The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Book Club #67 ｜ Bothelford's Gone with Edward McLaren

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome back to Book Club. I'm your host Connor, joined by Harry, and today

00:00:10.780 we are joined by author Ed McLaren to discuss his book, Bothellford's Gone. Ed and I have

00:00:14.740 already discussed this with our mutual friend Harrison Pitt, but I thought it would be good

00:00:18.500 to get the perspective of an actual northerner on this as well.

00:00:21.320 Is it supposed to be set in the north?

00:00:23.480 It is, but it's a sort of composite town, and given I'm from the south, there are southern

00:00:27.920 components that sneak in.

00:00:29.140 I could tell that, and there was a general dirty, grimy, grey vibe to the whole thing

00:00:34.700 that definitely felt true to where I'm from. 1.00

00:00:37.300 Yeah, just like the North.

00:00:38.500 For those of you who haven't read Ed's book, you can go to Vauban Books and pick up a copy,

00:00:41.980 or even Oldspeak Books, who's now moved online.

00:00:43.940 Is it not in the Molden Press?

00:00:46.060 Molden is an offshoot of Vauban.

00:00:48.500 Are they an imprint?

00:00:49.500 They're an imprint. I came up with the name, which was sort of nice, but there we go.

00:00:52.640 Oh, yeah.

00:00:53.200 A bit of trivia I didn't even know.

00:00:54.100 There you go.

00:00:54.840 For those who don't know about the broad synopsis of the book,

00:00:58.740 do you care to give us a little bit of an overview sure um so this isn't the first novel that has

00:01:04.360 been written about the grooming gangs one was actually done by the philosopher roger scruton

00:01:07.980 but when i read that uh i was horrified by it because he would do stuff like write second

00:01:14.680 person rape scenes where you were being subjugated in this this or that terrible way uh and he was

00:01:21.540 also using your many um grooming gang demographics very very strange choices but it made it

00:01:27.960 pornographic in a sense and I wanted to follow in the footsteps of a director I quite like called

00:01:34.320 Tony Kaye who did this film American History Acts talking about race violence and very complicated

00:01:39.120 issues but he used techniques that he had learned from the advertising industry to make those topics

00:01:44.980 broachable to make it somewhat entertaining to consume and so on the one hand there is no actual

00:01:50.840 direct sexual content in the book at all I didn't want to risk eroticism ever and secondly because

00:01:57.320 it's a novel precisely the middle class people that don't want to acknowledge the grooming gangs

00:02:02.040 were a real issue suddenly have an incentive to read it oh i want to pick this thing up like jm

00:02:07.380 kurtz's disgrace which is this noble prize winning text that everyone had on the a-level reading

00:02:13.300 lists you reference within the novel as it appears in the book and that will force them to attune

00:02:20.360 themselves to what's presently going on in our country besides that the general narrative is

00:02:25.360 fairly simple it follows a young man who is called jack and he's born in the early 20th century early

00:02:30.760 21st century and it's about going through every single year in his life from effectively one

00:02:37.300 till the age of 18 and showing you how he is demoralized by education how he is kept from

00:02:44.420 his roots how he is kept from building friends by a confluence of factors by technology by medics

00:02:50.860 by his relationship with his parents who were divorced, by the television, very importantly,

00:02:56.640 and also by law enforcement eventually, when he discovers that one of his classmates is being

00:03:01.420 groomed, being trafficked by predominantly Pakistani Muslim Murpri men from the area,

00:03:07.120 and he can't do anything. And what follows is an act of violence that he perpetrates in order to 0.87

00:03:13.000 try and get back, not only at the people who are responsible for abusing her, but also breaking him

00:03:19.340 down as well there's a section where i say that the psychological molestation precedes the physical

00:03:25.100 molestation and yet of course once again in every single aspect of society he is not allowed to save

00:03:33.940 the day he's not allowed to be the kind of chivalric knight that he wants to be um and

00:03:39.000 according to that logic that um this one twitter phrase had which was going around the purpose of

00:03:45.600 system is what it does well the book is about showing you that all of these things that seem

00:03:50.000 to be very disconnected in our day-to-day lives are actually all part of one thing and that is

00:03:55.320 what the system does the system enables that so that's broadly how i'd summarize it yes uh the

00:04:00.980 perspective that you're writing for uh from being that of the protagonist jack's perspective all of

00:04:06.180 the way through with this sort of like um closed third person um narrative perspective where you're

00:04:11.940 still everything is still from his perspective even though in third person it led to scenes later

00:04:16.360 on within the book where he's asking himself why he's feeling uh such a pull to inaction

00:04:23.040 and he's wondering to himself if this had been the the purpose of all of the films that he had

00:04:28.640 watched throughout his childhood if this had been the purpose of the educational system it was

00:04:32.840 programming him into a state of inaction of helplessness that he knew that he wouldn't be

00:04:40.180 helped by anybody uh he knew that the system was against him and on a certain site deeper

00:04:45.620 psychological level there was a part of him holding back because well that's that's what

00:04:49.920 bad people do and uh this is also where the character fauna comes into it who is this

00:04:56.020 sort of male to female transgender who he's put in a special class with when he's doing his a

00:05:02.120 levels and he's thinking maybe i'll get into a very good university by working alongside this

00:05:06.880 person this person could have been his mentor in another world he he could have been saved by this

00:05:14.800 individual but what's happened is this individual who's come from arguably an even more fragmented

00:05:20.120 although slightly more privileged background than he has just means all of that's neutralized

00:05:25.120 this person who was clearly on the autistic spectrum to sonic center or another and was

00:05:29.440 preternaturally um or i shouldn't say preternaturally but predisposed to thinking of

00:05:34.180 themselves as alienated from their body is destroyed by this late 2010 social contagion

00:05:42.320 and because of that they kind of can't help him they can't relate to him in this situation

00:05:47.400 and to a large extent that is what these political egregores seem to have done to people

00:05:53.300 i don't really regard people on the theoretical sort of quasi far left who typically come from

00:06:00.560 middle class backgrounds as bad people i think typically they have been hijacked by some kind

00:06:06.380 of mind virus that makes them unable to assume that the data that they're getting from their

00:06:11.020 own eyes and ears are correct and yet inaction is all he sees earlier on when you're introduced

00:06:17.520 to fauna there was a certain level of um sensitivity that you approach the subject

00:06:22.900 with but i was surprised towards the end when jack ends up in prison when fauna almost takes

00:06:29.320 an act of heroism uh in going out of his way to broadcast what had been happening to agatha who

00:06:37.640 was the um the unfortunate grooming victim in the story uh which leads to the police making a deal

00:06:44.480 with jack i was surprised that you gave what is really one of the only moments of like heroism

00:06:50.540 or relief a good deed done selflessly uh to the character of fauna it seemed outside of the realm

00:06:58.600 of what somebody like say for instance roger scrutin uh would have done in that situation

00:07:04.040 because i i do appreciate what you're saying here with the sort of like um there's a certain

00:07:08.360 sympathy that you're giving to these people yeah um i think it's also just because i've been

00:07:12.680 friends with a number of people who have ended up transitioning and have haven't we all in our age

00:07:17.340 and horribly regretted it um and to that extent what eventually happens to fauna behind the scenes

00:07:26.000 I mean, it is a sort of behind-the-scenes suicide after arriving at Cambridge, is joined up with that.

00:07:32.900 There's a sense that there is no hope left.

00:07:35.660 There is no escape from the political and ideological neurosis that said character has assumed.

00:07:44.560 And as a result, rather like a lot of people that commit suicide, he's thinking,

00:07:49.500 what can I do that will be very charitable before I disappear?

00:07:53.900 or maybe it's i'll i'll i'll play around with my vices for a bit but in fauna's case there is this

00:08:01.800 kind of priestly asceticism associated with the character that i think shows up in their interest

00:08:07.460 in plato and the idea that there are divine bodies that pre-exist the mortals that we are right now

00:08:15.080 and fauna kind of wanting to be one of them there's a literary trend that isn't explicitly

00:08:20.160 transgender or queer or anything like that that goes back a very long time and you could say that

00:08:24.700 Emily Bronte was quite like that she was recognized as someone who was very gender non-conforming and

00:08:30.340 she went around with her father's gun to defend her his pack of females but she also as soon as

00:08:35.860 she started writing about Heathcliff got kind of bored of herself and wanted to be this this

00:08:41.720 isolated soul this transcendental object that existed beyond herself and I think Fauna is

00:08:47.020 helping out because there is just

00:08:49.000 dearth, there is just dust, there is just

00:08:51.340 emptiness, grist, left over

00:08:53.320 and that's the last sort of

00:08:55.200 signal of light. Just as Fauna's

00:08:57.380 been quite literally castrated by 0.91

00:08:59.320 transgender ideology, Jack 1.00

00:09:01.240 sort of expresses his

00:09:02.440 sort of

00:09:04.780 heroic castration, I suppose you would

00:09:07.360 say, by all these overlapping factors. There's a bit

00:09:09.220 later on in the book where he's

00:09:11.280 licking his wounds in his bedroom

00:09:13.000 after he's been

00:09:15.300 essentially framed by the police

00:09:16.980 for the activities of the gang

00:09:18.660 and he's disgusted by his phone

00:09:21.180 because he's taken to sedating himself 0.99

00:09:22.880 by watching essentially porn of women 0.99

00:09:25.020 much too older than him 0.98

00:09:26.140 similar to that which the gang is producing 0.98

00:09:29.100 using Agatha's mum 0.61

00:09:31.100 which makes him feel complicit in the whole act

00:09:33.180 yeah and he essentially says

00:09:35.160 like okay I've been

00:09:36.420 delivered this porn machine since I was younger

00:09:39.060 it's maybe incapable

00:09:41.000 of having regular relationships, it's distracted me

00:09:43.040 it's sedated me and it's also made me

00:09:45.220 morally complicit in the broader superstructure that i seek to vanquish like a knight trying to

00:09:49.840 slay the dragon and when we were talking before i said so the left has this idea of the omni cause

00:09:54.860 where all of its various um causes somehow intersect climate change intersectionality

00:10:00.980 feminism queer liberation palestine well what you've stumbled upon here is the omni crisis

00:10:05.020 it's all of these intersecting um perverse incentives that render heroism almost impossible

00:10:11.500 for young men despite the revulsion that we have of the injustices that have been inflicted on us

00:10:17.460 i mean he's on the one hand just unable to have a relationship with a girl his age anymore

00:10:26.620 because he thinks agatha was this girl that i was attracted to she was my gateway to sexuality

00:10:33.500 and she's been used in this way i can't be complicit and like her in that way and so i'll

00:10:39.380 go for older women and then on the other hand when he's investigating the profile of Agatha's mum

00:10:46.480 who is this OnlyFans model he immediately feels himself slipping into the kind of pornographic

00:10:54.560 gaze that he's used to numb himself before and he works out that that entire methodology that

00:11:00.960 whole sort of logos of being in a way is corrupt and has to be cut out of him and the only way

00:11:07.460 that he is going to truly make war on the system is by cutting it out of himself and yet to a

00:11:13.520 certain extent I think this is I think this is impossible once you raise or provide the

00:11:17.940 opportunity for 11 to 13 year old boys to watch videos of people having their heads cut off with

00:11:23.140 chainsaws run the gauntlet was what it was called at my school but everyone has their own version

00:11:27.740 you can't really go back from that and you were dealing with fundamentally different human beings

00:11:32.740 kind of in the same way that after the second world war we had a bunch of excess violent men 0.98

00:11:37.520 lying around and they were recruited into the black and tans which is why the black and tans 1.00

00:11:42.020 were such a violent group they were not hormonally the same as ordinary men anymore and they couldn't 1.00

00:11:47.740 be um i mean it's something that i'm grateful for that um if my school had anything like run the

00:11:54.300 gauntlet uh i never saw it i had an instinctive aversion to all of the uh gore and horror videos

00:12:01.920 that some people that i knew had watched some tried to get me to watch them and i refused very

00:12:08.300 forcefully and so i managed to keep myself away from that still still though even when i was in

00:12:13.800 my 20s you know like people who i knew who worked on blue collar sites and this isn't saying anything

00:12:17.960 about blue collar guys at all uh would occasionally just throw a phone up in my face and go hey have

00:12:22.760 you seen this and it'd be a video of somebody horribly dying and i don't think outside of

00:12:28.220 outside of like historic context in war and such things i don't think it's normal or healthy for

00:12:34.300 people to see like brutal gore or horrifying death on a regular basis at the just at your

00:12:41.260 fingertips every single day similarly my introduction and this is a this is a personal

00:12:46.400 thing here my introduction to pornography was when i was i think 11 years old and it was not

00:12:53.200 something that i searched for it was the next door neighbor's kids coming over on a flip phone

00:12:59.840 who remembers those one of them had somehow managed to like download this video onto his phone

00:13:05.180 came over to my house one day when i had some friends over and said hey guys why don't you all

00:13:09.480 take a look at this and just showed us and that was me at 11 years old being drawn into that by

00:13:16.740 my own will so even if you are a kid whose parents have taken care to avoid you interacting with that

00:13:21.460 sort of stuff the social aspect of life means that yeah they're gonna they're gonna be in contact

00:13:27.080 with it one way or another and this is where the the schools come into i mean you had that

00:13:31.180 in the story there is the um example of the well the foreign kids with their messages of uh white

00:13:38.580 tings in the white tings group chat uh but even all of the white kids who went to that school

00:13:43.560 they would probably you know have kids sharing that amongst one another as well and it all drags

00:13:48.120 down into the same sort of pit and further than that not only based on personal experience but

00:13:54.560 just by looking at history lesson school curriculums the school collaborates in

00:14:01.220 precisely that kind of demonic you could say shock content never will you see accounts of

00:14:11.240 let's say the black hole of um calcutta or the crimes that were going on during the barbary

00:14:20.060 trade or the hindu mutiny or just contemporary bradford and bristol and london and oxford and

00:14:27.720 henley and everywhere you'll never see any of that in the school room but you will see images of 1.00

00:14:33.320 black people being hanged by the ku klux klan and you will never tell you why though yeah they will

00:14:39.740 never tell you why. They will never give you the full context. But you will be plastered with 0.93

00:14:44.160 images that your own parents would hide from you in order to strain you and mold you in a particular

00:14:51.280 way that you would not be otherwise. And it is always associated with shame that is everywhere

00:14:57.820 reinforced, reinforced in the pornography, reinforced in the kind of narratives that

00:15:02.900 you're forced to read. I mean, we've mentioned J.M. Kurtzer. I think he's a very good writer,

00:15:08.360 but his book is literally about South African gang rape, racially provoked South African gang 0.67

00:15:13.040 rape. And that was on children's A-level school curriculum lists. And it was criticized by

00:15:19.480 Nadine Gordimer, who was another South African writer, for not being anti-racist enough.

00:15:26.080 I mean, the world that we are living in is completely insane. And when parents feel that

00:15:31.100 their children are different from them, they are correct. These are people that have been through

00:15:34.720 a psychic blitzkrieg and girls who see themselves as Freya India would point out as a kind of

00:15:40.660 branded product that can be shoved around unless they somehow have control over the walls and

00:15:46.520 borders of their own body and boys who either think of themselves as as pimps of whatever

00:15:51.600 ethnicity they happen to be or as cannon fodder that is going to have no future at all and so

00:15:57.320 much like a lot of the classmates of this young friend of mine we used to be at school together 1.00

00:16:02.500 he's about five years younger than me he said when I was in university everyone just wants to

00:16:07.840 die at the age of 35 they don't see anything beyond 35 that can come into existence because

00:16:13.300 they don't think they'll own a house they don't think they'll have marriage or anything like that

00:16:17.260 so no wonder we're headed towards something like the anti well we're headed towards something like

00:16:23.660 the anticipation of year zero even if unfortunately we are still fed whilst everything around us

00:16:29.660 staffs. Well, related to the points that you were making about the sort of curriculum books that

00:16:35.040 you were talking about, and this also relates to the pornographic content of that Roger Scruton

00:16:40.980 book that you mentioned at the beginning, which I have thankfully not read because frankly that

00:16:44.840 just sounds incredibly distressing and also crass and unnecessary. When I was in A-levels,

00:16:50.220 we studied Birdsong by Sebastian Fork. Have you ever read that? I had to as well. Yeah, yeah. Then

00:16:55.300 you'll understand in that case that that book on many occasions is just pornographic. There are a

00:17:01.080 number of scenes and the way that we were taught about it was that the reason was to contrast

00:17:04.420 between the shocking and awful brutality of war with like, I don't know if they wanted to say

00:17:11.440 the beauty or the sensuality of sex, but obviously like significant chunks of that book are dedicated

00:17:19.440 to incredibly in-depth and detailed sex scenes between the main protagonist and the wife of,

00:17:28.520 I believe it's the man that he's staying in in France prior to the beginning of the First World

00:17:32.540 War, where you get these incredibly graphic descriptions of fluids and what's happening

00:17:38.600 with them and all sorts of disgusting things. And this is the problem with what you're describing

00:17:43.980 with Roger Scruton. This is a problem that comes with, you know, I'm a fan of the Song

00:17:47.600 of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin, but he does the same thing where you get incredibly

00:17:51.540 graphic sex scenes when you just realise that what you are reading is the author's pornographic 0.69

00:17:57.380 fetish put to page. They can try and dress it up in literary allusions, oh I'm contrasting 0.86

00:18:03.140 the graphic nature of sex versus the graphic nature of warfare and I'm making some kind

00:18:08.920 of grand point on that, don't ask me exactly what it is. No, you are indulging in your

00:18:15.000 fetishes it's incredibly crass it's incredibly unnecessary so one of the things that i was

00:18:19.620 grateful for was that you didn't indulge in that in this book because this book was already

00:18:23.700 actually a dark enough read for me uh the way that it was but not only did it help it from sink

00:18:29.600 too deeply into the mire uh to the point where it's just unpalatable um further it actually

00:18:36.420 allowed for a greater psychological understanding because i do find that when authors write in that

00:18:43.620 way they get sucked too much into simply just describing graphic depictions rather than

00:18:49.520 understanding the character's mentality how they're reacting their psychology towards all of

00:18:55.500 this just just focusing on the on the sexual element um often has kind of a gross out effect

00:19:00.200 so we had to a level we had to do the handmaid's tale which is i maintain one of the worst books

00:19:04.480 ever written um and well that is just a fetish book really though isn't it yes and having not

00:19:10.260 read it I'm only assuming. It's also Margaret Atwood going and visiting Afghanistan and then

00:19:15.320 writing it during the Iranian revolution and going but let's put a Christian skin suit on 0.99

00:19:18.660 Islamic society and so that sort of the discomfort the constant description of sexuality and rape 0.75

00:19:25.440 it demoralizes you and in that vacuum it leaves your head essentially empty to be filled by other 0.68

00:19:30.960 things it's the same thing with the the civil rights curriculum that we have to learn about

00:19:34.740 I mean I mean just on a purely physical and biological level the amount of studies that

00:19:39.900 have shown that like excessive consumption of pornography actively reduces i think it's the

00:19:46.240 white matter in your brain it's either the white matter or the gray matter so it's it's literally

00:19:51.040 it's literally scouring your brain of the ability to form rational thoughts and and what it does

00:19:58.040 is it takes something normal like um sex or your uh intuition towards justice and it perverts it

00:20:06.040 It debauches it, disorders it, and then with that disorder it can reorder it towards something else.

00:20:11.700 And what you were saying with the history curriculum, with the abolition of boundaries around healthy sexuality,

00:20:18.640 all of this is the sort of open society imperative following the Second World War

00:20:23.160 to abolish your preference for your family, your country, your identity, your heritage,

00:20:27.260 and fill it as an empty vessel with something else.

00:20:29.940 And so that's why I thought it was a really interesting motif.

00:20:31.840 you said egregore earlier

00:20:33.140 it's a really interesting motif

00:20:34.400 when Jack's dreams are haunted

00:20:36.880 by this sort of egregoric creature

00:20:38.480 that you call the chimera

00:20:39.540 which has a TV for a head

00:20:41.480 sort of hypnotic effect

00:20:44.760 it has on in his dream logic

00:20:46.760 the people of the town

00:20:47.740 who he thinks are his aunts and uncles

00:20:49.040 it literally petrifies them

00:20:50.700 and it's curled up around the war memorial 0.98

00:20:52.620 much like the Arab who in real life

00:20:54.600 is disrespecting the war memorial 0.78

00:20:56.000 and quite literally flouting the sacrifices

00:20:59.000 the men of Boffleford made

00:21:00.060 so it's quite interesting

00:21:01.340 you actually gave the post-war consensus a kind of actual monstrous form.

00:21:05.180 If you would like to see the full version of this premium video, please head over to

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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - October 14, 2026

PREVIEW： Book Club #67 ｜ Bothelford's Gone with Edward McLaren

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