Hi, everyone, welcome to Susurrus, the show where we talk everything books, and I'm your host Nandini Krishnan. So, I've been thinking about the Booker Prize, and how I'm actually happy with the outcome. And I was thinking of all the books that haven't won the Booker Prize. And I wanted to speak today about one of my favourite authors, Jim Crace, who has been shortlisted not once, but twice for the Booker. The first of his books to be shortlisted was the spellbinding Quarantine, in 1997, and the second book was The Harvest, in 2013, a book which he said took only six months to write and wrote when he was dealing with writer's block for another novel which remains unfinished.

It was another novel which introduced me to his writing, though—Being Dead, published in 1999, which...it's one of those rare novels about which you can say everything without giving anything away, because there is no plot as such. The blurb would simply say it is a couple on their holiday... or what was supposed to be their holiday. The book is a delight because it is an experience in itself, it is an immersive experience of being transported to a world created by a master craftsman who can describe everything in such minute detail and yet leave so much scope for the reader's imagination that you feel you are travelling in a world of which you are the only occupant, other than for his characters. It is your world, and you can do what you like. And at some point, it meets the other world, the real world, the world inhabited by the daughter of the couple.

It might be the least political of his novels, but actually, for a man who is so political himself and has such strong opinions on the world and on Britain and on social justice, his works are immensely subtle and contemplative. I, in fact, interviewed him ten years ago, and you can find the link on the Fountain Ink website. () And I asked him this very question, and he told me that if you're using your writing as a campaign vehicle, you should be writing pamphlets and I simply love that attitude. For him, writing is all about storytelling, it is about leaving the facts behind to look at other facts, the facts in the world outside his novels, the facts of the lives we live and the things we do and we don't do, and that we perhaps should do. And here's a little nugget which tells you just how intricate his descriptions are—he told me how he was once on a panel with the famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and Dawkins asked him about a particular insect that he had written about in some detail in Being Dead. And apparently, he said, "Jim, I've never heard of this insect. Where did you read about it? And which place is it native to?" And Jim Crace had the pleasure of telling him that he had imagined it.

I would later read his Harvest, which has a mediaeval setting and a sense of the brutal idea of justice that existed in the Middle Ages, and in some strange way, it reminded me of the film The Mill and the Cross, which itself draws upon the painting The Procession to Calvary by Pieter Bruegel the Elder as well as a book on the painting by Michael Francis Gibson, also called The Mill and the Cross. Unlike in the painting and in the film, there is no referencing of Jesus Christ, but one gets the sense this was set around the same period as the time the painting was created, in the 1500s. Your religion could be reason for persecution by the state, and persecution essentially meant you were being tortured on one of the devices the engineers of the middle ages seemed to delight in creating—innovative means of pushing the body to extreme pain, and sometimes for the slightest of things, such as petty theft. I remember all these years later, how much I loved the way Crace brings alive the process of making sheets of vellum on which maps are drawn. This is among his more densely plotted novels, and I think if you're not used to his style of writing, it might be a good place to start.

And that brings me to another aspect of his writing. He doesn't usually have settings for his novels. In fact, early in his career, that was one of his most political acts, the absolute refusal to set his novels in a particular country or give his characters a particular face. I suppose in a way it tells us that we could all be each other, that any country could be any other, that we are all capable of the same things and that we could all undergo the same things. And it makes me wonder whether the 1980s were a better time to write than now, you know? Now, publishers seem to want us to be so overtly political and so temporally and spatially specific that our fiction is really fact disguised as fiction.

This aspect of his writing is most evident in his first book Continent, which is basically a collection of stories, which makes you question the very idea of truth. And there's another interesting story about this. So, the 1980s were apparently a time when writers didn't woo literary agents. It was the other way round. And Jim Crace had been a journalist for a fair bit, and even before he conceived of the idea that would become his debut, Continent, David Godwin had gone all the way to Birmingham to convince him to write a novel.

And that brings me to what might be my favourite book among his--Quarantine. Back when I read it, and back when it was written, in 1997, it didn't have the connotations it does post-pandemic. It had, in fact, to do with the forty days Jesus Christ spent wandering the desert, and it is one of the most tender, powerful books written about a central character who comes across in turns as vulnerable, delusional, pitiful, and dangerous. I found it terribly interesting that an atheist should choose this particular subject and as I would discover when I discussed the book with the author himself, it was his intention to undermine our core ideas of faith, that for instance the power comes from elsewhere in the universe, that our determination and our pushing ourselves to overcome the greatest of obstacles does not come from within ourselves but from some mythic and divine force. As it happened, a great many readers wrote to him speaking about how the book had helped them find their faith. In my own case, it was a book that left me feeling incredibly strong and yet tired. And I think it is a book that everyone must read at least once in one's lifetime.

He said after Harvest that he would retire from writing, but some years later, he wrote Melody. This book does have a central theme, and one that finds echo throughout the world, the buying up of land by developers from people who have the ownership of prime real estate, but no money to do anything about it. But it is also about the life of a grieving widower, and in a way, it evokes our tendency to want to cling on to something that gives us a sense of sameness right after we have suffered a loss that changes our lives forever. When something is wrenched from us, how do we exercise our control again? Do we let go of everything else, because it no longer matters? Or do we hold on tighter than ever to the things that we  can control?

I'm afraid I haven't read his latest book eden, and that's something I'm going to set right now. And if you haven't read him, you should set that right too. So, happy reading and I'll meet you in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, do send your feedback to f-e-e-d-b-a-c-k@fountainink.in.