Whitcoulls Recommends: Air and John and Paul

Air by John Boyne. This is the fourth book in a series about the four elements of matter (the preceding titles are Water Earth and Fire), where he takes each element and writes a story around it. This time the novel is set while the protagonists are on a flight, 30,000 feet up in the air, on a trip towards a woman who isn’t expecting them. It’s story of a father and a son on a moving journey to mend their troubled lives. I love John Boyne and read everything he writes. 

John and Paul by Ian Leslie. You think you’ve heard it all before about Paul and John – but this new biography is amazing. It has the music at its heart – the story of two lonely kids both of whom had suffered great grief in their early lives and who formed a really strong bond – and as the author says, when they couldn’t talk about a thing they sang it and even after breaking up maintained a musical dialogue at a distance, in songs full of recrimination, regret, and affection. It’s full of remarkable insight. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News talks'b.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Joey Mackenzie is with me. Now, good morning, Good morning.
What have you got for us?

Speaker 3 (00:17):
I've got John Boyn, who's one of my favorite favorite authors.
He's an Irish writer. I've loved his books for years,
and the one that I'm talking about today is called
Air Air, which is the fourth in a series of
novels based on the four elements he did Water, Earth, Fire,
and now Air. And they're not long books, they're around
one hundred and sixty hundred and seventy pages, but they're

(00:39):
really great character portraits of people who are all damaged
individuals and difficult circumstances and whose lives haven't gone in
the way that they expected. My favorite book of his, actually,
I'll just have a shout out for it is The
Hearts and Visible Furies, which I absolutely loved, which is
about six seven hundred pages long and really tells the

(01:00):
arc of a person's life. But in these shorter books
he shows that he can do it in a much
briefer version as well.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Sorry, the character is the same throughout. This series is
just literally a series of Name.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
It's a series of name based on the as I said,
four elements. Okay, so the first one was Water, which
was set on an island, water all around, where a
woman goes to hide away after her husband's very publicly disgraced.
The second one was Earth, which is all about themes
of guilt and being responsible for when things go wrong.
Fire was about the central character was a surgeon who

(01:34):
specializes in skin grafts. And now in this latest one,
it's fittingly set on an aeroplane at thirty thousand feet
up in the air, and you've got an adolescent boy
who's very embarrassed by his father and very awkward, and
they're traveling together. He felt abandoned by his mother, and
his father's had a lot going on in his life
that this kid knows nothing about. And on this journey

(01:56):
where they're heading from Sydney where they live, to Ireland
to a woman who doesn't know that they're on their
way to see her, the story of his father's life
is revealed to the child and by the time they
get there, they've got quite a lot going on. It's
beautifully done, wonderful. Now tell me about John and Paul
by n Leslie. Well, it's a bit of a thematic

(02:19):
link today actually because I talked about the characters being
damaged individuals in John Boyne's books, and part of the
premise of this book about obviously John Lennon and Paul McCartney,
is that when they met, they were two young, damaged
kids because Paul's mother had recently died and John felt
very abandoned by his mother, Julia, and they got together.

(02:40):
And the essence of this book is that male friendships
take many forms. And whilst we all revere their songwriting partnership,
actually what they did was use their lyrics and their
music to communicate with each other, and they had a
very deep emotional bond that when words couldn't, you know,
conversations couldn't help them get through in the way that

(03:00):
many men particularly can find difficult to have these deep conversations,
they could do it with each other through their music.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
Oh, it is a biography, but just with a different
from a different kind of angle.

Speaker 3 (03:10):
Yeah, And it's a great angle because every chapter is
the title of one of their songs. So you go
from in the beginning, there's a song called I Lost
My Little Girl, which I think I'm very pleased. I
can't remember. But then it goes through things like Yesterday
and Alan or Rigby and Strawberry Fields Forever and I
Am the War Rush. So lots and lots and lots
of chapters based around the songs, what was happening at

(03:33):
the time that they were written, the relationship between them,
and the fact that they've managed to use their music
to really speak not only to the world but quite
intimately to each other.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
So if you think that you know pretty much all
there is to know about John and Paul's, actually there's
something new in that.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
I haven't read everything that's ever been written on the Beatles,
but this seems to me to be a really clever
way of telling that story. And there's so many insights
in here that I had never seen anywhere else. Oh lovely, Yeah,
it's really good.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
Do you need to love the Beatles or is it
just still a really interesting story about two people and
a relationship. I think it is.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
It helps if you love the Beatles. But the other
thing is, as you're reading through these chapters, you know,
you get to she Loves You. You can then play
the song and you can listen to the lyrics and
then reference it back to these chapters that you're reading
that tell you about what was going on at the
time they wrote.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
It's really good now, that is very cool. Thank you
so much, Joan. So that last book is John and
Paul by En Leslie and Air by John Boyne, which
took next week.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
See you then.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks it'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.