Tim Lott's Reading List

"East of Eden is set in Salinas, California – like so much of Steinbeck’s fiction – at the start of the 20th century. It’s a book with a number of narratives in it, starting off with Samuel Hamilton and his wife Lisa, who raise nine children on a piece of very unprepossessing land in Salinas. Then Adam Trask, a wealthy stranger, purchases a nearby ranch. The main brother narrative within the story is that of Adam and Charles Trask. It’s not only about them, there are other families in the narrative as well, notably the Hamilton family, but I want to concentrate on the Trasks. It’s constantly referring back to the Cain and Abel story. The relationship between Charles and Adam Trask is very murderous. Interestingly, and I don’t quite understand why Steinbeck did it this way, Charles and Adam are not really true brothers. Adam is the older step brother, and Charles is the murderous younger one who wants to destroy him. I don’t know why Steinbeck made Charles the younger brother rather than the older one. The murderous impulse normally comes from the older brother – in classical psychology you are dethroned as an older brother when a younger one comes along. Charles Trask is infuriated that his father didn’t want a pen knife that Charles saved up for ages to give him, while Adam gave his father a mongrel puppy that he didn’t even pay for and his father showered him with kisses and affection. Shortly after that, Charles picks up an axe and goes after Adam to kill him. He’s so furious that he was passed over by his father, rather in the way that Cain was passed over by God, that he plans to kill Adam – but Adam hides until he’s gone. Eventually Adam falls in love with Cathy Ames, who is probably one of the most evil characters in literature, and they have twin boys, Caleb and Aron. Interestingly, both Adam and Cathy carry a mark on their foreheads, like the mark of Cain. Let me read you some quotes that I pulled out of the book, which I think are very important and go right to the heart of East of Eden . They are certainly very germane to my book, and inspired me as I was writing. First is the reflection by the character Samuel Hamilton when he’s talking to Lee, a wise Chinese servant of his, about the Trasks: “Two stories that haunt us and follow us from our beginning,” says Samuel. “We carry them along with us like invisible tales. This story of original sin and the story of Cain and Abel. I don’t understand them at all, but I feel them. Here we are, this oldest story. If it troubles us, it must be that we find the trouble in ourselves. Such a little story, to make so deep a wound.” The Chinese character Lee then goes right to the heart of it: “It is the single story of the human soul. It is everybody’s story. The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection, and with rejection comes anger and with the anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt and there is the story of mankind. If rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. One child refused love kicks the cat and hides the secret guilt. Another steals, so that money will make him love. A third conquers the world and always the guilt and the revenge and the more guilt. Therefore this old and terrible story is important because it is a chart of the soul. A secret, rejected, guilty soul.” There is such a deep truth in that. I think a huge number of people in this world – and I would not exclude myself – are driven by a sense of rejection. That rejection, for a lot of men, comes in the shape of their brothers. That’s why the Cain and Abel story is so very powerful. I can remember so desperately wanting the love of my brother, but he wanted nothing to do with me whatsoever. That continues to scar me today, to some extent. What interests me in East of Eden above all is the reference to Cain and Abel. That story is absolutely key to the relationship between Adam and Charles."

"This book is ostensibly about fly fishing, and the author’s relationship with his brother Paul. The story is about an older brother, who is never named, who talks about his brother, also called Paul – a genius fisherman who is very troubled. Paul gets arrested, gets drunk, goes with whores and ends up being murdered. The whole book is a tribute to his troubled younger brother whom he couldn’t help but felt immensely close to. He just adored his younger brother and wanted to protect him. What really struck me about this book was the love between these two brothers. That is what I felt a relationship between brothers should and could be – that some people actually have, and which I missed out on. Of course, there has to be some rough and tumble. It’s quite interesting that when I was growing up, the idea of fighting with your brother was considered something that would knock the edges off, that was normal and healthy in a sense. I remember punching my brother in the face when I was 14, the first time in my life when I was big and strong enough to do it, and it felt great. Then I felt this terrible guilt. He couldn’t save him because he didn’t and couldn’t know him. The unknowability of people runs right through this story. It’s the people we live with, love and should know who in the end elude us, says the narrator. I think that is very true – how elusive the people closest to us are. On the one hand these brothers love each other very deeply, and on the other they don’t know each other. “It’s the people we live with, love, and should know, who in the end elude us, says the narrator.” But what shocked me was the love between them – the open and adoring love of the older brother who wants to protect his younger brother from his flaws and damage. That’s the way I see it between me and my brother. I’m quite flawed and damaged. I was the bad guy, the one getting into trouble. He was mature and sensible, while I was the one who took drugs and misbehaved. He always really enjoyed me getting into trouble. Nothing made him happier than to see me fuck up. So what appealed to me about this book was the older brother wanting to protect his younger sibling. Exactly right. The quote from Cain is: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”. And the answer was: No, I don’t give a fuck about my brother. I hate my fucking brother. That’s the other truth told to us in the Bible. But this is a book about someone who really is his brother’s keeper, and takes that role very seriously. That is why the book speaks to me so much. I’m a fairly useless, troubled person, or I certainly was as a teenager. But I could do one thing, and that was write. And Paul could do one thing, and that was fish. This is a fantasy book for me and for all tortured souls – I was one, but I’m not anymore – who imagine an early, tragic death when everyone is sorry for what they did, all the love finally goes in your direction and everyone agrees what a great and beautiful person you were."

"Shakespeare was really good at brother rivalry. Apart from Hamlet you can also see it in Twelfth Night and King Lear . A constant theme of Shakespeare’s plays is the falling out and coming together of brothers. Clearly, it was a relationship he understood and mistrusted in many ways. He certainly recognised the deep divisions and rivalries between brothers, and Hamlet is a marvellous example of the murderous impulse that can exist between brothers. I love the speech when Hamlet’s uncle Claudius admits to being inflicted with “the primal eldest curse” for killing his brother, and begs on his knees for forgiveness for this ultimate violation of the law of nature. “ Hamlet is a marvellous example of the murderous impulse that can exist between brothers.” The play also recognises jealousy, and what is a brother relationship without jealousy? You can’t get away from jealousy and rivalry when you’re brothers and that, taken to the extreme, is what happens in Hamlet . It’s about how brothers sometimes really fucking hate each other. I know there are times in my childhood when if I’d had a gun in my hand, I would have shot my brother dead. That dark impulse, although suppressed and effaced by what we want to believe about ourselves, is very deep and dark. That’s why I have included East of Eden and Hamlet – to acknowledge something that is not comfortable for us. Absolutely. In Hamlet it happens again in the death of Gonzago in the play-within-a-play. One reading of Hamlet is that the murder by Claudius of his brother is about ambition, about wanting to be king and his brother’s wife. But it may also be simple jealousy and hatred. In some ways that is the purest of emotions, and what brothers are reduced to when things go wrong. Shakespeare is not scared to look at these dark impulses. The idea that you could do something so cold blooded, not even in rage, as poison your brother, says something about the coldness and hatred that can exist between brothers. So I don’t think Hamlet is purely about ambition and power, I think it’s about the hatred of a brother for a brother. The phrases that we use about brothers – “brotherly love”, “brotherhood of man” – and the idea that it’s a very close and tender bond are also shot through, I think, with veins of real hatred. And that’s something Shakespeare is very clear-eyed about."

"The book tells the story of two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno. They both had appalling childhoods and are abandoned by their hippy mother, who spends her life in communes pursuing shallow, hedonistic relationships. The premise of the book, as the title suggests, is about the disconnection between people in the technological, scientific, post-modern world, where all relationships are mangled, damaged parodies. Michel is a scientist who believes that love and family is essentially redundant given the advances of modern genetics, and that men in particular are redundant. Aldous Huxley’s nightmarish book Brave New World is the template he looks towards with actual anticipation. Michel is an ascetic who finds women repulsive on some level – he is afraid and confused by them. Bruno, on the other hand, is a sexually obsessed masturbator incapable of, or unwilling to, hold down a relationship with a woman. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . At one point, Michel writes the words “blood is thicker than water” on a piece of paper. That’s perhaps the only recognition that his relationship with his half-brother, feeble and unsatisfying as it is, is superior to any artificial bond with a woman. Certainly, the brother relationship seems to be the only one in the book that involves any form of true communication, even if it is highly intellectual and unemotional. Michel and Bruno keep in touch, and reach out to each other in some tortured way. These brothers are Houellebecq’s mouthpieces for his very French philosophising. There may be love here, but it is suppressed to look more like desperation or habit. Atomised is an important book, if only for its determination to break taboos – the hatred of women of both Bruno and Michel is apparent – but it is not important for its portrayal of brotherhood. There, perhaps, it is typical. The brother relationship, as is so often the case in literature, is seen as relatively trivial if by necessity long-lived. Absolutely. The book was apparently semi-autobiographical. There’s a great press quote from Houellebecq’s mother Lucie Ceccaldi, who wrote an autobiography in rebuttal called The Innocent One , saying of her son: “If he has the misfortune of sticking my name on anything again, he will get my walking stick in his face and I’ll knock his teeth out.”"

"Two pairs of brothers feature in Death of a Salesman . There’s the main protagonist, Willy Loman, and his dead brother Ben who went into the African jungle at the age of 17 and came out at the age of 21 very rich. Then there are Biff and Happy, Willy’s two sons. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This is a story, on the one hand, of distorted idealism. Willy idealises his brother Ben, who represents everything he might have been, and everything his two sons – whom he considers losers – might have been. His obsession with his lost opportunity to go into business with his successful brother torments him, as does the fate of his two sons, who both appear to be in a state of arrested development. Even though they are in their thirties, Biff and Happy still try and get girls together, and talk of going into business together – but at first, at least, they are just as much fantasists as their father. They have failed to mature and in a sense held one another back, just as Ben, in a different way, holds Willy back. Brothers are an appealing fantasy, but in the real world and in the long run they need to be transcended. Willy, Biff and Happy have failed on this front. Death of a Salesman is more about the relationship between fathers and sons than brothers, but the motif of maimed brother relationships runs in all directions. Just as Willy idealised Ben, Happy clearly thinks more of Biff than he ought to. We are taken into a world where brothers project their fantasies onto one another – a course that can only end badly."