Magic Classical Book Club: A Ghostly Little Book

Today’s guest on the Magic Classical Book Club is Roddy Doyle who will be talking to Nigel Williams about his involvement in a new short story collection, "A Ghostly Little Book"

From Edgar Allan Poe to Charles Dickens, from Shirley Jackson to Toni Morrison, the greatest writers have always been drawn to that ancient, mysterious thing: the haunting.

A Ghostly Little Book is a slim, beautiful testament to the enduring appeal of the spook, a landmark collection of specially composed modern ghost stories from Roddy Doyle, Olga Ravn, Eliza Clark, Tom Crewe and Helen Oyeyemi, five of the most acclaimed and exciting authors at work today.

With surprising scares and anguished apparitions, with chance encounters, spectral phones and vengeful spirits, these tales chart the many twists and turns the ghost story might take: strange, unsettling, heartwarming, hilarious and, of course, blood-chilling.

Nigel firstly asked Roddy what was it about about the invitation to write a ghost story that appealed to him:

I suppose it was a bit unusual. I've written a couple in the past but it's the challenge, because if I'm asked do you believe in ghosts? My immediate answer is no. Do you believe in anything beyond what most people accept as reality, physical reality? The answer again is no. So the challenge is that to write something where the presence of the ghost is believable, and I've always been open to that.

Some days after my mother died, I was in my kitchen filling the kettle early in the morning, and she called me, and I turned and was halfway across the kitchen before I realized, no, she's not here anymore. And not only that, she never lived in my house. But I had spent nights in her house in the months before she died, and she'd be calling during the night, and it was that call which I heard, and it was me.

You know, it wasn't my mother. She wasn't there. She's dead. But it was me somehow or other. So I believed in the honesty of my emotion there. I think somehow I was reassuring myself that she was okay, that it was all fine. And I've read Stephen King and been terrified even though a lot of what he writes about I don't believe in, but if it's well-written, and it often is or usually is, I believe it. So that's what the challenge was, to write something that seemed believable.

Nigel goes on to talk about how “A Ghostly Little Book” is from the preface of A Christmas Carol, but Nigel asked what Roddy would ask Charles Dickens if he met him:

I'd ask him how he managed to get so much done. How he managed to be so prolific and at the same time walk around London, walk out of London, walk for 10, 20, 30 miles a day, organize various organizations, rear or semi-rear 10 children, have an affair for years, all these things, and produce these huge novels at the same time.

I think being in his presence, I'd try to see if there's anything about it that made it clear. I suspect the contradiction to my mind is that he was incredibly restless, yet he managed to sit and write for hours and hours and hours, and I think it must have been physically exhausting.

I'm 10 years older now than he was when he died, and I wonder sometimes is it because of that workload that he put upon himself? So I'd be interested in meeting him, but only once, 'cause I suspect I wouldn't like him particularly much, and I think he'd very much have to be the boss, and I'd endure that for an hour or so, uh, but I wouldn't, it wouldn't be what I'd call friendship.

Nigel finally asked why Roddy chose Steve Reich's Different Trains as his pick for Magic Classical:

It's a ghostly piece of music really. I think the rhythm of it is extraordinary. I play it a lot when I'm working, particularly in the afternoon when maybe my energy is beginning to flag a bit. It features the voice of Virginia. The voice is old, but Steve Reich knew her when she was young.

She minded him as she brought him from the East Coast of America to the West Coast to visit his father. There's also a railroad employee, but it's just, it's such an evocative piece of music, and the use of the voice within it I think is extraordinary because all of those people, who we're listening to, are dead.

If you want to listen back to Nigel's full interview with Roddy Doyle, click here to see all past shows.