‘I don’t understand him and never will,’ says Pearl, the pivotal character in Anne Tyler’s 1982 novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. She’s talking about her husband, but could be saying something much bigger, larger, more meaningful. That’s the charm (and effortless skill) of Tyler’s writing. She appears to be drawing very mundane portraits of family life — angry wives, feckless husbands and troublesome teenagers. The kind of lives lived behind respectable but not very interesting front doors. What can such ordinary-seeming people possibly tell us about deeper truths? Yet Tyler convinces us it’s in those unachieved and often rather dull characters that real life resides. This is so reassuring.
Radio 4’s new dramatisation of Tyler’s book by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (and directed by David Hunter) draws us in straightway. We know from the start that Pearl’s marriage to Beck, a travelling salesman, is doomed, not from anything overtly stated but by the things left out. Nothing romantic is ever said between them, no real communication takes place, and very soon we discover that for Pearl, ‘Pregnancy took on the lustre that marriage once had.’ Pearl has three children, Beck abandons them all, the children grow up, troubled and homesick for something they know they have missed out on but can’t put into words.
Each 15-minute episode of the serial, which is playing daily in the Woman’s Hour slot this week and next, takes us through such a lot of confusing emotions (who’s to blame here?), but without spelling it out and without a lot of screeching and door-banging (the scriptwriting team of The Archers could take note). ‘At least I can have more closet space,’ says Pearl when she realises that Beck is never coming back. She visits her elder son Cody and his wife and feels ‘the thin, tight atmosphere of an unhappy marriage’. But this being Tyler we discover it’s ‘Not a really terrible marriage. No sign of hatred, spitefulness, violence. Just a sense of something missing.’
This dramatisation works so well because the experience of listening to it is almost like reading; those moments of sudden connection as the words leap out at you and you think, ‘Why, that’s just how I feel’ (or what I think). We know exactly who is who all the time and Barbara Barnes as Pearl heads a stellar cast (including Fenella Woolgar as Pearl’s daughter Jenny) who somehow succeed in getting across to us Tyler’s seemingly simple insights, not rushing, not overemphasising, just making plain.
Alan Dein spends his working life talking with people to find out and record their stories in the belief that anyone and everyone has something worth telling. It turns out he has a knack for finding the extraordinary in these random encounters, perhaps because he is always genuinely interested, encouraging those he meets to unburden, reveal, disclose. In his latest series, Don’t Log Off (now in its third run and produced by Laurence Grissell), he locks himself away overnight to chat to people around the world by plugging into internet chatrooms and seeing who will talk to him. Last week we heard from a lawyer who had landed a dream job in Antigua but soon found himself mixed up in a murderous attack on a restaurant. He tells us without bravado how he tackled the men with guns only to get beaten round the head with a machete. He sounds OK now, if a little laboured in his speech. But we discover in the course of the conversation that the injuries to his head were so bad he had to relearn how to speak. He talks slowly now because every word means so much more.
This week on Wednesday Alan cheated a bit when he met Jennie, a 60-year-old widow living in the depths of the Australian bush. It’s so remote her internet connection doesn’t work very well, and Alan had to improvise, sending over a digital recorder so that Jennie could become her own broadcaster (this was not so much Alan asking Jennie not to log off as she promising not to turn off, a subtle distinction). We heard not just from Jennie but also from the sounds of the Australian bush, especially at sunrise. The acoustic was so vivid you could almost smell the dew as dawn broke and the heat of the day began to build.
What’s intriguing is how frank Alan’s conversational partners are prepared to be, disclosing the most intimate and sometimes shocking details of their lives, without being solipsistic, just in the pleasure of sharing, laying open. Jennie fearlessly admits to falling in love at first sight, ‘It was like a fairy tale.’ She opens up about the loss of her daughter. ‘She was only 20,’ she says, wistfully. And she proudly reveals she was instrumental in ensuring rights for the aboriginal people who were dislocated by the Darwin cyclone in 1974, when the city was virtually flattened. Now she lives very simply in a one-roomed shed built by her husband and lined with books. ‘I have everything I need,’ she declares. ‘I want for nothing.’
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