Tina Srebotnjak

Transcription

Tina Srebotnjak: And I'm going to turn things over now to the man, the host of the evening, who of course is Michael Enright, and he's the host of Sunday Edition on CBC Radio One. [applause] Michael Enright: Thank you, good evening. Welcome. Good to see you here. Critics and reviewers like the word "sprawling" to describe the novels of Edward Rutherfurd, which indeed they are large, lusty, filled with cathedrals of indelible characters, all woven seamlessly into a rolling narrative of human and geographical history. He is the master of the historical novel. His first novel "Sarum" was published in 1987. It took four years to write and it was an immediate best seller. His latest book "Paris" is on the same glide path. I think, you can be rest assured about that. "Paris" looks at the world's most romantic city from its earliest days, right up to the liberation of the city in 1944, and the students' revolts in 1968. The novel is populated by the famous, the Gustave Eiffel, Ernest Hemingway, Coco Chanel, Dreyfuss, Robespierre, and by the unknown, members of six families and their descendants who interact with one another and with their great city. ME: It is physically a heavy book to pick up, and once you start it, it is impossible to put down. Edward Rutherfurd was born in the English cathedral city of Salisbury. He was educated in Cambridge University and the Stanford Business School in California. His novels have been translated into 20 languages and have sold in the millions. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Edward Rutherfurd. [applause] Edward Rutherfurd: Thank you for that much too kind introduction. I hope you like the French beret. [laughter] I had to dress for the part. Thank you all for coming. And some years ago, I was invited by a friend of mine who is the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography in Ireland, to join into the august institution called Kildare Street and University Club. And I went along there to be interviewed, as they don't call it an interview, but of course, that's what it is, namely, I was invited to dinner. And beforehand, James, my friend, said to me, "Oh, by the way, don't tell them you're a novelist," because novelists, even in Ireland are not well seen. [laughter] ER: So, we were getting along absolutely famously at this dinner. I felt I was amongst friends. And then, one of them leant across the table to me and said, "I understand you write books. What sort of books are they exactly?" And entirely forgetting James' injunction, I said, "Oh, well they're novels." The entire table fell silent. They all turned and looked at James. "Oh well," he said, "He does a lot of research." They were short of members that year. I was lucky to get in. But contrast that, with the attitude of the French, Victor Hugo in the 19th century, they named an avenue after him in his own lifetime, so that, his address was Monsieur Hugo, in his house, in his avenue. Doesn't get much better than that. [laughter] ER: And when he died, they gave him a state funeral. There are incredible photographs of this with this massive catapult lying in the arch of the Arc De Triomphe. And it took, I think, it was three or four hours for the procession to go by. So, there's something for a novelist to work for. [laughter] ER: And I have a little guy in my book, Thomas Gascon. He comes from the area known as the Maqui which was the shanty town slums in the back of Mommath. And his family are pretty rough, warm people. And he goes as did all Paris to the funeral of Victor Hugo, and he manages to get up onto one of the buildings where he's got a bit of a vantage point over the crowd because the sidewalks, the pavements, were full. And if you want to see the spot, just go down the Champs-Élysées about 60 yards from the Arc De Triomphe from the Etoile and there's a cinema on the right, and that's where I think he was. And in order to do this, he thought it through before, he got a rope around his waist and he attached that to the balcony behind him and tied it tight. And while he's there, he sees a girl. It's like Dante and Beatrice. He knows that this entirely ordinary girl is the woman for him. No other. So, after a while, he tries to get down, so that, he can join her. But the rope is stuck. So, he looks down and he trod on the head of a man to get up there. [laughter] ER: And he says, "Has anybody got a knife?" And, no reply. Then he sees the man he trod on and he said, "Have you got a knife?" And the man says, "Yes." And he said, "Can I borrow it?" And the man says, "No." [laughter] ER: Actually, it's a little stronger than that in the book, but this is a family audience. [laughter] ER: And so, he's now urgent, and he, he says to the man, "I've got to go. Would you like it on your head?" So, the man passes up a knife. [laughter] ER: For a year... He gets down and of course, the girl's disappeared. For a year, this little guy goes all over Paris in the hope that he might spot her. He goes back to the spot, where they met, at the time where they met. People in love do these foolish things. Sometimes, he takes his little brother and he never sets eyes on her, until one evening. ER: And this is how every romance should begin. It was already growing dark as he crossed the Pont d'Iéna to the right bank. Ahead of him on the slope overlooking a bridge, stood the strange, moorish-looking Trocadero Concert Hall as it then was, built a decade ago, for the last World's Fair. Thomas smiled to himself as he passed this exotic palace. Ten minutes later, he was at his lodgings, but he didn't go in. He was feeling hungry. If he walked for another five minutes up the Rue de la Pompe to where it crossed Victor Hugo, there was a little bar where he could get a steak and some Laricots verts. He had earned it. Still feeling rather cheerful, he trudged contentedly along. On his right, he came to the railings of the Lycée Janson de Sailly and this made him smile again. All Paris knew the story of the grand new school that had recently opened on the Rue de la Pompe. The rich lawyer, whose name it bore, had discovered his wife had a lover, his revenge had been sweet. He had disinherited her and left his entire fortune down to the last sous to build a school for boys only. Though the Lycée had only just opened, it was already fashionable. Thomas wondered cheerfully what had become of the widow. ER: It was still a glow of gaslights coming through the windows, no doubt, the cleaners were finishing their work. As he watched he saw the light starting to go out, he paused. Why did he pause? There was really no reason at all, just idle curiosity to see the cleaners come out. A moment later, they did. Two women, one old, one younger; though he couldn't see their faces. The older one crossed the street, the younger turned up it. He continued walking. He came level as he reached a lamp outside a doorway, he glanced at her and stopped, dead in his tracks. It was the girl from the funeral. It had been so long since their brief encounter, that he'd almost put her out of his mind. He wondered if he'd even recognize her, yet now that he saw her, even in the lamp light, he hadn't the slightest doubt. He'd looked all over Paris for her and here she was hardly a mile from where he'd first seen her. She was a few paces in front of him now, he drew level again. She looked across, sharply. "Have you been following me?" ER: "No, I was walking up the street when you came out of the Lycée." ER: "Keep walking then." ER: "In that case, you will be following me," he said cleverly. ER: "I don't think so." ER: "I will do as you ask, but first I have to tell you something. We have met before." ER: "No, we haven't." ER: "You were at the funeral of Victor Hugo." ER: She shrugged. "And?" ER: "You were in the front row on the Champs-Élysées. A soldier made you move." He paused. She gave no reaction. "Do you remember a man hanging out from the railings on the building behind?" ER: "No." ER: "That was me." ER: "I have no idea what you're talking about." But she was thinking. "I remember a crazy man. He was saying vulgar things to a man below him." ER: "That's right." He smiled. "That was me." ER: "You're disgusting. Get away from me." ER: "I went looking for you." ER: "So, now you found me. F off." ER: "You don't understand. I went to the same place in the Champs-Élysées for weeks. Did you ever go there again?" ER: "No." ER: "Then I went from district to district. All over Paris, over a year in the hope of finding you. My little brother came with me sometimes. I promise you, this is true." ER: She stared at him. ER: "I work on Mr. Eiffel's Tower," he continued proudly. "She knows me." ER: She continued to stare at him. "Do you always piss on peoples' heads?" she said. [applause] ER: "Never, I swear." ER: She shook her head. "I think you must be crazy." ER: "There's a bar over there." He pointed up the street. "I was going to eat something, I'll give you supper. It's a respectable place. You'll be quite safe. When you want to leave, I won't follow you." ER: She paused. "You really looked for me all over Paris for a year?" [applause] ER: Could you hear anything? [laughter] Speaker 4: Oh, I could. [laughter] [pause] ME: I trust you'll leave the beret on, I hope. I hope. ER: Oh, I should stay in part, don't you think. ME: I should've brought my red one. There are so many grand pictures in the novel, large tapestries, large panoramic things. But I wanna start with a small detail. Louis XIII had a double row of teeth. How do you know a thing like that? Did you check his dental records or what? ER: Some of my French cousins come from a long line of dentists. [laughter] ME: He must have had a crowded mouth. Did he? I mean, with the... ER: Oh yeah. I think, that was his... I mean, I think, it must have been immensely discouraging for him, and I think he had an unfortunate personal life on account of it, I think that's the truth. And he and his wife were quite sort of distant. I think, he was a difficult fellow. ME: When you begin a project, do you start with the research? Is that the idea? Do you pick a site, for example Dublin, New York, London? ER: It's very difficult in this sense. I usually walk the place. Now, of course, when you walk a place your imagination runs riot. And, on the one hand, it gives you indelible impressions and things that are probably gonna last through the book with you. On the other hand, of course, it may mislead you because you don't really know what you're looking at, depending on where it is, naturally. So, then you have to start trying to educate your own responses, educate the imagination. Now, in the case of Paris, it was a little different. I was lucky enough to be in a family where since the 19th century, since quite early in the 19th century, people have been marrying French men or French women. So, I have a slew of French cousins. ME: Can you speak French? ER: Very badly but I can make myself understood. And, above all for me, by knowing a bunch of French families well from my childhood and living in their houses, you get a certain sense of how people live and how they are. And it's a sort of sense of, it validates what you're doing when you're writing. So, that's how I come by that. ME: How do you come to pick the particular bit of geography? How would you happen to pick New York City, for example, or Dublin or indeed a forest, the New Forest in England in... ER: Mostly for different reasons, I think. I mean, essentially, I mean, as of this moment, I have about seven books in pre-production as they would say in the movie industry. Some of them I've been mulling over for years. Two of them, I've been thinking about for 12 years. And sometimes they sort of go away. What looks like a great idea after a little while isn't any more. Others grow more and more urgent. And then, you have the business that you have to talk to publishers, all over the world, just to make sure that a good number of them actually think it's a good idea because otherwise they won't really do what's needed. So, all of that comes together. And it varies so much. I mean, The Forest, which is the book of mine that has sold the least, was probably the favourite for me to write because I'd known it since my childhood, it's right beside Sarum. ER: I had my grandfather and my great aunt live there. I love the place and I love the people. It's basically full of criminals. I mean, those people, the same families have been living there and breeding with each other for more than a thousand years. And they're smugglers and they're poachers. And so, when I'm working there in the research library, I'll see in 1278, John... I will say the real name was Stride, the family's called Pride in the book. John Stride is done for poaching in 1278, and John Stride is sitting opposite me at the same table because it's his descendant. I love that. ME: How can you possibly have seven novels going at the same time in pre-production, whatever you said? ER: Well, I go from one to another. ME: Is it like those chess masters who go and play 12 different games at once or what? ER: It's more like putting six cakes in an oven and opening the door now and then to see if any of them seem to be cooking. ME: Alright, you've picked a site, either Paris or the New Forest, what's your next step? What do you do next? You seem to marinate yourself in research. It's extraordinary. ER: Are you suggesting I drink too much? [laughter] ME: No, take it as you will. No, no, the research that goes into it. You're a novelist, you can make things up. That's your license, that's your warrant. But you don't, you demand some kind of historical accuracy. ER: There are two things going on here. One, I try to... Somebody who writes a popular historical novel is actually a propagandist. They may not want to be, but they are, whether they like it or not, and even more so a movie maker. You make a historical movie like Braveheart, a lot of people are going to believe that, that is how it is and they may have their prejudices either awakened or reinforced, all these things. So actually, without being pompous about it and without actually wanting to have to do it, you have a certain responsibility when you're doing this stuff. So, in that sense... ME: To the reader. ER: Yeah. To the general public because you are purveying ideas in a very insidious way, and I've tried, therefore, to do that responsibly, that's one thing. ME: But we wouldn't know, for example. You could say that Louis has four rows of teeth and we wouldn't know the difference. ER: That is true but there are all sorts of subtler things where, I mean, thinking... You look back at historical novels in the past and look at who the villains are and it's nearly always whichever race was out of fashion at that particular time and therefore... Let me give you, if I may, and it's a historical example but it went straight into fiction, as well as non-fiction. There was a massacre in Ulster in the 1640s and it was said that the Irish Catholics had arisen and slaughtered the Protestants. Well, actually it was much more complex and it was a two-way street and maybe 5,000 people died, 50/50 each. Within a very short space of time it was being said that these animalistic Irish Catholics had slaughtered 300,000 Protestants. There weren't 300,000 people there even. ME: Mm-hm. ER: And that went into... It was like... It's like an urban myth. That went into the woodwork and even in Victorian England, in the House of Parliament, people were still citing this as a reason why the Irish should not be able to govern themselves. In a subtler way, novelists do the same thing whether they like it or not. So, I research. The other side of the research is, when your constructing one of these big books and it is a big construct of course. It's very architectural 'cause if it isn't it won't, it won't resonate. It won't hold together. And I do these huge 20 to 40-page synopses and at the end of the book, I'm always surprised by how close I've stayed with the synopsis. But when you're doing that sometimes, you're just inventing a plot. Let's say you've had two romances. Okay, well it's time to have something else. We better have a theft or a murder story or something. And that's what you're supposed to do as a novelist. Just like a playwright, you've got to keep things moving along. ER: But another times to you may see, no, I'm not quite sure what plots I want here, and then, I go into the research more and more and I always without fail find the story in the research. And then, you try to look to see whether it's something that in some way evokes or mirrors the history of the time. Can I just give you what... A simple plot and then an evoking of history? When I was writing the London book, I have this a chapter which I really enjoyed writing at the time of Chaucer. One high middle ages, rich, rich culture with London Bridge with its tall gabbled houses, like a dam across the River Thames. And I discovered in the records of the Waterman's Company that a little apprentice had once dived out of one of those houses and saved his master's daughter who'd fallen into the river, and it was like a mill race and that is exactly the story in the book. And in reality, that fellow did indeed get his master's daughter in marriage, became an alderman, became Lord Mayor of London and his descendants became Dukes of Leeds. So, that was real and it was just right for my story. Now, that you talked about Louis XIV. Louis XIV, I'm pretty sure was not the son of Louis XIII. He was almost certainly the son of Cardinal Mazarin, who was... ME: I'm shocked. ER: Who was the queen's lover subsequently, but I think, I think he was then. And some French people like that and some do not. But so, therefore, the story for that flashback in the book for that period is about illegitimacy. ME: Do you... To get the geography, the ancient geography done, do you look at old maps or how do you... ER: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely and I mean, Paris has a wonderful, wonderful collections and actually they have done a two-volume atlas of the city of Paris. It's the most lavish production I've ever seen and you can actually... I mean, this is where you have to limit your research because I can go street by street, house by house and I can actually tell you that where the house exactly, what the house was and very often in some periods who was living there. So, I mean you could write a million-page book with the all the information there is, but I kept it down to a brief 800 pages. [laughter] ME: How... It took four years to write Sarum? How long does it take you to write a novel now? This complexity and depth and heft. ER: It depends on the complexity, is the answer. London took five years to write and the reason why I took so long and some of it was great fun to write but it was that you think of the audience, people will have so many expectations for what they expect to find there. So, they... London Bridge has got be there, building St. Paul's has got be there. This and that. And there were so many things that I knew that huge numbers of people would be disappointed if they were not there. ME: Because they were familiar with it, all these things. Yeah. ER: Because they were familiar with it, people all over the world. And of course, you can't please everybody but I've finished up doing a huge, it was like a three-dimensional jigsaw. Writing The Forest there were no expectations in particular and it was much quicker to write. I actually write quite fast. I've written as many words as John Grisham in the same amount of time which makes him a lot cleverer than me. [laughter] But, Paris, there were expectations alright, but it's a limited number. Unless you're going to try to satisfy the French. [laughter] And so right... ME: It's a feckless endeavour. Isn't it? Yeah. ER: You're not gonna win. So, right from the start, I just thought we are not gonna try and do that. And I thought, we won't sell this book to the French. So, don't waste time. Make your life easy. And so, I said... I'd been in the book selling business. So, I said to my agent in London, "Now look guys, there's only one way you stand any chance of selling this book to the French." Has anyone here ever been in sales? ME: I have, we had some... Yes. ER: So, you're gonna know what I'm saying. If you're trying to sell a book to a bookseller, and you know its no good, then what you do is this, you start to take it out of your bag and then you say, "Uh, you don't want this." [laughter] And you put it back. And so, I thought of a variation on that. And I said to my agent, "You go to the French publishers and you simply say, 'I'm sorry the author refuses to sell this book [laughter] into France'". And I'm so annoyed because they didn't have the cojones to do it. [laughter] ER: And they're still trying to flog the damn thing when we've sold everybody else. [laughter] ME: You do something in Paris, I don't think you do it in your other novels. You bend time. You jump backwards and forwards in time. Was that a difficult thing to do to... ER: No, it wasn't. But the reason why I did it, I'm almost embarrassed to tell you. I thought, first of all two things, as time passes on when you're reading these books, you tend, you yearn to put more structure in them. You want to make it better made. More operatic, whatever. It's rather like, Vivaldi's Four Seasons is absolutely perfect. If you listen to a lot of the other music of Vivaldi, you realize that the Four Seasons is all prefigured there 'cause in that century, people were always reusing their music anyway. And then, finally it all came together and in a sense, you hope to do the same one of these days. So, I wanted the book to be better constructed. I wanted it to be a single family saga. But I also wanted to tell the history of Paris. ER: Now, if you tell the whole history for 2000 years, you've got a very long book. Because its gotta hold together, the story's gotta flow right the way through. So, I thought, well, why not let's use flashbacks. And they were fun to do. And they link, and of course all the flashbacks in this book contain a secret, that the protagonists, the people in the book don't know about their own families and their relationships, and so on and so forth. I mean, there's one where a guy who's called Galant de Semilly believes that he's descended from the great hero, Galant as in the Chancellor Galant, the friend of Charlemagne. And in fact, it turns out in the middle ages that there were two sons and the older was called Jean, and his father casting about for a name for his second son decided to call him Galant because that was the name of his favourite horse. [laughter] ER: So, you do that. So, this was the idea and the hope was that I was going thereby to make the book shorter. ME: Didn't work did it? [chuckle] ER: Did not work, totally failed. Huge apologies. ME: Wonderful. You touch on some subjects in the book, that I think are, as you did with the Irish book, subjects of religion. Now I did not know and that's not surprising about the expulsion of the Jews, for example, in France. And I knew about the Huguenots and the St. Bartholomew's Day and so on... Why did you... There's quite a lot on those subjects in the book. ER: It happens that there were, as all over Europe, the Jews were expelled and then they... Usually, they got let back in because of course they were a wonderful way of the king raising cash. I mean, that's the truth of the matter. So, you took all their assets and then you got them back and so on and so forth. And of course, none of the debts... I mean, the king would say, "This is monstrous, these people have unfairly, encumbered you with all these debts. I'm gonna throw them out", but you still owed the money, only you have to give it to the king. I mean, it was totally fraudulent. And it so happens that the most famous expulsion of the Jews and the one which actually kept them out for a long time, for several centuries, took place at exactly the moment of the fall of the Knights Templar. ER: And the fall of the Knights Templar was exactly the same story. The king wanted their assets. All the trumped up charges about all these things that these guys were supposed to be doing, was complete nonsense. It was shameful. So, there's two... Well, a lot of them were executed in the end but above all, he seized all their assets with the help of the Pope who was then a Frenchman. So, that made a wonderful two stories coming together to a theme. A theme that resounds through the middle ages and beyond. So, that's why that expulsion of the Jews. And of course, it also is a background because I have a Jewish family, the family Jacob who are descendants of the family that are expelled in the book and then, we see what happens to them at the time of the occupation in the early 1940s. So, and that for me is a very moving thing. Interestingly, I'm sure you all know, La Madeleine, that beautiful church right in the middle of Paris staring down on Place de la Concorde, did you know that originally it was a synagogue? ME: I did though after I read the book, yeah. ER: Ah, well there. ME: Is it difficult to affect the balance between the fictional narrative, which we're dying for and the history? Is it hard to reach an equilibrium there? ER: Yes it is. ME: Isn't it? ER: It is and of course it depends on the subject, it depends what you reckon people know or not. Yeah, in my earlier books, I started as you, will understand so well, modelling Sarum, to a large extent structurally on the books of the late and great James Michener. Because that guy really invented this genre. And so, structurally... And he doesn't hesitate at certain points just to come in and give you some pages of fact. Just as in the middle of The Godfather, the 16 pages of nonfiction, smack in the middle of the book. So, you can do it. I'm trying, as time goes on, to meld it more smoothly into the story. But, I don't think that the reader minds occasionally, not too often, but occasionally just being taken out for a few paragraphs and told something. ME: You're very generous in your public acknowledgement of Michener, as a kind of, not a mentor but someone... Is he... He didn't event the genre, did he? ER: I think he did. ME: Really? ER: I think the multi-generational sagas, they call it. Yeah, I think, he did. I don't write the same way as... Yeah, I don't write the same way as Michener. I mean, everybody has their own style. As often happens, while Michener was alive, a bunch of followers tried to write Michener books and of course, what they did is, they took all his idiosyncrasies and copied them. And of course, the result not very fortunate usually. I just write it my own way but the structure is interesting. ME: When you finish one novel, do you go immediately into preparation for the next or do you... Gérard Simoneau used to write a book every two weeks and then have a nervous collapse and get married or something. ER: That was delicately put. [laughter] ME: For those of us that know about the Simoneau household, I just, you either know or you don't and I'm not gonna tell you. It was really awful. But do I go straight into another? ME: Or take a break, yeah. ER: I take maybe a week or so, depends what there is to do, like if I've got to move house or something, that's when I do it. But otherwise, until very recently, I had two children to educate. So, I went straight back to work. ME: You went from being a bookseller, among other things, to writing books. Was there something so terrible about being a bookseller or you just always wanted to write, since you were a wee tad? ER: Well, writing's in the family. ME: Mm-hmm. ER: There's even a distant connection and it is there to Walter Scott, who's mother was a Rutherfurd and my grandmother was a prolific romance novelist in the late '20s and '30s. And she, I should explain that the rather pervert part of the family, who's name I use, they married their cousins, frequently, their first cousins, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, almost without exception. I'm a great believer in marrying your cousins because at least you know what you're getting. [laughter] ER: Of course, it can have its disadvantages as we know. But also, I do believe if you're going to do anything in the arts, it helps hugely to be inbred. [laughter] ER: When one of my aunts was gonna get married to a very, very staid and conventional family, she was interviewed by the future husband's two sisters. They started questioning her in a way that sort of puzzled her a bit and then finally, she started to realize that they were asking her whether there were any genetic bolts in the family. And she said, "Oh no, absolutely nothing like that at all. Oh, unless you count madness, of course." [laughter] ME: But, and I tread softly here, Rutherfurd is a pen name, is it not? ER: Exactly. Exactly. ME: You're not wanted by the police or anything. I mean, is it an alias or what? ER: Well, as I say, I didn't quite realize this myself as much. My father's name is Wintle and which is a very, very nice old farming name from the second valley in the west of England and they've been there forever. And it's a nice name, yeoman's name, but I found in America that nobody could get it right. They either, they either think your Winthrop, especially if you've got an English accent. ME: Of course. ER: Or Wendell or sometimes even Winshil. And any of those are fine but they happen not to be the name. And I should say that my dear ex-wife's family, still, some of them still can't get my name right. They can't spell it right and they're entirely literate. So, I sat down with my agent. I mean, come on, writing a novel is a difficult thing. If you give people a name they can't even handle, you really are making your life even more difficult than it is. ME: It strikes against you. ER: Two strikes against you before you've put pen to paper. So, I sat down with my agent and we went through a bunch of family names. And when we came to Rutherfurd, we both said, "Hey, that's it." What I didn't appreciate until actually years later... Well, I knew about the inbreeding but I didn't realize quite the extent to which, for instance, my grandmother's writing and many other characteristics that she had, came from the Rutherfurd family which was so much, so strong... I mean, if you look at my DNA, you'll find far more Rutherfurd by a factor of about 10 than anything else. ME: Are you saying that people in the Rutherfurds had family reunions in order to meet girls, was that the idea or... ER: Absolutely. [laughter] ER: It was rather... You know the way in Rudyard Kipling, you know the elephants get together and stamp around and I just rather like that, once in a while. Of course, you know this is from Ireland. It's funerals. ME: Oh, yes. Wakes. ER: Wakes. ME: Yes. ER: That's where you find them. ME: When you were transitioning from book-selling to book writing, you said a book that changed your life was the Confederacy of Dunces. ER: Yes. ME: By John Kennedy Toole. ER: Yes, yes. ME: How? ER: Okay. So, I had been a... Some of you, I'm sure, you do go to England and you know... ME: God yes. ER: You know the Waterstones Bookshops? ME: Yes. ER: Okay. So, for years and years, I worked for Tim Waterstone. I've actually godfathered one of his children before he ever did the bookshops. We were in book distribution and publishing, both sides of the Atlantic. He was my mentor, a wonderful and charismatic and material mentor. So, I had a very happy life. I'd started trying to write a book as soon as I came down from university and I'd gone back and then, I'd taken time off. I had said to Tim, "I'm gonna go and write." He also has written novels since and he said, "I remember so well." He, then, had six children. He has eight or 10 now. And he sort of said, "Well, I can't do that but you'll be surprised how much I'd like to." ER: So anyway, I went off and did that and wrote 12 plays and then, came back to Tim and said, "Well, I'm broke now," And he gave me a job again. Prince that man. So, I then, I worked and worked and of course, like all entrepreneurs, they make you work so hard you've no time to write. ME: Were you in a bookshop? Were you working in the shop? ER: No. No. Mostly selling and marketing books and then, I had my own publishing. I have worked in bookshops but... So, book selling in one shape or form and I loved it. I love the book business. I love the smell of books. I like being in warehouses. So, that was fine. And then, I had the idea. Well, if I can't write, maybe, I can have my... I had my own list by this time. Maybe, I could set up my own publishing house. After Tim got fired and went off to found his book chain which, of course, the best thing that ever happened to him, his successor was a very, very nice man, became my second mentor and he was crazy on business education. He was actually a graduate of Stanford and he got me and three or four other guys he was mentoring to go and look at business schools which the English didn't think was a good idea at all. Because as the guy from Smiths said to me, "We don't like people to go to business school 'cause they might not come back." [laughter] ER: So, anyway, I was lucky enough to do something called the Sloan Course which is an MBA for geriatrics at Stanford which is a wonderful one-year course. And I was about the youngest person on it in my early 30s. And I came out of that with ideas of setting up my own business and I actually thought I'd get a little production house going and I tried to buy the Confederacy of Dunces to get the movie rights and Johnny Carson in them. I couldn't get them and I, fussed around with some other things. And then, I was standing in New York looking at a picture, one day of Sarum, Salisbury Cathedral, Constable. And there are actually two, one in the Frick and one in the Met. And I suddenly thought, "My God, there's my hometown and Stonehenge and Michener," and the whole thing suddenly came to me. And so, if I'd been able to buy the Confederacy of Dunces, they say that it is cursed, that you can't get a movie made. Who knows? That might have been a great movie which is still waiting to be made, still waiting. Instead of which, I wrote, Sarum. ME: You said you told an interviewer, that you loved... Confederacy of Dunces had tremendous impact on your career and your life but there was one book that you wished you'd never read and that was PG Wodehouse's Summer Lightning. ER: Yeah. Any PG Wodehouse fans here, by any chance, or we're all too young? ME: Oh no. ER: Yeah. ME: Is it Wodehouse or Woodis? There's a big debate. ER: Wodehouse. Well, I say I don't know. It's probably, if you're very grand, you say Woodis. I don't know. I just say Wodehouse. ME: Why did that book scare you? ER: Because, it's perfect. It's perfect. I mean, they don't call Wodehouse the master for nothing. There are two great popular masters of the English language, who in my humble opinion, have never been surpassed, perhaps not even by Shakespeare and one is WS Gilbert, as in Gilbert and Sullivan, who I think was the most... His patter and all the rest of it... And also, he wrote a lot of other stuff as well as the Operettas. The words he managed to work in there for a popular audience and they responded just as audiences did in Shakespeare's time to this incredibly rich vocabulary. The Victorian musical tradition is verbally incredibly rich and that all worked its way into Gilbert and Sullivan. So, Gilbert is one and I would say that PG Wodehouse is the other and 'Summer Lightning' is so perfect, you will never do better. It's also so full of that man's spirit. ER: When my grandmother died, my mother had a younger sister, who is still a little girl and she had to deal with her for the day and it was a summer stay, they were country and she took her to a haystack and read, 'Summer Lightning' to her and she wrote to PG Wodehouse just to let him know that she had done that and just said... Anyone ever seen a program on television, it is a British program called the "Sky at Night" with Patrick Moore? He's a lovely guy and he would get wildly enthusiastic. And my father would say, "I have never seen a fellow get so excited about what we do not know." [laughter] ER: "Is the moon made of cheese? Well, of course, it may be. But we think, probably it is something quite different and we still don't know and we may not know for years and there it is." And he's a fantastic man. And when my father had agonizing back pains in his last years, he was... This was the one thing, apart from obviously some pain killers that was able to give him a little pleasure in life. So, that's what Wodehouse does, I think, for a lot of people. ME: Before we get our audience to ask you a couple of questions, you said earlier that you love books, the heft of them... the smell. You love to be in warehouses and so on... And everyone is saying the book is, as we know it or knew what is dead, or it's on life support. Do you buy that, be replaced by the e-book or the reader or... ER: I wondered, but I think absolutely not. For a whole bunch of reasons, for a whole bunch of reasons. Actually, I mean, looking at my own kids the younger generation because of their computer screens they're actually reading more. And my own kids, I had difficulty getting my kids to read books, amazingly. And... Probably 'cause I wrote books; and so they come in and see me writing and that probably put them off, I would say. ER: Once, one of the teachers at my son's school said to my son, "Are you going to be a writer like your dad?" and he shook his head very thoughtfully, he was then aged eight and said, "Oh, no, it's much too difficult." [laughter] But you know, everybody... First of all, we all need information, but secondly, everybody wants to be told stories and it just doesn't change. And the thing about e-books is this, it too rather interesting developments that everybody certainly noticing about e-books. One is that, they are helpful for people who want large print. So, the large print book may well gradually become a thing of the past and there is a double whammy there 'cause of course the large print book, by its nature is going to be physically bigger. So, by the time you get one of my books to notch, print, [chuckle] you're probably too old to lift it anyway. [laughter] So, that's one thing and they're using their devices for that. But the other thing is, you know what's happening? People are buying the books and they're buying the e-books as well. ME: Yeah. ER: So, they're reading the book at home and then they want to go on reading it in their travelling, and they're going in the subway or this and that, so they continue reading and so forth. So, it's just turning out to be much more complex than we expected it to be. I never worry about the world coming to an end until it comes to an end, thanks to one thing, which is human boredom. And so, you get this terrible homogenizing of everything including books. But it's okay 'cause very soon then they'll all get bored and then all the little boutiques and the individualistic books and so forth will bubble up again, like plants. So, it is going on forever and libraries will be here forever and that's great. ME: Mr. Rutherfurd, you take a few questions? ER: Sure, and may I... Before we stop, may I just apologize to this side of the room. I was conscious when I was speaking that I could hear, somehow when I was slightly this way I could hear because, of course, it was there 'cause we were talking, I could hear the microphone making a better sound when I was looking that way and so, every so often I was just looking at you guys and then thinking, "It's no good, they won't be able to hear," and turning back again and say, I wasn't ignoring you, you know... [laughter] ME: Do you want to start over again and just talk to that... [laughter] ER: Okay. Now, I can see a sea of wonderful faces that I didn't see before. But actually I can look over my shoulder and I can still see these guys too. So, that's alright. ME: As I said, the microphone is there, if anyone wants to ask questions, while we're waiting, I will ask a question. Can you talk about your next project, or you'd rather not? Or, writers don't usually... Novelists don't like to say anything. ER: Yeah. Well, I'm still, as I'd already said, I've got a bunch of books on the stocks. There is one that I'm certainly mad keen to do. I've talked to most of my publishers now I had, I'm happy to say, a delightful dinner last night, here with publishers who are very, very, very good guys because they agreed with me. [laughter] And I'm pretty sure it's coming off. But I have to confess to a very primitive superstition, and my rational mind tells me not to believe in it, that I'm somehow gonna jinx it. ME: Right. ER: If I say. But there is another very real consideration, I hate to let you know, especially in such a place, that publishing is not always a gentleman's industry. And my books take time to write. And I have, on one occasion, had to finish a book in a hell of a hurry because a competing author decided, once he discovered what I was up to, to get a book out on the same subject, but shorter, and piped me to the post. So... ME: That's not on, is it? I mean, to use an English expression. ER: Well, it may not be cricket, but it happens. I'm glad to say I was able to get mine out first. I screwed him. [laughter] ME: Any questions at all from the audience? I think you've answered... Well, yes, down... Speaker 5: Hi. I wanted to ask about your novel, "Russka", which is actually the first one that I read before reading "Sarum", and "London", and "New York", and "The Forest", and the Irish books, and now "Paris". What I found fascinating about "Russka" was that you created your own Russian village that moved, rather than making it about Moscow or about St. Petersburg, or even like Suzdal, or Kostroma, or one of the smaller places. So I'm curious to know when tackling Russia why you decided to create your own place, rather like Michener's Island of All Saints, rather than using an existing place. ER: Okay. First, the quick answer, and then of course, being me, the long answer. The quick answer is, Russian history moves from South to North. So, you have the old Russia, somewhat more European than the later Russia, centered in the lovely city of Kiev. And so, you're either gonna have to route from Kiev, to Moscow, to Leningrad... Well, Leningrad, St. Petersburg, if you're going to tell the story, you know, in place, so to speak. Or, you're gonna do what did happen, which was that whole villages would move north. And so, for long and complex reasons you will know from wading your way through the book, for which I thank you, they went up after the Mongol invasions and moved up into those northern forests. And a rather more intense and what we think of as more Russian Russia appeared. So, hence the two Russkas. And in fact, I discovered finally, on an old map, a Czarist map, from the 19th century, that there was, in fact, a small village called Russka, actually near Novgorod, which I didn't even know about when I wrote the book and nobody remembers anymore. But that's why. So, that answers that question, I guess. Thank you for wading through the book, it was a second book. ME: She's read all of your books, Edward. ER: I know! I don't know how you can hold down a job. [laughter] ME: Thank you. S5: Thank you! ME: Yes! Yes, sir. Speaker 6: I was curious whether you've ever, sort of, considered embarking on a project, peeked into the lobby of culture, or the history of a region and thought, "Oh, no, no, no!" and walked away. If you ever, sort of, considered taking on an area or a period of history, and then just thought, "No". ME: Dropped the project after getting into it, and say, "No, it's not for me"? ER: Well, projects often just quietly die, they seem exciting, and then, they go away. Yeah, that does happen. But not necessarily from fear of tackling the subject, just because the subject doesn't seem to grow in the mind. I have a project which I've been passionately wanting to do, I have two actually, but one of above all I've been passionately wanting to do for 12 years, and it's a huge subject and I know exactly what I wanna do. And for 12 years, I have been unable to get my publishers anywhere to let me do it. Well, they'll let me do it, but barely. So, it's no good, it's stillborn. One day, when all of you guys have bought so many of my books that I can just say, right, "I will do anything I like." Or once my children are supporting me. [laughter] I will write that book. And I'll send you a free copy. [laughter] S6: I've got a card. That actually ties into a quick second question, which is, I think you're in a unique position to talk a bit, both as an author and as someone who's worked in the publishing industry about the changes to the industry. Because for me, as someone who sort of works as a bookseller, it... There are very strange and dynamic things happening now in the book industry, with Amazon buying up complete rights to authors' works and so on. And I'm also wondering how that impacts on publishers with sort of diminished margins, in their willingness to back certain kinds of projects. And so, I'd be interested to see what publishing looks like to you now. ER: Okay. The gorilla has just entered the room. [laughter] So, I will give you a brief, but as good an answer as I can, because nobody knows what's gonna happen, of course. And it's interesting to come here, where publishing a book and promoting a book is still being done in the same way; whereas in America, for instance... Sorry, in the US it's completely changed. And the book tour as we know it is... It's still happening, but not... I'm not doing it. Mind you, I've done all the events down the years, but still, it's all done virtually now. But what you're really getting at is something much more profound. We have a situation where first of all, I'm gonna deal with the bookstores first, if I may, and then Amazon, which is tricky. ER: We have big retailers who tried, like Barnes & noble, to operate like sort of super independent bookstores. But it's just not the same. And most of those retailers are now in deep trouble. We've lost Borders, Waterstones in trouble; Barnes and Noble is struggling. Things are a little better in Canada, but it's world... It is a world-wide phenomenon. And what's gonna happen? It's a huge distribution problem. Curiously, in the United States there are signs of the independent booksellers actually starting to bubble up again, despite all that's going on. And the great independent booksellers still have a business. I do have, I believe, a solution for this problem; a business solution. And it goes against the grain for most independent booksellers, but I do believe passionately, and I mean, I'd almost stop writing, if I could be the guy that could go in there and organize it. ER: I do believe that it is possible. I think that independent booksellers have got to form cooperatives, to give them huge purchasing power. I think it's legal, especially, we're talking in the US of A, but other places, too. It will give them the purchasing power to get the discounts. This in particular, matches the United States, because with the antitrust legislation, which is now doing the exact reverse of what it was intended to do... It was intended to level the playing field, and it's done the reverse. It is... You can't give generous discounts, unless people buy huge quantities, 'cause it's illegal. If they would form cooperatives, they could, I think quite legitimately, buy large quantities of books, which can then be delivered individually to the individual bookstores. Which is what happens... I mean, Waterstones, for instance, in England, for a long time operated without a central warehouse. It worked just fine. The difficulty is, the mindset for most independent booksellers is not for doing that. But they should, and I think that it could transform bookseller life very much for the better. And there would be a mass of bookstores, independents, to take the place of the big chains, if or possibly when, they are no longer with us. ME: Thank you. Mr. Edward Rutherfurd. [applause]