10. East Of Eden: Steinbeck, Sin, and Redemption

She said softly. "I didn't know you would take it so I'm sorry Adam."

“His breath burst, horsely out of his throat. His hand trembled trying to turn the key. He”

pushed the door open. She stood three feet away. In her right hand she held his cult and the black hole in the barrel pointed at him. He took a step toward her, saw that the hammer was back. She shot him. The heavy slug struck him in the shoulder and flattened and tore out a piece of his shoulder blade. The flash and raw smothered him and his staggered back and fell to the floor. She moved slowly toward him, cautiously, as she might toward a wounded

animal. He stared up into her eyes, which inspected him impersonally. She tossed the pistol on the floor beside him, and walked out of the house. So that is probably the most melodramatic environment of many melodramatic and violent confrontations in John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden, which he published in 1952. It's a family's saga set in the silliness valley of California, where Steinbeck grew up, but it's much more than that. Steinbeck, of course,

he's seen as the great champion of the downtrodden in America, of the Californian workers, the dustbowl, depression, America, of mice and men, and the grapes of Roth is most famous books, high school standards on they. But Tabby, this is the book that Steinbeck regarded as his absolute masterpiece, the book by which he thought he'd be judged, and there's a lot going on in East of Eden, isn't it? It's a very complex, surprisingly dramatic book

“I think. It's a kind of massive retelling of the story of the opening chapters of Genesis”

in the Bible, particularly the story of Canaan Abel, and a little bit of Adam and even there, as well. It's a book about good and evil, about free will and destiny, how much we trapped by heredity, or by sort of cycles that repeats down the generations. And above all, I guess,

from Steinbeck's point of view, he wrote it as a message to his two young sons, and basically

what he was telling them was, you're not bound by the past, you're not trapped by history, you can choose your own fate, and be whatever you want, and you're not tainted by original sin or anything like that. I mean, that all seems fairly straightforward, but it was very controversial at the time. A lot of critics absolutely hated it, and I keep, I'm struck by the fact that a lot of the books we've done so far on the book club have been hated

by critics upon their publication, so there's something in that, but it's obviously been injuringly popular, so there was this very, very famous film in 1955 starring James Dean of only the second part of the book, an Alliah Kazan film, and then Oprah Winfrey's book club, Oprah's book club, championed it in 2003 unexpectedly, and then that sent it back up to number two on the best cellulist, and she described it as maybe the best book

she'd ever read. Wow, no less at critic than Oprah Winfrey. No less at critic, I know, we're following in some lofty footsteps there, but then part of the reason that we were drawn back to it, or why certainly was, was because there's a, there's a Netflix adaptation coming out this year starring Florence Pew's Kathy, who will be getting onto because she is surely one of the most genuinely evil characters in all literature. Well,

she just misunderstood, tabby. Well, she misunderstood, yeah. So let's get into the plot a

“little bit, and be warned there will be spoilers, but this isn't I think a book in which”

the plot is really the point. Spoilers won't ruin. Okay. Reading it for you. So obviously, as you said, it's kind of a massive window into America during a period of flux. So the novel setting, California's Selena's Valley, and it chronicles the lives of these two into woven families, the Trasks, and the Hamilton's, between the start of the 20th century,

and then the end of the First World War. And we start with the kind of the well-intentioned

Adam Trasks, and he leaves his violent brother, Charles, to settle in this kind of Eden like Valley, the Selena's Valley. And he brings with him his mysterious, but blatantly evil wife, Kathy, and she, before coming to the Trasks, she turned up on their doorstep kind of half-dead. She had burnt her parents alive, burnt down their house. When she was a teenager, property, the Trabellion. Exactly. And we'll explain all that later on, but she had worked as

a prostitute before becoming a mistress to a horrible pimp. Yeah. Anyway, she's pregnant, possibly with Charles's baby, but Adam believes it's his. And after they move, she's not happy in Selena's Valley, and she gives birth. She ends up shooting Adam and running away, and that's the opening reading. And her Kathy goes off, she becomes this sadistic brothel owner. She's running the worst brothel in the town, right? Everyone speaks of

of dark, toxic desires of powerful and rich men against them. Yes. Anyway, so meanwhile,

a kind of broken hearted Adam raises his two sons, who Kathy has given birth to Caleb and Aaron, cow and Aaron, with the help of his Chinese American servant Lee. And their neighbors, the Hamilton, who I mentioned in the beginning, that Samuel Hamilton, his Irish immigrant, his well-loved, and his family of endless children. I can't remember their names, but let's just say they're all good Tom Dick and Harry. Tom Dick and Harry, yeah, they might as well be.

I mean, basically no one, massive spoiler, no one really cares that much about the Hamilton's, they take up. Do you? Do you? Yeah, I do. I love the Hamilton passages. Oh my god, I've

“just tempted to skip those. I think you can't tell us about this. I think you can't tell us about”

the quality to what is otherwise quite a dark, but you know, ultimately important, story. Anyway. Well, so the twins grow up and they kind of go into polar opposites, like emblems of good and evil, maybe. Aaron is kind of good, kind, virtuous, cow is kind of more troubled. And jealous, his knee. jealous, his jealous of his father's love. He's afflicted by guilt over the fact that he knows he has a real strain of evil inside him. Aaron becomes a priest, becomes obsessed with

being virtuous. And then cow wins back the family fortune, which Adam had lost, you know,

ill-advised, refrigerated lettuce business. That you're never read a book that has more about

refrigeration than it. Yeah. And frankly, it adds to the story in my opinion. But, um, and they both seek the effect on the same girl, Abra. Finally, this tragic conflict breaks out between cow and Aaron because cow offers his father his, you know, recently, one fortune, Adam rejects it and says

“you should be more like Aaron. In a fit of jealousy and kind of revenge, cow takes Aaron,”

who he's discovered the true identity of his mother, Kathy, who's been living as this matter more these years. And takes Aaron to meet her and show him, shows him the brothel. Yeah, shows him the brothel and shows him, like, who he's born of, what's inside him? And Aaron is so appalled and repulsed by this that he enlists in the first world war and he dies during the battle. Kathy is also affected by this encounter. And Adam's heartbroken, he has a stroke,

and on his death, that he forgives cow and gives his blessing with this very particular ancient Hebrew word. But what it is, what it all means, will be revealing after the break. Before that, I know Dominic, you absolutely love this book. So for a moment or two, I'll indulge your your passion for it. Tell me what you thought of east of Eden. So I had never read this before. I had read Steinbeck obviously, but not this one. I put off partly by the fact that it's quite long.

And you have been waxing lyrical about it about what a brilliant book it was. I have to say, I was a tiny bit suspicious. I was a bit skeptical because the last massive book that you recommended to me, Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollab, consumed a giant part of my life. And I wasn't even doing the podcast then. I was reading that for pleasure. This is basically what I do. I seek to entrap you in long, tedious novels to slowly rob you of the desire to live.

“I know you'd love it. So I don't want to rain on your parade. What do you love about it so much?”

Because you've always, you read this a long time ago, do you? I actually read it for the first time

two years ago. So no ages. And like right right from the beginning, I was pretty captivated by. I thought and I hate it. Psyley pains me to use this word because it's a bit vague and it's a bit sort of obvious. But I genuinely found it to be powerful. But not just powerful. Also enjoyable. It felt as though it kind of encompass everything that matters and is best and worse about being human. I love the way that Steinbeck writes. I have a real weakness for books like this,

quite masculine prose set in the west or Midwest America. And I love the way that even notice is kind of playing masculine voice. He manages to have very all-naked and delicate descriptions into woven throughout. I love his descriptions of the land, Sloan's Valley. I thought the characters were vivid. Yeah, the biblical stuff's a bit blatant, which doesn't really bother me. Like all stories are derivative of other stories and the Bible is surely the biggest of all. Yeah. The source

of some of the greatest stories of all time. So I absolutely loved it and I did this time as well. Well, let's kick off by talking about Steinbeck himself. So Steinbeck's a really interesting character. He's born in the Selena's Valley in California in 1902. Yeah, this is almost all to buy a graphical isn't it? There's a lot of his family history and there's a lot of kind of therapy I would say in the writing of this book. Yeah. So he grew up in this sort of frontier valley. It's

about 25 miles in land from the Pacific. His father could John Ernst Steinbeck and he was a local government official and his mother Olive was a teacher and she appears in the book. Doesn't she? She does. Yeah. Olive Hamilton. I mean, that's yeah. I'm quite, because I'm quite slow.

300 pages in or something and then I started to realize the narrator was John Steinbeck and actually

“we'll talk about this a bit later about whether Steinbeck is effective in his use of the narrative voice.”

Anyway, so as a teenager he worked on farms and ranchers and he was struck at the time by the terrible conditions of the migrant workers, which is something that obviously he was to write about in the 1930s. In the 1920s he studied English at Stanford. He would travel to New York and try to come a writer and failed. He came home back to California. As early he tried to make an name from himself as a manufacturer of a plaster mannequins. Then he had to have sponging off his

parents for a bit and he went back to writing, then he had to bridge through 1935 with a book called Tortilla Flat, which is about a group of mates who are home in Monterey, California from the

first world war and they're kind of getting up to japes with girls and drinking and stuff like that.

Then two years after that of mice and men and novella and then the grace of wrath 1939 that makes them a massive name. So it was the best selling book of 1939. The one the Pulitzer Prize. There was a film made by John Ford starring Henry Fonda and then there was a massive backlash against it because the grace of wrath is really about the plight of the Oakeys, the people who have moved west, during the Great Depression to flee the Dust Bowl and people on the right. So conservatory

was business owners and stuff, but also a lot of people in California were outraged by it and tried to ban it. At the end of the 1930s, Steinbeck is simultaneously very successful. He's very well-known. He is a kind of touchstone for it's kind of new deal, depression, America, kind of very polarised thing left and right. But at the same time, he's very controversial. He's getting an awful lot of flag, not least in his native California. Yeah, and this all had quite a big impact on his personal

life, which was getting very, very messy by this point. So he'd been married to a woman called Carol Henning in 1930, but by the end of the 1930s, their marriage was really framed. I can part because of all the pressure from the backlash to grapes of wrath. So then he starts in a fair with a 19-year-old singer called Gwyn Conga. This is just horribly, it's a horribly toxic back and forth. You know, the two women are fighting for Steinbeck. They both claim to be pregnant. Carol is

lying. Gwynn then has an abortion. Finally, Steinbeck ends up divorcing his first wife, Carol. He pays her $100,000, which is a massive sum of money at this point, and he marries Gwynn,

and by this point, he's 41 and she's 23. So it's a significant age gap. And he was always

afflicted after all this by massive guilt and actually self-loathing, and you can see this in East of Eden. You can see it in characters like how, to some extent, maybe Adam, and the themes of the novel, you know, love turning to hatred, women who lie in and manipulate men, you know, people who love and are therefore betrayed by that love. It's a huge factor in the book, and you can see why, therefore, it is, as you said, kind of therapeutic. He's writing it.

Yeah. So amidst all this, he goes off to Europe as a war correspondent for the New York Harold Tribune, when America joined the war. But he was never really the same afterwards. So he was hit by a shrapnel in the head during the Allied landings at Soleno in Italy.

And he almost lost his hearing, and then he came home, basically, scarred by the war. He was drinking

a heck of a lot. I mean, he's absolutely one of those mid-century American writers. Like, F Scott Fitzgerald, he would talk to Batman, Great Gatsby episode, or Ernest Hemingway, another of your favorites. These people who basically, the first thing they do when they get up in the morning is drink a bottle of whiskey, or something. Steinbeck is cut from that cloth. Hemingway's great kind of accent was right drunk at it's sober. So.

“Right. Yeah. There's a bit of that with Steinbeck, I think. He suspects his wife,”

Gwyn, of being unfaithful, while he's been away. He's a very troubled and unhappy man. They have two sons in the 1940s called Thomas and John, John Steinbeck, the fourth. It was just mental. Why don't Americans do that? No, thanks to our American listeners. Yeah, American listeners, if they exist, please direct to your complaints to Tabby, if not to me, on this issue. Sorry. He's a terrible father. I mean, the irony is that he's to be

an isn't part of book about fathers and sons. And also dedicated to his sons. Right. And the mad thing is, you know, he went to all the stress of writing a book for his sons, dedicating it to them. And yet, he was, he'd by all accounts. I mean, just to give you a couple of examples, when John the fourth was three years old. There was an accent with a dog when he let this dog into the apartment, and the dog relieved itself on the floor. And Steinbeck

discovered this, and he rubbed his son's face in the dog mess on the floor. It was so sad to

“discover this. To teach him a lesson. Or this, this, I think, is badly, I think this is worse.”

When he was tiny, Steinbeck would encourage him to jump from his high chair into his arms.

stuff. And then one that they, you know, Steinbeck was doing this. So he could teach his son a lesson.

“People would betray you. You know, you can't rely on anybody. And one day, he basically pulled his hands”

back at the last minute. So son fell on the floor with a huge bump. And as John the fourth set, later, the greater epiphany of my childhood was realizing that my father was an asshole. But you know, this is actually massively reflected in east of Eden itself, because there's this little passage about how that moment when children realise that their parents are flawed and fallible and how it shatters you. I just think it's, it's very poignant. When a child first catches adults out,

when it first walks into his grave little head, that adults do not have divine intelligence,

that their judgments are not always wise, they're thinking truth, a sentence is just his world falls

into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods. They do not fall a little, they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. And the child's world has never quite hold again. I mean, it's so interesting that he can understand these concepts and you can see that he, you know, it's his fault and that he's done wrong, but he can't change his behavior. I think that's often the case with serially guilty people.

Yeah, I think that's probably true. By the end of the 1940s, his life really isn't a mess, because his marriage is disintegrating to Gwen. He's now drinking very heavily. They're falling out because he wants to move to the countryside out of New York and she doesn't. And amid all this, he decides he wants to write a history of his family. And you can see that I think there's an

“element of nostalgia, nostalgic escapism in this almost. His own family life is a terrible mess.”

He's basically, you know, extremely distant, best, violent, a worst, his own sons. His wife,

Gwen, ends up asking him for a divorce. So you can see why he would want to look backwards, I guess. And to this sort of idealized paradise of his own boyhood. And to sort of want to tease out lessons from that that he can pass on to his own sons. But he doesn't write anything until in 1949. He meets his third wife. He's called Elaine Scott. She works in theatre. They meet at a party. And she is your classic, you know, mid-century male American writers long-suffering wife.

So she basically says, "I will take care of the house, I'll take care of the paperwork, I'll do all the accounts, I'll do everything, I'll organize the cleaner and the man who sweeps up the leaves, you are free to write." And so crack on. So in 1951 he starts on east of Eden.

And he writes to his editor, who's called Pascal Kovicchi. And he says, basically,

"You know, this is it now." I either write the book or I do, not the communal excuses. The writing will be spared and lean. The concept is hard. The philosophy old, and yet new born, it may destroy everything for me. But it has to be done. The way that he wrote this is just mental. It's extraordinary, actually. And we know this because there's a really nice essay online about it by a guy called David Christinger of Chicago University.

He writes the whole thing in pencil, in a notebook. He writes the story on the right hand pages. On the left hand pages, he writes a series of letters to his editor, Pascal Kovicchi. And every day, he kind of gets into the writing by writing a letter to Pascal. And it's kind of like brainstorming. It's basically more therapy. He's thought about the book as anxieties, as ideas for characters, even just news about himself in his home life. And then he leaps across and continues the story

on the right hand page. But it's quite a slow starter for about two weeks, progress isn't, it's he's not getting very far with it. And then on the 14th of February, he goes to visit his sons. And he's shocked because they're very, very distant with him. They're very cold with him. I mean, understandably, chucking them out of pie chairs and rubbing their face in dog poo. And he's still very, very upset by this. And as I say, shocked. And then that night,

he just pours himself into writing and becomes totally absorbed by it for the rest of the year. He writes the whole book over the next 276 days. There's a massive massive intensive to it. And he says, again, and again, that it has to be this masterpiece, puts himself under such pressure. And he even stops drinking during week, which for him, he's a heavy, heavy drinker. Yeah,

“where does this intensity come from? You know, why does it have to be kind of so powerful to him?”

And I think it's because it's this central redemptive idea that comes to him and just animates the entire book. And it's a secret wrapped up in the translation of a single Hebrew word, which I mentioned when I was kind of explaining the plot from the book of Genesis. And this for him holds the key to the entire story. And we will be unlocking that mystery in the second half.

their longest and shorter, the most difficult work I've ever done. He says to his sister Mary,

“and to a Swedish artist friend, these very celebrated lines, he writes, "I've put all the things”

I wanted to write all my life. This is the book. If it's not good, I have fooled myself all the time.

Always, I had this book waiting to be written." And then he spends four months cutting it,

which is hard to believe when you discover that the edition I bought. How he told me this was quite a short book and very readable. It's 714 pages long, quite small print the edition I have. So it's almost as long as one of my own books. So he cut it down and then in September 1952, Viking released the book and they basically went to town and they said this is going to be a major event. He's a, you know, one of America's best known writers. And this is the Magnum Opus.

But nevertheless, the reception is pretty mixed. So it does reach, I mean it's popular with kind of the reading public at large. It reaches number one on the New York Times fiction by Celalist in November 1952 and it holds it for five weeks. But a lot of critics say that it's far too

“moralistic. It's too clunky. The good vases evil is, you know, simplistic and a bit sensationalized.”

The New York Times said that it was clumsy in structure and defaced by excessive melodramatic

and much cheap sensationalism. And then the Christian science monitor Steinbeck's obsession with naked animality, brute violence and the dark wickedness of the human mind remains so overriding that what there is of beauty and understanding is subordinated and almost extinguished. That's harsh. Yeah. But he did win the Nobel Prize 10 years later. So that's hope for you. Exactly. Although then the New York Times kicked him again and said,

why have the Nobel Committee given an award to a writer who's limited talent as in his best books, watered down by 10th rate philosophizing? Oh, savage. Yeah. I mean, you don't want to be reading those reviews. So whether we agree, you know, there are two schools of thought clearly. Yeah. There is Oprah Winfrey, who speaks for the general public who loved the book, who said, "Come on, don't sneer at this book." And then there are the stuffy, stuck up,

high-brake criticism. It's also hard. Yeah. Academics. Yeah. Well, the tabby and I identify with Oprah Winfrey or with these sneering academic critics. Yeah. We shall discover the end of this. Before we do that, let's get into the into the book itself. And to do that, we need to explain a massive central part of it, which is the biblical story of Canaan Abel. And this has taken from Janice's chapter four verses one to sixteen. But God, interestingly, is carefully excluded from the plot.

God doesn't really have a part to play in any of it. Even the title "East of Eden" was taken from Janice's four sixteen. Right. So Canaan Abel basically had the two sons of Adam and Eve. Canaan is a farmer. Abel is a shepherd. And they both bring presence to their father and Canaan's rejected. Abel's is accepted. And so Canaan is full of bitterness. Full of anger and bitterness. He's also marked. He has the mark of Canaan on him. It's like a darkness. It's a sign of God's

disfavor, basically. Exactly. Yeah. He ends up being branded as a killer because he's murdered his brother. And then he's exiled to the land of Nod on the east of Eden. So Steinbeck basically thought this was the only story in all literature. He thought it was the first story, the major story because it's the ultimate confrontation of good and evil from which all stories derive.

Yeah. All novels, all poetry, built on this never ending contest he said.

And they're basically his idea was that this story, that this taint of sin repeats through the generations and there's no escape from it. Or is that we should discover? It's kind of original sin, isn't it? That all humans are blighted from the moment of birth because Adam and Eve rebelled. Exactly. And the idea of east of Eden. I mean, this is the Selena's Valley. And basically, some of these characters are trying to create their own Eden in the valley.

You know, paradise that aren't started again. So many people did when they moved to America. But they end up just repeating the cycle of portrayal, which is Eve betraying Adam, you know, by messing around with the snake and the apple and whatnot.

“All that. I think I'd have eaten all that exactly. And then Kane murdering Abel. And these”

patterns reproduce themselves down the generations. And there's no matter what you do, you know, the implication is that you are trapped by them. I guess the Selena's Valley, and this is Valley itself is a big character in this, right? The landscape is a character in the story. It totally is. And you can see how important it is to the book and to Steinbeck, in the alternative titles that he can say before Nania East of Eden.

It was going to be called the Selena's Valley, or down to the valley. I think that was a near mess. To answer the valley, yeah, no good. Or alternatively, recognizing the importance of this biblical element, it was going to be called Kane's sign. And he wrote to his editor, "I want to describe the Selena's Valley in detail, but in sparsity, so that there can be a real feeling of it. It should be sights and sounds, smells and

So his intention was to give kind of an impression of the valley, a sense of it. And I think he does that extremely well. The whole opening, mini chapter of the book, is a description of the Selena's Valley, and I think that's beautiful. But it's also, it's like a microcosm of good and evil,

“a microcosm of the world of maybe the nation of America. And that's why this opening section,”

it's full of kind of dualism. Like there's light and dark mountains, valleys, rain, dry, and it's kind of mirrors the good and the evil in human nature. And I guess in Steinbeck's view, throughout the course of American history, it's full of light and dark.

Yeah, when that point's about American history, so basically the book covers the time period

for 1862, I think, to the end of the First World War. So this is the moment when America comes of age as a capitalist power. It's the conquering of the frontier, the decline of the American kind of rural dream, which is being eclipse by kind of industrial modernity. So you have the two families, the Hamiltonians and the Trasks. The Hamiltonians have arrived as immigrants and they're working on the land. And Samuel Hamilton is a classic immigrant and he wants

to be a farmer, but his sons all end up as sort of urban professionals kind of working in advertising

“and whatever or teachers. Almost in reaction to him and I think that's quite true to life, isn't it?”

Yeah, of course. They kind of resent his outside estate, so they become kind of apex Americans.

Yes, exactly. I mean, that's exactly what happened to so many first, second, third generation

immigrants in this period. And then you have Adam Trask. I mean, he's the central character of the book and he's the kind of personification of American history in this period. He says the son of an East Coast farmer who served in the Civil War. He goes into the American Army himself, the US Army, and he fights against Native Americans. He basically cleans them from the landscape. But he's a pacifist. He refuses to commit violence or to take human life.

But he's very brave. Yes, exactly. I'm being too harsh on him to be honest. You are. He moves west. He tries to establish himself as a farmer, but that doesn't really work out. So he ends up in the city eventually, or a town eventually. He does things like he buys a Model T Ford. He Davils in refrigeration, as we've already mentioned. And then his son goes off to the First World War. So basically all American history is condensed and

embodied in this one character and in the life of his family. So that's the sweep of American history. One other thing we should talk about before we get into the characters, the style of narration. So I mentioned already. I didn't realize the Hamilton's was Steinbeck's own family for some considerable time. I thought they were the narrator's family. And I didn't think Steinbeck

“and the narrator were the same person. And actually, the reason he did that, I think, is because”

he'd thought he would write the book as a family history. And then he wrote it very quickly. And I think he still had that idea of it being his family history. And he hadn't quite ridden himself of that. And so a times, particularly the beginning, he says, I don't really remember what happened. I'm relying on old photographs, I'm relying on kind of family anecdotes and things. So he grounds the narrative in real history. And it's almost as though he's pretending to be

a historian. But then I think he forgets about that for whole chapters. And then the narrator almost disappears. And then comes back in whenever he remembers. And I find that a bit patchy and unsustained. And I know that some of the early critics did as well. But to be, I know you like this. You think it's very well done. I do like it. I think it's intentional. Like someone that was putting as much energy and intensity into writing this book. It wasn't just going to

start forgetting what he was doing. But I like it because it feels loose and free and unrestrained. And as we'll see, freedom and the ability to choose as a big part of this book, it kind of it melds history and mythology together, which the book does throughout. You know, as you say, it's a window into genuine American history. But then it's also a retelling of the Bible. It moves you from this kind of very intimate reflections or observations about someone

to kind of these the philosophy at the heart of it. And this idea that it kind of encapsulates the heart of the nation over all over all. I think it's very, very effective. But so let's get on to the major characters in the book then. So we've spoken a little bit about Samuel Hamilton, has a big family. He's an immigrant. He's kind of people write suspicious of him originally when he comes to the valley and then they grow to love him. The classic immigrant story, right? He's an

Irish immigrant. Exactly. He has this large, very boisterous family. He's brilliant at inventing

things and he's pretty ingenious, but he never ever managed to make any money. And I like that

kind of detail of him. And so he's always poor, but he's always kind of free in himself. He has kind of great faith in himself. So if I was being skeptical, let's say two things. I'd say first of all if everybody who reads. So you are being skeptical. All right, fine. The Hamilton's, the stuff

basically everybody who reads East of Eden is really only interested in one of these two families,

which are the trasks, which are the family that the cane-enabled thing recurs in and the good, good versus evil struggle. And the Hamilton's are a kind of slightly solid counterpoint to that. We joke to the beginning. They're all called Tom Dick and Harry and no one can remember which one is which. And Samuel Hamilton, I would say, you know, he, to me, he feels a bit of a stereotype. They're basically the, the stoical, wise, hard-working, Irish immigrant who, you know, he's unlucky,

but he's warm-hearted. Things haven't really worked out for him, but he's a great patriarchy, and he loves his family and all this kind of thing. For me, he and his family do not feel

“terribly alive as characters. I think they do, that each, each child has a very different character,”

and each child kind of goes on to, you know, symbolise something different about that kind of American dream. And also Samuel Hamilton, he has a real quietiness to him, which makes him more than kind of just conventional and a bit of a stereotype. But then, let's go on to the trasks, as as you mentioned, they're massively the heart of it. You would agree they'd tell you the trasks are much more interesting than the Hamilton's. Wouldn't you? Yeah, I would, I would, but that's partly because they're

much worse people than the Hamilton's. Of course, that's the point. Isn't it the case in a way then that that makes the Hamilton's kind of more realistic, that their flaws and their weaknesses are not evil, they're just like human foibles. Whereas the trasks are firmly divided into good

and evil, because they are essentially the second, um, cananable. So you have the first cananable

in the Bible, then you have the trasks. And you have an equal child's an atom. So the sea in the A. And these, there's a massive element of nominative determinism in this book. And clearly is. Yeah. And so Cyrus Trasks, their father, he's from Connecticut, he's a fake war hero. I find them really, really funny, because he reminds me of someone that was like briefly in the territorial army or something. And then makes their identity having been in the army. So I put in that quite amusing.

Exactly. He ends up becoming basically a mate of Abraham Lincoln or something. Yeah, well, he claims to have been a big mate of Abraham and Lincoln. And the basically says that all kind of military tactical discussion that goes on is all thanks to him. He uses up his wives those. He has a first wife. This is Adam's mother, she dies. And then the second wife, this is Charles's mother, she dies.

And he loves Adam more. Yet he also says of him that he's a weakling, he will never amount to a

dog turd. That's a harsh. Yeah, Lisa doesn't rub his face in dog turds. He doesn't, but he actually says it to him. Adam, this is more at some of the poor parenting that that recurs. Adam, yeah, look, he's guilty of constantly letting things happen to him. He's not exactly a proactive character. He's a massive drifter. But his blindness and his naive teeth, it's kind of just a form of radical optimism. He's without malice. And he's not the most charismatic character. He's a good man. And in a sense,

“I think Steinberg writes him weak because he puts the possibility on the table for readers that”

goodness in life gets you nowhere. Yeah. And ultimately, that isn't the case in this book. But he's also the perfect contrast to his brother, Charles, who is violent, fairly psychopathic. He's cruel. He almost beats Adam to death as a child. You know, again, echoing, cane-enable story. And, but he's not, I think, an entirely one-dimensional villain either because he writes these letters to Adam that are kind of full of guilt and missing, like childish, missing of his brother.

Hmm. And there's his line, friends, to the death, as of many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his proplexities. And I love that because I think there are people in life that you can recognize that in. Yeah. So you've got these two characters. They can enable effectively. And then, a big twist in the book, Steinberg introduces the character

“who really comes to define the book more than any other of the character that I think most readers,”

you know, that lives in readers minds. Yeah. And this is this woman, young woman, called Kathy Amis. She's by far the most memorable character in the book. She could be a psychopath, a devil in human form. She could be a scathing portrait of Steinberg's ex-wife or she could just be a misunderstood, hardworking woman trying to make her way in the world with what assets she has. And we will fight that with some of those. We think she is after the break.

Welcome back to the book club, everybody. Now, we love a strong female character on this show don't we, Tabi. You're wearing your feminist dad T-shirt. Feminist dad. It's just, so Kathy just to be clear. So Kathy, this person we're talking about, she's psychopathic, she's evil, she's slender, she's blonde-haired, she has these sort of blank staring eyes. I'm looking

myself in her. I don't by the way. She's awful. I remember when I first read this and coming to the bits about Kathy and meeting Kathy and being like, and it may seem obvious, but nevertheless, it's effective. I was totally chilled by her. So who is she? She is described as having been born different and monster from birth with a male form soul. And Steinberg kind of uses the idea of being born with physical defects. But rather than it being on the outside, it's on the inside,

“there's something wrong with her inside. So there's this wonderful quote. And it's, I believe”

there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some of you can see Miss Shapen and horrible with huge heads or tiny bodies. And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but of a twisted gene or a male form to egg and produce physical monsters may not the same process produce a male form to soul. She's born and raised in a small town in Massachusetts and the kind of

cosmic evil that is manifested in her, it comes out right from the first when she's a little girl. You know, she's the devil incarnate. She entrams the teacher, doesn't she? There's a real element of the kind of horror story in this. You know, the pretty little girl with a terrifying cold smile who's got the devil inside her. She manipulates, she harms, she destroys those around her. She frames young boys of her age for sexual assault. She drives a school teacher to commit

suicide. She smiles when she hears that one of her school fellows has died. And there are

other kind of unnerving details that give her away. Like, her room is always spotless and never

betrays the fact that it's lived in by little girl. There are other children are kind of fascinated by her, but then they look at her with like, they look away as if what they've seen is a bit, like they're something disturbing there. Most importantly, in fact, about her characterization, she has these chilling, sharp, small, white teeth that are constantly referenced when she smiles. She doesn't drink because she's afraid that it will expose her darkness. That's a very bad sign.

That's a terrible sign. Yeah. And at one point it does. There's this moment when her the Pimp that she is the mistress to persuade her to drink some champagne. And she goes utterly mental. All the wickedness comes up to the surface. And like, she tells him that he's a big fat slug that she knows his mind. Yeah, brutal. That she can use, whatever he feels, all of his weaknesses and desires against him. And she does this throughout her life. She spots and recognises the weakness in people,

particularly men when it's sexual. And she uses that against him because she feels no desire.

She has, you know, emotionless hazel eyes. She has childlike figure. And she never

develops a woman's figure. And like a scary little rosebud mouth. And then over the course of the novel, as she gets older, it's like the evil insider starts to show on the outside because she becomes kind of twisted and crippled, contorted by arthritis. She's just, she's a full miserly wicked character.

“And I think she's a joy to read. So at first, the only person who really sees through her is”

some another so-called evil character. So the cane figure in the first half of the book, which is Charles Adam's brother and Charles says to Adam, basically she's been beaten up by the Pimp because that she accused him of being a fat slug. He beats her up. She arrives on their doorstep. She's been beaten within an inch of her life. And they take her in. Adam develops this huge fondness for her. Charles says to him, "Please, Adam, throw her out. She will tear you to pieces. She will destroy you

Adam." But Adam can't see it as we'll, as we'll discuss, being able to see clearly and blindness is one of the themes of the book. Can you see the complexity of human nature or are you doomed to only see the good or only see the evil in people and not to see the sort of the battle within

every soul? And love is blinding. Love makes you less able to see the never.

So Adam is blinded by his love. He thinks she's absolutely wonderful. All he sees is the golden hair. And so he ends up marrying her, although Charles actually ends up sleeping with her and is

“possibly the father of her twins. It's never really spelled out. Now, here's the thing.”

People who have not read the book and who have listened to add description may well say, I think that what we're describing is not necessarily a real person but a pantomime villain, a bit of a caricature. So when Steinbeck says some people are monsters, she's just evil. I kind of think in a more sophisticated book, the characters would be more rounded than that. You wouldn't just say, here's a decency and villain and who ends up, you know, she corrupts men. You might, you might

well say this is actually quite a misogynist kind of take on a female character that the big female character of the book is just using her beauty and her sexuality to bewitch men and then to betray them and to, you know, kill them or to steal all their stuff or whatever she does. I mean, she then, she is a murderous. Yeah, I actually totally disagree because first of all in the real

Like these people exist, they don't exist just in books. Also, I think she is far more than a decency

and villain because first of all there's no chaos to her. She is patient, she's observant,

she's socially intelligent. She's also fascinating because she, the character, is kind of skeptical of human goodness. Like she embodies that. She is an experiment in finding the darkness and the weakness and the heart of every person and manipulating that. And there's a power in that, which challenges the books otherwise fairly simplistic moral thesis and it prevents it from becoming just a book about simple moral optimism. But also, the other thing that makes her far more interesting is that

when her son Aaron comes to see her, she is appalled by how appalled he is to find her as his mother. She's not necessarily guilty, but she is appalled and horrified by his horror of her. It actually frightens her. And that's another thing. She has vulnerabilities that make her through dimensional. She experiences fear, she loses control, she's forced to confront growing older and like losing the facade that allowed her to be manipulative. So she realizes there

are limits to what she can achieve. She's kind of, you'd never the less, admirably, kind of irreducible.

And she doesn't have this thing that a lot of pantomime villains have, which is kind of an unrealistic goal. There's no moral, flimsy moral justification to her. She's just kind of an animal, as I think some psychopaths are. Her desires are animistic. It's money. It's comfort. It's basic things like that. And in terms of like, Simon Beck's women often quite sexist, like they're often defined by what they do in society. So they're either kind of prostitutes or wives and mothers.

Yeah, and literally they're a mother or a horse. Yeah, mother or horse.

“It's used the old kind of cliche. I mean, that's what she rejects one and embraces the other.”

But I think that's still a little bit dismissive. I agree. His women are kind of defined in terms of their potential or otherwise for sexuality and motherhood. Like lies, a Hamilton is your ultimate, like domestic mother. She's virtuous. She's strict. Kathy is pretty attractive. She's a temptress. She's depraved. But I would say that the mothers and prostitutes themselves, while they may be those things. They're far from one dimensional and they have kind of iron wills. And there's

actually this line. I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess the loving woman is indestructible. And it's almost like through Kathy Steinberg acknowledges that women do often fall into these two categories. Because Kathy sees the way that women are defined by men. She uses it against them. She knows that Adam sees her as like a perfect, motherly, beautiful kind woman. You know, there are the men who see

her as a whore and a prostitute. She uses that against them and she takes their money. You know, she charts her own course throughout. So in a way, she's a critique of Standard's notions of femininity. Okay, fair enough. I take that point. But so the key moment, the sort of pivotal moment, we

started with it. She basically exposes her true nature to Adam. She's heard his two boys. She doesn't

want to really be their mother. She doesn't want to be his wife. She says to him, I'm going,

“he tries to stop her, she shoots him. That's what we began with. And then she walks out.”

He then brings up the two boys, the canaanable cow and Aaron on his own. And the question that hangs over the second half, are they ever going to find out the truth about her? And I guess is the canaanable pattern going to recur with these two boys as well? Which brings us to the two boys cow and Aaron. Horrod Henry and Perfect Peter. That's what I kept thinking of. Yeah, completely. What Standard makes does is he makes absolutely obvious to you. I mean,

no one could ever accuse him of excessive subtlety, even with the names, this bloke is going to be cane. This bloke is going to be able. The bloke who's cane has got dark hair. The bloke who's able is blonde and very good looking and all of this kind of thing. All the canes have got some sort of scar or just figament. So do you think that these two characters are a bit one dimension or surely you do? I do think I have to say I think Aaron is massively one-dimensional.

He's a bit tiresome, bit of a character, character, he's blonde, he's beautiful, he becomes obsessed

“with passionate purity. I actually when I came to reread it this time, I could barely remember”

anything about him because there's nothing really memorable about him. But there's a bit more to cow, his twin brother. Yeah, actually you're right about that, cow is much more layers. Probably the most complex character in the book really because he knows that there is darkness and evil in him and he spends all the whole course of the book trying to fight it and struggle with it. He's tormented by his own self-knowledge, isn't he? Because Cal is aware of the, this thing about

can you see yourself and other people clearly Cal really can. He can see that there is darkness in his soul and it really troubles him. He can be very manipulative and very cruel and yet at the same time we're told. He longs for his brother to love him. And his father. And as far as the Adam and it

in his soul. Dear Lord, let me be like Aaron, don't make me mean I don't want to be. If you

“will make everybody like me, why I'll give you anything out in the world and if I haven't got”

it, I'll go and get it. I don't want to be mean I don't want to be lonely for Jesus's sake. Our men, it's quite a moving moment, actually. Really moving. And it's one of the few moments I would say in the book where somebody sees themselves clearly and they wrestle with their nature because

Kathy never wrestles with her own nature. She accepts it. She just basically says, I'm an evil person.

I'm going to be evil. She uses it. Yes. And the other person I guess that they live with, which we should talk about is this guy called Lee. So Lee is he's the sort of servant of Adam. He's a, perhaps a slightly dodgy character. So he is Chinese American. He speaks in this kind of pigeon English, which we'd discover is put on because he's playing a part that people want him to play. It's what Americans expect him to be. Yes. And then once he's sort of unmasked, actually,

you can speak very good in this. What you're doing speaking this pigeon English, he then assumes his natural guys, which is a sort of stereotypical mystical man of the East, who dispenses Chinese wisdom, regular moments during the book. And, you know, I don't know, some people

readers may find that powerful and moving. I found Lee's Chinese wisdom a little bit annoying

to be honest with you. It's a bit like a succession of fortune cookies. I found it quite powerful because he's like he's the only ballast in these boys lives. And I like the conversations that he has with their girlfriend, Abra, Abra. I don't know if it's Abra. But I did, yeah, I agree. I got a little bit sake of his sections after a while. Like, vast portions for the book are given in to just given over to just conversations between him and Adam. But they're sort of philosophizing.

Yeah, philosophizing. It's those Steinbeckers slightly included the literary criticism about the book in the book. I think. Yeah. So this narrative will stop on people. Then characters will have

“a conversation and they'll sort of say, what does the story all mean? And that's what Lee is there for,”

right? But you have other books where that happens. I mean, that happens in 1984. What doesn't it? When they're reading from the Goldstein's manifesto, a little bit. But I feel it's a massive, I'm giving myself away here. But I think all well is a much better right than the John Steinbeck. Anyway, I mean, let's talk about actually what the book does mean. Yeah. So Steinbeck wrote it for his sons. This is a huge element of the book. And actually,

the relationship between fathers and sons runs through it. So you've got, you start off with Cyrus who's the war fake war hero and his sons. And then you have Adam's sons, Carl, and Aaron, and so on. And this idea that the Canaanable story in particular, the love of one's son being rejected by his father. And that makes him a biter and he takes out on his brother that that just repeats down the generations. Did you like it? Do you think it was well done? I thought it was quite well

done with the with the first set with Adam and Charles were near young enough, all the Cyrus,

“because that is basically what drives Charles, you know, that's what that's what fills his heart”

with darkness and a sense is his jealousy over the fact that Cyrus says to Adam at one point and he suspects this. I love you better. And actually, there's this moment when, I mean, before he calls him dog turd, a dog turd. There's this moment where Cyrus takes Adam out and says, you know, I need you to enlist and just so you know, I love you better. And I actually, I was

very moved by that. I was always found myself weeping, something about this hard man of

20th century America saying soft loving words. It really was very tender. See, I think was something that you really like. There's no question about this. You like basically very spare hard-boiled prose written by a man in which, as you say, hard men are struggling with steep sentimental emotions. Exactly. I do. I really speak to him. It does beat to me. Yeah. Yeah. It's something as it's hard for those of us with, you know, wheels of steel and hearts of stone. Right, of course. Stuff out there.

So I was moved by that and I thought it was a great motivator for Charles's evil. I was kind of less convinced by the second generation. So this is Adam and his two sons. I thought the point there was kind of cow. Yes, he feels rejected by Adam, but I suppose Adam doesn't, it doesn't feel like he necessarily prefers one to the other. It just feels like he's broken-hasted by Kathy's betrayal. And also it is interesting that fathers and sons are such a major theme in

the book because obviously Stein back had a very strained relationship with his own sons, but he also had a very strained relationship with his own father. He was also kind of a man of sunken ambitions. He owned a business that went bust. And, you know, he turned into that kind of father himself. So he must have been very therapeutic for him writing all this. I mean, Stimex, it's not terribly interesting. We already mentioned he's not terribly interested in motherhood.

So either you're a stereotypical mother like the Hamilton's mother, Liza, who's this sort of, she's like a mother from a kind of little house on the prairie or something. But let's get to

mother's sons or whatever. It's actually good versus evil. This is what Stimex always said was

“the point of the book. And I quote, I believe that there was one story in the world and only one.”

Humans are caught in their lives and their thoughts and the hunger's and ambitions, but above or above are in a net of good and evil. There is no other story. A man after his brushed off that this is so kind of American prose in the 1950s. A man after his brushed off the dust and chips of his life will have left only the hard clean questions. Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well or ill? Now, I may sound like I'm mocking that and I slightly am,

because I don't think that is the only story you can tell on that. I don't think that's the only subject of all literature. Of course, but it is a massive one. I mean, the big Russian authors, like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, all those guys, they're constantly grappling with the question of, you know, the evil and every human heart and how to live a good life and stuff like that. And no one ever criticises them for the day. I know you think I could see what you've

written in your notes. I know you think I've got double standards on this. I mean, I've got double standards. But also, I mean, the thing is, yeah, it may not be the only question I don't think it is the only question. But just because it's kind of text on this like mythical greater than life quality in the book, it doesn't mean that, you know, in the day to day and people's lives going about their daily business, it isn't something that everyone grapples with

“to some degree. It's just that you are, I think, too cynical. Like in this way, you don't think”

ideas, govern, you know, human lives or the cause of human history. York, you think it's stuff like, you know, how much food people need or how the economy is doing and stuff. So this idea wouldn't chime with you very well. But I actually think, I like it. I think it, I think just because it may be a bit clichéd, it doesn't mean it's not valid or true. Okay, fair enough. So we've really said that whether you can see good and evil clearly as a big theme, like basically

characters who are rewarded who are successful are those who can see both the beauty and the ugliness and people. So actually, even Adam, who is deluded most of the book because he can only see the beauty, there was a moment when he goes to see his ex-wife at a brothel. It's a very...

It's a good matter. It's actually quite powerful. Seeing and he says to her, you think you're

so great because you just see the evil in people and you have cynical and all of this. You're the Dominic Sambrook of brothel owners. So that cast us in our true roles on the show. You were the Kathy of this podcast and I am a turnily kind and optimistic, Adam Trask. Well Adam says to Kathy, you know about the ugliness and people but you don't know about the rest. You see only one side and you think more than that you were sure that that's all there is. There was a part of you missing. And I suppose,

by Steinbeck's own lights, he's quite right. That he and Kathy are polar opposites and each of them only sees one side of human nature. And the clarity with which somebody like Cal, Adam's son can see the complexity of human nature and he wrestles with his own demons. That elevates him. It makes him more successful as a character because he is alive to both the good and the evil in human nature. He wrestles with this darkness within himself and he's frightened isn't he that he

will be trapped by his own nature. That you know that he basically sees the can and able pattern.

He thinks gosh I'm can and I'm doomed to evil and can trap him. I'm trapped by my nature. Yeah and do you think that's, do you think people really think that's about themselves? Maybe. I think that is genuinely something that people battle with. I think some people go through life terrified of they're being something inside them that isn't that has bad impulses. So I think

“that is true to life and that's why Cal is such a relatable character. I think for anyone,”

you're lying if you think that you're good all the time. You're definitely not being honest if you say that you don't wrestle with yourself from time to time. But then the thing is that other wonderful hopeful part of this novel is that basically the crux of it all this secret Hebrew word has been looting to throughout. It's all about freedom. It's about how we are in fact free to choose not to be the darkness inside us but rather the good side of us. And this is basically encapsulated

by this word Tim Shell. It comes from a key line in Genesis when God is talking to Cain and God says to Cain, if thou doest well, this is the King James Version, shout thou not be accepted and if thou doest not well, sin life at the door and unto thee shall be his desire and thou shout rule over him. Thou shout rule over him is basically, if you're good, you will rule over sin and if you're not, you won't. And basically, the three characters Samuel Hamilton, Lee, the Chinese American guy,

who's basically a bit of a character and Adam, they sit around for hours, don't they're talking about these, about Cain and Abel and about this, sort of, what does it all mean?

Tabby. Yeah, I was born for this. So Lee, the Chinese bloke, he says to the others, right, I've taken this, I've taken this bit of the Bible to my Chinese elders and they've consulted some sort of rabbinical authorities and they've studied, they spent two years studying

“the meaning of the Cain and Abel's story so they can report back. And basically, the key word here”

is Tim Shell, which the King James translation says is thou shout, but in reality, it should be thou mayest. And as Lee says to the other characters, that gives you a choice, it might be the

most important word in the world that says the way is open, thou mayest, why that makes a man

great, that gives him stature with the gods for in his weakness and his filth and his murderous brother, he's still has the great choice, he can choose his course and fight through and win. And Lee basically says, so Lee is given the role of the sort of dispenser of wisdom. Profit almost, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And he says, this is what separates us from animals. We have the choice of good and evil. We're not trapped. We're not predestined. You might think you're

going to be Cain, but actually you thou mayest, means this were Tim Shell, means you could choose to be a good person. You're not defined by your heredity or by the role that you feel like you've been given and this is amazingly exciting. And he says this to Cal, basically to say that you're not trapped, you don't have to follow in the footsteps of Cain. Just because your name is Cal and you've got, you know, wickedness in your family, you can choose to be a good man and this

kind of liberates him. And obviously, you can see the appeal of a concept like this to someone like Steinbeck, Steinbeck, a man that had made mistakes throughout his life. He had a, you know, toxic and tumultuous personal life. He had had a negative relationship with his father and then had a negative relationship with his sons. You can see how emancipating and liberating this would be for a man like that. And then, you know, he's writing this for his sons. So to be able to tell them,

you don't have to have the same relationship with your sons. You don't have to make the mistakes that I made. God, that you can see how liberating is. How liberating that would be. Yeah. I'm trying to liberating. But you know, there are only tabby. I hate to be the person who's constantly

“writing an liberate. I mean, I don't really, but I'm pretending I hate. That's what you live about.”

It's a pleasing, pleasing the listeners. Steinbeck was wrong. Like that word, it doesn't even exist. It's not even a word. Tim Schill. The word is actually Tim Schill. And I read an article about this in the Jewish review of books by Schiller Tala Kaita. And she said, you know, actually, the original version was right and that Lee and Steinbeck are quite wrong, you know, all this. Oh, you have little faith. Do you not think that I have not contemplated

your every single tricksy little argument you'd have to destroy this book? It's intentional. He's doing it intentionally. He's not like rewriting biblical interpretation. He's just, he's creating a philosophy and an idea in his book. You know, it's more than a word. He's creating a magical word in a way a way to reshape the way that we see human nature and get put some more positive spin on things. I think he intended it to be mistranslated. Okay. So when we get to the very last

scene in the book. So which is basically, I actually cried the first time I read this. Oh, it's

happy. I'm going to have to really dial down what I was going to say now. No, no, that loose. Let it. No. Well, Adam is dying, isn't he? And Cal comes in. So Cal who basically has conspired or colluded in Aaron's death. He by forcing Aaron to confront the truth about his mother, he effectively drove him to enlist in the army in the Great War. Aaron has been killed that sort of telegram has arrived. Adam has had a stroke. His lying in bed, his dying,

Lee brings in Cal, the bad guy, basically, and says, help him. Adam, help him.

“Give him his chance. Let him be free. That's what a man has over the beast. Free him,”

bless him. And Adam does bless him. He whispers that word. Tim shell, thou mayest. Meaning. You're not trapped by, you know, by fate. You can choose to be a good person. Set yourself free and be a good person. I forgive you all of this. And well, clearly, I was about to say, do you find a moving, but clearly, if you were crying, you weren't crying at the, at their pros, you were crying at the, the message, the message.

Yeah, so you did, so you do find this moving. I do find a moving firstly because, you know,

the idea of forgiveness is always moving. When that's like in war and peace or whatever,

when the attach is forgiven on the deathbed or anything like that. And then, you know, it's a father dying, heartbroken, and then finding some degree of kind of hope and redemption in his wayward, prodigal son. So I do find that moving. But also, he's not actually being massively

believe it. It's a story. It's a conversation. It's actually a debate that runs throughout, like are humans good or are they wicked? Does good get you anywhere in life? And the emotional

“reality of the book, you know, the death of a father whispering goodbye to his son. I think it”

outweighs the allegory or the symbolism of the idea of, you know, free a well. And I do think it is preachy. His voice is full of thought and doubt. It's intimate. And, you know, you love the Chronicles of Narnia, which has a big message at the heart of it. Yeah. And this message is no, is no bigger. And it's just just subtly done. I think and just just powerful. So you can use that word again. It's, it's that good. It's as good as the Chronicles of Narnia. I mean,

that is good. All right. So I think this is can tell we probably don't quite agree on whether this book is a great book or not. This book has created the tension at the heart of the book club.

We've never disagreed so much. No. So tabby stands with open wind free. I do. And I stand with

the New York Times as always. So we're going to pick them up like this. What are we going to might we we always as part of our own commitment to subtlety? Yeah. We must. We might these books out of ten. Yeah. So I'm going to appole you by giving it five out of ten. Oh, slow, smart. We've ever had. So the critics in 1952, what they didn't like about it, the hybrid critics. They said they did not like the Hamilton family. They found them a red redundant, which I do. They found

Kathy unbelievable a sort of a psychopathic, a prostitute turn madam. They didn't like leaves a profound eastern wisdom and they found the cane and able stuff to one the nose. And I agree with all of that. I agree with all of those things. That said, I know a lot of people love this book and a lot not so not just you and loads of people do find it moving and they love the kind of family saga element to it. And I agree with you about this. I think particularly

maybe as a British reader. There is something always very appealing about these books setting

“kind of California on the frontier, people queuing out and you life for themselves. So that's why”

I've managed to find five marks to give it. That's kind of a good idea. But I know that you are going to give it a massive score and feel free to be my guest. Well, thanks. I'm going to give it a nine out of ten. As you said, I love books setting this kind of part of America, set during this time period. I love Steinbeck's writing. It's kind of it's so simple and spare and plain and yet it conveys incredible delicacy of thought and incredibly delicate descriptions and this delicacy delivered in

this kind of hard, masculine voice kind of cuts to the quick. I love the descriptions of the Selena's Valley, you know, moving through the seasons. I like the message at the heart of I think it's a hopeful one. The idea that people can change. As you say, I love the family saga element. I actually thought the Hamilton's added a kind of nice domesticity to it that otherwise would make it just a book seen from the birds eye view maybe. And I read something that said that it

“captured the vast confusion of life. And that's how I feel about it. But I'm deducting a mark”

because I found Aaron and Lee a bit boring. Our first proper disagreements and the first I hope of many. By the way, people should on Instagram, on X or whatever, we'd like to hear your own thoughts. Express the fact that you agree with me. I know they will agree with you. I mean, there's no question

they'll agree with you. I mean, I should never have done this show because I've just opened

I've just opened myself up to abuse from tap stones. So what we've got coming up, I think some books that will agree on a little bit more. So the first one, the Hound to the Basqueville's is what we're doing next week. And then we are doing a court of thorns and roses by Sarah James and we shall probably be discussing the whole genre of romanticity and why it feels the same many people at the moment. The woman in white, by Wilkie Collins, beloved by Tony Morrison,

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I'm looking forward to that. And after that, another big change of tone, the Hunger Games. I don't know, you're right, the Hunger Games. Who were the Hunger Games? Suzanne Collins. Suzanne Collins, that's an indictment of my literary knowledge that I don't know. But I'm looking forward to this. I was just pretending it's one of my favorite books. So we're always keen to hear your views and if there is by some weird

missed chance somebody out there agrees with me and not tabby, I'm particularly keen to hear from you. All right, tabby. Thank you very much. And goodbye. Bye.