Book In

In the early 1960s, a group of old barges and minor naval craft have been converted to houseboats. They are falling apart and so are their owners. The boats creak, leak and occasionally sink, and the people who live on them struggle with life, relationships, money and mental health issues. Penelope Fitzgerald’s marvellous novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1979, describes lives lived on the edge, between water and land, marriage and separation, getting by and financial ruin, and life and death. London, too, is poised between the greyness and discomfort of the post-war period, and the explosion of life and energy in the 1960s. In only 180 pages, she creates a rich and varied cast of attractive and vulnerable women, hopeless husbands, small time crooks, male prostitutes and feral children. Damp is everywhere and disaster just around the corner, yet Fitzgerald’s novel contains warmth, humour and beauty; the elegiac paintings of the Thames by Whistler provide an atmospheric backdrop, with the spirit of Dante haunting the story. Fitzgerald herself had a husband who could not provide, and spent much of her own life in abject poverty, including a spell on a houseboat which sank, taking all her worldly possessions with it. She only came to writing in her sixties, and in this late period produced several novels which are as fine as anything written in the second half of the 20th century. Join Rupert and Charlie as they discuss one of the best, Offshore.

A.S.Byatt wrote Possession as a completely self-indulgent project, with no thought of commercial or critical consequence. It sold millions and won the Booker Prize in 1990, introducing her to a mass audience and turning her into a literary superstar. It tells the story of a fictional Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash, who is mostly Browning with a dash of Tennyson; Ash falls in love and eventually has a child with another fictional minor Victorian poet, Christabel LaMotte. But their affair remains unknown to posterity until a young researcher in the 1980s discovers by chance some letters they had written to each other. He teams up with another academic, Maud Bailey, to find out what really happened, and like the Victorians, they too fall in love. Part detective story, part love story, part literary tour de force, Byatt herself composes the poetry through which Ash and LaMotte express their feelings for each other, and the letters they write. It is a brilliant, wordy, baggy, exciting, moving and above all literary book, covering Victorian sensibility, London in the mid 19th century, the absurdities of competitive academics in the modern age. Join Rupert and Charlie as they delve into this wonderful and heartwarming novel.

The Siege of Krishnapur is set in India in 1857 during the Indian Rebellion (or what used to be known as the Indian Mutiny). The small British community are besieged by the rebellious Indians, and as food and medicine gradually run out, and casualties rise by the day, their instinctive recourse to the social and hierarchical structures by which they have lived their lives is tested to breaking point. Their leader is the Collector, an essentially good and thoughtful man, who tries to maintain discipline, ensure the defences are manned, and keep up morale by promising that relief is near at hand. But his belief in progess and the ability of science and technology to improve the human condition is shaken to the core. Based on letters written by people involved in the sieges of Cawnpore and Lucknow, J. G. Farrell's brilliant novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1973, is thriller, satire, love story and history all at once - funny, informative and deeply moving. Farrell died young in a tragic drowning accident; another of his novels, Troubles about the British presence in Ireland, was awarded the Booker Prize for 1970 after his death. Join Rupert and Charlie as they look at this often overlooked masterpiece, and place the story in the context of the rule of the British in India.

In the second part of the Book In episode on Midnight's Children, Charlie and Rupert look at the way Salman Rushdie places the novel in the context of the extraordinary political and social changes created by the birth of the Indian nation. How will India change after independence? How is Pakistan different? How did the dreams of independence give way to the chaos of Partition, the creation of Bangladesh and the nightmare of Emergency Rule under Indira Gandhi? Why is Rushdie so brilliant at writing about women? And how is the style like Dickens on acid? Join us as we conclude our discussion of Rushdie's masterpiece.

On the stroke of midnight of August 15th 1947, the nation of India became independent from Great Britain. Saleem Sinai, the central character of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, is born at exactly the same moment, and in this monumental book, Rushdie tells the story of Saleem's family background, his childhood and his early years as an adult. Saleem's story is also India's story, and it plays out against the background of the birth of this vast and teeming nation. The creation of Pakistan, the subsequent emergence of Bangladesh, the death of Mahatma Gandhi, the emergency rule of Indira Gandhi in the 1970s - all profoundly affect the lives of the central characters. Yet Rushdie's story is rooted in the family and friends of Saleem in all their generosity, pettiness, scatological excess, dishonesty, bravery and humour. The nature of India, the effect of British rule, love, adultery, materialism, spirituality, success and failure are all explored in a kaleidoscopic and often chaotic panorama which reflects the nature of India itself. Has independence been a success? What does Rushdie, a Muslim, feel about partition, the dominance of Hindus and the creation of Pakistan? What is magic realism? And why is there so much snot in the novel? Join Charlie and Rupert as they take on Rushdie's masterpiece, which won the Booker Prize in 1981.