Me on Brightcove

My recent interview with Nina Sebastiane is now available online, so I thought I would try and post it here. I do hope it is of interest!

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[quercusbooks]

Lost comes at the end of a long line of stories about remote islands, told to teach the secret philosophy - from Gulliver's Travels to Lord of the Flies. Though he didn't like to draw attention to it in later years, William Golding lived in an esoteric community for a while.

Superficially all these stories are about how exotic, how different life on the island is, but really the aim is always to highlight the ways in which our own everyday lives are exactly like the strange life on the island.

In Lost the central conflict, set up from the beginning, is between Jack - the man of science - and Locke, who calls himself a 'man of faith'.

But this is not faith as your local vicar would frame it. Locke is learning about the Deeper Laws of esoteric philosophy, laws we all experience, even though they could not possibly be happening if science acoounted for everything there is. In my book I list these laws and try to show how they shape history as well as our own individual narratives.