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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello, it's Lisa Leong from This Working Life, helping to make your work life better with advice from the world's top experts, like psychotherapist Esther Perel. Many conflicts are about power. Power is when I dismiss what you're bringing up. Power is when I magnify a problem. And Professor Adam Grant. We need to take our critics and our cheerleaders and turn them into coaches. Free coaching.
This working live on ABC Radio National and any time on ABC Listen. Picture this.
You and your twin sister are called to a family meeting where your parents tell you they're splitting up. Now, they want to have a clean break, no shared custody. Instead, each child will live permanently with one of the parents. And the way to decide which kid will live with which adult? Well, how about rolling a dice?
I'm Clare Nicholls, and this is The Book Show, where I bring you conversations with your favourite fiction authors. The Australian diplomat turned novelist Ian Chemish will join me soon. He's written a page-turner inspired by his experience in the Balkans in the 1990s. But first, let's get back to those parents deciding their children's future with a roll of the dice.
Now, this is the cruel and funny start to A Rising of the Lights, the new novel by Australian writer Steve Toltz. Steve famously shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his very first novel, A Fraction of the Whole. Hi, Steve. Hi, Claire. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. But this idea of rolling a dice to see which child will live with which parent, it's brutal.
Yeah, look, it is. And it serves a few purposes in the book. But the book is sort of, it's this book that lives at the edge of consciousness in a way. So there's all these kind of things that happen. Like there's characters that get PTSD from a dream. There's sleepwalking, sleep talking, hypnosis. And a lot of it is about kind of free will.
And I thought rolling a dice to decide one's fate early in life is probably a good way to do that. And it's, yeah, some people find it dark. Some people find it funny.
Yeah, I think I found it a bit of both. But I want people to get a bit of a sense of the tone and of the relationship between these parents who are probably some of my favourite characters in the book.
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Chapter 2: What is the premise of Steve Toltz's novel 'A Rising of the Lights'?
Can you read a little bit just from this prologue here where the parents have just rolled the dice? Can you read to us what comes next? Sure.
My father dragged a large red suitcase from the back of a cupboard. My mother shot him a hard stare. That's mine. He pulled it behind his back, holding it tightly. I was the one who paid for it. With our money. That I stole. While I was carrying your child. It went on like that.
They debated the ownership of this battered suitcase that seemed to have disproportionate sentimental value to these notoriously unsentimental creatures. My father claimed she only liked the red suitcase because it matched her eyes. My mother said that was a good joke, but the suitcase was mauve, not red. Let's agree to disagree. I never agreed to that.
My father eventually won the argument by yanking the suitcase from her hand, breathing heavily and retreating to pack. A border had been erected between us. We were all strangers to each other now.
And that was my first laugh out loud of the book, Steve, was let's agree to disagree. I never agreed to that because this book is funny and sad at the same time. Is this kind of the Steve Toltz trademark?
I guess so. I mean, I think that the style in which I write, which is kind of darkly humorous or, you know, dark comedy, blackly funny, whatever you, however you want to describe it, is just the kind of default style. style that I have. It's sort of like asking someone to describe their odour. It's very hard. This is the way it sort of comes out. And I guess it's kind of the way I see the world.
Why is being miserable funny?
Well, I don't know if being miserable is funny, but I think if you can't find the humour in difficult circumstances, then the misery will just be compounded. You know, it's probably basically I've probably made a living out of my self-defence mechanism.
Okay, well, look, tell me how this book started. I want to know what was going on in your life, what was on your mind when you sat down to write A Rising of the Lights?
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Chapter 3: How does the theme of fate play a role in the characters' lives?
And her idea is that she doesn't want him to witness her decline. She can feel that she's a bit of a burden. She also might be just doing it to spite him. It's a little unclear.
There's this line in the book that really jumped out at me. It sucks that the cure for loneliness causes loneliness. I found this so powerful, you know, this idea that our need for love and connection with people means it hurts so much when we lose it. Can you talk to me a little bit about that line?
I've kind of always been writing about the four, like, central concerns of loneliness. Existential thought and existential psychotherapy. So basically, the four things are that death, that we know that we're going to die, we have an awareness of death. And then there's freedom, that means that we're free, but we're responsible for our choices.
The third one is meaninglessness, that the life is kind of meaningless, but we have to create our own meaning. And I've written about those three with my other three books. But the fourth one is about isolation and that nobody but us can finally experience our world. And, you know, and even when we're together with someone, we're sort of still alone and because we die alone and everything.
So, and then, of course, at the same time, you know, according to a lot of discourse, you know, that there's where that loneliness is a sort of public health crisis as a modern lifestyle problem. And, you know, whether there's a loneliness epidemic or not, I'm not sure.
But, you know, even in the US, the Surgeon General declares loneliness, you know, a public health crisis comparable to smoking and obesity. So it's pretty, I guess there's also like there's loneliness, solitude, isolation and aloneness. They're not all the same thing. So loneliness is intrinsic to human consciousness.
But yeah, and every character in this novel experiences it in some form or another.
And when we're talking about loneliness in this day and age, it seems like in an increasingly digital world, perhaps it's easier to be lonely than ever before. There's a lot in this novel about tech and AI. Also this idea that we're perhaps becoming redundant, Steve. Tell me what you were seeing in the world that made you want to write about this.
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What influences did Steve Toltz draw from his life while writing this book?
There were victims on all sides. I have to say that the Bosnian Muslims emerge, and probably rightly, as the clearest victims of the period. But look, you know, it's not coincidence that The backstory in my book does feature, well, it features two bad things. It's not altogether a book that's about bad things. These things lie in the background.
And my point is one of them, based firmly on a real set of developments, involves an atrocity committed by Serbs against Croatians in the very early years of the conflict. And the other involves an atrocity committed by Croatians against Bosnians, Bosnian Muslims. And, you know, I'm not trying to make a huge local agenda point here, but in the end...
If there were villains on any side, it was particularly the politicians, the nationalist politicians who, for their own purposes, manipulated and fanned the flames of century-old resentment that does, for historical reasons, exist in that region between some of these... These groups that we lazily call ethnicities, I mean, they're not ethnicities, they're cultural groups.
They're as ethnically different from each other as Catholics and Protestants are in Northern Ireland. In other words, not at all.
Yeah. Ian Kemmish, I'm so interested in your journey from diplomat to writer. It did occur to me that as a diplomat, you know, you're obviously dealing in facts, but it's also about crafting a narrative around those facts, right? Like, I'm interested to know how much storytelling is involved in diplomacy.
A lot. And I think you're onto something here, I have to say. Particularly, I think, as a head of mission, you get to that point of authority and a level of confidence that people have in you in the system.
You're looking to influence particularly your own capital, your own ministers, your own prime minister when it comes to the issues that you're dealing with in your country of location, in your location. And to do that, you're competing with a whole lot of other people who are trying to do the same thing. You have to tell your story in an interesting way and sometimes even in an entertaining way.
And I used to find ways of doing that. Papua New Guinea seemed to generate lots of opportunity to do that, I have to say. So absolutely, you know, I think people who haven't been within the system couldn't be expected to understand it. But, you know, at least half your job is about managing your own side, if I can put it that way.
You know, influencing your own government's thinking and approach when it comes to the issues that you're facing close up on a day-to-day basis.
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