Sebastian Faulks

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2009

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer Sebastian Faulks. He is best known for his novel Birdsong, which told in shocking detail the misery of life in the Flanders trenches. It was published with little fanfare or glossy advertising and failed to win any major awards - but it became a literary phenomenon and a huge best-seller. He was inspired to write it after visiting the battlefields of the Western Front with some veterans of World War I. One old soldier held onto Sebastian's hand and recalled seeing his friend killed next to him and, for the first time for him, Sebastian says, the war emerged from the history books into real, tangible human experience. He concedes that he still struggles to get to grips with much of life. Writers, he says, are often trying to impose a structure on a world that they find generally baffling.

Favourite track: Miles by Miles Davis Book: Remembrance of Things Past (Proust) by CK Scott Moncrieff (transl.) Luxury: A wicket, cricket bat, net, an endless supply of balls and a bowling machine that can be set to replicate the style of any bowler

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2009. My castaway this week is the writer Sebastian folks. By his own estimation he didn't really get his life on track until he was about 30,
0:35.6	musing that he could quite easily have gone off to she a sheep in Cumbria or something.
0:40.3	Luckily for us, and possibly the the sheep he didn't.
0:43.0	Described as one of the most impressive novelists of his generation,
0:47.0	his literary acuity has delivered a succession of profound and popular works.
0:51.0	He's best known for the book he wrote more than 15 years ago,
0:54.3	Bird Song. Set in the First World War it told in shocking human detail the misery of
0:59.5	life in the Flanders trenches. It was published with little fanfare or glossy advertising
1:04.4	and didn't win any major awards, but it became a literary phenomenon. He says,
1:10.1	I've long ago abandoned any search for meaning but I do believe that are values and I do believe
1:15.6	experiences have value. I'm wondering if that's one of the reasons you're right to explore the meaning
1:21.5	of experience and values.
1:24.0	I suppose it is. I think a lot of novelists set out to impose a shape on the world which
1:31.0	otherwise we're in danger of finding completely incomprehensible.
1:35.4	Human beings have this terrible curse, it's the curse of consciousness, it's what first happens
1:40.2	to Adam and Eve when they acquire self-awareness. The dog and the woodlouse and the tortoise all live
1:46.3	quite happily because they don't really understand that they're going to die, but we live in
1:50.4	this ridiculous shaggy dog story which can only end one way.
1:55.9	And I think that one of the important things that serious novels do is to try to give comfort,
2:01.9	reassurance and a sense of redemption to what is otherwise a really
	...

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