Saturday 27 March 2010

Answering questions

I was sent these questions by the Glasgow Sunday Herald, and the answers were published last weekend. My thoughts on doing this kind of thing must wait for another post.
WHAT BOOKS ARE BESIDE YOUR BED AT THE MOMENT?
I’m halfway through Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, taking it slowly and savouring it. I’ve begun Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, and I’m enjoying its sensitive evocation of Nakasaki before the bomb drops. John Worthen’s biography of DH Lawrence is in the pile.
WHICH WRITER LIVED THE LIFE YOU MOST ADMIRE?
Graham Greene would be a contender, thinking particularly of his writing life. He was a troubled and difficult character, but he communicated a sense of so many different places around the world as he experienced them, and never lost sight of the business of telling a good story. Something in his restlessness appeals to me as well as his commitment to the craft.
WITH WHICH LITERARY CHARACTER DID YOU FIRST IDENTIFY?
Dick Dewy in Under the Greenwood Tree, a tongue-tied yokel who gets the girl. It launched me on an early romp through Hardy’s novels that included The Trumpet Major and Far from the Madding Crowd. My enthusiasm hit a wall when, still only 15, I reached the last few pages of Tess of the D’urbervilles and realized, with a sick feeling, that this wasn’t going to end well.
WHAT BOOK DO YOU FIRST REMEMBER BEING READ TO YOU AS A CHILD?
My father, a Catholic convert, read us stories about a guardian angel called Wopsy who watches over a little African boy. It was a dog-eared paperback, and no doubt anachronistic even then. My father took his religion very seriously, and the book had perhaps been recommended by some priest. The African boy’s mother has been converted by the missionaries, I remember, but his father is a pagan and gets drunk on banana beer.
WHAT IS THE MOST UNDERRATED BOOK YOU HAVE EVER READ?
It depends who’s doing the rating. I was far too young to read John Updike’s Couples when it hit the zeitgeist in 1968, but I read it a few years ago and found it moving, intelligent, and evocative of its time without being dated. But there are so many unjustly neglected books. A writer who seems to have dropped below the radar recently is Peter Benson. I’ve enjoyed all his novels, but perhaps most admire Odo’s Hanging, which puts the story of the making of the Bayeux Tapestry in the words of a mute underling.
AND THE MOST OVERRATED?
The Great Gatsby. Not that there isn’t plenty to enjoy in it, but it doesn’t deserve its exalted status. US publishers, Modern Library, rated it second only to Ulysses in its 100 best English language novels of the twentieth century. I re-read it recently, along with A Farewell to Arms, also written in the 20s, and I was struck with how much better Hemingway is. The tone of Gatsby is quite uneven and some of the writing is cloyingly sweet.
DO YOU HAVE ANY RITUALS OR SUPERSTITIONS AS A WRITER?
I’m wary of dissipating the energy around a book by talking about it before it’s written. That’s a kind of superstition. As for rituals, I wouldn’t mind a developing a few. My life has been rather transient since I’ve been writing seriously. But I’m lucky that I’m able to write in lots of different circumstances. Perhaps because I grew up with eight brothers and sisters, I’m able to shut out distraction.
WHAT WAS IT ABOUT THE THEME OF NATIONAL IDENTITY THAT APPEALED TO YOU?
I grew up in England, but my mother was Irish. I was an altar boy and went to Catholic schools. We were taught, catechized, sermonized, admonished and absolved of our sins in a variety of Irish accents. We were also very connected to my grandparents and our other relatives in County Cork. I’ve never felt unambiguously English. I’m appreciative of the increasingly rich mix of cultures and ethnicities represented in Britain, and I wanted to touch on the complexity of that.
WAS EVOKING THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE THATCHER YEARS BASED ON PERSONAL EXPERIENCE?
I lived through the Thatcher years, and some of what I remembered found a place in the novel. But the progress of the story, as it took shape, determined what kind of period details were needed and I sometimes found myself turning to research for these. But I never thought of that section of the book as a portrait of an era. It’s about two brothers, their girlfriends and family relationships, their yearnings and ambitions. The period is incidental to most of this, though it does have a significant impact at certain moments.

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