The Knives: a Prospect podcast with Sameer Rahim

Follow this link for the audio of a 20-minute conversation I had last week at the London offices of Prospect magazine with their Arts & Books editor Sameer Rahim. For me it was very engrossing. 

Sameer's Twitter avatar is a picture of Joseph Conrad, which would be a fine thing to do at any time; but if you should cross his path at any point then the tale of why he chose Conrad at this particular moment is well worth the telling.

This is the billing on the Prospect site:

In Prospect’s latest podcast, the novelist Richard T. Kelly discusses a Conservative Home Secretary struggling to cope with a multitude of problems: terrorism, civil liberties, immigration and human rights. But Kelly isn’t talking about the former Home Secretary Theresa May; he’s talking about David Blaylock, the protagonist of his new political thriller The Knives. Through Blaylock, Kelly explores the difficulties of being a politician in the 21^st century: the knives are out for you, always.

The elusive essence of 'Conradian'

Over there on Faber Finds I've written a post on Joseph Conrad, whose marvellous A Personal Record (1912) Finds has made available between covers. I didn't mention Conrad's political disposition, which I usually never fail to point out in a writer, whether or not I care. (But Conrad was, of course, a pillar of reaction, with a bleak view of general humanity. Still, to his great credit he didn't - much - let that get in the way of his stories or deface his characters.)
I do say that there aren't any good film versions of his novels, and I daresay that remains the case: I never saw Mark Peploe's Victory despite wishing to, but then the whole venture was widely reckoned to be waterlogged from an early stage. Anyway, it's better, I think, that great novelists be undefiled by hopeless films; and Conrad's artful, atmospheric prose has often left admirers with cameras quite at sea over how to replicate that quality in images. Even one so gifted as Christopher Hampton, who has spent a fair bit of time engaged with this very difficulty, hasn't been able to crack it, as you may surmise from the trailer for his version of The Secret Agent (below).