Chapter 1: What is Nicholas Shakespeare's latest novel about?
All right, this is going to be good, isn't it?
I loved this book. Put that effing book down.
When it comes to crime, only murder will do.
I'm reading it and reading it and I'm going, oh no. So I thought I really have to hook the reader. It's taken up half my heart, you know. The book actually put a hex on me. Hello there, Bookshelf listeners. Thanks for joining me for a special podcast extra series of interviews. I'm Kate Evans.
You might have noticed in the regular show that when we review a book, there's often a short grab from the author talking about the book or a theme or one particular idea in the novel. Well, you won't be surprised to hear that that comes from a much longer interview about the book and about the bookshelf that made me, or made them, rather.
Well, we keep getting so carried away in the weekly show that it's been hard to fit those interviews in. So we're going to play a series of them here instead. And I wonder, could you help spread the word? Get your friends to subscribe to the podcast to make sure they don't miss out. Who's first then? It's Nicholas Shakespeare. He's a biographer as well as a novelist.
He's an essayist, a critic and a documentary maker. He's written non-fiction on Bruce Chatwin and Winston Churchill and on an English woman living in Second World War France. His novels include The Dancer Upstairs and Inheritance. But it's his latest, The Sandpit, that I want to tell you about. It's a literary mystery novel, a playful spy story.
It's also, I think, fiction about the ethics of storytelling. Most of all, though, it's an engaging novel that is intelligent, that expects the reader to keep up. So in this conversation, we started with that novel, then moved on to the many books that are referenced inside it, as well as to other books and writers that have influenced him. So let's get to it.
Nicholas Shakespeare, thank you so much for speaking to us on the bookshelf.
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Chapter 2: How does Nicholas Shakespeare incorporate his personal experiences into his writing?
He would always want more or less the same stuff read to him as he asked other Englishmen who, writers who would turn up and he would always ask them to pluck from this glass fronted bookcase some Anglo-Saxon poetry or some Viking poetry or Chesterton. Actually, I had to read him from Macbeth, although from Hamlet, and also a poem by Kipling called The Harp Song of the Dane Women.
And his favorite line in it was, it's all about the Vikings coming to kind of ravage everything. And his favorite line, it was, sicken again for the shouts and the slaughter. So you had this, I had this image of this elderly man who was blind, leaning forward in his chair on a cane stick, absolutely galvanized by images of rape and pillage on a continent thousands of miles away.
Anyway, he was a very important influence for me. And I, when I wrote my second novel, third novel, The Dance Upstairs, I was given a Borges, I think it was probably the one and only Borges fellowship to go and in his house down in Madelplata, where he used to go and write. I was allowed to go down there for three months and finish my novel. And that was a great honor and privilege.
And so I've always kind of held a candle for Borges. And he came over to England, actually, and I got him on a TV program with Bruce Chatwin and Mario Vargas Llosa, the great Peruvian writer. And they were just, Chatwin said, I mean, Borges, he's just a genius. You can't go anywhere without packing a Borges. It's like packing a toothbrush.
I was standing with Borges about to bring him on to the stage and he overheard this on the monitor and he said, how unhygienic.
How lovely. Now, Dyer, your character, also reflects on Graham Greene. And I wonder if he's also a writer who's important to you, not just to your fictional character.
Yes, Graham Greene is one of my mentors, along with John le CarrƩ, and I suppose earlier people like John Buchan. Greene, I didn't read him until we were in Argentina at the same time as I was meeting Borges. And Greene had just written The Honorary Consul, which was all about a British diplomat who's held hostage up in the north.
And this seemed to mirror my father's position, because my father was in charge of the embassy in Buenos Aires. And we had We were surrounded by bodyguards the whole time. And we had six SAS people with nicknames like Topper and Lofty living in our house with machine guns and grenades for fear of kidnapping, which was quite prevalent then.
And the ambassador in Uruguay, Jackson, had been kidnapped by the Tupperwares. And so I read The Honorary Consul, which is a wonderful book. And later, when I did have the fortune to meet Green, he said to me that it was his favorite novel. And I asked him why. He said, well, because the character changes during the course of it, which is very difficult to do.
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Chapter 3: How does Nicholas Shakespeare view storytelling in relation to ethics?
And she said it was Jane Garton.
I will take that. That is a question that I will ask from here on in. Nicholas Shakespeare, thank you so much for speaking to us on the bookshelf.
Thank you very much for listening to me.
Nicholas Shakespeare's The Sandpit is published by Harville Secker. I'm Kate Evans, and this is a podcast extra edition of The Bookshelf. Share it around, tell people to listen, ask your bookish people to subscribe. There are many more thoughtful writers to come, let's see. Sarah Moss, Ian McGuire, Christopher Paolini. I could go on. Instead, keep listening. See you next time.