YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew O'Hagan

lines on the record: 53
first: 2024-04-14
most recent: 2024-04-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“references to this one. And I've been around a while, I know the difference. I know books can have different kind of experiences. Sometimes they're quieter, sometimes it's a slow bun. And then if you're lucky once in a balloon, it's a sort of instant, you know, and very striking response.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I would certainly try again. I've never caught the bug, you see. Those Victorians were relentless in their willingness to go back to the coalface again. And all joking aside, I think I'll keep some of that energy with me if I can. And I will return to it. And I can see by the response, I'm pleased to say that this book's having that, I mean, it makes it all feel worth it. I mean, I've just come in from signing huge numbers, copies of this book across London. It's just the way that it's arriving in the culture. And I think people were ready for a book like this. That's all I can assume. You know, I mean, you were in early, Susie, reading it and taking an interest in it. And I think that's fantastic because, I mean, you just don't know. I was alone with this for quite a long time. And now I see that, you know, it's literally overwhelming at the moment, the response.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“for months you know every one of those discrete individual jummies you know across London to get to a court to get your credentials organised to go upstairs to you know to sit through the the adjournments and the cancelled days and you know it's you know we don't require any violins around us but it's a big task and always I would say to anybody who's willing to take it on is please do because it's the kind of book I like but I mean I would say that wouldn't I But be ready for long nights and long weekends.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm always nervous about giving advice to other writers because they will by absolute by every writing to man and woman have their own sense of what to do. But I'll tell you something. If you're going to set out to write a big compendious novel like this, you better be ready to graft. You better be ready to go outside. Stick with it, you know, and not, this is not something you can dream up. And I love the house and provolence over a summer, you know, without with a few references to the internet, you're going to have to really pound the pavements. And I think that you only write a book like this if you're lucky as a novelist once or twice in your whole career because it takes so much out of you to do it. And the migrant case that forms one of the main strands of the Arabs have alone caused me to have to go to the old way every day.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reactions of the men in those clubs to that hitting the news. I could kind of hear it that I'd gone beyond being the person who wrote this novel into being somebody who did a crash course that I'd sooner forget now. I need to sort of podge it, you know, get it out of my head somehow.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was national when an American writer said to them, This is like having a backstage pass to London. And I was quite pleased with that because I know that when I was writing it, that I was getting access to things which, I mean, often by luck, by the way, I mean, it's no great skill of mine if you can, you know, you can only charm yourself into places so far. But I had luck on my side when I ended up really knowing those places quite well and was able to bring them home. And that's how I think of it with a big novel. I was bringing it all home. Some of it was very local to me indeed was my home. Scottish as I.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To go to your point, it was fact checked because it felt to me that the frison of lived experience, the free son of actuality, would add to the intelligence of the thing and the experience for the reader of being inside this very plausible world.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stopping to think Well, how does he know that or why would that true of vermier? You can trust the author because you've gone to the trouble as a novelist to make it right. I sort of would go forward with this particular novelist say that I said, I think I sort of fact checked this novel. You know, I kind of walked through it in real time and fact checked it, you know, went to the restaurants and made sure that those things were on the menu, that those things they choose from the wine list and the many expensive restaurants that feature in contemporary London in this novel, those bottles were actually on the wine list and that they would be priced at the right place for that particular consumer if it was a Russian oligarch because they spend I can tell you from lived experience they spend ridiculous amounts of money on wine that they don't even finish it's quite upsetting thousands and thousands”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things so the next time you see me, Zen Buddhist sitting in my cloud, that will be the day. But no, I think you're right. I'm going to have to throw myself into brand new territory because they're covered so much territory, some of which was very new to me, and some of which was utterly familiar and just part of my own life. I'm not an art historian, you know, I'm not an expert in Vermeer. My man had to be. And so I found myself, you know, zipping around from city to city all around the world looking at these Vermeer paintings as becoming a sort of not an expert, but certainly somebody very familiar with the territory in Dutch art. That's just one example of many hundreds where you do that work for the novel so that the reader doesn't have to think twice about it. It just sort of goes down like a glass of cool water after a fever. That sort of should be like reading a good novel that you just take it in.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you were hoping not to think about, these things are all happening at the same time, and that is where the novel should become, as Henry James, what's called a capacious baggy monster. You know, it can take it all if you set it up and you get the patterns right. I think readers like it.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even to the extent that our lives sometimes give out to little melodramas, you know, poetry and melodrama make for a great novel or sometimes for a great movie if you think of some of the movies that have really lasted stood the test of time. There's something about the marriage of the internal poetic self-examining world and the external world of business and craziness that we are all moving around in at the same time. And that certainly was my hope, is that the busyness of this book would be like the busyness of life because you don't get to just experience one thing discreetly at a time if you're living a life. You know, it's not then you have the broken love affair, but you don't have the problems at work and you don't have the problems of your children or you don't have a computer that's breaking or you don't have to think about who to vote it for the next election or that you don't have a television program that's brought up something horribly in your”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of these things are happening to Campbell Flynn. He feels he's not as rich as he should be despite being the man who owns these houses. There's a negotiation with his own ambition and greeds at the core of the book. So he writes a silly self help book that he imagines will make lots and lots of money. What it does instead, we can say, I think without giving too much away, is to draw him into the centre of an absolutely toxic set of circumstances around men masculine behavior, masculine self description, relationships with women, exploitation. I mean, these things are happening as they do in life simultaneously. I mean, a criticism you could make is that there's so much going on. Maybe there's too much going on, but I would defend that instantly by saying, well, we could see that of our lives. And I sometimes like to think that we can cope with a book which is a little bit like our lives.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Begun to conceive of him although of the milieu around him to do with technology, the internet, cryptocurrency, and also these relationships that grew up in the times of culture war. A lot of those themes are very, very new to the novel, but the setup humanly isn't that new. In some senses, you see that in Shakespeare, you know, in the relationship between sort of Gloucester and Edmund and King Lear, or between Othello and Iago. I mean, there's lots of classic sort of shapings of this kind of story of how somebody can begin to almost undermine themselves with, is it ambition? Is it self-loathing? Is it the return of something from his past that he doesn't know how to cope with? Is it our development inside his own moral imagination that he'd never be prepared himself for? I think all of”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think it's such a classic area of interest for people who read novels or watch big dramas is to have this seemingly successful individual, this tall, elegant man who wears beautiful suits and has a fascinating, brilliant psychotherapist wife. They live in the most amazing house. They have a second house in the country. Their children are both quite high achieving contemporary individuals. They have circles of friends and influence all around them. And yet something is off. Something's not right in the mind and in the heart of Campbell Flynn. Something's beginning to break apart. And the fragmentation of a supposed hero is, I think, a cornerstone of Western drama, is a cornerstone of the novel. I mean, I say that, but unashamedly, when I...”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The adapters will look to sort of grow those worlds and away from the book. I have no fear about that, by the way. I've loved the conversation I'm having with them. And when they say, oh, we will take those characters on, what they mean is on from what I conceived. I mean, on underway from what I invented. That's to say they'll have scenes in life and incidents which have essentially nothing to do with me. And I'm quite excited by that notion. My last book mayflies was adapted for by the BBC and I loved watching how that grew and changed from being the story that I had invented into being something else where other creative people got to have their say and put their stamp on it.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that they want to. I mean, I think that they're already looking at the hinterland of some of these characters. They're excited by the potential for this to become a returning season drama which keeps returning a bit like in the, I suppose, if you think of something like the Wire, where it just sort of grew and grew that minor characters suddenly become major characters that maybe you do end up going with my main character, the art historian Campbellny's son Angus, who's a superstar DJ. Maybe you end up in Abifa. Maybe you end up on that plane that he's always flying around obnoxiously in or, you know, the world of fashion, which is certainly there are scenes from that world in my book. And I spent a lot of time backstage at Paris and Milan researching that. And I was in the front row, the second row, the third row, wherever I could manage to get a seat. Many of those fashion shows over a period of years, but there could be more. And I think in television,”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“throwing myself into letting new things for future books. But what's exciting with this is I'm going to hopefully learn something about what it takes to lift something from the pages of a novel onto this much faster moving world of screen images and plot lines going off in all different directions in a returning series.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They asked me to invite. They said they're setting up a writer's room. And they asked me to come in. And of course, I give the necessary warnings that aren't the original paper balls across the office interrupting people, trying to drag people out for a glass of wine at lunchtime. Guy, they wouldn't necessarily want me in there. But they said, no, no, we need somebody like that. We'd love you to write an episode and just be part of the group. So I'm quite excited by that. I love learning new things. I mean, one of the things that's now gone from my life since I stopped researching this book is this business of throwing myself into areas where I was forced to learn things, you know, suddenly being at the polo at Windsor or being in the Old Bailey for 24 weeks or, you know, being with a group of drill wrappers. I was always learning new things for this story. And I'll always do that. I mean, I have a journalistic energy that takes me out. You know, I'm not going to be shy of.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they highlights very quickly Will Smith, the British shorerunner and adapter of the Apple series Slow Horses, which is a great saga based in London. So it seems to me that this team are second to none and I've been delighted to work with them so far. I've got every hope and expectation that they're going to do something really exceptional. I certainly hope so.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This came about from quite early on people as soon as I had a finished manuscript, and of course I worked the manuscript through the drafts, but as soon as I had a decent manuscript, they'd begun to be shown to producers and actors and film companies. And I have to say it was a very forceful reaction straight away. I mean, I was kind of overwhelmed by how responsive people were to the idea that this big story could become a returning series on television. So American streamers were very interested right away. But there was a particular team led off by a director called Johann Renk, who made Chernobyl the series for HBO, which I thought was wonderful. I just thought it was humanly and dramatically so brilliant, that piece of work. And he came along with a brilliant producer called Michael Perez. And they have great experience between them.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are the energies you can in the pythons that you can set up in a novel, and for me, the joy of writing the book actually and the agony, to be quite honest with you, was trying to keep all those plates spinning all sort of several hundred of them simultaneously and then make them all, as it were, all those plates crash to the floor simultaneously towards the end. I mean, that's for me the great task with a book like this.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a new way of being an activist, a new way of bringing people to book through the dark net and through hacking and so on. That's part of the energy of the story. But even he would admit that he has to be self-questioning. Is he motivated by what happened to his mother? I won't give away the plot, but something significant happens to his vulnerable mother in this book. And it's actually one of the things he has in common with his great adversary, the 50 something year old intellectual Campbell Flynn, the white man in the big house. They both are suffering from some sense of having suffered a family disappointment. A family disaster or a tragedy to do with parenting and to do with having this energy, I suppose, each of them to reinvent their lives, to not be overdefined by what happened to their parents.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a really useful notion for human beings that we can spend our lives totting up our virtues and spend our lives pointing our fingers at the guilty parties who clearly aren't us. But that seems to me a sort of deranged way to go about a kind of moral life if we can talk about a moral life. People used to talk about the well-lived life, about the ambition that we all had as decent people to live a moral life of some description. And it seems to be not an entirely copper-bottomed version of that life to just find other people to be in the wrong but you to be pristine. There's too much of that around at the moment in the culture.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody, when it comes to the state of the nation, really gets off, have all been part and parcel of allowing this cult of selfishness even if we congratulate ourselves for being on the quote right side of history as we often do in the left. Did we give up our equity when our houses grew in value? Did we prevent ourselves from sending any of our family or any of our children to private schools? Did we, you know, take up arms against all those causes of inequality? I think we'll find we didn't entirely, and that, I'm afraid, is part of the entertainment here. I mean, you're right when you say it's a pessimistic picture in some respects. That's to say everybody gets named. And I hope that the evils get called out, but it's fundamentally a comedy. It's a comedy of manners and of differences, you know.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I have to say that there have been changes in multiple failures on the liberal left as well at the same time. You'd have to point to that and show how the self-satisfaction that can exist on the left and in the leftist media, the sense that they are above and beyond criticism when it comes to questions about the state of society. Well, that is actually an unhelpful and an unimaginative way of going about thinking about the state we're in to allow them a free pass, allow me, as it were, a free pass. Some, you know, London review of books writing, Guardian writing, guy who's happy to write pieces for The New Yorker and appear on the radio for today program. You know, I would be the very person I'm talking about. There's a bit of me in Campbell Flynn. He deserves to be deconstructed for the reader's delight. And I have to take it on the chin that I would be one of the people who had to be self-questioning in all of that.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it could be even handed as a social novelist, Susie. You know, it's okay to name the clearly guilty parties, to look at corrupt royals and sort of tick that box or look at oligarchs who are clearly laundering dirty money and tick that box. And, you know, certainly I wanted to reveal them and expose them all the great right-wing conspiracy that exists in relations between a passive media, a right-wing media that somehow finds itself energized by criticizing the less well-off or the vulnerable, I would say, but finds it harder to question those institutional inequalities upon which they slightly depend. But at the same time as naming the guilty parties on the right, a novel is not an editorial. A novel does not have a legislative program. We are not issuing a party political broadcast. I want it to be even handed on behalf of the”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“House of Lords and so on, what you see is it's not a party political issue very strictly, successive governments in this country have allowed this modern-day Casablanca to grow up. Of course, it became a city where if you had dodgy money that wasn't even declared, that's to say that was coming from foreign bank accounts in places like Panama or the Isle of Man, then lots of deluxe property in London was available to buy without too many questions being asked hordes of quite dodgy lawyers, very lax accountants and lots of posh schools. I mean the oligarchs loved it. They thought they derived in a kind of nirvana and that's what we allowed to happen here during our lifetime. So again, a novel was going to try and unwrap that at some point and show the connections that caused it to happen.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your question is really about the state of the nation and the state of the capital. And I would say that I'd have to admit that things have taken a pretty bad turn in recent years. Four or five governments in a row have allowed London to become a kind of modern day version of Casablanca, a place where people with dirty money can come and park for dodgy gleanings without too much trouble. A combination of factors allowed London to become that place. If you look at Tony Blair's deregulation of the city for a start, then you look at Gordon Brown's issuing of golden visas to oligarchs, then you look at David Cameron's hospitality to the idea of these people and their ways of life and their ways of doing business. And then, of course, Boris Johnson, almost on a more personal level, allowing some of these people right into the heart of the British political system, into the heart of the”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at all pessimistic about London. I mean, I live in London and Hubdone for 35 years. It's the most fascinating city in the world, second to none in my view, and I'm a great fan of Paris, Rome, Berlin, New York, and lots of less famous cities. But I have to tell you, for me, London is the one. And I can say that without too much feeling of being party pre, because I don't come from London. I'm an incomer to London, as so many people are. But I do love the place. And I think that the great sort of dimensions of London, this incredible mix that you find here, to say nothing of that great, those great combinations of the classical and the romantic in terms of its architecture, in terms of the flow of life you find here. I mean, I'm with Dr. Johnson, you know, the person who's tired of London is tired of life. So that is my base feeling.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was especially striking about that is that when I looked at the poverty maps per Caledonian Road and all the adjacent squares and streets of the 1890s,”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At least in bricks and mortar, and I wanted to show my readers that on one side of Caledonian Road does that, on the other side of Caledonian Road there's social housing, there's places where migrant workers are living. There's a whole other London but only about 300 yards, separating them. And so for me as an obelisk, you know, that proximity physically, but also the stories that can be fashioned around those differences, around the fact that some people are unspeakably rich at using the same shops, using the same street breathing the same oxygen, but otherwise living in an elephant universe from some migrant workers who are living in a tower block just off the Caledonian Road. So that was the joy of it for me, but I'll tell you something.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many inner city Londoners over a period watching themselves become property rich. And I wanted money to be at the centre of this book. It was one of the sort of haunting vehicles of change, difference and division that I wanted to be there in the book. And that comes down to property in London. Some of these buildings sold for under £10,000 in the 1960s are now selling for £7 million. That's just a fact. And so again, we hadn't had the novels yet, which really showed us that and went inside what that actually meant in a family, in a life, in a community, in a city, when you have people who were, you know, teachers, writers, lawyers, solicitors, you know, accountants who found themselves suddenly millionaires.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their cattle for sale in London. Caledonia, of course, being the old word for Scotland, though being a Scotsman myself, it felt like a gift you don't often get gifts from the gods as a novelist, but sometimes you do. And I lived in King's Cross for ten years when I was young and got to know the nooks and crannies of that particular part of London, which were always fascinating. Caledonian Road itself, apart from having these associations that I've spoken about with the prison, with Scottish children, with marketplaces, it was also a place where there was a great multiplicity of economic and social types. That was true in the nineteenth century and it's true today. On one side of the road you have Barnesbury, places like Thornhill Square where my main character lives in the novel Campbell Flynn, lives in a big house which would probably go now for something in the region of six or seven million pounds. He's lived there as have”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a really important question. I think, Susie, because the road itself, let me just explain what it is. It's a big thoroughfare, not one of the famous ones like Charing Cross Road or the Strand or Tottenham Court Road. It's North. It's right next to King's Cross Station, people who use the Eurostar on the other side of the station. But on that opposite side, you find a big thoroughfare that was well populated in the 19th century called Caledonian Road, named after the Caledonian Asylum that was at the top of that road, next to Pentonville prison, which is also stationed on Caledonian Road. In Caledonian asylum was the place that the abandoned orphaned children of Scottish soldiers in London would be taken in the 19th century. And there was also a Caledonian market where Scottish farmers would bring”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“studies in my view and in the view of people like Dickens and other Victorians certainly thankfully a number of my contemporaries today believe even that notion that it's by looking at each other by finding common ground common language common experience and strangeness and difference among us that the big novel gets its energy”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and Dombey and Son's case it's these that almost new mechanical thoroughfares the railway lines. Also I was absolutely betrothed for a while to our mutual friend again a Dickens novel that has a thoroughfare and the thoroughfare in that book is The River Thames. Every character touches on or floats upon or is found dead in or is otherwise connected to the river Thames in that book. It's an amazing novel which unearths connections between human beings of a sort that you can't even believe. It's so exciting that book. It sets up language as a kind of servant to the idea that we are all actually living in the world at the same time. We shouldn't forget that. We may be caught up in our own little universe of autofictional self-investigation. But actually the great”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my world and in my head, you certainly do. It goes with the territory. It's the most fundamental part of the job. And one of the things I was looking at certainly mentally was Dombey and Son, a great novel, one of the biggest, actually, if not the biggest in terms of age numbers of Dickens' novels, set in Camden Town in the middle of the 19th century with that great energy that came with the building of the railways. That novel has an enormous family plot in it and a great story of corruption and difficult human relations, as you often find in Dickens, great comedy too. But what's at the center of it is the cutting through of those canal-like railway passages through Camden Town. I live near Camden Town. And it meant everything to me, that novel as I was trying to conceive of a huge cast of characters who would have been brought together by a street, in my case, Calidor.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were two in particular that gave me actual sort of a bit of backup, if you like. I mean, we forget as novelists that we're always relying on each other, much as musicians do, you're always quoting, if you're a pianist, you're always quoting other pianists, you know, your sense of pressure, of pace, of timing, of volume is all to do with what you've been listening to all your life as a composer. You may be literally quoting phrases and there's an influence there. It's kind of delicious in the life of artists. There was Dagas saying somewhere that we were born to look at each other. We are looking machines. And I think that's especially true of painters and novelists that we spend our lives looking. We take for granted that we have permission to look. Now, I know there's debates out there in the world that would question whether one has permission to look.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, I got my train or something, put my jacket on, got on the train, and went to Leicester, went to Spinney Hills where there's a lot of such factories and got inside the factories and started to speak to people who were on low wages, who were in quite unsafe environments, certainly unsafe in relation to the COVID threat. They were passing garments to each other sometimes without any face protection, without enough sanitizer. In the culture around that was very, you know, we've got orders, we've got deadlines, let's go on with it. And those women were among the largest numbers of people dying of COVID in the country. And that's an economic problem. So I allowed, to answer your question, I allowed at that point the pandemic to become a kind of central divider, if you like, between rich and poor in contemporary Britain. I was already thinking about austerity, was already thinking about Brexit.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I thought it was going to hinder me entirely. I mean, it loomed before me at a point when I'd already written a lot of the characters and a lot of the scenes were fully formed in my mind. But then I saw that if I had a bit of luck on my side, i.e. there wasn't going to be another full lockdown after May 2021. And if I had that luck, then in fact the pandemic itself, the original pandemic, could be a fulcrum in the book, helping me in a way in my plan to create a large tapestry that, if nothing else, showed up the bright colours around that distinction between rich and poor in this country. For example, I learned pretty early in the pandemic that some of the biggest numbers of fatalities were among Bangladeshi women who were working garment factories and sweatshops in the Midlands.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea of interloping novelist coming along asking questions, but you have to win the trust of people. If you're writing Famously called social novel, then the first thing you require is sociability. Now has to be social. That's why I knew that this book would never be said during lockdown, because lockdown made sociability impossible by its very nature. So I judged the timing over the years, I kept shunging it forward, and I had to judge the timing very carefully. And after the second pandemic, so I decided to... May 2021 to 22 would be that whole year would be my setting.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The gangs imagine a guy like me, a middle aged, Scottish white guy, is a sort of drug squad guy undercover cop. Everybody thought it was an undercover cop in that world. I look like an undercover cop to them. I look like a guy from head office who's arrived to infiltrate their world. And that's not to say that their entire world is criminal, by the way. It's not. These were artists. These were drill artists. They were often a recording studios. You would see them at video shoots or I wouldn't at all suggest that they have reason to be worried about the police constantly, although they clearly do a bit because there's quite open blip smoking, quite a sort of easy attitude to drugs. And of course there's drug dealing in those criminality there as well. So it's a bit of both. But they had reasons to really not.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't open up the question while you're working on it. You tend to just become wallpaper. You know, I was in those rooms. I'd make contributions occasionally, but mainly I listened. Mainly I took notes, sometimes very quickly after if I couldn't take notes in the situation. It was the same with the Russians. These were both difficult worlds to infiltrate. But once they had you in, they kind of run towards a notepad, some of those people. They're quite vain. They love the idea of being memorialized and remembered. In a way, after the initial difficulty that was easier, much harder for another reason were the gangs.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I managed to get much more insight than I would have expected. It was like journalistic research in that sense. I mean, I could have written a piece for the London Review of Books or The New Yorker in the end about the incredible sort of lives of these people and the ways that they had of interconnecting with these financial sources and not thinking it was a moral issue, not thinking it was a problem, taking a very strong moral line on other parts of British life, these well-to-do people, but not seeing themselves as being in any way answerable for some of the great inequalities that are there in British society today. So I just pursued it as best I can. And I have to tell you, Susie, one of the things that happens as a novelist on a big project over many, many years is you learn to become a kind of wallpaper. You know, this is the dice part where I get to talk to you and we get to open up the question.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were a lot of them that were incredibly sort of closed as worlds for very different reasons. The world of the British aristocracy is incredibly closed. I found that I was sort of invited into that. I went to the polo at Windsor won initial time and made some connections there that then grew. I was already speaking to a very, very good source who's close to the royal family, who was a duchess who began to open up those worlds rather kind of amazingly the language, the habits, the customs, the fears that existed in that world where there were strange financial connections between minor royals and Russian oligarchs. That became completely explicit to me from one-on-one research. There was a lot of lunches, a lot of suppers, a lot of visits to the grog table in various country houses up and down Brittany.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mrs Jellyby, you know, unforgettable characters full of their own specific way of viewing the world and their own way of being, but you could unbalance the book if you falsely make them stick around for too long. I think that was certainly my feeling. The characters grew and grew in relation to each other. That was the thing. When I look at the notebooks, and many, many of them see this kind of almost organic growth as if the book had already pre-existed my writing of it. I know that's a weird thing to say, but that's how it felt. That was kind of brass rubbing. You know, it already solidly was there and I just had to find the traces.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Glean the material for what I knew was going to be a big social novel. I just felt it before I'd even fully developed some of the characters. I knew who they were and I went after them. I went to find the world of superstar DJs, even though I knew that Angus would be a minor character and he'd certainly be a secondary person. He'd come in and out of the novel four or five times because he had an absolutely defined role in his family and in the plot. But no more than that. And I think that's one of the things you have to face as a novelist, is that there'll be people that the characters like the readers like, but you have to let them go because you could give a whole series of scenes.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was unobsoletely insane amount of research. I mean, sometimes in one day I would literally be going from the old bailey to meet with a person who was conenter to the Russians, oligarchs, to big property developers, then later in the afternoon I'd be spending time with members of the British aristocracy that evening, I'd be with drill wrappers in South London. I mean, there was a few costume changes, I have to say. It was a sort of pavement pounding experience very often. I clocked up a lot of steps. I clocked up multiple thousands of steps trying to”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think from the very beginning I understood that this was going to be one of those novels where the connections were deep and surprising between a whole cast of characters in contemporary London. You know, I grew up loving novels like that. I was a great fan of the Dickenzie and of the Trolopian and of George Elliott. Those large canvas novels were sometimes the action was carried and very much changed by minor characters secondary characters as they're sometimes called people who would appear only for a page or two and that was going to be the kind of book Caledonian Road was a big entertainment very much one of those page turners where eventually you would have this theories of truths and secrets revealed and that the reader would be sort of turning the pages to find out what they were. That's a conceived of it from the beginning.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That to be the case just by listening to him for five minutes. Yet here he was being slightly pushed onto the ropes by a young student and I thought wow they were standing beside a vermere and suddenly a whole disturb opened up to me the story of a Campbell Flynn, an art historian Scottish, elegant and in trouble, and partly in trouble because he has this brilliant student but also because he begins to dismantle his own comfort, dismantle his own life and so I saw it in front of me and there began ten years worth of research and writing.”
2024-04-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Great London Novel, with Andrew O'Hagan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT