Thursday 1 July 2010

Suspicion, disbelief, trust: Knight Crew

Let’s go back a few steps.

Tonight on BBC2 is the final programme in the Gareth Malone series about the making of the opera Knight Crew at Glyndebourne (and you know, you just know, it will have a triumphal ending: that’s the genre). Before the TV series was the opera, before the opera was the book, and before the book became a book there was a writer who went into a prison.

The piece by Nicky Singer that I’m linking to here isn’t really about writing at all, and though it says a lot about prisons it’s not really about them either; it’s more about the things that writing can and sometimes should be about. Don’t go there unless you’ve got 20 minutes to spare. (Which really isn’t long, compared to a prison sentence of five and a half years.) But if you do have the time, go.

(And then you might care to buy the book. ‘Out of stock’ at Amazon, as usual, but over the next two weeks I’ll match their price if you buy it from the CBe website.)

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