We're shining light into hidden recesses, delving into the darkest corners in today's podcast, with the practising psychoanalyst and professor of modern literary theory Josh Cohen and the novelist Nick Harkaway.
Harkaway arrives at the Edinburgh festival with his third novel, Tigerman, which sets a story of fatherhood and secrets on the imagined island of Mancreu.
He tells us how the island's shadowy status was born from a collision of ideas and fuelled by anger at a political class which conducts the dirty business of realpolitik behind a smiling face. He confesses that his most personal book to date was also an attempt to write an anticapitalist, climate-change novel with mass-market appeal and argues that literary culture is too afraid of the surprising, too wrapped up in sadness to measure up to the defiant burlesque of contemporary reality.
According to Cohen, the inner life which gives us the capacity to engage creatively with the world around us is increasingly under threat. He describes how celebrity culture and social media are draining the richness from our internal lives and explores how a similar process of exteriorisation reduces the body politic to a superficial sham – a pantomime which hides the unacknowledged business taking place off stage.
Reading list:
Tigerman by Nick Harkaway (William Heinemann)
The Private Life by Josh Cohen (Granta)
