Joanne Harris and Islam Issa
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Eläinvakuutuksemme tarjoavat sopivan turvan kaikenlaisiin tarpeisiin. Sinä valitset vakuutuksen laajuuden, me tarjoamme maksuttoman etäeläinlääkärin sekä nopean suorakorvauksen klinikan kassalla.
Hello, welcome to A Good Read, where we talk about books we love, or one of us loves anyway, we don't always see eye to eye. With me today is first the author Joanne Harris, whose more than 20 novels include the massively best-selling Chocolat, and most recently a prequel to Chocolat titled Vianne. This coming October she's bringing out what she describes as a kind of ghost story, Sleepers in the Snow. Here with Joanne is Islam Issa, author, broadcaster, curator, professor of public humanities at Birmingham City University. Islam's publications include Milton in the Arab Muslim World and the award-winning Alexandria, the City that Changed the World, a history of his own birthplace. Joanne Harris, would you start us off?
What are you suggesting is a good read?
It is Shirley Jackson's book, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I discovered about five years ago. I should have read it as a teenager, but I missed it somehow. I think partly because she's largely underappreciated as an author. But it's a wonderful book. To me, it is the forerunner of all kinds of things. Things like The Wasp Factory, I think, wouldn't quite have existed without it. And John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure. I think it's the intersection point here. And because I live... 20 miles from Howarth. To me, it also has resonances of the Bronte sisters. And it is about two sisters called Constance and Mary Catherine Blackwood. And Constance is the good sister, the sage one, the one who likes cooking, the one who looks after everybody.
And Mary Catherine, who is called Mary Cat, is the wild one, the younger one, who has a peculiar outlook on life, who is perfectly happy to run wild, who has various rituals to keep their house safe. And it needs keeping safe because they have been the victims of a family tragedy. Six years ago, half of their family was poisoned at dinner. It was assumed at the time that Constance did it, but she was found innocent. But now they are shunned by the community. And so it's a kind of gothic mystery story set within a rigid little community in New England with these two rather codependent sisters living alone. Constance can't leave the property. Mary Cat doesn't really want to and hates everybody. And there's a wonderful dynamic there.
The prose is just crystalline and gorgeous. And I think the opening lines are possibly the best opening lines in literature. It begins with Mary Cat speaking. My name is Mary Catherine Blackwood. I'm 18 years old and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
Ah, great. Islam Issa, what did you make of it? We have always lived in the castle.
I found it very atmospheric. And building on the start of the novel, I was fascinated by the narrator. I thought she had all the qualities of a bad narrator. Unreliable, limited, relatively intrusive. And I think she had something like... What I describe as a noisy mind, like just constantly overthinking, not very mindful in that sense. I felt like, well, at times she felt things, she didn't see things. So when she talks about her neighbours talking about her or she can feel them talking about her. Or they're looking through the glass. She can feel them looking through the glass. And I was never convinced that any of that was actually happening. This idea that she was feeling things rather than seeing things.
And I very much enjoyed it. If I had one reservation, I think it might be the slight predictability.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–7:23
2
What book does Joanne Harris choose and why is Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle significant?
7:23–15:15
3
How does Mary Catherine Blackwood’s unreliable narration shape the mood and plot of Jackson’s novel?
15:15–29:42