Hello, my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today I'm talking to John

Lanchister about walls, about nightmare scenarios, and about what happens when the young blame

the old for the terrible state of the world.

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The big theme of this conversation is climate change. We are going to be doing more episodes

about climate in future because we haven't done enough.

John Lanchister's new novel, The Wall, is an imagining of a world after the change and

will hear in a bit about what that might mean. I recorded this conversation with John Lanchister

a couple of weeks ago in London. This is about a novel, so we're talking fiction as well

as fact, but we are also discussing some of the nightmare scenarios with climate. It's

not all doom and gloom, stick with us, and we do get to some hope at the end.

We are of a generation for whom the kind of drumbly of climate disaster has been there

in the background for our adult lives, not as children, but most of our adult lives.

Was there a point where it moved into the foreground for you, or does it kind of move

back and forth? Is there a moment that you recognise that that existential terror came to

the front of your mind? Well, in a funny way, as a generation, there

was almost a switch of existential terrors because our childhood terror was the bomb.

It was the bomb, and there's that thing that I often think of, I think Napoleon said

that to understand a person, you have to know what the world looked like when they were

...