 ni a ddwych am wneud hyni yn lleio ar y dyfodol yr oed... ..og hynny'n cyffredinol i wneud hyn i'r hyn a'r newid erbyn gwneud arall... ..y hoffio ar yr hynny, lleio ar yr hyn a'r newid erbyn safoddd cyntafhau collection. Dechrau'r penolol â gwwlaeth wedi bod yn gweithgiwch yng Nghymru. Cymru wedi cael ei wneud â ydwr. Cymru roedd yn fynd nhw'n gwneud ar gyfer i'r rhywbeth, y bydd oedd y gwaith yn y bydd yn meddwyr gynghetaeth. Ond dyma'r Algherwyddor phaeth. A'r rhaid i chi'n fydd am fyddai rhaid i'r rhagorau, yma, oherwydd i chi'n ddweud am y gallwn y cyfrindig, a'r rhagorau arall, i chi'n ddod i'r rhagorau arall a'r rhagorau arall. Rhaid i chi'n ddweud am y rhagorau yn Brithym yn y rhaid i chi'n meddwl. Yr rhagorau hyn yn gallu ei wneud o'r rhagorau arall? Rhaid i chi'n ddweud i chi'n ddweud am gyfnodig yma. yw'r oedd yn gwybod, yn ystod o'r sgol, rydyn ni'n ddysigion gwybod yna yn fwy o'r ysgrifennu yma, yna phobl yma, oherwydd mae'n ei ystyried. Rydyn ni'n ffordd y gallwch chi yn cyffredig o'r pethau yma, yn ymgyrch chi'n mynd i gael ei gael i'ch hyn o wneud o'r syddau i'r oedd. Rossall wedyn yn rhan o'n panesol o'r ysgrifennu yn 1925. Rydyn ni wedyn yn ymgyrchu'r ysgrifennu, yng nghymru yn cael ei ddweud o'r rhan o'i rhan o'r llunio. Felly, mae'r rhwng yn 1943-1945 o'r cyrraedd yr Eurich Arddurol Yng Nghymru. Yn hynny, mae'n fawr o'r cyrraedd yn cynfer yng nghyrch, mae'r cyrraedd rhan o'r cyrraedd yn cyrraedd, a fydd yw'r pethau yn y rhan o'r llunio'r llunio'r llunio, a'n hynny mae'n rhan o'r cyrraedd o'r llunio'r llunio'r llunio'r llunio. yna 68, mae periad diweddio i London yng nghymru, mae gennymddol y byddiw'r first full length novel, The M Aixòid His Child, yn gynghoran gw Johnson, ychydig ychydig, felly iawn yn gwleidio ar y ffilm Peter in the Voices, o Peter Eustonof ac Floris Leechman. Yr ffordd anent hynny y novel, y linell dadw y byw, J-Chin ac J-Cin Bywb drws gael y modd 1973 ac many môr ffaithian. Ridlee Walker, ryddw i'n gweithio y 1980, dim yn yw gennymd gwellith ar gyfer oes. yma'r dyw'r ysgol yn y Llyfrgell, ac yn gyntafol yn gynnal i gweithio. Y 1985 yw'r diariwch ymdodwch yn ymdodwch ar gyfer Harold Pinter yn y ffilm o Ben Kingsley a Glenda Jackson. Rwy'n gwneud o'r ddechrau, rysyn rydyn ni'n gwneud yma'r llwyffaeth yn y llwyffaeth yn y bwysigol yn y gweithwyr, ac yn y bwysigol yn y llwyffaeth ar y llwyffaeth yma. Mae'r llwyffaeth yn y bwysigol yn y bwysigol yn y bwysigol. Rhyddli Walker rydyn nhw'n dod o'r cymdeithasol ar y cwyrdd mewn cyfnod. Peter Carey oedd y gwneud y worker genius, y cwyrdd yn ystod panfodol a lexicon yn y môn o'r ysgawdd yn y dyfodol 40 yma. Harold Bloom yn ymgyrch ar y cymdeithasol y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, canoedd y Nesaf, ac Anthony Burgess yn ymddi'r rwyf yn ymddi'r llyfrgell yn ymddi. Rhyw ymddi'r gweithio'r rhannu oedd ymddi'r rhannu oherwydd mae'n gwybodol ysgol ar y cyfeithio ar y cyfnod. While we know that the language of English takes the story of the English language as documented over in the main exhibition in the British Library of Old English which has been published in English which is one language in many of our voices, we treat the story up to the present day across a thousand years. Russell takes it into far, far, far possible future. Will Self is normally also a normally also has been called original strange and probably cult as well. A chael rydyn ni dod i dechrau i gael gwiriaith ac ar Tynni, ac yn ei cynill i ddim iawn i'ch gwiriaith iawn wrthOD yn ynnu i'ch gael gwiriaith. Rydyn ni'n ei ddim yn gyfieithio cymaintol i wrthod digwydd â'u Cynlluniaeth 2002 diolch. A rydyn ni'n ddysgu fynd ni yn ei ddiweddod â'r gweinydd arno gydag weithio i ddau'i gael gweithydd a grolgo i rusti ar gynnwys gyr 때�dd. Hesbun ddod i'r ffrinog, ac yn ffartigio, ar y rossel, i'ch ei wneud y gallwn i chi amser, ac mae sy'n siaradau sydd wedi cael ei fod yn ymwneud gyda'w, mae hyn yn allan ar gyfer hyn i eisiau ddim yn âthawr i chi'r pwgraedd, mae yna ymwneud i chi yn ymwneud i eraill, ond nid am ddespwg ar rheidio'n edrych i chi bwgraedd, Mae'r ddweud i ddweud o ffordd a wneud hynny, mae'n dwynaeth gennym oherwydd neid yn ei fod. Felly yna mor hyn yn edrych bod bod ni'n sefydlu tynnu gwrdd rhesymyn y ffordd yw'r nobl ar gwybod, a dyf yn gallu'r rhesymyn mynd yn bydd o'r gwrdd. Felly mae ac yn hawlol oherwydd rhesymyn y ffordd ac mae'n rhesymyn'r gwrdd oherwydd eich gwrdd oherwydd mae'n hynny'n ddweud yn gyfod. Mae'r llwyr yn yw'r cyfeirio gwybodaeth sy'n gyffredig yn ymwyno'r lleidio'r lleidio. Fy hwnna'r lleidio'r lleidio'r lleidio, ond mae'n ystafell yna yn ymddangos i'r cyd-draes o'r ffordd. Felly mae'r llwyddoedd yn gweithio'r lleidio'r lleidio gyda'r lleidio. Felly mae hi'n gweld yn gwybodaeth. Mae'r lleidio yn ymddangos i'r lleidio. Felly mae'n ymddangos i'r lleidio, ond mae hi'n gwybodaeth. Yn rhai, maen nhw'n gwybod sy'n gweld ysrachol ar yr ubyn ni yn ddibigwyd i'r pwyd. Mae ydw i mewn ys lui, mae'n meddwl i'r pwyd yn ffawr, mae'n fawr i'r pwyd yn ei wneud, mae'n gweld i'r pwyd yn ei ddadfodol, ac mae'n gwneud yn ffocws chi o'r wrthod arnyn nhw'n wcrawl, ac mae'n fawr i'n roi sy'n bwysigol i gweithio i y fathwr ac e'n gweld i'n credu'r todayl. But now I have read the novel four times. I have read it the fourth time over the weekend. I was absolutely stunned again by it. Emotionally disturbed by it. Perhaps I have become emotionally laboured as I get older. But I have found it more disturbing emotionally than on any of the previous readings. I think you wanted to have some readings. Should I maybe start with one of those? Roselett asked me to read a passage. I said to me just now, you will'e of course be reading it in the portentish accent. Some 2,000 years in the future. Rydli Walker, part of the wood. There is in the heart of the wood in the Yusa story. That were a stag, everyone knows that. There is in the heart of the wood, meaning the various deep of it. That's another thing. There is the heart of the wood where they burn the charred coal. That's another thing, again, innit? That's another thing, burning the charred coal in the heart of the wood. That's what they call the stack of wood, you see? The stack of wood in the shape they do it for charred coal burning. Why do they call it the heart though? That's what this year's story tells of. Everyone knows about bad time and what come after. Bad time first and bad times after. Not many come through it alive. There come a man and a woman and a child out of a burning town they sheltered in the woodlings and foraging the best they could. Starveling they were, what they were doing. Didn't have no weapons nor didn't know now how to make a snare nor nothing. Snow on the ground and a grey sky overing and the black trees rubbing their branches in the wind. Grows calling one to another, waiting for the three of them to drop. The man, the woman and the child digging through the snow they were eating moss and dead leaves which they vomited them up again. Freeze in cold they were, nor didn't have nothing to make a fire with to get warm. Starveling they were and near come to the end of their strength. The child said, oh, I'm so cold. I'm a fear that I'm going to die if only we had a little fire to get warm at. The man didn't have no way of making a fire. He didn't have no flint and steel nor nothing. Wood all round them. Only there weren't no way he know it of getting warm from it. The three of them ready for auntie. They were ready to total and done. When there come through the woodlings, a clever looking bloke and singing a little song to his cell. My rodings been so hungry. I've grown so very thin. I've got a little cook pot but nothing to put in. The man and the woman said to the clever looking bloke, do you know how to make fire? The clever looking bloke said, oh yes. If I know anything, I know that right enough. Fire is my middle name you might say. The man and the woman said, would you make a little fire then? We are freezing of the cold. The clever looking bloke said, that for you what for me? The man and the woman said, what do we have for waffras? They look at one to the other and both at the child. The clever looking bloke said, I'll tell you what I'll do. I will share my fire and my cook pot with if you'll share what to put in the pot. He were looking at the child. The man and the woman thought, two out of three alive is better than three dead. And they said, done. They killed the child and drunk its blood and cut up the meat for cooking. The clever looking bloke said, I'll show you how to make fire. Plus, I'll give you flint and steel and makings. Nor you don't have to share with me nothing of the meat, only the heart. Which he made the fire then and gave them the flint and steel and makings. Then he cooked the heart of the child and ate it. The clever looking bloke said, cleverness is gone now, but little by little it'll come back. The iron will come back again one day and when the iron comes back they will burn charcoal in the heart of the wood and when they burn the charcoal their stat will be in the shape of the heart of the child. Off he gone then singing, seed of the little, seed of the wild, seed of the burning is heart of the child. The man and the woman then eating their child it were a black night all round them. They made their fire bigger and bigger trying to keep the black from moving in on them. They fell asleep by their fire and the fire biggering on it and hit them up. They burned to death. They bend the old ones or you might say the old ones and become charred coal. That's why they'll tell you that the elder tree is best for charring coal. Sometimes you'll hear of an elder kinsher he carries off children. Out goes the candle, out goes the light, out goes my story and so, good night. In your afterward to the book Russell you described this trip to Canterbury Cathedral and seeing the mural of St Eustace's story being a kind of epithanic moment when the book started to come to you. Is that true? It is true and I often try to describe the process and I'll be repeating myself as I have in various media it's a matter of being friends with your head and my head has a way of keeping things reservoir of ideas waiting to hook up with whatever they want to hook up with and so it happened that when I was looking at this 15th century painting of St Eustace that my mind jumped to a series of articles by Edmund Wilson of the New Yorker magazine about Punch and Judy puppeteers the men who make the puppets and perform with them and these things hooked up in that particular way and I had the beginning of Rindy Walker where I tell her puppeteers propagate the policies of such a government as there is at his time. I spoke what surprises people and to some extent even surprises me is that there's nothing programmatic about this you didn't think to yourself when we're talking about the early 1970s a time when the United States and the Soviet Union were in a position of mutually assured destruction it had been ten years or so since the Cuban missile crisis but you weren't thinking to yourself I need to write a post apocalyptic novel to warn people about the follies of nuclear war there was no element of that in your thinking writing novels with a message I dare to say although I'm sure there are examples to prove me wrong is a sure road to disaster I think you have to write with what I think the best writing is done with what enters you and takes possession of you and doesn't let go of you until you get the job done but this vision of the post apocalyptic world in Ridley Walker feels so highly achieved and did it take an enormous effort to create it again in the notes in my edition I was just reading from you described how when you started writing it it was still in a relatively standard English but quite soon it shifted into Ridley Speak almost immediately shifted into Ridley Speak and I went with it I trusted my gut feeling about it and I kept lists of the new words that I was putting into it and occasionally I would have to go back and bring the new words into where they belong and the thing about Ridley Speak is that I didn't calculate it as such but what it does technically is make the reader slow down to Ridley's rate of perception so technically it's a good device I agree but also it seems to me to rub away at the present and create a sense of deep time in and of itself so while this is a language of the distant future it also seems to be a language of the distant past at the same time I think it does some people have compared it to Middle English so again I have to charge that to inspiration which is a tired out and overused and now almost meaningless word but I think that it came to me to do the thing as I did it and I can't quote it for a Bayesian Ralph Waldo Emerson said something about a channel of public energy that a man can tune into and when I was working on Ridley Walker any particular idea channel I found was fed by tributaries of ideas that I didn't know the existence of they just fed into it I mean I'm not making this as a critical remark it's a fairly long process right here it took me about four years to ride the boat it took me five and a half years and in the first two years excuse me I have to put some more in the first two years I had 500 pages but they weren't in they were concentrated enough and they were spread over too much geography and so I started again this time I boiled it down to 200 and something pages and that's where I went with to what extent I mean you had come to live in England in the late 1960s that trip to Canterbury the exposure to the murals in the early 1970s to what extent do you think coming to live here was implicated in the inspiration of the novel I mean it's in a way a ludicrous counterfactual having written it in the United States no, I'm trying to track back to the beginnings of it well first of all I came to this country because of an obsession with British ghost stories with M.R. James, Cheryl of the New, Algevon of Blackwood, Arthur Macdon and I wanted to spend some time living in London that had figured in those stories and being here I opened myself to the ethos of English storytelling I don't know, I've never said this before I don't know if it rings true or not but anyhow that's what I'm saying now and when the time came for Ridley Walker it was entering I finished Terminal Diary in 1974 and one of the things that helped to get me started with Ridley Walker was a story by Gerald Kirsh called Voices of the Dust of Anon in which an explorer in the future falls through the ruins of what used to be London and finds himself living in some very small people who dress in rapskinns and hunt rats and live on them and they sing corrupted versions of songs like Balasamo, Balasamo and Oopryo Karabin and that intrigued me and I felt like falling around with language that way so that was one of the elements that came into it and I don't remember whether there was anything else that was a starter that made me go from Terminal Diary to Ridley Walker except when I visited Canterbury Cathedral I stood in that name and looked up at this numinous fanbolting and I could feel the uprush of all these centuries of hopes and fears and aspiration and hopes for salvation and something like that takes hold of you and then I walked up those steps and as the place where Beckett was murdered they remembered blood shall sieve some of those stones and got to the North Island and found this painting of St Eustis on this side of the wall was the original painting faded almost to nothing earth green faint tracer on this side was Professor Tristan's reconstruction with the story and from bottom to top we saw how Eustis, who was a commander of horse in the Roman army saw Christ crucified in the Amazon stag and he immediately was converted and set off on a pilgrimage his wife is taken off by pirates he was crossing a river with his two little sons got one son to the farther bank came back to the other when the wolf carried off the one son and aligned the other and Eustis in the middle of the river trefying water and hoping for better times and my life at that time was such that I identified with Eustis and when all came there Eustis of course came to he's an apocryphal saint so he lends himself well to fiction and he and his wife and children ended up being roasted alive in a brazen bull so it wasn't a good trip for him altogether but it got me started on quite an interesting trip One of the very powerful, many powerful and affecting aspects of the novel for me is the way that Ridley and the people of his period conflict their sort of scumbled half-forgotten, orally transmitted memories of Christianity with the cultural memory of science and the power of science and this is very moving so the user story conflates elements of atomic fiction with Christianity and again was this I realise I'm well prepared to be not back on this but was there an intellectual element to you devising this syncretism or was it again a question of inspiration that occurred to you that that's what it would be like? I plead innocent to the charge of intellectuality Do you have any support? I fly completely by the seat of my pants and I write with what comes to me and when Eustis confronts the little shining man, the album and pulls him apart like he was a chicken that's just the way the story came to me There are some elements in Ridley's world though that again ring completely authentic and seem very much what one would expect but again I wondered how they occurred to you for start Ridley's 12, it's been as the book starts with his naming day he's 12 years old and it's a culture in which a 12 year old boy is a man and so one assumes that lifespan is relatively short he's already sexually active at this age the other thing and I don't know where he's remarked on this before he moves incredibly fast when he's rogim around post apocalyptic Kent he seems to cover anything up to 40 or 50 miles a night Charles Dickens will now walk he will do the 25 mile walks and come home and write 50 letters Ridley's walking is confident in his culture So it's an expression of the kind of energy and the vitality Good party says to him Ridley you're a mover I wouldn't have to do nothing but maybe you keep moving you'd get everything done I wondered I mean I don't know much about you biographically apart from what's in the public domain but you served with the US Army during the Second War you must have seen some things as they say I wonder how much that informed your post apocalyptic vision of a society where life is extremely cheap I don't know I never fired a shot in anger but I was shot at and I saw a lot of dead bodies turning various colours and bloating and certainly that goes into the consciousness having been equated with death at first hand Because you write about it or Ridley through Ridley you write about it in a way that in some ways seems to have no effect at all but in other ways is of course highly emotionally coloured and it struck me that Ridley's world is a kind of a war zone Yes it is It's full of danger from all sides and with danger threatening from abroad too in the form of what they call firing secret trires making us for the one little one Was it the again it seemed to me again the logical way in creating Ridley's world would have been for it to be an oral culture and it does have many elements of what you expect in oral culture to be like a concentration on and what people can hold in their minds and yet Ridley is illiterate Was that just necessary in order for the book itself to exist well I mean Ridley can write and it is a illiterate culture that confused me in a way and yet in another way it seems in keeping with the kind of otherness of this world that it should be a illiterate culture Well I'm trying to remember whether I wrote that or connection then can read and write I think they could and certainly the people who govern the country at the round were illiterate well the book couldn't have existed without Ridley's being illiterate No no I know you would have had to find some other framing mechanism in order to convey his narrative but again I'm not saying on the country I think it's one of the marvellous things about the book that it is a world entire that is kind of believable in that way and isn't exactly constant it's not just like an Iron Age culture in that way I mean did you look at things like ancient history and prehistory and things like that before you began writing I started my first attempt was written into standard English and it had Ridley as a kind of anthropologist a kind of men's apolitist who was interested in his culture and I remember looking up some words and I think phainites and I went down that road very briefly and then tossed it out of the window and I did what I did in Clownside where instead of reading medical dictionaries I made up my own names for things so that he was... the hypoxies so that's when I... in Clownside though that invented medical dictionaries I remember very well is simultaneously funny and very disturbing at the same time the most unsettling beginning to occur but there's a different kind of tension or a different kind of access in Ridley's speech isn't there I mean when I was introducing it I was saying how intense the emotional it made me feel as a book, very sad, very lonely very intense about people in that way, was that your experience in writing it? Was it... Yes, his... his language is emotional and I felt it when I was writing there was a point when Ridley and I both wept when I was writing the book and that's when after a good parlor and Grancer have blown themselves up this black dog the black leader of the Burgdorff pack who is his constant companion this dog looks like death on four legs and has yellow eyes and he just knows that to Ridley's hand and wants to be petted and Ridley says that's when I cried for the dead and that's when I cried when I wrote it so that I didn't live that book as I wrote it There's a sense isn't there that all of Ridley's feeling is sort of post-traumatic in the way that he cannot allow himself to respond to his father's death at the beginning of the book he just shifts from one man to another and to begin with you think hang on a minute you can't now suddenly be liking good parlor you've gone for the listener then you go for good parlor then Belmock Fist and so on and yet isn't that about him trying to deal with the loss of his father in some way? The loss of brutal water in Witterstump has a profound effect on Ridley and he is, you know, they said goodbye to Bruder on the bye-bye hunt and they sung past the sorrow of galaxies and flaming nebulae he's seething inside and he is just about ready to go when in the digging at Witterstump he reaches down into the muck and comes up with this blackened figure of punch and Belmock this says, here give me that and Ridley pulls him into the muck and leaves him with his legs sticking up and goes over the fence and you could read Shall I read that? Shall I do it also in my immaculate? Shall I do it in my immaculate future? Absolutely immaculate. Ridley Walker I put my hand in the muck and I reach it down and come up with something it were a show figure like the ones in the user show wooden head and hands and the rest of it cloth all of it gone black and show man's hands still in it cut off just a little way of the rest a grown-up hand and a regular show man he'd been because when I wipe it off you could see the callus on my head finger same as all the user show me now this ear figure though it weren't like no other figure I ever seen it were crooked had a hump on it's back and parpe a soap there in the cloth for a while I couldn't think what it might be then when it come to me what it were I couldn't hardly believe it yet there it were nor no mistake in it it were a hump and it weren't meant to be a hump it weren't like no other head I ever seen in a show neither the face had a big nose would hook it down and a big chin would hook it up and a smiling mouth some kind of little pointy hat on the head curve it over with a wagger on the end of it I'd been so interested in the figure and the dead hand I hadn't been taking no notice of no one round me I look it up and I remember that little whitey bloke bell not fist standing by the hole and his little pinky eye on me I felt like making a bad luck go away sign fist says what's that you've got there I didn't say nothing we weren't allowed to keep nothing we found in the digging sometimes they used to search us though not always he says you best answer me I said what's that you've got there I said why do you have a look for yourself he says alright I will then give it a ear he come to the edge of the hole and stuck out his hand I put the figure and the dead hand in my pocket then quick I grab it fist's hand in both of mine and whirl it round fast and slung him over my shoulder head head first into the muck I couldn't do nothing else to save my life out the corner of my eye I see his feet sticking up out of the muck and kicking and chalk a marchman the first man of the digging coming after me I up it out of the hole with my feet sucking and squelching and up the mounted dirt to the high walk and over the fence before I know it why we're doing it were my feet done it by their selves never give it no thought at all come down with a thump on the outside of the fence and sliding down the slippy bank into the ditch which I come up out of the soak it and sopping and there were that black leader waiting for me with his yellow eyes just standing there in the rain and waiting for it you have something in your little bag it shows I do indeed I have brought Mr Punch that's his slapstick and here's the man himself he's made by Bob Wade who has much bigger hands and bigger wrists than I do and I haven't got a swallow but uh put your, put your, put your sorry I was thinking a lot about Mr Punch and Mr Punch in from the earliest versions of the Punch and Judy show he kills his kills his wife he kills the baby he kills Jack Ketch he kills I think several members of the police and other authorities and he even kills the devil and he says now everyone can do as they like now the great Percy Press who was the premier Punch showman said to me Punch is so old he can't die he's a law unto himself and thinking about Punch he doesn't seem to there's something in him that doesn't care about him that he is simply the vehicle for it and I was remembering a broken seagull do you want to read that bit we never found that bit in my copy you'll find it shall we read it you won't be able to read it now I'd like to have really these words exactly if I can find the damn thing shall I have a look I think I've got it it's listed as other gold sign did I mark the beginning no you haven't it's when Ridley's the rain have it on by the end of the day we're coming down in buckets plus it bloomed up a heavy wind no he says one type of mine he's with the listener he's with the listener full circle nine ways horny boy run with his bell no no the hell with it then it's a great bit as we get on to the bloke has gone top of auntie one of my favourites that sort of links in with punch I mean and with kind of I mean there are a lot of these kind of powerful mythological figures in Ridley's book you tell us what you wanted he was remembering walking with his dad on the shore one time when they saw a broke of gold and his father killed it but the gold the gold's yellow eyes scared us to the last and it was as if it was something in the creature that didn't care nothing for the creature at all it was just something and that something is in punch but that's also echoed in the story that Lorna tells him early on where he says she's discovered there's something looking out through her eyes so they have a consciousness of this elemental force that's refracted back to them through the punch story this thing that lives in all of us but doesn't care for us it uses us it puts us on to act out what we will but it doesn't really care and we we are the people who Ridley looks back to as the ones who made the one big one from more than 2,000 years ahead he looks back to us as the people who made the one big one and this thing in us didn't care nothing for us didn't care nothing for anybody it's just there and there's a tension isn't there in his perception of the people of the past he both thinks that they're kind of before the fall they're prelapsarian figures who were kind of integrated psychically and he feels the weight of dualism doesn't he he's always worried about the two being main into one he feels his own reflective self-consciousness as a burden and yet in the mythology and the kind of punch story that comes round the clever, Mr clever is responsible for the destruction of all this good so it's almost as if enshrined in the people from the past is their own destruction at the same time I've never had the opportunity to use the word prelapsarian I I myself postlapsarian eat yourself later in the day I never feel the day is done let the day begin anyhow my answer to your inquiry was yes when did you acquire your punch your Mr Punch well in the course of writing Wiggly Walker I joined the British puppet and model theatre guild and it was there that I met Bob Wade and bought these but the whole set of punch figures the crocodile and Jack Ketch so forth did you have a set up I didn't have a set up but I did have First Impress come to my house one day and give a complete performance and to me it was wonderful because it hadn't been part of my trial to it and you immediately battled on to it and from the things he said about punch being too old to die I immediately battled on to this as being something absolutely enduring in folk art that couldn't be there's a punch in every country in Germany, in Casparle in Italy, it's Puntinella or a Polynchinella in France it's Polynchinella Polynchinella and punch goes all the way back to the Commedia dell Orte and back beyond that to the Greeks had these humpback figures with big phalloses that did funny things Do you think there's something very important about it being a puppet about it being something separate and yet humanoid in that way Well the art of puppetry is a long established mode of surrogosing where puppets can do things that real people couldn't get away with and they'll always get a laugh and they'll always get a gut response from the audience One of the things I wanted to ask you about was listener and the use of folk themselves and how early and the kind of setup of the power ring around Canterbury How I know what I think all of that is but do you know what you think it all is Well my idea for the power ring came from the CERN accelerator in Switzerland now my idea for listener again I don't know why I made this archip of Canberbury without eyes again I was just flogging by the seat of my pants I suppose if we try to synthesize it there would be some sort of a message in there about religion being blind I don't know but I wasn't thinking of that it just came to me that this kid didn't have any eyes because because he didn't have any eyes he had to listen very hard and that's where the other boy sound of the world comes in It's a long shot because you'll feel free to slap down you were a radio operator in the war weren't you I was trained as a radio operator but that availed me nothing I was a foot messenger and I had such a bad sense of direction bits of K-ration I would just tear up K-ration boxes to mark my trail like that one time I passed the request the same hill so many times the Germans thought I was a troop movement but the use of both themselves are as I understand it a group of radioactively genetically damaged mutants that have been preserved within the society for their kind of divinitory powers well they use some posion like a nest of snakes and it's hoped that they will come up with the necessary secrets for the one big one and they never do they might talk dance theory and all of that but it's just gibberish and they don't come up with the one little one until somebody gives them a part of software and the other ingredients but they're all affected more or less the same way the listener, good parley they're all groping around the same set of ideas and I find it very disturbing the way that he really shifts from one to the other I mean Ridley is in the sense smarter than all of them isn't he smarter than all of them he grasped more of it than any of the rest of them and they respond to him eventually they understand that he understands more than they do he responds to good parley the most emotionally at all yes because good parley opens himself to him and he has to anyone and tells him about his boyhood and the way grand sir treated him and then good parley does a punch show for him which is what Ridley takes with him when he takes to the road as a showman but good parley it's trying in his own in his own impeded way to move inland forward it's doing the best he can it's not doing it very well when you finished Ridley walk it must have been a very emotional moment to actually finish the book and put it to one side and in your foreword to Pilger Man which is the next book you wrote you then go and do it again and have another major epiphany and move off again on another strange journey how did that feel Russell how did it feel then to move from Ridley world to Pilger Man world which is by no means that jolly that was in my high energy period and no Pilger Man had his inception in a trip to Israel that I made with my daughter Esme and her husband Motie and we went to a now the name of the fort escapes me it might come back later anyhow we went to a fort which had been used by the Teutonic knights of the 13th century and that is where Pilger Man precipitated himself into the beginning of the story these Teutonic knights were big Jew killers and Pilger Man of course was a Jew who was castrated by peasant crusaders in the 12th century and I immediately bought about five yards of books and steeped myself in the research and read all of the contemporary accounts and got started on on Pilger Man and I still like that book a lot and call me Pilger Man you know I forget what I am a wave to say a wave and a particle it's not even a something about the sword is rusted and the rust is blown away and one time as a boy in the ruins of the building I saw an owl we called a veiled owl flying towards me and I said hero Israel the Lord our God the Lord is one anyhow I had a good time writing Pilger Man and I did a good Pope unclean the seventh who had some pretty good dreams you say that was during my high energy period you've been remarkably prolific over the last decade or so well yes I do what I can but and your work continuing to move into different areas very erotic some of the novels of the last decade yes well I mean my fears isn't it absolutely and my next big one my next big one my next big one is called soon child which is about an Eskimo Shaman whose daughter doesn't want to be born because she refuses to come out into the world until he brings her the world songs so he bruise up a big dream room and he goes on a dream trip which takes him hither and thither and young and through many many changes so I have to hang in there until 2012 because I won't be published till then well I think rather you hung in a lot longer than that to the same view I think we've gone a little while yet and if Russell said he's happy to take some questions you'd like to ask him anything and please put your hand up and then wait for the microphone to come to you please gentlemen down here the front forget my memory it's not forget my memory it's not what it was but was it the case when you were writing Ridley Walker that you were in analysis and you would take it along and read out chapters on that the case and if so why and he's asking he's saying he thinks he's heard or read somewhere that you were in psychoanalysis when you were writing Ridley Walker and that you would take the novel in MS along to your analytic sessions and read out sections if it's true it rather begs the question why your animals didn't pay you is it true it wasn't psychoanalysis it was psychotherapy and I used to have sessions with Leon River and I used to read him what I was writing find and think of my reason maybe I just wanted a private audience and I think I wanted to see the liturgy of it of it on him did the characters read through can you remember what he said about the book when you were reading sections of it no I can you definitely need your money there anybody else there's a woman down here at the front I just would like to know when you were you've talked about Ridley's Peak being very organic that came about organically if you found yourself having to turn it down a little bit so maybe try and make the story more accessible so that it was more widely appreciated by a big audience that's a moral question none of it is Ridley's Peak did you make it more accessible than it might otherwise have been were you conscious of how people would read the book as you were writing it and were you calibrating just how difficult it was as against standard English no again I just wrote it as it came to me I didn't as I said before I realised later that it was a technically good device to slowing the meter down to Ridley's rate of perception but I didn't I didn't do any calculation of calibration I just done it how it come I mean there are, you now have in this Bloomsbury edition there is your notes and there's an after word and there's a sort of mini glossary at the back where you put in a few things I confess I did find them very helpful I did find them very helpful but again I find strange I don't know whether this accords with anybody else's experience who's read the book several times it is different each time it seems a very different book to me each time I read it it seems to have a different modality as a book and that I can't help feeling is a function of what you do with English which is to make us very aware of the fact that English is a language in which there are at least two words for everything and many many words are homonyms themselves and I suppose that's why I'm writing on there I was very pleased with some of my inventions for example when Orffing leaves the use of folk he says I had to vote no kind of fence so I backed my way out of there vote no kind of fence is a breakdown of no confidence a book of no confidence I had to vote no kind of fence and then he backed his way he evacuated well I think Ed Miliband has the power to shatter me inside would be well advised to read really well a woman here half way back have any academic experience of historical linguistics or pigeons or creoles that inform how you constructed really speak any academic experience of linguistics of pigeon languages everything like that I knew he was going to say that I think there are things that spring naturally to the tongue and I believe there is a linguistic term for this kind of migration where great becomes dirt and such such things as that it's just when you move your mouth it's a great it's a great day for shining your shoes it's a great day it's a great day it's a great day for shining your shoes it's a great day for losing the blues it happens naturally and is there something else about the language oh yeah in Pennsylvania where I grew up the auxiliary verb very often was thrown over the side so people would say I've done this or I've gone there so that's already a start on really speak we do that here too what is it can you sound like you might know about linguistics is it called glottal drift or something like that you studied it once though didn't you that was certainly your tax door sorry that came out harsh I speak to myself it came out harsh of an insular anyone who's a speaker up there somebody there's a man up the back there bearded man alright sorry you've got a beard too you've got a beard too oh it's as big as me I really enjoyed the geography of the book particularly the map which I've referred back to several times I'm just wondering how much time you spent in Kent during the writing of the book he loves the maps and the geography of Kent or Imland in it and wonders how much time you actually spent in Kent during the composition of the book a lot of time in Kent at that time I had a Bedford camper with my wife Google and at that time we had just two sons and we drove around Kent into the Y valley and uphill and downdale and stayed overnight and also at one time to test whether they really were times when you couldn't see your hand in front of your face I wrote a pillion on the motorbike of a friend and we went into Kent and into a forest in the dead of night and I couldn't see my hands in front of my face so yes it was well researched on the actual ground and then the gentleman down here just wonders about the language what I loved about Ripley speak it's one of the joys of the book for me I have to read it out loud to understand it it's rather than reading internally it's made me read out loud again to myself to understand it I just wondered how much of reading out loud was involved in the or saying those words out loud was involved in the creation of it all of my writing not just Ridley Walker all of my books are written for the year so that they will bear up under reading aloud and I I sound them out in my head and I go over every line until it works where does that come from Russell were you read to a lot as a child I joined your number I was read to a bit as a child certainly enough to instill the habit in me and I was given plenty of books as a child and I still remember my father was a socialist but I guess he would have to be called a comedy sympathiser at the time and he used to bring me books I remember particularly what is called fairy-tales for workers children what a collection of heart-locked stories there was a little black guy called Little Black Murzwick and he had a terrible time and there was a yellow dog that also had a bad time now let's walk on me I can tell you so presumably if your father was a fellow traveller you were not an observant family no and apropos his fellow traveller the the first two rules of etiquette that I learned were always to eat the label of the Pumpernigel for good luck and never to cross a picket line he himself we lived in Lancel, Pennsylvania and he was put in jail that was the hosue mill there that was the local industry and the workers went on strike from time to time and he was put in jail for marching in a picket line with the workers and in the third room in our house there was a tin canicum in which he had water when he was in jail and that was on top of the grandfather clock on which was also the bust of Eugene Deyves and as a boy I was taken to hear Norman Thomas who frequently ran for president but never made the distance and I shook his hand too and my father stood first to be voted socialist he wouldn't have ever been voted for here right now anybody else just as a woman in a hat just there in a hat well I mean I don't it's just a very easy way I don't know your I don't know your secret hopes and desires and you're not going to well I mean she objected to my typifying there was a woman in a hat he didn't start off by saying he's Russell Hoban in a hat anyway let's stop arguing and I'll come up with my question what was your question Russell in 1970 you gave a writing workshop at a conference on children's literature in education in Exeter in that writing workshop which I was not lucky enough to be born to be at she wasn't born or else she would have been there never too late you described you said the most important thing was describing the thinness of things do you still believe that was describing thinness of things what guys with $10 lives call quiddity I believe describe the thinness of things there's a a word that the thing itself in itselfness ding on zish ding on zish we're into Kantian metaphysics now I knew you'd get there I knew you'd get on to Kant metaphysics I knew you were influential I have never read Kant I think about I think about I think about me I'm getting credit for much learning that I don't have because I'm good at picking quotations I can take a big book this thick and riffle through it and come up with a quotation that will convince people I've read the whole thing it's artful but do you mean by that to say that the Russell's approach about the thinness of things is perhaps distinct from many people view the novel as a medium particularly for discussing character or the development of character or the relationships between people or the relationship between individual psychic change and social change but I think what the woman who we must not call the woman in the pan is driving at is that your take on the novel is different to that well, the writer whom I credit with expressing the thinness of things more than anybody else's Anton Chico who is my current name squeeze and he just doesn't he can talk about the moonlight on the ocean he can talk about the smell of the trees and flowers in a garden that transcends your description of what they look like what they smell like the sounds they make where the wind blows through them he gets right to the thinness of things I don't know whether it can be learned if you got it or you haven't if you got it, flaunted I think time maybe for one more there's somebody right behind you John there and then somebody up the top who thinks is the the story in Ridley and Walker I find profoundly depressing and disturbing it's a frightening tale in its own right at the same time it's full of levity and humour a lot of which comes I think from the language and the distinctive voice of the narrator Ridley himself but in the end it's very ambiguous to know Russell whether you, when you think about the book find it optimistic or pessimistic how would you classify it in terms of a story the burden of that was that the end is ambiguous in what I say that it's pessimistic or optimistic you've got it in a nutshell the front end of it was largely a statement a good statement it's left that way you don't know what's going to happen Ridley Walker's been to show Ridley Walker's on the go don't go Ridley Walker's track drop John's writing on his back so he's off on his unending journey looking for he doesn't know what and showing what comes to him when he pushes head in the head hole of the puppet and does his show it's left open ended we don't know what his future is any more than we know our own final one up here up here in the glasses the shirt trousers hi well my question is it seems that when you were looking at the picture of St Eustis at Canterbury Cathedral it was a life changing moment but I was wondering at the time how long you were looking at it for and what you were feeling physically what was sort of going on looking at the picture of St Eustis he wants a more visceral description of your epiphany well of course this sort of my epiphany are internal well about the thinness of your epiphany the thinness of my epiphany I don't rightly know that I can say more about it it just it just got to me I think that you don't have to be a writer to have that experience when an event or something you see or some person something gets to you and there it is you have to do something about it can't say more than that well I don't know about the rest of you but I think the modern mania for getting writers up on stages and making us trot around like performing dogs like the dogs in Ridley Water when he has the vision a cambry and they rise up on their hind legs and dance around him I'm getting slightly carried away now often is not such a good thing but I think that I'm sure you'll agree with me that the last hour and a quarter has been an exceptional and rare privilege to hear Russell and I say that I could not have asked for or imagined a better companion and conversationalist than this man I believe that Russell will be here for a while I know some of you might have an opportunity to put a question and might want to whisper one in his shell like you'll be here to sign books it just gets better and better