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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No to turn to bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt. This is Bookworm, and I have as my guest,

John Lanchester, his new novel is called The Wall.

Well, maybe I'm arrogant, but I think that the people who have been writing about this book, they say

dystopian novel, they say George Orwell, they say 1984 animal farm, no.

This is a book, The Wall, which takes the form of that kind of novel

in order to tell a love story. And as the book progresses, the love story gets wilder and wilder. The people no longer have to

just confront climate change. They're confronting pirates and secret islands and cargo

cults. And, you know know it's a very wild and funny book

this book is a book that takes

a lot of current crises and says

what is a novel a novel is something that can possibly, if it wants to,

have a happy ending. Now tell me, John Lancaster, why a happy ending? I think it's partly a

sort of Aristotelian thing that it's in the nature of stories to reach certain kinds of resolution.

And actually the options are fairly limited for the kind of resolution you have.

There's a flaw in the English novel.

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