3. The Great Gatsby: Old Money, Murder, and the American Dream

taboo to welcome them as the new presenting partner of the book club which could not be more fitting.

“Absolutely and Dominic you actually gifted me a Folio society book for Christmas and it's”

absolutely beautiful. Every detail feels considered it's a work of art and on the third of March

they are launching the great Gatsby as part of their spring collection and I actually have that beautiful edition here with me now. Look at that beautiful illustration. Fist Gerald lets the gold gleam and then quietly shows you the cost which is why it's worth returning to the novel spending a bit more time in those bright rooms and staying after the orchestra stops. It feels like the novel itself, the sparkle on the surface, the silence beneath. The Folio Society is a small

independent publisher owned by their employees and based in South London. Folio's design

captures the shine of Gatsby's world, lingering just long enough for the holiness to surface.

You can order the great Gatsby and explore the other books that we keep coming back to at foliosociety.com/thebookclub. [music] I turned again to my new acquaintance. This is an unusual party for me. I haven't even seen the host. I live over there and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.

For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand. I'm Gatsby. What? Oh I beg your pardon. I thought you knew all sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very good host. He smiled understandingly. Much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced or seemed to face the whole eternal world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible

prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you, as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that at your best you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over 30, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Sometime before he introduced himself I'd got a strong impression

that he was picking his words with care. So, hello Dominic, the man whose own smile launched

a thousand podcasts that was a very welcome. That was a crucial scene in the Great Gatsby by

F. Scott Fitzgerald published in 1925 and it is perhaps the most celebrated of all American novels.

“It's a very short book which I think people are always slightly taken aback by, it's less than”

50,000 words and yet it's seen as perhaps the classic example of the Great American novel and its emblematic of the jazz age, flappers, speed keys, highball cocktails, rebellion against the status quo and so because of that it's generally taken to be a very frivolous and lighthearted book but actually it's got a core of real tragedy to it. Yeah absolutely so it ends with the deaths of some of the key characters and ends with the total disillusionment of the narrator and actually

the Great Gatsby in many ways is a book about the tragedy of characters who are destroyed by their own dreams. So it's a book about wealth and pleasure of course as you say the kind of the fast cars and the high living and the part is and stuff but also the human costs of that. It's a book about the American dream, the idea of reinventing yourself and being reborn but also the fear of that dream being punctured and the fear that we all have actually of being found

out the sort of fate that awaits us all to be and terrified for us that and something that actually

“I think people don't bring out very often about the Great Gatsby I think it's a book about nostalgia”

and about the past and about the desire to turn about the clock and to clutch onto something that's vanishing out of sight and that's something that this character Gatsby who I have to say I felt like I even in a few words I think I really captured really some charm of the man. The fraudulent

well later in the episode we'll be meeting Tom Buchanan so maybe. Yeah. His cool power. Are you

“reckon like you guys are British violence? Yeah exactly. So before we get into you know we'll”

be discussing the book we'll be discussing the context of the 1920s and F Scott Fitzgerald himself but first of all tabbing your first impressions of the book. I'm guessing you've seen the film as well the Baz Lermon film. I have so like a lot of people I studied it for my GCSEs and the movie came out actually in the run up to the exam itself and then I watched it afterwards and I loved it you know I loved the surface value of it flappers, fast cars all of that and but it didn't it didn't

make a massive impression on like on my mind didn't really stay with me it didn't sink that deep and then I watched the film and I was kind of outraged by its adaptation but actually the film had done just what I had done with the book and because it's all about the surface it's very blunt it's all about like jazz music and at one point for instance Nick the narrator says oh we all

drunk too much which is always implied in the book but never stated and then rereading it I mean

well we'll discuss what we made of it this time but it definitely didn't make a massive impression

“I enjoyed it but it didn't go much further than that yeah so for me when I first read it I remember”

being struck by how much stranger it was when I was expecting so I thought it would be a book about cocktails and parties and hedonism and whatnot and of course those things are in it but it was much more haunting and kind of a bleak I guess than I was expecting yeah everything's beneath the surface isn't it it's all the things that aren't sad which is why I actually think it doesn't lend itself to movie adaptations it's really one of those books it's almost impossible to do just

this too I totally agree and we're not gonna spend ages on the film no the best learned film they Leonardo DiCaprio film the one thing that strikes me is it's so glitzy yeah so sensual so over the top but actually it doesn't capture the subtleties and nuances of the book and particularly writing well we'll we'll we'll see how our impressions change by the end of this episode but let's start with some of the context Baslem and actually has a wonderful montage of this

at the beginning of the film because it's jazz age America yeah exactly so that's the period

from the end of the first of all in 1918 to the Wall Street crash in 1929 massive economic growth

in America it's the rise of the city and mass consumerism in the popular machinations this is the roaring twinces hundred percent like one of the most iconic epochs ever in all of this sort of art deco fashion and and all of that yeah however you know there's a definitely a dark side to it because it's the decade of the second kukus clan you see a hint of that in the racism of one of the writers Tom Buchanan which we'll come on to it's the decade of prohibition

which has been a force since January 1920 but the paradox is on the one hand you have prohibitions that's the outlawing of alcohol but at the same time you've got bootlegging which is smuggling of illicit alcohol you've got illicit bars called speakies is yeah it's seen at the time as nature it excess to the point of destruction so the New York Times in 1922 had an article on the new phenomenon of the cocktail party and it said you know the end of cocktail party is basically

somebody always gets shot or stabbed this sort of sense of danger you know of hedonism and

danger going hand in hand for a leg very exciting and it's like a kind of go hang it yeah yeah that's exactly how all of our parties end but the jazz age label obviously jazz the emblematic music of the era and that's popularised by one writer above all F. Scott Fitzgerald he wrote a short story collection called Tales of the Jazz Age published in 1922 and actually tabby

“that takes us very neatly to Fitzgerald himself doesn't it yeah and I think Fitzgerald is definitely”

one of those writers who it's really really important to understand in order to kind of see the inspirations behind his book because he's everywhere in the great recipe and he really did live the jazz age he was in the very middle of it all bad fairly mixed relationship with it so this is Francis Scott Fitzgerald born to a middle class Catholic family in St Paul Minnesota in 1896 and Paul yeah I didn't use when some time I so unbelievably I lived in St Paul Minnesota for a year

what were you doing there I was doing there was such my PhD right it's very cold like I was there over the winter yeah it's it's it's very see you are being a kind of on-form terrible at the very heart of a to know what the revelation scene of literally doing and starving I can't describe how different my life was from that so basically I remember really vividly there was a moment where I had spent all day like at the archive and then I was walking back to my rock story it's my rented

basement and through the snow drifts and I genuinely thought if I fell into the snow drifts now no one would notice my body wouldn't be discovered for ages but also no one would miss me no one knows how exists he's gonna eat and vials stations like the next summer that's very great

all right in this note exactly so yeah that my life was not life it's not not one bit he was actually this is a really fun detail he was actually named after a guy called Francis Scott

“Key a cousin and he wrote the stars bangled with banner yeah which had not yet been adopted as the”

American national anthem yeah which I didn't know thirty's I didn't realize it was so recent but for it's sterled he has a kind of his middle class so he's he's not you know a super establishment or a lead but he still goes to private schools doesn't he he has quite a charmed life for sure he goes to private school you know he's clearly a gifted writer even from that stage and then he goes to Princeton where he's made to feel like a bit of an outsider because he's a Catholic and again

there's echoes of that in in the Great Gatsby's narrator and now we come to what is definitely one of the key moments of his story so during a Christmas holiday he met and fell in love with a 16-year-old girl called Geneva King and their doomed romance is just a massive inspiration for the Great Gatsby people often think that it was his wife Zelda who will come to in due course who's kind of the main inspiration for the book but it's not it's this romance that he has

with this Geneva King and she's a very rich debutant she's one of what was called the four depths or something like that and then the four most sort after well-faced most attractive debutants of that season so she's very rich from posh lake forest to cargo you know it's all about tennis golf finishing schools and her father though when when Fitzgerald was quoting her allegedly said poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls oh my gosh that's very very harsh yeah

very and he's absolutely gutted by this I mean he's almost suicidal and so he enlists in the

U.S. Army to fight in the first world were hoping that he'll get killed but he never actually

goes to France and ends up spending the war in a series of army barracks is that way he meets Zelda so this is where he meets the iconic Zelda Fitzgerald so he's it's 1918 he's at Camp Shoden at Alabama and he meets another rich fashionable slightly nuts debutant and as she's a southern bell with very intense feelings about the Confederacy and the old south okay that's a bad sign very very totally signed from the start and she's called Zelda Serre and he's clearly so in love

“with Geneva in fact I think he's probably in love with her the rest of his life you know he's still”

writing to her he's begging her to get back with him but then she writes to tell him that she's married a rich Chicago businessman and three days later so obviously massively on the rebound he tells Zelda that he loves her and they become a couple but she won't agree to marry him either until Fitzgerald makes something himself to be made a bit of money so he tries advertising in New York after the war he and Zelda had this very turbulent on off sort of relationship going on he considers

suicide again and this will also kind of continue for the rest of his life and then he decides

to have one more go at becoming a novelist and he finally finds success with a very famous book

and is called this side of paradise and it's a huge hit and it comes out in 1920 and it's very much based on his time at Princeton so it's like love affairs parties you know right from that stage he's drawing on his own life so finally he and Zelda get married and they become the fashionable literary couple of the early 1920s they're constantly in the papers for partying Zelda is the definitive flapper she even writes along essay in defense of flappers and then in 1921

she gives birth to their daughter Francis Scottie Fitzgerald this poor child has a very turbulent life and there's a really interesting story about how when she emerges from anesthesia she says isn't she smart she has the hiccups I hope it's beautiful and a fool a beautiful little fool oh that's a line from the grey gansby that's a line directly yeah taken from the gansby great so let's move forward to the summer of 1923 Fitzgerald is 26 so he's or you know he's

quite a handsome guy and a kind of slightly fade away but he's in the face of him he's quite attractive but he's already beginning to sink into dissipation isn't he? even in our stage Zelda clever witty and

“what not but she's she's she's quite hard work I think it's yeah I mean obviously it's big spoiler she's”

going to end up in a lot of kind of institutions mental institutions and so on she's I have a fun fun detail about Zelda I'd like a fun detail yeah yeah you live with it I named my dog after Zelda Fitzgerald oh my god yeah a blonde deeply neurotic spaniel so wow yeah it's a very apt yeah there you go and they're both massive drinkers aren't they I mean

this is the this is the core of their their issue is that they're basically functional alcohol

I mean functioning alcoholics Zelda was so notorious that when they were living in New York the police detained her near Queen's bro bridge I think because they thought that she was this person called the bobbed head bandit who was an infamous spring robber because she was so famous

her but she was very shaken by the whole thing and that's why they ended up moving um to Paris well but but before they go to France they're living on Long Island which is where the Great Gatsby is so they're living in a place called Great Nek and Great Nek basically is this hangout it's a former fishing village it's now become a massive celeb hangout in the early 1920s so movie stars and whatnot people call it the Hollywood of the East and Great Nek in the book is a place called West

Egg across the bay is a sort of slightly more at market place or sand's point which is in the book East Egg it's kind of more old money and less flashy and when he's there Fitzgerald is clearly you know he's fascinated by these issues of class and status and exactly where you sit in the hierarchy definitely and as we'll see you know there's a big party lifestyle and he throws

himself into it and he's always you know first to the to the drinks cabinet but at the same time

“he's kind of repelled by it and I think there's a self-loathing about all the party you”

seen the self it doesn't have I don't think I think she very much you know leads him astray in that regard but to go back to the Great Gatsby because this is when he starts thinking about the Great Gatsby the big inspiration for this really is that doomed romance with his first love isn't it? Yeah definitely it is he writes to a friend at one point actually which is so telling the whole idea of Gatsby is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with

money this theme comes up again and again because I lived it and actually interestingly during the relationship Geneva wrote a very Gatsby like story and sent it to Fitzgerald in which female characters trapped in a loveless marriage with a wealthy man who cheats on her but the all the while she's pining for this young love of hers so she's pining for him too. Yeah I think she's pining for him but I think he kind of represents an escape that is not really a

reality and they actually ended up reuniting in later life when her when she left her husband and to disaster because Fitzgerald's so nervous that he gets really really drunk and also the whole thing up yeah it's really interesting. God such a shame. Such a shame so but he's still married to Zelda at this time which shows you how tumultuous their relationship was anyway so he ends up

writing a first draft of the Great Gatsby but he isn't happy with it and then in spring 1924 he

and Zelda moved to the south of France and he tries again and their marriage is in total crisis at this point. Zelda's had an affair with a French aviator or allegedly the guy himself totally denied it said she made the whole thing up and then as a result of this she ends up overdosing on sleeping

“pills and this again will recur throughout their life and so in that I think that's a”

inspiration on the Great Gatsby it's like the idea of shattered romantic illusions and idea of love that can't ever live up to one's hopes for it I suppose and he's still working on the book isn't he because he originally had been thinking about setting in the 19th century and now he and he was going to call it among the Ash heaps and millionaires which is I think a terrible title but not as bad as some of the titles he later with which he later floods. I don't think it's a bad title I think it's

it's some type of a quite well. So the other thing is when he's in France he's got he becomes interested in this idea of it basing it on a great kind of Roman classic which is Petronius's satiric on which is from the late 1st century AD and there's a whole section of satiric on which is about a guy called Tramalchio. Tramalchio is a former slave who has basically got his freedom and his new very she's a kind of parvenue his very vulgar he has this huge dinner party to show

of his fortune to other kind of top Romans. Top Romans and he's telling I'm sure there's must be some more must be some more specific. Yeah I'm sure there's an expression for this but I'm just going to call them top Romans. So he's telling loads of tall stories about himself Tramalchio and showing off and he actually it ends with him talking about his own death and staging a mock funeral of himself. And Fitzgerald found all this really interesting and suggestive and he

“wanted to call the book Tramalchio in West A. This is mad. Which I think is a bad title and when”

he sends him to his publishers he made a huge fuss saying I want to call the Great Gatsby Tramalchio West A. And they basically said no. And then his other suggested titles. Do you see this? So he wanted to say he said I could call it gold-hatted Gatsby. Yeah. I think Hatted doesn't belong in a title. It sounds like a Bond movie title. Oh well this is really as a Bond movie title or at least the song from a Bond film was something the high-bound sing lover.

Yeah that's like a PG Woodhouse pasti show something. Oh my gosh yeah anyway. So he finishes the book in 1924 in October 1924. His editor is a guy called Maxwell Perkins. Really really famous editor. He was Tom Wolf's editor as well as me. Oh what's he? Yeah that's a very famous relationship.

So Maxwell Perkins is one of those editors who's very into American editors as always more

naturally deserves a fair bit of credit for the finished book. Yeah he definitely does. I mean for

Gerald always kicks back against the title which is a really good one the great Gatsby but

he never makes his piece with it but another really interesting massive inspiration was the cover of the book and it must be one of the most famous book covers ever and it's called Celestial Eyes and it's kind of this art deco image of these two massive eyes floating in a deep deep blue sky. And it's like the mens media yeah blue landscape the eyes of a flapper and then you have this quite sensual mouth underneath and it was by a very unknown Catalan artist called Francis Cougar

and Fitzgerald's big mates Ernest Hemingway said that it looked like the bookjacket for a book of bad science fiction and I'm there so many interesting tidbits about Hemingway and Fitzgerald's relationship but nevertheless Fitzgerald absolutely loved it and he actually revised the great

Gatsby to match the cover yeah that is so rare it's so rare and that plays on no never

must be plays up the themes of kind of eyes and blindness and like there's his omniscient watcher or whatever it is but we'll come back to that. Just on the Hemingway thing to be

“I think we'd be really remiss of you not to tell your anecdotes you're looking for ready to share”

with me is there a lot of some issue with Hemingway and Fitzgerald haven't going to the gents to inspect each others yeah there is there so basically Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald absolutely loathed each other he thought she was nuts and she thought she used to say that his overt masculinity hid his secret homosexuality and she used to mock him about it all the time and so he started saying that she was trying to destroy F Scott Fitzgerald and the way that she was

going about this was by going to parties and telling everyone that he had a very small penis oh my god so Hemingway said no no this is absolutely not right I'm going to be a top friend and I'm going to prove everyone that this is not the case so he took F Scott Fitzgerald into a public loop examined it and came out and confirmed to everyone that he had an average sized penis after all oh my god I think you enjoyed telling him so I don't know so much but I don't know if that makes

“it worse you have to like stage a robust defense and you have to tell everyone”

you're a friend yeah yeah exactly you were standing there next to me it's face falling that's the best part of this whole episode I've been building up to that days anyway back to the great guys yeah to the great guys be actually we should just say what happened to Fitzgerald and Zelda because you know we talked about the book for the rest of the thing but it is sad isn't it because Zelda basically she was in and out of mental hospitals for the rest of her

life she had a electro shock therapy and actually she died of a fire in a mental institution they think now that she probably had bipolar by the time they said that she has schizophrenia and Fitzgerald he basically just drank himself to death he's sank into complete alcoholism and he's a he died of failure in Hollywood in 1940 and at that point basically people said he's just to footnotes in history no one will care about him because his books had stopped selling

do you see this factor by his rotors yeah it's absolutely tragic that in the last 12 months of his life his royalties came to exactly 13 dollars 13 cents I know let's hope that you're half million word historical tombs yeah remain the best sellers that they are also that have a better funeral than Fitzgerald at his funeral they have an Episcopalian funeral only 20 people went and the minister said afterwards the only reason I agreed to give the service was to get his body

in the ground he was a no good drunk and bum and the world was well rid of him yeah and there's a

terrifying tragic symmetry there with with the great Gatsby actually and the thing is he was always

criticized for trying to be too commercial with his writing for writing to make money but he said that with the great Gatsby it was going to be a work of art it was going to have nothing to do with money and then it was it was quite negatively received yeah yeah which which broke his heart that's real going on to you all right so let's talk a little bit about the book yeah um I guess the first thing about it the strikes you is the sensuality of it yeah overwhelmingly so yeah so

it's kind of full of music and colour and kind of you know I don't know shimmering dresses and stuff and people you know parties with cocktail I mean that does that that's the period I bought it yeah when you first read it it's hard to kind of miss all that is it but also he he has these minute details he's an incredible builder of kind of tension and you know there's a very fraught seamer where he sort of describes a sweating bottle of whiskey and it's just it creates a

“a very sort of tense atmosphere yeah it's masterful actually I think and yeah you're right but”

there is this kind of general impression of kind of beautiful women shimmering dresses people kind of wondering through shady gardens bottomless cocktails it's quite impressionistic like I always think it has Renoir's painting the luchion of the boating party and it's kind of lots of figures

specific details but it's kind of a mass of bodies and colour and that's very the great Gatsby

“yeah so I think that that style reminds me a little bit of somebody like Joseph Conrad who actually”

was one of Fitzgerald's favourite writers like it's always a little bit elusive and and there was

a bit at the edge of your vision you know nothing is ever quite in focus and and clear and actually nostromo Conrad's brilliant book was one of Fitzgerald I think was Fitzgerald's fate he said it was his favourite book of the last 50 years and what he got from Conrad was this idea of a narrator so Marlo in heart of darkness yes famous famous narrator and a writer who's sort of telling is telling you the story and he's also telling you what he thinks the story means but at the same time he's

not necessarily reliable so so you always have to be a little bit you know skeptical of what the narrator is telling you which I guess brings us to the central you know the person who's telling us the great Gatsby which is this guy Nick Nick Caraway and it's so interesting because in the initial drafts of the great Gatsby he wrote it as having an omniscient narrator it wasn't

“from Nick's perspective and that totally transforms the whole story because Nick is actually”

he's almost a version of Fitzgerald you know they're both from kind of middle-class Midwest and families both Ivy League but they're both kind of somewhat outsiders to the worlds that they are a part of the worlds that they're describing and Nick says of himself I'm one of the few honest people that I've ever known but then everything that happens in the book kind of leads us to question that right because he doesn't necessarily behave in an honest way no he's a he's a

participant and a lot of the deceptions that happen they're looking at love triangle decisions and actually it's an interesting thing because the class is such a big thing in this whole book Nick boasts about his family at the beginning he says oh we've been prominence in the mid-west for three generations but then he goes on to say that they are kind of a bit of a fraud in themselves so the caroise he says we have a tradition that we're descended from the juice

of buckley but then he says well actually I've had the founder of our family came to America

in the 1850s he sent a substitute in his place to the American Civil War he basically started

a hardware business in other words quite a fraudulent and banal beginning and actually at one point when Nick he moved to work and finance doesn't see in the in the east coast and he says how he's bought all these these books these books I'm banking read and gold like new money from the mint and actually that is what Gatsby is going to do later on is have all these sort of flashy books to show off learning that he doesn't really have he's like a later restoration of what

“Gatsby is trying to be exactly so well that sort of I think Nick and Gatsby I mean Nick is fascinated”

by Gatsby but they're kind of versions of each other yeah definitely so I mean Nick in the book he moves to Long Island from the Midwest as Fitzgerald did and that brings him into contact with these two people Daisy and Tom so Daisy is his cousin second cousin once removed and he knew Tom in college and he's very impressed by them because they are like a secret society to him it might be actually the secret history which we're going to be doing on this show there are echoes

of the great Gatsby throughout the secret history which we've both kind of been reading recently yeah it's so true because also I mean Tom and Daisy are properly like they're it they are old money they're everything that people like Gatsby aspire to be so and Tom is kind of like he's a bit of a classic rug alert I guess he plays polo yeah he's stupid brash very violent he's played by Joel Ederton in the film very well actually he's from a very rich Chicago family went to Yale

play football he has shining arrogant eyes enormous power in his cruel body and there's an ongoing joke in the book that everyone that Gatsby refers to him as as the polo player and he doesn't like that at all so just straight straight out of your university friends yeah thank you I'm sorry there's no doubt in my mind that you love polo you know loads of people like him come on I shouldn't have he's my today'sie and then Daisy yeah and now Daisy do you see yourself and Daisy she's

I don't like to think of myself as one of a Jordan beaker really swing yeah anyway I mean said do you see yourself and Daisy then looked at the notes and saw the words Brittle comma in substantial both satisfies two cases God that's uncanny actually is like looking in a mirror terrifying and Daisy has a voice full of money no we would say that you tell me no one would ever say that of me yeah but they're terrible people and they're terrible but there's something utterly utterly

alluring about Daisy like there's an immaterial immateriality to her because it's always about her voice

and we never really hear what Nick looks like but equally we never really know what Daisy looks like and yet everyone has such a strong sense of her being this kind of wavy with big eyes she's described as she's she's very slender kind of immaterial but she's also unhappy in her marriage to to

first meets them all at this very elegant lunch party and her friend Jordan Beaker whispers

“kind of waspish waspishly in Nick's ear that all about this affair and that the mistress was calling”

and actually Jordan Beaker is but based on a real person too right so she's the great um what she golf is it going yeah he just comings and she was Geneva King's best friend right in real life so so she's the king so I have a relationship with Nick yeah and she cheats no one is what they appear to be no and actually a couple of quick things about Tom and Daisy Tom is a racist so Tom is reading these pseudo scientific racist books he's wittering on constantly about the white race is going to be

submerged and actually Daisy agrees with him on this and she says at one point we've got to beat them down yeah she's sort of jokingly she's very carelessly flings it away and there's this wonderful wonderful quote about them is one of my favourite lines in in the whole book and it's they were careless people Tom and Daisy they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other

people clean up the mess they had made and that is sums them up perfectly it does yeah the careless people and to be frank I mean there are lots of people like that I mean that can think of people I

“know who are like Tom and Daisy I'm sure I think we all do and then there's Gats be himself so let's”

talk a little bit about Gats be before we get into the break Gats be in the first couple of chapters the book he's alluded to he's a neighbor of theirs in Long Island but he's a mystery he doesn't really exist as a physical being he's just a sort of compilation of rumors and anecdotes all a lot of which are kind of mad and wrong right yeah like at the parties that nick attends before he meets Gats be there are all sorts of things like people say he's the cousin of the Kaiser somebody thought he

killed a man once he was a German spy during the war no it can't be that because he was in the American army during the war no one knows anything about him and no one knows where or how he got his money from but there is gossip that he's a bootlugger and yeah and people people think that he may be in the neck of Von Hindenburg or whatever it is yeah yeah and that's sort of mystery reflects what Fitzgerald himself said about Gats be so Fitzgerald later said to a friend the

friend of complaint about Gats be and said I can't work out who he is and Fitzgerald said you're

right about Gats be being blurred and patchy I never any one time saw him clear myself he started

as one man I knew and then changed into myself and the the man he knew you you know who this Blake is you've done some taking on this I thought this was so interesting so for Fitzgerald's neighbour while living on Long Island was a guy called Max Gerlach and he'd been a major in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I but then he later became a gentleman bootlugger who operated speed keys for the Jewish mob boss in New York Arnold Rothstein and will come to

him more later he lived like a millionaire he kind of flaunted his wealth by having massive parties he famously never wore the same shirt twice which is a detail about Gats be and apparently he referred to everyone as old sport which is like so he's very Gats be very very very Gats be and he used to spread very outlandish myths about himself like he once said I'm a descendant of the Kaiser so I mean that has Gats be written all over it yeah so interesting and then we first see Gats be physically

in this very very famous scene at the end of the story when he's I mean maybe to have you want to read a little bit of it he's gone outside and he's Nick sees him he's standing looking at the stars and looking up at the heavens and in this very very memorable and strange kind of posture right yeah very odd so it's written a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbour's mansion and was standing with his hands and his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars

something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr Gats be himself come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens and

then this is the amazing bit he stretched out his arms towards the dark water in a curious way

and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling involuntarily I'd glance see wood and distinguish nothing except a single green light my new and far away that might have been the end of a dog that green light is the thing that guides him for the whole book and in the colour green

“recurs again and again I think people who don't know much about the great Gats be they're”

everyone's heard of the green light and it's meaning as you say it's hard to pinpoint you know it's kind of the embodiment of of hopeless yearning and it's something that all anyone who reads the book can kind of transpose their own hopes and desires onto it's symbolic of of kind of longing isn't it yeah green the colour of money of envy but the green light as we discover is kind of also Daisy Buchanan right and he's got this yeah he's got this kind of

yearning for Daisy Buchanan anyway they first meet in person Nick and Gats be at that party that's

the passage that I think we read or performed so magnificently at the beginning to be and he's never

he's a year or two over 30 he's elegant but he sort of feels in substantial and and actually weirdly

“when Nick talks to him Nick says often Gats be had nothing to say that he was nothing there”

he's like an outline of a man as he yeah and he he kind of tries to fill it in for other people rather than letting people make their own judgment of him and he tells all these wild fantastical stories so he says I'm the son of so he this is he's trying to tell Nick about himself he says I'm the son of some wealthy people in the middle west all dead now I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years after that I live like a

young raja in all the capitals of Europe Paris Venice Rome collecting jewels chiefly rubies hunting big game painting a little things for myself only and trying to forget something very sad that happened to me long ago that's the one honest thing that he said because that one tragic thing was his his love for Daisy yeah so the love for Daisy Nick's girlfriend Jordan Baker tells him that

or story doesn't she she basically says you know Gats be was an officer it's this is very

Fitzgerald and Zelda it's being was a young officer and Daisy was a kind of posh girl rich girl from Louisville Kentucky he fell in love with her he quartered her he was posted overseas but her family wouldn't let her go and see him off you know he was too poor but she pined she got over it she married this guy Tom Buchanan and said the question is what's Gats be been doing in the interim why is he taken the house across the bay what is his how has he got all his money yeah

and what is his plan what is this and what is this kind of yearning for this green light all about well the answers to these intriguing questions are coming for Nick and also for our listeners

in just a moment but first in true 1920 style we'll take a break to hear from Dr TJ Ajoberg

in some of our other beloved advertisers all right see how to the break welcome back Dominic you promised us answers to all these burning questions about Gats be his money and his plans and obviously people who've read the book will know what's coming they've ever announced in del just tell all Tom Buchanan at one point who's actually Gats be his love rival describe some as Mr nobody from nowhere and it's a phrase that says a lot about

Tom's snobbery and his arrogance but he's actually right Gats be his Mr nobody from nowhere he's originally James Gats from North Dakota we discovered this about two thirds the way through the book yeah and coming from North Dakota you could not find a place in the United States that's more provincial more far from the neutral place than the bright lights a more banal kind of background

“but also North Dakota interestingly it was a key kind of pipeline for elicit alcohol during prohibition”

from Canada so right away the fact that he comes from North Dakota is a little signifier that he's involved in bootlegging in smuggling just as actually Tom had predicted so yeah it's horrible and just a terrible person but he's also right about Gats be Gats be his parents we discover we're Lutheran farmers he went to college in Minnesota like you know F. Scott Fitzgerald of course this is an outsider but he dropped out and at one day he was walking along Lake Superior along

the sort of the the lake shore and he saw a yacht in trouble and this yacht belonged to a copper tycoon called Dan Cody now Dan Cody's name yeah Dan Cody's obviously an invented character but his name Cody and the fact that he has made his money on the frontier from copper in the west recalls buffalo bill because buffalo bills oh that's a good name was Cody so the very name of Dan Cody tells you that he's out there on the frontier on the west and he's made a bit

of Georgie yeah Cody adopts him because he saved the yacht almost as a pet and a protoshay

“sorry that all these kind of theories that they're sort of lovers or whatever but I think that's”

the internet matter projection yeah so Gats goes aboard and over time he renamed himself and more what seems like a more prestigious name Jay Gats be although that name too I think the name Jay to an American reader in the 1920s famous Jay in American history was a guy of Jay Gould who had been a corrupt railroad magnates and financier and robber barren in the 1870s and 1880s and he had become a byword Jay Gould for fast wealth concealing immense corruption and

crookedness so again the name Jay Gats be yeah kind of is a is a is a clue to American readers

in the 20s right yeah because also the thing is we never do find out exactly how he does make his

money and you know they're all sorts of he thinks he's going to be inheriting Cody's millions after he dies but the it all ends up going to his mistress Ella so instead Gats be the implication is

because they're all these kind of dark illusions throughout the book because he constantly has buttlers coming up to him saying oh Chicago's colon and he says no not now not now great American accent by the way that's very much yeah well I mean you had a a sample of it in the opening reading the interesting thing about him is not really that it's a crook though to me yeah he's not crooked at his soul and he's definitely not crooked to neck no no he's not I get although

although he does tonic some tall stories doesn't he? and he does try to recruit neck and test sort of funny dodgy schemes but the interesting thing about something that everyone takes away from the book is that Gats be is a dreamer who's committed to this project of reinvent of remaking himself yeah absolutely you know shedding his skin and taking on a new identity

“that becomes a very kind of familiar archetype in American fiction so I think for example”

the most one of the most famous ones is ripply in the talented mr ripply so many coes of a talented mr ripply completely yeah or as we'll come on to when we come to it in the late the late the episode the secret history done a tarts book these characters were playing it being something they're not it's a really really common theme in American and modern American writing I think and he has invented a character for himself crucially that he thinks will appeal to

daisy because just like fits Gerald himself with his first love Gats be has never ever recovered

from that initial disappointment with daisy and everything that he's doing is about turning himself into the kind of rich character that he thinks will win daisy's heart yeah so I mean he he gets the house that he gets because it's across the bay from daisy and it's revealed that he throws these massive parties in the hope that daisy will come to one of them one day

“fundamentally actually misunderstanding there the the cast in between old money and new money because”

his parties are very new money and when daisy finally does go to one she's slightly appalled bridal but so there's something very apparently romantic about that you know it's a kind of romantic idealism to it but the further we get into the book we kind of see that it's not very romantic at all because it's kind of more of an obsession his feelings for daisy are slightly you know unhealthy he's built a whole life around them and it's all about the pursuit of a group of a dream yeah rather than

about daisy herself right it's about the idealized vision of daisy it's a flawed ideal he doesn't actually see daisy for what she is she's just a symbol of like wealth sophistication stasis all the

things that he wanted as a child but it would always be in beyond his reach and in the realization

of that dream from the moment that they for first reunited and then as their kind of love affair unfolds you increase in you get the sense that it's you know all the glitters isn't gold it's not quite what he hoped it would be and he sort of trying to get round that and trying to make it this perfect ideal but it could only be from afar yeah in the living so this takes some of the question what the book actually and but in in capital letters means if anything right well these

the interesting thing because when it was first really a gaspy had this gaspy I mean the fact that I've caught him gas so it's really a slip yeah very for instance first Gerald thought that this book would absolutely make his name that this would be the kind of masterpiece and actually most early reviewers said it's not that great and actually they said it's very superficial the great critic and saturist hl manken famously said it's a glorified anecdote which I don't think anybody

would say now not sending not all these so hundreds of thousands of people studying it as teenagers in their English literature classes yeah it's one of the most written about study but I mean even

preparing for this episode I mean never-ending things about this book exactly and just to pick up

on a couple of things that really striking about it so first of all I think one most people take straight away is that it's actually just a brilliant brilliant window onto the the sense of modernity of the 1920s so the technology and the cars and all of that and I think you know what I read one reviewer from the time who said that it was a it described a world that most people couldn't relate to because this is actually a period of great poverty in America etc but from the safe

you know distance of today it doesn't matter to us that we can't understand it it's it's

“glorious looking into a world you know you have to time and as you say it is so modern you know”

it's very fashionable that all the clothes that all the characters wear but also you know it's electric lights it's got telephones Gatsby's got speed boats he's got a seaplane you know it's all about you know the movie massively plays into this fast cars gas stations commuter trains and Gatsby himself is a very very modern thicker you know he's a bootlegger a bond market speculator and it's also a book of the new mass media and consumerism newspapers magazines cars advertisements yeah all

of that so we mentioned before how how Fitzgerald love Joseph Conrad the other writer that sometimes Fitzgerald reminds me of a little bit because of the way he charts all the these very rich characters and their kind of love affairs is Henry James another great animator but if you read

and Fitzgerald on the other his his books seem to belong to it well they do belong to a different century even though the time pit laps is not that great it's it's as though time has really speed it up and suddenly we're in a world of telephones and you know cocktails and all of this kind

“of thing and yet at the same time I think one of the things that I find so interesting about it”

is it's a book about it's very present minded it's set in the twentys but all the characters are looking backwards the whole time I mean even somebody is unreflective as Tommy again we're

told right away that basically he's constantly dreaming of some irrecoverable football game

that he played at college totally but but also for characters like Tom and Daisy it's kind of like the last stand of that old world for people like them a world in which you have you know servants everywhere and people bring you cocktails of stuff so and he can feel Tom the sense of incursion the incursion of like new money and and modernity yeah for sure and I think one of the most iconic lines in the whole book is is when Nick says to Gatsby or you can't really live the past or

something like that and yes he says well of course you can old sport yeah yeah and he's and it's we also discover he's wrong and actually that so there's a bit when Gatsby first meet remeades Daisy

“when he meets Daisy again Nick has arranged a poem they meet at Nick's house I find that right”

man at the beginning of that meeting Gatsby knocks over almost knocks over a defunct mantle piece clock and that sort of sense of like time has stopped in the clock right but also something is broken you know there's there's a there's something flawed at the center of his vision this idea that you can turn back time and recover something that was lost because you can't yeah it's actually quite sort of tragic foreshadowing that moment and the idea of something being broken brings us to a part

of the book that always stuck in my mind I'm sure it sticks and lots of people's minds and this

is the valley of ashes and so obviously this is a book really preoccupied with class these are the working class people the people that people like Tom and Daisy kind of use and abuse and they're very firmly delineated the three classes you have like east egg west egg you money or money and then you have the value of ashes and that's like where the the sort of working man lives and it's inspired by the real life corona dumps which are huge mounds of ash and rubbish four miles long

and this is where we come back to the eyes that we talked about on the front cover because there's this massive advertising billboard above this huge grey desolate land you know and it's described as being worked by ash grey men with lead and spades and on this billboard are the gigantic eyes of Dr. T. J. Eccleberg no face just is terrifying enormous yellow glasses and it's not entirely clear what it means I mean I could be like god watching over all the sin unfolding before his eyes

or or is it maybe the false god of consumerism and an advertising there's one point where George Wilson who is the husband of Tom Buchanan's mistress murder he pulls it over to the window and he gets her you know and he says to god is god is sees everything and they're directly in front of Dr. Eccleberg's eyes. I found that thing when I first read it the idea of these two weird eyes overlooking the whole scene over this value of ashes really really I mean that to me was the image

“that I remembered most from the book I think a lot of people yes it's so strange rightly so weird”

and actually this is so interesting because this actually reflects not just the cover but also one of the other big inspirations for Fitzgerald which is the poem The Wasteland by T. J. Eccleberg I know you're a massive fan of the wasteland. I'm a huge fan of the wasteland that's my favorite poem. Well well so Fitzgerald like you was a huge fan of it and he sent a copy of the great Gaspit T. J. Eccleberg and he dedicated it to and I quote the greatest of living poets from his

enthusiastic worshiper. No way! And in the Wasteland as you remember there's a character T. Eccle yes this kind of blind sea of the sea of the future and T. J. Eccleberg T. S. Eliot they're not so different and at one point Nick wanders if Eccleberg and I quote sank down into eternal blindness like T. Eccle. So this clearly you know this I mean this is the value of ashes is the Wasteland from T. S. Eliot's great modernist poem which is basically for people who don't know

it's a poem written in the Elements in Twentons that's trying to capture the experience of Western civilization after the First World War kind of broken into fragments and whatnot and is haunted by death and despair and all of this kind of stuff. Yeah definitely but I mean you made a very impressive observation didn't you? Oh thank you. Yeah fabulous piece of

this. Well that was really amazing. I had to remind you. I was so proud of myself. Yeah so there's

a bit in the book when Nick's talking about Gatsby's parties and he says in the blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperers and the champagne and the stars and

where he says in the what's it in the something the women come and go talking of Michelangelo

right and and in proofrock that Eliot poem he's basically Eliot is saying all those

parties very insubstantial and everybody's actually alienated and their book and chitchat but

“actually their lives are empty and hollow you know and that's a good time but that's what the”

that's true of Gatsby's parties as well right and I love the way that Fitzgerald writes the party scenes and the great Gatsby because I think I remember reading when I reread in this time I thought that is like what parties are like their succession or I've slightly disconnected images the more you drink you can't remember now where you're talking to this person and suddenly you're in a different place entirely and you don't know how you got there

and all of this I think this is your unique experience the parties to be happy I just have I just have really fun parties yeah really really fun calls to mind some of your journeys back to Chipping Norton from our team get together but you know sitting on a 4 AM train wondering how you got there but you are actually right there's such a hollowness at the center of of these parties and even Gatsby's massive ones and there's this enormous sense of excitement

“and everything's so beautiful and it's colours and there's vast trays of peeled or like oranges”

coming and going but there's a creeping sense that either this kind of joyous balloon is

going to just deflate and you're going to feel every second of it and feel utterly hollowed

out as a result or it's going to burst and then again everything's destroyed there's nothing at the center and people come for the wrong reasons people don't really know each other. People who are there are painted in the most kind of scathing possible terms on these so they all have the most ludicrous names there's a great passage the Chester Becker's and the leeches and a man called Bunsen who am a new Yale and Dr. Webster Civit who was drowned last summer

up in Maine and the hornbeams and the wheelie of Altair's the cat lips and the benburgs and G. Earl Muldoon brother to that Muldoon who afterwards strangled his wife and they've got ridiculous American names I mean obviously but also their lives are absurd and dark and violent and yeah and I guess you could say in this passage you know so much of the book is very sensitive and nuanced but there are moments where fits Gerald kind of tips into caricature so not just with the

parties but also you know you mentioned the mob and all of it so there's a character to come Maya Walsheim and he really is a very unappealing caricature of a corrupt Jewish gambler.

“Yeah I think this Gerald lets himself down there and he does his cufflinks a human teeth.”

Yeah he fixed the world series in 1919 he's obviously based on the character you've already mentioned on a Rothstein who was the head of the Jewish mob in New York City but the portrait of him is frankly anti-Semitic I would say. Yeah I would I would definitely agree with that but the interesting thing is well about the parties is they are actually you know we we described how there's nothing really at the centre of the mess sort of fake and there's a confusion to them

it's actually during the course of these parties that we get the first hints that Gatsby's life

is false and and that he's afrored and you know if if Fscot that's Gerald strays into caricature from time to time this is done with a men's skill and subtlety so for instance we start like his house it's sort of it's described as an imitation of some hotel deville in Normandy with a tower on one side that was at most excellent French accent but thank you so much yeah actually I make a point of really exacerbating my Englishness when I speak French. Ade de Vil in Normandy

continue with a tower on one spanking knee under a thin beard of raw ivy and a marble swimming pool and so this may have been modelled on fallays who was Harry that's Harry Guggenheim's mansion across the bay it sounds point and it's kind of a mock gothic castle but the thing about Gatsby's house is it's it's trying to be what the Buchanan's house is and like for instance it's covered in ivy to try and make it look old but the ivy is brand new and bright green he doesn't understand

that you can't be in that world unless you're born into that world. Yeah yeah yeah yeah you can't it's like people used to say of the Tory politician Michael hesitate. Oh that was a bridge out of the sea coin. He's an unexpected link he's the kind of man who buys his own furniture. No the words yeah other tourists would say this off him right so and actually there's a wonderful scene in the library. I love this. So with a man with massive owl-eyed spectacles say he's

liked Dr. Ekelberg or he's like god or whatever he's a man who's conceitings and he's looking at Gatsby's books and he's amazed at their real he says I thought they'd be cardboard. He says of Gatsby's library it's a triumph what thoroughness what realism he knew went to stop to he didn't cut the pages in other words he hasn't actually read the books. Yeah and there's a sort of you know it's fake it's a set. Holly it's a Hollywood backdrop and the whole thing is designed

to do the line to be an Oxford man like hellie is he wears a pink suit and he fairness I mean he wears a pink suit and I'm an Oxford man so you know yeah yeah I'm canny and you have dodgy dealings with the mafia so it all fits together Tom's very snobbish comment there it brings us back to the class thing which is just through it is everywhere in this book and it's the sense

that Gatsby can just never transcend this outside of status you know he'll never fit in he'll

“never make it and I think that deep down that's kind of what Daisy is for him it's not that he”

loves this woman necessarily you know the nuances of her personality it's what she represents she and I actually think maybe Escot Fitzgerald had that little bit with Geneva King you know it's a ticket until a gilded world that has always had reach. That fit that's feeling that is so well I'd be so commented lots of listeners so come into all of us yeah you know there are so many scene moments in the book where there's a nick thinks of somebody outside the party looking

in through the window yeah and that feeling that we all have sometimes that there's a there's an exclusive party going on we're not invited we'll never get in we'll never be accepted because

even if we're not wearing a pink suit even if we're not wearing a pink suit our essential pink

suitedness will will identify us as an outsider it's writ large all over our faces oh yeah exactly and there's a very sort of almost a poignant moment at the end when oh yeah big spoiler Gatsby's father turns up and he shows Nick this book that his son had when he was a boy with a kind of timetable in which he said you know practice elicution poised and how to attain it read and improving book or magazine once a week they're very touching that yeah Gatsby had this sort of

to do list to try and improve himself and what that's doing of course is it's mocking all these characters in kind of late 19th century early 20th century books was a character that's kind of the writer called Horatio Alger who's specialized in this characters who improve themselves and rose up and climb the ladder the american dream they made something of themselves and actually one of the lessons of the great Gatsby's you can't try to do it but you'll be dragged back you'll

be found out and it will end horribly yeah definitely brings us to the end of the book tell me

“yeah and I love I think this is just such a brilliant written scene because it's it's a boiling hot”

day so quite like the go between so there's this there's this relentless beating heat and it reflects the emotional temperature you know all the characters it's basically a moment of real revelation for everybody and it's building to this massive crescendo but ironically what triggers this massive denumer is that it's a it's a lunch at the Buchanan's house that Gatsby is attending and Daisy says to him oh you're so cool you always look so cool which shows that she actually does

know him and I actually think you know did all slightly love him the way that she and Gatsby are looking at each other is Tom Buchanan finally realises that there is something going on between them and he's absolutely appalled by this he's very shaken by it even though he's always had affairs he possesses Daisy yeah he realises that they have a connection doesn't he exactly exactly past exactly and then they all go bizarrely I mean slightly perhaps slightly implores the

big given what's just happened they also well we're going on this massive drive across the Valley of Ashes into New York City they get to New York City and then they all meet up in New York City and they have a big showdown don't they Tom has this rant about Mr Nobody from nowhere and says you know as this the fashionable thing now you know people can sleep with your wife and then he really lets him to melt down he says the next thing you know people will be throwing

everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white so there's the ugliness at point coming back out but Gatsby still is there's still something contrived about him because I was thinking at this point he sounds like someone from a soap opera or from a sentimental melodrama she never loved you she only married you because I was poor she was tired of waiting for me it was a terrible mistake in her heart she never loved anybody but me and it all with it almost

feels a bit trite I think about it but follow what you're saying Nick says at one point during this confrontation that he can see that Gatsby knows it's all unraveling you know he knows it's gone he knows it's too late so once again there's this massive clash between the sentimental ideals and the reality because you know Daisy admits at one point she did love Tom and that actually she loves them both and well this is enough for Tom because he's from this old money world

where basically people hurt each other they throw themselves up against the rocks but they never

ever break up because tradition demands that you stick together but for Gatsby it's not enough

“Gatsby wants sort of owned Daisy entirely because that's the only way that his dream can kind of”

reach fruition Tom says about he and Daisy there are things between us that you'll never know that's these words seem to bite physically at Gatsby and I always wondered that thing there things between us you'll never know if that was kind of a callback to F Scott Fitzgerald's relationship was Zelda you know they'd hurt each other so many times they'd had abortions miscarriages

terrible things they're both witnessed and seen by their suffering yeah by their kind of mutual suffering yeah and their kind of brutality with each other yeah you know completely so we're probably running out of time so we can't really get into the absolute ending I mean there's an amazing

I probably one of the lines of the book that always sticks in my head we drove on towards death

through the cooling twilight because they then drive back to Lai Lens and that's just when the great tragedy happens which if you've read the book if you listen to the audiobook you will know maybe we shouldn't spoil the story for those of you who haven't there is this incredible moment

“at the event I think it's a brilliant piece of writing one of the great pieces of writing the 20th”

century when Nick and her later sort of widens of the focus out and he turns the whole thing into a metaphor for the American dream and for the story director more broadly doesn't it because he thinks about Long Island oh it's beautiful writing this and he says the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors eyes a fresh green breast of the new world it's vanished trees the trees that are made way for Gatsby's house had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all

human dreams and that dream the dream is not just the dream of Daisy or the green light it's the dream of becoming new of starting again of reinventing yourself and the world and that's Gatsby's dream throughout hasn't it but it's turned out disastrously as we'll discover at this point in the book because it's a dream that kills people yeah it destroys people's lives and Gatsby pays a very very high price for building his whole life around a single hope a

single desire a single dream you know it's this theme again that runs throughout the book that you can't turn back the clock even with the kind of force of will that Gatsby has at his disposal the determination that he has from being a young boy you just can't do that you can't undo the past yeah so it's very melancholy I mean actually there's the one thing I really took from it's a really really melancholy book and actually the last lines the most melancholy of all

“one of the most brilliant passages I think in all that I could not agree more yeah I totally agree”

do you want to give us a first happy car of course you do but don't do it but don't do it in your america now I won't I don't I'm worried as far too poignant I don't want to I don't want to make people sob and as I sat there brooding on the old unknown world I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green night at the end of Daisy's doc he'd come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it

he did not know that it was already behind him somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city where the dark feels the republic rolled on under the night Gatsby believed in the green light the all-gastic future that year by year recedes before us it eludes us then but that's no matter tomorrow we will run faster stretch our arms out further and one fine morning so we beat on boats against the current born back ceaselessly into the past and that final line the boats

against the current is what was written on F Scott Fitzgerald's headstone oh wow that's a good detail let's know that wow it's very yeah at the fair point in detail yeah all right so we have to

always give these things marks out of ten don't we and how what we're marking in this week I thought

initially that we should do it in green lights but actually given that this episode has been really about you maybe we should do it in pink suits wow I didn't see that coming but yeah I agree

“pink suits is the best thing so who's going to go first like I first you go first yeah I'm actually”

going to give it you know what I've actually this is a mad thing but during the recording I've actually increased my mark so I've increased it from I've been so persuaded by the pair of your analysis thank you so many pretty strict from eight to nine oh well I'm going to nine because I think I'm I'm docking a mark only because I don't really care about the characters particularly all right so enough I don't find it has an massive emotional heft with me but I think in terms

of pure writing line by line writing it's as good a book as was written in the 20th century as good a book as you'll ever read and I yeah I think the the layers of nuance are tremendous so yeah nine out of ten yeah I I hate to admit by totally agree I I think this is one of the great books just definitely one of the greatest books that's come out of America if not the greatest so I'm going to give it nine out of ten I just couldn't believe this part as well yeah but it's the

power of the writing and the nuance and the subtlety I'm going to dock a mark though because he does flirt with characters okay so we're not we're not doing what we should be doing which is disagreeing

agreeably no there's never the tagline we're agreeing disagreeably exactly we're reluctant me agreeing

the movie that's just come out yeah Matthew very intriguing yeah I can't wait to actually it's one of

“my favorite books so lots to come right lots to come thank you so much tabby everybody enjoy your”

cocktails and your pink suits thank you very much that was really good fun bye bye

team 9 8 I'm a book what is loose have Nutella vergessen me it's my turn now smectes

on himless before we're on the moon one no Nutella is Nutella