PREPARATION NOTES FOR THE BIG BOOK SHOW

THE WORKSHOP
The workshop is a variety of interactive drama-based exercises designed to:
 encourage pupils to read books by giving them some tools to help them appreciate and
evaluate what they are reading. We think of this as games they can play whilst reading;
 encourage pupils to criticise what they’ve read, and say why they did or did not like it;
 look at beginnings and endings - how important are they?
 show how to study a book in terms of its characters, setting, atmosphere, and plot;
 invite students to consider the political significance of writing;
 compare different genres, including “popular” writing such as romance or science-fiction.

PREPARATION
We have devised The Big Book Show to adapt to very varied groups of students: widely different
age-groups, with different levels of English fluency, and at very different levels of literature
studies. For all students, knowing a bit about the books we look at will definitely enhance their
experience.

We do not recommend a huge amount of preparation, as this can weary the students, who then
arrive at our show with a sense of literary burn-out (and groan when we mention a novel!)

Here are some things for the pupils to do (and not do!) before the visit

1) It is not necessary to read all the books in advance. It’s nice for the audience to recognise
some things, and be curious about others. Reading part of a book is a useful exercise.
2) We do recommend the students have a small knowledge of all four books we look at – we
attach very brief introductions to each.
3) All these books have been filmed. The films are all great classics and are easily available
from sites like Amazon. We would recommend seeing all or just the beginning of any of
these films as preparation.

Also before the visit there are some things you can do for us:

(1) Tell us which books from our list the students are already familiar with.
(2) Tell us which other books (not on our list) the students are studying: we’ll refer to these in
the show.
(3) Please select a book in the students’ own language, and originally written in that language
– not a translation of an English book – which the students know (or at least know about)
and lend us a copy on the day. The actors will refer to it in the show.

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The Big Book Show: the main things you need to know

THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler

The Big Sleep was published in 1939. It was Raymond Chandler’s first book, and immediately made him
famous. His name has become synonymous with the ‘detective’ genre.

The Big Sleep is written in the first person (‘I’). We see everything from the point of view of the narrator,
and main character, Philip Marlowe, a private detective. He is lonely, flawed, bitter, and funny. He is very
perceptive about the things he sees and the people he meets. He has a keen moral sense. He wants to do
the right thing. But he’s no saint: he is misogynistic, homophobic and racist; he drinks and smokes heavily.
The flawed Marlowe has come to define the character of pretty much every detective in fiction (e.g. ‘Kurt
Wallander’ from the detective series by Henning Mankell).

The setting of The Big Sleep is Los Angeles, mainly in Hollywood, where rich people live. It is a very
unglamorous view of Hollywood – it is dirty, uncomfortable, dangerous, and it rains all the time.

The basic plot of The Big Sleep is very simple but the details are very complicated. Don’t worry if you feel
confused: you are not alone! When The Big Sleep was being filmed, the film-makers asked Raymond
Chandler to explain the plot, and he confessed to not understanding it. He was unable to say why one
character was murdered, or who murdered him (Owen Taylor, found in a Packard motor-car that has been
pushed into the bay).

At the beginning of the story, Marlowe goes to the house of General Sternwood, an old, dying millionaire:
bitter, nasty, dangerous. Sternwood wants Marlowe to find out about a man he thinks is blackmailing his
daughter, Carmen. Marlowe meets both Carmen and her older sister Vivian. Both are very sexy and very
aware of their sexuality, and of its power over men. The rest of the story consists of Marlowe finding out
about the Sternwood sisters’ affairs and the web of intrigue surrounding them. Along the way he meets lots
of other very sexy women, and lots of bitter, nasty, dangerous men. Many of these women and men end up
dead. ‘The Big Sleep’ is a euphemism for ‘death’.

The style of The Big Sleep has often been imitated but never bettered. The first paragraph sums up the
economic narrative voice, establishing in a few lines the atmosphere (“the sun not shining”), the character
of the narrator (“I didn't care who knew it”), his profession (“private detective”), and the situation that
starts the ball rolling (“I was calling on four million dollars” – i.e. visiting a millionaire)

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of
hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark
blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks
on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything
the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The 1946 film of The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe is a classic. See it!

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The Big Book Show: the main things you need to know

THE HATE U GIVE by Angie Thomas

The Hate U Give was published in 2017. Angie Thomas’ portrayal of what it means to be a black person in
today’s America is shocking and depressing, but also very funny and inspiring.

Angie Thomas paints a vivid picture of the world of ‘Garden Heights’ a poor black neighbourhood in an
unnamed American city. She describes ordinary families living their lives alongside violent gangs. They are
armed and brutal. The only white people who normally enter this community are the police.

The story is in the first person (‘I’). So we see everything from the point of view of Starr, a 16 year-old black
girl. Starr lives in two worlds: ‘Garden Heights’, where her family live, and ‘Williamson High’, her school in a
white part of town. These two worlds are very different, so Starr is adept at ‘code-switching’ – behaving
and talking in completely different ways in each world. Much of the book reads like High School story, with
dramas around falling in love, jealousy, gossip and teasing. But the main genre of the book is ‘coming of
age’, indeed a very brutal coming-of-age.

Right at the beginning of The Hate U Give Starr witnesses a police officer brutally shoot and kill her friend
Khalil. This sets off a series of events that change the lives of Starr, her family, the gangs, and even Starr’s
white school-friends.

The Hate U Give was an immediate bestseller because it directly confronts the issue of police violence
against innocent black people, which inspired the Black Lives Matter movement.

Trailer for the film version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g96iU1zX-Fo

The title of the book comes from a song by 90s rapper Tupac: THUG4LIFE, which mocks the way black
children are brought up to want to be a ‘G’ (a macho, drug-dealing, violent gangster). Tupac said about the
song that THUG4LIFE stands for The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody. Tupac himself was shot at
the age of 25 in a drive-by shooting.

http://www.epicreads.com/blog/tupac-thug-life-hate-u-give/ is an article about how the song inspired the

title, and has a video clip of Tupac talking about what it means

Lyrics at https://genius.com/2pac-thug-4-life-lyrics (NB very strong language – including the N-word)

Karaoke version of THUG4LIFE with lyrics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UycQKnOSX1M

It’s very interesting to compare the experiences of reading the book and watching the film. NB the film is a
bit rubbish. Only suggest the exercise if the students have read the whole book.

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The Big Book Show: the main things you need to know

NORMAL PEOPLE by Sally Rooney

‘Normal People’ is a romance set in Ireland. We are going to look at one single page of this book.
Here is a bit of background:

The main Characters are two teen-agers Marianne and Connell. The Beginning of the book is immediately fizzing
with sex.

Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell. She is wearing her school uniform, but she’s
taken off her shoes and skirt and has no shoes on, only tights.
Oh, hey, he says.
Come on in.

A couple of pages in they are having really great sex.

Both Marianne and Connell are shy in different ways. Marianne is from a ‘posh’ family living in a big house, and
her school friends think she is weird. Connell is from a poor family. His mother is Marianne’s cleaner. Connell is
very popular at school – everybody likes him. Neither of them want anyone to know about their relationship,
which leads to devastating consequences.

At the end of their final school exams, Irish students all celebrate with a party called ‘The Debs’. (like the ‘Proms’
in America).

Here is the page:

In April, Connell told her he was taking Rachel Moran to the Debs. Marianne was sitting on the side of his bed at
the time, acting very cold and humorous, which made him awkward. He told her it wasn’t ‘romantic’, and that he
and Rachel were just friends.
You mean like we’re just friends, said Marianne.
Well, no, he said. Different.
But are you sleeping with her?
No. When would I even have the time?
Do you want to? said Marianne.
I’m not hugely gone on the idea. I don’t feel like I’m that insatiable really, I do already have you.
Marianne stared down at her fingernails.
That was a joke, Connell said.
I don’t get what the joke part was.
I know you’re pissed off with me.
I don’t really care, she said. I just think if you want to sleep with her you should tell me.
Yeah, and I will tell you, if I ever want to do that. You’re saying that’s what the issue is, but I
honestly don’t think that’s what it is.
Marianne snapped: What is it then? He just stared at her.
She went back to looking at her fingernails, flushed. He didn’t say anything. Eventually she laughed, because she
wasn’t totally without spirit and it obviously was kind of funny, just how savagely he had humiliated her, and his
inability to apologise or even admit that he had done it. The next morning she quit school.

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The Big Book Show: the main things you need to know

ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell

Animal Farm was published in 1945.

The setting of Animal Farm is a farm. The characters are mainly animals plus a few farmers. Animal Farm is
written in the third person (‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’). It is told from the point of view of the animals.

The book is written in the style of a children’s story, (The original title was Animal Farm: A Fairy Story) It is
an animal fable, like Aesop’s Fables or Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Like them, it is not actually about
animals: it is written to tell us something about humans. George Orwell’s fable is a political satire. The
story of Animal Farm is about animals who live on a farm. The deeper meaning of Animal Farm is about
human politics.

Animal Farm tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their cruel tyrannical farmer and
try to live on their own. They are led by the pigs. They are very idealistic. One of their laws is ‘ALL ANIMALS
ARE EQUAL’. At first everything goes well, and the animals feel proud and happy. But the pigs are corrupt.
They fool the animals into following them, but in fact end up becoming just as cruel and tyrannical as the
farmer they have overthrown. The law ‘All animals are equal’ written up on the side of the barn
mysteriously changes to ‘ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.’
The pigs start behaving like humans: walking on two legs, sleeping in beds, wearing clothes, drinking
alcohol. In the famous ending of Orwell’s fable, the pigs have become so much like the farmers that when
the farmers visit them, the other animals looking in through the windows of the farmhouse cannot tell the
difference between the pigs and the humans.

No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked
from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was
impossible to say which was which.

Animal Farm is clearly satirising the Soviet Union. George Orwell was a socialist, but was very disappointed
by what he saw was the betrayal of socialism by the most important socialist country: the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. His book is a thinly disguised re-telling of the history of the USSR. The farmer represents
the Czar of Russia. The pigs represent the leaders of the Russian Revolution: Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. Other
animals represent the workers, the peasants, the religious leaders, the intellectuals, the propagandists, etc.
Events in the book parallel events in history. But because of its simple style, Animal Farm remains famous
not just as a fable about the USSR but as a warning about the corruption of political power in any country at
any time.

The 1954 animated film of Animal Farm is great. There is also a 1999 TV live action version. Both films differ
from the novel. In the 1954 film Napoleon is overthrown in a second revolution. The 1999 film shows the
pig's regime collapsing in on itself, as happened in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

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