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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to the Granta Podcast. I'm Josie Mitchell, an editor at Granta Magazine.
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B
And I'm Leo Robson, writer and critic. We'll be speaking to magazine contributors past
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and present to hear how authors connect the dots between what they're reading and
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B
writing, and to hear about the themes weave through their work.
- [00:29]
A
Our guest today is the novelist Alan Bratton, whose short stories have appeared on Granto.com and his debut novel, Henry Henry, came out earlier this year. Alan Breton was born in the United States, raised in Alexandria in Virginia. He holds an MA in English Language and Literature, having written a thesis on medieval kingship. Henry Henry is his debut novel, and it follows Hal Lancaster, the young heir to the Dukedom of Lancaster. But the novel is set in 2014, so it's sort of looking at how this young man is making sense of holding that title in the 21st century. He's openly gay, he's devoutly Catholic, and has a reputation for drinking and drug use. There's sort of like a desperate edge to the way that he's doing that. He's partying to quite extreme degree. And over the course of the novel, you come to learn that maybe some of Hal's behaviors, the casual sex and the substance abuse, are perhaps coping strategies for dealing with this legacy of severe emotional and sexual abuse that have begun in his early teens and that he's trying to process. It's quite an interesting book tonally, because it's bringing together, I think, quite dark themes with a quite satirical, sometimes witty tone that can be quite surprising. And as the title suggests, Henry Henry. It is a modern reworking of the Henriad, which is the Shakespearean cycle of history plays that charts the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV and his son, Prince Hal, who eventually becomes Henry V. And those events are mirrored to some degree in the novel in ways that are kind of interesting and I imagine we'll sort of end up talking more about. But I think it mostly focuses on Henry IV's part one, which is sort of about Henry IV is king, is dominant in the court, and Prince Hal is sort of his layabout son who's failing to get his head together and is messing around with these drunkards and thieves. I mean, what do you think about Shakespearean adaptations generally, Leo? And what did you think of this one?
- [02:50]
B
I think there's been a surfeit of them, and we think of Shakespeare as timelessly popular and ubiquitous and so on, and I suppose that is true, but I think since the early 1990s, it's been true to an Even greater extent, as it were. So there've been many topical rewritings and updatings. I mean, even whole series devoted to rewritings of major plays by Shakespeare, which were done by Edwardson Auburn and Margaret Atwood and Anne Tyler and others. I think in this case it's really fresh. I mean, we're quite familiar with the Hal archetype, the Falstaff archetype. So, you know, the young man who has the burden of the future on his shoulders and then the people that he basically mucks about with. I think the way that Alan Bratton does it, as you say, it's an interesting clash of tones, lot of wit and satire and social observation. And then there's also this darker underpinning. But I suppose the stuff that we get to enjoy, seemingly kind of blamelessly at first, turns out to be a bit of a front or repressed trauma. I think one of the interesting things this book does, which wouldn't have been conscious, but is that it does kind of reconcile or accommodate what we now call like the trauma plot to a Shakespearean narrative, which supposedly doesn't have a trauma plot. When people are complaining about how modern novels are all about backstory and prehistory and the etiology of drinking or self harm or whatever, they often go, you know, in Shakespeare, it's just action characters revealed through action. There's no backstory. Well, you know, you can argue that's true about the Shakespeare plays themselves, but Alan Bratton shows that you can certainly do both here in this book.
- [04:28]
A
It's playing very intelligently with genre. I think one aspect that a few reviewers have picked up actually is they refer to fan fiction as much as they do more traditional adaptation, which is an interesting thing to draw in, specifically slash fiction. So one of the characters, I mean, Hotspur in the original play finds this modern equivalent in this sort of soas attending rival to Hal, called Henry Percy. And rather than replicate that original tension between these two guys who eventually fight in order to defend the throne, Alan sort of rethinks that dynamic as a romantic one between openly gay Hal and this bisexual guy, Henry Percy. And people have pointed to that being an example of modern day slash fiction, this system of taking existing stories and then finding a gay narrative in them that sort of takes an archival work and makes it fresh and imagines more explicit gay themes and things that might have been otherwise implicit and solely about subtext. So I think that's another thing that I imagine Alan is doing quite consciously.
- [05:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes with these updatings of Shakespeare, they might be seen as necessarily sort of taming elements, I suppose, in 10 things I hate about yout, which is brilliant high school comedy, which is a rewriting of the Taming of the Shrew, it doesn't have the kind of slightly unrelieved nastiness which some people find in the play. Whereas, as you say, this book, and there have been other examples, finds, you know, things that may have been necessarily occluded or omitted or weren't sort of appropriate to their time. One of the things we'll talk about and about is there has already been a queer rewriting and sort of inhabiting of the Henry IV world, which is Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho film, made in 1991, and sort of a forerunner of things like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, which also sort of brings a more fluid dynamic to Romeo and Juliet, especially in the casting of the secondary characters. But in My Own Private Idaho, Keanu Reeves plays a kind of Hal figure who is essentially larking around with his best friend and sort of lover played by River Phoenix. And it's essentially when he's ignoring his sort of aristocrat or at least wealthy American background, it's by spending time among gay hustlers on the streets of Portland, Oregon. I don't know whether this book is in dialogue with that. Clearly Alan Bratton knows a lot about medieval English history and, you know, may have come to the text totally independently, but the question of how receptive Shakespeare is to that kind of queer treatment.
- [07:25]
A
It's interesting. You can't help but read this book as one which is very attentively writing about contemporary English culture as an American novelist. I don't know whether you had that experience when you were reading it. You were sort of getting these very detailed, intricate references to Itzu and Leon and the Piccadilly line and all these things. And I'm thinking, how does this. How does this research happen?
- [07:52]
B
Yeah, well, yeah, it's clearly the work of a major Anglophile. I mean, more. More immersed in some of these reference points than you might expect an English writer, but not in a way that seems touristic. It just seems sort of relevant and engaged. I mean, perhaps there's an exoticism to some of these things that wouldn't have someone who's London born. But I found it plausible in the reading. I mean, I guess one thing we haven't really touched on yet and may or may not touch on the interviews how, in my opinion, at least, how brilliantly done the book is not necessarily purely as an adaptation of the elements, but just as a portrait of a world, well, two worlds, really. The kind of rejected aristocratic one and boho druggie one. I thought it was a terrifically involving book.
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A
We'll hear a reading from Alan Bratton now and then we'll speak to him about his novel and work in the magazine.
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C
The curtains in Henry's bedroom were a heavy dark blue that blocked light completely. When Hal left the room, he was surprised to see the landing visible in the gray morning light coming down through the skylight at the top of the stairwell. He had made it through the night. He could go out walking or to the cinema and then to the pub, and he wouldn't have to go back to his flat and be alone until he was drunk and exhausted. Before he left, he went out through the French doors that opened onto the terrace and smoked a cigarette, sitting on the stone steps that led down into the garden proper. How many hundreds of times on how many mornings or evenings, fine or gray, had he sat on these steps and smoked? When he was younger, he'd only smoke in view of the house while his father was out. If there was a chance Henry might have seen, Hal would go beneath the trees. After the third or fourth time it had happened, he'd smoked on the terrace, knowing Henry was in, thinking it couldn't possibly matter anymore. Hal's memory was generally good. Even if it wasn't, one would think that anyone would clearly remember at least the first 10 or so times their father had brought them to orgasm. Why did he have to work to remember even the first time? And then it had happened maybe five times between the start of that autumn term and the end of summer term, about once every school holiday except Christmas, when Henry waited until after Boxing Day. And then it happened two nights in a row, once when Hal was quite drunk and once when he was not. This third or fourth time then, had been in brilliant spring during the Easter holidays, and the early morning had been warm enough for him to go outside in a T shirt and flannel pajama bottoms, which picked up dirt. When he sat on the steps. His hands had been shaking so badly that he'd broken one cigarette and had to light another. That was when it had finally felt like it was happening. Before it had felt like an inexplicable mistake, an experience he had been given by accident that would soon be taken back. There was healthy lavender beneath the steps and pale pink hydrangeas bordering the terrace. And further off in the garden, the blooming cherry and crabapple, the pear tree. Mary had been the one who'd done the garden. Henry had told her not to bother. Nobody cared about London gardens. And she had said, I do all that life in paradise. Before the fall of man, there had been trees and flowers and clean water and fresh air, and that ought to have been enough. If he was suffering now, thought Hal, it was because someone from whom he was descended had done something wrong before he, Hal, had ever had a chance to do what was right. Now, having been punished, he was here in the garden again.
- [12:28]
B
I was wondering if we could start by asking you about your Anglophilia and your relationship to English literature and history, because Henry Henry is both a rewriting of elements of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays, but it's also totally immersed in modern English class system mores, bad habits and so on.
- [12:51]
C
Yes, this is an interest that has kind of come upon me unasked for. I grew up with Shakespeare and had visited London as a young child and it made a strong impression on me. And I only really returned to it when I was an undergraduate and was interested in the history of the First World War and particularly the British experience of the First World War. From then on I started to learn more about the class systems with which I was familiar in that literature had evolved over the past century or so. And then I became a medievalist also, slightly by accident, and into the reigns of Edward II and Richard II in particular. When I was an undergraduate, I did study briefly in London in the time period that is covered by Henry Henry. I was there for the 2015 election when it was looking like it was very neck and neck and it was kind of a toss up. And then it turned out that the Conservatives had pulled off more of a success than had been predicted. And I think being in London in, in that particular moment shaped how I would go on to fuse the sort of present day sociopolitical situation with my interpretations of history. Particularly, I didn't want to do a kind of facile, well, Boris Johnson is just like Richard II because he's bad or whatever. I really resist that kind of mode of comparing current political affairs with examples from history because I find that people are often straining too hard to make connections where there really are more differences than connections. And so with Henry Henry and this set of characters who are kind of simultaneously medieval kings and modern aristocrats, I wanted to come at it kind of sideways and kind of tease out some of these resonances that are a bit more complex than this current political leader is. Just like the political leader of 600 years ago.
- [15:30]
A
I love this phrase you use of these characters being simultaneously medieval kings and modern aristocrats. And it's really interesting in the book how you explore those tensions, these ideas of heritage and legacy and dynasty. It would be really helpful to hear what specifically you had to consider in reimagining these historical characters within a modern framework. Were there specific decisions you made along the way, like, I will make this adaptation. I will make this equivalence.
- [16:00]
C
Well, I knew from the beginning that I didn't want to do a modern monarchy story. Monarchy, specifically has changed so much since the time of Richard II and Henry IV and Henry V that it would require me to force the connection in a way that almost limit me from exploring the questions of how do these histories continue to live today? And so what I did instead was to make the family. I write about the Lancasters, aristocrats, who are from a family that had been ennobled about the time that the medieval kings lived, the late 14th century. What I find interesting about that is that the position of a duke has not changed as much as the position of a monarch, in the sense that in the late 14th century, a duke such as Henry Bolingbroke, before he usurped Richard II and ascended to the throne as Henry iv, would have been an agricultural landowner and would have been responsible for sort of maintaining his portion of the nation. And it's actually quite similar now. Agricultural landowners do still exist, and hereditary landowners certainly are much fewer in number and have less power than they did. But there is still this system of tenant farming. I have actually sort of encroached on the modern royal family's domain, in the sense that the royal family currently owns the Duchy of Lancaster and are landlords, essentially, for a huge portion of that region. And I have my fictional family, the Lancasters, owning lands that would be kind of in that area because it was the lands that Henry IV had controlled before ascending to the throne. And so I find that I'm able to ask then to chart change more precisely by comparing like with like, as opposed to trying to kind of rewrite British history so that the history of the past 600 years didn't happen. And there was no Reformation, there was no House of Windsor. I mean, that would have been totally contrary to my purposes.
- [18:41]
B
Yeah, I mean, one of the questions that we have with a book like this is, you know, is the ways in which it does and doesn't map onto the world or history as we know it. Like, you've, obviously, you've just confessed to expropriating the royal family of some of their land for artistic or literary purposes. But also, one thing I was wondering, which is probably a little bit of a silly question, and it's something that comes up a little bit in the rewritings of Shakespeare or rewritings of historical narratives, is does the Henriade exist within the world that you've portrayed? Like, would these characters be aware that William Shakespeare wrote those plays?
- [19:19]
C
That's an interesting question and I'm surprised that I don't think anybody has asked me that before. I've kind of kept it a well guarded secret that there is this mysterious Bermuda Triangle of history in the world of Henry Henry. I don't answer within the text the question of whether there was a real Richard ii, Henry iv, Henry V, and then if so, was there Shakespeare's Henriad with Falstaff and so on. The answer is that I believe the monarchs still existed. I believe that there was a historical Richard II and Henry IV and Henry V in history proceeded more or less as it, as it did in our world, but there was no Shakespeare's Henriad there. There would have been Shakespeare, he would have done Romeo and Juliet and so on, but wouldn't have done the Henriad. That in my mind is how it works. I think the way I separate the characters because so many of them are as they were in history, named Henry, is that the protagonist of the novel is Hal. Hal is, is sort of the nickname that he's adopted for himself and that he thinks of himself as. And only his father and his family call him Harry. And then Henry is his father. Then his boyfriend is named Henry Percy, and his boyfriend's father is named Henry Percy. And the boyfriend is Harry Percy. But Hal insists on calling him Percy even though Percy kind of says, stop that, just call me Harry. My name is Harry. Why do you continue to insist on calling me Percy even though we're having sex?
- [21:22]
A
The family name. So we have Hal then and Henry Percy that you're talking about Leo.
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C
Yes, Hal and Percy.
- [21:33]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, I was just. I was just wondering about the kind of decision making process, if that doesn't make it sound a bit too rational, of what central relationships and dynamics you were bringing from the Henry plays. I mean, there's another version of this story that, you know, another updating of this story in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho in which Keanu Reeves is obviously the Hal sort of figure. And in that version, as in your version, the Falstaff relationship is there, but it's not feels perhaps not as central maybe as it is to Shakespeare. Like his, his betrayal of Falstaff as the embodiment of the life he has to leave behind doesn't loom that large. Maybe in your. In. In your version of events. Perhaps that's a misrepresentation.
- [22:22]
C
No, no, I agree. I. I think that's absolutely correct. And part of what I wanted to do with Henry Henry, I mean, I think the Henriad is. I mean, people sometimes refer to it as the. The false Daffy ad. And I think that's quite correct that Falstaff is the character who looms the largest culturally. And Henry V certainly comes out as the hero, but he wouldn't have become that. That character without having had Falstaff and the figure of how especially. And Henry iv. These characters are considered kind of tertiary in their own plays, depending on the production. I mean, some productions center Hal more, but there's also very much a tradition of considering Hotspur, AKA Harry Percy as the real protagonist or the real hero of the Henriette. Part of what I wanted to do with Henry Henry was return to these relationships that are considered less important in the Henriette itself, particularly the relationship between Henry IV the father, and Hal the son. It's very much a sort of B plot, this relationship between them. And Henry is sort of this hectoring father who's worried about his son's adventures in the taverns. And then Hal comes back and is a hero at Shrewsbury and, and then ascends the throne and, and is a great hero as, as Henry V. And I was really interested in exploring this filial tension, specifically the expectations that a father places on his son to be not only a copy of himself as he was in his youth, but but a perfection of what he had tried to be and not quite succeeded in becoming. Henry iv in history especially and in Shakespeare had this very illustrious youth and was a real rising star and the kind of flower of chivalry. And then once he ascended the throne, he began to succumb to serious illness and paranoia and guilt at what he had had to do to secure the throne. And he ends as this fairly pathetic figure on his sickbed chastising his son for trying on the crown. And I wanted to explore how this dynamic might play out in the context of modern primogeniture, where there's kind of nothing for the son to become. There isn't really a means of becoming a successful duke in quite the way that Henry V became a successful king.
- [25:44]
A
I think that makes a lot of sense. How would you Say that sexuality has been kind of threaded into the story, because I think that is one way that you adapt and inflect the story. Both the sexuality of Hal and also Richard, the relative of his father, and also, more generally, the way that sexuality plays out in the relationship between the father and son. They're quite striking components of the story and I think quite brilliantly explored.
- [26:17]
C
There was never a world in which this was not going to be a queer story. My interest is in writing queer literature, and I wouldn't have adapted the Henriad if the instructions were to make it straight. I mean, it really came out of having read and watched performances of and studied the Henriette. Thinking about. Of course, there's a long tradition of scholarship kind of exploring the queerness of the Henriad. Specifically, the focus tends to be on the relationship between Hal and Falstaff. And Hal is this sort of feminine or feminized figure who represents an alternative to the strictures of masculinity that Henry IV in the court world represents. And so I wanted to go all the way with these characters and not kind of compromise by going, well, I have to make some of them straight for diversity purposes. The characters that I felt had the most interesting possibilities in terms of queerness, I just went ahead and made queer. In the novel, especially 2014, 2015 is an interesting period of time because it's just on this cusp of acceptance of gay relationships and. And of legal rights vis a vis gay relationships. And yet there's still very much a lingering cultural heteronormativity. Certainly for a person like Hal, the expectation when he was born in the early 90s would have been that he would grow up and. And get married and have children and have a son to pass the title and estate onto. And this also, of course, is complicated by the fact that they're Catholic. This puts them in quite a different position than if they were aristocrats who kind of nominally belong to the Church of England, but were not especially religious. I think social acceptance would come much more easily in that context. But with Henry Henry, there's the kind of intertwining of the system of premagenature and hereditary land ownership and Catholicism, which for hundreds of years have been at odds in Britain. So it's very much seen as Hal's duty, not just as a landowner, but as a Catholic, to kind of play his part, to fulfill his role. And it's for this family in particular, a much greater upset to the norms and traditions than it might be in a. In a more ordinary British family.
- [29:23]
B
Though the element of Catholicism complicates or exacerbates the problem of intolerance towards his homosexuality, is there also a sense in which it's also a form of kind of outsiderdom or ostracism? He has to kind of repeatedly. Well, not repeatedly, but he makes clear at one point, you know, we don't have any money because we're Catholics. Is there
- [29:47]
A
he outs himself as a Catholic?
- [29:48]
B
Yeah, exactly. I'm not saying you're drawing a crude equivalence between the way that members of those groups are portrayed or treated or anything like that, but more just that it seems within the world he's in, even if he's among other homosexual characters, being Catholic is sort of a, I suppose, like a sort of othering factor in this world. Something not necessarily to be ashamed of, but something that sort of makes him sort of less hegemonic and also less financially comfortable.
- [30:20]
C
Very much so, yes. That is one of the complicating factors in terms of the material situation that their family is in, which is that since the Reformation they've been recusants, which means that they've continued to practice Catholicism despite the legal penalties that were levied against Catholics for many centuries. It wasn't really until the beginning of the 19th century that rights were really being restored to Catholics. The Lancasters kind of missed out on the opportunities for enrichment that family of similar status who had conformed and become Anglican would have benefited from. In particular, he's compared with Percy, whose family conformed and then were very vigorous colonizers and enriched themselves in that way. But to return to your original question about Catholicism making how an outsider? Very much so. He's an outsider in the sort of global Catholic community. In being from this English recusant family, he is an outsider in Catholicism in the sense of being an out gay man. He's an outsider in gay circles because he's a Catholic. There are all these kind of overlapping spheres. I think one of those Venn diagrams with like 10 circles. And so he never quite fits into one role. And so there's this contradiction or impossibility about the role he's being asked to take up. There's really no way of being ideal in every respect. And yet he has the expectation for himself and, and from his father that he's somehow going to succeed in in every area. Well, except for being gay, which of course his father would prefer that he just stop.
- [32:41]
B
What kind of research did you do for the book? Both in historical, theological, but also I suppose, modern London as well.
- [32:50]
C
It's Hard to answer this question because there's just so much, you know, I didn't sort of go to the library and check out a selection of books and then those were my books to research. Henry. Henry. It's this sort of lifelong project. Like I said, I've. I've been studying British literature in, in some form or another for about over a decade now. And so a lot of the, the fundamentals of the history and the evolution of the class system were there before I even conceived that the novel, similarly my experiences of London circa 2015, I did not realize were going to be turned into a novel much later on.
- [33:41]
B
You didn't know how useful it would be to know what Itzu was when you were living in London.
- [33:47]
C
Sorry, can you repeat that?
- [33:48]
B
Never mind, I'm just being silly.
- [33:50]
A
I'm as curious in the way that you were able to integrate your studies of English literature and the history of English culture with these small details that depict the decisions, the movements down the street where these people are eating, whether they get the Piccadilly line or the District line, the tinned G and T that they might drink on the tube. How are you capturing the paraphernalia that litter these characters lives? Because I think when I'm reading it, as someone who's living in London, I guess not in 2014, but in 2024, very similar world, a lot of these reference points, I'm surprised that an American novelist is hitting them.
- [34:33]
C
I mean I.
- [34:34]
A
It's very, there's a, there's a detail there that's quite interesting.
- [34:37]
C
It's a question to, to answer because it, to some extent, I mean, I don't think I have ever looked at like a canned G and T and went ah, this is information that I can use for my novel. I tend to integrate things in retrospect. So of course, you know, when I was studying in London I was doing a lot of that because they didn't have in the US at the time, those little packs of the pre mix drinks. When I came, I was like, these are amazing. I don't even have to mix my own drink. No longer is the choice between buying a bottle of liquor and then buying a bottle of mixer or drinking beer. I can now have my preferred beverage in a prepackaged tin. But it's interesting because this is one of those questions that I tend to be asked by British people that I feel I never have a sufficient answer for. People are kind of like, you know, how do you know about the bus? And I'm like, I don't know, I just do. And of course I find that whether or not someone finds my representation of modern life in London accurate really depends on how much they like the novel. In other respects. I don't, I don't think, I don't think I've ever had a British reader who went, well, I really loved the depiction of London life, but this was a terrible book otherwise. It tends to be kind of the concept of this book is horrible, the writing is horrible, and it's offensive to the very soul of Englishness. So, you know, I think the jury's still out on whether I even kind of have accomplished an observation of life in modern London.
- [36:35]
A
It feels like a universe that you are quite committed to. I know that you've published short stories in Granta as well, both of which seem to be set in the same fictional universe. Am I right in thinking they're in the same fictional world?
- [36:50]
C
Yes. The stories I've published in Granta have been returns to this older generation of characters, Hal's pother's generation. So the first story I published was Barbarism, which is about Henry and Richard's relationship from Henry's perspective. And the second story which I published actually on the the occasion of the most recent general election in the UK was Honeymoon, which is about Richard from Richard's perspective and really has nothing to do with Henry because Richard doesn't think about Henry nearly as much as Henry thinks about Richard. And this certainly isn't something I had planned. I mean, it all kind of grew out of. I think the first thing I ever wrote about these characters was probably a 200 or 300 word vignette that was about Hal and Henry. And then I wrote something slightly longer. The second thing I wrote was about the length of a long short story or short novella. Then I. I wrote another story of similar length again about Henry and Hal. And this was after I had returned to the US after studying in London, but fairly soon after. And so I was working through all of those impressions and considerations, everything that I'd been newly exposed to. And at that point I really was just playing and I thought, well, I'll write this one story and have fun with it. And I didn't realize at the time that it would become a novel. And really what happened is that the idea, the cast of characters and the situation just took hold of me and I couldn't stop thinking about it. And I thought, well, this is all I really want to write about at this point. I might as well start a novel then. Writing that one novel didn't get it out of my system, which is a bit frustrating, actually, because I. I do feel like this world has had me in a chokehold since about 2016. I keep going deeper and deeper into it. So now I am kind of turning my attention to the older generation, into Richard in particular.
- [39:17]
A
One thing that we haven't talked about yet that I'd really like to touch on is the thing that was the most striking aspect of the reading experience for me, which was the tone of the book. Obviously, this story represents. We haven't really talked much about the relationship between the father and son. There is an incestuous relationship between them. You could characterize it as the father sexually abusing the son, at least has done in his teenage years, but it has continued into Howell's adulthood. The tone in which it's presented and explored is really interesting to me. You know, I think no one in this book is entirely monstrous, and desire and pleasure can exist in some surprising places in the book. How did you find the tone for this book and did you have a guiding philosophy for that?
- [40:08]
C
Tone is very much something I. I work out by intuition. I had an idea of how Hal's consciousness worked and how he would process situations and make sense of them within himself. And that really is. Is what guided me, that even though it's technically third person, it. It's kind of Hal narrating his own life to himself. And he has this overwhelming impulse to make a joke out of everything. It's his first response, and often his only response is to take something that he experiences and immediately go, well, this would be really funny if it happened to someone else. And in a sense, it is happening to someone else because I don't quite see myself as a unified being. So I'll. I'll just have fun at my own expense. And the novel really charts his realization of the truth of the situation that he's in. For about 10 years when the novel begins, he's been conflicted and confused and repressing his own perceptions of the situation so as not to come to further harm. And he has to peel back this. This layer of defense which is his. I mean, I don't even know if I would call it humor, because it's quite mean. And I took inspiration from the Henriad in the sense that in Henry IV, Part 1, Prince Hal has these pranks that he plays that when they're performed on stage by actors who have decided on a particular approach and rehearsed, can be carried off in a very funny way. But especially when you read the text, you realize there's nothing really inherently funny about these situations, especially the prank that is completely of Prince Hal's own invention. He's like, oh, it'll be so funny if like you points his friend and drinking companion points. If you go to one end of the bar, I'll be on this end of the bar, and then I'll talk to this busboy essentially and get him to try to pay attention to me. But then you'll be at the other end of the bar calling for him, and then he won't know which way to go. And of course, when it's performed, actors can perform it in a, in a very funny way. But like there's, it's such a. It's such a stupid prank. You're like, okay, so the thing that's funny to you is this guy is trying to do his job and you're kind of mildly inconveniencing him. And so I tried to carry that forth into the perspective of the how that I write that often what he thinks of as humor is cruelty. And then in turn, what really is cruelty he thinks of as humor. And he has to look seriously at this and come to the realization that the cruel things really are just cruel.
- [43:45]
A
Are there any other influences other than the Henriad that you would highlight in relation to this book?
- [43:51]
C
Probably the biggest influence on Henry Henry, besides Shakespeare is the Wastelands by T.S. eliot. It was very much the era and movement of literature that I was interested in most when I was studying in London. So I would kind of wander around and think about the wasteland. For better or for worse, the poem has become fused with my conception of London and especially in its treatment of sexual assault. I find that really, it does something really interesting with the myth of Tarius. Terius is a. Is a king who abducts his wife's sister Philomela and, and holds her captive and cuts out her tongue so that she can't unmask him as her rapist and captor. And eventually she, she weaves a tapestry that reveals the secrets and revenge is taken. And Eliot transforms this myth into firstly a scene of sexual assault. That's, that's rooted very much in the day to day of early 20th century London. So in order to dispense justice, the gods transform Philomel into a nightingale. According to Ovid's Metamorphoses, it's other birds in other sources. So the, the song of the nightingale is associated with this kind of lamenting. Elliot transforms this into onomatopoeia. In the sense that he renders the name Terius as Teryu, as if it were a part of birdsong. And this is what one of the sections of the book is is named. I wanted to draw attention to the complexity and ambiguity of disclosure. The expectation around the midpoint of the book might be that Henry is going to be in some way unmasked and brought to justice, and only then will Hal start his healing journey. And that isn't what Hal is interested in. He he doesn't want justice in that way. He feels that it would be too damaging in its own way, and so he has this approach of speaking about it in illusion and in suggestion. I felt that that overlap of birdsong and human speech resonated with my approach in this respect. The expression of one's experience need not be a confession or of revelation in the way that we've come to understand it.
- [47:08]
B
That was Alan Bratt, whose short stories have appeared on granta.com you can read his work by going to our website, where you can get a digital or print subscription to the magazine. You'll find a link to do so in the episode description. We offer listeners a 40% discount on an annual print subscription to Granta. You can subscribe for just £30 by visiting subscription subscribe.granter.com and entering the coupon code Granter Pod read the best Writers of Tomorrow Today with Granta.