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Chapter 1: Who are the featured guests in this episode?
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Nyt mä muutan. Se on varmaa. Friendit lähellä, futiskenttä, kuntosali, siis oma rauha. Katsotaanpa, mitä etuovesta löytyy. Hei, tässä se on. Mun uusi koti. Etuovesta löydät kaikki vuokra-asunnot kaikki alta Suomesta. Avaa ovi uuteen.
Hello, welcome to A Good Read, where we talk about some books we love. And with me today are two top crime writers. Louise Welsh is the author of 10 novels, among them The Cutting Room, The Second Cut, and most recently, The Cut Up. She's also a professor of creative writing at the University of Glasgow.
Chris Brookmeyer began his career with Quite Ugly One Morning, later adapted for TV with James Nesbitt, while his many novels since include Black Widow, The Cracked Mirror and, just out, Quite Ugly One Evening. Chris, would you start us off?
What are you suggesting is a good read? I'm suggesting Espedere Street by my late friend Ian Banks, which is an almost fictionalised biography of a 70s rock star who, at the start of the novel, explains that he planned to kill himself, but then he's going to elaborate on why he changed his mind. which is the result of a tumultuous and fairly uproarious week spent in Glasgow.
And that's intercut with the story of the band from him in his teenage years all the way through their 70s excess. And it's a novel that I've loved since I first read it in about 1990. I was in my late adolescence, but it's the stuff of male adolescent dreams, certainly about being a 70s rock star. But it's so much more than that.
It's a very tender story that makes you care deeply for this wounded individual.
Well, Louise Welsh, Ian Banks' Espadaire Street.
Oh, well, this took me back 40 years because it was 40 years since I last read this book. I couldn't quite believe it. I had to look at the publication date. It's like one of those albums that you found in everybody's house. Everybody in Scotland of a certain age had this book on their shelf, partly because it's set in Scotland. And as you said, that's Scottish sensibility.
But it took me back to a time before social media, when people smoked in pubs, walking through the wet and the grime. And the point before the bridge to nowhere that goes over the M8 was built on. But I think it's a really beautiful book. And I think there's something very nostalgic about it, about those 70s rock scenes.
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Chapter 2: What themes are explored in Iain Banks' Espedair Street?
It can be dangerous. It can be really dangerous and sort of blow up with people. But Danny seems to negotiate that and get away with it.
This is a book with a very interesting end. And I'm still not sure about it. We obviously can't actually describe it. But... I found it, in a way, really effective because it's one of those endings that comes as a total surprise and about three seconds later you think, oh, of course, I can see this being set up. But it is interestingly tender-hearted, isn't it?
Yeah, I re-read it. I mean, I've probably read it five or six times over the years, but it's a few years since I read it and I did actually tear up reading the end again. It's probably because of the age I am and just a stage in life where you start looking back yourself at things so I could relate again. But it's very tender and it's not tender in a cloying way.
It's in keeping with the character you've spent all this time with. It's wistful. But I think also it invites us to ask, is this the end? Yes. And we're invited to think, what happens next?
We've been talking about Espadere Street by Ian Banks. And to my choice of a good read now, which is a novel published in 1917 by Edith Wharton. And it's really a quite unusual Edith Wharton novel because quite often she writes about New York high society. And this is very much not that. The novel is set over one summer in a dreary little one street village somewhere in New England.
And the only pretensions to high society come from a woman called Miss Hatchard. And the other bit of grandness, I suppose, is a lawyer called Mr Royal, a rather broken down, sleazy lawyer. Our heroine, 17-year-old Charity Royal, is Mr Royal's adopted ward. She's a very beautiful, rather proud young woman.
What happens is that somebody turns up in the district, a young man, an architect from New York called Lucius Harney, And this could develop into a story that you could summarise as innocent young village girl wronged by older, more sophisticated, richer man. But for me, it's something much more than that, because it's quite a complicated and subtle book.
Charity Royal isn't just an innocent young woman. She's something different from that. I hadn't read it until very recently, and I really like it. Chris Brookmeyer.
I was very surprised. You've just outlined the version of the story that we're familiar with of the young woman who is taken advantage of or that she's faltering as she confronts a more complex, sophisticated society. And it's almost as though the iterations of the story we've seen since were that version and they forgot about this version. She's constantly surprising in that respect.
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Chapter 3: How does Louise Welsh reflect on her experience with Espedair Street?
He is somebody who is free, as far as she can see, who lives an exciting life. And I think in a way what she loves is not so much him as what he represents.
Yeah, and I feel she's fascinated by this greater possibility that he represents, but she's slightly afraid beyond that. It's like there's the larger town that seems more glamorous than the tiny town that she's used to, and she has her eyes opened by simply visiting that, and he represents that. But she's quite intimidated by the notion of ever go to New York.
Almost like you can't ever see her doing that in the same way as perhaps part of her thinks he might be too much. He might represent something like New York as well. I think she's a very intelligent young woman. Is she in love or not? I think she's in passion. I think she's in desire. And summer is about that. It's about this ripeness.
Exactly. It seems to me that the fact that it is summer, and Edith Walton describes the landscape so well, is all part and parcel of it. I mean, there's a... There's a moment she describes when Charity is sitting on the hillside over the village and she says, you know, she can smell the pine sap and the thyme and the fern.
And she says, and all were merged in a moist earth smell that was like the breath of some huge sun warmed animal. I think the landscape and the sexual passion both sort of feed off one another, don't they?
I think that one of the things that really surprised me was the modernity of it because normally novels I've read of that period would shy away, especially from female sexuality, but from confronting those desires and also the fact that this is a book published when it was and the description of abortion, for instance, is almost quotidian and the local attitude to it is not...
And particularly controversial. It's seen as perhaps shameful, but not in the way we might anticipate.
Mind you, I think it was quite controversial at the time it was published. I can imagine.
I think it's also fair to say that the abortion, somebody who undertakes, you know, to have a termination, that is the end of their social life. That's the end of their social standing. You should say that this is another character we're talking about. Yes, yeah, exactly.
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