Radar: My Cultural Picks 10.11.25
- Andrew Jamison
- Oct 22
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 23
Rose Tremain: This Cultural Life, BBC Sounds
I’ll make a terrible, shameful confession: I’ve never read anything by Rose Tremain. Well, apart from an extract from her novel The Road Home, entitled ‘Significant Cigarettes’, for the purposes of teaching it as part of the Edexcel English Literature IGCSE. It’s okay as an extract; it features a character called Lev who’s leaving behind his Eastern European family in order to pursue work in England. It’s an intriguing character study and a good advert for her work, but I’ve just never found the right moment to go and read her work. I am, of course, aware of Restoration, the novel, but I just haven’t read it yet (sorry). But, if this passage was a good advert for her writing, then this interview really sold her writing to me. Some authors interview incredibly well (I’m thinking of the poets I’ve heard a lot such as Heaney and Muldoon); some just have the gift of the gab in this situation. For my own part, I’ve always felt like I’ve sold myself short in interviews, particularly on the one or two occasions I’ve been asked into a radio studio. I think, at the start of my career, I just felt so self-conscious about saying something stupid that I overthought my answers and came across as overly ponderous and failed to really answer the question. I think, maybe, the key to being a good interviewee is just being yourself, and speaking naturally about yourself and your writing. This also comes down to the part of the interviewer and feeling comfortable in the presence of the interviewer. Rose Tremain’s interview with John Wilson was excellent. I was gripped throughout.
It was fascinating to hear about Tremain’s life which in itself would make for a good novel. And then at other times I found it moving when she was asked about her estranged relationship with her father, who abandoned her about aged ten and hasn’t been in touch since. She went on to say about how she sent him her novels when she became successful and he never responded. When Wilson asked what we were all thinking: ‘was he jealous?’ She said that maybe he was but didn’t really know.The interview covered her upbringing; her mother who refused to let her go to Oxbridge and instead sent her to a finishing in Paris; her time at UEA under Angus Wilson; her success as a writer; her experience of not winning a Booker Prize; and her sense of enjoyment at writing. It was a pleasure to listen to from start to finish. Are authors’ own lives more interesting than the ones in their fiction? I’ll have to read Tremain’s novels to find out, but she came across as humble, authentic and a truly dedicated writer.
Artworks: When Kevin Met Sadie, and The Three Faces of D. H. Lawrence, BBC Sounds
Artworks on BBC is a fairly reliable series, and these are the two I’ve enjoyed most recently. When Kevin Met Sadie is one which captured my attention because it’s about Joan Lingard’s series of novels set in Belfast, the most famous of which is Across the Barricades. In the novel, a Catholic boy called Kevin and a protestant girl called Sadie fall in love across, literally, across the barricades. The novel ends with them leaving the country for England in order to continue their relationship. I enjoyed hearing the daughter of Lingard discuss her work and give insights into the character of her mother, and this was well supplemented with archival interview recordings with the author herself, who came across as a mix of spark and dignity in her responses to the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. It made me want to go back and pick her books again. The professor from the University of Ulster raised questions about how the novel doesn’t really investigate the status quo of British ‘occupation’ at the time which was important for balance, and, to be honest, I felt like the programme could have done more to probe the deficiencies of the novel, as in doing this it would have highlighted the positives more – the show came across as more of a tribute to Lingard as opposed to assessment of the novel’s place in the canon, which was fine, but it could have had more opposing voices to liven it up a bit.
‘Simple, sensuous and passionate’ was how John Milton defined poetry, which in many ways was ironic considering most of his work was complex, cold, and highly allusive. At any rate, if he was describing the writing of D. H. Lawrence, he couldn’t have hit the nail on the head more accurately. These are the qualities which make Lawrence such a wonderfully popular novelist and poet and essayist, actually. His book Lawrence on Education has some wonderful insights about class and education. At any rate, this is an interesting triptych of radio programmes presented by Michael Symmons Roberts. One of my bugbears about podcasts is when the presenter gets in the way of the subject or topic by giving us irrelevant or unasked details about their own relation to the art or artist. At times this can be interesting but at others I just want to hear about the main event. Symmons Roberts is guilty of this occasionally in this podcast, as was Chris Page in the Lingard one, but largely this is a successful show which shows the writer in new lights. I find the most interesting thing about Lawrence not all the sex stuff (the famous scenes etc) but the root of that which is essentially is relation to and attempt at understanding the female of the species. In my view, he does so with language that is ‘simple, sensuous and passionate’ and surely one of his greatest achievements as a writer is showing that men, as much as possible, can write about women in a way that is gracious, humble, and tender not sympathetic, not patronising or misogynistic. One of the great tragedies with the legacy of writers like this, is not their work, but how some in the world we live in now are intent on reading into it what was never there and therefore ruining their reputation. Lawrence was a true, authentic writer dedicated to his art and lived a hard life paying the price for that.
There is a fine line between telling it straight and glamourising violence. I’ve listened to a couple of podcasts on the subject of The Troubles recently (The Brighton Bomb, and Escape from the Maze, which I've written about here), and have been wondering about that line more and more. We love history, of course we do, as often the ‘true’ narratives of history are stranger and sadder than fiction. We live in a time when the historical novel is now a staple fixture in bestseller charts, for example. The ‘true crime’ podcast also is incredibly popular in our time. I think Mario Ledwith does an excellent job here in reporting the events of The Poppy Day Bomb. Iit's not until near the end of the first episode we discover he was born in Enniskillen, where it happened, two days after the explosion. I had tears running down my cheeks listening one of the interviewees recount losing his father on the day - it was still so raw for him even after all this time. He questions how any human could possibly have have killed innocent people who attending a remembrance day ceremony on that day, and we're right there with him. How, just how? As Ledwith suggests, there are still so many unanswered questions from The Troubles, and quite rightly interrogates the notion of whether there can ever be true peace without the answers of who committed this atrocity. While some onlookers might casually glance at Northern Ireland and say "oh well, all of that bother is over now", I'd suggest they listen to this podcast as while the Good Friday Agreement was a milestone, and a great achievement in ending the violence, there still lives on anger and frustration and confusion and insurmountable, unspeakble grief for many people in the province, and that's worth remembering.
Andrew Jamison is a poet and teacher, and you can read more articles on his blog here or get a paid subscription and access all previous and future posts here. You can also browse his poetry collections and buy signed, first editions of each of them here.
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