Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Sebastian Faulks
Title Page
Author’s Note
Modern Times
John Betjeman
The Brontës
Gustave Flaubert
Jonathan Swift
A. A. Milne
Mark Twain
Philip Larkin
H. G. Wells
Jerome K. Jerome
Henry Fielding
William Blake
Daniel Defoe
A Shot Rang Out
Marcel Proust
Edgar Allan Poe
Enid Blyton
George Eliot
Virginia Woolf
John Grisham
Sports and Pastimes
Rabbie Burns
Thomas Hardy
Ted Hughes
W. B. Yeats
Seamus Heaney
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Raymond Chandler
John Keats
Ian Fleming
Enter Stage Right
Terence Rattigan
Tom Stoppard
Sophocles
Tennesse Williams
Playing to the Crowd
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Javier Marias
Dan Brown
P. G. Wodehouse
T. S. Eliot
John Osborne
Dorothy Parker
Between the Sheets
Jackie Collins
Stephen King
Alan Hollinghurst
E. M. Forster
John Le Carré
D. H. Lawrence
Bedtime Stories
Allen Ginsberg
William Shakespeare
Hans Christian Andersen
Stephenie Meyer
Sylvia Plath
Philip Roth
J. K. Rowling
Copyright
About the Book
Robinson Crusoe discovers thousands of ‘half-naked savages’ having it large on Ibiza.
James Bond is on a mission, as a 24-hour call-out plumber.
‘The young stable lad is a moody fellow,’ say reviewers of Wuthering Heights in The Good Hotel Guide.
Hans Christian Andersen gets into the subprime mortgage racket.
Stephen King attempts a love story that doesn’t involve buckets of blood.
Robbie Burns cheers on Andy Murray at Wimbledon.
And Harry Potter is left high and dry when Ginny kicks him out and keeps the house.
Re-mixed and re-imagined, this is literature – but not as you know it.
About the Author
Nothing is known of the author’s life, but it is widely believed that ‘Sebastian Faulks’ is the nom de plume of the publicity-shy Neapolitan novelist known as Elena Ferrante.
ALSO BY SEBASTIAN FAULKS
FICTION
A Trick of the Light
The Girl at the Lion d’Or
A Fool’s Alphabet
Birdsong
Charlotte Gray
On Green Dolphin Street
Human Traces
Engleby
Devil May Care
A Week in December
A Possible Life
Jeeves and the Wedding Bells
Where My Heart Used to Beat
NON-FICTION
The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives
Pistache
Faulks on Fiction
EDITED
A Broken World
The Vintage Book of War Stories
Author’s Note
Most of the pieces here were broadcast on the BBC Radio 4 literary quiz programme, The Write Stuff, between 2006 and 2015.
The programme itself ran from 1998 to 2015. It started life, along with several other hastily commissioned quizzes, as a filler for the 1.30 slot when a new controller decreed that the World at One should lose 15 minutes, thus leaving a half-hour gap before The Archers. The brainchild of question master James Walton, The Write Stuff was the only such quiz to survive, going on for 17 years until another decree cut off its legs in 2015.
I would like to thank all those people who have expressed their dismay at this decision; but in truth it was a pretty good run.
Some of the parodies and squibs here, e.g. Knaussgard, Marias, Hollinghurst, were not on Radio 4, but were written for this book. However, like a rock band on tour, I have been wary of playing too much from the new album and have thrown in half a dozen tracks reprised from Pistache 1, which came out ten years ago. I hope they don’t seem too rusty now.
I would like to thank all the listeners who said how much they enjoyed the show; those guests (the majority) who entered into the spirit; the programme producers Sam Michel and Alexandra Smith; and the core team: Beth Chalmers, who did the readings; my inspired opposite number, John Walsh; and James Walton, whose intricate questions and patient chairing made it such fun to take part in.
SF July 2016
MODERN TIMES
JOHN BETJEMAN
reflects on St Paul’s precinct being Occupied
In the shadow of the pillars, hard by Paternoster Square –
It was hardly Wren’s intention to have vagrants camping there.
Whisp’ring dome and candled choir stall, chancel fabric starts to crack;
Where the deacon dons his surplice there’s a tent from A. C. Black.
Driven out, the poor old deacon; Dean has followed him in pique
All because a bearded camper garbed investments like a freak
Asks the question, ‘Who’ll inherit?’ Clearly it is not the meek.
But . . . bend your ear to Beardie’s message, guaranteed to make you cross.
Banks are free to keep their winnings, you and I must bear their loss.
Shut the schools and fire the nurses, let the library close its door:
Bankers want three million bonus or they’ll take their trade off shore.
Double dip in distant haven, is this how the law was bent:
Barclays on ten billion profit paying tax at one per cent?
Ghosts of Hawksmoor, Wren and Morris, Arts and Crafts, St Pancras high,
Come together in the forecourt, let the heavens hear you cry.
Say to Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Merrill, Lloyds and RBS:
Take your bonus, tax avoidance, greed and filth and fiscal mess;
Take your blackmail, coke and Porsches, let the Bishop help you pack;
Hail a cab for City Airport; go to Frankfurt, don’t come back.
THE BRONTËS
find their various houses in The Good Hotel Guide
Lowood Manor (formerly Lowood School House)
‘We loved it here. Mr Brocklehurst, the owner, believes that less is more and is as good as his word! Small helpings at dinner and a bracing wooden plank at bed time did me the world of good. I made friends with a sweet little maid called Jane. Sad to discover on a return visit that Mr B had to leave following outbreak of typhus and a few deaths. Health and safety gone mad!’
Miss Helen Burns
Thornfield Manor
‘Mr Rochester, the manager, promised me the Candlelit Dinner Option, but then seemed to have eyes only for the young governess. Very disappointing when it distinctly said NO PETS.’
Miss Blanche Ingram
‘I came here from my home in Belgium for a weekend of prayer and self-flagellation. What a ménage! The landlord has a mistress, two fiancées and a French child of uncertain parentage. Grace, the chambermaid, smells of sherry. Demure Miss Eyre, the governess, was more to my taste, thought the fire precautions are a scandal. The best room – in the attic – was said to be closed for refurbishment, though I distinctly
heard someone moaning in it.’
Paul Emmanuel, Brussels
Wuthering Heights
A long-term Guide favourite, though recently some guests have complained of creaky windows and disembodied voices. Others still find the ‘honesty bar’ a considerable draw.
‘Landlord Hindley (no relation to Moors Myra) certainly enjoys a glass! The young stable lad is a moody fellow and the housekeeper Mrs Dean a bit of a chatterbox. Avoid the room with the graffiti and the broken window pane. Since my narrative-framing duties necessitated only a short stay, I hesitate to go into detail, but I would say this: WH is not for the faint-hearted!’
Mr Lockwood
‘Our slumbers were interrupted by a man with a shovel, covered from head to foot in earth. He said he had been digging up the daughter of the house, Catherine by name, for ‘one last go-round’. What can you say? My husband and I find the comforts of our own dear Cranford far superior and we shall not be returning.’
Mrs E. Gaskell
‘Wow, wow, wow! I’ve come ho-o-o-o-o-me!’
Miss K. B., Bexleyheath, London
Haworth Parsonage B & B
‘A charming taste of times gone by,’ writes Anon. ‘High tea at six, hymns round the harmonium at seven and lights out at eight. We loved the ‘eat-all-you-can porridge buffet’ at breakfast and the three silent waitresses who watched us from the corner of the scullery. Rooms a little on the chilly side.’
Male guests not welcome.
Wildfell Hall
A new entry in the Guide this year. ‘Wildfell is tragically overlooked by most weekenders. Landlord Arthur Huntingdon is a bit of a ‘loose cannon’, to be sure, but his bar is ever open. Why not give it a go?’
Anne B
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
asks Bouvard and Pécuchet to update their Dictionary of Received Ideas
The Angel of the North, The Millennium Bridge and Battersea Power Station. Call them ‘iconic’. Look round for applause.
You should also apply the i-word to LP covers, TV theme tunes, popular catchphrases, famous comedy sketches – anything you like except Russian religious imagery.
The Internet. Say: ‘It has given a voice to everyone.’ Ignore the fact that 90 per cent of those enfranchised appear to be bag ladies or Nazis.
Your first memory. Recount what it is. Pause, and then say: ‘Of course, I don’t know if I really remember it or whether I’ve just been told.’ Look round for admiration. If more admiration needed, say, ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper.’ Don’t forget to look round again afterwards.
Bath or shower. Prefer shower. Say you don’t like baths because you don’t like to ‘wallow in your own filth’. Ignore the fact that you are not a pig-farm labourer but work on a computer in a modern office.
Pall Mall and St James’s clubs. Say they are ‘full of old fogeys’ who eat ‘nursery food’. Suggest that the members go off after lunch to be spanked by their ‘old nannies’.
Madonna. She does not get a new hairstyle and change of outfit between records, she ‘reinvents herself’.
Some of these incarnations are ‘iconic’. Be sure of which ones.
Oedipus. Say with a rueful chuckle that he was ‘too fond of his mother.’ Ignore the fact that he didn’t know Jocasta was his mother and was so appalled when he did find out that he blinded himself.
Cricket. Call any game you happen to see ‘real England, Their England stuff’; mention cucumber sandwiches and tea. Ignore the game’s violent edge and the fact that it is chiefly played on matting in the Indian subcontinent.
Americans. Say: ‘They have no sense of irony’. Ignore Woody Allen, Bart Simpson, Philip Roth, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemon, Dorothy Parker, Bob Hope, eecummings, John Updike, James Thurber, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, the casts of Friends, Cheers and Frasier, Saul Bellow, Sarah Silverman, Ogden Nash, Larry David, Joan Rivers and the entire collected New Yorker cartoons.
Newspapers. The Times is ‘the noticeboard of the establishment’. The Guardian is read by ‘sandal-wearing, knit-your- own-hummus-eaters’. The ‘dear old Torygraph’ has lost its way. The Mail is ‘beyond redemption’. You yourself read none of them, preferring to get your news ‘from the Internet’. It is not necessary to be more specific.
Modern novels. You don’t read them, because you prefer something with a ‘proper story’.
Classic novels. You don’t read them either. You prefer biographies, because they deal with ‘real life’.
Politics. Boris Johnson ‘adds to the gaiety of nations’. Assert that ‘dear old Wedgie Benn’ turned into a ‘national treasure’. ‘Maggie’ was a ‘union-basher’. Most MPs spend the day ‘fiddling their expenses’. You yourself don’t vote because ‘they’re all as bad as each other’. While propounding this view, feel free to blame ‘the media’.
JONATHAN SWIFT
has a Modest Proposal for the London bicyclist
It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town to see the garish yellow jerkins of those upon the two-wheeled pedal-driven conveyance as they mount the walkways with no concern for the safety of the ambulant population, be they infant or advanced in years; or on the highway ford upstream against the legal flow of four-wheeled carriages which might at any moment flatten them; nor yet pause at coloured beacons posted only for their safe passage, but rather pass through with nose held high for all the world as though inviolate, not subject to the laws by which we lesser mortals must comport ourselves; and venture forth at night disdaining even rudimentary lanthorns while shaking choleric fists against the lawful citizenry.
As to my own part, I feel that this yellow-jerkined company, convinced of its superiority, should put it to the test. I propose that we withdraw our beleaguered and inadequate militias forthwith from Mesopotamia and the poppy fields of the Pathan tribesmen, bring them and their feeble blunderbusses home; and in their place that we dispatch six yellow-jerkined companies upon their two-wheeled conveyances to ride full tilt against the enemy cohorts.
For being immune from ordinary danger, such inviolable and superior troops could surely bring home the victory that has eluded our more conventional cavalry these many years. And for provisioning such a force would need but little: a puncturing repair device for each man would render unnecessary the behemoth of the King’s ordnance; while for lethal weaponry, what could be more effective in the war against the lesser races than the adamantine power of the two-wheeled cavalry’s self-admiring sneer?
A. A. MILNE
gets gritty
Little boy kneels at the foot of the bed,
One nasal piercing in one little head.
Hush, hush, whisper who dare,
Christopher Robin hasn’t a prayer.
Peep through my fingers, what do I see?
Hot naked ladies on Murdoch TV.
Wearing a dressing gown, reading a mag,
There’s Mummy’s partner having a fag.
God bless Daddy, wherever he is,
It’s five years now since he gave me a kiss.
Oh Lord, don’t forget to make me look cool,
Stealing Toyotas and bunking off school.
Bright golden curls on a bright little bonce,
Grandma’s a pusher and uncle’s a nonce.
Give me a PlayStation, Game Cube at least,
Big Macs and Pringles for my midnight feast.
Lord, let the Social send a man round,
Get me out of this tower block, down to the ground.
Hush, hush, whisper who dare,
Christopher Robin has gone into care.
MARK TWAIN
tires of the Mississippi and sends Huck Finn up the Thames
My Pap beat me so often I got taken away and this care home chief Mrs Douglas tried to git me do GCSE and stuff. Pap said if he saw me near any schoolhouse he’d tan my back end with the hick’ry so good be the colour of a cotton wood tree. I was playin hooky eight days a week and I don’t put no stock in learnin’. This Douglas **** she told me I w
as goin’ to a bad place so I smoked some more weed in mah pipe and it warn’t long before I lit out one night and found mahself down on the river – near Teddington with mah friend Jim who was one big bad ******. We formed an ambuscade just near Hampton Court and stole a motor skiff, a reeeeal river boat, and headed her upstream. Jus’ then we saw a sign for Kempton Races.
‘Hey, de Camptown Races,’ said Jim, ‘we gwyne sing all night, gwyne sing all day.’
I told him to lay down and pick some cotton. Next thing I know we was passing through some place called Eton.
‘Hey man, why de kids all dress’ up like penguin?’ said Jim. ‘Why dey am got no chin?’
‘Maybe and it’s a charm to keep away the Devil,’ I said, and I sho’ nuff clumb up the mast of the skiff like Ah seen a ghost. Them boys was scarin’ me good, Ah doan min’ tellin’ you. With them tailcoat and stiff collars they was like zombies from the dead.
Next day we tied up on a tow head in a place called Cookham.
‘Maybe we get some roasted hog here in Cook Ham, boss,’ said Jim. ‘And some grits.’
He was always thinkin’ about his belly tho we had a fifty-pound sack of cornmeal in the bilges and a four-gallon jug of whisky. We din’ find no hogs nor no bacon neither in Cookham, only thing they had was some paintings by some man called Spencer, said the Lord came back in Cookham. I don’t put no stock by religion and I knew that was moonshine.
Next day we steamed in somewhere they was rowin’ little punts eight at a time. It was called Henley. There was ole boys in stripe jackets pink and gold and they was shoutin’ at us. ‘Kindly clear the course, the regatta is under way.’
‘What dey talkin’ ’bout re-gatta?’ said Jim. ‘Ah’s gonna kick their sorry ass with mah motor skiff. Dere’s gon be only one winner here, boss.’
We was just comin’ near the finish line with all them flags like jack o’ lanterns or lightnin’ bugs by the riverside taverns and this man comes on board and put Jim in cuffs round his wrists.