The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 20: The 2023 shortlisted authors live at Cheltenham Literature Festival

This week we’re bringing you a special episode recorded live at Cheltenham Literature Festival in October. Tune in as James is joined by all six Booker Prize 2023 shortlisted authors – Paul Murray, Chetna Maroo, Paul Lynch, Jonathan Escoffery, Paul Harding, and Sarah Bernstein – and we get to hear all about their books, the varied inspirations behind them and why and how they write.

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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Jo Hamya:

Hello and welcome to the Booker Price Podcast with me, Jo Hamya.

James Walton:

And me, James Walton.

Jo Hamya:

We’ve got a slightly unusual format for you this week because James, you’ve gone off and done an episode without me.

James Walton:

I’m so sorry, Jo. They made me do it. All it is, I went to the Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival as it’s officially known, a couple of weeks ago, and I interviewed all six of the shortlisted authors for this year’s Booker Prize. Three of them live on stage and three of them on Zoom, but miraculously, turning up from all around the world in Cheltenham Town Hall, which was a packed, I think, about a thousand people there. Great thing about literary festivals really, that a thousand people turn up for an event like that, and it seemed to go all right.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, it’s heartwarming. I love a good literary festival. But now, actually, what I really want to ask you, James, is spill the tea. What are they like? Our six short listees? How’d you get on with them? How did you find them?

James Walton:

Well, slightly awkwardly, given that we didn’t like all of the books, and I was savaging a couple of them in the episodes, in which we discussed the shortlist. They were all lovely, so I feel awful. I felt such a hypocrite. I did vaguely challenged bits that I wondered about, but obviously, my job there was to just let them speak.

And the thing about authors these days is they’re all really good. All six were just terrific. I’m pretty sure that 20 years ago, there’d be one shy one or one where it was a bit rubbish or anything. It’s sort of part of being an author now I think, is that you’re just good at that and they all were.

They were lovely in the three who were live on stage, which is Chetna Maroo, and two of the three Poles, Lynch and Murray, we had a drink afterwards in the green room and they signed me books and everything and it was all lovely. And I’m very sorry to Paul Lynch that I went on to question aspects of Prophet Song when we discussed it. And I like to think that it was a successful event.

Jo Hamya:

But in the meantime, I think we should play the recording of that day.

James Walton:

So here we go with the recording from Cheltenham Town Hall a couple of weeks ago.

Wow. It’s all worked, the technology. Fantastic. Hello everybody, and welcome to the Town Hall, to the Sun Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, and to Booker Prize 2023.

My name’s James Walton, I’m the co-host of the new Booker Prize podcast, which started in July and is available wherever you get your podcasts. Sorry about that shameless plug but Booker made me do it, I promise.

Anyway, with that out of the way, I’m delighted to say that we’re joined this afternoon by all six of this year’s shortlisted authors. Three, as you can see live on stage, and three, joining us online. In the flesh, we’ve got Paul Lynch, Chetna Maroo, and Paul Murray. Spread across the globe are Sarah Bernstein, Jonathan Escoffery, and Paul Harding, so please welcome them all.

Two little facts about the 2023 lineup. It’s a rare example of a Booker shortlist where none of the authors has been shortlisted before, and it’s a unique example of a Booker shortlist where three of the authors are called Paul.

So apologies to the authors who are going to be clapped into silence for now. But let’s begin with Paul Lynch, author of Prophet Song, which is set in a near future version of Ireland where a totalitarian government has come to power, which begins with something that’s never terribly good in these circumstances, a knock on the door late at night by the secret police. But as well as powerfully capturing the terrifying impact of the new regime on the country, the book is also a thoroughly imagined account of the effects on a single family led by the mother, Eilish Stack, who’s a terrific character. I think most readers will agree with that.

But anyway, Paul, thanks so much for joining us and congratulations on being shortlisted.

Paul Lynch:

It’s great to be here.

James Walton:

Okay, so here’s the first question. What made you decide to set a story of totalitarianism in Ireland? Not the most obvious choice, really of place for that to happen, I wouldn’t have thought.

Paul Lynch:

Everything we do is rationalisation after the fact when you’re a writer. Writing comes from the place of dream, and for me, I think it’s important to talk about what I was feeling or thinking at that time in 2018 when I started writing the book, I had just reread Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. And there’s a page in that book that I remember reading in my twenties where Harry Haller is describing Germany in 1927, this sort of sense of political unrest, the disintegration, the xenophobia on the streets, just the climate. I remember, and he said, “The next war is inevitable.” And I remember reading that in my twenties thinking, “Wow, it wasn’t an extraordinary time compared to say the sedate 1990s when I was reading it,” but when I reread it in 2018, the chill went up the back of my spine because I thought this is actually now.

And so I found myself writing into the opening of Prophet Song. And if I had said something like this in a country where you may say, this might be typical, then the power is gone because the idea of this cannot happen here is fundamentally one of the questions that I’m asking in the book. It’s all about the posing of the questions.

James Walton:

I really miss nineties complacency.

Paul Lynch:

Yeah.

James Walton:

It wasn’t that great. But in a way you sort of talk…

Paul Lynch:

The end of history, that’s what it was.

James Walton:

What’s interesting as well about the book is you just in a way just placed the situation before us here is totalitarian Ireland. There’s a reference to some sort of crisis that’s led to this government coming to power. Did you have in mind what that crisis was?

Paul Lynch:

No. I mean, I was deeply interested in Syria and I had been reading books about the Syrian problem for another project, and so that was in mind, but as I was writing, it’s not totalitarian at the start. That’s the thing, it’s incremental, and I wanted to capture that sense of the frog boiling. I wanted to measure how change occurs and how we don’t recognise the change as it’s occurring. It’s one of the things that I’m doing in the book, but so I wanted to capture that sense of a narrative that could contain all narratives. And so there was a line from Cormac McCarthy’s, The Crossing that I wanted to use as an epigraph for the book, but he was dying and we couldn’t get permission in time for publication where he says that, “People may think that the choice is to choose one story from many that are available, but really the choice is to make many of the one.” And that’s what I was trying to do, was to capture multiple political realities, multiple scenarios in the one container, which is this book.

James Walton:

And you decided also to focus on a single family, as I said, led by the very appealing character of Eilish. Do you like her as much as I suspect most readers do?

Paul Lynch:

Yeah. To me, Eilish is just this typical character in her forties who’s been squeezed from every direction. This is part of, for me, the sort of intense realism of the book is so much of what might be considered dystopian often feels to me sort of paper mache world. And for me, the idea of an intense realism must come from somebody who’s completely enmeshed in their lives. Her father has dementia, her teenage children have various things pulling on them, and she’s got, obviously Larry, who’s taken by the police, and she’s trying to hold all of these things together while also keeping her career. So the question of should you leave becomes an impossibility for her. How can she leave? She’s completely enmeshed, and that’s part of her struggle and part of who she is.

James Walton:

You’ve got that stuff about the history in a way is the story of people who leave it too late to leave.

Paul Lynch:

Yeah, yeah. And she has a sister in Canada who’s saying to her, “You need to go, it’s time to get out.” And she’s saying, “How can I go? What happens if dad falls and breaks a hip? What then?” And it’s that

simple for her. And so this is part of the complexity of… I mean, I’m interested in fiction that offers the deepest level of complexity. That’s what I think we should do is open things out and just pose questions. There are no answers in Prophet Song. It’s all about the framing of the question.

James Walton:

Well, thanks so much, Paul. And next up for the in-depth treatment is Sarah Bernstein, author of Study for Obedience whose unnamed narrator goes to an unnamed northern country to look after her oldest brother, who not necessarily always to her benefit, she’s always looked up to since she was a girl. She also has to navigate the weirdly suspicious locals. Weirdly suspicious partly because she doesn’t speak the language. But partly too, we gradually realise because she’s Jewish and this is a place where Jews have been persecuted. But at the same time, the narrator might not be all she seems either. I’ll have to ask Sarah a bit about this. She has strange habits of, for example, making grass talisman dolls and leaving them out for the villages to find. Sarah, hello and welcome.

Sarah Bernstein:

Hi.

James Walton:

Lovely to have you with us. First question’s, quite an easy one. Where are you?

Sarah Bernstein:

I’m in the northwest highlands of Scotland, where I live.

James Walton:

Okay, well great to have you here in Cheltenham Town Hall. And this is a book where, as the title suggests, A Study for Obedience, is about obedience, partly not least about its dangers really both to the person obeying and the person being obeyed. What drew you to that theme?

Sarah Bernstein:

A few years ago, I had gone to see a retrospective of the painter, Paula Rego’s work in Edinburgh, and up on the wall, they had a quotation from the artist where she said something like, “My women can be obedient and murderous at the same time,” and you can really see that in the way that she creates her scenes, particularly her domestic scenes. So I got really obsessed with that dynamic and I started to wonder if it could be recreated in language. So that sort of became the seed of the idea how something that is supposed to be passive, a characteristic like obedience that’s usually passive, that’s usually feminised, could become something agential and could act in the world so that sort of what I was interested in at the start anyway.

James Walton:

There’s a review of your first novel, The Coming Bad Days, which places it in a new tradition, if there’s such a thing as a new tradition, of novels that keep things vague or at least dispense with quite a lot of the normal signposts. So here too, in your second novel, we don’t know the names of any of the characters except the dog actually, don’t we, or the country where it’s taking place or when it’s taking place. It partly seems timeless, but there’s references to Twitter and to Microsoft Teams and so on. Are you looking to disorientate the reader? Is that part of what you’re trying to produce?

Sarah Bernstein:

I don’t think that much about the reader when I’m writing. I think what I was interested in, in this book anyway, is to think about rather than a kind of specific historical event, to think about the way a certain experience of history could be sort of passed down through generations rather than a trauma in a specific event but seeing how somebody might embody an experience of history. In this case, it’s this kind of the narrator’s sense that there’s a kind of catastrophe that’s always just outside of the garden gate about to come get her. So I think that that’s what I was interested in, in not locating the country certainly and not sort of specifying the context of the atrocity that happens to her family.

James Walton:

And it’s not a book that gives up its secrets easily to this, but there are little clues increasingly sort of dark suggestions throughout the book. But if you don’t think of the reader, I was going to say, you have to trust the reader a bit in those circumstances, don’t you? And you’re never tempted to just give us a kind nudge in the ribs just to let us make of it what we will.

Sarah Bernstein:

Yeah, I think so. And I think I sort of believe that once you write something, you’re no longer kind of in control of its meaning, right? You’re not in control of how whatever you write is going to be received as much as it might be tempting to try to control a narrative over your book. But yeah, there is a certain level of trust that I think I have for the reader. I trust that they will find their own way through the text and find points for orientation that are theirs.

James Walton:

It does make it most intriguing. There are clues cunningly planted, I think, here and there. And one last question we’re do again, quite a big one really, but it’s a book that in the end is without simple goodies and baddies, which given that it’s about Jews and anti-Semites might seem quite daring. Were you aware of that that might cause, I don’t know, anxiety to either you or to some of your readers?

Sarah Bernstein:

I think I really wanted to question this idea that in order for somebody to be cast as a victim, for us to be able to acknowledge that something bad has happened to them, I wanted to sort of refuse the idea that that same person has to be totally innocent in all other areas of their life. I think that’s an exceedingly troubling idea. And I also think that we’re all enmeshed in the terrible history of the world together to varying degrees. And obviously, in this case, it is fairly straightforward. We know who the baddies and the goodies are supposed to be. But I think the narrator feels a connection to the people, a kind of ancestral connection to these towns people as well that recognises their humanity and doesn’t sort of cast them beyond the realm of the human really, because that’s another way of denying the way bad things happen, I think.

James Walton:

Yeah, no, I must say your idea that we always talk about innocent victims as if unless they’re a hundred percent innocent, that’s somehow not victims. That is a very striking feature of the book, I think. Thank you, Sarah.

We move on now to Paul Murray and his novel, The Bee Sting, another book set in Ireland. But this time in a recent and recognisable recent past where the boom years of the Celtic Tiger have given way to the

financial crash, putting Dickie Barnes’s car business in big trouble, and with his entire family, wife Imelda, teenage daughter, Cass, and his 12-year-old son, PJ, all of whom the novel thoroughly inhabits, where their different perspectives constantly shifting, even undermining what we thought we knew.

Hi Paul, again. Thanks and congratulations to you. As I said, The Bee Sting sees the story through the eyes of all four of the family. Which were the most enjoyable to inhabit, which are the most difficult to inhabit? You’ve got a teenage girl, 12-year-old boy, and the mom and dad. Were there any way you thought, “Oh good, I’m writing about so-and-so today.”

Paul Murray:

Well, I went through the book linearly so I started with Cass and initially it was going to be all Cass’s story and she’s got a very sort of teenage view of the world. She sees things in very black and white terms. She sees herself as the innocent victim all the time, and her parents is kind of the enemies and her brother’s probably the sweetest member of the family.

James Walton:

He’s lovely, PJ.

Paul Murray:

He’s the only one of the family who really believes in the family. Like everyone else, Cass and the two parents, they want to escape. They see the family as this kind of negative space that they have to break free from. And PJ, he’s the believer who really wants them to stay together and sees the value and the love that they’ve stopped being able to perceive. I liked all those sections. I feel like you have to make a connection with each character if you’re going to write the book that way.

The parents, when I got to the parents sections, that’s where the book sort of really changes for me and for the reader too, because the parents have a past which the kids don’t really have. And from having seen the parents from the kid’s perspective, which is quite sort of two-dimensional, as I say, they just see the parents of these kind of irritating kind of cartoon figures. You suddenly realise that the parents are people and have had this trauma in their background, which is still kind of driving their lives today. I mean, I felt a lot of… I don’t know if you’re supposed to feel like a lot of love of your own characters, but I did really sort feel each one was important to me in their own way and each section was rewarding for me to write in its own way.

James Walton:

There is a sense of love for the characters, but no spoilers, but quite a lot of terrible things happen to them all. Did you feel mean? It’s a slightly naive question but did you think maybe I’ll just cut him a break here.

Paul Murray:

I wrote a book called Skippy Dies, and in that book, Skippy Dies on page five so you really have to kind of be tough with yourself when you’re writing a book. And each of them, they’re all going through their own kind of individual struggle and I felt sad for the things that were happening to them, but I really wanted to…. People have hard lives. When you talk to ordinary people, the stories they tell you. I think part of my journey, as a writer, as I get older, is that I’ve got better at just listening to people and people’s stories. And if you’re willing to listen, people are surprisingly willing to tell you very intimate

details from their lives. And a lot of the details are just about just difficulty, or pain, or illness, or death in the past that they’ve never got over.

So that’s what I was trying to get at in the book, that each of the characters has something that they feel very isolated and they feel very alone because they don’t think any of the other members can understand them or help them. But we, the reader, having this sort of perspective, this overarching perspective, we can see that if they’d only talk to each other, then they could fix things and they could move forward and the tragedy of the book is that they’re just not able to make that leap.

James Walton:

Let’s leave the Cheltenham Town Hall for a minute and we’ll be back after this short break.

Jo Hamya:

Welcome back to part two with James at Cheltenham.

James Walton:

Funny enough, on the Booker Prize podcast, only yesterday we were interviewing George Saunders who won with Lincoln in the Bardo. And one of his ideas of fiction, particularly the short story, I think, is that it constantly asks you to re-examine what you thought you knew. So you think, “Oh yes, that’s what, so-and-so’s like,” and then you read on and no, and no, and no, and no. And in a way that’s that changing of perspectives in your book. Do you imagine the reader and thinking, “Wow, this will blow their minds?”

Paul Murray:

Well, one of the big drivers for me was the difference between how you see your parents when you’re a kid, and then how you understand that relationship when you become a parent yourself. So as I say, the two kids see their parents as being not quite cartoons, but they’re not really imagining them as having had lives before the kids were born. When you’re kid, you kind of think until you arrived and present them with meaning, your parents are just sort of floundering around, just growing sideburns and wearing whatever it might be. And then when you get older and you become a parent yourself, you realise that your parents were just like you. They were, instead of being just these kind of monolithic lawgivers, they’re people who are trying to just to create this new role for themselves and they don’t know how so they’re improvising and it’s difficult and they make mistakes.

And so I guess that was one of the really big engines for the plot for me, was just making that flip. So you start the book thinking, “Wow, these parents, they’re just obsessed with money and they’re sort of very superficial characters.” And then when you get to their sections, it turns over and you realise that there’s a lot more going on there, and that the kids, the way the kids think and the ways that the kids see the world is unbeknownst to them, actually, largely created by the parents’ worldview and what’s happened to the parents.

James Walton:

Well, thanks so much Paul. And so to a man weirdly not called Paul, which is Jonathan Escoffery’s, If I Survive You, which is one of the two debut books on this year’s Booker shortlist. It’s a collection of interlinked stories about a Jamaican family whose parents moved to Miami in the late 1970s to escape political violence on the island. And again, we get the perspective of several family members, but the main focus is on the youngest son Trelawny, who’s born in America as he struggles to work out his identity. Hi Jonathan, thanks for joining us. Where are you joining us from?

Jonathan Escoffery:

I’m in Oakland, California.

James Walton:

Okay, well now you’re in Cheltenham too. If I Survive You opens with the words, it begins with, “What are you?” In italic, hollered from the perimeter of your front yard when you are nine, younger probably. And this question, what are you reverberates throughout the book? So why is it such a hard one for Trelawny to answer and does he ever manage to answer it, do you think?

Jonathan Escoffery:

Well, in one sense, he has, essentially, been placed in a position where his parents haven’t given him the context of an American racial identity because they don’t know it. They themselves haven’t immigrated from Kingston, Jamaica to the U.S. And over here, especially thinking about the 1980s, there wasn’t a lot of room for bringing your ethnic identity from Caribbean islands over to the United States and kind of holding onto that. A place like Jamaica, which the national motto is out of many one people, it’s kind of a place that the government sanctioned ideas that you’re embracing this, in a sense, mixed heritage, especially if you have a mixed heritage that you maybe have your grandparents who are coming from different places, their pictures in the living room.

Whereas in the United States, you have this more, I guess, boiled down kind of one drop rule for Black people but that’s not something that the parents are prepared to give Trelawny that kind of confidence in a kind of Black identity in a sense. And so, in a sense, that’s part of it and there’s this kind of cultural… Where are his cultural allegiance is as someone who’s been born in the United States but is very much growing up in a Jamaican household or how is he to operate as a man in the world? In a sense, that’s another question that he’s being asked as he, at times, is kind of doubting that his father is giving him the right answers because some of what the father believes about how to be a man in the world is not necessarily what Trelawny is believing, agrees with how you’d be good in the world.

He’s seeing the contradictions and he’s having a difficult time with it. But the book, hopefully, is kind of breaking down these assumptions that we have that some of these ideas are very simple or essential. Whereas I’m hoping that the scenes, the kind of dramatisation of these instances where Trelawny’s being asked these questions hopefully is giving the reader an idea that maybe the things that we take for granted are maybe more complex than we sometimes think.

James Walton:

Did you think it comes to answer that question, what are you, by the end of the book or is it always going to be a continuing struggle?

Jonathan Escoffery:

I think it’s going to be a continuous struggle. It’s just depending on how you look at it it’s potentially a positive or maybe that’s a tragedy that nothing changes in terms of his idea of his ability to answer that question and maybe that’s a tragic thing. On the other hand, understanding that these boxes that we’re told we must fit in, in terms of identity, in some cases it’s possibly a very positive thing. He’s a human being. So if you say he should identify as one particular thing, there’s a lot of assumptions that come along with whatever he chooses to say or what people say he is.

There’s the stereotype that comes with that. There’s the biases that come with that. And for him, Trelawny’s just trying to be a human in the world and trying to deal with a lot of the difficulties that

come along with being alive at the time he is. And so in a way, I think there’s a kind of possibility there for him so that he’s not necessarily given into the limitations of a particular idea of him. But I don’t know that he comes to one particular idea of what are you. It’s not necessarily a question that he believes he should be asked in the first place.

James Walton:

Yeah, there is that. Okay, thank you. Thanks. Thanks Jonathan, very much. And so to our second debut book on the shortlist, which is Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane, a deeply moving account of a bereaved family, that’s all the more moving really for how much the book and the family leave unsaid, I would suggest. Instead, the game of squash becomes a way that the three daughters and their father spend time together initially and kind of connect following the death of his wife and their mother. And 11-year-old Gopi and turns out to be very keen on the game. She’s the youngest of the three and, luckily, very good at it too. Chetna, usual welcome, thanks and congratulations to you on Western Lane. I did try, but I couldn’t avoid the obvious first question. Did you play squash when you were younger and were you quite good at it?

Chetna Maroo:

Well, when I was a child, much younger, I was extremely uncoordinated and I didn’t do sports. But much later in life, I started playing squash probably when I was about 19. And then it was years after that that I played properly. And I think the main thing that helped me play properly was taking lessons and I had a really great coach who taught me to think of the game as a fight for space and that the objective is the game is to move the opponent and not the ball. And so as well as doing lots of drills so those two things were really a foundation for the game, which held me in good stead. I would play in not amazing leagues, but decent leagues and it probably more than three or four times I would be in the court and a six-foot man would turn up, come in the court, look at me and think, “Okay, well it’s not really worth playing this through.” And I wasn’t great, but I was probably more accurate and more strategic and so I had a bit of a surprise.

James Walton:

Did you wonder how much squash to put in the book? Which I would say is just the right amount by the way. I’m not doing a Joey Paxman here.

Chetna Maroo:

It wasn’t something I worried about. As I was writing, it was just a case of trying to figure out where is the right place to go here with this sort of family that are struggling with their grief. And actually, when the squash appears, it’s not just again, that’s on the page. What we’re seeing is how this family are interacting with each other and what the young girl who’s narrating, she’s 11 in the narrative, how she’s using the game to make sense of the world, to watch people, to figure out what someone is about to do, what they’re feeling. So having squash in the book and having a lot of squash in the book didn’t worry me because it wasn’t just there for the game.

James Walton:

No, it’s really not just squash. For example, that very first page that we heard there, the narrator says the echo, which is the ball striking the wall of the court is louder than the shot itself. And in a way, I don’t know if this is contentious review ease, but that’s what I do. In a way that’s how the book works because the prose is quiet, it’s understated, but the echo of it, the pain that’s underlying it is much

louder. And as I say, it’s a book in a way, which the family and the book leave quite a lot unsaid, but that it still, it’s very powerful to the reader. So basically, what I’m saying is how do you write about the unsaid, given that by definition you can’t say it.

Chetna Maroo:

Talk about two things there. So one of the inspirations for the book, or not for the book, but when I was thinking about the book, so I had the world of the story, but I was kind of resisting writing it as a novel. And in the days before I wrote the opening, I went back to a lot of the science fiction of my childhood, and I kept going back to this one line from Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, “Because this moment simply is.” And this idea that a moment is permanently in space and it exists permanently in space, it sort of became the fabric of the book.

And so that kind of idea of you mentioned the reverberation and that’s sort of the moment kind of reverberating through time was… Yeah, I kind of had it in my head from going back to some of those books that I was reading. In terms of the unsaid, I think once I had felt my way into the mind of this 11-year-old girl in this family that is dealing with grief, it just came naturally to understand that what happens, a lot of what happens is going to be unspoken.

James Walton:

And yet it comes through very powerfully in the book. So thank you to you. And so to our final shortlisted author, Paul Harding, whose novel, This Other Eden, is inspired by a pretty shocking true story about an island off the coast of Maine that for more than a century was home to a racially integrated community, descended from enslaved people, Native Americans and others. Until that is in the early 20th century when the state authorities eradicated it. I mean so completely they eradicated not just the living members, but also the dead ones by digging up the graves. In the book this is all done in the name of science as well, and specifically eugenics, the belief that unhealthy or unworthy stock shouldn’t be allowed to breed, and call between the authorities and the islanders in a way is Matthew Diamond, a Christian teacher who visits every summer and has built a school on what in the book is called Apple Island.

Hello Paul and welcome. And just for interest’s sake, where are you? Where do we find you?

Paul Harding:

I’m on scenic Long Island in New York.

James Walton:

Amazing. Amazing the world, isn’t it? Anyway, so I suppose again, the fairly straightforward first question, but when did you first come across this extraordinary story of the island off Maine?

Paul Harding:

I’d been just sort of informally reading about the formation of labour unions, actually, in the United States after the American Civil War, and those are some of the first institutions in the United States anyways, who advocated for things like civil rights and women’s suffrage and so forth. And for some reason, it just occurred to me that after the Civil War, there must’ve been all Black and probably racially integrated communities. So I just googled it and lo and behold, I came upon the story of Malaga Island pretty quickly and it just started to sort of insinuate itself in my imagination, partly because it’s off the coast of the stat

state of Maine. And there was something about an island that just I found to be resonant and sort of interesting. And one of the families that was evicted were, actually, committed to an institution called the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, which played a small role in my first novel Tinkers.

And this is when you’re a writer, you were just always asking the universe to give you a sign. And so I was already just sort of fascinated with the story of this place and the displacement of these people. And then I found out that to the month, if not to the week, that the people were evicted from the island, the first International Congress for Eugenics was taking place in London. So I thought that was a pretty good sign from the universe to start imagining my way into a very highly fictionalised version of it. I wouldn’t call it historical fiction per se.

The documentary version of the story it wasn’t mine to write. I don’t have any connection with the people that live up there, the descendants. So once I knew that I was going to write about a plot and a story that was inspired by those historical events, I stopped doing research. I just had read two or three articles about the island, and I stopped doing research and started just trying to work up an imagined version of a story like Malaga’s.

James Walton:

Do you think there’s any danger in romanticising the Islanders? Were you conscious of that?

Paul Harding:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I tried not to romanticise them. I mean, I was trying to find a balance. Like some of the other authors have been saying most of the book, as I realised sort of what the kind of tragic dimensions of the book, I realised that most of the book, most of the pages of the book were to be spent just with these people as individuals, as family members who loved each other, who drove each other crazy, who were loyal to one another. Just how they lived their lives, just people trying to live their lives every day. And the actual eviction and the terrible things that happened to them are probably only five or 10 pages in the book.

I realise one of the dangers is romanticising what happened. Another danger would make the violence so prevalent that it became gratuitous and sensationalistic. And then sort of combination of those two terrible options would be to write the book in such a way where, in the end, the subject was the reader’s self-righteous indignation about what happened to these people. Because the true subject of the books are those human lives, those people that are trying to just sort of make lives for themselves.

James Walton:

Okay, thank you. Sorry, you have to be really quick on quite a complicated question, but this character, Matthew Diamond, who’s caught in the middle is interesting. On the one hand, he had sort of revolted by Black people really, but he’s Christian and he wants to do his best and he’s absolutely outraged by what the authorities do when that happens and quite surprised. So did you see him as a villain, as a fool, or possibly even as a tragic figure?

Paul Harding:

Well, I think I certainly consulted my Shakespeare with him. One of the things that I’m always fascinated with Shakespeare’s villains as it were, is, and what I think to the extent that I tried to make Matthew Diamond a human being with greater and worse impulses is that he’s very aware of his own racism and he knows better. He’s ashamed by it and he’s disgusted by it. And that seemed to be, to me, a perennial, universal, recognisable human situation is to have a bad impulse that’s a bigotry and know it’s terrible,

but still not feel differently. So he knows that his prejudice is terrible, and yet he experiences it nonetheless.

James Walton:

That’s true. We don’t always feel the things we want to feel. That’s, of course, true. Very interesting. Thank you very much. And our time has now run out, but let me thank most warmly then the Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival for having us and you all for coming. And of course, Paul Lynn, Sarah Bernstein, Paul Murray, Jonathan Escoffery, Chetna Maroo, and Paul Harding.

Huge thanks and good luck to them all for November 26 is the big day.

Jo Hamya:

And there we have it. James, I’m so jealous. It sounds like you had an amazing time.

James Walton:

That was really, really good. Really, really good fun. As I say, only undermined slightly by my feelings of mild hypocrisy at the fact I was about to be less than complimentary about some of those books at the podcasts we did on the shortlist. But again, a pleasure to meet all of the writers, and I do wish them all well for November 26 when the winner is announced.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. And you’ll have to go to confession and purge yourself of your sins because, hopefully, we’ll be talking to a few of them at the winners ceremony.

James Walton:

Let’s say they don’t all listen to the podcast.

Jo Hamya:

That’s it for this week.

James Walton:

And you can find out more about all of this year’s shortlisted authors at the thebookerprizes.com. We now also have a Facebook book group that you can join at facebook.com/theBookerPrizes.

Jo Hamya:

And remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Substack at The Booker Prizes.

James Walton:

Until next time, goodbye.

Jo Hamya:

Bye.

James Walton:

The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by Jo Hamya and me, James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Kevin Muyolo and the executive producer is John Davenport. This is Daddy’s SuperYacht Production for the Booker Prize.