Summary
Matthew Sweet talks to author Sarah Perry about her gothic imagination, writing about religion, rationalism and disease in novels including The Essex Serpent, After Me Comes The Flood and Melmoth. Recorded from her home in Norwich, Sarah discusses her experience of these times as someone who has an auto-immune condition, her interest in comets and the way she used sewing to overcome a temporary inability to write.
You can hear more from authors in the Norfolk area on the website of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival https://nnfestival.org.uk/
There is a collection of in depth interviews with guests including Zadie Smith, Mark Haddon, Sebastian Faulks, Marilynne Robinson and other authors on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04ly0c8
Sarah Perry can be found discussing her novel Melmoth in detail in this episode of Free Thinking called Sarah Perry, Spookiness and Fear https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000kk2 and she discusses the Essex Serpent in this episode Still Loving Victoriana Jokes and All https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b081tkr7
Producer: Robyn Read
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.2 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:36.9 | It's late. It is for us, anyway. It's about 10 o'clock at night by the clock here, |
| 0:42.9 | which would be nothing unusual if the times were normal and I was sitting with a guest |
| 0:47.7 | or guests around the familiar bays-covered table of Studio 50A, Free Thinking's ancestral home. But they're not normal, not the old normal. |
| 0:58.8 | Anyway, I'm at home in South London, my kids are in bed, and I've set up a little studio in the |
| 1:05.1 | corner of my living room, and our guest, well, she's at home too, in Norwich. You'll know her if you know contemporary British |
| 1:12.7 | fiction because she's a key figure in its tableau, though the idea of the contemporary |
| 1:18.2 | seems not quite to fit Sarah Perry. There are some writers who occupy a zone all of their own, |
| 1:25.3 | whose characters and situations are of our world and yet apart from it. |
| 1:30.2 | And I think Sarah is one of these. She's published three novels. After me comes the flood, |
| 1:36.0 | which she wrote while studying creative writing at the University of East Anglia. That's about a man |
| 1:41.2 | who gets out of London on impulse and finds himself in a strange household, |
| 1:46.1 | in drought-stricken Norfolk, staying in a room with a Puritan portrait on the wall. |
| 1:51.5 | It's a little bit Kafka, a little bit Iris Murdoch, a little bit don't eat cheese at bedtime. |
| 1:57.1 | It is, and I mean this as a compliment, peculiar. |
| 2:00.7 | Then she wrote The Essex serpent, |
| 2:02.8 | a novel of doubt and science and faith, and something monstrous slithering through the mud |
| 2:08.0 | of Victorian Essex. And her most recent novel, Melmoth, crosses time and space. The European |
| 2:14.7 | past, always finding the same figure somewhere in the frame, |
... |
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