sep 2021

Robert Lukens’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Bookshelf · On Caoilinn Hughes' Orchid & the Wasp, Steven Carroll's The Year of the Beast, John Lanchester's The Wall and Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Result · 1 Feb 2019 podcast

And he reduces and reduces and simplifies things down to often a single character.

So one character comes to represent one entire strata of society or a whole idea.

So here we have the elite, the breeder, the other, the defender.

And in some way, and it's not a criticism, the word simplifying, he's reducing big ideas down to small usable parts.

And in lots of ways, that's what a novelist does.

There's a kind of flatness and I think a deliberate flatness to both the prose style.

It's an unadorned prose style, but also this is a flat world.

We're sitting on a grey wall.

We're staring out at a flat sea.

It's an airless world.

Yeah, so there's been this event, the whole point of this, the reason for this world of sea on the other side of the world is this event, at some point in the past, called the change.

And this is climate change.

So on the other side of the wall is a devastated, flooded world.

And this is the reason why the others are so desperate to get onto this, our side of the wall, is because this is where safety resides and out there is death and peril and...

time frames in here are all very nebulous and i think this is this idea that history has been stripped in some way from the lives of these people the change was this thing that happened at some indeterminate point in the past and we don't quite know what life was like then we get little hints we have our joseph k's parents when he goes to bed they watch documentaries about the beach

Because there are no beaches.

There are no beaches.

There are just these hard lines now.

So there's this idea that some people have hold of some memories of the past, but it isn't allowed to infiltrate into the present.

By ironing over the past, people are allowed to exist in this quite horrific world.

Showing 321–340 of 541 · page 17 of 28