Magic Classical Book Club: "Look What You Made Me Do" by John Lanchester

Today’s guest on the Magic Classical Book Club is John Lanchester who will be talking to Tim Smith about his new novel: "Look What You Made Me Do"

What if the year’s most talked about TV show was all about your marriage?

Kate, thirty years into her marriage, has a seemingly idyllic metropolitan, North London life.

Phoebe, a young screenwriter, is the creator of the year’s hit TV show, Cheating.

When Kate’s world takes a darker turn, she thinks she sees details and intimacies in the show that only she and her husband Jack could possibly have known. But who has betrayed who? Who gets to tell whose story?

A black comedy of resentment and entitlement, Look What You Made Me Do is the story of two very different women from two very different generations, heading toward a battle only one of them can win.

Tim asks John to tell about what happens in the book without giving too much away:

“There's not much I can say really. The whole thing is the plot. It's two women in very different generations. There's a man who's sort of present and absent, who's in a sense at the centre of the story, and it's a conflict between, in a way, who gets to tell the story as much as anything else.

Kate's a woman in her fifties (she's what Bridget Jones would've called a smug married), married to an architect called Jack. Phoebe is a young TV writer who's first show is just about to come out when we meet her, turns into colossal hit. It's a show called Cheating, and the story is about the kind of interaction between two of them and the various surprises and back and forths that happen when the show becomes a hit. And Kate sees things in it that she finds very, for reasons I can't go into, disturbing.”

Tim then asked where the idea for this book came from?

“There was very much a moment when the whole story arrived fairly fully formed. I think there have been things I've been brooding about for a long time, partly about the private languages you get in marriages. And I was quite interested in that thing where a TV show or a movie or a book is absolutely everywhere.

_"So there are few things that I've been brooding on in the background I think without realizing it unconsciously. But then the whole story came fairly fully formed: I just got out of bed, brushing my teeth and it's as if the whole story was there in one go, and I still have the notebook wrote down by the side of the bed."_

That he said, she said, back and forth and the central reversals in the book, but yeah, it was as if I'd been working on them for years without having realized it.”

Tim then asked about writing from two different perspectives and how difficult it was to do:

“For me, if it's a voice, the crucial thing is being able to pick up a voice, you know, tune in the radio. Once it can do that, one voice/two voice is kind of the same. It's like they're there. So, no, I think and I have done it before, I've written a novel in three different voices.

I don't think one's harder than two as long as you can locate them. But I think that the crucial bit is that thing about the difference between the idea. Because you have an idea of what a character's like, and there's certain things that happen to them that have to be credible.

It almost sets a set of rules for what the character does, like boundaries. She can do this, she can do that. She inhabits that sort of world. That's not the same as being able to hear them. That sort of creates the conditions for what they have to do, and then the tuning in the radio bit is when you can actually hear them, and that's which is the point at which they come to live.”

Tim finally asked John to choose a favourite piece of classical music and why he chose it:

“I've chosen the Queen of the Night Aria from the Magic Flute, which is one of my absolute favourite pieces of music. Partly because it's such an astonishing, technical thing. It's such a beautiful piece of music, but I also really like it because Mozart was a child prodigy and he was performing these astonishing concerts when he was about three and his first pieces of music I saw a few years ago.

I went to the opera called Mitridate, which is this opera he wrote when he was 14. I could hardly bear thinking about the level of genius involved in that. But it almost singable, it's full of these incredibly demanding technical things. And I was watching it and I suddenly realized what happened was because he was a prodigy, he was writing things kind of for other prodigies, it was right at the limit of what it was technically possible to sing. Because that was what he was used to. He's used to basically demonstrating the full bag of tricks.

And the thing I love about the Queen of the Night is him coming back to that thing about showing the limits of what the human voice can do, but it's integrated within the story and it feels organic, and it's not just showing off. It has this wonderful mix of emotional power and this extraordinary technical virtuosity and this sort of prodigy who's grown up, and it brings all these things together, and as well as being just an absolutely astonishing tune.”

If you want to listen back to Tim's full interview with John Lanchester, click here to see all of Tim's past shows.