The Amanda Craig blog

Reading for Review

Tue, 8 May 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

As someone lucky enough to be paid to read books - though the ones I review are only a fraction of what I read each week - I shouldn't complain about aspects of my day-job. My second-greatest fear in life is, after all, alibriphobia or finding myself without a book in any situation. The advent of the ebook has made this slightly less pressing, but I am literally someone who will read the labels on bottles of bleach when all else fails....

Reading against the clock is, however, quite a different matter. Right now I'm supposed to be finishing the sequel to Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's accalimed novel, which bored and irritated me very much when it came out in 2009. I've enjoyed Bring Up the Bodies rather more, which is a relief, but I'm very aware that, having been asked to do it by the New Statesman for this week only a couple of days ago, I may not be giving it a fair crack.

People read in all kinds of different situations - on the way to work, in bed, on the loo, in the bath, on holiday - but they tend not to read under pressure, as critics do. Although a really good book (and I include genre books in this) absorb you into their world so much you become oblivious to your surroundings, there's no doubt in my mind that your surroundings also influence how you read. Part of my own enjoyment of Mantel's new novel must have had something to do with travelling down to Devon by train, and being able to relax with it. Her hero, Cromwell, has a house in Devon too (as does Mantel, who now lives on the other side of Dartmoor to ourselves) but never gets to visit it. Something about this telling detail made me sorrier for him than anything else, because as far as I'm concerned that must be like denying yourself entry into Paradise....

Some newspapers give up to four stars for books, but to my mind, they should give apples. Almost all my own favourite books seem to be devoured at the same time as an apple, or up an apple tree (when young). There's something about crunching into a crisp apple, with its mixture of sweetness and sourness which makes me think of the best kind of fiction. But it can't be done in a hurry.

When I read for review, I feel more like an examiner than a reader. Look at any pictures of women reading (a popular subject) and you'll see that this is not supposed to be the way to address a book. I make notes, and bossy little ticks or crosses. I query facts, and quarrel with opinions. This isn't at all how most people read; however, I am pretty sure that most successful literary authors are aware of this tendency because they "front-load" the opening chapter of their work and very often put the best stuff first. The really canny then round it up, like an essay, with some more good stuff at the end. (To me, the one brilliant passage in Wolf Hall was that quoted on the back cover - but the contents didn't bear it out.) Yet a really good and every great novel has this kind of stuff "seeded" all the way through, which can only be picked up at leisure. This is why you can re-read someone like Jane Austen and notice new things in it each time. How many of us notice for instance, the little joke about Lydia in Pride and Prejudice buying a bad hat, but being convinced she can improve it?

Certainly not a critic, who is often in the position of Lydia herself.

THE PAIN (AND PLEASURE) OF BEING A RED-HEAD

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

The news that red-heads are most susceptible to pain than everyone else has brought the usual spate of articles about how we’re not really “ginger whingers” or prone to rage, simply more sensitive. I wonder. As a red-head myself, I try to ignore the fact but am constantly reminded of it.

Mostly, the reminder is useful if not pleasant. I know my hair makes me easy to spot in a crowd, which is reassuring for my nearest and dearest, and also for friends at crowded parties – there are few of us on the literary and journalistic circuit, and I always feel warmly towards other copperknobs, whether their colour is real or artificial. I have made life-long friendships and alliances that were initially solely the result of sharing my recessive gene.

I'm also thrilled that red hair is having one of its periodic revivals. Men have, if anything, an even worse time of it than women, and actors such as Eddie Redmayne (geddit?), Damien Lewis, Rupert Grint, Michael Fassbender and Paul Bettany have been very helpful to the image, as has Prince Harry, while Julianne Moore, Christina Hendricks and Gillian Andersen are of course goddesses. But the film that is likely to do most for us is Disney’s new cartoon, Brave, about a Scottish princess, which will be released in the capital of red-heads, or Scotland, this summer. It's so thrilling even in trailer form that even my sophisiticated daughter has expressed an interest in seeing it with me.

I’m fed-up with the adjective “feisty”, and especially when it’s applied to my tribe (for that is what we are), but it does take a lot of guts to be a red-head. Being so noticeable does mean you get picked on more – as I realised, not for the first time, when I was tied up to the football posts at primary school and had footballs aimed at me by two nine-year-old boys. This, it later transpired, was the infant way of announcing a major crush; I was laughing too much to be hurt or scared, but it wasn’t the most pleasant kind of courtship.

People expect you to be different simply because you look different. Often that difference is due to boring things like needing to wear sunglasses because (being one step away from albinism) our eyes tend to be more sensitive to light, just as we burn more readily, and need to stay in the shade. I get bored with having to explain this; it’s one of those tiresome things, like travel-sickness or allergies, that those who don’t have them tend to treat as a form of neurosis when it’s not. I get so worried about red-headed babies not having sun-hats and being slathered in sun-block I’ve even gone up to total strangers to beg them to protect their tender skin. Of course, this kind of bossy behaviour is just about acceptable because it comes from another lunatic red-head….

Is it true that red-heads tend to have hotter tempers? Yes, in my experience. If you have been picked on all your life, it doesn’t take much to rouse the volcano – and of course, for that to be noticed. You screw yourself up to do things so many times that after a while it becomes second nature, and you stop being frightened. It’s a tremendous gift to not be fearful even if (as in my assault last year) it can lead to some unpleasant repercussions. I’ve often wondered whether the reputation of ginger tom-cats as ferocious fighters is due to this, or to crossness at being noticed. It seems to be so universal in the feline world that I suspect that cats, too, experience some form of prejudice.

The other side of this is that many red-heads tend to be exceptionally timid and self-effacing, terrified of drawing any attention to themselves. I know both men and women (and girls and boys) who are painfully sensitive, and who never stand up for themselves (which as the other kind of red-head, makes my blood boil on their behalf). There’s something about seeing that milk-white skin and sandy lashes that always makes me swell with protectiveness, because it is like having a layer of skin missing. Each time I've had an operation, I've been told later by the surgeon that I did indeed need more anaesthetic than normal, and don't get me started on dentists. If you feel pain more readily, you also, I think, feel more empathy. (I’m always the one in the cinema hiding my eyes in scary bits, much to the irritation of other adults.) Strangely, there are very very few authors and artists who are red-heads, though DH Lawrence, William Morris and Van Gogh all had flaming hair, and a sort of contra mundum attitude which I also recognise. However, I’ve lost count of the number of children’s books in which the heroine has this feature. They range from some of my favourites (Maria in The Little White Horse and Eleanor in The Diamond in the Window) to thoroughly irritating ones like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. There definitely need to be more red-headed heroes besides the Weasley family in Harry Potter.

So far, I’ve had two ginger-haired characters – Grub in A Private Place, and Ivo Sponge in A Vicious Circle and Hearts and Minds – but no women. Actually, the heroine of A Vicious Circle, Mary Quinn, was originally going to be a red-head but that was one of the things that had to be changed after my libel threat from the charming Sexton – who used to tell me that as red-heads had less hair I’d be bald by thirty, something I’m pleased to say shows no sign of happening. Both Grub and Ivo are different kinds of red-head, the one having aspects of Judas (a traditional Biblical reason for persecuting us) as well as more of a satirical spirit than his friends, and Ivo being more like a fox.

However, there is one sphere in which red-heads reign triumphant and that is as artists’ muses – and prostitutes. Titian wasn’t the first to make us his beauties of choice – Cranach’s Venus, and his Eve, for instance are auburn haired, and so are more of the women in Heironymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, who both enjoy the rewards of virtue and who experience the exotic torments of medieval Hell. Both the Pre Raphelites and the Impressionists were also mad for the colour. For what all these studies about red-head’s sensitivities neglect to note, perhaps out of ignorance, is that red-heads experience more pleasure as well as more pain; it’s my guess that prostitutes who dyed their hair this colour knew this perfectly well, as did their clients.

Gay Marriages are Made in Heaven, Too

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

GAY MARRIAGES

Maybe this is a subject that, as a heterosexual woman, I shouldn’t venture near. Yet as the most devoted couples I have known have almost all been gay (men), and known throughout my life, I do feel I might have something to say now that gay marriage is being repudiated with such hostility by, among others, the Catholic Church.

When I was two years old, my parents came to London. We lived in a tiny flat opposite the library in Primrose Hill, and next to us were a gay couple, Ken and Henry. One (I don’t remember which) was an antiques collector, and the other the very first costume designer for the brand-new Dr Who series. Primrose Hill in those days was not at all the swanky suburb it is now but a genuinely raffish mix of bohemians and council tenants.

My mother has always adored gay men, and vice versa, and soon a flood of gorgeous paste jewels and scraps of fabrics left over from the Doctor's encounters with aliens came my way from either Ken or Henry. I played with these endlessly, loved our neighbours' kindness and maybe that's one reason why - apart from a tendency to find them senstive, funny, gifted and brave - I also grew up with strong feelings of sympathy for gay people.Their own flat was an Aladdin’s Cave, and looked it thanks to the fabulous things they collected. But they didn’t have an easy time of it, and one day either Ken or Henry had a terrible row – so terrible that one, let’s say Henry, tried to gas himself. Unlike Sylvia Plath who died round the corner the following year, he was unsuccessful. But his lover, who found him, called the ambulance because it was clear he needed help immediately.

There was just one problem. It was 1961, and suicide was still illegal – the law changed later that year. But as things were, if you were suspected of trying to kill yourself you might be revived only to face a sentence akin to that for murder. (The law, what an ass.) So my mother, whom he had also called for help thought quickly. There had to be an explanation for why the flat stank of gas, even with the windows open. She put on a tiny pot of milk, and made it boil over. The ambulance men now had an excuse not to inquire any further, and Henry was saved.

Such was their gratitude that they gave (or sold at a very low price) my mother a magnificent mirror which came from the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. I am proud to say that I now own this, and it graces our sitting room immeasurably with its lovely cracked bronze gilt frame and speckled glass. The couple, deeply shaken, made it up and lived happily together for the rest of their lives.

Would they have liked to marry? I don’t doubt it – and so did another couple of men whose devotion outlasted that of almost everyone else my parents knew. One was a French cousin of Gore Vidal, and the other was a Filipino man, as gentle as people from that sad place often are. After over forty years together in a little cottage in Tuscany, the Frenchman became gravely ill. He was the one with money, and wanted to leave his partner in life his property. He could only do so by adopting him as his son. Well, no son could have nursed the poor man so tenderly, and nobody could have been more broken-hearted when he died. Years later, he still can’t get over it, or speak his partner’s name without tears.

So why on earth shouldn’t they have been able to get married? They couldn’t have children together, but that’s the case with many heterosexual couples. They were both Catholic by upbringing, but repudiated by their Church. None but they knows what they did alone together, but that is scarcely any business of ours anyway. Why shouldn’t their love, fidelity, trust and kindness have been recognised as what it was? Why did one have to pretend to be the son of the other? Does God, if you believe in God, not create homosexual animals as well as humans?

I don’t know. But every time I see a picture of another beaming gay couple in the papers, I feel like cheering – until I remember that the reason why they’re thought newsworthy is that they’re still supposed to be freaks.

Plodding up Mount Olympus

Tue, 6 Mar 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

PLODDING UP MOUNT OLYMPUS

Every writer has days, weeks or even years when the struggle to write just seems like too much. There are a few who don't believe in writer's block", and on good days it's hard to remember what this is. But on bad ones it seems incredible that one ever gets anything done. There is no solution but, as Kingsley Amis said, nailing your bottom to the seat - which is why my own seems to get ever-larger.

In addition, the depressed writer is often plagued by wondering what it's all for. If you make a decent living out of it, this usually doesn't arise - the answer is obvious. If you write the kind of book that gets laden with prizes, ditto, even if you can't pay your heating bill. But if like myself you fall between these two stools it can be quite hard to find a reason, except that you have a vocation and that writing is what you do. Sometimes people love what you write, and even let you know (thank-you); sometimes they don't. The amount of effort put into a book is no guarantee of its quality. I've met many authors who write abysmal books, and who suffer just as much as those who write good ones.

In a way, the author who writes for neither money nor fame is the purest of beings. I often think of a poem by Cavafy called The First Step, in which a young poet complains that he'll never climb any higher than the first step of Poetry. His companion retorts:

"Just to be on the first step should make you happy and proud.

To have reached this point is no small achievement:

what you've done already is a wonderful thing,

Even this first step is a long way above the ordinary world.

To stand on this step

you must be in your own right

a member of the city of ideas.

And it's a hard, unsuual thing

to be enrolled as a citizen of that city,

Its councils are full of Legislators

no charlatan can fool,

To have reached this point is no small achievement:

what you've done already is a wonderful thing."

Of course, to be consoled by this, you do have to believe that the Legislators are as incorruptible and wise as Cavafy says.

Borgen - TV for grown-ups

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

BORGEN – TV FOR GROWN-UPS

Apart from the News At Ten, I tend not to watch much TV. Of course, there are some shows that were too fun to miss – the first two series of Life on Mars and Spooks, Prime Suspect, the BBC adaptation of Bleak House and Pride and Prejudice, and the new Sherlock series. But by and large, a TV drama has to be really good to wrench my eyes from a book. I spent my formative years with Italian TV in which an episode of Laurel and Hardy, dubbed, was a real treat, and somehow (after a couple of years of overdosing on thigns like Star Trek and The Professionals when I got a TV) that inoculated me against the nationwide slump in front of the gogglebox. I find most British series painfully predictable and formulaic. It’s depressing because it is, potentially, a new art form which, like the Victorian novel, carries the possibility of commanding a higher level of narrative skill than that allowed by film.

Then along came The Killing, and now Borgen, both made by Denamrks public service broadcaster DR, and like millions of others, I sat up. The Killing was revolutionary in that it showed a woman doing a hard, difficult job well; like Prime Suspect it broke new ground in not having its heroine ask for any concessions on account of her being a woman and a mother – but neither did it show her collapsing in the usual way into alcoholism. The plot was in itself gripping, but also opened up in the manner of a Victorian novel to show us the individual lives of the suspects, the grieving parents, the detectives and (a novel twist indeed) the power struggles in local government. Not all of it was plausible, and out of all the various strands, it was this last political element which I found least compelling; so when I heard that Borgen, made by the same company and featuring two of the actors who played Sophie Grabol’s sidekicks, was “like The Killing without the murders” I thought, I’ll give that one a miss, then.

How wrong I was I only discovered a couple of weeks ago. Borgen is TV for grown-ups. It feels like the kind of series I’ve been waiting for all my life. Unlike The West Wing, which a friend pressed on me as a boxed set and which I found risible, it shows a woman rising, by a mixture of fluke, ambition and shrewdness, to become Denmark’s first woman Prime Minister in a Coalition Government. Life followed art shortly after the series was broadcast in Denmark, but that was of secondary interest.

Everything about this series is stunning, from the title sequence, which though clearly influenced by Mad Men’s, captures the heart-breaking joy and idealism of Birgitte, its heroine, as she is first elected, to the attempts to grasp the ungraspable by her spin doctor Kaspar, to the emotional intensity its newscaster Katrine pours into her work as a journalist. Each episode is prefaced by a quote from a politician or philosopher – mostly Machiavelli – to warn us of the corruption of power.

At first it seems as if Birgitte will escape this. She is both charismatic and sensible, a liberal who always follows her instincts even if it seems impolitic to do so; and she is lucky in that her instincts have so far advanced her rather than her opponents. To a British audience, fascinated by the strains on our own Coalition, the parallels are both funny and weird: the Danes seem much more preoccupied by sexual equality and their relations with Greenland than, say, re-organising their Health Service or pursuing bankers for their bonuses. They look like us, only better (there is a striking absence of any ethnic minority in Borgen though the second series of The Killing featured Muslim immigrants) and their language sounds very like ours. It’s like watching a parallel universe, of the kind the liberal intelligentsia of this country loves to point out as superior to our own, not least because Danish TV feels free to portray its own middle class professionals at work and play in a way that the BBC repeatedly cringes away from.

Birgitte is aided in her rise by a man who seems like the perfect husband. He does a fairly serious job lecturing university students about business, and is able to advise her in her early handling of crises. The Nyborgs have no cleaner (improbable in this country) so presumably do all the domestic chores themselves; only when their marriage begins to break down do they discuss getting an au pair or sending their kids to boarding school.

The portrait of the disintegration is painful to watch, and given that I am writing a novel about a couple trying to divorce in the recession, fascinating. I admired Borgen immensely for showing – for the first time that I can recall on TV – Katrine having an abortion and subsequently getting on with her life rather than collapsing into suicidal psychosis. But the toll on Birgitte’s marriage makes you realise yet again how crucial to the Thatcher story is her being married to an older man who had retired by the time she became PM (something omitted from the film The Iron Lady). The husband loses his libido, apparently, and gets it back only when he gets an important new job – which he has to sacrifice due to a conflict of interest with a defence contract Birgitte’s government is trying to pass. The viewer suspects he is having an affair long before she does, but her reaction is amazing: instead of booting him out, she offers an open marriage on condition he supports her in public. It’s the kind of thing we almost expect from male politicians, but seeing a woman offer it in order to keep her job is jaw-dropping.

Several other plot-lines, involving Kaspar’s secret past, and the political horse-trading, are woven in satisfactorily, but the other aspect of this which I find so good is that it actually shows how all-consuming a professional life is, and how in a family, one person has to stay at home for the children. Even in Denmark, where we are asked to believe that the Prime Minister doer her own gardening and school runs, it’s impossible. What hope for us? I don’t know, but I’m gripped.

TOO MANY BOOKS

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

TOO MANY BOOKS

How can anyone have too many books? If you’re a reviewer, this is a stupid question. Every day, my postman brings a giant, bulging mail-bag to my door, filled with the latest children’s books, and quite a few adult literary novels. I get around 100 books a week, and can only choose two to review – and that was in the days when my column in the Times was once a week. Now it’s once every three weeks, it’s a nightmare.

So this particular blog is what I can and can’t cover. I’m very aware that there are only four other people on national newspapers who have this kind of problem, and that to a number of authors we must seem like gatekeepers. It’s often not obvious even to me as a literary writer why some books get reviewed and others don’t.

Most importantly, I can’t review self-published books (so please don’t send me yours) and it’s not my job to read them – it’s an agent’s, or a publisher’s. I can only review what will be released to bookshops nationally, because the Times is a national newspaper.

For my part, a review has nothing to do with whether the book has had a lot of hype, or even advance praise. It has nothing to do with whether the publisher has invited me to an expensive restaurant (something that only annoys me because the money would be far better spent on placing an advertisement in my newspaper, which would then persuade the editor to allow Books more pages), whether there is a launch party or whether my review copy arrives with a free T-shirt, mug, or sparkly sprinkles. Nor does it matter to me whether a book is inspired by a true-life story, or a centenary event, or a heartbreaking news item. All that matters to me is whether the book is good – so good that whether it’s a picture book, a novel for 8-12s or YA fiction, it beats off the competition.

On the subject of which, I have now made it a rule that I’m not going to review an American book unless it’s as remarkable as Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games or Where the Wild Things Are. An American book has already sold to its own, vast market, and whatever a British newspaper says about it is just the icing on the cake. American authors, like American movies, are competition for the home-grown, and in these dire economic times it’s British authors who need the publicity. By and large, it’s British authors who think outside convention and come up with something extraordinary anyway. But if I get a press release telling me that the book has already been on the New York Times best-seller list then why on earth am I going to add to this?

I am not going to review books about tweenagers’ OMG dilemmas over boys and fashion, cute animal stories about fluffy kittens, or anything more about vampires, angels, werewolves, ghosts and dystopias in which only teenagers survive to rule the world. Some people confuse books with sausages. I don’t.

Nor am I going to keep reviewing series. There are some I, just like millions of children, am especially fond of – whether this is Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider books, or Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon. They have done phenomenally well and established themselves as a brand and a bench-mark of quality; but if you want the latest, you’ll have to go to a bookshop to find it, or join the author’s Facebook page, because though I may have given them their first push, they no longer need my help. Of course if a book is really good then I long for a sequel too. But from now on, all I can do is mention it in passing because there just isn’t space.

If, by the way, you happen to think that children’s literature IS a literature, rather than a genre to be on rotation with Crime and Thrillers, then do by all means write to the Editor of the Times, James Harding (james.harding@thetimes.co.uk) and let him know. Nobody else has the power to decide on a rethink, but all the cross and bewildered readers, parents, grandparents, librarians, literary scouts and publishers can change matters should they be so inspired. Meanwhile, I only have 600 words every three weeks. I can slice that into covering 6 books in 100 words – barely enough for three sentences – or 2 books in 300 words or any combination in between.

So that gets rid of about half my mailbag. I have to carry those six sackfuls out of my house myself by the way, so if my postman feels cross, I feel crosser. No matter how often I ask not to be sent them, I still get endless reissues, board book versions of picture books, duplicates and triplicates of paperbacks whose hardbacks I’ve already reviewed (or not). Please, stop these! It’s great for all the local State schools around me, and Oxfam, but a waste of resources otherwise.

The really heart-breaking thing is what to do about the remaining 20 or so books that are really good. So here are some further pleas.

The two things that I, like any parent, look for above all are great picture books for pre-schoolers, and great books for younger children, ideally 6-9s. Books for teenagers are really distractions from the classics that, in my view, they ought to be tackling from 13+. Of course teens need fun and fantasy too, but they aren’t going to pay much attention to reviews, just to their peers. Yet in recent years there has been a rush of talent to address these age groups. While I completely see the point in the case of authors as good as Meg Rosoff or Anthony McGowan, far too much YA stuff is just turkey Twizzlers for the brain. Of course if you get a Twilight or a Hunger Games fan-base going then you’ve hit the jack-pot commercially. But as a critic, what I’d really like is more for the audience that Beatrix Potter, CS Lewis, E Nesbit and Frances Hodgson Burnett addressed. I’d like more original books which are for children with imagination, initiative, a sense of humour and a sense of prose style.

Strangely, this is exactly what I get least of.

WRITING FOR TABLOIDS

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

WRITING FOR TABLOIDS

Let me start by saying that, although I principally write novels and review them, I do write occasionally for a tabloid. The Daily Mail, commonly called The Daily Hate by the people I know and like, is both one of the most admired and the most hated of the tabloids. Admired because, in among all the fluff and celebrity gossip which is currently being excoriated by the Leveson enquiry, it does break real news stories and employs some of the sharpest pens in the business. Hated because it is widely perceived as everything that a liberal, intelligent person should detest.

Nor am I going to defend that side of it, although Janet Malcom’s famous words about the indefensibility of all journalism is one that should be written up in letters of fire. I write books and book reviews for love, but I also need to make money – not a huge amount, but just the national average minimum wage. Without the odd piece for the Mail, I simply would not have that. In addition, the section for which I write perhaps three or four times a year, Femail, seems to be edited by people who are professional, polite, pleasant and thoughtful. Even if they chop my sentences in half and commit solecisms such as inserting “And” at the start of sentences, they have excellent subs and careful lawyers.

Yes, they have an agenda, as do I. What people never know is the number of times I say “no” to a commission, even if it is financially tempting. I say “no” about five times more often than I say “yes”, sometimes because it’s something I feel is ethically wrong, or because I don’t feel I’m the right person to write the piece.

A long time ago, my father wrote for tabloids like The Express, when it was a fairly respectable newspaper of its ilk. He had little choice: he had given up his job as a distinguished columnist on the Johannesburg Star, as had my mother, as a result of fighting apartheid. Although he was British, his entire career had been founded in South Africa, and he had no contacts in London. Nor had he gone to university, which was the pre-requisite for joining newspapers such as The Times (for which I now write regularly.) He was just a bright, self-educated, brave man who had survived things like being blown up in World War Two, and who had such charm that people like Noel Coward and Gracie Fields adored him. He was completely fearless, never smart, and I’m afraid he tended to be more polite to dustmen than to dukes. (Though he had a life-long loathing of London cabbies and waiters who failed to bring cold white wine.)

But my father also had a strong ethical sense which, unlike many of today’s hacks, he never forgot. He hated “door-stepping” people, and passed up on the story of his career when he found himself on holiday on Capri just as the first whiff of the Profumo scandal was breaking. The Profumos were also there having, as it were, a second honeymoon after Jack Profumo had privately confessed all to his wife and she had decided to stand by him despite the affair with Christine Keeler. My father was rung on Capri by the editor of the Daily Express and asked to ask him about the rumours of an affair were true. But he, having seen how besotted with each other they were, and loathing that kind of thing, said there could be no truth in it, and refused…..

My father had all kinds of ruses with which he got out of asking questions he found despicable. One of them was to ring the Speaking Clock, if his editor was standing over him demanding he call some aristocrat or other to ask whether she could confirm she was sleeping with, say, her valet. The voice on the other end sounded so impeccably posh that when my father said, “She denies everything”, it was believed. In the end, my father left his job before he got fired, because he hated the ruthless blood-lust of the reporting pack. He was asked to “doorstep” some poor person whose son had been killed, and he found he just couldn’t. He told me that he wrote a note and put it through their door saying that he was ashamed of the way the Press were behaving, and walked away.

At the time, he had two small daughters and a sick wife to support, in one of the coldest winters in living memory. He went down with ‘flu, and for a while things became pretty bad. I remember not having all kinds of simple things like sweets and nice clothes for much of my early childhood, which I think was to do with this. We certainly suffered (not for the first or last time) because of his principles. When I think of what must be driving journalists on to commit the deplorable acts of intrusion and spying on people in their private lives, I do feel a grain of pity mixed with the contempt. It’s a terrifying thing to know that you’re only as good as your last story, even if that story is a piece of filth. It takes a lot of courage to refuse.

But then a miracle happened. Somehow, a very distinguished journalist called James Cameron (whose name lives on in the annual James Cameron Prize) and who had also worked at the Express heard about the story, and told my father that there was a job going in Italy, in the Press Office of the UN. So my family were transported out of the cold and grey of London, to Paradise, where he lived for the rest of his life.

English v Russian novels

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

English v Russian novelists

I returned home in a rather cross mood last night, having had a conversation with George Walden, judge of the Russian Booker. The setting was a jolly Faber Finds party for Marc Polonksy's book USSR, and not surprisingly the room at Pushkin House was heaving with "expatskis", Russianists and former Russia correspondents, as well as a few old friends like myself. Amid the Soviet era canapes cunningly recreated by a caterer, noisy Russian music and enormous quantities of vodka, people got down to discussing such burning topics of the days as Abramovitch v Berezovsky, and how rich the best show in town is making various English lawyers.

Anyway, George Walden and I got into conversation about contemporary Russian and British literature, fired by an enjoyable piece I'd read by Edward Docx in this month's Prospect http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/10/among-the-russians/, in which he describes the passion and seriousness with which Russian novelists address their art. One key paragraph jumped out at me in it :"We are democratically privileged in Britain and this means that our writers tend to “matter” less because—to oversimplify—there is fundamentally less to fight for politically. Most of our writers do not give voice to the disenfranchised because, compared to Russia, most people in Britain are, well, enfranchised. Conversely, the best of the Russian novelists are not primarily entertainers (although they are this too), but also political parsers, revolutionaries, elucidators, protestors, “soldiers” as Igor puts it. They take up their work more seriously because there are more serious issues to be taken up. And because the novel—not the newspaper, nor the theatre, nor film, nor television—has always been the best place to say the unsayable in Russia."

This is perfectly true, though it seems to me that there is a good deal in our culture still deemed unsayable. I was absolutely shocked earlier this year when, for instance, one of the judges of the Orange Prize told me that the reason why Emma Donaghue's extraordinary novel Room hadn't won was because it would have been too divisive and controversial a choice. (I don't think I misheard this.) There are also plenty of serious issues to discuss, as the protesters outside St Paul’s and the rioters well know, but rather less enthusiasm for political fiction. Anyway, George Walden, who is a very clever chap who resembles one of those dangerously attractive Nazis in a Speilberg film, was bent on insisting that contemporary British novelists are all mediocre unlike Russian novelists, and that one reason for this is that the Russians never trot out the usual rubbish about this year being a wonderful year for fiction. "They'll say to me, 'Nothing good this year,' or 'There's not much good but there are one or two novels that are interesting,'" he said. “Whereas in this country, fiction is never addressed with that level of honesty.”

As someone who sees present-day fiction as a succession of heroic failures, I might have been expected to be less annoyed by this than I was. Perhaps it's my nature to put more emphasis on the heroic than the failure part; in any case, I also feel that many works of art aren't understood or appreciated at the time they become public, and that that mysterious judge Posterity is more impartial than those sitting on prize panels. I count myself lucky to be alive in a time when a play as good as Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and a novel as good as Ian McEwan's Atonement were written; and there are a handful of other books, like Lord of the Flies, which will last as classics. Otherwise, though I’ve read an enormous number of contemporary novels which have been fascinating, charming, gripping and funny, the jury is pretty well out. I’m fairly sure that JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun will last, but am also fairly sure that not one novel that has won the Booker Prize will – not even those that I thought pretty good.

Too often, our fiction does seem to be about pure entertainment – and yet, the other frustrating aspect of this is that a serious novel which tells a story, and which has a plot, is dismissed as middlebrow. For far too many readers, the literary has become synonymous with the deadly dull. As Philip Pullman has said, “In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They’re embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would.” I remember telling my children the story of Jane Eyre, among others, when they were under ten; it was so exciting that they forgot all about the fact that, at the time, we were sitting on an aeroplane in a storm. Fiction’s job is above all to get us through life’s storms. The greatest compliment ever paid me about one of my own books came from a woman I knew very slightly who told me that she took my second novel, A Private Place, into hospital with her, and was so keen to find out what happened next that she delayed being put under by the anaesthetic.

What one loves about classic Russian fiction is not so much its plots but its characters, who live and feel and speak to us as people we know and whose lives we care about. I am still enthralled by Irene Nemirovsky (whose photograph is reproduced above), the Russian Jewish novelist murdered in the Holocaust; it's clear that she learnt almost everything about how to depict thew human heart from Tolstoy, and might well have equalled him in Suite Francaise had she lived. Her novels are also, however, stories - packed with passion, hatred and the desire for revenge - and even lesser works like The Dogs and the Wolves (which I chose last year for the Radio 4 programme A Good Read) grip a reader.

Despite an enthusiasm for classic Russian novels and plays, I haven’t read any contemporary Russian fiction apart from Boris Akunin’s amusingFandorin detective series (I tried and gave up on the much-hyped Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, feeling that, as it wasn’t actually as good as War And Peace, life is too short.) Maybe it is stuffed with novelists who, due to their political seriousness, are also great story-tellers. But whatever George Walden says, I somehow doubt it.

The lack of women reviewers

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Last night I went to the Authors' Club in Frith St, Soho to debate the lack of women reviewers with the Independent on Sunday's Literary Editor, Katy Guest. Ms Guest and I had not met before, though she had impressed me by commissioning me to review Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child after I pointed out, in a Facebook debate, how certain men were never reviewed by women. I was indeed the only woman to review that novel (and probably the only one trying to write my review while being interrupted every five minutes by children having hysterics over their exams - think of having a pneumatic drill going off at irregular but repeated intervals.)

There are many disquieting features about the reviewing culture in the UK, but the most striking remains the way that half of the human race is so persisitently under-represented. Although the Guardian and the Daily Mail come the closest at achieving an equal number of men and women reviewers in their books pages, the vast majority seem to think it fine to keep reviews by women, and books by women to about 10-20%. Needless to say, the number of women reviewing books by men is even smaller: in the last month, only Jeffrey Eugenidies's latest novel seemed to merit female attention. It's title is The Marriage Plot. Go figure, as Americans say.

Yet women buy almost twice as many books of all kinds, according to such research as is available. (I am indebted to research by Mslexia magazine, and by Bookmarketing's survey, supported by the Arts Council for this information.) We are just as interested in the new Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan as men,and much more likely to buy it. Yet if a woman wants to review a novel by either of these, she is likely to be disappointed. I should know - for although I used to review McEwan before he won the Booker, after it I was simply not allowed to. I asked many papers, many times, and believe that there could be no reason for my rejection but sexism.

As a result, not a single voice was heard objecting to the risible scene in McEwan's Saturday in which the hero's naked daughter deflects a would-be rapist and stalker by reciting Dover Beach. While women up and down the country were howling with laughter at this improbable scene, male critics swallowed it without a murmur - until John Banville, a rival on the Booker short-list that year, pointed it out in an American publication, several months later. The spectacle of men closing ranks in this way does a deep disservice to readers, and indeed to authors. No serious writer, and McEwan is probably the best we have, wishes to be addressing only one half of humanity.

Some of the best literary critics are or were women. Virginia Woolf, Queenie Leavis, Janet Malcom, Alison Lurie, Michiko Kakutani, Elizabeth Hardwick, Elaine Showalter, Zadie Smith, Marina Warner, Natasha Walter, Jane Shilling, AS Byatt - need I say more? So why is it still such a struggle?

Katy's information as to how she commissions reviews was interesting in this, and many other respects. After she had written a column asking where all the women reviewers were, several critics, both new and established, reminded her of their existence. She commissioned them, and in so doing discovered what every responsible Literary Editor should, a number of talented new women reviewers.

Her view on why men outnumber women in Books Pages came down to men's perisistence and organisation. The former email her once a month with a handful of titles they would like to cover, and an explanation of why they are interested in each. Women are more likely to wait to be asked. In my own experience, this isn't the case - after 21 years of writing fiction and reviewing in many national newspapers, I still ask, and still get turned down, or sometimes don't even get a reply. Sometimes, the replies I have had (not least from women literary editors) have been pretty brusque. There is an attitude of suspicion as to why I might be interested in reviewing when I am a novelist - something I'm sure neither Philip Hensher nor DJ Taylor ever encounter. The notion that you might be just as deeply interested in literary culture as a man, just as knowledgeable and articulate is apparently not conceivable if you are female. (The rudest, I may add, was the LRB which to this day has something like one woman critic in twenty - and which is edited by a woman.)

Why does it matter? Well, it matters for a number of reasons. If you take the conventional view of female interests, women do not see the domestic as less interesting as the battlefield; indeed, it is another kind of battlefield. An outstanding novel that achieved belated recognition through the Orange Prize, and now through film, is Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin; I was one of the very few critics to review it (in the New Statesman) before it appeared on the Orange long-list, and called it 'Desperate Housewives as rewritten by Euripides'. True, it was published by a small independent publisher, Serepnt's Tail, but it's exactly the kind of thing that a male-dominated literary establishment overlooks despite its relevance to all kinds of contemporary preoccupations.

But women are also interested in a huge range of other subjects, if my visits to book groups are anything to go by. Biography, history, science, film, politics all interest us quite as much as fiction - so why are the Books pages of, say, the Sunday Times still publishing virtually the same critics they did twenty years ago? If books are worth noticing at all, they should not be sunk in a moribund culture.

What I would like to see is a conscious moving towards parity between the sexes - between books by women, and books covered by women - in all national newspapers and magazines. I would like to see literature by men reviewed by women, and vice versa, as a matter of policy. There is no shortage of able women capable of covering serious books in all subjects - given the preponderance of low-paid, highly-qualified women in academia, it should be painfully easy to find ones to whom the standard £150 fee is welcome. There is simply a shortage of will and energy.

DOGS VS CATS FOR AUTHORS

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

DOGS VS CATS FOR AUTHORS

I am not, I have to admit, a cat-lover. Before cat-lovers throw up their hands in horror and decide this to be the mark of the Anti-Christ, let me say that it's nothing personal. I've known and liked a few cats in my time, from our family tortoiseshell to my dear mother-in-law's Siamese. It's just that I'm madly allergic to felines, so much so that were I to spend any time with one again I'd die of asthma.

When something makes you mortally sick, it's not surprising you view it, and those associated with it, with a certain distaste. No doubt those allergic to peanuts felt the same way about Jimmy Carter. So I have to confess that a cat, and a cat-lover play a sinister role in the new novel I'm writing at the moment....my justification being that cats have had such a very good press from novelists ranging from PD James to Dickens that they have effectively become the writer's pet of choice.

Now it's perfectly true that cats and authors often share a certain self centredness (if one is anthropomophically inclined) not to mention a fondness for fish, lying around in warm places and a deplorable interest in prolonged torment of smaller creatures. We like being stroked, and spoilt and generally made much of, and we especially like walking off for no apparent reason but boredom and superciliousness, leaving adorers discomfited. But none of these are especially good traits to have, and it is my belief that the author who succumbs to living like a cat quickly becomes intolerably obnoxious, not to mention depressed.

For although non authors see the writer's life as an enviable one, the fact is that its physical and mental toll is not good unless we counter our cat-like inclinations by having a dog. To me, a dog is the perfect writer's companion. Not only is he (or she) unswervingly devoted and attentive as an audience and companion, but he forces us out of the house for at least half an hour of daily exercise and fresh air. The benefits of this are incalculable. You simply cannot sink into a gloom while your dog is busily investigating another dog's bottom, rolling in fox poo, chasing rabbits or trotting obediently alongside you, the Boswell to your Johnson. A walk with a dog is always interesting, if occasionally exasperating, whereas a cat strikes me as a very limited companion.

Cat lovers like to wax lyrical about how their cat keeps them company by lying on their manuscript, but my own dog goes one better by lying on my feet, which makes them wonderfully warm during long periods of immobility. Cats are ruinous to furniture (what my husband's family call "downholstering") but dogs make little impression if clean, and actually prefer their own baskets to sofas or beds, as long as these are comfortable. The greater danger is that you or your family develop an allergy to your pet; but I was assured after consulting the London Allergy Clinic, that a small neutered male dog is a very low risk. The English habit of sleeping with dogs is not one I subscribe to unless you live in a freezing home and have no love life, but otherwise our love of dogs is one of the best things about us - though I do wish we'd chosen a more attractive breed than the bulldog to be our national emblem.

People often worry about the responsibility involved in having a dog, and it is true, ours has ruined long distance holidays for a good few years - though given the state of the planet and the economy that is no bad thing. I hate being away for longer than a week, which feels almost as bad as leaving a toddler given the incomprehension and mourning. However, I think having a dog tends to bring out the best in people. It forces those who take it responsibly to be more sociable, more regular in their habits and (unless the type who thinks of a dog as a weapon) more peaceable. If you are curious about people, as most novelists tend to be, a dog is a perfect excuse for having a conversation. It's odd that the only classic detective I can think of who has one is Tintin, whose adorable Snowy always plays a crucial role in chewing through our hero's bonds or warning him of danger.

I am afraid that if I discover someone has a dog, I always think better of them immediately, and instinctively. I can quite see why every American President has had to have a First Dog; nothing became the dreadful Bush so much as his chocolate labrador. David Cameron, as far as I know, has only a cat in Downing St, and that is to hunt down an infestation of rats. So far it has failed dismally. A terrier would have been a better choice. But any dog, especially a rescue one, would send a postive message to the electorate about reliability, fidelity and honesty. Or maybe it's too late for all that anyway.

The only authors I know who have dogs are all, as it happens, children's writers. One, Meg Rosoff, has written a wonderful novel called There is No Dog but has two elegant lurchers called Blue And Juno; far from saying, like Richard Dawkins, that there is no God her theory (entirely plausible) is that the reason why the world is in such a mess is that it's been created and managed by an eternal teenager. Do dogs perhaps make one believe in god? I don't know. All I can say is that, unlike cats, they make me feel life might not be so bad after all.

Middle-class novelists

Tue, 4 Oct 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Middle class novelists are much-derided and rejected, according to William Nicholson. The Gladiator screenwriter and much-feted children's author of The Windsinger has had less luck with his adult fiction, rudely rejected as being overly concerned with the kind of people who drive 4x4s. What with the return of Downton Abbey on our TV screens and the departure of one of my children for university, I have been pondering this.

Where I got myself to Cambridge by lugging my school trunk from Hampshire to Clare College on the train, my darling daughter had us to fetch and carry her stuff even though she's only moved three bus-stops away.

Nor was she the exception: I kept seeing other anxious parents helping their kids unload mountains of duvets, clothes and even pot-plants from their own cars. Although my contemporary Jeanette Winterson has said how struck she was by the other undergraduates arriving at Oxford with this sort of assistance while she drove a van with all her worldly goods there, I don't think I was particularly exceptional in being expected to stand on my own two feet and buy myself what I needed out of a small grant. Yet three years later, when my sister went up to Oxford, my mother not only accompanied her there and bought her everything she needed, but actually repainted her dingy room.

My family were middle class, but somehow between the 1970s and the 1980s, life changed. My children, unlike myself, have not become short sighted from poor reading lamps or constantly ill from dirty, cold bedrooms. Children take access to hot showers and cool drinks as a right. They have never seen the chilblains and bronchitis that plagued my generation as a matter of course - let alone the often fatal illnesses of which Maurice Sendak complained in a recent interview in The Times.

What effect will this level of comfort have on the next generation of artists and writers? I can only hazard a guess, but while my generation pretty much expected to be almost as uncomfortable as the Bohemians in Puccini's opera, this lot are unlikely to put up with a creative life that does not involve hot showers and central heating. A few choose to live the hard-core Green life, with only woodburners to stave off winter chills - but I bet they still have electricity to fire up computers.

Of course, a lot of writers have played up just how poor they are/were in pursuit of their art. I well remember one contemporary who was feted and given a prize largely, it appeared, by claiming he'd lived as a tramp. Those who knew him (including a former girlfriend who is one of my closest friends) found this puzzling because, to the best of their knowledge he'd never been homeless, and had perhaps spent one night wandering the streets.

I've certainly had periods in my life when younger where I felt quite desperate for money, and, while just about supported on the dole, been unable to buy much beyond bread, milk and eggs to eat. Like Kate Atkinson (feted by newspapers when she won the Whitbread as a cleaner or a barmaid, I recall) I've done rotten jobs for low pay. I didn't make a fuss about this because it was what I expected to encounter as a young writer, and now I'm glad I had this time, unpleasant though it was. If you've never experienced the grind of poverty, or how fearful it can make you, it's almost impossible to imagine. But EM Forster's words in Howards End about how the Schelgel sisters stand on a rock of those whose income is a certain amount a year, and how that affects their thoughts and attitudes has always resounded in my heart. It's what I keep returning to as a novelist, and why I keep mentioning how much things cost to my characters. Even if that information dates rapidly, it matters.

So, do readers still want to read about middle-class people. To judge by the Booker short-list, no: but I think they do, as the success of novelists from Trollope to Alexander McCall Smith testifies. However, to me a novel which is wholly preoccupied with one class (however broadly this is now interpreted) feels airless. In real life, people from all kinds of different backgrounds interact; strangely, it's only in enjoyably toshy TV series like Downton Abbey that we get to see any of this.

So while I'm glad that for now, my efforts over the past two months mean my own children are screened from not being able to buy a suit for the sixth form or a good reading light for uni, I also hope that they find out what it's like to be one of the have-nots. Personally, it's an experience which I believe every politician should be made to undergo for a period of at least three months before getting into power. But then I'm only a novelist, and novelists long ago lost what little influence we ever had.

A response to the Riots

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

So much has been written in the past week concerning the UK riots that my response has been to stop writing the novel I have now half-finished and start a novella about them. I hope this won't disappoint fans waiting to find out what happens next to some characters - because their stories will be brought forward into this one. Meanwhile, I'm posting up my responses to a questionnaire sent me by Alexandria Molony of Consoul Magazine in Perth Australia. I've been especially pleased by the thoughtful and enthusiastic response to Hearts and Minds by Australian readers, but those in other countries who have been disturbed by recent events may possibly find this interesting too.

Q. In your novel "Hearts and Minds" published in 2009, you presented a depiction of the struggles such as oppression and racism faced by the immigrant underclass in British society. In your opinion, do you think that these are contributing factors to the outbreak of rioting and why/why not?

A. The struggles faced by the immigrant underclass are real, and can’t be underestimated. However, the riots were committed as far as anyone can tell not only by second and third generation immigrant Britons but by white Britons too. There is a vast simmering problem involving our state education system, a loss of respect for authority and parenting which all play their part; it’s not just race. Generally, as far as immigrants are concerned, those who have the energy to get out of their country of origin to come here to find peace and work are the last people who want to get involved in criminal activities. The problem is that, when an economy stops growing, the ladder to prosperity gets kicked away and it’s their children and grandchildren who feel growing resentment. However, these riots were also exacerbated by weak policing, and the loss of two of the Met’s most senior policemen following the News International phone hacking scandal, which encouraged professional criminals to think they could get away with theft. It was a perfect storm – which isn’t to say that it won’t happen again.

Q. Do you think the political/social elite have played a role in contributing to the decline of morality in British society? What roles have they played (corruption, exploitation)? Should they take responsibility for having played a role?

A. I think it’s too easy to lay every ounce of blame on the heads of politicians. It doesn’t help that there is no aspect of civic authority which is at present untarnished. Successive Governments, not just the present Right-wing one, have failed to stop the corrupt from feathering their own nests, and have failed to help those in most need of it. I don’t myself believe that everyone who goes into politics wants to screw the poor – I think that many both on the Left and the Right have a genuine wish to govern responsibly, but it’s how this is interpreted that counts. While an economy continues to grow, as ours did up to 2009, the wretchedness of those at the bottom of society can be obscured. Many of the people on whom my characters in Hearts and Minds were drawn have gone on to not only survive but flourish, and that’s not because Labour were better at running the country than the Conservatives, it’s because the whole of the West enjoyed a boom.

Q. David Cameron has proposed a helping scheme to 120,000 'trouble' families in response to the rioting. In your opinion, will this approach will be effective in helping mend British society or are there deeper underlying issues that need to be resolved?

A. Any money helps, even if it’s too little and too late. The deepest underlying issues however concern our schools, because they offer the only window of opportunity to reverse some of the worst cases of parenting a child is likely to get, and to give a child new prospects. To me, the most disturbing passages in H&M are actually those involving Ian, and his struggles at the Samuel Smiles “sink school” where pupils don’t want to learn and are gang members in the making. He can’t fight the system single-handedly, nobody can, but there are one or two real-life Heads of state schools who are making a real difference to such children. (Ironically, one is an Old Etonian.) Those interested in these matters could look up the transformation of the school called Mossbourne, once one of the worst in the country, serving some of the poorest children, which has now got 10 pupils into Oxbridge. I’m quite interested in bringing Ian back at some future date because this kind of battle interests me a lot.

Q. In the past, David Cameron has faced allegations of "social elitism" with 3 members of shadow cabinet and 15 members of his front bench team coming from Eton College where he attended school. Do you think that this impairs his ability to rule a country coming from such a narrow base?

A. I’m going to go against received opinion here and say that I’m very glad we have a Prime Minister and Cabinet which has benefited from the best education Britain can offer, and that I find it quite heartening that rich men still go into politics rather than making yet more money for themselves in the City.

However, I do think that it’s almost impossible for people born into wealth to really empathise let alone imagine what it’s like to be poor – how frightened and constricted and powerless it makes you feel. Do you need to understand what poverty is like in order to be an effective Government? Some would say no – what matters is making the right decisions for the country in order for more and more people to be lifted out of poverty. The mess this country is in wasn’t created by the Conservatives, or even by Labour’s Gordon Brown. It was created and sustained by the America of George Bush, one of the richest and most privileged world leaders since Roman antiquity.

Q. Do you think that the Western media portrayal of the UK riots has been a fair and accurate one? Why/Why not?

A. We’re still in the process of digesting the riots, and because they have so many sources everyone has a different opinion about their cause. Overall, I’d say to Australians that this is still a very safe country to come to, with a strong committment to peace, order and justice. Pictures of impoverished suburbs in flames look horrifying, and were dreadful for those involved but the reason why they are news is that they were so unusual. In Paris, that kind of thing happens far more often.

Q. In your opinion, what are some ways that British youth could use these events to become innovative and help to advocate change?

A. British youth is struggling with their own anxiety and despair over the rise in tuition fees, the lack of jobs and the inability to find somewhere of their own to live until they are in their late thirties. I think there are jobs, if you look for them and are prepared to do pretty grotty jobs for low wages and live in crowded accommodation. That’s OK if, like the Aussie characters in Hearts and Minds, you’re only passing through and experiencing the Antipodean rite of passage. It’s another matter if it’s the whole of your youth.

I certainly think that our best and brightest may be coming your way soon rather than tough it out at home for the next five years. But having emerged from university in the last big recession of the early 1980s, my hope is that desperation will also make the young braver and more creative and innovative, as we were. We’ve got a fantastically creative, inventive streak which needs more support – especially in the arts. So if the young were to push for anything, it’s for the enabling of small businesses, which are the seed corn of future prosperity. Meanwhile, those of us who are older have to stop the incessant disparagement of the young. The young I see now may have multiple piercings, tattoos and awful manners but they work harder and display less prejudice towards others than anybody.

Q. In your opinion, do other Western countries such as USA face similar threats of rioting among youth with growing racial tensions and inequality becoming prevalent in Western societies?

A. Yes, I do. We’ve seen this kind of thing happening in France, which historically is more inflammable than the UK. In the US, violent crime has sunk to a historic low for reasons which nobody quite understands; however, all of the more developed economies are showing fault-lines as the gulf between rich and poor widens. We need to stop wasting human capital, for our own sake as well as theirs. The recent atrocities in Norway have strengthened the determination of its society, especially its youth, to resist racial hatred – but Norway is one of the richest countries in Europe. My great fear is that something similar could happen in a more impoverished country, and instead of reconciling, deepen rifts. Destruction always looks easier than creation as a solution. The extraordinarily wise and humane response of the Muslim father whose murdered son died in his arms in Birmingham, asking for people to stop rioting, was a turning point. We need more people like him to speak up all over the world. One of my regrets in H&M is that I did not explore the character of the Muslim father whose son is a would-be suicide bomber. It’s something I want to return to in the near future.

Q. Do you think it's fair for people to blame budget cuts as being an underlying cause for the rioting?

A. No, I think it’s insulting to the vast majority of people who are poor and honest, and who are suffering most of all from the destruction of their homes and businesses. I don’t think those who were rioting were students rejected by universities or those on more than £40,000 who’d lost child benefit. But I do think that when people feel they have nothing to lose, they’re going to be much more tempted by the idea of grabbing something for nothing; and then weaker characters who do have more to lose feel that if everyone else is doing something bad, they can do it too.

There’s a character I’ve been developing ever since A Vicious Circle, which is another novel about London life which readers might enjoy, called Ivo Sponge. He starts off as venal, and only gradually discovers (through love, in Love in Idleness) what he really is. All my novels are really about understanding how crucial it is to make up your own mind about what is good and right and true, no matter what the prevailing consensus is. These decisions are not easy to make, and will not necessarily make you more popular or rich, or at least not at once. But they are the only way any individual is likely to find happiness and freedom from fear.

Travelling Light

Mon, 8 Aug 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

TRAVELLING LIGHT

There are few advertisements that change your life, but for me, one of them is an old American Express poster featuring a young woman’s bottom with nothing in the back pocket but a toothbrush and a credit card. Add a passport, and this represents my ideal of luggage – but then, unlike some, I grew up abroad, with a family which once had a propensity for over-packing that reached epic proportions.

My father, like my husband, thought that wheeled luggage was unmanly. This resulted not only in several hernias as he laboured to lift elephant sized suitcases of indescribable hideosity, but in his having his pocket picked whenever we travelled through Naples to Capri. It also meant quite a few years waiting for airport carousels to deliver cases that never came, lost wardrobes, lost books and lost tempers. Daddy was a romantic, and in his mind he was always in some 1930s film rather like the beginning of Murder on the Orient Express, with every traveller dressed in crisp white linen, wafting effortlessly along, while uniformed porters loaded Louis Vuitton steamer trunks between salutes. My mother, a legendary beauty, had come from South Africa to Italy at the age of 21 a fabulous wardrobe-style trunk with hangers and drawers for her 1950s dresses. Being ravishing, she had no difficulty in getting this carried for her but it was another matter entirely for the rest of us.

At a certain point, my mother put her foot down and insisted we all travel with hand-luggage – but this was impossible given that I was travelling to and from boarding school three times a year. I managed to leave most of my clothes behind in a trunk (one of the most useful items of furniture I’ve ever possessed, and one which followed me through my life until it collapsed from parrot guano, another story) but of course books defeated this. If you are determined to carry a Riverside Shakespeare with you then you have your work cut out – or did. As I travel most frequently on the Ryanair flight to Perugia to seem my elderly mother, and Ryanair has a strict 10lb limit on hand-luggage, I sometimes found myself with little more than a change of underpants.

The Kindle has set us book-lovers free at a stroke, and now that I have one I can’t praise it enough. It won’t do much for parents who want to read to small children – here, the feel of a book is essential, and you need to bring at least 10 picture books – but for travelling readers of 8+, a Kindle is sublime. Instead of packing a bag with 20 or so paperbacks, you just have a single light gadget. Pure magic! You can even change the print-size, which for older readers is a huge boon.

Packing light is possible partly due to such technological advances – thanks to mobile phones, you don’t even need to bring a camera, and if you do it’s no bigger than a pack of cigarettes – but also to common sense. My own family have spent two weeks in South Africa, in winter, living out of Samsonite hand-luggage, and we didn’t even get through all our clean clothes. This is how:

Everything liquid, from contact lens solution to shampoos, can be bought in miniature or decanted. It can also in the case of sun-cream, be bought in the country of destination. Any cosmetics counter like Clarins will ply you with miniature creams and mascaras if you buy one thing from them. You don’t need to load yourself with a handful of transparent plastic bags when going through check-out points.

If a woman, take one handbag, ideally a flattish kind that will pack inside hand-luggage. Mine is made from Osprey, and as I loathe handbags I hope this is recommendation enough. It’s big enough to fit a paperback, purse, Muji folding umbrella and make-up in, but small enough to do for evening. Longchamps do a brilliant black nylon bag which folds up into a pocket size; every stylish teenage girl wants or has one, though they aren’t cheap.

Take ONE pair of shoes, ideally flat ones like sandals or ballerina pumps, apart from those you wear, which should be as comfortable as possible for walking in. I’m assuming you don’t have a shoe fetish. If you do, buying shoes in a new country is actually quite fun (unless it’s Japan and you have size 9 feet like myself). Really cheap ones like flip-flops or espadrilles can even be left behind. What is just as essential in my view is a hat. Few hats bought abroad look anything but ridiculous (and I should know, I’ve got a whole wall of them from all over the world). The very best, though they cost a fortune, are real Panama hats which can be rolled up. The Daily Telegraph sell an acceptable cheapo version on their shop website but a proper Panama will make anyone look wonderful. The entire English reputation for elegance abroad rests on the Panama hat. And please, please if travelling with children, pack two hats. We all know about the dangers of skin cancer now, but I still see too many toddlers and babies without a bonnet.

But what about clothes? The capsule wardrobe, beloved of Vogue, is the key here, and having worked on a glossy magazine in Vogue House a million years ago I learnt from much-travelled models and fashion editors. Stick to two colours (one of them black or navy or white) and you can’t go wrong. I live in trousers, so black linen pants work best for me in summer, with a fresh cotton or linen top every day. These pack to almost paper flatness, and good ones can be bought inexpensively from many chain-shops, from M&S to Gap. Underneath this you can wear a pretty camisole vest, and over it a thin cardigan, or pashmina. The best are of course cashmere, and Uniqlo do jumpers that are under £50 if you are smart at scouring their website. Pack one jumper and one cardigan, ideally the same colour, and you’ll be warm enough for winter as long as you also have a raincoat. A cardigan, if long, can double as a dressing-gown. Silk is also amazingly cheap these days, and worth finding provided it isn’t ruined by furbelows. The simpler the cut, the more versatile it is to wear. Personally, I like very plain Italian-style clothes, and if classic designers like Marina Rinaldi are too expensive, then on-line stores like Artigiano do good substitutes, especially in their sales.

The plainer a dress or top, the more it can be made to look fantastic with a necklace or brooch. I’m not nearly as stylish as many women writers, and have a dread of looking as Stella Gibbons put it, “all arty-craft around the neck and ankles”, but there are now such fabulous necklaces available from Top Shop, Libertys, Wall and so on that you can have a lot of fun. Just make sure they are light.

Holiday packing should be part of the delicious anticipation of a week or more of pure leisure, so you don’t want to be washing underwear – or not too much. I think five days’ worth of clean smalls, and a bit of hand-washing is fine to bring, along with a bikini or two. What Italians call a pareo and the UK calls a sarong, ie a large, fine piece of cloth which can also act as a blind in emergencies is really essential. All pyjamas or night-gowns should be light cotton; the nicest I’ve found are by Bonsoir and Cath Kidston.

Anyone with a teenage daughter knows that all of the above is easier said than done. I’ve had battles to remove an absolutely essential complete set of pink hair straighteners, iPod decks, lap-tops, three pairs of platform shoes, thick velvet jackets and several boxed sets of DVDS in my time; recently, however, my 18 year-old daughter paid me the ultimate compliment of getting me to pack her ruck-sack for a 6 week Inter-railing tour of Europe. She hasn’t run out of clothes yet….and she has now learnt to leave paperback books behind when she’s finished them. Travelling light can risk the odd panic, of course; I always find I’ve left something crucial out and brought too many trousers or dresses, just like everyone else. However, I’d so much rather not have the back-ache and the heart-ache involved in waiting for another giant suitcase to come creaking round a carousel (if at all) that it’s worth it. Even my husband has accepted that wheeled luggage is not totally despicable in an Alpha Male, provided he carries his, and mine, up any flight of stairs. But then, it does only weigh 10 kilos.

Part of what is so enjoyable about holidays is, after all, the feeling of leaving all your cares behind you and taking only what Chaucer called a bag of needments. That airy, unburdened feeling is what cheers me up most about the thought of death, when we can take nothing with us. It’s also pretty good when enjoying life, too.

Going to the Queen's Garden Party

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

THE QUEEN’S GARDEN PARTY

It’s not often that authors get to move in Royal circles, but this week, for the second time in my life, I found myself in Buckingham Palace.

The first time was when, about a decade ago, I was invited as part of what was termed the British Book World. It was a markedly jolly occasion for several reasons. One was that authors (unless excessively shy and retiring souls) love a party, especially one which is packed with several hundred of your best friends and enemies. Although it was a moot point whether we were more intimidated by the Queen or by JK Rowling, the drink was either orange juice or gin. You can guess what happened. Hardened Republicans who, with the exception of Will Self, had compromised their principles out of sheer curiosity found themselves warming to the whole concept of Royalty as never before, and the ice was cracked long before the Canongate publisher Jamie Byng reputedly offered Her Maj a line of cocaine. A children’s author countered this by whipping out his book, The Queen’s Underpants. She coped admirably, of course.

All the same, when I was rung up by the retiring Chairman of the Society of Authors, the saintly Mark le Fanu, to ask if I’d accept an invitation, I hesitated for a second, largely on sartorial grounds. I can scrub up reasonably well, though with increasing reluctance as middle age advances, and there has been no end of post-Kate talk about fascinators replacing hats. As it happens, I have a nice collection of hats from a period when my innate eccentricity of dress overlapped with the 1980s fashion for neo-Edwardian clothes, and everyone I knew was getting married. These days, my hats sit in their boxes at the top of the wardrobe collecting dust and awaiting the time for my children and godchildren to be matched. Time one of them had an outing, I thought, and besides, I’m always curious about everything British. I took advice from various friends (including the elegant historians Amanda Vickery and Catherine Horwood, herself a recent invitee) and said Yes.

Getting into Buckingham Palace is a bit of a palaver. About a month before, an envelope arrives containing not only a stiffie with the information that “The Lord Chamberlain is commanded by Her Majesty to invite X and X to a Garden Party” but several more important pieces of paper, including the pale green piece of card that actually admits you, a big bright green card with a black X on it to stick into your windscreen if you drive, and instructions. You have to come with two items of photographic ID, one of them a passport. Women must wear a dress or trouser suit, and a hat; men a morning coat, lounge suit or uniform (no medals).

I made no special attempt to buy a new outfit, because I can't at present afford one due to what is happening at The Times thanks to the News International debacle, though I had my hair done and my husband sheepishly bought new shoes. We left work at 3pm to meet outside the gates just before 4, naively surprised by the great numbers of cars parked in the Mall which had got there earlier. It’s an odd business walking past people pressing their noses to the gates and looking longingly at the inside, especially as we were just ahead of the Changing of the Guard. One Anglo-Asian couple had really gone to town, in full morning dress, and had hired a photographer to snap them looking resplendent - but cameras are forbidden which is why I’m not putting in a picture of us. For those interested in these things, I wore a navy chiffon outfit with a cream and navy hat, and a lot of pearls, but I saw women of every shape and size and dress, some in wonderful hats clearly bought specially for the event, some in fascinators, so in long jackets and skirts and some in frocks with little shrugs or even shawls. The sensible ones wore comfortable shoes.

Inside, the Palace is much less heavy than its exterior suggests (not surprising, given that its core was designed by Nash) and is strangely reminiscent of Disney’s Cinderella in that its white paint is off-set by quantities of gilded moulding. Compared with the amazing palaces we saw last year in St Petersburg, lovingly rebuilt by the Russian people, it all looks quite modest, with family portraits and displays of porcelain as the only decoration.

I was struck by how elderly all the staff were. They were impeccably courteous, but from the liveried waiters handing out lemon barley water to the Beefeaters, they all looked well past pensionable age. The Beefeaters (sternly told not to talk by their leader as they headed for the tea tent with their heavy haulberks or is it halyards clanking dismally against each other) are pretty much walking costumes but when you looked past the gorgeous scarlet and gold, they were a group of tired old men. It felt just like Alice in Wonderland, especially once the Queen and Prince Philip arrived.

The reverential hush was broken by the sound of soft applause, and then the brass band, after playing God Save the Queen, broke into Isn’t She Lovely and various other numbers from My Fair Lady. The crowd, which snaked around the lawn, was about ten deep; arriving late, we had the best view of the two tiny, very upright figures, one in primrose yellow, the other in uniform, making their way slowly along. For over forty minutes, the Queen and Prince Philip dutifully talked to their people.

What a life! No wonder she always ends up asking if her subjects have travelled far. It was immediately evident that the people whom she wanted to meet were not obscure writers, but those for whom meeting Royalty was a tremendous event; people who were in wheelchairs, or uniform. Quite right too, but I saw absolutely nobody I knew (which, I confess, is a rare event for me in London). Normally, this isn’t a problem, because we like meeting people - only hardly anyone dared talk. There were plenty of nervous smiles but even the tea, self service on an elegant white rectangular plate with an indent for the tea-cup, failed to encourage people to relax. The presence of Royalty made everyone stiff and self-conscious, fearful of talking normally, so that the whole afternoon had a kind of hushed murmuring sound to it instead of the bee-like hum of a happy crowd. Now, in these raucous, informal times this may strike many as no bad thing, but it could have been so much less artificial. Many, like ourselves, got more pleasure out of wandering round the gardens with their splendid trees, than any human contact.

This struck me as a shame, because some – notably the clergy and the military, who were able to identify each other through their uniform – were having a jolly time. The secret of any good party is to have at least seven people present whom each person knows, and many more whom they might want to meet. I am not sure of the history of the Garden Party, and whether they were started by Her Majesty or some forebear, but they are a wonderful idea which, despite tremendous good will and effort all round, don’t quite seem to work. Surely the solution is simple? Given that there are more people invited (about 1000) than can possibly even glimpse the Queen, it would seem sensible for there to be one day for, say, the Arts and Sciences, one for Business and Charity, and another for Sport and the Armed Forces. That way, even if not everyone could meet the Queen (or King), we could at least meet each other – and be reminded that, in a democracy, this is just as important.

Addicted to exams

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

ADDICTED TO EXAMS

Although I’m not very good at them, I realised a long time ago that I am addicted to exams. Having just come through six months of maximum stress on the domestic front as my kids sat GCSEs and A-levels in the same year, this looks like a weird fixation to have. Yet almost everyone who writes to a deadline has to have it.

Writing a novel is a very different kind of deadline to writing a piece of journalism. I always treasure that remark of Douglas Adams’s “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sounds they make as they fly by” (stolen, inevitably, by Hollywood scriptwriters in Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and given to Jonny Depp about moral choice). My own attitude, where journalism is concerned is a kind of nutty delight at being up against the clock, fingers flying and adrenalin pumping. This may be because the other kind of deadline, for a novel, feels more like being slowly crushed to death in a lift-shaft, and journalism (like blogging) is a welcome distraction from the headline that Mitford sisters used to chant about “Man’s Long Agony in Lift Shaft.” You have to have a deadline for a novel, even if it's not commissioned (as my current one is not). Otherwise it never gets finished. There are many stories about authors who keep missing deadlines, and whose long-awaited book when finally published, isn't worth the wait. Then there's Proust, who makes a mockery of all that.

Modern exams are said to favour the lift-shaft approach, rather than the whooshing sudden death. Supposedly, the former is what girls are better at, and the latter are what boys prefer. Actually, I think it’s more a matter of temperament, and the flight or flight reaction to fear. If you’re conscientious and have superior powers of concentration, you prefer the fight; if you’re flighty and nervy, you prefer the latter. I’m capable of bursts of speed about something I feel strongly about, or know well, but am by no means the best at zipping off a piece; like many who have ever worked on a newspaper, I’ve been awed by the way a brilliant wit like Craig Brown could type one of his columns in fifteen minutes flat. I’m also terminally envious of Trollope’s ability to compose his novels as fast as the fastest typist could type (according to his Autobiography.)

Timing is everything, however, and this is as true for fiction as for journalism. As I’ve said before, I was writing Hearts and Minds long before Rose Tremain’s The Road Home was published – I just didn’t get it finished sooner because of getting cancer. If you’re lucky as well as smart you publish a novel just before something relevant. Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring came out not only when another excellent novel, Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever, was published but in time to catch the wave of interest in the big Vermeer exhibition in London’s National Gallery in 2001. It was she who had the bright idea, and the courage, to get her book put on sale there at the shop, and thus a best-seller was made. Personally, I dislike the way readers no longer trust the imagination and want facts and relevance. I think a novel should stand or fall on its own merits. But then I’m probably old-fashioned.

One of the problems about writing contemporary fiction, as I do, is that you have to not only taste something in the air before anyone else but have a kind of prescience. I’ve already described how, weirdly, I’d originally planned to have Hearts and Minds climax with three Muslim men from the Midlands letting off bombs in King’s Cross – and then it happened. Had I published my novel sooner then who knows, I could be the Mystic Meg of the literary world?

Being assaulted -the full story

Wed, 8 Jun 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

As those of you who read The Guardian and The Daily Mail know, I was assaulted eight weeks ago in my own front garden. Many kind people, both friends and strangers, have written to ask whether I have recovered, and I am happy to say that my eye is almost back to 100%. This is a more detailed account than that in the Guardian Magazine, which I wrote while still in some shock and pain. I now feel that I was extraordinarily lucky not to have been more seriously hurt, given the information I have since received from the police.

The teenaged girl had been standing outside in the street shouting at a boy for a good quarter of an hour. On and on and on she went, screaming abuse at him. It was unpleasant, but not wholly unusual, for although I live in a quiet, leafy North London street, we have had our share of inner-city disturbances ranging from a violent burglary to drug dealing and even a brothel, both of which helped to inspire my most recent novel. I often joke about living on a kind of social San Andreas fault because although my neighbours couldn’t be nicer or more respectable – I live next door to a postman, a minicab driver, an engineer and a lawyer – we are ringed by some pretty grim council estates where, it’s said, even the police fear to go.

I should have remembered this last fact when the girl started hitting the boy. He was cringing away, protecting his head, and she was really hurting him.

“No, no, no, no,” he yelped; and at this point, increasingly concerned for a boy roughly the same age as my own son, I intervened. Had it been a boy hitting a girl I’d have called the police, but because it was the other way about I didn’t realize how dangerous the situation was.

“Stop that! Move on!” I said sharply. The girl took no notice, but continued hitting and slapping. I was watering my garden, and so I did something idiotic. I squirted the pavement behind them both for half a second, as you might fighting cats.

The next thing I knew, they had ripped off half my fence, and were in the garden. The boy seized the hose, and turned it on me before smashing up my flower-pots. The girl began punching me repeatedly in the face with those same savage jabs I’d seen her give the boy. Both were screaming abuse at me.

Half-blinded first by water and then by her blows, I screamed for my husband. I grabbed hold of the girl’s hair to make her stop hitting me. She immediately seized mine. The pain was excruciating, but I had my mobile phone in my pocket, and with one hand I dialed 999.

I got through to the police, and then came the worst part. I must have told the Emergency Services operator my address, with full postcode, five times – not an easy thing to do when your hair is being torn out, and you’re being punched – and he said,

“If you don’t stop screaming, I’m putting the phone down. I need you to spell out the name of your road.”

“I’m being attacked in my front garden!” I shrieked, adding the full post-code again. But he kept saying, “Spell it out.”

In utter desperation I remembered the way the Army spells out the alphabet, and began, “Charlie, Alpha…”

“Got it,” he said.

By now, my husband and son had erupted out of the front door, just as the boy had found an empty bottle in our recycling bin. My son had armed himself with a hockey stick; his best friend was by his side.

“Put that down!” my husband roared, and both boys reluctantly obeyed.

Meanwhile, I was still in a hair-lock with my assailant.

“The police are coming!” I yelled.

“Let me go, you bitch,” the girl yelled back.

“I’ll let you go if you let me go.”

It was like some awful playground fight, both of us streaming with pain and fury.

“We’ll both let go on a count of three,” I said. “One, two, three!”

I released her, and to my astonishment she released me. There was a moment of total bewilderment all round, and then I said to the boy,

“Why did you attack me? I was trying to help you.”

His only reply was to kick another pot, and then, the police sirens approaching, he legged it.

The girl, instead of running, stayed to uproot more pots and bins, because she’d lost her mobile phone. A neighbour who lives opposite came out to help, and spotted it next door. As soon as he gave the phone to her, she too ran.

“Don’t press charges,” he said quietly. “She lives on the estate at the end of the road, she’ll be back to trash your car or your house.”

The police swept past us. At first, we were dumbfounded, but then they returned, having caught her.

Naturally, her story was that I had attacked her with my garden hose for no reason – and technically, even acting in someone else’s defence, I was guilty of common assault. The girl, when confronted with my bruised and bleeding face, apologized to me, saying she “hadn’t meant to do it.” “But why did you do it? Why did you hit that boy? Hasn’t anyone ever told you that you must not hit?” I said. I felt sorry for her. She wasn’t drunk; she didn’t seem to be on drugs; she seemed just hopelessly feral. But the policewoman who saw my rapidly swelling eye, bleeding lip and puffed-up face came inside to hear the whole story.

She was from the Holborn Violent Crime Unit, and she told me four other neighbours had done what I stupidly didn't do, and called the Emergency Services while the fight was going on. She was one of the biggest, toughest women I’ve ever seen and, in her stab-vest, like Alexander McCall Smith's No 1 Lady Detective. I told her we weren’t going to press charges, and why, although I felt ashamed at being intimidated in this way.

“It doesn’t matter, she’s still going to be arrested for GBH,” she said. Then she added, “Do you need an ambulance? I’m not being a drama queen but I think you need your eye looked at in A&E.”

By now, I was increasingly conscious of a burning pain in my left eye.

“Oh, I don’t want to take up resources,” I said. My husband, who was himself suffering from shock, said he’d drive me to hospital. Shakily, we prepared to leave.

A moment later, we heard the girl shrieking abuse again as she was arrested. We were later told that, in the course of the arrest, the policewoman was assaulted herself, and hospitalized.

By the time I got to Accident and Emergency, all I could see out of my left eye was white light. With the pain and the fear of being blind mounting, I burst into tears. Having often written about and researched the violent underbelly of modern life as a novelist, I felt as if something I had imagined had invaded my private life, threatening not only myself but my family. The wonderful, gentle nurses and doctors held my hand, and shone lights into the eye, agonizingly. They told me that they regularly saw violent assaults of my kind, which are among the worst and most distressing they have to deal with. Some anaesthetic, then dilating drops were put in, and eventually, as if at the end of a long white corridor, I could read the first two lines of the opthalmologist’s chart. Again, I felt as if the alphabet was both saving me and tormenting me.

Everyone was worried that my retina was not only bruised but torn. I was warned to come back immediately if the black floaters I could see became worse. I was in shock, and found that I couldn’t get out of bed for a week. My children, who are in the middle of GCSEs and A-levels, had to look after me. When I returned to hospital, twenty-four hours later, I fainted; black eyes, far from being comical, are deeply disturbing things to receive. The external bruising healed up within a week, but the damage to the cornea and the pain still continue, almost eight weeks later. The doctors are confident it will eventually heal, although the floaters will always remain. I am still clumsy, and although I’m no longer frightened of going out of my own door thanks to the great kindness of everyone I know, feel vulnerable and sleep badly.

My assailant was let out temporarily on bail, and during that time, the police told me, assaulted yet another person.

Cambridge and Kettle's Yard

Fri, 20 May 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

THE BIRD AND THE FISH

Last night I gave a short talk and a reading in aid of Kettle's Yard, the Modernist museum of art and craft in Cambridge, which is trying to raise over £1 million in order to keep going.

I was happy to do this, in an event chaired by Professor Gillian Beer, and in the company of Ali Smith, Ruth Padel, Louisa Young and Saumya Balsari, all of us women novelist connected to Cambridge. Kettle’s Yard holds a particular place in my affections, because during my second year at university I lived exactly opposite it. My college, Clare, had a house on Castle St, and I had a room that looked across the road to the museum’s entrance.

As a novelist, I am always interested in the way that where people live, as much as how they live, affects their internal lives, and this probably stems from my experience of living in Castle St and looking at Kettle's Yard. My new room was painted puce, and carpeted with the kind of pattern that looked as if someone had slit their wrists over it. I had the usual student's lumpy single bed, a coin-operated gas fire, and a table, on which I would work. The road outside was noisy, and the limp brown curtains stank. I longed for an escape both from Castle St and from the rather monastic beauties of Cambridge itself; I found this in the museum opposite.

Kettle’s Yard had already become a place of pilgrimage. Like everyone else, I loved its pebble spirals, and its white sofas, and the play of light. I loved Jim Ede’s philosophy of making art a part of life, rather than apart from life. I loved the way it was a place in which art and domesticity could meet. Like many women then I had few role models for the kind of creative life I wanted, and what were available were not, to put it mildly, especially hopeful. But there was one thing above all that has stayed with me.

Gaudier-Brzeska’s work, which Jim Ede championed, is not as well-known as it should be. You might find his animal sculptures appealing , and his drawings dynamic, but his Bird Swallowing a Fish is much more. It’s charged with a powerful narrative tension – will the bird swallow the fish, or choke on it? Will the fish, shaped like a torpedo, escape - or will it destroy its predator? Each must live, at the cost of the other. They exist in a perpetual, irreconcilable, jack-knife tension.

What is it about? Like myself at that time, Gaudier-Brzeska was locked in a strange, painful affair - with a woman novelist. It’s hard not to think the sculpture is about their relationship, but to me it’s also about an aspect of art. At the start of the 1980s Bird Swallowing a Fish seemed to embody all that would be unleashed on my generation, the unending horror of what has been termed social Darwinism. But it also came to hold a more personal meaning.

To me, fiction is about embodying or containing multiple dialogues, questions, situations and stories, and about not choosing between them. It is about inhabiting both the bird and the fish. I do not know if Jim Ede saw that putting Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture in his home was a bit like putting a bomb in it, but it is what makes Kettle’s Yard more than an apogee of Modernism. For in the end, art is not about what you know to be useful or feel to be beautiful. It’s about truthfulness to a vision of the world.

ROYAL FLUSH - A PROPOSAL FOR WILLIAM AND KATE

Tue, 3 May 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

ROYAL FLUSH

So much has been written about the Royal Wedding and the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge that it might be thought no more is needed. After the celebrations, the couple has, wisely, decided to bunker down in their new home in Anglesea rather than jetting off the Mustique or Kenya, and good for them. Prince William has issued a plea for them to enjoy some years of peace, such as those his mother enjoyed as a Naval Officer’s wife, before becoming Queen.

Most normal people, Monarchist or not, have every sympathy for this. Yet at the same time as praising the former Kate Middleton, journalists have, in the usual fashion, praised with one breath and sniped with the other. How long before this discreet and sensible young woman starts to get attacked as “boring”? (Not that this is the worst a Royal bride can be – just look at Fergie.) However much she may try to maintain a low profile, the world hungers for more pictures and more stories. Whatever she supports will become high-profile, and this is what makes me think that, besides her admirable concern for the victims of bullying, she could do something different and remarkable.

The great glory of this country is its creativity – yet ever since the death of Prince Albert, the Arts have had no royal champion. Prince Charles’s forays into modern architecture have been contentious, and possibly unhelpful, but apart from these no royal person has done much beyond trying to flog dreadful books (Fergie’s Budgie the Helicopter anyone?) written by themselves. The Queen is known to have watched films in which she or her father have been portrayed, and the Royal Variety Show is an annual trashfest which, while it may do good for charity, does little to present the nation’s real talent. It is known that a selection of books is sent up to Balmoral every summer, but what these are and whether they are read remains secret. When Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, revealed last year that she read every novel on the Orange Prize short-list, there were audible gasps of amazement from the audience who tended to assume that Royalty never reads anything more than Horse and Hound. At a stroke, much of the audience (which had been wondering quite what she was doing at the ceremony) felt warmly interested in her.

This is very much what I would like to see the new Duke and Duchess doing. Both studied History of Art at university, so each must, presumably, have a keen interest in the subject. Catherine Middleton wrote her thesis on Lewis Carroll, the most brilliant and strange of English authors. How splendid it would be if, as the most academically distinguished Royals ever, they were to be seen actually reading contemporary books! Books, moreover, that are not just about history but about the present day. How marvellous, too, if instead of turning out for the latest James Bond premiere, they were to turn up at the National Theatre, or the RSC or, most daringly, the Almeida and the Donmar! Just think if they were to be found listening to music at the Festival Hall or the Wigmore what a shot in the arm it would be for beleaguered musicians! They need not say a word – just to be seen doing these things, and supporting them by their presence, would be enough.

Many of today’s writers and artists are anti-Monarchist, not only because inherited privilege seems outmoded and wrong but because the Royal Family have presented themselves as Philistines, and low-brow louts who preferred It’s a Knock-out to the Booker Prize. Were that to change, so would the hearts and minds of many influential people – people who have as much to say as the tabloids, and whose voices might last longer.

It’s often forgotten that Queen Victoria was herself a gifted amateur pianist (who had a session with Chopin, no less, when he came to England.) She also wrote books, and painted. Her marriage was probably the last true Royal love-match, and it helped to transform the cultural life of the nation. Is it too much to hope that William and Catherine genuinely represent a Renaissance of what could be best about Royalty? Probably. But then, like other artists, one can dream.

BBC Bonnets AGAIN

Thu, 7 Apr 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Last night, for want of anything else to occupy me, I sat down to watch the BBC's latest literary adapatation, from Michael Faber's best-selling novel, The Crimson Petal and the White. There were several things about it that made me quite hopeful.

For one, as a living author myself, I am very keen on TV adapting novels by living authors rather than dead ones. Not only do we need the money (and the publicity) but pretty much all the classics worth adapting have been done, and several times over in the case of the Brontes, Austen, Dickens etc. To get an adapatation of your work is, in terms of sales, better than winning a prize. As most authors earn well below the national average wage, we could well do with the boost.

For another, I quite liked the idea of Faber's novel even if when I read extracts of it in the Guardian a few years back it seemed rather prolix and soft porny. Just as Sarah Waters's Fingersmith strikes me as perfectly permissable pastiche because of what it revealed of the lesbian undercurrents to female friendships in Victorian literature, so Faber's seamy explorations of Dickensian London might be interesting - though of course John Fowles's The Frenchy Lieutenant's Woman got there first.

I also like Romola Garai, Richard E Grant and Gillian Andersen, last seen playing the haggard Lady Dedlock in Bleak House but almost unrecognisable as the Madam of a small brothel. I was prepared in short to be entertained, especially as BBC4's word-of-mouth hit The Killing (Forbrydelsen), imported from Denmark, had ended.

But heigho, within moments it became clear that it was all going to be the usual stuff, only with more cocks and frocks. Beautifully shot, of course, with Garai as Sugar's silk draperies floating down grimy alleys, and every corpse-white prostitute pretty as a picture, with the kind of teeth you pay a fortune for. There was the white, neurotic angel-in-the-house wife, the crimson boudoir of the brothel, the bewhiskered gents Up To No Good and just about the only thing missing was Jack the Ripper. Sugar and her new Sugar-Daddy bonded over the kind of demolition of Victorian authors' reputations that passes as clever among first-year undergraduates, and proceeded to the usual joyless bonking in which the man takes the woman from behind so that we see her bored expression rather than her breasts. Well, this is prime-time TV after all.

How different it all was from The Killing! The Danish TV series had just as much stuff about sex, crime and power in, but we never saw anything remotely titillating even when a teenage sex-scene was filmed at school. It's heroine conducts her entire investigation in a thick woolly jumper. The city of Copenhagen, and its interiors were shot with the kind of loving, gloomy care that the BBC seems only to lavish on sets depicting life of 100 years ago. The script showed everyone, even the killer, as flawed and interesting human beings. When the actors were attractive, they were realistically so. Above all, it was totally compelling viewing. More and more people recommended it to each other via Facebook and Twitter, and the BBC (which according to one friend of mine in the business paid only £1500 per episode) finally woke up to having a hit on its hands.

Why is there no British equivalent to The Killing? Companies such as ITV and Channel Four have long been good at making gritty contemporary thrillers like Taggart, and there have even been adapatations of good crime series like Morse and Wire in the Blood, but the BBC seems to live in permanent denial that the 21st century exists. I enjoy escapism as much as the next person, and have no quibble where something as good as Bleak House or their adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is concerned. But it seems to me that these days, they are only ever interested in adapting contemporary fiction if it has an ethnic element to it, like White Teeth (where you had to struggle to find a plot). There is so much more to our culture than that.

The knock-on effect this has on our culture is dismaying. Although there are novels about contemporary life that do well, it's rare for these to be marketed in the way that those set in the past tend to be. The modern Trollope or Balzac has to swim against the stream with tremendous energy and determination, because the current constantly tries to drag us backwards. We need the equivalent to the salmon leap, and there is none. Most of us are accused of being little more than journalists, as if it were not a thousand times harder to identify what might be of lasting rather than transient interest about the present day, and to create a fictional world around this. How much easier to simply decide, as I heard one writer put it, to set a novel in a particular century, for no particular reason except that it "hadn't been done much", then research it. Needless to say, she won a prize for her first effort, too.

When historians of the future come to research our own time, they may well decide to look at its journalism and its official reports, but the fiction that might have distilled these will be almost wholly absent from page and screen. We are already the poorer for being the first in many hundreds of years to lack contemporary diarists and letter-writers. The frantically writing Sugar, whose brains and talents far exceed her work as a prostitute is indeed a conceit of her times, and not ours.

Against Books for Free

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

BOOKS FOR FREE

Getting something for nothing is never a good idea, as many fairy-tales tell us, yet far too many readers seem to think that giving books away for free is a Good Idea. World Book Night, book station and a host of other programmes have sprung up in the wake of the Internet as something that will supposedly encourage more people to read more. If only it were so.

Every publisher, bookseller and author I know (apart from a handful of best-sellers) is now suffering as sales plummet. It was bad enough living under the “winner-takes-all” culture” where a few authors lucky enough to get onto Richard & Judy sold and the rest didn’t, but this is worse. It’s absurdly easy to pirate e-books and download them onto a Kindle or e-reader – so easy that even a Luddite like myself can manage it. The music and film industry has been plagued by this for years, and yet the attitude among those who do it is that, far from being an honest citizen, you’re a mug for not taking something for nothing. I have had furious rows with some of my own relations about downloading films illegally. They can’t grasp that it is theft. “Oh, but they’re making so much money already, my download can’t make a difference.” Yet it does when millions do it.

Besides, there is a principle involved. Do turkeys vote for Christmas? All artists have, sooner or later, to make a living from it or stop altogether. Writers tend to be especially poorly-paid; few of us even make the minimum wage, and so have to top up earnings with another job. Somehow, this isn’t supposed to matter, because writing (or acting, or playing a musical instrument) is supposed to be such a glorious experience that it’s a privilege to do it at all. Amateurs who dabble at it may well feel this, but for professionals it’s a very different matter. We do this stuff because it’s what we do. We’ve spent years training for it, we’ve struggled to get to a certain level of competence and reputation, and it is no more glamorous or vocational than to be a professional lawyer. Yet somehow, what we produce is to be given away, without our consent, for free.

As a reader, I of course enjoy being able to buy second-hand books more cheaply than new ones. I love trawling through second-hand bookshops and finding lost jewels and out-of-print classics. However, I deplore the fact that neither author nor publisher reaps any benefit from this, especially if an author is still under copyright. I am not keen on people who can afford to buy books even borrowing them for free, but second-hand book sales are worse. If authors were even to get the 6.25p that library loans bring us each time a book is borrowed, it would be something. I find it extraordinary that hardback copies of some of my novels sell for sums five or six times what they originally cost, and I get nothing. Of course, I should have kept all twelve of the copies sent me by my publisher – but I gave them away.

Today, I was on Radio Four talking against one Daniel Ratchford, Sutton Council’s Director of Environment and Leisure. He has had the idea of setting up a council website in which people can log the ISBN numbers and titles of books they are willing to share with total strangers. How lovely you may think, and how totally unconnected to Sutton Council’s plan to cut £930,000+ from their libraries budget. Mr Ratchford assured us it would be an extra, which would get many more people reading; as his predecessor was paid (according to the council website) £114, 838 pa in 2009, the woes of writers on less than a fifth of that must seem like flea-bites. The Big Society is all about Small People on small incomes doing something for nothing. Well, what else could we expect from the Con-Dems?

The Sick Reader

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Sickness is something that used to be a good deal more familiar to readers than I suspect it is now, thanks to better medicine, surgery and hygiene. Yet I am always grateful to have spent a good deal of my own childhood ill in bed because it's what made me a reader, and ultimately a writer.

Solitude and boredom are invaluable for stimulating the imagination, and what is striking to anyone interested in the first golden age of children's literature is how many of its heroes and heroines tended to be invalids too. There was Katy in Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did (for which I've recently written a Preface for the Folio Society), and Colin in The Secret Garden, there was Diamond in At the Back of the North Wind and Clara in Heidi, there was Harding in Nesbit's House of Arden and many more. Crippled, consumptive children only needed fresh air and exercise to put them right, together with a hearty dose of Christianity.

As it happened, what I needed was fresh air too - I suffered from acute allergic asthma caused by the family cat. Ultimately, I was sent to boarding school. The cat stayed. No doubt psychologists would have a field-day with this, but in those days parents really didn't understand that asthma could kill. I certainly did - I mean, you don't spend night after night fighting to breathe without it being pretty clear that the next non-breath could be your last - but the strange thing about asthma is that if you stop fighting and somehow relax, you do breathe a little easier. What made me relax was a really good story, and this is one reason why, when I'm looking at a children's book to review I pay particular attention to plot and narrative. In the back on my mind is always a white-faced, desperate child trying to escape from their labouring lungs.

But modern heroes and heroines tend on the whole to be a pretty healthy lot. Occasionally they suffer from amnesia (I'm pretty bored of this as a device) and sometimes they are actually dead (more interesting, as Rhiannon Lassiter's Ghost of a Chance showed recently) but few are sickly. Almost the only one I can recall is in one of Mary Hoffman's Stravaganza series, and I remember being tremendously disturbed because he died in our world and went on living in Talia. I am allergic to dying kid novels, and will never review any. But sickness is different. I was delighted to find my old friend asthma cropping up in Zizou Corder's Lionboy trilogy, and also in Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom; although we have inhalers, and all kinds of medical tricks, pollution seems to be making things just as bad for children's lungs.

This week, both my son and I were laid low by a nasty stomach bug. I haven't been ill since my medical odyssey of 2003-2006, and lying in bed once again was most unwelcome. But for my son, who has unfortunately become all too keen on playing on his X-box, it was a revelation. What can you do when your mates are at school, and the lights from a TV screen hurt your eyes? Read, of course.

He doesn't want to read about sickly children, but wounded soldiers always interest him, especially when unwell. Few heroes seem to appeal to his generation as much as Wolverine, Russell Crowe's Gladiator and Call of Duty's delightfully-named Soap McTavish. There are plenty of action heroines these days, but not enough fully rounded heroes for boys. I worry about this a lot. Well - not that much, because he unearthed a stash of Rider Haggards. What does he think of Alan Quatermain?

"He's sick," my son says.

ON BEING A MIDDLE-AGED, MID-LIST NOVELIST

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

ON BEING A MIDDLE-AGED, MID-LIST NOVELIST

At a certain point in your career as a novelist, you have to come to terms with no longer being “young.” For novelists, youth seems to last, officially at least and according to Granta, until you are forty – but eventually, Anno Domini catches up with us all.

Personally, I’ve always been conscious of death and on the whole rather cheered by the thought that one day my troubles large or small will be over. What I’m not so happy about is not having done enough with my life. Next to those I revere, composers especially, none of us will ever do much – or indeed, suffer as much. But there are times when I feel that I’ve been serving out a sentence of some twenty years in order to look after my children and work and write, and that none of these has been done quite a single-mindedly or as satisfactorily as I’d wish. Not that I’m complaining: I count myself unbelievably lucky to have combined even two of these things . However, other women artists may understand when I say that it’s often felt like competing in a race in which you have a handicap.

About a decade ago, I looked up how old all the women novelists I most admired were when they published their breakthrough book - the book that either won them a big prize, or became a best-seller. I was quite depressed at the time, and wondered how long, if ever, I was going to have to wait and whether it was ever going to be worth while. (Usually, I feel that one must write for the love of the thing itself, but this requires a level of fortitude which isn’t easy to maintain.) Time and again, I found that they all hit their late 40s or mid-50s before this happened. The exception seemed to be gay women. The reason why was easy to guess: if you have children, your career tends to be eclipsed for a good decade and a half.

Children bring plenty of other things to a novelist's life, many of which are beneficial but the one thing that you can't get over is the loss of time and energy. There are only so many hours in the day. Even JS Bach, who crammed more compositions into one year of his life than most would manage in a lifetime, and who had twelve children, had somebody else to do the dishes. Without children, many people could write a novel a year, certainly a novel every two years. With them, you more or less double that. The whole books and babies issue was satirised by the French critic Roland Barthes, who completely failed to understand why French novelists featured in Marie Claire were photographed with both. I am not going to go into this vexed territory again, but I have been thinking a good deal this month about middle age, partly as a result of reading Jane Shilling's The Stranger in the Mirror, an affecting memoir of her own entrance into the condition of not being young.

Becoming invisible is actually quite an important thing if you are the kind of novelist who is above all interested in people, and I don’t mind it as much as some. It means you can, like Miss Marple, be overlooked as you overhear all kinds of interesting stuff; personally, I found it quite annoying and tiresome to be looked at as a young woman (unless it was by someone I wanted to pay attention to me.) However, not being young is currently disastrous for novelists, especially women novelists - much as it is for actors. Unless and until we get to the lofty eminence of our eighties and are once again deemed as interesting as Diana Athill, middle age is a period of about thirty years in which somehow, despite having a life-time of experience to draw upon, we are somehow not worth reading.

This is, I think, a relatively new problem. Up until the 1980s, it was expected that novelists would be people of some age and experience; in fact, I remember when I met Graham Greene as a mere strip of an eighteen-year-old and said (with a mixture of trepidation and callow eagerness) that I, too, wanted to write fiction, I was subjected to one of his withering put-downs. "What can you possibly have to write about?" he asked. "You haven't begun to live. Wait until you're at least forty."

Nowadays, I might well say the same thing myself to a teenager - but I'd be wrong. I think the young have a lot of experience to write about, much of which we tend to forget when older. I love the freshness of young writers, and the way they’re still so exposed to painful feelings; I love the mistakes they make, and the violent extremes of emotion. Adults are so often so nasty to the young that they forget, the young can be just as observant and as critical back.

However, in one sense Greene was right. As a young writer, or even a writer of thirty, you are unlikely to have the understanding of human nature, and the experience of the ironies of life to draw upon. Having reached the grand old age of fifty-one, I now see so much of life which is very like fiction – people who reappear after vanishing for decades, stories that are unexpectedly completed or enlarged, plot-lines that converge or diverge as death, decrepitude, divorce, inheritance and a host of other factors familiar from classic fiction come into play. In middle age, most of the unworthy impulses that might inspire a work of fiction have fallen away; I am no longer interested in heroes or heroines who are as dazzlingly attractive or accomplished as I once wished to be, or as rich, either. I am simply interested in people. I could live twice as long, and never get to the end of how interesting individual lives are to me, or how interesting the novel is as a form. (I am not interested in experiments in form because on the whole this has been done before, is just showing off, and not as interesting to re-read.) Furthermore, most if not all the contemporary novelists I most enjoy and admire - Linda Grant, AS Byatt, Rose Tremain, Lorrie Moore, Alison Lurie, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwen, William Boyd, Michael Arditti, Pat Ferguson and more - are middle-aged too. They have life under their belt. They have seen and experienced things that make their fiction wiser and deeper than a person under forty.

Yet it’s also very clear to me that publishers would far rather I were some stripling of twenty-five. Novelists now regularly get their teeth done (I am not going to mention Martin Amis, because his really were a medical necessity.) We all, if female, discuss plastic surgery with increasing urgency and interest, and every so often one or two disappear and return looking strangely fresher. Two novelists I know of have lost half their body weight by joining Lighter Life. One has had gastric surgery. Naturally, I’m not going to say who any of these people are – and nor do I mock them. Publishers are business people with stock to sell, and alas, it’s always easier to sell something with an attractive person behind it than not.

However – I return to the point I’ve made before. On the whole, good and great fiction is not written by beautiful people who feel successful. It’s written by the person who is most overlooked, all their life, and who understands things about the human condition which is very different from that of the experience of the twenty-five year old part-time model. Every author has a professional deformity – club feet, an uncomfortable religious inheritance, short stature, or incurable alcoholism, take your pick. Writers are always outsiders, and our nearest kindred isn’t someone in Hollywood but the bag-lady who rootles through dustbins muttering to herself.

A Writer's Voice - The King's Speech and Room

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

A WRITER’S VOICE

Many years ago, when young and poor and desperate I thought the way out of my troubles was to become a newspaper columnist. I mentioned this to an editor, and she duly asked for an example. I produced a perfectly well-turned column (ventriloquism coming easily to me) which she rejected with the words, “I don’t think you’ve found your voice yet.”

I resented this as one only resents the truth, and when I eventually did become a columnist for a brief time, I quickly realised that I hated writing about my private life, or even my political views so much that no matter what the financial attractions I’d better stop. Few publishers seem o understand that a novelist and a columnist tend to be very different creatures. A novelist (or at least the kind I aspire to be) is a cloud in trousers; ie, someone with no very fixed sense of identity, or with multiple personalities and views all shifting in or out of focus. One of the most stupid and maddening kind of critic I still get lumbered with is the sort who believes I write autobiographical fiction, or have protagonists who express my own views. I have many views, all contradictory. A columnist, on the other hand, is all about taking a singel line on a subject and sticking to it, however contrarian this may be. They may assume a persona, or they may write what they genuinely think and feel but either way, it becomes the single dominant note of their writing. Often this can be entertaining (it certainly earns them far more than most novelist by a factor of about 5:1) but it is coarsening. A columnist can’t get under the skin of anyone other than themselves, and if they do write fiction, it’s almost indistinguishable from their column. The only exception to this general rule that I can think of is Zoe Heller whose charming, quirky girl-about-town column was so popular that when she wrote her first novel (All That I Know) about a middle-aged man it was rejected by certain foolish publishers who wanted her to produce more of the same.

But this business about finding your voice has been preoccupying me this week, because of a film (The King’s Speech) and a novel (Room), both of which I enjoyed immensely.

The King’s Speech is about the way the future King George Vl, otherwise known as “Bertie” overcame an appalling stammer with the help of an Australian speech therapist. Colin Firth plays Bertie, and his rendition of the vulnerability and frustration of not being able to do what most of us take for granted had me laughing, crying my eyes out and gripping the cinema seat in tension. Stammering is often a sign of high intelligence, and some emotional damage; it also was common where left-handed children were forced to write with their right hands because of the superstitious associations of “sinister”. I am left-handed, so I’ve always taken an interest in this; I also lost my voice completely after a throat operation a few years ago when my children were little. Being unable to speak (or shout) was an interesting if painful experience. Bertie can speak perfectly (he recites "To be or not to be") when he can't hear himself speak. Part of his therapist's work is to relax him sufficiently for him to be able to control his stammer, physically and emotionally.

Finding your voice as a writer is not unlike the physical process of finding your voice as a talker. Few are "born" writers in being able to write without the equivalent to stammering in the beginning. It takes years of practice, not least in learning how to relax in your medium so that it supports rather than opposed you. I love chatting almost as much as I love listening, but of course like everyone I talk in a different way according to my audience. My dog gets a very different voice from my children (much nicer, they complain), and different friends get a different voice from my husband or mother or editors. Wa all do this to a greater or lesser degree, and when the disparity is too great, people tend to notice as a note of falseness or insincerity creep in. But what to do when you write for an invisible audience? The voice I use here in this blog is different again from the voice in my diaries, or letters, or on Facebook and very different from the voice in my novels – or even between novels. Which is the true one? Can they all be true? Is one more true than the others?

When writing in the first person you set yourself a technical exercise which can be fascinating, but which is also self-limiting because almost the only game you can play is, what is the narrator not understanding? This is brilliantly exploited in Emma Donoghue’s ROOM, the novel that I’m now convinced should have won the Booker Prize last year. I’d been dreading it because it’s based on, among other instances, the Joseph Fritzl case in which an Austrian man kidnapped a young woman to imprison and rape. Fritzl repeatedly impregnated his victim, and she not only gave birth to seven children (one of whom died) but brought three of them up in her underground prison. This is a subject so grim that when James Woods attacked the novel in the LRB as exploitative I heaved a sigh of relief and thought I’d give it a miss. How wrong he was can’t be over-stated, as I discovered when buying it in paperback, reluctantly, last week. Few novels have excited, moved, enthralled and ultimately uplifted me as this extraordinary story about how love defeats hate.

Room is told wholly in the voice of Jack, the five-year-old son of Ma, with whom he lives in a room measuring eleven feet by eleven feet. Some readers have found it improbable that a child with his vocabulary should fail to include the word “the” in his conception of the world, but to him only Room is real, everything else is “TV”. It’s when he’s old enough to understand that outside Room is real, and that time is running out, that he saves Ma and himself by escaping into Outside.

I found Jack wholly believable, but then the children of writers, while not necessarily any brighter than the rest, often have an advanced vocabulary simply because their parent lives at home and tends to be more interesting in words – much as musician’s children tend to be more precocious in music. Room is the kind of novel you could only have written having had at least one child grow up; unlike John Fowles’s The Collector, to whom it bears a slight resemblance as a novel of ideas and suspense, it has a brutal realism to its account from which we, like Jack are partly shielded by the child’s innocence. We don’t see “Old Nick” raping Ma, we hear it because Jack is always hidden away in Wardrobe. This makes it both more horrible, and less so, because it makes our own imaginations picture what the child doesn’t know about his father, and his situation.

What his voice also does is make you fall in love with him. This is often a feature of children’s fiction (in which I have a particular interest as a children’s critic) such as Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Millions and E Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers, but much less common in adult literary fiction where, ever since Lolita, repugnance seems more the order of the day.

I don’t for a moment imagine Jack’s voice is that of his author, though occasionally I did wonder whether some of his sayings (like green beans being his “enemy vegetable” weren’t that of her children) and Ma’s weren’t taken from life; what Donoghue does is to use him as a filter for seeing things that we either don’t know or don’t want to know or (most interestingly, once they’re Outside) don’t tend to notice. I normally dislike fiction in which the child’s supposed naivety and all-noticingness acts in this way; it can so easily verge on the twee. I’m deeply fed up with sub-Riddley Walker novels in which the narrator can’t spell or use correct grammar (goodness knows today’s children have enough problems learning the correct version without confusing them further.) But Jack, being distantly related in fictional terms to Shakespeare’s Miranda has wholly credible reasons for talking and perceiving as he does, after a life-time of isolation and partial information.

Jack is above all a triumph of the way an author can manipulate not only another consciousness very different form their own, but another voice. Like Bertie in the film, he gives utterance to some of our deepest feelings and fears as human beings. I only hope more people have the courage to hear what he says.

BECAUSE I'M WORTH IT -Writers, Rioters and the L'Oreal Generation

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Anyone who has watched the startlingly violent riots about student loans this week probably has a number of different reactions: sadness, anger, anxiety and exasperation. Yet if you’re a writer, there are certain uneasy parallels between the demands of the students and the demands of authors. Like so many, they are part of the L’Oreal Generation in believing they can demand something “because I’m worth it.”

No, actually, you aren’t. The brute fact is that nothing in life is free, we are owed nothing and people will only pay for what they consider to be worth buying. For the past half-century, our Welfare State has insulated us from the market. Generations have grown up taking free health and education for granted, as something that is owed every citizen in return for taxes. Generations of authors have also grown up expecting that, if they wrote a book it deserved not only a publisher but a publicity campaign. Neither Governments nor publishers can afford to deliver this, yet they – or rather we, for I am part of this discontented populace – can yet grasp what it means that it there is no money.

How can there be no money when we’re still conducting a war in Afghanistan? How can there be no money when politician’s memoirs as dire as those of Tony Blair’s are published, to huge fanfare? There must be some money, somewhere, so why can’t it be spent on the things I want? Why can’t it be spent on my university fees, or my book?

This sense of entitlement is one of the most worrying aspects of contemporary culture. How has it come about? I imagine that, during the boom years of the past decade, nobody really thought about where the money was coming from, only that it was there. Like the glorious palaces and gardens conjured up by djinns at the rub of a lamp, we not only accepted it but expected it as the heroes and heroines of our own fairy-story. I value a good university education as highly as anyone, and I also value high culture; I believe both feed the soul of the nation, and that without both we are lost. But do I believe we’re owed them in a time of economic crisis, for nothing? No. Great universities, deep knowledge and culture all cost huge amounts of money, generated by the labour of millions. Other countries acknowledge this, and charge accordingly; the true cost of a university degree should not be £30,000 but £80,000 if America is anything to go by.

I certainly believe that a great many people have earned things. I don’t believe that the rise in A-grades is all due to examinations getting easier; as a parent, I’ve seen how hard today’s teenagers work, and how keen they are to continue studying subjects they love. I also see how much harder writers work; everyone I know is doing twice as long hours for half as much money. I don’t want education or culture to become, once again, the preserve of a rich minority – and I want the poor and gifted to be given every help - yet who is going to pay if they are truly the right of the majority?

The uncomfortable truth is that a great many people in this country who could pay for something, don’t, and that what was meant to support the neediest has become seen as a universal human right, “because I’m worth it.” We have a culture of entitlement, and it’s destroying the real culture that we once had. I am shocked when people a great deal better-off than I am think they should not have to pay for their child’s education – or, for that matter, for books. Who do they think pays for these things? The students protesting about the tripling in fees never had a “free” education: it was paid for by millions who were never going to go to university. Is higher education a right, like freedom of speech? When many are attacking the very institutions they attend, or aspire to, this is debateable.

The anger felt by many of the protesters yesterday stems from a great many sources, not least the loss of the hope that future generations could escape poverty and drudgery through education. I have nothing but sympathy for this; my own father, a highly intelligent man from a poor family, never got to grammar school or university and he always felt the lack of these. Yet, despite having, like most people of his generation, fought for his country and been rendered deaf in one ear by the War, he never felt entitled to further education.

Synchronicity, or when writers have the same idea

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

SYNCHRONICITY

Ideas for novels may come in a flash of inspiration, or grow slowly over weeks and years but they are the precious seed-corn from which your future grows. The question, “What are you working on?” is one novelists dread, but especially when this comes from other writers. Politeness requires an answer, and if someone is interested in your work it’s a good idea to alert them to a forthcoming book. Yet you can’t give too much away of either title or content. All authors are snappers-up of unconsidered trifles and some are less scrupulous than others. Or it can be an instance of synchronicity.

Synchronicity is when two or more people have the idea at the same time. Science is littered with examples of this. Darwin only published his Origin of the Species because a fellow biologist had also deduced the concept of natural selection, and sent him his own book in manuscript; several people can claim to have invented the computer, and so on. So, too, in literature. I still remember a Spectator Diary Susan Hill wrote when she found out that Beryl Bainbridge was working on a novel about Scott’s doomed expedition to the Antarctic. She had to abandon it. Rival biographies of the same person are commissioned simultaneously, and sometimes even films (like the two versions of Les Liasons Dangereuses).

Why this happens is difficult to understand, but Patricia Highsmith (who avoided the company of authors and stuck to painters for this very reason) described us as being like deep sea angler fish, with our little lights out to attract the same prey. Lightning can and does strike twice. Two novelists, Deborah Moggach and Tracy Chevalier, both had the idea of writing about Dutch people in the time of tulip fever. Both featured painters (one imaginary, the other Vermeer) and forbidden love, both were strikingly well-written and both for a time looked equally successful, as both Tulip Fever and Girl With a Pearl Earring were developed for film. Alas, the latter was made and the former has not been, so the one overtook the other. What is touching about this story isn’t just the coincidence; it’s that Deborah Moggach, then by far the better-known writer, was generous in her praise of Chevalier’s book and took trouble to promote it alongside hers. Synchronicity is never nice to live with, but some rise to it better than others. I still hope that one day, the film of Tulip Fever gets made because it’s an excellent book with a perfect plot.

I had experience of how uncomfortable synchronicity can be while writing Hearts and Minds. Originally, it had one more character – a Polish builder who sheltered under someone’s front steps when he first arrived. Lo and behold, when the proof of Rose Tremain’s The Road Home arrived, there was an Eastern European immigrant who sheltered under someone’s front steps when he arrived. “You’ll have to lose him,” said my publisher, Richard Beswick, and I did; but the reason why he was there is that Rose and I clearly watched the same TV programme about Polish immigrants, which featured just such a man.

I hardly ever take characters from life, let alone TV programmes, and I was not altogether sorry to let my Pole go. He was my one bit of lazy research, and Rose got there first with her Lev; she won the Orange Prize two years before my book was published. But as reviewers pointed out, my novel also bears some striking resemblances to Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December, published six months after mine. I was quite cross about this – and the long, fulsome profile of him in the Sunday Times magazine comparing him to Dickens, Trollope, Balzac and Thackeray – though when I subsequently read the book, I had a good laugh. We had indeed read the same Victorian novelists, and some of the same newspapers, but we had taken very different things from them in our portraits of contemporary London. As those who listen to the episode of A Good Read on Radio 4 on November 30 will know, I am not an admirer of this particular novel for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with any lingering feelings of rivalry.

The point is, though, that in the end this obsession over similarity and timing and who got there first doesn’t matter. Readers discover books in their own time, not publisher’s schedules. The person who has a new idea may get credit for it, or may not; what matters is how well it’s done. All that matters – to me, at any rate – is that people find my books irrespective of publishers’ publicity machines pumping away, and take from them what they can.

OFF TO THE PUB - A SHORT INTERMISSION

Tue, 2 Nov 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

In the days when I worked in offices, I spent a lot of time looking out of the windows and wondering who all those lucky people were whom I could see walking around in the middle of the day. They must, I thought, be writers, or people doing jobs a million miles away from my utterly dreary one at the J Walter Thompson advertising agency. (Actually, it wasn’t a dead loss because I shamelessly read my way through Proust and still got paid. But you get the picture.)

Now that I am a writer, I look out of my window and wonder who all the lucky people are whom I still see walking around in the middle of the day. Are they the Yummy Mummies beloved of Sunday colour supplements who do nothing but spend and lunch? I doubt it. We don’t do Yummy Mummies (or Daddies) in Camden Town. Winos, prozzies, unemployed architects, yes; and writers by the truck-load, which is very nice on the occasions when I, too, bunk off for a long lunch with a couple of pals – which I assure you happens once in a blue moon.

Lunch in the literary world has a number of associations, not all of them pleasant. In the old days, ie about a decade ago when people could still earn a reasonable living from writing and/or journalism, you would expect to be lunched quite regularly by your agent and editor. According to how well you had done, this might be The Ivy or the Garrick Club, or it might be something closer to the kind of gastropub I have around the corner. Lunch was one of the expected treats of anyone with an expense account – in fact, when I got my one and only staff job on a national newspaper, I was hauled up within a fortnight by the editor about lunch.

“Amanda,” he said, “I feel I should point out that you are expected to make a weekly claim for lunches and taxis.”

“But what if I haven’t lunched anyone?”

“I’m sure you can think of someone,” he said, meaningfully. “Just make sure you put in for, say, at least £40 a week. Otherwise you might find yourself a tad unpopular with the other members of staff?”

“Really?” I said, bewildered.

“Yes. It shows us all up, you see.”

After that, I claimed for lunches and taxis with the best of them. In fact, my claims constituted a most welcome weekly addition to my salary, and my future husband enjoyed being more and more improbable people like Doris Saatchi, Tom Cruise and Salman Rushdie. I was especially grateful to Rushdie because, being under the fatwa and in hiding, nobody could ever prove I hadn’t in fact had lunch with him. Soon after I left, however, there was a crack-down. A colleague, who for years had brought in his own sandwiches, to be eaten primly at his desk, turned out to be unable to tell the difference between blue and black ink. His forged receipts for equally improbably lunching companions were discovered by a new broom in accounts, and he was promptly sacked.

Actually, if I am honest, I much prefer lunching in pubs to smart restaurants; like a lot of English people of a certain kind, I enjoy dressing down rather than scrubbing up, and my usual uniform consists of very old (and often muddy) jeans and Doc Martens rather than something involving a Spanx girdle and a designer dress. I love the democratic nature of pubs, which are a uniquely British invention, and now they have banned smoking and brought in coffee, newspapers and good food as well as warm beer and neighbourly chat, they are my preferred place to hang out. To me, pubs are part of Dr Johnson’s dictum about how to avoid depression: “If solitary, be not idle; if idle, be not solitary.” Almost every writer I’ve ever known is depressive by nature, or by force of having to engage in introspection. Providing you don’t become an alcoholic, the pub is a good antidote to this.

Of course there are all kinds of pub authors avoid like the plague. Those with tinned music (especially of the kind that “the management won’t allow us to turn it off” nature), giant TVs tuned to Sky Sport, sullen locals who demand you never sit in “their” seat, an absence of natural light and meals prepared fresh from the freezer are all hopeless. I hate fake fires, over-decorated walls and furnishings, and in the approaching season, an abundance of tinsel and fairy lights. I also (I’m afraid) don’t want the kind of pub that doubles up as a crèche. Much as I enjoy children as individuals, the company of a dozen wailing toddlers is not pleasurable, and no adult can possibly enjoy their company in a place intended for public rest and enjoyment. My ideal pub has no music, but does have big windows, panelling, pleasant lighting, stripped floorboards, scrubbed pine tables and brown furniture. It also has a kitchen with reasonably-priced (under £8) meals which are prepared on the spot, so you can be sure nothing nasty has gone in, and staff who are efficient and look pleased to see you. Even better, they allow in dogs and give them a bowl of water. Luckily I have exactly this sort of place just around the corner, and very lucky I feel too.

Some writers become altogether too fond of pubs. I am too young to have ever encountered Julian Maclaren-Ross, the model for Anthony Powell’s X.Trapnel in A Dance to the Music of Time, but I did know Jeffrey Bernard in my twenties. Like all that Soho crowd of writers and artists, he was the most charming man in the world with one drink in him, and the most loathsome with two or more. It was, I suppose, a version of Extreme Lunching in which you never knew whether you’d emerge laughing like a drain or being sick in one; that stage in my life didn’t last long, or my liver would have been shot.

But lunch still feels faintly wicked even if most of what I talk about is work-related. I never go to publishers’ lunches if I can possibly avoid them, and it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to me when a publicist tries to tempt me with an invitation – if anything, I just feel cross that they think I can be bought. (I’d far rather they spent the same money on advertising their author in a newspaper, or promoting them creatively.) Lunch with friends is a whole different matter, though. I just wish I had the time I did when I worked in an office to indulge in it more often.

Arrogance, hubris and writers behaving badly

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

ARROGANCE, HUBRIS AND WRITERS BEHAVING BADLY

The Ancient Greeks believed that arrogance, or hubris, was doomed to be followed by a catastrophic reversal of fate. Yet the sad truth is that, from what I can see, it’s the least arrogant authors who are getting treated like dirt, while what AS Byatt called the “turkey-cocks” of the literary world continue to strut and preen.

Last week-end I was at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, one of the most charming and well-run of the current round of LitFests, and the stories that were going round the audiences and authors there were naturally very different from those picked up by the press. I appeared with Sarah Dunant and Louise Doughty, and the lovely woman who interviewed us told us about the Very Famous Author whom she had done a gig with there. Half an hour into the event on stage, he whispered to her, “Can we wrap it up now, and do the signings?” As an event is always scheduled to last for an hour, she said, “No;” but the VFA, unaware that his disgruntlement had been picked up by the microphone and broadcast to the entire audience, then became so sulky that he gave only monosyllabic answers.

Another even more VFA that day was so patronising in his manner of answering questions that members of his audience complained to us. Nor was his unfortunate manner confined to readers. Another very famous woman author attending the Cheltenham Festival said of this man, “Never ever has another writer been so rude and uppity with me as he was. Never ever have I before been made to feel like something crawling under someone's shoe. He was arrogant, smug, unpleasant and unfriendly. I couldn`t believe it.”

Now LitFests abound with tales of this kind, and a kind of omerta forbids me from mentioning names, or indeed which famous historian throws hissy fits if he isn’t booked into the best hotel suite, which novelist believes publicists should sleep with him and which media star sits at tables in the Green Room, refusing to talk to anyone who isn’t as famous as himself. Needless to say these stories are all about men, simply because women – even the most prize-laden – just have it drummed into them that they had better not get uppity. But there is no doubt in my mind that the tiny amount of fame accorded in our culture to some authors does go to heads like wine. It’s most peculiar. If, like myself, you believe that there are no major living authors in our time – not one of the stature of Tolstoy, Dickens, Eliot etc – then absolutely everyone is simply quarrelling over degrees of mediocrity. Does that stop them? No, it does not, and the worst thing is that the newspapers that would once have sent them up for it now grovel and fawn – something not unconnected to all of them having their own LitFests. The reading public, who have bought the books and who may well be just as distinguished and intelligent, are not so easily bought off. Yet far too many come away with the impression that this is the way a "genius" behaves.

The trouble is that to write anything at all requires a degree of arrogance, and to think that what you've written is publishable requires even more. If you ask yourself,What makes your vision of the world, or grasp of language, so special? you are unlikley to write, or publish. Nor is publication the end of it, because these days authors are expected to flog their work to the world. Such pretensions to public notice can cover the naturally modest with confusion and misery. I know of writers whose talent has never had its due thanks to paralysing stage fright, and others who have had to take beta-blockers in order to appear on Start the Week.

Yet some authors take to public performing like the proverbial ducks to water. Is this arrogance? I doubt it. If you’ve ever seen someone like Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters or Philip Pullman perform, you’ll know that on stage, they are both natural and magical. Being able to do this is a gift quite different from being able to write, and the happy few who have both are not necessarily big-heads. I quite enjoy giving public readings and talks, simply because of having forced myself to do it in the first place. It really was forcing: I’m all too well acquainted with the feeling of fear so deep that my heart is all I can hear, the shaking, the trembling and so on. But the more you do it, the easier it becomes. Maybe for some, it becomes too easy.

There’s a part of everyone, I think, that longs to behave abominably. I love writing about such people, because they’ve lost their inner censor; one of my favourite stories about Boris Johnson (who is not, of course, Quentin Bredin the editor of the Rambler in Hearts and Minds) is that, when asked at prep-school to talk about the person he most admired began, “Reluctant though I am to blow my own trumpet...”

But the Borises of this world (unlike the Quentins) would never be rude in their arrogance. Really believing you deserve your fame and fortune, rather than humbly thanking the Gods for it is the first step to ruin. Or it would be, if the world the Ancients described were still with us.

Writing from life

Mon, 4 Oct 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

WRITING FROM LIFE

I’m almost at the mid-point of my new novel, which is about the recession and what it can do to people; as a writer of contemporary fiction, this means that I have an almost embarrassing amount of material flooding in every day.

Choosing which ideas to pursue is never easy. The kind of novel that interests me most at present is the national novel, or rather the English one, something so profoundly out of fashion that I might as well spend my time making ships in bottles. I’ve found a study of it called Nation & Novel by Patrick Parrinder (OUP) especially stimulating, especially when he discusses how the twentieth century novel discussed a “shrinking island” with a diminished social circle. As so often, I find this quite depressingly unambitious. I’m no more preoccupied by only describing the metropolitan elite than I am in only describing the rural underclass. What interests me is nothing less than everything, or at least the everything that a novel can contain if circumscribed(as it must be) by time and place.

One of the few TV series that I’ve relished this year is, not surprisingly, Downton Abbey by Julian Fellowes. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his novels, which are very much in the “silver fork” Powellian mode and which have been predictably castigated for being about upper class people, but the film Gosford Park has been his masterpiece. Downton Abbey is full of delicious clichés, ravishing costumes and stand-out performances (especially from the lemon-mouthed Maggie Smith, asking in puzzlement “what is a week-end?”) but what I admire from the professional point of view is not only that it is unashamedly entertaining, but that it is even-handed in its scrutiny. Both servants and masters are accorded equal dignity as interesting human beings; it’s the kind of drama that Shakespeare, and some of the great Victorian novelists would recognise. Yet why is it that we only stomach this kind of thing when it’s set in the past?

The present day is scarcely lacking in “masters” and “servants”, only we don’t call them that. We call them “au pairs”, “handymen”, “cleaners” and the like. It’s all been outsourced, but those who still have money are effectively, thanks largely to immigration and now also to the recession, living lives that are pretty close to that of the Edwardians, only without the sense of personal responsibility that Fellowes’s Earl shows to his staff. This was one reason why I wrote Hearts & Minds, and it’s also why I’m writing my new novel about rural poverty – a shocking subject, once you begin to dig into it. I am passionate about the English countryside, with its uniquely beautiful landscapes, as perhaps only a “foreigner” can be. Like Bill Bryson, I loathe the way it is so little understood or valued as something more than a place for an economical or eco-friendly holiday. Yet away from the pretty cottages and stately homes, it’s just as much a sink of deprivation as any inner city estate. I get fed up with the kitsch dream of rural bliss sold to us by the media. How people live on half the national average minimum income isn’t pretty, but what is inspiring is also how so many manage it, with resilience, ingenuity and patience.

I don’t know what can be done to help, though the proposal to give Cornwall super broadband speeds would do much. I know that a number of politicians on both sides have read H&M, which is strange but pleasing; it may be that by bringing this up as a subject it could (in the infinitesimal way that modern fiction can affect anything at all) be moved up the national consciousness. Certainly it'd be wonderful if a TV station had the guts of even the much-loved Archers radio show to show us the present-day Downton.

Based on a True Story

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

WRITE WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW

One of the oldest pieces of advice given to aspiring writers is “write what you know about”. This is all very well for people who turn to writing after a decade of, say, nursing, or taxidermy. The majority of the population know little of either professions, and there are no doubt a rich fund of stories which would make fascinating fiction.

If however, you lead a rather more mundane life (as I happily admit I do) then you are forced to use that little-known thing, your imagination. People seem to forget that there is another golden rule and it’s this: Facts Are Boring: Writers Make it Up. Yet readers now seem to feel a curious reluctance to admit this. The rise and rise of historical fiction, which I view with almost total dismay, is surely due to the feeling that fiction is a waste of time unless you can have, like added vitamins, a dose of Facts with your novel. To which my response is, why not read a proper biography? Quite a few are jolly good, and display an almost novelistic play of imaginative speculation: few novels, for instance, have amused my family this year as much as Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat.

What I particularly resent is when a novel is pitched to the reading public, or to me as a critic, as somehow more remarkable because it’s Based on a True Story. There are a number of films on release at present, including the jolly-looking Made in Dagenham, which are Based on a True Story, and every time I hear the phrase I grind my teeth and rend my hair. Of course I’m delighted that the doughty women workers of the 1960s are getting their story out to the public, but entertaining though this is, it is unlikely to be more than a docu-drama in the style of The Full Monty and Erin Brokovitch. We’ll leave the cinema having had a pleasant time but not having seen a film in any deeper sense.

Any life contains a number of stories, many of them pretty universal ones, and few of these are really the kind that can be rendered into a work of art. Nor does their existence guarantee quality or interest. Jane Austen, I read recently, was given the idea for Pride and Prejudice by hearing about a family which contained an unusual number of girls, born in an attempt to break just such an entail as that which plagued the Bennetts and ultimately gave their home to the odious Mr Collins. Does it make the novel any better to know this? No it does not. I do not give a fig for the real family to whom this may have happened, but I give the whole tree for a work of immortal genius.

I put a number of true stories, or fragments of them into all my novels, especially Hearts and Minds. You more or less have to if you are writing about contemporary life, and the point at which the political and the personal collide. But I did this not to make a work of “faction” nor (as one or two reviewers have complained) to patronise or lecture readers but because they seemed to me to be interesting and credible details to find in my invented world with its imaginary people. It’s curious to me who is interested in the real-life stories I found and used, and who understands that a novel is more than that. Children when first introduced to fiction often ask, But is it true? You hope, however, they move on from that. One of the journalists I most respect is the late Studs Terkel, whose interviews with “ordinary” people approached (no doubt after hours of editing and guiding) some of the qualities of fiction as an art. But it is not art.

I always remember the passage in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature when he talks about writers and lying, and how it’s the moment when the Boy Who Cried Wolf came running back to his village crying, “Wolf! Wolf!”, and for just a moment the villagers almost see it, stalking them in the long grass.

Writing and gardening

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

WRITERS AND GARDENING

Why are so many writers also obsessive gardeners? There’s an old joke that every author wants on their headstone “A Plot At Last”, and in this season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, it’s all I can do to tear myself away from spending the day on hands and knees, planting bulbs, pruning and spreading compost.

Some of the temptations offered by gardening is simply that of getting your hands dirty and being out in the open air. Writing being sedentary and indoors, the grass is greener; we yearn for the sort of bloke Tamara Drewe goes off with in the delightful new film made from Posy Simmonds’s book of that name. The lower down the rom-com game you go, the more likely you are to encounter a hunky son of the soil eager to do a Mellors on the heroine, but at the other end there’s also a risk of encountering God disguised as a chap with a spade (something I seem to recall Julian Barnes specifically forbidding in Flaubert’s Parrot).

Gardening has much in common with fiction. The more time you spend preparing your soil, the more likely you are to grow healthy and fruitful plants, and the same goes for characters I find. Knowing where your protagonists have come from, what nourished their souls and what blasted their growth is essential even if that knowledge is mostly concealed from a reader. More importantly, a good garden has to have a masterly orchestration of effects over the year. The kind of person who understands that it’s worth having a smoke tree not only for its fiery autumn foliage but because this looks stunning behind late-flowering crocosmia, Bishop of Oxford dahlias and pink sedum for instance may well be the kind who knows that a properly constructed plot has seemingly unimportant details that are later revealed to be necessary in terms of structure and colour. One of the joys of visiting books groups is when I find that some, on first or second reading, have spotted and enjoyed these effects (as few critics can or do) which took my time and trouble to think of and put in.

I like many different styles of garden, but my personal preference is for a combination of formal symmetry and a good deal of billowing romantic colour in between. Having grown up in Italy, I like things such as clipped box balls and bay trees, and in both my London garden and my developing Devon one, I’ve put these in. I think of them as ways of formally separating a narrative; just as my plots fall into a classic three-act structure, so too my gardens are divided up into different colours or “rooms”, each with a different feel. I like formal, densely patterned beginnings to both gardens and plots, in which many elements are introduced; I like a mixture of both high and low plants, so that I always have tall ones like acanthus and Japanese anemones mixed with low ones. I think of the tall plants as being more like the refined, lofty characters and their thoughts, and the low ones as the characters with more warmth and comedy. To me, a good work of fiction needs to have a mixture of both. I detest the kind of novel that, like a municipal garden, sticks to one level only. (Actually, having said this, some of the finest gardens I know are “municipal”, in the Regent’s Park Queen Mary’s Rose Garden.)

As you get older, I think your tastes change in both fiction and gardening. I started off immensely interested in flowers, often of the bright, quick-flowering type; similarly, I was far too interested in wit and smart effects as a young writer. Then I discovered perennials, and shrubs – much more expensive, but more satisfying. Now, trees obsess me. I love the fact that they will go on living and growing long after I am dead; I love their height, their foliage, their shape, their shadiness. I also love what many hate, which is their tenacity. Even if some trees are far too prolific, and I spend my time rooting up ash and sycamore saplings with the same brutal indignation I feel for bad writing, the way trees refuse to give up is touching. I once lived near a small house in Kentish Town whose owner had foolishly planted a magnolia grandiflora in his tiny front garden. Of course this magnificent beast it began to overwhelm the whole space, and once day to my horror, it was chopped down to the ground. I spent the year silently mourning it; then, suddenly, it began to grow again. It’s now a healthy shrub-size whose bowls of large, lemon-scented blooms once again give pleasure to passers-by – for like many trees, it can be shaped and pruned by a more careful hand.

In my small London garden, I have 25 trees, all quite mature. They include such Mediterranean favourites as an olive, a cypress and a fig, a magnolia grandiflora and a magnolia stellata (the last inherited from my best friend’s godmother who, coincidentally, lived here with Mike Newell the director of Four Weddings and a Funeral ten years before we bought our home, when the area was much more run-down). I also enjoy in my neighbours’ trees, which form a varied view from my study for which I’m always grateful. Trees are London’s greatest blessing and beauty, though we are strangely unappreciative of them, treating them largely as creators of mess in autumn, or as obstacles to passing buses. If you’ve ever lived in a city without trees, though, you’ll soon feel their absence. One of the things I most disliked about New York was its lack of trees on all but a very few streets – and one of the things I loved about cities like Charleston and Savannah were its great old Spanish oaks dripping with grey moss, which I put into my novel In a Dark Wood. Who can fail to love the plane trees of Paris and Rome, the lindens of Berlin and the cherries of Washington? I’ve been won over to Boris Johnson as Mayor of London largely because he’s instigated the planting of so many new trees; as a result, long formerly dreary stretches of road around King’s Cross are now enlivened by the blossom and foliage of young cherries and rowans.

My favourite trees are on the heroic scale. There’s one on Hampstead Heath with a fabulously twisted green bole, which is like a giantess dancing. Another is a 100 foot weeping beech planted by Humphrey Repton in the grounds of the Endsleigh Hotel on the River Tamar. This is so huge that its mossy branches snake up and down like a giant anaconda. Its beauty is beyond compare whether in brilliant new leaf or now, when turning that shade of annealing copper that is so ravishing to behold. We make a quarterly pilgrimage to see this tree in its mysterious valley, where mist rises on a warm day and the slopes shiver with small streams falling past gigantic camellias and gunneras, and have planted a weeping beech of our own in hope that it will one day bring as much delight to our great grandchildren. There are novels and novelists I think of as trees – most, sadly, Victorian because to create a great soaring bole and a canopy of branching characters seems beyond the modern writer. To write a novel that is like the beech tree at Endsleigh or the oak on Hampstead Heath, that would be a fine thing.

Handbags: leave home without it

Wed, 8 Sep 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

GETTING RID OF HANDBAGS

I once wrote in a novel that “a handbag is a metaphor for the owner’s vagina.” It was a rather nasty joke because the woman to whom it was said was a rich, spoilt fashion maven who was about to have a baby - so neither her vagina nor her handbags were ever going to be the same again. I have a relationship with my own handbags that is far from Freudian, but it is now a year since I gave up carrying one on all but the most formal occasions.

For most women, the handbag seems to have a totemic significance well beyond that of mere utility. Look at the way the gorgeous women in Mad Men carry theirs, as a kind of trophy of femininity. Like the kangaroo’s pouch, it seems part of all we are. If a woman disappears and leaves her handbag behind, you can be pretty sure she has been kidnapped or murdered. A wonderful collection of short stories by Sheena MacKay is called Dreams of Dead Women’s Handbags – a suggestive title that is about how picking up someone else’s handbag can evoke powerfully unpleasant memories. On the other hand, the emblem carried by Moominmama in Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll series, as the repository of comforting maternity, is also a handbag.

When Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell enunciates in aristocratic disgust, “A handbag?”- learning that this, together with a novel “of revolting sentimentality” is what the hero of The Importance of Being Ernest was discovered in as a baby boy, she is very nearly making a rude joke. Handbags, like vaginas, have featured as magical, and somewhat sinister receptacles in films from Mary Poppins onwards. Surprisingly large, ungainly objects can emerge from them, or disappear into them; it is when Grace Kelly unpacks a negligee from an oversized handbag in Rear Window that we fall in love with her, and James Stewart is doomed. The handbag is a formidable weapon: consider how Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet referred to being “handbagged” when harangued or sacked.

About a year ago, I began asking myself why, as a woman, I felt I had to carry so much with me. In Italy, which might be termed the home of the handbag, few women have dared to carry one for decades, thanks to the prevalence of bag-snatchers or “schipattori”, who work in pairs and sneak up on you on a motorbike, brutally yanking a bag from its owner. After my mother was mugged on a couple of occasions by them, she stopped carrying a handbag, and as so often when one gets older I’ve come to see this as a rather sensible move.

When my children were babies there was no question of ever being without a bag. The need for a spare nappy, some wipes, a small toy, a packet of coloured crayons, sticking plaster, a bottle or a rusk necessitated carrying something that was at least the size of a small tote. Even so, I was fairly appalled by the enormous bags some felt they needed to carry. Surely it wasn’t necessary to also bring a changing mat, a complete change of clothes, disinfectant and an assortment of lotions and the absurd Bach Rescue Remedy? Just how much could any buggy, or back, be expected to take?

Maybe it was this that made the fashion for ever more enormous and expensive bags take off, but there came a point where you couldn’t move without tripping over bags the size (and price) of a small car. I found them all incredibly vulgar and ugly, as well as in most cases unaffordable – my children’s infancy coincided with the last recession, and when The Daily Mail ran one of its priceless pieces on How To Feng Shui Your Handbag, I decided I had had enough.

I have always taken a rather minimalist view of bags as it is. To me, there is one really perfect all-round handbag ever designed. This is made of soft black or brown nappa leather (in Florence of course) by Enny. It has a big central zippered pocket, and a number of other pockets and flaps that all zip or click closed thanks to concealed magnets. It’s almost impossible to steal your purse from, and much-copied though inimitably stylish. Like all too many perfect things, they are no longer available, as Enny closed in 2003 (though you can still buy them vintage). You could wear an Enny bag slung diagonally over the body, distributing its weight, or hold it like a clutch but the point was that everything a sensible woman might need, from a paper-back book to a mobile phone could fit into it; and it was beautiful. Very few handbags are, in my view, beautiful. The Hermes Kelly Bag (named after the aforementioned film star) has a certain hard-edged retro charm but is far too boxy for my liking; my own current preference is for the far more modest, slim-line and graceful Osprey models into which the necessities of life including a paperback novel may be slipped. However, since giving up handbags I’ve come to the conclusion that they are the biggest con that has been foisted on sensible women since the stiletto heel.

In an age of jeans and credit cards, why do we need so much? Why are women supposed to burden themselves with so much? Isn’t make-up now supposed to stay on all day, until we wipe it off? Can’t hair stay in place without bringing a brush (and what is wrong with a comb?) With mobile phones that double up as cameras, iPods, mirrors, address books and even books why do we need more than a pocket? Why are we supposed to spend hundreds or even thousands of pounds carrying half a dead cow and most of our bathroom cabinet around? I understand the need for a briefcase, if you need to bring a lap-top and some work papers (though the paperless office and the iPad should dispense with much of this, but not all the rubbish women are supposed to carry. Even if you have the irresistible urge to hand out dog-treats or religious pamphlets, a handbag bigger than an evening bag is surely surplus to requirements.

My thoughts on this were crystallised by seeing an osteopath for a bad back. He asked me to hand him my bag, and winced when he picked it up. Of course, I was carrying about 7 lbs of stuff, much of which I hadn’t actually examined since around 1998. Being the world’s most neurotic air passenger I had taken all those survival guides far too seriously, and regularly packed not only a complete First Aid kit and miniature torches but things like folding pen-knives which increased airport security would pick up and discard, making my husband very cross. I had miniature bottles of Calpol and sun-block, and lavender oil for de-ponging smelly public toilets, I had emergency birthday cards and wrapping paper and sellotape, folding hats, expandable gloves, spare socks, a miniature copy of Shakespeare Sonnets and Keats’s poetry, pens that had ink eradicators at one end and indelible ink at the other, notebooks for jotting down interesting conversations or ideas ...well, I was probably a marvellous, though slightly mad, person to be castaway on a desert island with but my handbag and my spine couldn’t take the strain. There’s only just so far you can take being a mother and a novelist and then your seams will split.

So the next day, I walked out of my home, bagless. If a bag-lady is synonymous with a tramp, then a bagless lady looks even more eccentric. I felt very odd indeed. What was I supposed to do with my hands without a bag to clutch to? How was I supposed to walk without compensating for leaning over to one side? It was a bit like giving up smoking and wearing pumps after a life-time in high heels. What if I needed to give myself a quick make-over? What if my plane crashed? But just leaving that lump of leather or canvas behind was a liberation. It’s like the moment when you realise you don’t have to be joined to your baby twenty-four seven, or when you pack everything you need for a holiday into the one piece of wheeled hand-luggage the Ryanair will allow you, and find its all you need. Less is more – more energy, more freedom, more speed.

The more I did it, the more I noticed how burdened we have all become. We aren’t refugees, so why do we walk around as if we were? Children now regularly stuff their schoolbags with around 10lbs of books and equipment, something that is giving the new generation back problems even before they have stopped growing. Many men have been persuaded into buying the “man-bag”. The handbag itself has suffered from gigantism of a kind only equalled by the Harry Potter books. Yet it’s perfectly possible to survive without one.

Men get around the problem by turning one entire garment, the jacket, into a receptacle for the most essential things a handbag contains. They rarely seem to lose keys, as we do when rootling around in our handbags. Their money fits into wallets, not the silly purses women get fobbed off with, and they put change in their trousers. You can put pens, contact lens cases, glasses and even lipsticks in the breast pocket of a jacket. You can (if pressed) put a paperback into the one on your hip. A jacket may not hang quite so well – but then the body carrying a bag won’t stand so well either. I’ve made the choice, and I would rather stand straighter than have a perfectly cut jacket or trousers.

People do look at me oddly as I stride about. I suspect I remind them of a camel without its hump. I whisk cash out of my back pocket when I need to pay for something, and I stuff my keys, mobile phone, change and credit card in pockets where I hardly feel them. I feel as light and as free as air – because, despite being very feminine, I have simply decided to be as bagless as a man.

Is the Bohemian life worth it?

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

LA VIE BOHEME

My first inkling of what a writer’s life might entail came when I saw La Boheme * as a child. It was performed in the Rome Opera House, a two-bit theatre where arias were enthusiastically greeted by old-fashioned “claques”, paid to applaud even the most appalling caterwauling, and persuade the rest to join in. The audience tended to turn up more to show off their diamond tiara than listen to the opera. The claques were of course, the real clue; but as a ten-year-old I was transfixed by Puccini’s music, and by the doom-laden story of Rodolpho and Mimi. Actually, what I was even more transfixed by was a lifestyle in which people had to burn novels in order to keep themselves from freezing, and hock their last bit of jewellery to pay for a doctor. I had an uneasy premonition that this might be my own future if, as I knew I wanted to be, I became a writer myself, and for a good few years I wasn’t entirely wrong about this.

Yesterday, a kind friend took me to see a performance of La Boheme at the Soho Theatre, now in its last week. What made it wonderful were two things: its witty translation, updating it to present-day Soho, and the youthfulness of its cast, who not only sang beautifully but who brought back many memories of my own twenties. Of course, living in modern Britain, I had the benefit of the dole, free medicine and centrally heated public libraries. Even if I still got chilblains on every finger and toe because my own shared accommodation was too expensive to heat during the day, it was nothing like La Boheme; I was miserable for a whole range of reasons, which were also in the opera but which I was too young and silly to work out. I did all kinds of nasty, boring jobs, and eventually, I found enough work as a journalist to improve my lot, and life became slowly better.

But it made me think again about how difficult it is to get started if what you want is to write or paint or compose, and how hard it is for the present generation of young people. Even if you are lucky enough to find employment in a severe recession, just how much time and energy should you give to earning, and how much to trying to realise your creativity? The bohemians in Puccini’s opera had a familiar jocose despair, which may have cost Mimi her life – though in those pre-antibiotic days, it’s unlikely they could have done much to help her – and you wonder just how long the painter would have resisted the allure of full-time commercial work if he was to keep Musetta from the streets. Nowadays, perhaps, she would turn into a sex-blogger like Belle du Jour and not need him but a hundred years ago, options (especially for women) were more limited. I especially liked the translator’s touch of making Mimi an illegal immigrant with TB, as this is the kind of world I wrote about in Hearts and Mind. Those who have seen the musical Rent tell me it’s the same story, in a gay environment; maybe it’s always going to be around for as long as people feel they must choose between Art and the world, the flesh and the devil.

Myself, I think that to live on air in pursuit of your ambition or ideals is not always admirable (somebody after all has to pay, somewhere, and it’s not exactly honourable to live off your relations or the State unless you really are a genius) but that having a day-job is good for creativity. Artists of all calibres need to keep in balance two seemingly contradictory things, which is the purity of their individual vision, and the demands of the market. Very few are, like Emily Dickinson, so private that they never want to be published or exhibited, and most, even if they don’t dream of riches, would be overjoyed to sell. It does you no end of good to think that your audience may appreciate you more if you make your work intelligible to them; I could write in a very much more elaborate, self-pleasing style than I do, but I don’t think many would thank me for it. Yet money is always the crack in the golden bowl. Should you compromise in order to be more commercial?

Only you can decide – assuming it’s a choice you’re free to make in the first place. Most of the writers, painters and musicians I know box and cox, fitting in what they truly want to do with teaching, journalism or even (in the case of a sculptor) fitting new boilers. Are they any less bohemian for so doing? I don’t think so, but this isn’t everybody’s view. There’s nothing that journalists seem to hate more than a novelist who earns a living doing journalism, and the same seems to go for musicians who write commercial scores or artists who, like Millais, let their painting be used to advertise Pears soap. The same is true of film directors who shoot commercials; I’ll never forget how, after I saw a preview of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, I begged a features editor on The Times to let me interview him because I thought it so extraordinary. She curled her lip and said dismissively, “Oh, but he makes advertisements.” Presumably if Scott had been living off Arts Council grants, there wouldn’t have been a problem.

Poverty may look pure and romantic to the well-fed, but it is in itself dispiriting, and draining to the stamina creativity demands. Yes, it may make you time-rich but someone who can only afford a bowl of vegetable soup and a slice of bread for supper is not going to create with the same vigour as somebody who can afford a can of tuna and beans. In the end, whether you succeed or fail as an artist is down not just to talent and luck, but to finances, and if someone is able to finance themselves then good luck to them. Not everyone is, of course. I am very against a world in which the only people who are creative are those who can afford to be – and I worry about what the cuts in grants and bursaries is going to do to the arts, which any nation is right to treasure as its conscience and its soul. However, I also think that to be creative is not a right, and that to live off others if you can possibly support yourself does not make you more talented or truthful or worthy of respect.

We all love to think of creative people as something akin to holy man and women, ascetics who see visions while mortifying the flesh. No doubt some have done so, but anyone who studies the lives of great artists from the Renaissance onwards may note that most preferred steak and a glass of wine – just like Puccini’s bohemians, in fact.

*Yes, I know the second “e” has an accent on, but I can’t put one on. Sorry.

Selling Yourself to a UK university: UCAS and Personal Statement Hell

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

UCAS AND PERSONAL STATEMENT HELL

Selling Yourself to University: Personal Statement Hell

It is with some regret that I have come to realise that, far from being an advantage to my children to have a novelist for a mother, I am quite a serious disadvantage. For one thing, no teacher has believed their homework to be their own, despite my not having been allowed to see theirs since each turned ten – so my kids tend to get marked down. For another, when one of them shows me something they have written, it’s a prelude to fearful rows. I read everything with the stern eye of a professional, and this of course, is a bruising experience for a child, especially one who has inherited my own unfortunate knack of hearing the subtext. What I can damp down, tactfully, in a review is horribly apparent to them, whereas any praise is overlooked as bias.

As a result, my daughter is applying to a different university to my own to read English, and my son says he doesn’t want to do the subject for A-level at all. (My husband is hoping he may yet escape the curse of becoming what he fondly calls “another useless arty type” and actually earn real money. I have to say that this crosses my own mind as I brightly suggest a future in either brain surgery or plumbing.) Anyway, I have every confidence in both of them - despite being wracked, like most parents at this time of year, with appalling anxiety about exam results. On top of this, my daughter has been concocting her Personal Statement for UCAS, or University College Admissions System.

This has been a harrowing experience all round. Every newspaper is full of dire predictions about universities being full up, so that even those with 11 A*s at GCSE level and 4 As at A level are rejected not just by Oxbridge but every place of their choice. I find my sympathy for immigrants strained on learning how many places are taken by fee-paying students from abroad, simply because universities are desperate for money. I’m sure they are very bright people, but my own preference would be for a needs-blind system in which applicants are means tested, so that those who can pay, should; something that I’m sure would stop a degree of brain-drain to the US, too.

Anyway, the Personal Statement is something I remember writing in a single burst of misplaced confidence some time when I was seventeen. At that age, you don’t (or didn’t) realise just what a life-changing thing getting into a good university is but now of course the middle class has expanded, A-levels have been accused of dumbing down and the number of university places has remained the same. Consequently, applying is an absolute torment. I have been allowed five minutes in which to cast an eye ofer the daughter's, gulp, and hand it back. To me, she sounds like Lara Croft but then so does every child. From the moment your child is in secondary school, they are supposed to be not just working hard academically but honing their hobbies and skills in order to look more impressive. As a result, thousands of teenagers spend far too much time plodding up mountains to gain a Duke of Edinburgh Bronze, Silver or Gold, pretending to love charity work and learning, in my tone-deaf daughter’s case, to murder the classical guitar. Really, all she wants to do is lie about with her head in a book just as I did, but instead she must fulfil that accused CV.

All of which, according to friends of mine who are Oxbridge dons or serious academics, is a total waste of time. They assume that if your child has Grade Eight violin they simply had lots of money thrown at them, and it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to whether they are any good at the subject. They don’t give a damn about rounded personalities or other accomplishments, just whether you are a geek who might one day become a colleague or get a First. Try telling that to schools, though.

So, what are you supposed to put in this accursed Personal Statement that makes you stand out from the crowd? I’ve looked at quite a few Personal Statements as a favour to friends whose children apply to Oxbridge, and it is depressing how few even bother to check their spelling and grammar – but then I myself, as the product of progressive schooling, misspelt “February” until the age of 22, and am still rather hazy about split infinitives. I still don’t know why I got into Cambridge and other, no doubt brighter and better-qualified applicants didn’t, but I imagine my Personal Statement must have had something to do with it even though I can’t recall a word I wrote. How are you to sell your achievements without sounding like a conceited twit and a monumental pain in the neck? A friend sent me the following from America, and it cheered me up no end:

“I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.

“I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook thirty-minute brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

“Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by Juventus, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my shed. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

“I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don't perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. Last summer I toured Burkino Faso with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat 400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

“I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I chant Latin whilst working casually as a freelance ambassador. I perform short operas in the street to raise money for injured stunt dolphins, and regularly powerlift garden furniture for an entire afternoon.

“I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on holiday in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

“I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a pot noodle and a small spoon.

“I breed prize winning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling awards at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken to Elvis.

“But… I have not yet been to university."

Should I Have Heard of You?

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

SHOULD I HAVE HEARD OF YOU?

The question, “Should I have heard of you?” is one every author dreads. When Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize last year, she said in her speech that now, at last, she could answer, “Yes”. Few are so fortunate. “Maybe if you read literary fiction”, is one answer; “maybe if you read newspapers,” is another; “maybe if you read at all” is a third.

The fact is, most members of the public, including those who do read newspapers and buy books, are unlikely to have heard of 99% of contemporary novelists. I was snidely reminded of this recently in the Letters Page of The Daily Telegraph. I had written a somewhat tongue-in-cheek response to Harry Mount’s claim that the novel was dead because there were no modern literary page-turners. All the writers he cited were men. I pointed out that, actually, there are many literary page-turners – citing not only my own work but that of Helen Dunmore (Orange Prize winner) Andrea Levy (Orange and Whitbread Prize winner), Liz Jensen (best-seller) and Louise Doughty (author of among other things the Telegraph’s own Novel in a Year column). All of us, I hinted, had something else in common (ie, our sex.) Of course it was cheeky to include myself, so maybe when Mr Anthony Kay of Buxton, Derbyshire, wrote in to say the thing we had in common was that he hadn’t heard of any of us it was only my just deserts...though Mr Kay himself appears to be a fictitious character, as the Electoral Register has no record of his existence. I do hope I am not being paranoid in pointing this out.

Philistinism is endemic in Britain, and most particularly in London; a favourite dinner party game is to recite, with pride, the list of great books you haven’t read and have no intention of so doing. One can’t imagine the French or Germans behaving like this. British authors have a life-long battle to get noticed, even when published to rapturous reviews. There are only four ways of becoming well-known as an author in this country. One is to win the Booker prize; another is to have your book made into a successful film; a third is to appear on a TV show like Oprah or Richard & Judy, and the fourth is write a best-seller. My ex-US publisher, the sainted Nan A Talese of Doubleday told me of a boss of hers who send round a memo at the start of the recession asking editors to “from now on, only commission best-sellers.” This is a joke those outside the inky vale may not understand, because of course editors have no more idea of what makes a best-seller than anyone else. Editors are a much-maligned breed, and it’s easy to forget that they are brave and passionate people who tend not to publish anything without the hope and the belief that it will sell. Most of the time, they are disappointed. “Hope for the best, expect the worst,” is what my own editor, Richard Beswick, has as his motto.

Of course, as a critic, I am in a different position to editors and to many fellow-novelists because I’ve been able to give a bit of help to authors who have gone on to become hugely successful. JK Rowling, Philip Pullman, Stephanie Meyer, Cressida Cowell, Rick Riordan, Francesca Simon, Anthony Horowitz and many more got their first real, serious coverage because I spotted them, and stuck my neck out to tell readers they were something special. No one person making a fuss in just one newspaper is enough, of course, but it’s often the small pebble that starts an avalanche.

All this however is in parenthesis from the original question: Should I have heard of you? Well, it depends what kind of reader you are. If you only ever read on the beach, then definitely not; ditto if you only ever read non-fiction, or classics. Equally, there are plenty of readers who only ever read the winner of the Booker Prize, more, one feels, as a sort of grim cultural duty as out of pleasure. There are those who only read the titles recommended by a particular newspaper. There are those who read a book because they have seen an interview with an author on TV, or have gone to a literary festival in which they said something interesting – or just like their column, or their photo. I’m not decrying any of these, because so many books published you have to have some sort of filter. Few have the leisure, or the money, to read everything.

Mostly, however, if you have heard of an author, it could well be because a publisher has paid to have their book publicised on the Underground, on railways stations and on buses, or to have them discounted in a supermarket, or promoted in a bookstore. I don’t know what this costs, but at a guess it’s several thousand pounds because, ironically, it only happens to people who are already selling well. Doris Lessing put it very well in her Autobiography: a publisher is like a general who divides his soldiers into two troops to fight a battle. One troop does well, the other not. Should he send reinforcements to the successful force, or the flagging one? The answer, counter-intuitive as it may seem, is to reinforce the successful troop. This is how you win wars, or in the case of publishing, make profits (which can often feel like the same thing.)

As a critic, nothing annoys me more when a book arrives on the wings of a massive marketing budget. I’d much rather discover something that has been over-looked, or which has been bubbling under as a cult book that many more might enjoy if they knew of its existence. It may be no coincidence that I myself belong to this category: one of the most frequent, and frustrating questions I’ve had from readers who have enjoyed my work is: Why haven’t I heard of you before? As an author, of course, I’d love to receive that kind of push. It’s very time-consuming to not only have to write your books but to sell them, too. With Hearts & Minds, I was incredibly lucky in being taken up by Waterstones’ own book club, which got me promoted energetically in every store for a month; I’m hugely grateful to them. It was one piece of real luck, which came after twenty years of the opposite. Being long-listed for the Orange Prize also helped – a bit.

Writers such as myself sell a bit through public recognition, but more through word-of-mouth. You can’t in the end beat that. We all depend upon people who have enjoyed our work telling other people, who tell other people, and so on. It’s a very frail system, which can break down at any time, and yet it can’t be faked or corrupted. There is something very satisfying in knowing that the people who do read your work have come across it not because it’s fashionable, or massively marketed but because they are actually the people for whom I, at any rate, write. These are Readers, with a capital R. They are people who have intellectual curiosity and yes, dear Reader, if you are part of this blessed breed, then yes you at least may have heard of me.

The work-life balance for women writers

Thu, 8 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

THE LIFE-WORK BALANCE

Now that the school holidays have begun, I am once again pondering the life-work balance. I suppose everyone is confronted with this; as a writer you are ideally suited to bringing up children. Or are you?

I have always treasured stories about how women authors keep a kind of green belt around their working lives, though a description in Dorothy L Sayers’ work about how her alter ego, Harriet Vane, managed to keep her small son quiet by instructing him not to bother her until both clock hands pointed to noon roused some scepticism, even as a teenager. I try to be stern (the “I’m not to be disturbed unless you have a broken leg” line) and taught mine how to cook, read and do their own homework as soon as possible. However, like many of my generation I am also a surrendered mother. Even though my younger one is nearly fifteen, I still drive him to and from school most days, because he has been mugged twice and I’m not madly keen on it happening again.

Writing during term time is constrained by this – I know I have to be home by 3.30, which means any interviews I do as a journalist, or meetings I have as a novelist, are curtailed. I can do some evening events, like talking to book groups or chairing discussions, but the sort of things that men do are beyond me, as they are beyond a great many of my sex. Every now and again I get cross and threaten to go to the famous writers’ retreat, Hawthornden Castle, where you can live in luxury for a month just writing and being served exquisite meals. Needless to say, I never do this, and strange to say neither do the other over-worked mums I know either. I didn’t have the confidence to apply when childless, and now I’ll just have to wait until my twenty-year sentence has expired.

The thing is, it doesn’t get any easier. If the first ten years of motherhood are a hard physical slog, with constant broken nights and illness, as well as the usual financial constraints, the second are more of an emotional slog. Nobody tells you that when your own children are teenagers you get a lot of turbulence as they fall in and out of love, flog themselves to pass exams or fail to prepare at all, get bullied, get drunk, get lost and so on. This drains a considerable amount of energy that could go into writing; and yet, I have no regrets. My sex may be totally ignored by the literary establishment (and a piece in the Daily Telegraph by Harry Mount this week, lamenting the absence of literary page-turners did precisely that) but I think that the experience of having and raising children enlarges us as writers.

The novelist Candia McWilliam claimed, famously, that “every baby costs four novels”. Few female novelists with children manage the novel a year that is the ideal rate of productivity; whenever I look at, say, the production rate of a childless author like Iris Murdoch, I sigh with envy. I also remember a piece AS Byatt wrote the year that Possession came out about how she suddenly realised her children were grown up and she was free. Yet most of us manage one every other year or two. Furthermore, even if it sometimes feels like (in the words of one of my characters) being shackled to a lunatic, the experience of having a child forces you to see the world afresh, and opens up whole areas of human life. Not enough writers seem to celebrate this, I think.

There is a democracy to motherhood that is much like the democracy that can arise in any other kind of long-term emergency. (Perhaps the reasons why sensible women loathe the cliques and trouble-makers at the school gates is that they run deliberately counter to this.) When you have a child, you have something in common with women of every kind of background. I know that the big leap between my first two novels, and A Vicious Circle was partly due to suddenly finding myself not only talking to mothers from very different social backgrounds, but invited into their homes. A male writer would simply not have this opened up to him; Orwell, who is one of my heroes, had to go undercover as it were to write Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. He idolised the working-class, whereas I am just interested in people and the human condition. I am not a political animal, as he was, but I am passionately curious about the here and now. When you become a mother, you are given a free pass into some of modern life’s most hidden aspects. I am able to write about the lives of the poor, and the dispossessed, because I have been allowed into them as a person and this is a privilege I have both sought and been given.

Yet the work-life balance remains very hard to achieve. What motherhood gives with one hand, it also takes with the other. To work in an office is tiring, not least because of the commuting often involved, but the domestic coal-face can be just as stressful. I have always worked, and always earned even when seriously ill, but I am not the principle bread-winner in my family. Inevitably my own work takes second place to the smooth running of family, household life and supporting a more successful partner. I do have a cleaner, though nothing like the army of immigrant helpers I needed when seriously ill five years ago – an experience which of course informed the writing of Hearts and Minds. There are plenty of women who write in far more adverse circumstances, but we all, I suspect, achieve what we do by cramming our “real” work into the interstices of our lives, getting up early and going to bed late, feeling permanently tired and stretched.

Some people look forward to a time when this isn’t the case, but I’m not sure that I do. The writers I most admire are those who, in Kipling’s words, “fill the unforgiving minute/With sixty seconds' worth of distance run.” Anthony Trollope, for instance, wrote most of his novels while working for the Post Office (whose post boxes he invented). He composed and wrote, in long-hand, as fast as the fastest typist can type if his Autobiography is to be believed. People like to imagine that all they need in order to produce their own novel is more leisure, but I suspect the complete opposite is due. Despite the image of the artist enjoying the freedom of the garret, unencumbered, most of us produce our best work in between sorting the laundry, making fishcakes for supper, overseeing piano practice and watering the garden. With which words (there being a drought on) I must leave to switch off the tap....

Launch parties for novels: are they necessary?

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

LAUNCH PARTIES: ARE THEY NECESSARY?

The first time I ever met a Literary Editor, he was fulminating about a launch party.

“Do they not realise,” he said, “that I could be out at a party every single night of the week, and that the kind I go to have CHAMPAGNE?”

This was the 1990s, when novels were fashionable, and the lavish literary launch party was in full swing. I caught the tail-end of it once I realised that it isn’t enough to sit all alone in your room toiling at your craft. You have to get out and play the game: for even now, people are more likely to get a decent contract if they’re on the circuit of about 300 “movers and shakers” than if they are just good at what they do. It’s astonishing the way that contacts continue to be such powerful things, but I suppose publishers are as susceptible to blandishment as anyone else, provided an author is under 45 and reasonably photogenic. Here is a passage from my third novel, A Vicious Circle, describing how an Irish waitress called Mary infiltrates the literary world:

“There were partiers every night for those who cared to go to them: parties in clubs, parties in pubs, parties in houses, in flats, in boats, in gardens, in bookshops; parties in museums and parties at the Zoo. How did publishers continue to afford such things? Why did they bother? Mary did not know or care...The same people spun round with their glass of white wine and line of patter, and soon they became familiar, less frightening, more frightened of her, almost friendly as long as you didn’t look too closely at the eyes. The women all wore skimpy black dresses, even in the middle of winter, and they were seemingly prepared to have sex in public if it would advance their career. You could always blame it on the drink, and literary life was so incestuous everyone had probably seen it already.

“There were neighbours who heaped praise on each other’s work before modestly declining to review it “as a friend”, publishers who proclaimed every one of their authors as brilliant, agents touching down from auctions, gossip columnists truffling for a snippet, freelances exchanging telephone numbers, hacks in search of a free meal. All this industry, generated on the back of a book that would, if anything, make a loss.”

I’ve written before about the strange double-act that novelists are expected to perform. By nature, we must enjoy our own company more than is usual or we couldn’t produce our work; yet increasingly, we can only sell it if we are bold enough to get out and stand on a stage, or go to parties. Little has changed about the parties of the 1990s and those of the 2010s, except that hardly any publishers now pay for such parties as are thrown. A lead title might still get the full club-and-champagne treatment, but those such as myself have a party, if at all, at home or in a friendly bookshop and buy their own wine. You’re lucky if you get so much as a bunch of daffodils from your editor on the day.

Having been over-lavish with entertainment budgets, publishers have now decided that everything other than in-store promotions is now a waste of resources. They may well be right. As I wrote in A Vicious Circle, most books make a loss, so to celebrate their arrival into the world with a party can seem a pointless extravagance. I’m not impressed by the whole caviar and champagne treatment myself: as a critic, I’d rather see the money go towards a newspaper ad – as this helps to pay my wages.

Yet writers do really need some acknowledgement of all the hard work that goes into a book. Even the worst gives its author pains beyond those of childbirth, accompanied by a wracking sense of self-doubt that is ghastly both to experience and to inflict upon our nearest and dearest. A party makes the pain seem almost worthwhile, though it can throw up memorable irritants of its own. The only big party I was ever given was for A Vicious Circle, as it happens, but that was due as much to the scandal that surrounded its publication as to its perceived merit. Many of the people who turn up to launches are no more than lice in the hair of literature: the superficially friendly, privately sneering sort. Some are amazingly grand about whether they will attend or not – as if it honestly mattered – and some are just there for the canapés. They will, like that long-gone literary editor I mentioned, feel personally affronted if there is no champagne.

My favourite kind of launch party happens in somebody’s home, or a pub, and thanks to the recession there are more of these and less lavishness. I was at one last night for Louise Doughty, to mark her gripping new novel Whatever You Love, which Faber had supplied copious amounts of wine for. Even with the usual speeches – first by the fulsome publisher, then by the grateful author – so stylised as to be no more than a cuckoo emerging from a cuckoo-clock, it was lovely, probably because the guests were almost all other writers who wished her well, and family. The very worst parties tend to be at The Ivy, where the canapés are in inverse proportion to the author’s number of true friends and supporters.

Launch parties can seem, to those who don’t go to them, to be the essence of enviable metropolitan glamour. They are, in actual fact, more like work than they seem but they mean nothing to the readers who, you hope, will ultimately buy the book. Now that we are all living in reduced circumstances, seeing a publisher’s entire entertainment budget been splashed over just one author (even if the author makes a contribution) is so irritating as to be counter-productive, but not having a party at all makes the whole enterprise feel like a failure from the start. Like the christenings in fairy-tales launches are often a mixed blessing; but like christenings, launches are somehow necessary – if only to prove to an author that the book they’ve had in their head for so long is now out there at last.

Music and writing - Angela Hewitt and Seth Lakeman

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

As listeners to Radio 3 may know, I did a Private Passions interview with the composer Michael Berkeley some years back in which I talked a little about how important music is to me as a novelist. It was not an altogether happy experience, partly because, as with most enthusiastic amateurs talking to a professional, I felt more and more of an ignoramaus when discussing an art about which I have very little technical knowledge or ability. I have listened to Radio 3 most of my life, sang in choirs and am now learning to play the piano again thanks to the inspiring composer and teacher Robert Ninot (whose recording ONE I recommend) who shares a passion for Bach. But the gulf between this and real musicianship is immense, and humbling.

I listen to music while writing, and often put passages into my novels describing it: the most recent being in Chapter 14 of Hearts and Minds, where one of my characters, the deeply unhappy American dogsbody, Katie, hears Couperin played at the Wigmore Hall. The pianist is Grub Viner one of the main characters in my second novel, A Private Place, who has now grown up and become a professional pianist:

“At first the pieces sound playful, almost like half-remembered nursery songs, and she feels self-conscious and on edge, thinking: he’s all peacock brilliance, without feeling. But time after time, the melody turns on a hair, jumps a key or an octave, and amazes her. One piece especially almost stops her hearts, and it’s clear that not only does the pianist love it but everyone in the concert hall does too, for that special quality of listening which is particular to the Wigmore blossoms like a great flower. Nobody coughs, or rustles, or shifts by so much as an inch, but they seem to hold their breath as the ravishing sounds transfix them. What are the Mysterious Barricades? Are they real or imaginary, between people or between the world and the spirit? The broken chords and weak beats are perplexing, like someone approaching a being they desire yet fear, but underneath there is the same strength as Bach. The sky darkens overhead, and the glow of the burnished figures above intensifies. It is worth being alive.”

I was thinking of several things when I wrote this. One, of course, is the famous, absurd and marvellous passage in EM Forster’s Howards End, when the Schlegel sisters listen to Beethoven’s Fifth, which moves Helen so much that, fatefully, she goes off with an umbrella that isn’t hers. I have a particular love for Forster, and his motto, “Only connect”, is very close to the central theme of Hearts and Minds. I suspect that I listen to music in a way not unlike he did, in that I, too, find my imagination stimulated to see and feel strange things – though I also have more of an aesthetic sense of the structure of classical music, and a little of its history. Couperin was important to the aristocratic French audience of his time, who found relief from their highly artificial, emotionally repressed existence at Versailles by listening to his compositions, whose dreaminess and unpredictability enabled them to weep (behind a curtain) as they could never do in public. Katie herself is emotionally repressed, and, having starved herself to the point of anorexia, this experience is a release for her, too – though her presence at the Wigmore is also necessary for the plot.

Piano is the instrument that means most to me. I have periods of practising obsessively, and know that it can easily overtake the impulse and sheer application needed to write fiction. Like Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, I know that "my fingers do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see many women's do. They have no the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault - because I would nopt take the trouble of practising," I gave up playing as a teenager, much as I gave up Art, because it became perfectly clear to me that if you are serious about one kind of art, the others have to fall by the wayside. Of course, I always regretted this, but I still think the decision was correct, for I have two friends who are outstanding amateur musicians, and failed writers. The hours they put into practising their instruments should have gone into writing - or so I believe - because just as you need 10,000 hours of practise in order to master an instrument, so you need those same 10,000 hours to master your voice as a writer.

I love many different kinds of music, from classical to jazz and folk; though I loathe almost every kind of pop music written after the 1980s. (I think this is because it tends to be "composed" by people with no proper musical training, but it might just be my age.) The musician I listen to live whenever possible is Angela Hewitt, the goddess of the keyboard. She has recorded both Bach and Couperin, among others, and those who have heard or seen her will know what I mean when I say that she’s as great a story-teller as she is a musician. When you watch her you really feel she’s more fully engaged with a composer’s thoughts and feelings than anyone alive. I was thinking of her when I wrote that passage in Hearts and Minds.

One of the difficult things about writing fiction is finding something akin to a kind of musical “key” for each book, and each character within each book. The one I’m writing at present is set in Devon, and I've been listening a lot to Seth Lakeman's Kitty Jay and Freedom Fields, so imagine my joy when I discovered that he not only lives and works quite near me there (and his family once had as its Health Visitor my friend Lynne Hatwell, the http://www.dovegreyreader.co.uk book blogger) but has a new album out called – yes – Hearts and Minds! (http://www.sethlakeman.co.uk/) The title song is stunningly good, and if you click on Seth’s website you can hear him playing it at the extraordinary Minack Theatre in Cornwall (http://www.minack.com/theatregoers/minackbrochureweb.pdf).

A composer/fiddler/ rock folk singer of serious talent, Seth Lakeman combines visionary lyrics about Dartmoor with an extraordinary bluegrass quality. He sings while playing the fiddle, which gives a nervy, exhilarating pitch to each track. It's not music to relax to but it his music has a feel to it that is both so traditional, so Devonian, so cutting edge, so full of energy, tragedy and joy that I don’t know how I’m going to be able to wait until he plays at the HMV launch for it at the Jazz Cafe on June 29 (http://www.jazzcafelive.com/now_booking.asp . I’ve already pre-ordered my copy of the CD, and something of Lakeman’s inspired music and (if I’m given permission) lyrics is definitely going into my new novel, which is about rural poverty, love in adversity, the landscape of Dartmoor and (as so often) murder.

Dressing the part as a woman novelist

Tue, 8 Jun 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Novelists can’t help looking a bit odd. Most of us don’t get out enough, and tend to emerge reluctantly, like something found under a rock. We never look as glamorous as Daphne du Maurier, Rosamund Lehmann or even Candace Bushnell, whose horse-faced mavens currently adorn every bus in London. Few of us are well-groomed: Agatha Christie’s fictional novelist, Ariadne Oliver, described as “handsome in a rather untidy fashion, with fine eyes, substantial shoulders, and a large quantity of rebellious grey hair with which she was continuously experimenting” is instantly recognisable round the streets of North London and North Oxford to this day. There are, of course, exceptions: Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Aminatta Forna among them, but most good books are not written by people pretty enough to feature in Vogue. Few of us earn enough money to dress particularly well, and yet we live in an age in which cheap clothes can be put together stylishly. When, then, do so few of us know how to dress the part?

One of the weirdest questions I get asked is whether I wear anything special to write. I suspect this stems from a dim memory of Jo, in Little Women, who when she grows up feels she has to don a kind of turban in order to compose. The notion that any item of clothing is crucial to inspiration has recently been sent up by the fiendishly clever children’s author, Anthony McGowan, whose hero must wear Einstein’s underpants on his head to foil an alien invasion, but I myself am only interested in thick woolly socks to keep my feet warm during prolonged periods of physical inertia and mental activity; nevertheless, there is such a thing as an ideal novelist’s outfit. Although I’m not especially interested in dressing myself, I’ve directed enough photoshoots of people to see what works for portraits and TV, and I’ve seen enough mistakes at festivals, too.

Of course, what I’m about to describe applies to women only. Men are far more practical creatures, to the extent that they are not burdened with large handbags or silly shoes. They don’t have to worry about where to clip a microphone during a reading because they nearly always have a jacket.

A jacket is one of the most crucial items for an author. Don’t get one from Topshop, because it dates instantly. Mine, made of light gabardine by Marina Rinaldi, doubles up as a short coat in temperate weather, and goes under a raincoat (also crucial, given British weather). It’s black, which means that microphone wires disappear, and it has large pockets in which the transformer boxes can sit comfortably, and it’s single-breasted and very plain. The fact that it’s ancient, and its lining is falling to bits will I hope be overlooked because it was bought about 10 years ago when I last had a decent advance. One piece of advice I will offer to anyone is: always go for the best jacket you can, in plain, dark, creaseless fabric. Never wear tan, or any pale colour, and never wear something remotely like the jackets TV newsreaders tend to wear – especially if going on TV.

Be almost as wary of what you wear underneath. Glittery, over-sized T-shirts, or ones featuring The Grateful Dead are just naff. I’ve been caught out by tunics far too many times, thanks to the availability of very reasonably-priced linen from shops like Gap and M&S. White or pale shirts make you look enormous unless only a tiny portion of them is showing. On the other hand, touches of white near the face are always flattering. Proper blouses – or, if you remember about the need for microphones, dresses – seem to work much better. Almost all the most stylish women writers I’ve seen, from Jill Dawson to Susie Boyt, seem to go in for vintage dresses, and layers that can be taken off if a tent or a theatre is too hot.

I have a great dread of looking “all arty crafty about the neck and ankles,” as Stella Gibbons put it in Cold Comfort Farm, but it is a weakness of my peers to go for large, elaborate necklaces, scarves or even feather boas when given half the chance. Some carry it off quite marvellously, and I’m sure make themselves much more interesting for an audience to look at. It’s hard even for adults to sit still and listen for an hour, and I’m sure the odd flashing collar is a help as long as it doesn’t get tangled up with either microphone or wildly gesturing hands. A few, such as Jacqueline Wilson, have made “statement” jewellery a part of their public persona, which is good fun for kids. My own feeling however is that an excess of ornament makes it easier for people (ie men) to pretend we are unprofessional and frivolous. We need to be able to wear shoes that enable us to stand at lecterns for an hour, long socks or tights that don’t reveal bare calves, make-up that makes us look more human than troll, and well-cut hair. Anything less makes it too easy for us to be dismissed. Publishers and agents can’t or won’t tell you this stuff: very few even give authors media training, which (even for journalists) can be quite an eye-opener.

If you’re going to be photographed, or going on TV, or giving a public appearance and have the time, it’s better to go to a cosmetics counter and buy a lipstick in return for a make-over than try to do it yourself. It does help to make you look less mad if your eyeliner is on straight, and your lipstick the right colour. It’s a good idea to have a well-fitting bra. Like most second-wave feminists, I don’t think any of these things are incompatible with being seen as an individual, and a professional by your public. There are those who still believe that wearing make-up is false or hypocritical: they’re entitled to that belief, but my own is that it’s actually disrespectful not to try to look your best, even with jet-lag and a bad cold.

Looking good, and looking dignified, is important for novelists even if we tend to be wary of setting too much store by personal appearance, and consistently tell stories about people who are more than their appearance. I am passionate about my profession being more professional, because at a time when it is more embattled than ever I fear we will otherwise be sidelined. It’s worth noting how groomed and impressive Hilary Mantel now looks, given a plunging electric blue dress she wore as a Booker judge, and the tendency she once had for smocks. Electric blue has a disastrous appeal for clever women: when AS Byatt won the Booker for Possession, the headline in one newspaper was “THE BLUE BALLOON GOES UP.” Spiteful and silly, yes – but someone should have told her how a poor choice makes a serious author an easy target for misogyny. Someone like Fay Weldon, who is consistently elegant, would never have made that mistake.

I love seeing people dress up, and I love eccentrics of both sexes. I’m all for colour, decoration, fun and experiment, but you have to know how to do it to pull it off. Some authors, such as Sally Gardner (who once worked as a theatrical costumier) Cressida Cowell (who went to art school) and Kathy Lette (who worked in Hollywood) can carry off turbans, giant earrings and amazing tiny dresses by Italian designers. They add to the gaiety of the nation. My own wardrobe is full of mistakes, and probably far too dull. But I have learnt the slow and painful way that it’s better to spend a bit of time dressing the part, than not.

Down with CInderella - my quest for size 9 shoes

Tue, 25 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Down With CInderella

This week, shoe manufacturers finally woke up to the fact that women's shoe size, like their busts, has gone up. The founder of French Sole, whose clients include the Duchess of Cambridge, has launched a new collection, Pirouette, for those of us with size 9-11 shoes. I must put my foot in it - or not. My daughter was told off at school today for coming in wearing black trainers. The reason is simple: like me, she has size 9 (or 42) feet, and cannot find shoes that are either pretty, comfortable or affordable. The one pair we did buy, at vast expense from Russell & Bromley last autumn, has now fallen to bits.

As a child, I remember being mystified by a famous Australian song about Waltzing Matilda. "Herring boxes without sockes/Sandals were, for Clementine" it went. The reason? Her shoe size was No 9, like mine. Presumably, this is what high street shoe maufacturers still think, because if you go onto any store website in the UK, you find they stop at size 8. Yet it has been in all the papers this year that our average female shoe size has gone up to a size 7 - so there must be plenty more like us.

If I am in despair, imagine what it's like to be a teenager. I have always refused to wear too-tight shoes, and as a result tend to look eccentric in Doc Martens, Uggs or sandals. My feet, though large, are one of the few things I'm proud of because they are shapely, with neither bunions nor corns nor misshapen nails. I never liked the bit in Cinderella about her tiny glass slippers - a mistranslation of "fur" as it proves from the Russian - where her Ugly Sisters chop bits off their heels and toes to cram their feet into her shoe. Shoes are perhaps the ultimate Freudian symbol for the vagina. One of the few short stories to have ever made me feel faint is Emily Prager's A Visit From the Footbinder, about a young Chinese girl having her feet broken in order to be bound to fit into the minute satin slippers that Pre-Revolutionary husbands demanded. (Apparently this was so that wives could perform grotesque sexual acts on them, though what sane person would find rotting hooves attractive is a mystery.) Clearly, it worked as a means of sexual selection, for to this day, all my children's Chinese and Japanese friends do have remarkably small feet. When they visit us and remove their shoes, as is now customary in civilised British households, they look like thimbles next to barges.

Large feet are always supposed to be comical, much like anything else that is large in women, who are as a sex still supposed to be frail, tiny and timorous. You really can't help being born with size 9 feet, but to see the reaction of UK shop assistants, you'd think it was always our fault. Should my daughter, who is 5'10", have had her feet bound? When I see the pedetal extremeties of many other women in changing rooms, or sandals, it's clear that a great many of us are challenged in this way. Yet nobody seems to notice that we are hobbling around in agony, or incredibly bad-tempered because somebody has trodden yet again on the corns we wouldn't have with well-fitting shoes. Frankly, if Cinderella's godmother had had any sense she'd have skipped the dreary Prince and concentrated on the slippers.

Why can't manufacturers realise this? The Observer Magazine recently ran a feature about how women's bust sizes have increased, which I imagine was largley so that the male half of the population could ogle attractive embonpoints, but our feet are just as important. I can never bear to watch horror films in which women have to run away, because they always trip thanks to their idiotic shoes.

My daughter, it so happens, not only uses her feet for the usual activities, but for fighting; she's a serious kick-boxer, who is almost a black belt and she takes out very large men, very politely, once or twice a week. I am thinking of letting her loose on Clarks, Marks & Spencer, Topshop, Boden and the rest, just to show them how dangerous it is. In the meantime, any useful suggestions about where to go will be gratefully received.

Don't let's have a Return of the King

Fri, 7 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

A familiar feature of many children’s books is the need for strong government, preferably by a king but occasionally by a queen. Without such a figure, the country falls into chaos, ruin, crime and terror. The old Arthurian legend dies hard, and even CS Lewis’s Golden Age of Narnia, which had the bold move of power-sharing between four siblings, still chose to have the eldest, Peter, as High King. Lord of the Rings took this trope to extremes with its final book being called, no less, The Return of the King. I’ve always been particularly fond of Tolkien, no least for making the king somebody whom our heroes meet in a pub, who doesn’t look particularly nice.

My own current preference for the Liberal Democrats’s Nick Clegg, may well be affected by his being the only leader in possession of both a neck and regular features. But is he a great leader, in the style of Aragorn et al, with Vince as his Gandalf? Only time will tell. Meanwhile, the British media is united in agreeing that a hung Parliament is a Bad Thing. This is enough to make me suspicious it might not be. After all, Germany, the most successful country in the EU, has been governed by a coalition, and Angela Merkel is currently being forced by some of her outraged countrymen into confronting their extreme reluctance to bail out Greece. I’m afraid I lost all sympathy for the Greeks on learning that they have been retiring at 55, so am watching the developments with interest.

Trollope, the only novelist to have depicted British politics with any conviction, has a Prime Minister in a novel of that title, actually the Duke of Omnium, who presides over a rickety coalition for three years. I seem to recall that he doesn’t do too badly, though his wife spends too much money on lavish entertainments. Agreeing to disagree, and burying your differences in order to get on with the job that needs doing is something only grown-ups do – as I recall, not too badly in World War Two. It also works in marriage. One of the wisest books on the subject that I’ve read, reprinted by the splendid Persephone Books is Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s 1924 novel, The Home Maker. It describes in harrowing detail the marriage of a sensitive sickly man who loves his children as much as he loathes his work, and his super-competent, deeply frustrated wife who is a martyr to eczema brought on by floor scrubbing. Half the book is the kind of thing all too familiar in modern novels, working up to a pitch of misery – but the other half is much more remarkable. The husband and wife swap roles, and peace and prosperity flow from the decision. She is the stronger of the two, and better suited to one kind of leadership; he is ideally suited to look after their children. They become a coalition that works.

Will Gordon Brown, notorious for not being able to work with other people, make such a compromise with Clegg? I very much doubt it, even if he has indicated that he will consider the long- overdue electoral reform that the Lib-Dems have championed. Besides, if Clegg chooses Labour there is every indication that Brown will be ousted and we will have yet another unelected PM in the form of David Milliband, the charmless boy wonder that his Party is convinced is the future. No: a much more intriguing coalition would be if Clegg got into bed with Cameron. I can’t see it happening simply because the Conservatives are so obsessed with Strong Government. More’s the pity: such a compromise between Left and Right might play to the strengths of both. Again and again, in the televised debates, we saw the public’s desire for the parties to stop shouting at each other and find common ground. The only political party that seemed to be hearing this was the Lib Dems.

The desire for a single party led by a strong leader is at best babyish and at worst sinister. I don’t trust anyone who says, Trust me, I will guide you to a new and better life. We may have believed this in fairy-tales and children’s fiction, but as adults who have studied History are sadder and wiser. We know perfectly well that such a person is bound to be a fool, a knave or a rogue. We can’t trust to other men’s consciences – look what Tony Blair and George Bush got us into with theirs – we can only trust our own.

Libel and the threat to authors

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Libel is a subject close to my heart, and if you don't know why then look at the history of my novel A Vicious Circle on my Novels page.

If you have been genuinely libelled, it is a most painful experience. There are cases of people whose careers and even lives are destroyed by the publication of bare-faced lies – but there are also people whose careers are damaged by being accused of having libelled somebody when this is not the case. My accuser David Sexton went on to be appointed Literary Editor of the Evening Standard, a position which he occupies to this day. A Vicious Circle, though published as something of a success de scandal, is now out of print.

One of the things that struck me very much at the time was just how sexist the treatment I received was. All the most influential literary commentators are men, and with one gallant exception – John Walsh, widely believed to be the model for Ivo Sponge – they were pretty snide. Few seemed to grasp that the issue at stake was not whether I was a vengeful Woman Scorned but about freedom of speech and creativity.

As a result of this, I joined PEN, and became an active member of both it and the Society of Authors. I also became much more strongly feminist, having had reason to believe that unless more women writers banded together to help each other, men were always going to bully us. I have total contempt for bullying, cowardice and meanness of spirit, and believe that it is always best faced down.

So it was with great interest that I came across the now-notorious amazon reviews of Rachel Polonsky’s excellent new book on Russian, Molotov’s Magic Lantern by one pseudonymous reviewer, “Historian”. He or she did not like Dr Polonsky’s book at all, giving it one star, and neither did he/she like various other books on history or Russia by authors such as Kate Summerscale. Strangely, the only book “Historian” did like was one by Orlando Figes, which was given five stars and ended with the ecstastic commendation: “May he write forever.”

The Profile of “Historian” was revealed by amazon at the touch of a button, as “orlando-birkbeck”. I, among others, drew the obvious conclusion, and I posted the link not only to Facebook but to various newspapers, including the TLS. I do not know Orlando Figes, a Professor at Birkbeck University, but I am an admirer of Dr Polonsky’s, and knew that following her meticulous demolition of one of his books, Natasha’s Dance, he had given an interview to The Guardian in which he was apparently “misquoted” in describing her, quite wrongly, as an embittered former student of his. Readers will draw their own conclusions from the following statement on the Guardian’s website after Polonsky successfully sued for libel, http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/nov/21/leadersandreply.mainsection1

Following this posting, Orlando Figes’s lawyer, David Price, not only sent aggressive letters to various newspapers letters, threatening libel, but also sent three to me. Now if you get a letter like this from a lawyer, what do you do? Fleet St was terrified – but the one exception to this was the TLS, who broke the story in its NB column. You can follow this link: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7103624.ece

Mr Price’s letters to me appeared a mixture of bullying, a crude attempt at entrapment and assertions which, in the light of subsequent revelations, are highly comical. I removed my Facebook link and comments, but not before they had been read. I am still interested in knowing just who forwarded these, given my privacy settings, to David Price. Perhaps they failed to understand that accusations of libel, far from terrifying everybody, add fuel to the flames.

A new twist was revealed on Sunday, which was that Figes’s wife, herself a barrister, now claims to be the author of “Historian”’s reviews. It seems remarkable, as Polonsky herself commented, that a busy lawyer should take the time to comment in this way, and not at least inform her husband she was doing so when his own reputation was being dragged through the gutter. We must await such interesting additional information as to the location and timing of the amazon reviews – which they can be compelled to reveal - and also the court diary of Mrs Figes, which is a matter of public record.

Once it was out, other newspapers became bold enough to comment on the story. Several, however, misunderstood the point, and took the opportunity to attack not Figes’s actions but amazon for allowing anonymous reviews. Only Sir Peter Stothard, formerly editor of The Times and now editor of the TLS went straight to the point as someone who understands both journalism and academia:

“The issue is only that scholars, more than all others, should think long and hard before hiring lawyers to stop publication of material about themselves that they dislike - however much they may dislike it.

“The Figes family has fallen in the mire by forgetting this week that the ethics of a celebrity footballer or actor, whose lawyers will regularly use libel and privacy law to prevent discussion and disclosure, are not to be aped by those whose primary duty is to those very virtues.

“Professor Figes's lawyer not only attempted to gain silence and his costs from newspapers, those who need no sympathy here for we can care for ourselves. He attempted on behalf of his client to suppress the wholly legitimate questions of one of that client's more distinguished colleagues and, still worse, to point out the financial risk of libel damage that this colleague risked by refusing to comply with his demands,” Stothard wrote, with thunderous scorn.

http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/2010/04/one-lesson-of-the-figes-affair.html

Let us hope that this particular lesson sinks in.

Polonsky’s case is totally different from mine: for one thing, she has been the one who justly, and successfully, sued for libel in connection with Figes in the past, over the Guardian interview. I doubt very much that this new case will be let go – and nor should it be, given the suspicion that must arise of a lasting grudge of a type the feels strangely familiar to me. She is an academic, and I am a novelist. Academics deal with facts and research, novelists with the altogether hazier realm of the imagination, and with invented beings and situations. Both are equally vulnerable once threats start flying about. Yet her case is also different because the culture in which the complaints were made has altered sufficiently for her not to be portrayed as a hysterical or vengeful woman. I do not think this would have been the case fourteen years ago.

When public apologies are duly issued, I look forward to receiving my own letter from Orlando Figes, and from his lawyer. The apology will be made under duress, unlike those private apologies that have, over the years, been made to me by the more intelligent and thoughtful of the male columnists who commented on my own case in 1996. But they should all know one thing: when you have had experience of libel, you either lose your back-bone, or you grow balls of steel. And when those balls belong to a woman, watch out.

Literary Envy

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

I have as many faults as the next person, but one of the few from which I don't believe I suffer is literary envy. That feeling, summed up by Gore Vidal as "every time a friend succeeds a little bit of me dies" is one I find mystifying.

Of course I understand what it feels like to be envious. I have felt envious of women who had babies when I didn’t, and envious of people who were given certain jobs that I’d have liked at the time. I’m still envious of those who, unlike myself, have had children and kept as slim as they were before. I’ve envied people who have had nice holidays when I’ve had a nasty one, and yes, I’ve sometimes felt not envious but very cross about other novelists for getting praise or prizes that I didn’t feel they had earned. Envy is an emotion people confess to quite freely these days, especially since the rise of “wannabee” celebrity culture. Into each life a little rain must fall as Marcus Aurelius put it, and by denying that anything is wrong, ever, the apparently blessed invite envy. To be envied, we are persuaded, is the cherry on the cake. But not for nothing is that most evil of emotions the one that is most frequently at the heart of Shakespearian tragedy.

Envy does has its more positive aspects in that it can be the spur to ambition. I expect that almost anyone who has written a book once began by reading something and thinking - I could do that, too. Whether it's true or not is another matter, but it’s a perfectly normal feeling in the untried. If you are perpetually in awe of other authors, you never dare to emulate them. From here, the feeling that I could do that, better is deceptively inviting. Real envy, however, is pure poison. It distorts judgement, wastes energy and lowers the envier in their own esteem as well as that of others. I can’t think of a more wholly corrosive emotion – other than persistent vindictiveness. Envy is what makes people take out their keys and scratch a line on your car or front door. It’s what inspires poison pen letters, malicious gossip and bullying. Someone who demands “Why haven’t I got that?” instead of, “How can I change in order to get that?” is in a hole of their own digging.

Writers cannot tell themselves often enough that, just as they can’t write somebody else’s book, nobody else can write theirs. Literary envy is stupid, because comparisons are odious, and largely pointless. It is perfectly possibly to take apart a piece of prose, and show how and why it is more effective than another on the same subject, but however elegantly this is done by someone like John Mullan in the Guardian, fine writing is only one aspect of an author’s armoury. (I am myself very distrustful of exercises of this kind in fact because they concentrate so much on the particular; a passage of prose, like a sequence of notes, can’t be read in isolation. Any author concerned with narrative has to have passages of relatively “flat” writing, simply to move a story along. A great many contemporary authors are now so intent on making every passage of prose an event they tend to forget this.) Having judged a good number of prizes now, I really do feel that, while a distinction can be drawn between those who can and can’t write, can and can’t plot, can and can’t draw characters, at a certain level it is ridiculous to say that X is definitely better than Y.

Yet for the past twenty odd years, our culture has done all it can to foster these comparisons through the prominence of prizes, and the culture of envy is now rampant even among children’s authors – once the kinder, saner, poorer relations of adult novelists. Almost everyone is bitterly envious of JK Rowling, seeing her millions as somehow ill-gotten rather than the product of phenomenal talent and hard work. I was astonished when I first came across this. Whether they were serious literary talents or minor children’s authors whose work would never have stood a chance of getting onto any best-seller lists, all felt their noses had been put out of joint by Rowling’s success. They wanted her life – presumably not the parts about having stalkers, litigants, religious maniacs and bodyguards, but just the money – and they felt that she had somehow deprived them of it. The notion that Rowling might actually have saved a large part of the publishing industry, and raised the profile and sales of children’s books as a whole was dismissed, and I was thought rather odd for insisting that she not only deserved it but was, I suspected, a perfectly nice woman.

No success comes without its shadow. I wonder how many of the men who have envied Martin Amis have really considered that his stylistic pyrotechnics are a Darwinian example of how a naturally intelligent man compensates for being unusually short. You can’t really have one without the other (though heaven knows, Will Self has tried hard enough.) Writers are defined not by their success but by their failures, deformities, unhappiness and ill-luck. Who would want these? Jane Austen’s spinsterdom, Dickens’s bottle factory, Nabokov’s exile, George Eliot’s “marriage”, Keats’s low birth – surely all these things are part and parcel of what made them great? If genius has no connection to the trials and sufferings of the rest of us, it can never touch our hearts.

I have had people confess to being envious of me, which I’ve found disconcerting because despite a number of things to be very thankful for, I’ve had my own share of troubles. So do we all; if there’s one thing middle age has taught me it’s how often people who seem to be the most successful are actually totally wretched inside. Everyone tends to want more, and most of us have to make do with less, but really the worst thing about envy is the way that it distracts us from what might actually bring bliss. Any writer knows that the moment you really begin to write, you enter a state in which all the baubles of the world are an irrelevance. This, I think, is the real meaning of the mysterious and exquisitely beautiful Bronzino painting in the National Gallery, Truth Revealed by Time, in which Envy clutches her head in a howl of despair.

Against the big battalions

Thu, 8 Apr 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

There's nothing like an election for making one feel a bit gloomy about the chances of those without deep coffers and large troops. God is always on the side of the Big Battalions, as Voltaire put it. I'm as disillusioned by Labour as by the Conservatives, and having always been on the side of the underdog, am wavering between the Greens and the Lib Dems; but I have no illusion that either will win.

I feel pretty much the same way about bookshops, too. Ask most novelists whether they prefer small independents or large conglomerates and supermarkets, and we'll chorus, Independents. We love Germany because they, unlike Britain, kept the Net Book Agreement and therefore have thousands of flourishing small bookshops. My own favourite here is the Primrose Hill Bookshop, which hasn't been my local for twenty-odd years but which has always championed my books to an almost embarrassing degree. They survive because they’re in an area so affluent that people tend not to care about paying the full price for a hardback. I buy about half the new books I want from them, and it’s always a pleasure. Many are novels that I haven't picked up on but which the ever-vigilant Jessica and Marek have hand-sold to me. It's entirely thanks to Jessica that I read Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin, which I was then one of the only critics to review, and which went on to win the Orange Prize. I don't always agree with her taste, but it's real and passionate and always worth listening to. (Do look at their website, www.primrosehillbooks.com , in fact.) What they cram into a tiny floor-space of about 4m x 6m is nothing less than everything currently worth reading. This is what I love about good small shops: like the Leverton St Groceries, which is the best corner-shop in my part of London, somebody has used intelligence and taste to make shopping fun.

Actually, not all small independents are wonderful. We probably all know the kind of bookshop, and corner-shop, which dies deservedly. The bookshop I pass most often is dire: it would rather have massively expensive art books in its shop window than local authors, and its staff is so ignorant that they didn't even know who Stieg Larsson was until the film of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Yet these are exceptions, I think. Britain is a nation of shopkeepers, and although as the terrifying Mary Portas shows in her TV series some don’t have a clue, most not only serve a purpose but a community.

London, for all its ruthlessness as a city, is surprisingly kind to many odd shops which must have tiny turnovers. Some of them survive due to geography, and others, presumably, to long leases: there's a shop in Kentish Town which mystifies everyone called Bluston's Gowns, where nobody ever seems to go to shop for one of its fabulously ghastly floral dresses - yet it has been there as long as anyone remembers. It's very much like Foyles Bookshop used to be, until its new management took it over and spruced it up.

Of course, once upon a time all politicians used to look as if they bought clothes from Bluston's Gowns. The wife of the novelist Ken Follett came along and taught people like the late Robin Cook how to choose colours that didn't clash with his hair, and now they all look pretty similar - so much so that, minus the radiant Sam Cam, I have difficulty telling David Cameron and Nick Clegg apart. The big battalions have branding on their side. It reminds me of what Germaine Greer once said about Americans with perfect teeth: when they smile, they all look identical. The Big Battalions are marvellous when they're on your side; it's just that I can never trust them to look after the odd, the individualistic and the quintessentially British.

One of the best books I read over Easter is Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre. It's the story of The Man Who Wasn't There, or the poor Welsh tramp whose body was used to fool the Nazis that the Allies were going to invade Greece and the Balkans rather than the obvious place, Sicily. The Nazis had the big battalions, but not the ingenuity of the Allies, and their failure to anticipate the location of the landings was the beginning of the end. The people who worked in Intelligence were not only very intelligent but highly eccentric – gloriously so - and three of the most crucial were novelists. I love the idea of novelists striking such a blow against evil, and inventing a lie which was so meticulous in every detail that it played to Hitler's worst fears.

God is not always on the side of the big battalions, in other words; if you believe Jesus, he seems to be rather inclined the other way. At any rate, on May 6 I’ll be putting my vote towards a smaller, more overlooked party in the hope that this time, something may really change.

Geek Gods in Fiction, and in Life.

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

For once, my teenage daughter and her friends see me as Someone to Know. The reason for this is not - of course - anything I may have done, but because Alex Guttenplan is leading Emmanuel College Cambridge to victory tonight (I hope) on the BBC in University Challenge. The adorable Alex is a Natural Scientist, so knows all about science questions. He's also the son of two of the top English scholars (Don Guttenplan and Maria Margaronis) in my college, and year, so not unnaturally is pretty hot on Arts too. Oh, and he' IS hot. So much so that according to today's paper there's a Facebook page in his honour with 700 fans.

Actually, I love geeky men myself. The science writer Matt Ridley has a theory that the human race developed bigger and bigger brains as our equivalent to the peacock’s tail: the bigger the brain, the more women find a man attractive. It doesn't work quite like that: it's no good having a brain the size of the planet if, like Beethoven, you don't wash. Yet I’m always absolutely amazed when women go for stupid men with nothing but a six-pack or a good profile to recommend them. Surely we aren’t as foolish as .... men?

Yet geeks are surprisingly few and far between in fiction. Hamlet comes top, of course, but far too many heroes are thick as bricks. I mean how on earth did Macbeth, Lear, Othello and even Prospero not see their Nemesis coming? Shakespeare has his work cut out making his heroes tragic or sympathetic simply because they are so very dim. Various other heroes tend to fail to meet the Craigian standard. Pooh, for instance, is a non-starter, as a “bear of little brain” and all Beatrix Potter’s rabbits are just lucky rather than smart. Mowgli is much more interesting: animal languages, use of buffaloes and inspired use of killer bees, but then he chucks in the towel for a pretty face. Harry Potter looks like a geek, but Rowling gave geekiness to his friend Hermione. In children’s books, as in adult ones, being exceptionally clever tends to make you the side-kick not the hero: look at Beanstalk in John Christopher’s Tripods Trilogy.

Films flirted briefly with the Geek as hero, usually with Jeff Goldblum in the role for Jurassic Park and Independence Day, but occasionally breaking out with Nicholas Cage in The Rock (one of my favourite lines, when Sean Connery sneers at him as a “lab rat” is, “Actually, Sir, I’m a super-lab rat.”) and the most improbable Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. It’s cruelly amusing seeing beefcakes imitating the signs of a working intelligence instead of shouting “Go-go-GO!”. However, the most convincing impression of serious cogitation I’ve seen from an actor was in the recent revival of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia. The young man playing the mathematician who realises that the universe must come to an end was astoundingly good at looking as if he could really think: it was only at the end, when I checked my programme, that I realised why. He was Stoppard’s son.

In real life, finding intelligence in men attractive can lead to some weird and unfortunate love affairs. I’ve just finished Martin Amis’s new novel, The Pregnant Widow. Wherever it’s most autobiographical, it’s hysterically funny – that is, wherever it descants (yet again) on the horror of being a short man. Shortness is to Amis what daffodils were to Wordsworth. Wherever we get his portentous perceptions concerning the sexual revolution, alas, the novel falls flat on its face. However hard he strives to portray the opposite sex as more than an assembly of tits’n’arse, he loses us, and in the end this makes for a silly, trivial novel striving to be more than 466 pages lusting after the unattainably lovely Scheherazade. You never feel an iota of pity for Keith. Again and again, Amis’s central tragedy is shown to be not that he is short, but that he isn’t wise or kind. Deciding that you aren’t going to be as much an old fart as Kingsley isn’t enough to reconnect with the human race.

Real-life geeks are nothing like Mart-style midgets. For one thing, they realise that there will always be somebody cleverer than they are at their subject, which makes them humble; and for another, at a certain level of intelligence there’s no point in being anything other than kind. If you love your subject with enough passion, it doesn’t leave much room for self-love. To be a show-off or a bully is a sure sign of having a second-rate intelligence, worthy of little but laughter. Almost all the kindest men I’ve ever met have been Oxbridge dons.

Yet showing how people of intellectual brilliance think and behave is a huge challenge for a novelist. How far can you go? Aldous Huxley’s know-all heroes, for instance, are dreadful bores, and so is the hero of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End; Nabokov’s tend to be evil and even Dorothy L Sayers (who knew a thing or two about dons) makes hers ridiculous. The most convincing portrait I can think of remains Sherlock Holmes, who is surely proof that an author does not have to be especially well-endowed with brains themselves to portray geekiness.

Surprisingly, given how academically competitive the world has become, it’s only recently that being studious has become attractive. I liked the first in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series simply because its heroine, though annoyingly passive, is the opposite of an airhead; Meg Cabot, whose Princess Diaries look so fluffy and pink, consistently champions the serious-minded heroine. In the 1930s, Stella Gibbon’s heroine in Cold Comfort Farm, Flora Poste, advises her friend Elfine to conceal her intellectual tendencies until she’s an old lady. Now she'd be advising her to empower herself at no matter what personal cost. Female geeks have been on the rise ever since Jane Eyre; it’s only boys who have lagged behind. Maybe that’s why the real-life Alex Guttenplan is causing such a stir. I rather fancy him myself, as a future son-in-law. Meanwhile, he’s helping no end as I wrestling with creating a geek hero of my own.

Judging and being Judged - Literary Prizes

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Judging and Being Judged

I'm in a curious state this week, coming to the end of two lots of prize judging - one for an unpublished children's author, for the Times/Chicken House annual prize, and the other for the Authors' Club First Novel Award. I get paid nothing for this, and do it out of general interest. I’m also up for the Orange Prize for Fiction, which is limited only to women but (unlike all others) open to American as well as British and Commonwealth authors. Judging and one hand and being judged on the other gives you a sort of double vision.

I take my responsibilities seriously, as I do being a critic, perhaps the more so for never having won a prize, or even been long-listed for one, myself. I take some comfort from the curious fact that, the year my own first novel came out, those who were garlanded have all, without exception, vanished; whereas I, who was pilloried, continued. Contrary to what people (including the modern publisher) like to believe, success is almost always that 90% of dogged, stubborn perspiration as you plod up Mount Parnassus. Those who achieve instant success tend to pay with it by having a readership that declines with each new book, and eventually even embitters them as a has-been. Writing fiction is not for the faint-hearted, and if authors often appear to be insane, drunk, conceited, suicidal or manic depressive that is because at some point all authors are. Prizes tend to come as the last straw, whether you win or lose. They make a contest out of something about which there can really be none.

I started to donate my time as a judge much as I started to review, in order to gain a better perception of what I had failed to grasp at the start of my career. You certainly do gain a good overview, and a better sense of your own strengths and weaknesses. Yet my experience as part of a panel has not always been one to inspire confidence. On a number of occasions, it became quite clear to me that a particular judge had simply not read a book. “Pass,” they say sheepishly, like a schoolboy caught out. What to do in a situation like this? Strangely, the culprits almost never get outed, or expelled. A kind of omerta descends in which at all costs shame must be averted. Our charming libel laws prevent me from naming names.

You do get something akin to reader rage when reading a great many books, and the sad fact is that in any one year, about 90% of what is published is dross, or at least wholly unsuitable for a particular prize. It’s only the top 10%, at most about 20 books, where all the in-fighting happens. Here, judges can stand or fall by any number of things. This book isn’t as good, they think, as the author’s last one – although that isn’t what we’re judging. It didn’t get good reviews, or it got far too many. Personal friendships, or animus can creep in. A number of people know the story about how one novelist was long-listed for the Booker as a wedding present by a judge, who even referred to it in his speech as best man. I am dubious about the merits of having people judge a prize when they can make a personal profit out of it – if, say, they are an agent or a talent scout. Equally, people can decide to hate someone on the grounds that they are happily partnered, have another job or live in a nice house. This being a small country, and a small community, you almost always know just enough about someone for it to be damaging, or to feel snubbed. None of these things should matter, only the book.

Personally, I once gave a prize to a novelist who has been completely vile about me, and who (true to the dictum that if you turn the other cheek, you get that slapped too) has gone on being so out of a weird persecution complex. I’m afraid that, if I were ever in a position to do her another good turn, I would have to be excused, because the temptation to do her a bad turn would be too strong to resist.

Yet most judges do as good a job as they can. Most read honestly, and make notes. Even bad books get read fairly, and argued for. People get passionate about something because they care about the culture in which we live, and try to contribute. I do, I have to say, get quite cross if somebody reads something at the last minute, becomes wildly enthusiastic about it and bounces everyone else into voting for it. Books change in your memory. Sometimes you can be carried away by a wonderful story or voice, but remember absolutely nothing about it the next week. Other times, a book you dislike grows and grows as it sinks in – and that is to me the more valuable one.

It’s perfectly valid to judge something purely on aesthetic terms, or in plot terms, or even in commercial terms but ideally you want all three. I don’t, myself, see the point in giving a prize to someone who is already seriously successful unless it is the Booker. I also prefer, when debating a short-list, to divide it evenly between the sexes if merit allows because men and women do write different kinds of books in my view. I’ve been hugely impressed by each of the novels on the short-list for the Author’s Club First Novel Award, which are varied, original and (sadly) almost entirely unreviewed. (I’ll be posting reader’s reviews on amazon for each, next week.) For those who are interested, the short-list in alphabetical order is:

After the Fire, a Still Small Voice – Evie Wyld

Choke Chain – Jason Donald

Designs for a Happy Home – Matthew Reynolds

The Earth Hums in B-Flat – Mari Strachan

The Finest Type of English Womanhood – Rachel Heath

The Rescue Man – Anthony Quinn

The prize will be awarded at the Arts Club on April 7, so watch this space.

What does worry me most about prizes, however, are two things. One is that being repeatedly left off long-lists does tend to have a deleterious effect on somebody’s confidence, and subsequent career. I am not just thinking of myself, but of a vast underbelly of authors all waiting in trepidation to hear whether or not they have been axed from their publisher’s list as the recession bites. In children’s fiction especially there are plenty of unsung heroes and heroines who play a hugely important role in getting a child to love reading, without being quite outstanding enough to win an award. Roald Dahl, notoriously, never won a prize – and neither did Enid Blyton. Yet they are now widely acknowledged as two of the most influential authors of the 20^th century. Luckily, they were also best-sellers in a market that was, comparatively, much less competitive than today. Today, if you don’t make some sort of long-list, your prospects for continuing to be published look increasingly dim.

The other thing that worries me about prizes is that somehow, a certain sort of book tends to win. Judges stop reading as readers, and step onto a kind of Olympian cloud in which they look at the bigger picture. This has the effect that prizes are often given for concept, rather execution or enjoyabilty. (You only have to read the annual Booker short-list to see this at work; who in their right mind would choose to read The Quickening Maze, for instance?) There is a high premium placed on having a new idea, or a new subject-matter, or even an “approved” subject-matter, which is often pursued at the expense of whether a novel is actually pleasurable or pleasing to read. I usually get the book I want to win by force of advocacy, but (naming no names) the times I did not was when a short-listed novel’s novelty of subject won out over everything else.

I am especially wary, therefore, when a short-listed book takes a historical subject, or a futuristic one. Why on earth should we be interested by a story about the Victorian sewer system, or the Tudor court? Why is it more respectable than here and now? (Ask, why is the sentence, “Marcus crossed the Forum” so much lazier than “Mark crossed the square”?) Although a novel is supposed to bring us something new, that newness is just as striking if it uses a familiar plot, or setting, or time. I am also wary of anyone who becomes a darling of a national newspaper, quite often it seems because they fit some arcane politically correct/incorrect ideal of the kind of person we should admire rather than because book after book is a masterpiece. It really should not matter that a novel is written by a lord, a lesbian, a refugee or a refuse-collector.

In the end, all judging reminds me of the old saying that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. You can be sure of your own taste and judgement, but when mingled with that of others it’s not so straightforward, and can on occasion result in some horrendous mistakes that time and later generations look upon with horror. At least, that’s what I think now.

Amazon readers' reviews, and professional critics

Mon, 8 Mar 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Columbus Breaks an Egg : Amazon reviewers and professional critics.

Like most authors, I'm boundlessly grateful to any reader who bothers to post a review of one of my novels on the http:// www.amazon.co.uk website. Readers are, after all, the people for whom you write – not, as some believe, critics. For your book to have impressed a real reader sufficiently to not only buy your book, and read it, but to let you know they liked it is ....well, pretty nice. To all those who bother, THANK YOU.

Reviewing is a subject of perennial fascination to me, as those who have read A Vicious Circle ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vicious-Circle-Amanda-Craig/dp/1857026853/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265135505&sr=1-2) and know about the scandal it created will know. In the UK, it is once again in the news, not in the books world but in the scientific world. Scientists have been complaining that their papers, which are reviewed anonymously (as books used to be) by peers are getting passed over for the publication that leads to funding, due to self-interested reviewers who want to present their discoveries as their own. They want the reviewing process to be published on the internet, and made transparent. The problem then is that if the peer reviews are named, life-time grudges get created, and also a culture of favouritism. Yet how to stop corruption? It is to the advancement of neither art nor science if this is rife – and in the literary world, where most reviewers are also authors, it is very rife indeed. On the other hand, reviewers who are not authors tend to be especially detestable. Few seem to do it out of a burning love of literature; instead, it seems prompted by a loathing of creativity. Often the most savage are (like theatre critics) frustrated or failed writers themselves, convinced they could do better. I’ll never forget Eric Griffiths, a don who once taught me at Trinity College Cambridge, appearing on TV before the Booker Prize judging, saying of AS Byatt’s Possession that it was the kind of novel he could have written himself if he were stupid enough to write novels. My incredulous laughter at the time has been, I feel, entirely justified.

Readers on the other hand have every right to be as critical as they please, especially if they have paid for a book. Yes, one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and some good books just fail to “click” with the most attentive reader. I myself am blind to the charms of a number of writers of both adult and children's fiction. The adult ones include Thomas Hardy, Cormac McCarthy and WG Sebold. I have tried, believe me, and I even love Hardy’s poems. But the novels – I’d rather scoop out my eyes with spoons. It’s worse with children’s authors, because of my job reviewing children’s literature in The Times. I have a rule that I only pick what I really, truly love.

Usually, an amazon review it isn't what you would call a critical review. Unless absolutely maddened by an inflated price (not the author's fault) or hype (not the author's fault) terrible or misleading jacket design (not the author's fault) readers, unlike critics, usually just don't bother. They simply stop reading. Yet occasionally, readers also leave reviews in which they take issue with something – as they are perfectly entitled to do.

When reading reviews in a newspaper, I sometimes feel that there should be a Michelin-style key at the top with symbols for things like Neighbour/ex-lover/rival for job/best friend etc. It would help the public no end. Despite this lack of impartiality, many professional critics are in despair at the way the internet has allowed the public to become critics. They believe, not without some justification, that this has lessened their own status and diminished the value of their specialism. I am not of this belief. I think both can and should co-exist.

Reader’s reviews on amazon are invaluable when they give an author (and publisher) real feedback. Being often anonymous or pseudonymous, they are however fraught with problems. For years, some authors shamelessly posted up reviews by themselves, and, even more shamelessly, admitted to doing this – until amazon stopped it. Other five-star reviews would be posted only by friends. Nothing is worse, or more discouraging, than the silence of one hand clapping. Nothing, that is, save a reader’s review posted ahead of publication by someone who gives it one star....as happened to a friend of mine recently.

This amazon reviewer wasn’t to know, naturally, that this author in question is a single mother living on the breadline. A professional critic has to be indifferent to that, though in practice is not. I once wrote that a children’s book of sickly sentimentality, reprinted from the 1930s “would turn ordinary children into bluebell-stomping psychopaths.” I believed its author to be dead. She wasn’t, and I was horrified when those words turned up in her obituary. I would also never, ever have mentioned that I loathed Siobhan Dowd’s very depressing first novel, A Swift Pure Cry, had I known that, beneath the hype and the prizes, she was mortally sick and had only a year left to live. (I liked her subsequent novels very much indeed, which made it worse.)

Yet a true critic has to be prepared to be disliked, even hated, for telling the truth – as they see it. Does it always matter, given that most books get swallowed by a sea of indifference anyway? Yes, especially if the author is very well-known, and has received an enormous advance or a prize. The latest Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow, has received so much advance publicity that readers really do need to know whether it’s any good. Whether they can trust the judgement of the critics is another matter; I don’t find it a coincidence that Amis, who was a star critic and journalist on the Observer, should have had raves there, but thumbs-down from The Sunday Times, its rival.

A reader comes to a book, after all, without any of this inside knoweldge, so why be merciful? Why indeed. The one-star that my friend received isn’t written by somebody stupid, or illiterate, but it is obviously by somebody who holds a big grudge and works in publishing or journalism - how else would he/she have got hold of an early copy? Did it damage the author? Yes. Because it is a children’s book, and a particularly interesting one, I’d talked to a fellow journalist on another newspaper about the book in question. As soon as she saw this bad review, she lost interest. Instantly, the book loses at least 2000 sales. I wouldn’t care if it was a bad book, but it isn’t.

Reviews, wherever they appear, cause authors real joy – and real pain. The internet has handed a lot of power back to people, and power always needs to be used wisely. Children, at least, are indifferent to what adults like myself think about their books. They tell each other what's good or bad, stubbornly refusing to part with their Harry Potters and Jacqueline Wilsons. They render all critics, amateur or professional, redundant; and I find that curiously comforting.

Short Stories:a defence

Wed, 3 Mar 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

PS My short story will br broadcast on Radio 4 on Wed 3rd March at 15.30pm.

Why is it, I wonder, that writing a short story always feels like laying an egg, whereas writing a novel feels like undergoing major surgery? It isn’t just, as Susan Hill pointed out to me in her usual crisp manner, that one is shorter than the other. There is an aesthetic difference which is interesting to ponder.

I’ve written a short story called The Ghost Writer for Radio 4 as part of the Bath Festival (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r0tbv ). My story is very short indeed (2,200 words or about 7 pages) which was quite a technical challenge, and it’s also very light-hearted if not exactly light-minded, being about the conflict between serious literary aspiration and commercial fiction. This is something that all novelists wrestle with, especially if female. One the one hand, we have serious things to say about the world as we see it, or the condition of being female. On the other hand, we can only survive the latter by having a sense of humour. An imp is perpetually whispering in the ear: if you can make people laugh, you could write something with a pink cover that would make you a great deal better-off than you are now. In January, when the taxman looms, this becomes especially hard to resist. Fortunately, I have earned so little (about half the average minimum wage) in the most recent tax-year that the tax-man is actually paying me back, so in my case temptation is avoided.

Anyway: the short story. Novelists always tend to look down on the short story. The novel is the Big, Swinging Dick of Literature and the short story the timorous, self-deprecating, self-denying creature which keeps its eyes modestly cast down like the heroine of a romantic tale. It insists on elegance, grace, wit, perfection: it’s a wonder, really, that Jane Austen didn’t write short stories, because the sensibility of the short story seems so akin to hers. The short story denies itself almost everything, and, like a nun in ecstasy, grants us a single moment of mystic truth. Among the best ever written were by Joyce, Chekhov, Katharine Mansfield and Henry James; they hold their own against the novel because the novel by its very appetite and energy is imperfect.

I believe that short stories should be stories, an idea which is so old-fashioned that it may once again be fashionable. It’s hard work writing an actual story, rather than 2,200 words of beautifully-crafted prose. I hope I don’t sound conceited when I say I’ve been able to write prose for a very, very long time now and I don’t regard it with the reverence bordering on awe of some. (This does not mean that I fail to think about the precision, weight, euphony etc of every word I choose, or about the shades of personality, thought, feeling and information that each conveys. But on the whole a bit silly to constantly draw attention to how absolutely brilliantly you are writing something. You might say that I belong to the Angela Hewitt school of writing, rather than the Glenn Gould one.)

A story, on the other hand, is an extremely difficult thing indeed to write. All those idiotic books, which claim that there are only seven basic plots, miss this point. A plot is not a piece of Lego. It is like the springy piece of wood that an archer must bend in order to direct an arrow. When my children were set creative writing assignments for homework, they would wrestle with what is now called the narrative arc. How to choose the right bit of wood? How to bend it? What could happen? “A story is about something happening to someone. As a result they change,” was what I would always say. While this is far too reductive for the great masters of the form, it’s a useful rule of thumb. It’s an irony only a writer can appreciate that children are regularly asked to produce as homework the two most difficult and subtle forms of writing – poetry and the short story – for English.

I do not write short stories unless a magazine or newspaper commissions them. (You can read one of my most recent, which was the New Statesman Christmas story for 2009, called The Christmas Tin http://www.newstatesman.com/fiction/2009/12/christmas-8220-polly-story.) They pay very poorly, though I find them a welcome relief after completing a novel; because they are usually written to order, they summon up the same burst of adrenalin that journalism does. I do not pretend to be a brilliant short story writer, like my friend Helen Simpson, but I spend three times as long editing and polishing a story as I do writing it. I find them satisfying because they only take a few days to write, and are self-contained (although I amuse myself by finding characters from my imaginary universe to bring out of their box – those who have read Hearts and Minds will recognise Justin Vest, who is the narrator of The Ghost Writer, and has a day job as Arts Editor of the Rambler magazine.)

The best stories suggest a whole world, like a novel, but show you only a fragment of it; those which leave you with questions in your mind about the future, or reeling at an unexpected yet logical revelation are also delightful. What they do require is craft, and a kind of kink in the brain which is similar to that which generates jokes. I am appalled by the many tedious, slackly-written stories now printed by newspapers, which often seem to be accepted simply because an author is well-known. Far from acting as an inducement to discover other work, they act as the reverse. On the other hand, I loved the short-list of the recent National Short Story Competition (especially Other People’s Gods by Naomi Alderman, which I thought ought to have won) because they were beautifully-crafted, moving and genuinely interesting as stories.

Some of my own favourite short stories are “genre” – horror and SF. When I was a child, I devoured those Faber Best SF collections edited by Edmund Crispin. About half appeared to be the ravings of men in white coats, but others introduced me to Ray Bradbury, John Wyndham, Asimov and Heinlen, whom I then continued to enjoy to varying degrees. I love Henry James’s ghost stories, and Dickens’s. SF and horror are particularly good at what Somerset Maugham called the twist in the tail. (Maugham is another under-rated writer; even if he degenerated into hackery and wrote the same story twice in one instance, at his best, as in Rain, he is masterly.)

Given the short attention-span we are supposed to have, short stories should be flourishing as never before, yet the reverse is true. The outlets by which writers such as William Boyd, Ian McEwen and Sylvia Plath first honed their craft have largely vanished, although Prospect has found some good new voices to champion. Collections of short stories are almost bound to be turned down by publishers, unless they are by – you’ve guessed it – novelists.

So is the short story on the endangered list? I would love to write more, but will not do so speculatively even though I usually have a couple lurking shyly in the undergrowth of my filing system. I think of them as being like those early mammals in Walking With Beasts, lying low in patience and cunning, while the great dinosaur of the Novel rampages around overhead, unaware that its day is done.

Becoming Madonna: why celebrities turn to children's books

Wed, 3 Mar 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

What is it that draws disgraced celebrities to writing children’s books? Once upon a time, when a public figure was tarnished by adultery or other peccadilloes, they would take up charitable causes. The late John Profumo, whose Cabinet career imploded following the exposure of his affair with the call-girl Christine Keeler, expiated his sins by a life-time of hard work on behalf the poor of London’s East End. He ended his days a better man for it.

Now, however, celebrities attempt to wash away their past by writing – or at least claiming to have written - children’s books. This week sees the publication of The Queen Must Die by one KAS Quinn. She is none other than Kimberly Fortier, the American former publisher of The Spectator, whose adulterous affair with David Blunkett, the Goverment’s then Home Secretary, resulted in much scandal, and a child. Miss Fortier’s husband, Stephen Quinn, stood by her and this week she was wise enough to apologise in an interview for her bad behaviour. The British Press, brutish as it is, will always forgive a penitent, especially one as clever and charming as Mrs. Quinn. Her book, the first children’s novel to be published by Atlantic, is a magical time-travel adventure in the mould made popular by E. Nesbit, and actually not a bad effort – but why write one at all?

Madonna and Jordan have both followed down this well-trodden route, as has the Duchess of York post the notorious toe-sucking incident. The phenomenal success of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books can’t be discounted, given that many rich people will jump at a chance at getting richer still. Yet it is the image of children’s books as something pure and unsullied in this polluted world which is most appealing of all. When Madonna promoted her picture books, inspired by the Kabbalah, she was attempting to reform herself in the image of a respectable English matron who would never dream of cavorting like a porn-star. The “glamour” model Jordan, with whom we might associate riding of quite a different kind, has had a series of books about ponies ghosted under her real name, Katie Price. Sarah Fergusson anthropomorphised helicopters, recalling her pride in Prince Andrew during his piloting days. Religion, sport and military service project a wholesome image that promise to prop up a flagging brand.

Children’s books also serve to remind the public that the woman in question is now a mother, inspired by the innocent desire to please – and pay for - her child. A reformed sinner is always a popular figure, and never more so than when she morphs from whore to Madonna, studiously reading her own work aloud to a crowd of bemused tinies too small to know, or care about, smut. The problem is that children are also the sternest critics, and literature for them is exceedingly hard to compose. To write for them is not like being washed in the blood of the Lamb: rather, it is like lying down in front of a troupe of hungry, irritable young lions. Few disgraced celebrities, in flight from paparazzi, seem aware of this fact. They will, however, find out.

Jewish Writers and Jewish Book Week

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

I'm doing Jewish Book Week on March 7 (http://www.jewishbookweek.com/2010/writing-to-change-the-world.php) and so I have been pondering this question once again: just how Jewish am I?

Like Polly in Hearts and Minds, I count myself as Jewish in the tribal sense. I am a mixture of races and cultures, but my mother's mother was Jewish, and her parents sat shiva when she married out of the faith - so I hope they're pleased that I married a Cohen. Like me, he is only half Jewish. Unlike me, he was bar-mitzvahed, and he was a bit put out when I insisted on having Christmas trees, cards and carol services. But his father (who was supposed to become a rabbi, and didn't just like his father before him) ate bacon. Not any other kind of pork, you understand, but ... I often wonder how many Jews lost their religion when confronted by a bacon sandwich. I myself eat pork, always with regret because I know pigs to be not only clean beasts (given the chance) but highly intelligent ones, too.

There must be millions of people who count themselves as Jewish, partly because Hitler concentrates the mind so wonderfully about whose side you're on, and partly because of a deep tribal sense of fellow-feeling. I like Jewish people. I feel at home with the warmth, the jokes, the fierce loyalty, the capacity to hold several opposing points of view, the disquiet, the value placed on music, medicine, art, philosophical enquiry, political engagement, literature and family. What I don’t feel at home with is anything to do with religion. I dislike any creed that insists women must be separate, silent and dirty unless ritually cleansed, and I do not see how any race which has suffered the Holocaust can believe itself to be a people chosen by God – at least, not a benign God.

I’m always interested when I come across Jews in fiction, especially when these are depicted by non-Jews. To me, the most moving is George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda – someone who is ignorant of his heritage until it is revealed to him. (I used to wonder whether he’d failed to notice he would have been circumcised, but this used to be a common practice among upper-class Englishmen, apparently.) Deronda is such a perfect gentleman that he sometimes seems as if he has tea rather than blood in his veins; however, he does much to mitigate portrayals by Shakespeare (Shylock) and Dickens (Fagin) which are very much less warm-hearted. Dickens at least removed Shylock’s Jewishness once he got to know real Jews and learnt how deeply offensive his portrait was to them: it’s always easy to hate, fear and caricature what you don’t know, as far too many modern Muslims now find. Shakespeare at least allowed Shylock a measure of humanity before ripping it away and returning to the Jew of Malta monster. The other appealing fictional Jew is Trollope’s Madam Max, whom Phineas Finn eventually marries (after rejecting her in favour of his tiresome childhood sweetheart) and whose exquisite sense of propriety puts almost everyone else to shame. She is the most intriguing of all Trollope’s many heroines, and the woman who not only saves him from disgrace but offers him her fortune and her hand. He doesn’t deserve it: but then, what man does?

Anti-Semitism was worst in the literature of the 1930s. I still remember the shock of coming across TS Eliot’s anti-Semitism, and am glad Anthony Julius brought this to public attention because when I raised it at school it was shuffled under the table. (But then, at my school, supposedly liberal people called you Jewish if you refused to share a Kit-Kat with them.) Even Dorothy L. Sayers, who was writing her detective stories at the same time, came out with a Jewish friend of Lord Peter’s who was unusually decent; she was more thoughtful than Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm, who refers to “Jew shops”, and whose Mr Mybug is a laughable, but regrettable, creation, embarrasingly obsessed with sex.

Contemporary Jewish authors have fallen all too frequently for Mr Mybugisms. Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Howard Jacobson have all emphasised the extreme randiness that is supposed to be a Jewish characteristic; the man and woman for whom moral courage and engagement is more important than carnality is seldom to be seen. With women, it’s a different story. I am a great admirer of Linda Grant’s fiction, and find in it much that is missing from her masculine contemporaries in that it makes sexual passion, beautifully described, part of a much bigger emotional picture, in which nothing is taken for granted. Her When I Lived in Modern Times is one of the best novels of the 20^th century, in my view, and should be even better-known than it became after winning the Orange Prize. My favourite living comic novelist is Elinor Lipman, whose sublime romantic comedies look so easy to write but are the product of tremendous skill and emotional intelligence; one of the new young writers whose work I read with keen interest is Naomi Alderman, who is rooted in the Orthodox community at Stanmore.

But to me, the best of all is Irene Nemirovsky. Since the discovery of Suite Francaise, I’ve read all that I can of hers. Even if nothing is quite as remarkable as her unfinished novel, forged in the fires of the Second World War, she is the modern author who, alongside JG Farrell, I would most like to save from untimely death, because her sense of what human beings are like seems to me to be extraordinarily truthful. When I wrote Hearts and Minds, it was with Suite Francaise open beside me; her fusion of deep seriousness and social satire in describing contemporary events is one I found inspiring. I believe that, had she lived, she would have been the female Tolstoy, and also the greatest Jewish author who ever lived – even if she herself clearly had problems with this part of her identity.

Unease is part and parcel of Jewishness, and I myself become uneasy when Jews turn on each other and accuse someone of being “a self-hating Jew”. Nemirovsky did undoubtedly witness much that was cruel and distasteful about her father’s business in Russia, and her relationship with her grasping mother can’t have helped either. It is regrettable that she appears to have succumbed – out of fear or snobbery – to anti-Semitism herself. It makes her less admirable as a human being but not as a writer.

You can’t talk about being a Jewish writer without being strongly aware of anti-Semitism, especially if you live in Europe. It’s such a part of Jewish consciousness that I find many New Yorkers faintly irritating for their lack of awareness of it. They can’t understand why Jewish religious festivals aren’t publically celebrated here, because New York is perhaps the one city in the world where Jews can feel totally at ease with themselves. This, I suspect, is why Lipman’s comedies are so buoyant – even if novels such as The Inn on Lake Divine were inspired by her parents being told that, as people of a different faith, they would not be welcome at a small hotel. It’s the consciousness that we, too, might be told at any moment there is no room at the Inn that makes so many Jews so different, so dangerous and so creative.

books into films

Mon, 8 Feb 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

BOOKS INTO FILMS

One of the things I’ve found most amusing and (in a non-financial sense) rewarding about being the Times’s children’s books critic was learning that my column is read by several Hollywood producers. Presumably they have their own talent scouts, but it’s nice to know that almost all the books that I’ve spotted as especially interesting – Harry Potter, Northern Lights, Holes, City of Ember and this year Percy Jackson and How to Train Your Dragon – have made it onto the silver screen.

Plenty more – Artemis Fowl, Across the Nightingale Floor, Wolf Brother – are stuck in development hell. They really shouldn’t be, because when you have a big groundswell of support for a book or a series, then not only do you have a ready-made core audience but you have something which is going to work an awful lot better in terms of plot and characters. When you see some of the real dross that does get made, it’s very sad.

Of course, there’s always the danger that a film adaptation could ruin a good book. This is what happened to the ghastly adaptation of Pullman’s The Golden Compass (originally Northern Lights). A combination of fearing to offend the American Christian Right and clod-hopping direction by the Chris Weiss left the story, literally, up in the air. My son loves to imitate the flat, nasal intonation of the actress playing Lyra (“We’re going North, Pan”), and every child I know seems to want to kick poor Daniel Radclyffe for his wooden performance as Harry Potter. Being a child actor must be hell, with those your own age either despising or envying you. Such has been the boom in family films in the past decade that there are few private schools in London which no not have at least one child star – often paying for his or her education not just with their own earnings, but with the sort of ostracism which appals.

Anyway, yesterday I took some of my family to the preview of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. We are all fans of Rick Riordan's series about the dyslexic boy who discovers he's the son of Poseidon, and a demi-god. It was a lot of fun; Uma Thurman plays a part she was born to play, Medusa, with terrific wit, and Piers Brosnan was charming and unusually hairy as Percy’s Centaur teacher. The actor playing Percy was nice, even if Annabeth, his future romantic interest, had one of those huge jaws American girls seem to have. We thrilled to see two of the leads in the superlative TV series, Rome, acting Poseidon and Athene. I’m always fascinated to see the way a film-script strips a book down to the engine of its plot, but also adds a lots of visual detail that books usually miss. Just as one of the nicest things about the Harry Potter films was seeing all the portraits and the moving staircases at Hogwarts, so we were entertained by things that weren’t in the book like Percy seeing lots of other demigods groaning on stretchers when he arrived at Half-Blood Camp, and enjoying his Poseidon-inspired cabin there. The jokes about Hades’s Underworld looking just like a slightly more hellish Hollywood were beautifully done, and Grover’s new line on seeing Charon burn paper money (“don’t you know there’s a recession?”) raised a laugh.

Yet film-scripts always meddle with things they shouldn’t. Annabeth, daughter of Athene, was far too much like Ares’s aggressive daughter, Charisse. Above all, what was missing was Zeus’s satirical speech about the way Olympus moves from country to country as each becomes the dominant power in the West (which is why, naturally, the home of the Greek Gods wound up on top of the Empire State Building). Maybe the director, Chris Columbus, worried this sounded too triumphalist – or maybe that a more accurate version would be to see Olympus drifting towards China or India.

I don’t myself think Percy Jackson will be the kind of hit that Harry Potter was, largely for emotional reasons. Percy spends about five minutes being miserable about his dyslexia, ADHD and fatherlessness and then it’s all slashing swords and swelling music. The point about HP is that his loneliness and stoicism speak to every child who’s ever felt left out. His relationship with adults, especially, is cross-hatched with so many currents of trust, frustration, admiration and anguish that Percy’s just look like the usual teen stroppiness.

This kind of fantasy fiction look formulaic and therefore easy to pull off, but it’s anything but. I have my own reservations about JK Rowling’s books, largely to do with their tendency to gigantism in Books Five, Six and Seven, which together with poor editing lost a large number of devoted readers. However, what I’ve always thought unique about Rowling is the way that she writes with the whole of her imagination. Every character has clearly been felt through as well as thought through, and this is what children respond to. The Percy Jackson books are a delight, with much that is wise as well as witty, but it’s not really a child’s world, more a teenager’s. Much as Hollywood does the teen stuff well, the life of an American teenager is already so much more affluent, privileged and free than that of any other nation, they already look like demi-gods to us mortals.

Writing in Winter

Fri, 8 Jan 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

The physical discomforts of writing in the days before central heating are hard to imagine. Although I spent much of my early life in the kind of cottage that would have been all too familiar to Coleridge when he wrote Frost at Midnight - only open fires, rattling windows and the sort of cold that meant toothbrushes and contact lenses froze overnight - chilblains are now a distant memory. Or at least they were until yesterday, when my poor daughter hobbled home from school saying her toes had mysterious red sores.

Still, this blast from Siberia has made me think both how wonderfully writers have evoked extreme cold, which of course means one thing for children making snowmen and quite another for adults struggling to get on with work. (For those whose kids, like mine, are having a day or two off school, I've put in some recommendations for Snow Books on my Journalism site. Inevitably, there are many more, including a rather intriguing one for 9+ called, after Coleridge's famous line, The Secret Ministry of Ice which I liked but never got round to reviewing last year.) This morning, my car was iced solid, so that I couldn't even get the doors open to have a go with some anti-freeze. Since then, I have learnt from a neighbour that the trick for unfreezing locks and wipers is to use WD-40. I have desperate robins tapping at my window for extra food. Of course, this is nothing to what most people outside London are enduring, and what those in the Mini Ice Age survived.

Anyway, when Keats contrasted the "bitter chill" outside of The Eve of St Agnes, and the sensuous warmth inside Madeline's chamber, you can bet that he was writing from experience. When you see portraits of people bundled up in hats, waistcoats, fur and gloves it's easy to think that it's somehow just people dressing-up rather than doing their best to stay warm. I sometimes get asked if there's anything that's essential for writers to have - I imagine people mean a piece of technology - and always answer "thick thermal socks". Having warm feet when you write is so essential to creativity that a number of writers, including Julian Barnes, actually have radiators to under their desk. If you have to sit still for several hours at a time, your chances of chilblains (and DVT) are much higher than for the rest of the population. If you also spend far too much time staring out of the window, a dramatic change in the weather which turns a landscape into a giant version of the blank page you are trying to fill also has an effect on a novelist’s imagination.

I have written several descriptions of snow arriving. Here is the opening of Chapter Fifteen of A Private Place, in which snow, combined with ‘flu at the progressive boarding school where my characters live, brings about the seduction of one pupils by another which ultimately leads to his murder:

“Three weeks into the spring term, it began to snow. Fat black specks whirled down from the bleached sky. At a certain, indefinite point, they reversed into white. Light as talc, the snow made everything pure and strange. The old buildings on the estate turned from pale sandstone to canary yellow. Willows turned auburn, weeping over invisible waters.... Even the seagulls disappeared. When people looked away from the windows, their eyes swam with moving specks.”

Snow is often an integral part of a murder story, probably because its appearance of purity can conceal so much that is wrong underneath. In A Private Place, the snow is the beginning of the moral reversal that happens to several of the characters – absolutely everything in my novels is there for a reason.

I am especially fond of the Brothers Limbourg paintings of the Tres Riches Heures de Duc de Berry, and this painting (from February) is one of my favourites because it shows the life of ordinary people rather than the nobles feasting and hunting. But the good thing about winter is that it fosters a great sense of friendliness and community, which is of course the opposite of SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder. I love pubs – the proper sort, without piped music, patterned carpets, slot machines or nasty beer – and every so often meet up with other writer friends at my local in Camden Town. As most of us usually work through lunch in solitude, having a real break for a meal and a gossip is a treat. “If solitary, be not idle and if idle be not solitary,” as Dr. Johnson said so wisely; the many writers who suffer from depression would suffer less, especially in winter, if they were able to take advantage of such meeting-places, just like the peasants drying their clothes and warming their feet in the painting. My local also has wireless broadband, so you can pretend to be JK Rowling working on your next book, but actually it’s better just for looking at its log fire and drinking hot toddies. (The other great thing about pubs is that, unlike cafes and restaurants, you can bring your dog in to sit quietly and slump comfortingly on your feet. Dogs, not cats are in my view the writer’s great muse and companion as I’ve said elsewhere.)

Socks, alcohol, and the company of friends. Perhaps things haven’t changed that much at all.

The problem of goodness in fiction

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

I have just finished reading what must be the only one of Trollope's Barsetshire Chronicles to have escaped me in my twenties - Dr. Thorne - in a pensive mood. Not because I needed any prompting to return to Trollope, but because I have been pondering why it has taken me so long to discover the charm of a good character.

By good, I mean as in morally good. It's a curious thing how often good as in artistically good coincides with wickedness. My daughter, for instance, has just finished Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, and has been revelling in Count Fosco. Like many adolescents, she is captivated by Jacobean tragedy, Poe's gothic and amorality. Most of the characters I delight in are also creations from whom, in real life, I'd run a mile. Jane Austen's Emma, and Mrs Norris, Dickens's Miss Havisham, just about everyone ever created by Oscar Wilde and Saki, Pullman's Lord Asriel and Milton's Satan - awful people invariably get the best lines. Whereas the good, though they may like Joe Gargery in Great Expectations, bring tears to my eyes by their acts of charity and compassion are, frankly, a bit dull. Will we be interested in Scrooge once he is no longer a wicked old miser? I think not.

Children's literature has always been partly about moral instruction, so it's not surprising to find that good characters abound in it. The very best, like CS Lewis's Aslan, Tolkien's Gandalf, Rowling's Dumbledore and Alan Garner's Cadellin are all versions of God, right down to the long white Michelangeloesque beard, and don't in a way count. However, goodness in characters who are severely tested is much more interesting, as they re-enact the temptation and the Passion of Christ. Frances Hodgson Burnett's Sara in A Little Princess is one, and Sam Gamgee in Lord of the Rings and Hans Anderson's Little Gerda in The Snow Queen are others. By far and away the most interesting child CS Lewis ever described is Diggory in The Magician's Nephew, especially when tempted by the Witch to steal a magic apple that will cure his sick mother. People whose moral code causes them real suffering make the heroism of goodness much more credible - and it's this that Trollope, above all others I can think of, really portrays. Dr Thorne is a middle-aged country doctor who takes in his brother's bastard daughter Mary, and raises her as his own. (People who believe the Victorians to be purse-lipped about illegitimacy should read this novel, which is full of surprises.) Like Col Brandon in Austen's Sense and Sensibility, he takes on another man's shame with what was once called true Christian charity. Furthermore, he keeps a great secret, even though it causes his beloved ward much mental torment.

Mary is in love with the son and heir of the local squire, a handsome young man called Fred who loves her but who must marry money at all costs. How both remain true, ultimately gaining a vast fortune and lasting happiness is the most charming tale. It must have made a huge impression on its audience, because young Frank actually whips the man who jilted his sister on the steps of his club. It's a thrilling scene, and just the kind of thing that Guardian columnists would deplore as illegal and unneccessarily violent, but it must have passed into popular imagination because it became a kind of byword .

Almost every character in Dr. Thorne apart from young Frank's snobbish mama is nice, and to see the way Trollope makes them all so interesting is well worth studying. Niceness and goodness (not that the two are synonymous) have fallen very much out of fashion. People do not believe they exist, and seem not to admire them when they encounter them in fiction either. Despite the popularity of Les Miserables, which cannot all be due to Andrew Lloyd Webber's notions of music, we never seem to create characters like Bishop Myriel, the man who turns Jean Valjean from thug to benefactor.

Yet I have known one or two people who are, I would say, truly good. They can be jolly irritating; one of the things about goodness is how shoddy it can make your own actions seem, how compromised by self-interest or hypocrisy or cowardice. Doing what is right is full of pitfalls and snares, among them self-righteousness, or worse. Our former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his opposite number George Bush were both convinced of their own righteousness, with the disastrous results that we all know well. A really good person is unlikely ever to achieve a position of power or high office, but works unremarked like George Eliot's Dorothea. This apparently escapes most politicians, as it does spiritual leaders. It would seem to escape modern novelists, too, at least outside genre fiction.

One of the things I wanted to do when writing Hearts and Minds was to create someone who was good in a more active and heroic way. Job, my illegal Zimbabwean minicab driver was inspired by a tiny story in a newspaper about a real-life client of a prostitute who, learning she was trafficked, gave her the money to escape. (You may well ask what a good man was doing in a brothel in the first place, but I can well imagine how someone like Job could find himself there.) Job is the character that audiences seem to like most, and ask to meet again; at present, he's looking for his lost wife, but who knows?

The point is that although modern audiences have been taught that everyone is morally ambiguous, we all have a great hunger for goodness. I often wonder whether the popularity of the Harry Potter series is actually due to this, as much as to our Millennial yearnings for magic and the supernatural. So although I'm not bringing Job back in the novel I'm writing now, I can promise that there's are other good characters waiting in the wings. Is goodness just a hangover of a kind of childish innocence, as some believe, or is it something that is actively chosen, and struggled for? How can goodness be a guiding principle if, for instance, you have no belief in God or a celestial balance sheet in which you actions count?

Meanwhile, if any of my readers have yet to encounter the delights of Trollope, do, especially if the present snow and icy weather continue. He is one of the best ways to pass a cold twelve days of Christmas anyone could ask for.

A writer's voice vs choirs

Wed, 9 Dec 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

For various reasons too tedious to go into, I am in an unusually grumpy state this week. December, the coming of Christmas or maybe just London with all its traffic jams and road-works is getting on top of me. By next week, however, I know I'll be fine again. Why? Well, not just because the holidays will offer some much needed rest but because I'll have sung in various carol services.

Although my voice, following an operation and the passage of time, is not at all what it was, I love singing. There's something about really opening your lungs and throat and belting out a hymn that is uplifting. You have to lose your self-consciousness, and lose your self, which no doubt is why it plays such an important role in religious services. I find in choral singing something that is both spiritual and aesthetic - perhaps because it is the opposite of what seems to go on when you write.

Perhaps the single hardest thing an author ever does is gain a voice; and having one is not always a good thing if you're a novelist. You can't read a single sentence by, say, Nabokov or Dickens without knowing it has been written by them, and some think that a hallmark of genius. However, this depends very much on whether what you value in a novel is being reminded that it is the product of a single observer or creator. Do you enjoy his (and it is usually his) company so much that you want it for page after page - and book after book? Should personality be sprayed on absolutely everything, much as some people now douse every meal with chili pepper or balsamic vinegar? Or do you enjoy the illusion that you are seeing into the life of different people, with perceptions and prose that shifts in register and complexity? This is certainly what I myself look for in other writers, and attempt to do.

I've written a couple of first-person novels which make the monocular nature of a single voice explicit; it's fun, but quite limiting because the only games you can play with your character and reader can be summed-up as What's Wrong With This Picture? What are they not noticing, or assuming? (There is an additional risk to the single narrator which is that your book gets read, or reviewed by somebody who believes it all to be autobiographical; the irritation of this might perhaps be shared by this year's winner of both the Prix Goncourt and the Literary Review's Bad Sex Prize, Jonathan Littell, for The Kindly Ones.)

When an author can completely change "voices" in a novel, that instantly intrigues an excites me as a reader. I remember the thrill of reading a novel by Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost, in which the narrative switched, and was narrated by someone so monstrous that some couldn't bear to continue, so missing a very fine recreation of 17th century superstition. I saw the same quality in Sarah Waters's Fingersmith, Matthew Kneale's English Passengers and Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, among others. (Curious that all these should be historical.)

An author interested in other people contains multitudes of voices, and like an actor can switch between them convincingly. But too often, the authors who get recognised as remarkable are those who are less like actors than film stars: they can only ever play themselves, or write themselves. (This, incidentally, is why columnists rarely make good novelists.) If someone is quite remarkably good company, like DIckens, or Thackeray, and really observant about other people then it doesn't matter that you're not inside their characters' heads. The god-like narrator who explains people for you is hugely relaxing, and I'm the firstperson to turn to him when low in spirits or energy. If kindly, like Trollope, they can persuade you that people are often better than they may appear, and that their motives are more shaded with complexity. It never hurts to be reminded of this.

On the other hand, someone who really gets you inside one character, then another, then another is doing something that (to me at least) is closer to musical composition. It's more demanding of a reader, and it's certainly more demanding of a writer. We all know, intellectually, that everybody sees things slightly differently, and that this difference is the source of both comedy and tragedy, depending on the outcome. Being made to see that, or feel it, is hard work. I think it's also what expands our understanding of life, and people, and choice.

So I think that the real reason why I love singing in a choir is that it's a chance to switch off, and become just one voice among many, all carrying the particular counterpoint written by somebody else, that will be part of a bigger whole. However glorious it is to hear a choir, it is ten times more so to be part of one; it can be life-changing, as the wonderful documentary series last year called The Choir showed. When you sing, it doesn't matter what you look like, or how old you are or how rich or poor: all that matters is the sound and the feeling that hitting the right note brings. The BBC has been encouraging people to join local choirs this year with its SIng Hallelujah project. I would so much rather more people joined choirs than wrote books... but maybe that's just because I'm in the run-up to Christmas.

Richard & Judy turns Strictly: the TV bookclub evolves

Tue, 1 Dec 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, thanks to the lovely new bed from RJ Norris (best beds in the UK, direct from factory and slept in by all knowledgeable film-stars etc) I had a vivid dream. Richard & Judy Bookclub had morphed into Strictly Come Dancing, and all us poor, frumpy, tired novelists found ourselves being fored into corsets and sequins to strut our stuff before the booing crowds. Today, I learn via Facebook and The Sun, that this is yet another prophetic dream come true, pretty much. The Bookclub is returning in January, but instead of nice cuddly R&J we're getting chosen (or not) by the likes of Gok Wan, the terrifyingly persuasive bloke who persuades women of a certain age to get their kit off for the cameras.

This, unless you happen to be as beautiful as Zadie Smith or as extrovert as (fill in the name of your favourite camp author HERE) is the ultimate indignity that awaits the 21st century novelist. It was also inevitable. Ever since the marketing people gained ascendancy over actual editors in publishing houses, the only contracts given became for those who were photogenic rather than actually gifted at writing. That was pretty bad, but now it's worse. More and more models and celebrities emerge in print, their biographies and bonkbusters and God help us children's books ghosted by clever people like Celia Brayfield. It's not enough for them to be dazzling examples of the plastic surgeon's art, or genetic lottery, they have to be authors too.

The trouble is, real writers tend not to be that good looking. The men are usually as bald and bland as Shakespeare and the women wild-eyed hags whose faces bear the marks of a fifty-a-day habit, a messy love-life or, in my own case, a fatal addiction to Fairtrade chocolate. Of course, you may have started out being not too bad, but then you had no life under your belt. The stuff you need under your belt to write Real Books isn't beneficial to the figure or complexion. Authors do not ski, go to aerobics or Pilates classes, join gyms or work out. If you encounter anyone who claims to be published in such places, they're there either as research or as a cover for adultery (the one sport which is acceptable, though Martin Amis and Julian Barnes briefly made it so for tennis.) Or else they're foreign. Actually, in France, which takes novelists sufficiently seriously to devote several prime time TV slots to them, it's not just acceptable for novelists to resemble frogs but in no way detracts from their general desirability, which may explain why so many British authors of haute literary reputation yearn to live there for much of the year.

Very few of us can drive, let alone dance. (The exception being, as ever, Kathy Lette.) Occasionally, some misguided young publicist makes the dreadful mistake of having a disco at at launch and then you might get the joy of seeing Salman Rushdie performing his famous chicken strut, to general merriment. The extremely drunk attempt upright fornication. It's not a pretty sight, and should definitely not be scheduled before the 10pm watershed, though I imagine that with the addition of fangs and fake blood it could gives parts of True Blood a run for its money.

So what, apart from the whole lot of us signing up for ballroom dancing, are we to do? Luckily, James Cameron's new film Avatar looks like it might provide salvation. We simply have to download our thoughts and personalities into something created by CGI technology, and bingo, we can appear on camera for the benedfit of Channel 4 audiences and our publishers looking more or less human. Bags I Katherine Hepburn.

Vampires and Werewolves: what women really want

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

I make no apologies for being the first British critic to have spotted Stephanie Meyer's Twilight and being quoted on the cover of its UK edition. One of the advantages of living with a couple of teenagers is that, from the moment they could read, they became my canaries down the mine of literature. Normally, my house rings with shrieks, yells, laughter and the sound of gunfire (X-box, curse it). But when total silence greets me, I know that some book has arrived which is very special.

So it was with Twilight, which was snatched up and devoured by my daughter, then thirteen, and subsequently by all her friends. She's embarrassed to recall her enthusiasm, because each of the sequels was worse but I stand by the judgement we both made at the time, that this was a strikingly original way of depicting the agonies of being young, and in the grip of passionate love.

Reams of journalism has now been written as the books and then the films became an international hit, biut nobody has put their finger on quite what is going on in the female psyche to make it so. The cinema last night was packed with girls under 20; I brought my husband and son, who were either feeling particularly indulgent towards me or hoping for some savage werewolf action. There were some unexpectedly good bits, in fact, as when Bella gets two boys to take her to a slasher movie which fills her nice, ordinary admirer with such revulsion that he vomits, incurring the contempt of Jacob the Native American-cum-werewolf for being a wuss. But overall, it was pants. Once again, Hollywood has handed over a perfectly viable fantasy, as with The Golden Compass, to the cretinous Chris Weistz, who couldn't direct traffic.

However, the essential drama of Bella being torn between the perfectly beautiful, cold, poetry-quoting yet deathly vampire Edward and the hairy, hot-blooded werewolf Jacob made me think that what is really at work here are two different forms of female fear and desire. On the one hand you have the cold, self-restrained Superego type, who controls his lust by force of will; on the other, the animal Id. It's just like Beauty and the Beast, in reverse - and I think that Bella's name is so close to that of Perrault's heroine as to make this pretty much a dead cert.

The difference is that in the fairy-tale, it's Belle who has to change in order to perceive the love and goodness in the Beast, which releases him from the spell and makes him into the perfect candy-floss husband. Disney's version, perhaps the best cartoon it ever made of a classic fairy-tale, and scripted by a woman, extended this into making it not just Belle who has to change but the Beast, who learns to control his temper and selfish desires in order to make himself lovable.

Alarmingly, Bella in Twilight and New Moon doesn't have to change at all. She remains perfect throughout, adored by three boys - a vampire, a werewolf and a dull, plain mortal. The last, naturally doesn't stand a chance but she is clearly tempted by the second. However, it's the first who has her undying love. Why? (Personally, I'd far rather choose the werewolf, but then I've had my fill of vampire types.)

This fixation on vampires is quite a worrying trend, deeply connected, I feel, to bright girls' fear of sex. After all, women do bleed every month, but not from the neck (and I think that the titles of Meyer's novels are also inspired by this.) If vampires really got that turned on by blood, a mere paper cut would be nothing compared to menstruation. But this, like big hairy men, is all too disgusting to think about. Much better to whip of the eroticism of repressed desire with an ice-cold, glittery teen idol who looks gay as a garden party and who will only bite you when you're married.

Why writing about sex is a bad idea

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

In less than a fortnight's time, the Literary Review hosts its annual party for the Bad Sex Prize, given, appropriately enough, at the In and Out Club (actually a highly respectable and elegant gentlemen's club opposite the London Library in St James's Square.)

This year, to my joy, Philip Roth is the favourite. Those who have not yet read his latest may be bemused by this, but Roth is well-known not only for one or two of the best novels to come out in the past decade but for his graphic descriptions of sex. Now that John Updike, another regular contender, has gone to the great orgy in the sky, there are few such worthy contenders. Those shortlisted get their passages read aloud by pretty young actresses who strive to inject a maximum amount of lubricity in order to make the sniggers louder, and the winner is expected to accept with as much grace and hunour as shown by Rachel Johnson, the winner last year. It's the kind of party which is jolly good fun as long as you're not up there in the stocks, in other words

I never write explicit sex scenes myself, largely because I made the awful mistake of doing so in my first novel, Foreign Bodies. What was intended as comedy and satire was taken literally by several critics (alas all female) who clearly believed this to be autobiography. One of the great divisions in people is between those who find sex essentially comical and enjoyable, and those who find it tragic, dull or distasteful. My pity for the latter is only tempered by relief that at the time of publication the late Auberon Waugh had not yet thought up his famous prize. Ever since,my motto has been: if in doubt, don't. We can live very happily with fictional beings without knowing every last detail of how they masticate food, and the same goes for masturbation.

Those who wish for guidance on writing this kind of scene should turn at once to Elizabeth Benedict's The Joy of Writing Sex, which has every tip and example you could wish for. However, my determination never to write about sex explicitly became particularly hard to sustain when, as in Hearts and Minds, I described the rape of a teenage girl who is trafficked into prostitution. This is, obviously, the very worst kind of sex to have, and after talking to young prostitutes and imagining what they went through, I am naturally pretty surprised and repulsed to find the anonymous author of the Belle du Jour blog and books outing herself on Sunday. Maybe her training as a research scientist made her able to switch off during sodomy, but I found her claims of enjoying this line of work incredible. The young women who are highly promiscuous now still have to numb themselves with vast quantitites of drink or drugs to do it, and are no different from the experiences of my own generation. I would never condemn such women morally, but I do condemn the attempt to persuade others that promiscuity, let alone paid promiscuity, is ever a good idea/ Women are too different from men, anatomically and emotionally, to derive any genuine pleasure from prostituted sex. When books become propaganda for a soul-destroying act and industry, I get very worried indeed.

As a young journalist, I was once sent to interview an American woman who had written her autobiography, after training as a nurse. Sex with strangers, she said, was no worse and far better paid than emptying bed-pans. Hmm, I thought, I can see that might be so. I read the first couple of chapters, in which she had fairly conventional, inept encounters of a sort that, at a stretch, I could imagine myself having had if very drunk, silly or confused. But then, it became increasingly grotesque and preposterous as genuine autobiography. My infrequent exposure to pornography as a genre shows that it always follows a pattern of apparent lustiness which degenerates into something along the lines of finding gas masks and rubber sheets a terrific turn-on, and so it proved here. The journalist who interviewed Belle, India Knight, is an extremely shrewd and unprudish writer, and just like me she kept trying to spot some external sign of psychological damage to the real-life ex-prostitute while interviewing her. Only later has it emerged that she had known her father bring home several drug-addicted prostitutes when she herself was a child.

Fantasy clearly has a part to play in many people's private lives, and I'd far rather it stayed that way. But one thing my talks with prostitutes always turned up (which I put into my new novel) was that punters, despite knowing that the only reason a woman was having sex with him was money, always demanded the pretence that she was feeling pleasure. It wasn't enough for the exchange to be bodily relief in exchange for cash, the poor girls had to fake ecstasy too. Really, they felt total contempt, occasionally tinged with pity.

What is so desperately embarrassing about sex in books is the similar assumption that the reader is enjoying this fantasy as much as the author. Believe me: we aren't.

Why Women Writers Are Excluded

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

THE EXCLUSION OF WOMEN AUTHORS

The papers yesterday and today are full of indignation about women authors being left off the list of the Top Ten Books of the Year by a trade magazine, Publishing News. It’s always nice to have an excuse to print a female author looking sexy but snippy (cue the unnaturally well-preserved Lionel Shriver, arms crossed in a tight T-shirt) and I confess that I was rung myself for a quote on Saturday. Unfortunately, I was otherwise engaged in watching “He Had it Coming” from the murderous musical Chicago at the time. So here are some of my thoughts.

Do we need to care about these lists? There are so many, after all, and often the people who compile them are not exactly the sharpest knives in the block. Given that the Booker this year was won by Hilary Mantel, with Alice Munro carrying off the International equivalent and the Pulitzer won by Elizabeth Strout , it may all seem a bit of a storm in a tea-cup – especially as my own money is on Sarah Waters winning the Costa. Yet when you look at what Publishing News did choose, you do want to snort. Geoff Dyer’s Geoff in Venice? A biography of John Cheever? Come off it, chaps. The Richard Holmes maybe, but the rest we’ve barely even heard of.

I am not myself an admirer of Mantel’s novel, and will be interested to see whether the enthusiasm for Wolf Hall lasts or whether (as with other Booker winners like Ian McEwen’s Amsterdam) it proves to be one of those wins produced by a general feeling that a particular author has been Overlooked for far too long. However, what is dangerous about these all-female winning streaks is that far too often they prove to be just that – a streak. The same thing happened when Rose Tremain won the (women-only) Orange Prize the same year that Anne Enright got the Booker, and suggested that perhaps the days of discrimination are over.

No, they are not. You still have five times more chance of winning the Booker as a man than as a woman, by my calculations, and almost the same odds against with the Costa. Are we to believe that men are five times better at writing fiction than women? FIVE TIMES BETTER? Even Firsts at Oxbridge aren’t quite so unequal. Certainly, the kinds of subjects that women often address are persistently overlooked as being of any importance. The domestic and familial may occupy the lives of half of humanity, but as a subject for serious fiction it’s mysteriously absent (though Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries went a little way towards redressing this.) To read a novel by a man is to enter a world in which houses are never cleaned, food is rarely cooked, children never cry all night and people are preoccupied by subjects such as war, politics, philosophy and priapism. While this may well be what privileged chaps think about, it certainly doesn’t reflect the rest of us. The tremendous complexity of the life of a working mother, which is an on-going topic of debate in the Observer, never gets a look-in outside of “hen-lit”. It would be interesting to look at, say, Booker wins and see how many of them were about “masculine” subjects, or feature a male protagonist even when by a woman writer. My guess is that all of them would fall into this category.

Men can and do get away with fiction in which an all-male cast is seen as nothing strange, and in which (as with Philip Roth and John Updike) the problems of an ageing male body are not only taken seriously but include scenes of a geriatric man having hot sex with a much younger woman. Eventually, the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Prize catches up with them but my goodness how one longs for a woman to get a fraction of this treatment! The only novels I can think of in which an older woman even falls in love with a young man is Doris Lessing’s wonderful Love, Again; and Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal. Both women, needless to say, get punished for it.

But there is this issue of women writers being seen as somehow “second tier”. I am one of several people asked by The Times to nominate my books of the Noughties, and it was interesting how very few stood out in my memory for each year. I did, however, find a pretty even spread between the sexes. Prizes are only ever as good as the judges on the panel that year, and the same thing goes for lists. Until these are drawn up by an even number of men and women, rather than largely by men with one or two women added in, the disparity is likely to remain. But there is an additional problem in that women are, with certain shining exceptions, notoriously bad at sticking up for other women, and in having confidence in their own judgement.

I find it faintly absurd that, whenever there is a controversial subject such as sexism being discussed in the press, I am one of the writers likely to be asked for a quote. Why me? I’m by no means as distinguished as many other women writers in my field but I am perhaps more forthright – or, it could be, more foolish in not keeping my head down.

How Not to Run a Literary Festival

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

In the seven years between my last novel, Love in Idleness, and my new one the literary festival has spread into almost every town of size and stature in the UK. Even small places such as Rock in Cornwall - best-known for its splendid surfing and the ill-mannered teenagers this attracts - now has one. What a cathedral was in the medieval era, a Town Hall in the 19th century and a public library in the 20th, a literary festival now is in the 21st.

This may seem a good thing. After all, before the Romantic era authors were very much embedded in a community - or expected to travel the world with their tales, like skalds or bards, and sing for their suppers. If you were no good, you went hungry.

Being a story-teller does, however, take a good deal of time and energy and the nature of modern literary festivals is largely inimical to this. You are jerked out of your normal wroking life, put on a train and hurtled North, South, West or wherever, arrive in the middle of nowhere (as far as you are concerned) expected to find a bus or a taxi to a hotel you've never heard of, expected to bond instantly with an audience of either three people or three hundred, find somewhere to eat, and have a good night's sleep before returning again. Either that, or you drive for several hours and drive back. Either way, it takes a good two days out of your life. And many of these festivals do not even pay you the recommended Society of Authors minimum, which is £150. Some of them think an adequate recompense is, as at Dartington, a packet of shortbread.

I didn't realise quite why I was getting so fed up with this business until I went to a really well-organised festival last week, which was at Durham. What made the difference? Well. for the benefit of those who now have careers organising these things, here it is.

Firstly, you must pay. It is simply not OK to treat authors as a public service. Authors may seem to have a lovely carefree life, or to be so low-paid that another day of penury simply doesn't matter, but in fact we all work extremely hard and our time is worth something. It may only be £100 or it may be ten times that. But offering only biscuits is an insult. We can get biscuits at home, thanks.

Secondly, do not, as at Hay, pay some authors more than others. You may think that having, say, Bill Clinton, is a big draw who will get your festival loads of publicity - and it may. But Bill Clinton is already a very rich man indeed, to whom a fee of £50,000 is peanuts. You are not running the Bill Clinton Festival, however, you are running the X Literary Festival. Authors believe in quaint things like democracy. The obscure author this year may be next year's big star, and vice versa. Pay everyone the same fee. The famous ones have had a massive advance already, the less famous ones probably haven't.

Thirdly, do not put some authors up in more luxurious accommodation than others. (See above.) If you really piss off an author then they will simply walk out and never return. You will have wasted your hotel money, and any good-will. Thanks to the internet increasing numbers of authors are in contact with other authors. Some festivals are actually getting black-listed.

On the other hand, some festivals, such as Charleston and Port Eliot, also run on a shoe-string, create such good-will that authors queue up to go to them. Charleston doesn't offer a fee, but it gives authors a gift of their choice from its exquisite gift shop. Port Eliot puts people up in the magical house of the owners.

Now, some practicalities.

Very few festivals are even organised enough to send you a letter of thanks for dropping everything to come and attend. Included in this letter should be such basic information as 1. A map. You may be totally familiar with your venue, but we usually haven't a clue. It's also nice if, instead of having to wait ages for a taxi, we get met.

2. The name and nature of the venue. Is there a lectern, or just chairs? Does it have a sound system? We need to know this because it will affect what we wear. I know now to always wear something dark and loose so that the wire is invisible and not too embarrassing to clip on, with pockets for the mike box, but loads of authors don't.

3. The name of the hotel. Authors do not need Corby trouser presses, Teasmade or even room service. We do however require certain basic things. One is a decent light to read by, because in between all this festival stuff we will be trying to read and write. Two is internet access. Three is a bedroom which has functioning windows and curtains. I've now lost count of the terrible, airless rooms I've had with curtains that don't close properly or block out light. And I am also disgusted by the number with no radio, or morning newspaper, but a TV offering only pay-per-view porn.

4. A decent place to eat later that night, at the festival's expense. Some festivals, like Cheltenham, organise lovely suppers for authors but others just dump us the moment we've done our stuff. It takes months to be reimbursed for even a sandwich, so basically we either starve or get indigestion for 24 hours. If you are doing an author supper, it would be nice to know who else is going to be on your table, (just in case we're mortal enemies) and not to stuff us with somebody's publicist. Talking to publicists is Work, and to be Working at 11 pm is no fun for anyone.

5. Also, make sure you have copies of our books there: not just the present one, but, ideally, one or two from our back-list. Every author has had the horror of turning up and finding the book-shop has no copies for us to sell. Given that this is (from the publisher's point of view) the whole point, this is the kind of thing that makes you wish for a firing squad.

On the subject of books: it would also help if festival could organise some small discount to help sel copies. Somebody who has already spent the price of a ticket to gain admission to a talk is not, unless an ardent fan, going to fork out for a hardback at £17.99, especially not if they can buy it for £5 less on amazon.

6. Publicise our event. I don't just mean by advertising the existence of your festival. I mean publicise individual events. Make a blow-up of the dust-jacket, and ask publicists for interesting quotes to stick up outside the venue. Don't just use Wikipedia to describe us. Find out what all the book groups in your area are doing, and get them involved. Make links with local libraries, local papers and local radio. On a local note, don't just parachute in famous authors. Every area has some wonderful writers for whom contact and exposure would be a God-send.

7. Get an interviewer who has read the book, genuinely feels some enthusiasm for it - and pay them, too. Don't just exploit some poor drudge. This makes an enormous difference both to how authors perform, how interested an audience feels in them and to subsequent sales. One of the best festivals I did this year was at Ilkley, Yorkshire, for the simple reason that my interviewer was a poet who genuinely loved Hearts and Minds and had done his homework. One of the worst was in a London borough where the interviewer was a librarian so inexperienced that she gave away the whole plot.

Do little or none of the above, and your festival will fail.

Some publishers, such as Penguin, are now giving festival organisers a hard time by ringing up and demanding to know how many tickets have been pre-sold, then pulling authors out if it doesn't look like a full house. For an organiser, this is a nightmare, but the main reason why this is happening isn't because authors have monstrous egos that need to be fed by vast audiences. It's because far too many festivals are run by people who shouldn't be doing it, and who somehow seem to see a literary festivals as a cheap way of promoting their town. Truly, it isn't. Once upon a time, it did great things for Hay-On-Wye - partly because it already had a thriving book market. But now you are as likely to create serious ill-will if you get it wrong.

If you don't have the budget, don't have the staff and don't have the organisational skills to think what it is like to be dumped on your home town as an exhausted and bewildered stranger - don't have a literary festival.

PS Mark le Fanu at the Society of Authors points out that any festival organiser should look at the SOA website for advice on what to do.

Elizabeth Jenkins at 104

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Next week, on Hallowe'en, Britain's oldest living novelist, Elizabeth Jenkins is 104. Those of you who follow me on Twitter and Facebook know I've already put out a plea to send her a birthday card. Alas, poor Miss Jenkins, who was fine until 101 has now lost her memory and is unlikely to register what I hope will be a deluge of well-wishers, but her nursing carers will. If you would like to do this good deed you should send a card to Miss Elizabeth Jenkins OBE, Magnolia Court, 181 Granville Rd., London NW2 2LH.

I know about Miss Jenkins's condition because I was so struck and moved by her novel, The Tortoise and the Hare (recently republished by Virago Classics with a foreword by Hilary Mantel) when I read it a few months ago that I wrote to her. One of her most loyal friends, Lady Hilton, and her nephew both then got in touch. As she lived not too far away from me in North London, I found other people who remembered what she had been like, and am even sorrier that I didn't try to make contact when I read her remarkable biography of Jane Austen.

Contacting authors is always an odd business; if you've come across this website as a result of reading one of my own novels then please be assured that it's very pleasant indeed to know that someone out there has been sufficiently interested to try it. (Of course, there are those odd people who do one-star reviews on amazon. It's fine if you're reacting against the kind of massive hype and best-sellerdom that I certainly don't have, but why bother otherwise?) Nowadays, people take it for granted that they can meet an author, and children get several visiting them - at least they do if they live in affluent urban areas. I know a number of children's authors who will now only visit the most deprived state schools in the country, feeling (quite rightly) that the rest have more than their fair share.

Yet when I was a child, I thought myself fantastically lucky to meet famous grown-up authors - as I was. This came about through a combination of circumstances, mostly geographical. Some of them were extremely nice, and others very much less so (Graham Green remains the grumpiest, as you might expect). Those who seemed the most remote were children's authors, who of course were the ones I'd most have liked to have talked to. Sadly, the only one I was taken to meet as a child by my journalist father was AA Milne (I think they wanted a child in a phogoraph or something), and I loathe Winnie the Pooh.... A novelist friend of mine, Susie Boyt, was so obsessed by Noel Streatfeild that aged eight she looked her up in the telephone directory and rang her at home. They had a brief but satisfying conversation which she has never forgotten.

Children's authors now expect so spend several hours a week, or if really famous, a day, in answering correspondence, and it's an accepted part of their life. It's much less common if you happen to be an adult author. However, in the case of Elizabeth Jenkins, it's something that could really improve the quality of her life. Even though she is a good nursing home, apparently, it's all too easy for carers to forget that an extremely elderly person once had a mind and personality - in her case, one of great subtlety and fineness. If Shakespeare's lines about " Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything" has ever filled you with horror, or compassion, do please send her a card.

What is the point of keeping on writing?

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Some notable failures: Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen

Sooner or later, every novelist I know has asked themselves What is the point of keeping on? This question, always a painful one, has loomed ever larger as the effects of the recession bite deep into publishing lists. At the beginning of the year, horror stories abounded of people having contracts cancelled on the slightest pretext. Now, even top agents feel only relief at extracting advances for successful, well-known authors.

If you happen to be one of hundreds of so-called “mid-list” authors, life has never felt more grim. Few of us have ever been able to live off our income from books, but now, if you haven’t ever written a best-seller, been on Richard & Judy, had a TV or film adaptation or been short-listed for a major prize, the future has become absolutely horrible. Journalism, which has always been the default setting for many, has either slashed its freelance rates by 25%-50%, or vanished altogether. Teaching, the other standby, is besieged with eager new applicants and so hedged about with testing and regulations that anything approaching creativity is almost impossible.

Meanwhile, authors travel up and down the country to go to literary festivals where, humiliatingly, they sell almost no books. (As a matter of fact, I enjoyed a lovely one in Ilkley, Yorkshire last Saturday where I had one of the nicest audiences ever. They not only asked strikingly good questions, having actually read Hearts and Minds, but they bought it in droves. But this is the exception.) Everyone seems to be feeling wretched.

So, what IS the point in going on? It certainly isn’t for money. Nor is it, as amateurs believe, because writing makes us happy people. Writing for a living is like banging your head against the proverbial brick wall, wonderful when you stop. Actually, in a deeper sense, the professional and the amateur have this in common: nothing beats having written a book. Yes, writing is a vocation, but it’s also a neurosis. You start to wonder whether anything you’ve ever done is any good – or in my case you expend huge amounts of mental energy blocking off that apprehension, and as Dr Johnson put it, going doggedly to it.

There are novelists, who shall remain nameless, who are notorious for thinking themselves to be above ordinary mortals. They have all won prizes and/or written best-sellers, and if ever it were true that success ruins a person, they are the living examples of how rude, monstrous and ugly the untrammelled ego becomes. (Sadly, almost all are men, but then men do win about five times more prizes than women.) Almost all the novelists I know are exceptionally nice people, and not at all like this, but that could just be failure gnawing away at the vitals.

Failure is actually the single experience common to all mankind, and there is some slight consolation that the more bloated with success any artist becomes, the more remote they are likely to become from the source of genuine inspiration. Although the sorrows of novelists pale into insignificance beside those of composers, those who are instantly successful always labour under a terrible curse: from then on, they know almost nothing about the rest of the world. The old joke about Martin Amis writing Mein Kampf has worn very thin over the past twenty years, after all. What would Dickens have been without the bottle factory, Trollope without the Post Office and Austen without her spinsterdom? The novel is the mature person’s art, and the art of people who have known despair, humiliation, rejection and above all failure. “Fail again, fail better,” as Beckett put it.

Yet publishers tend to have forgotten this in the search for instant stardom. Look at any major writer’s oeuvre and you’ll see books so bad that they would long ago have been forgotten had not the genius eventually matured. Is any play as awful as Titus Andronicus? (Yes, commercially successful – but still an atrocious play.) Would we read Sense and Sensibility without what came after? Some, like Lampedusa and Harper Lee had the wisdom or the leisure to write just one, perfect book. Most of us write a “heroic failure” (as the Guardian, in its usual kindly way, termed my own latest book.)

So what is the point? Maybe it’s that nobody can possibly succeed, beyond question, without a whole raft of those heroic failures. Evolution itself is full of creatures which did not survive, or which were just stepping stones in the continual path to becoming something new. It may be that, in the case of fiction, this something new are those handful of writers seen to make money or win prizes, while the rest of us are dead as dodos. Or it may be quite otherwise; an amusing new book, Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola, (to be published on October 22 by Frances Lincoln at £9.99,) shows how very wrong even authors can be when judging each other.

In the meantime, all those publishers who have been battling to survive their own recession (and let us not forget that they, too can’t be having much fun) may yet look up in the new economic dawn next year and find themselves strangely short of material that isn’t about vampires or Tudors. So my advice is, we should keep on keeping on. Because, like suicide, you never find out what would have happened next if you decide to end it all.

Snobs - why class war is still fun for novelists

Tue, 6 Oct 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Class, once a staple of fiction, has become the elephant in the room if you are a serious writer - and never more so if the author is aristocratic.

I hasten to say that this is not my own case, or caste. However, I enjoy reading about all kinds of people, and several of my favourite books - by Jane Austen, Trollope, Dickens, Proust, Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and the late Mary Wesley - are about Posh People. Why shouldn't they be as interesting as anyone else? They have more money, and therefore a different set of temptations. They are freed from the necessity to earn a living (something that can be pretty dull in a story, let's not forget) but not from the pangs of love, or mortality. Seeing a photograph from the Tatler, reporduced in today's Telegraph, of a gathering of Dukes made me reflect that, despite their total lack of photogenic qualities, all probably had an interesting tale to tell.

I was recovering from 'flu last week when I read Justin Fellowes's PAST IMPERFECT. I'd very much enjoyed SNOBS, and his screenplay for the film GOSFORD PARK. It's not often that the upper classes throw up someone who is not only bright enough to write fiction (though actors are all too common among the better-looking ones) but to step a little to one side and give us a guided tour of what is, despite the National Trust and several magazines, still a mystery to most. They may, in some cases, have hung onto their fortunes, but they have lost the power and awe they commanded even in my own childhood.

Like most gently pink people, I dislike actual snobs quite as much as they dislike me, but I find snobbery itself hilarious and fascinating. I was put off Fellowes's novel because all the reviews of it were so hostile. One critic after another claimed he was nostalgic for the 1960s. Well, who isn't nostalgic for their youth? However, what I found was a much more interesting and serious book, beneath the riveting plot about a dying multi-millionaire using his oldest enemy to search for a possible love child to inherit his fortune. It was a meditation on love, ageing, being ugly and, yes, how much life has changed for the aristocracy. Though kinder to some, you're left in no doubt that the author feels that the age of automatic deference to anyone titled is well past. Yet one reviewer after another entirely missed this. They were so vehemently ani-snob as to be snobs themselves, I think.

Snobbery dehumanises people, and makes them into mere carriers of a rank. Yet to a novelist, the tension between this Procrustean way of seeing human beings, and real people is quite fascinating. I've known a number of posh people, from an Earl who gave up his fortune and title out of socialist principles yet saw nothing wrong with inheriting his wife's small patrimony, to people ennobled by distincltly dubious donations. I've worked with people of noble birth who went around believing nobody knew their secret, and others who never married because nobody was good enough. I've seen fortunes disappear up the noses of great heirs, and people whose fathers were given a life peerage mention it with every second breath. Some were as gentle and well-meaning as those in Josa Keyes's enjoyable romantic comedy, ONE APPLE TASTED, and others as ridiculous as in Rachel Johnson's NOTTING HELL. Some were serious intellectuals, genuinely good and great who gave their lives to public service, and others venal slobs, and pigs. All, however, were individuals.

(I particularly dislike the way the Government is trying to blacken David Cameron's stab at leadership by sneering at him as an Old Etonian. He shouldn't be lambasted for an educational choice made by his parents, and one which, moreover, will have given him a fantastic education. As it happens, my own husband is an OE, and not because he came from a rich, grand family but because he won a scholarship.)

Nothing is funnier, sadder, siller and - occasionally - nobler, than a snob. The upper classes still exist, and if the debutantes described by Fellowes would now not dream of coming out any more at Queen Charlotte's Ball, they still live in the same geographicla areas of London, shop at the same places and know each other from the cradle. Yet so, too, do the urban professionals. So do those in the middle. Class, for all that it seems so rigid to foreigners, is actually extremely permeable in this country (as it is not on the Continent.)

Why should any of this be taboo for fiction? Nothing human is alien to me, or should be to any writer or reader. I had a blissful three hours reading Past Imperfect, and revelling in the luxury, revelry, suffering and sadness of it all.

Novelists as Nostradamus

Thu, 1 Oct 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Nostradamus in a fiery mood........

Just as I was starting a new novel (the very touching Running Wild) by Michael Morpurgo about a child saved from a tsunami , the dreadful news about yet another disaster in the so-called Ring of Fire came over the radio. Obviously, the novel was inspired by the events on Boxing Day almost two years ago, yet it made me think how odd it is that novelists often seem to predict the future. Even if Martians have yet to land on Primrose Hill (as predicted by HG Wells) and Big Brother is the name of a repulsive TV show rather than an Orwellian leader, there are so many instances of novelists seeing what comes to pass that it does make you quite superstitious.

The most terrifying novel I've read this year is Liz Jensen's The Rapture, an absolutely compelling and brilliant thriller in which a therapist discovers that the schitzophrenic teenage murderer she is attmepting to treat is actually predicting the future. A series of increasingly frightful disasters happen, and then there is the big one....Armageddon. End of the world novels and films are suddenly fashionable this year (that tsunami again, I expect, combined with global warming) but a month ago I found that the research which Jensen had drawn on to make her novel plausible might actually be happening even faster than predicted.

In my own case, one of the difficulties I have writing contemporary fiction is that I write scenes which then come true. My violent burglary (see Journalism) happened in the same place that I described it in Hearts and Minds; worse, I originally had for its climax terrorists let off suicide bombs in King's Cross. I have no explanation for how I imagined this - my bombers were, like the real ones, four young Muslims from the Midlands - except that I live quite close to the station, and it always struck me as particularly vulnerable to terrorism. Novelists often seem a bit more alert to strange cross-currents of thought or fate; there was an even weirder case of a debut novel called Incendiary published on the day of the 7/7 bombings.

When I had my libel problem with A Vicious Circle, there was one detail about the behaviour of the villainous Mark Crawley that would have got me into particular hot water had it ever come to court. Crawley was drawn from a number of odious male journalists, not just the ex-boyfriend and current literary editor that the Evening Standard maintains was himself. I can understand why he must have thought I was stalking him, or a witch, because I wrote a scene in which Crawley did something especially deplorable, and I was told years later that the ex had behaved in pretty much this way to a woman. Only that scene had been written a year before it took place in real life.... For legal reasons I'm not going to identify which particular scene it is, but reader may enjoy working it out.

It's often said that everyone believes themselves to be the hero of their own life - how shocking to discover you might be the villain instead! Most upsetting, and yet - where the British libel laws are concerned, how illiberal and disgraceful to threaten someone with a court case, imprisonment and penury simply because your vanity is pricked. But certainly, as far as human nature is concerned, it's often quite easy to predict how people with certain characteristics will behave in a given situation. Any novelist is intensely interested in people, and their thoughts, actions, foibles and virtues. Nothing is as interesting to us as a truly unpleasant individual - except perhaps that rarest of beings, a truly good one. I am increasingly interested in depicting good people because goodness like beauty is the hardest thing of all to capture. Yet often what I seem to end up with if a kind of precognition of what will happen instead. I've predicted marriages, divorces and disasters of all kinds simply by thinking about what is likely, from observation. I get odd feelings about places, as well as people, which I somehow know are going to be connected to me. It would be useful if this sense could predict the next Derby winner, but it doesn't. However my late father, who often had premonitions too, once saved his own life by refusing to go up into an aeroplane that crashed on its next flight due to metal fatigue.

Many novelists I know say they don't dare write about characters based in any way on real people dying. They believe that to do so might affect the real person. Yet fiction is often more of a warning than a premonition or a curse. I often wonder whether the world of 1984 would have come to pass had Orwell not written his novel, while dying; there are countries which have come hideously close to it, but not the whole world.

are libraries a good thing for authors?

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

It's heresy, I know, but I often wonder whether libraries are really such a good thing for authors.

The news that, from now on, any library user in the country can borrow books from any other library, for free and without even the small sum once asked for as an inter-library loan made my heart sink. Those of us who are authors, rather than brands, are jolly grateful for the extra sales that libraries bring to our work, particularly in hardback, and it's not difficult to work out that if any library can borrow freely from any other library then our sales will go down even further. Many of my own readers are frustrated by the fact the almost my entire back-list is out of print (please address complaints to my publisher, Richard Beswick, not myself). Having even less copies in circulation makes you feel the whole point of being published is increasingly fruitless.

I grew up using school and local libraries with huge enthusiasm, and as a poor young unemployed person in my twenties, they were a life-line. There are many books you do only want to read once, and few have houses big enough to accommodate all the books we would like. However, as soon as I possibly could, I began to buy books because I realised that even tatty second-hand copies were life-long friends to any aspiring writer, let alone a passionate reader. Your very own copy of a new book is something that, if good, contains not only your own response to it but memories of when you first read it. I have books in which the sand of a Thai beach falls out, and others which have marginalia, pressed flowers, old bus tickets or even letters inside. Every book is a memory box, or as John Masefield put it, a box of delights. No plastic-coated library copy could be the same.

Yet as an author, I feel very differently about libraries, largely because they seem to be used less by the young and poor but the very comfortably off. When some middle-class person of obvious affluence tells me how they've borrowed my books from their local library I'm afraid my reaction is not gratitude but private indignation. No other art is provided free of charge; this same person expects to pay for their TV, radio, theatre and film tickets. As an author I get something like 0.02p for ever library book of mine borrowed. Writing each books takes several years, considerable mental anguish and research, as well as all those things like imagination, inspiration, plot and characters that people assume to come like the leaves to a tree. For this, and thanks to the heroic efforts of the Society of Authors, I get an annual sum of about £200.

When I've raised this, as gently as possible, with library users whom I know to be people of means they get very defensive. Some say that it's what they get in return for paying council tax - a strange argument, given that this really goes to support all kinds of things every citizen needs such as the police, street lighting and various social services that ensure we do not sink into the abyss - and others say that they do often buy books....just not by living authors. Others say that they read so much that their habit would bankrupt them if forced to buy rather than borrow. Others still think that, as an author, I am in service to literacy rather than literature. Or that I ought to be grateful to be published at all.

None of the above, I'm afraid, cuts it with me. I am not a public servant. I work extremely hard at what I do. I earn something like half the national average annual income from my books, and while I'd rather the 10,000 or so people who borrow them each year read and enjoyed them rather than not at all, it is quite hard not to feel that if even half that number bought them in paperback, my fortunes and productivity would be somewhat better. I would not have to do so much journalism in order to make up for what I don't earn from fiction. I would definitely not have to go to the literary festivals that have become the bane of every author's life as we shuttle across the country in the vain attempt to hand-sell our wares to audiences who, having paid for a ticket, are (not unnaturally) reluctant to part with more cash in return for indifferent public performance.

Writing serious fiction has always been a hard job but it is made even harder when people consume something for nothing, and believe themselves to be righteous members of society for so doing. Unlike the film industry, which is also suffering from illegal downloads to the point when it is entirely possible films will no longer be made, we have little or no redress. But I hope that, if you do use libraries, and earn enough to pay income tax, you do at least feel a little twinge of guilt.

Is the Hampstead Novel Dead?

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Tomorrow (if my voice doesn't succumb to a bad cold) I'm discussing whether or not the Hampstead Novel is dead with Jo Connelly at the London Jewish Cultural Centre. Formerly Anna Pavlova's house, it boasts a wonderful view and a fierce young guard who checks you aren't a terrorist before admitting you.

There have been times when I've felt a bit like blowing up the HN. It was very much in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, when people (usually women) were always committing adultery among the bean sprouts in what was then known as "the muesli belt". Having spent a part of my childhood intermittently observing the adults of this region of North London, I think the adultery was largely fictional despite a few well-known bust-ups and tragedies. Just as birds commit adultery when well-fed on high protein diets (like sparrows) and stay faithful like swans if deprived of anything more exciting than water-weed, adultery tends to be something that happens to the well-heeled, and supernaturally attractive, like Joan Bakewell.

But why does the HN attract such opprobrium? After all, we have no difficulty with novels about an even higher class of Russian aristocrat, or New Yorkers. There are two conclusions: one is that what journalsits were attacking wasn't bourgeois fiction per se, but the Leftish tinge that those like Margaret Drabble and Fay Weldon were known to have. Secondly, it was a way of attacking and deriding women - although there are just as many HN men, in that shape of Melvyn Bragg, Julian Barnes and WIll Self also addressing the pressing topic of public faces in private places etc. The HN is above all domestic, but when chaps do it, it's supposed to be Literature, you might conclude.

I have been entertained by the number of (suually female) readers who have come up to me after reading Hearts and Minds looking faintly shaken and saying, "I thought it was going to be a nice novel about someone like me, because I feel just like Polly and then it turned into something about a world I knew existed but didn't know about. How did you find out about it?" (*Which is a long story.) Actually, this is the same way, pretty much, that DIckens and Mrs Gaskell got people to find out more about their world. You pretend to offer something like the HN, then plunge the reader into something much darker.

I became dreadfully angry with novelists like Drabble (though never Weldon, who always saw more) for sticking to one class when I myself was learning to write. It all went totally out of fashion for twenty years (though if you look at writers such as Rachel Cusk, it's still around in a slightly different form) while people explored post-modernism and history-lite. The latter, to judge by the Booker, is still riding high in critical opinion. I've nothing against readers wanting fiction with added historical interest (rather like those Omega-3 eggs) even if I can't bring myself to trust it or believe it's as good as the ordinary thing. If you look at what fiction has lasted, it isn't the experimental stuff (few who are not reading English for a degree really enjoy Tristram Shandy or Ulysses) or the historical. It's the novels about people who live pretty much as we do, to whom things happen. You can call it the Hampstead Novel or the silver fork novel or the woman's novel, but that's what it is.

Poets' Corner, or The Rise and Fall of Authors' Reputations

Wed, 9 Sep 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Last night, I went on from a very jolly party (all too rare these days) for the Telegraph Books section at the Garrick to Westminster Abbey, where my husband and I took part in a service in which all parents thanked God for letting their child into Westminster. As indeed you do; but after the service, which was conducted with the sort of gorgeous music, pomp and charm that only the British Establishment can put on for the exclusive little bunch of those it admits, we wandered round the Abbey.

I'm ashamed to say that, though I've been to one or two musical events there, I've never really explored it. What fascinated me most, of course, was the Poet's Corner. There was Geoffrey Chaucer's tiny tomb (he must have been well under five feet to fit) and there were many of my heroes: Charles Dickens, Samuel Johnson, TS Eliot, WH Auden, George Eliot.... I restrained the mad impulse to get down and kiss the marble slabs. Like all passionate readers (and writers) my gratitude to those who have written great poetry and fiction and plays is boundless. I might or might not die for my country, but I would, like the people in Farenheit 451, die for literature. I'm afraid that, every so often I do put a flower on the enchanting memorial to Oscar Wilde cast by the sculptor Maggie Hambling in Covent Garden, which I love both as a work of art and as a belated testimonial to another great hero of English letters.

Anyway, that little rant aside, what interested me too were the plaques to writers I really don't rate at all. DH Lawrence? Very fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s, largely thanks to the sex-starved rantings of FR Leavis,but now? (Though some of the poetry is pretty good) Bulwer-Lytton, anyone? Moreover, what about all the great authors who seemed to be missing? Where is a memorial to Coleridge? Orwell? Katherine Mansfield? Sylvia Plath? (Yes, of course, she was only married to a Brit, but if Henry James and Eliot could get in, why not her? There were NO WOMEN apart from George Eliot who presumably slipped in because she had a chap's pseudonym, Jane Austen and the Brontes - unless you count utterly obscure people like Anne Oldfield and Mary Eleanor Bowes. Why not Aphra Benn if Fanny Burney, for heaven's sakes!)

All of which underlines the way that authors' reputations continue to rise and fall like the stockmarket long after their death. Few now write for posterity: it's an afterlife that, like Paradise, people have stopped believing in, which is maybe why people no longer even attmept to write masterpieces.

You can ponder whether this is always driven by fashion, or whether people do genuinely rediscover authors, and make them read again - as Eliot undoubtedly did the Metaphysicals, or as Coleridge did Shakespeare. Or, more mysteriously, whether particular authors are just born out of time, and only strike the right note half a century or more later, when events demand it. Jane Austen for instance doesn't seem ot have been recognised as the genius she was in her own era, but has risen steadily since the 1920s; others, like Lawrence have had meteoric success in their own life-times only to fall completely out of favour. Dickens was pooh-poohed by the wretched Leavis, and thouhgt to vulgar for words; now people see him as second only to Shakespeare.

It ought to be comforting for authors to contemplate this, while wandering round the soaring Gothic interior of the Abbey. Better to get posthumous recognition than none at all. Yet what I found myself thinking was above all of the sadness of death, its finality and how short a space of time is given to any of us to make our mark. Those who died knowing they had achieved immortality of sorts are the most blessed; but there is also Keats's aching inscription on his tomb in Rome, which I remember seeing as a child: Here lies one whose name is writ on water. It wasn't: but he died in the despair, having had nothin in his life to prove otherwise. And for that, I hope there is a Hell, and Byron burns in it.

motherhood and creativity

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

It always amuses me when I meet male novelists in the summer holidays who ask how my next novel is coming along.

"It isn't," I say, for the umpteenth time. "It's the school holidays."

"Why don't you just let them eat pizza?"

Well, some of the time I do indeed do that. I buy an embarrassingly large number of DVDs - ones with lots of bangs for the son, and lots of art-house gloom for the daughter - and relax the eternally vigilant maternal eye a fraction. I also take them to a gastropub which does nice lunches for £6, and the odd film and play and exhibition, plus lots of walks. They are good kids, and try not to disturb me too much. But they do. I am their mother, and therefore a utility to be turned on or off at will.

Doing creative writing (as opposed to journalism) is almost impossible in these circumstances. To write properly demands unbroken concentration, and solitude. You can just about manage a couple of hours early in the morning when they are sleeping in, but it's in many ways worse that when they were very little and needed constant 24 hour attention. Teenagers get into scrapes, and need rescuing from the place where they've lost their Oyster card/mobile etc. They probably are less resilient than my generation, but when I think what that cost me in terms of fearfulness (catching an international aeroplane every three months aged twelve,alone, and having your passport stolen or getting on a flight diverted to another country are two of my least pleasant memories) then it's something I'd rather not put them through. I don't believe in that nonsense about what doesn't destroy you makes you stronger.

So, no woman novelist of my acquaintance works at fiction during the holidays. It's the same reason that you never find women with children going on those tempting-sounding writer's retreats in places like Hawthornden Castle or Lake Como. Though, let me tell you, we need them rather more than the chaps and childless women who do go there, get served hot and cold repasts and bond.

Candia McWilliam, one of the most gifted and tragic writers of the generation above mine, once said that "every baby costs three novels". It's not exactly true because when you're young and your babies actually sleep for a lot of the day you can manage a sort of frenzied output. I wrote three in this sort of state, and it's possibly no coincidence that my health then packed up for several years. Babies are physically exhausting, but much less so mentally. When, however, you need to shepherd a teenager through serious exams, rise to a fierce debate on politics and deal with violent emotional outbursts it's another matter. Of course, if you absolutely adore your children it's something you do willingly, in the hope of giving them enough love and stability to ensure a safe passage to adulthood. But it does undoubtedly exact a huge price on creativity.

This leads me to ponder the rationale behind the Orange Prize. Initially, it was set up because the discrimination against serious women novelists became so glaring in the early 1990s that something had to be done (I think it was the way Pat Barker's great novel, Regeneration, was totally overlooked by an all-boy panel of judges for the Booker - though the third, much less striking novel, won.) Since then, the field has been somewhat more level even if three times more men than women still win, and get long-listed. Women's fiction does seem to be taken more seriously - and yet the handicaps for those who are living lives that are not like men's - ie, with children - still remain astonomical. Just as in the past, the women who get the most praise and prizes tend to be either gay or childless or post menopausal.

. Of course, men writers always claim to do as much as women if they work from home....strange, that I never hear of them at the school gate, the hospital etc. My own dear husband, though a devoted and excellent father has, I think, taken our children to school for all of....five days ... in our sixteen years as parents. The rest, whether I was recovering from major surgery, sick, on deadline etc was all me.

Sometimes, I can't help wondering if there shouldn't be a special category - a Navel Orange Prize, perhaps - for those battling with the effects of motherhood.

The last of the summer whine or, bored kids on holiday

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

I was on Woman's Hour this morning talking to Jane Garvey with the delightful founder of Netmums, Siobhan Freeguard, about coping with bored children in the holidays, and thought I'd expand a bit on some of the points I made about boredom and creativity.

Having a bored pre-schooler can feel like hell - especially if you're trying to work. That feeling of needing to be an all-singing, all-dancing attention-giver, especially if you're exhausted from broken nights, is seemingly interminable. In my observation, the brighter the child, the less sleep they seem to need - so the obvious solution is to exercise them as much as possible, for an hour in the morning and ideally for an hour at the end of the day. It doesn't get much easier until they're old enough to use an Oyster card and public transport.

Personally, and depending on how old your kids are and where you live, I think parents are far too worried about letting their children go outside. There are children who play in my street every day - but that's because one end of it is blocked from traffic. I've always encouraged mine to go out alone, as I was six when I began going to the local park to play (with others). There was a well-known flasher in a row of bushes, who we all avoided, and that was that. To me, the feeling of physical freedom and the joy of being able to run around on grass was worth the agonies of doubt and fear my own poor parents had to put up with. Now, parents fear a) paedophiles, b) cars and c) other children mugging your child. The second two are more rational fears. Even so, experience has taught me to be less anxious. My son has been mugged for his mobile - and we got it back. Why? Because I'd written his name all over it in a laundry pen, so when the police raided the mugger's flat they knew whose it was. Far from being traumatised, he regards it as a rite of passage, because everyone else in his year has also been mugged. Strangely, the parents of the other boys with him didn't choose to go to the police station to make a formal statement which helped convict the mugger.....

However, the big problem, which seems to affect far too many mothers, is getting your son off the computer. I have this problem myself, with knobs on because once your son discovers playing on-line game with Skype, gaming becomes part of his social life. It's seriously addictive. Games like World of Warcraft ought to have an age-banding on them. It's only the realisation that many of your fellow gamers are sad old men of 20 that seems to stop most 14-year-olds from continuing.

So my first piece of advice if you're in this situation is: find out which switch on your fusebox controls the plugs to the computer, and pull it. Our goes off at a certain time every evening, and I also disable the internet by removing an all-important wire to the wireless connector. It's not easy, and indeed shrieks of rage go up each night, but in a couple of days it's accepted. Stopping your child from playing computer games for hour after hour is no different from controlled crying. It's horrid at first, but firmness does work. The more time spent playing Nazi Zombies, the less time spent doing stuff that actually helps turn your darling into an interesting, civilised adult.

The next biggest problem is getting them reading. At some point this year I'm going to do a list of books specifically for boys who are into sport, but two recommendations are that you try Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series - Alex is the ultimate bored schoolboy's fantasy figure - and Mal Peet's football thrillers.

However, a boy will not read if you just plonk him down with a book. YOU have to put in some spadework first, especially if it's a classic. Read it yourself, and then be prepared to read it to him for several chapters at bed-time. Many boys of 13+ actually enjoy this much more than you might think, and if you stop reading on a cliffhanger and say, "Someone is going to be murdered next, but you'll have to find out who", then they won't be able to resist. This works as well for Lord of the Flies and The Great Gatsby as for Agatha Christie. Get audiobooks for long car journeys that you can all enjoy - I especially recommend Ian McKellen's readings of Michelle Paver's gripping series, Chronicles of Ancient Darkness for 9+, and for younger children, David Tennant's readings of Cressida Cowell's How to Train Your Dragon series. Martin Jarvis reading Just William and Miranda Richardson reading Horrid Henry are two other brilliant series. If you have a bored boy you might find both of the latter a bit close to the bone, but Just William especially is actually full of ingenious suggestions for under-12s.

Many adult audiobooks are wonderful entertainment for 12+. Robert Harris's Pompei was a great hit, as was Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. Look out for old-fashioned classics like King Solomon's Mines, The 39 Steps and The Moonstone.

I'm horrified by parents who buy cars with built-in DVDs. We love DVDs as much as anyone, but watching films is a social activity, not something to fill a void of time. A child in a car is a captive audience (at least until they get iPods, another invention with distinctly mixed blessings), just like the BBC in the early days. Stuff good quality recordings down them and they won't want to listen to rubbish. I'm often surprised by the number of parents who worry about their children's diet in terms of food, but who fill them with the intellectual equivalent of turkey twizzlers. Sorry if this sounds self-righteous, but children need and deserve the best of a culture, not the worst. You don't get bored if you have enough stuff in your head. Children tend not to - which is why they suffer agonies.

Nobody who is addicted to reading ever gets bored, but giving your child the reading bug is half of what being a parent is about, as far as I'm concerned. With some children (especially girls) falling in love with books for life seems to happen by magic around the age of 11. Others, equally bright, just take more time and patience. They will only do it if books and reading are an important part of your life. Boys do seem to be especially vulnerable in this respect. They simply need more help, for longer.

I also think that reading a newspaper daily should be part of every child's life. Again, introduce it as a game. Show them interesting pictures, read them interesting stories - boys particulary respond to stories about science and the natural world - and do the crossword puzzle together. (The Times has by far the most child-friendly). I bring a paper with me on the train, or when we go out to the pub for lunch at the weekend, or a Scrabble board.

Of course it doesn't always work. I am not a perfect mother, and nor are my children, much as I love them, perfect kids. I often meet ones who seem a good deal better-mannered, more energetic and more mature (though their parents assure me that they're just behaving well as guests). I see all parents who take their responsibility seriously as fellow-strugglers in a life-long journey, which has its bad times and its great times. However, I don't think mine are often bored - and that's because I understood early on that boredom, far from being a form of torment is simply the first step of finding out what you really want to do.

A writer's room

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

I blame Virginia Woolf.

Every week, The Guardian features a writer’s room. I find this very irritating because either the studies have been made pristine and tidy in a way that no writer’s workshop ever is, or two it looks convincingly messy but so hideous you might as well be looking at somebody’s guts.

Having started, like so many women novelists, writing on the kitchen table for my first three novels I now have a study, an odd, lozenge-shaped room painted apple green, with the insides of the bookshelves painted deep purple, purple silk blinds and purple beading. How these colour combinations came about was a process of trial and error, but they were basically inspired by the mounts of some Gustav Dore prints of fairy-tale scenes picked up many years ago in a shop near the Prado, Madrid. They show scenes of pretty maidens drawing water as a crooked old crone hobbles into sight to dispense blessings or curses, Bluebeard showing off his riches to his wife, a timid Sleeping Beauty being presented at court full of conceited courtiers strangely reminiscent of people literary parties, Cinderella trying on the glass slipper and my favourite fairy-tale hero, Puss in Boots lying his head off to bowing peasants in one picture, and lying for his life before the ogre whose castle he is going to steal. The ogre has been guzzling on a platter heaped with dead babies, a touch I especially enjoy.

Dore, like Mervyn Peake, is one of the very few artists who captures the really creepy side of fairy-tales, and as all my novels are a kind a fairy-tale I keep them to remind myself not to let my novels get too cosy. I have a Venetian mask, an artist’s model of a horse and my old teddy bear, all of which represent different things to me; a piggy bank shaped like a London bus, a vase of a green Picassoesque head made by my daughter, a portrait of me drawn as an angel by her when three, a pottery pen holder made by my son and for some unfathomable reason, an unopened bottle of sherry. The books, which are rather more relevant, range from reference books, favourite novels, poetry collections, essays, biographies, travel guides, maps, photograph albums, books on plot and writing about sex (both of which I find difficult) and a copious number of diaries which, when I am gone, will no doubt keep my children in the style which my novels never did being absolutely packed with all the secrets and scandal which I never repeat.

Littered around the room are usually a few plates with apple cores, nuts, mugs of cold tea, and chewing gum packets. Either you smoke when writing, or you chew, and I’m one of the latter. There's also one of those KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON posters which are such a feature of middle-class life it scarcely seems worth mentioning other than to say that I panic every time I catch sight of it. Actually, panic is the only way I ever get anything done. Basically, my study is my panic room in which, theoretically, I should feel safe. Given that it was where I discovered a robber in the act of stealing my lap-top with my novel on it, and fought him all the way to the hall to get him to drop it, it's actually the least safe room in the house.

Does any of the above make me a better or more interesting writer? I doubt it very much The only things about it that do help is that 1. It’s in London and 2. It’s quiet, until the telephone rings.

Starting a new novel - or being a moving target

Thu, 6 Aug 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

One of the wisest and most useful pieces of advice ever given to me came from Iris Murdoch. I met her just before she became seriously ill with the Alzheimer's that destroyed her, but at a time when she herself was getting increasingly poor reviews after a life-time of good ones. Mindful of my own painful experiences from the start of my writing career, which were then absorbing a great deal of energy to overcome, I asked her how she coped.

"Make sure that by the time you have one novel published, you have the next half-written," she said. "Always be a moving target."

Although Iris Murdoch's eclipse has been so total that a revival seems a long way off, I remain forever grateful for this - even if it it seems harder than ever to get on with the next book in the run-up to publication. In Iris's day, authors simply produced a book, worked with an editor to get it into the best shape possible, and moved on. Now, the year after publication is constantly interrupted by having to support your work through journalism, blogging, broadcasts and festivals. The expansion of fiction publishing has made it more and more of a Darwinian struggle even to be reviewed. I loathe this pitting of author against author because to my mind we are all essentially bound up in the same culture of words and stories, with even the most successful and famous producing work against great odds. Yet this same culture is currently riven by the encouragement of rivalrous feeling, which can't be a good thing for anyone, and is I am certain antithetical to producing art.

Given how hard it is to start a new novel, and how easy it is to keep putting it off, I'm quite pleased that I've now got a few chapters sturggling into life. I'm carrying on Quentin, the appalling magazine editor from Hearts and Minds, whose multiple infidelities have led to his wife wanting to divorce him, just as the recession strikes. Quentin was a bit-part, and a superficial comic character (modelled, as I said in my New Statesman diary, on the late Marc Boxer) but he has stayed with me as I thought it might be interesting to delve deeper into a womaniser. Quite a few of my male friends have been dreadful rakes, and as a type they have always interested me, especially when they made the step Don Giovanni never does and grow out of it in middle age. Though as I have also known one who didn't, and who has remained a destructive force in far too many clever women's lives, I'm considering which way to take my story.

Beginning a new novel is one of the few times I feel quite cheerful about what is otherwise an agonising process. I am always amazed when people expect writing to be pleasurable, or something that they expect makes you happy. Happiness is for amateurs. It's what you feel when pursuing a hobby - in my case, gardening and playing the piano. It doesn't matter if you do it badly, because it's purely for private pleasure. Real writing is real work. Not work like building roads or beating steel, perhaps (my husband once worked with a famous economist called John Kay who wrote a very funny piece about Real Work in the FT, asking if we should all be slaying woolly mammoths) but still difficult and requiring concentration, energy, experience and a host of other tedious things.

There are dozens of false starts. Where to begin? I've been invited to interview John Carey about his biography of William Golding in September, and one of the stories I always love about Golding is that his masterpiece Lord of the Flies was turned down by everyone until an editor at Faber saw that it should simply lose its first chapter, describing how the boys' plane came to crash. That is a real editor - but nobody becomes an author without also being their own editor first. The trouble is, when you begin, there's nothing to edit. There is nothing - just words and feelings, ideas and apprehensions which somehow have to coalesce into a new world and story. It's especially hard if, like myself, what you write is contemporary fiction as opposed to the fashionable historical kind. History gives writers a ready-made framework; it allows them to go off and research subjects in libraries, to make stories out of other stories already shaped by past narratives....Whereas when you write about the present, you're vulnerable to other problems. For instance, when Rose Tremain's The Road Home came out, I had to lose a character in Hearts and Minds. To my horror, I discovered we had both watched a programme about Polish migrants, and one who lived under somebody's front steps in London. Of course, this was a hugely appealing detail for any novelist to snap up - but she got her novel out first. Had I not been ill, and been able to follow Iris Murdoch's advice, it would perhaps have been a different story.

Perfect novels, or not being on the Booker longlist

Sat, 1 Aug 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

How lucky, really, that I wasn't expecting to be singled out, otherwise my publisher's email telling me that I'd so nearly made it onto the Boooker Prize longlist that the publicity people had rung him up would have come as a big blow.... but I'm thrilled for those who have.

It's a terrific list, and I'm not just being noble when I say that I hope readers buy not just Mantel, Toibin, Waters and Byatt but Simon Mawrs's The Glass House, too, which was my editor Richard Beswick's other submission. It's a really interesting, unusual novel about a Modernist house which Anita Brookner described in the Spectator as "in a words, Bookerish." As the Spectator didn't bother to review me (something which I'm sure has nothing to do with the oft-pointed-put similarities between it and my fictional politicla weekly, the Rambler,) I now wonder whether it carried especial weight with this year's jury. Oddly, Mr. Mawrs once taught my sister Biology in Rome - she remembers him as a pleasant, flirtatious man, and seems rather disapproving of his having left teaching to write.

("What on earth does it matter whether you're long-listed for something only fifty people will care about anyway?" she asked me earlier this week. "I think you should write commercial fiction. At least then you'd make some money.")

Few stories about the long-list interested me as much as an interview in today's Times with James Lever, the author of the surprise choice, Me Cheeta. Apart from the book itself sounding hilarious as a satire on Hollywood, and part of an interesting literary tradition of animal narrators, the author now wishes he hadn't rushed his novel out. Well, don't we all.... "It's a very flawed novel," he said, disarmingly, adding that he'd planned to write a withering review of it in The London Review of Books before his anonymity was blown.

All of which was very amusing, and touching, because apart from one or two egomaniacs of my acquaintance, every novelist goes through prolonged periods of shame and remorse about their writing, in which it seems not only bad but quite possibly the worst book ever written. There are hardly any novels, including those recognised as great classics, which would not have benefited from more time, better editing and some rethinks. I rewrote Hearts and Minds three times, completely, and almost a year later all kinds of flaws in it are hideously clear to me. You simply write the best version of a particular book that you can, at the time - after having rewritten earlier drafts perhaps twenty or so times. I am notorious, as a critic, for anxiously sending in two or three versions of the same review, and often when it's published think, Oh no! How could I have missed that repetition or infelicity?

Maybe it's no co-incidence that two of the perfect novels I can think of - Pride and Prejudice and The Leopard - were both written under no financial pressure, and were repeatedly re-written. Few novels are perfect. I'd put The Great Gatsby, Emma, The Tortoise and the Hare among mine...but what are yours? And do you think they would have been long-listed for the Booker?

Reading Groups

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

I’m not a member of a reading group – few authors are, as far as I can tell, because for us, reading is work not play – but a cold chill went through me a couple of years ago reading a piece by Rachel Cusk in the Guardian in which she poured scorn on the “middlebrow” choices of the reading group she had joined. Seldom has a novelist done herself such a disservice. Yet those passionately involved with writing are also passionately involved, too, with reading. How would I feel if I went to a reading group which had chosen an author or a book I myself loathe and despise? Unlike Cusk, my tastes include not just Chekov but a good deal of commercial fiction; I can enjoy and admire the skill and imagination of crime writers such as CJ Sansom, romantic novelists such as Eva Ibbotson and SF writers such as Ursula le Guin. But how would I feel if called upon to comment on, say, my particular bugbear at present, which is historical fiction?

So I was quite anxious when I went, at the invitation of Lynne Hatwell, otherwise known as dovegreyreader, who as well as being the best book blogger around also organises a monthly book group near me in Devon at the Endsleigh Hotel. This, built for the Duke of Bedford with gardens designed by the great Humphrey Repton, was worth visiting in itself – a gorgeous country house hotel without pomposity, set in a lush valley of the River Tamar, fed by waterfalls and streams all planted with bamboo. Its trees are of such staggering beauty that a couple of days later my husband and I returned to buy a weeping beech from the excellent Endsleigh Nursery in the hope that in 200 years time when we are dead, our own descendants will enjoy its snaking branches.

But the Endsleigh book group were all lovely, too. They’d read Hearts and Minds as their monthly pick, and were far too kind about it though delighted in contrasting the mean streets of North London with their existence in the countryside. As I’m now writing a novel set in Devon, I was just as interested in their experiences... but their book choices were consistently interesting, and included some such as Poppy Adams’s The Behaviour of Moths, which I’ve been meaning to read and some I hadn’t heard of but then bought.

It made me think a good deal, as I drove back in the sheeting, pitch-black rain, about readers. I’ve complained about the way authors now have to do book festivals, because they do often feel like a huge waste of time and energy when you could be getting on with your next book, especially when you don’t get paid for appearing and have travelled a long distance to get there. Also, I fear, many of us are not all that good at selling our work (or ourselves) to total strangers.

Yet – readers aren’t strangers at all. Far from it: they’re people who’ve been inside something very personal, which you’ve created, and (you hope) got something from your book which has made them curious about you. I’ve felt exactly the same way about certain authors myself; one of the great things about being a journalist is that you can get to meet your heroes or heroines, and ask them what are often quite intrusive questions about their life and work. (Not that the lovely Endsleigh ladies did this – they were all far too intelligent and polite.) Sometimes they give very interesting, entertaining answers. But it never really explains why their books have struck one with such force as to be, in one or two cases, life-changing.

So why is there this hunger to meet the author? We may be charming or repulsive in a social context, but where this stuff comes from is private. Research, you can say, vaguely, because the workings of an imagination are too hard to explain. You can’t pluck out the heart of a writer’s mystery, and crude attempts to do so as beloved by psychoanalysts, critics, interviewers and so on never enlighten anyone: they just present another story about a storyteller. Only an idiot would believe that what makes an author is the death of their mother/father in childhood, an unhappy experience of education, mental breakdown or driving ambition.

Writers don’t really know why they write, and if they did, would probably stop. I think this, really, is why writers are always slightly afraid of meeting readers, in or out of reading groups. No matter how sympathetic or perceptive, there’s always the worry that one of them might ask a question which we don’t dare ask ourselves.

Prize-itis, or all can't have prizes

Wed, 8 Jul 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

There’s a common misconception which abounds at present, that (in the words of the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland,) “All must have prizes.” It’s true, there are now so many of these for novels – under 35, over 70, female, East Anglian etc – that it seems every author I know has won, or at least been long-listed for some award. Apart, that is, from me.

I have not been long-listed or short-listed for a single prize as a novelist. Not the Orange, the Costa, the Booker, nor any of the other ones young novelists may hope to get, such as the Somerset Maugham or even the Bad Sex Prize. Sometimes, I don’t mind admitting, this is quite hard to live with. The current issue of The Author has a piece by someone complaining about how hard it is not to win when you’ve been short-listed, and I’m sure it is; but not quite as hard as it can feel not to even feature on the consciousness of a committee.

However, the simple fact is, not everyone can have prizes. I was reflecting on this last night while attending my son’s prize day – at which, I’m proud to say, he did get a prize for a short story. The whole time he was writing it, he kept asking me anxiously, “But will it win?” And I would have to tell him, patiently, that winning prizes isn’t really the point of doing something. You do it for its own sake.

The present literary culture has made this fundamental creative impulse extraordinarily hard to hold fast to. I can think of one children’s author who has won prize after prize, but who burst into tears after knocking off yet another and confessing what I knew – which is that children loathe her books, and won’t read them, no matter how well-written they are. I can also think of many whom children absolutely adore, but who may never get an award, or even a sniff of one. It’s not dissimilar with adult authors. I’ve sat on prize juries trying to redress this, and groaning because (apart from the fact that every prize I’ve judged has contained one person who simply has not read all the books) somehow judgement has been skewed to what has been made fashionable by The Guardian. This is one reason why I know perfectly well that I’ll probably never win a prize: The Guardian is always horrid about me. I may be gently pink, but I’m not left-wing enough. So, short of reinventing myself, I’m pretty well stuffed as a white, middle-class married heterosexual, who doesn’t write historical fiction.

But back to prizes. I sat in my son’s school gym, reflecting on how odd the whole business is. Just as in the literary world, many of the same faces, and the same families, pop up year after year. These are the “good”, conscientious students who always do more than is asked, plus a couple of the really gifted ones. One or two – like the Chinese boy on a full scholarship – are so brilliant they have single-handedly raised the school’s academic performance. It was touching to see the huge cheer that went up when this boy, who arrived barely speaking English but who is brilliant at Maths and Music, walked up to get his prize. (He’s also very nice, and they all know that, unlike them, he works in the holidays.)

What interests me far more are the others who don’t win awards. My son’s best friend, for instance, is one of the brightest boys in his year, and a real all-rounder as well as a thoroughly nice kid. Yet he always doesn’t quite get the top mark, and doesn’t win prizes. He’s too sensible to get upset about this, I hope, and I expect that when it comes to university it won’t matter. I was sitting in the school gym with the brilliant Lucy Kellaway, who like me, would never have got into Oxbridge now, now as neither of us got 10 As at O level or even 3 As at A level. Yet she’s one of the star columnists on the FT, on the board of a top (FTSE 100) company and has just finished a dazzling first novel; her husband, who didn’t get into Oxbridge and who spent his whole time at school playing sport, founded and edits Prospect, the best political magazine of our time. None of us were remotely like the kids getting prizes, in other words. We were the naughty, geeky, sporty ones who didn’t fit in.

Children, like authors, often reach a point in their careers where it becomes critically important for them to be acknowledged, however. It mattered that my son’s gift for creative writing got publically praised, because he genuinely held the belief that he was stupid because he hadn’t won anything. When people, especially children, start to believe they’re stupid, they begin on a downward spiral that’s hard to pull out of. Adults can be just as badly-affected by this. Even if literary prizes are what Julian Barnes called “posh bingo”, there comes a point when the most committed editor just gives up. I know plenty of good novelists who just can’t find a publisher any more, and it’s heart-breaking to hear their tales. A prize, or even the sniff of one, does help.

What it can’t do, however, is make a difference between writing and not writing. I’d probably have written more had I had more early encouragement – but I wouldn’t necessarily have written better. For the truth is that the moment you feel as if you’re a success, you’re cut off from the essential human experience, which is that of failure. Failure to win prizes is the norm. It’s what most people, even now, live with; and although it isn’t a pleasant feeling, it’s something that, because it invites neither envy nor compassion, actually makes you (I suspect) less arrogant and more likely to have interesting things to say about the human condition. One of the best things about being an author is the kindliness and support of not only the readers who like your stuff, but other authors – and one of the worst must be becoming so successful that you’re cut off from this, and from “real” readers. For all her millions, I can’t think of anything worse than being JK Rowling, and having to hob-nob with politicians (well, maybe Obama might be OK). Wanting a prize is a bit like wanting to be famous.

Of course, I’d be as pleased as anyone to be offered a place on a short-list or a long-list, and it’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise. But in a year where so much exceptional fiction is being published, I’m not exactly holding my breath.

lunch with Alison Lurie

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Every June, the great American novelist Alison Lurie comes to London, and ever since we met up several years ago we have had lunch. This is a great pleasure, for not only is she the living novelist I most admire (at least on her side of the Atlantic) she is immensely good company. I love her dry New England voice making devastatingly funny pronouncements on this or that writer's work, just as I imagine Jane Austen would have done. She is wise, kind and as interested in everything to do with English life as only the best kind of American can be.

How I wish there were more Americans like this in Britain! Throughout the Bush years, a wave of anti-American feeling went through Britain, so that it became permissable to pour all the latent dislike people feel for anyone "other" into them. Yanks were universally stupid, crude, boorish, racist etc. Only now that they have rediscovered their Revolutionary roots and elected Obama, it's we who are left looking like donkeys.

I dare say that Obama will start to do things the liberal elite dislike soon enough. All power involves corruption or at least supping with the Devil at some point, and when people stop railing at bankers and fraudsters like Madoff, they'll probably blame him instead, and even those of us who watched his victory and inauguration in floods of tears at the realisation of a hope and a dream may become disillusioned. Though I hope not... Meanwhile, the American recession is hitting the publishing industry even worse than it has done here. My own chances of a publisher are apparently stymied by this, though Alison also thinks that it's due to my showing the underbelly of London, the kind of thing that Masterpiece Theatre would have conniptions over.

TS Eliot was right when he said that "humankind cannot bear too much reality." As a life-long depressive, I too postpone reading books or seeing films and plays that dwell too much on the dark side of life - I can't bear anything about the Holocaust, for instance - and yet what I write, though it explores some of the very bad things that can happen to people, is always slanted towards optimism. My good characters do find a way to escape and survive or even triumph, despite touching bottom. They are more fairy-tale than realist, in essence, because I think it cruel to deprive readers of hope when they've travelled with people and felt for them.

However, I also think it immoral to only ever show the pretty, safe side of life. I live on a kind of social San Andreas fault of London (and have just had my car windows broken into for the fifth and sixth time this year as a result) but as well as appreciating its leafy, attractive side I also relish its rougher bits. I have as neighbours not only some of the best-known artists of our time - Andrew Gormley, Paula Rego and Andrew Motion to name just three - but some very unpleasant people too, of the kind I describe in Hearts and Minds or worse. Drug dealers, pimps, thieves, whores, feral kids, feral dogs, car jackers all abound. Almost anyone who lives in inner London shares this experience. I'd so much rather live with this, though, than in a safe suburban street that had nothing but safety to recommend it.

But Americans don't have to visit places like this in order to be interested in them. True, they have their own mean streets, which I can well believe are much meaner and more violent than ours, and a rich line in fiction about it. Yet what is special about London is the way it interleaves the lives of rich and poor, respectable and criminal. By only wanting to read about the sanitised version of the city (or the endless history-lite versions of it) they're really missing out.

why women writers remain handicapped

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Back from Cambridge, where Mslexia invited me to be interviewed for the new Women's Words festival held at Lucy Cavendish College.

I had no idea Lucy Cavendish existed until last year, though in my second and third year at unviersity I lived only about 200 yards away from it. It's the kind of college that I instantly applaud because it's for women whose further education has been deferred - through lack of opportunity, confidence, time or money. There are students there in their late twenties, and some in their sixties. It's a serious place, which gains quite a few Firsts every year largely because education, like youth, is often wasted on the young.

I have revisited Cambridge only once every few years. It has unpleasant memories for me, though many pleasant ones too. It's at least ten years since I was in its centre, and I was astounded by how much money had washed over it. When I was there, at the tail-end of the 1970s it was so dingy and provincial that it was hard to find much that was nice to wear or eat even in the first weeks when I still had my grant money. Now it not only has the same shops that everywhere else has (Cafe Nero was doing a roaring trade) but many quirky one-offs as well.

My friend Ruth Scurr was also giving a talk later on in the festival, so we had lunch and talked about many things, especially books. We met after she gave me a remarkably nice and perceptive review in the TLS some years ago, and although she is now a History don and author of a fine biography of Robespierre, she is a passionate and serious reader and critic of contemporary fiction who was a Booker judge a couple of years ago. She is proposing to give her collection of women's fiction to Lucy Cavendish, which is a very good idea.

People often wonder why it's still necessary to have colleges specifically for women, magazines and prizes for women and, in my own case, run a quarterly dinner for women novelists in London. Surely, we are all given equal opportunities these days? You might well think that if you only came across women who had no children, or who weren't, in addition to earning a living, looking after elderly parents, husbands and other family members. I sometimes think that childless authors short-listed for the Orange Prize ought to have an extra handicap....except that it isn't just children that prevent women from struggling into the light, and I for one would always have chosen to have had them.

But if you had seen the hoops we all have to jump through in order to make time to get together, once in a blue moon, you might think that little has changed since Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own. Many men also have to write during odd hours when not at work, and I know some who make considerable economic sacrifices in order to have one day a week off writing. But you can bet it's a whole day, uninterrupted by domestic chores of any kind. Some of the people in my audience talked to me afterwards, and all had made great efforts in order to be there just for a few hours, because, even now, child-care never seems to land as squarely on men's shoulders as it does on women's.

I'm about to leave my own family for a few days this week and see my mother in Italy. Planning this has taken weeks of preparation, because although my husband is eminently capable of shopping, cooking and cleaning I know that he is really happier when dealing with a platoon of chaps, like most public school types, preferably in rugged terrain requiring serious fitness and endurance. I know that when I return, it will be to long faces and reproachful looks, plus a general chaos and - if I've been missed enoguh - maybe a large bunch of flowers to show how much they've noticed I do when not there.

Tall Poppies: Zoe Heller and journalists who become novelists

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

How cheering to read Christina Patterson's interview with Zoe Heller in today's Independent. Patterson is one of the best newspaper interviewers around - shrewd, sympathetic, never spiteful but always perspicacious and completely trustworthy about facts unlike many - and the portrait she draws of the talented Ms Heller is totally recognisable.

I have always liked Heller's writing - both journalism and fiction - a lot. She's funny and brave and far more serious than either of those two adjectives usually allow for. The thinking woman's Bridget Jones, she had a reception for her (very good) first novel that was almost as spite-flecked as mine. Curiously, as a junior jounralist, she was almost the only critic who understood what I was doing in my debut, so I wasn't altogether surprised to see people falling over themselves to cut her down when she made hers.

There is huge and, to me, mystifying resentment when people perceived as journalists turn to writing fiction. You are seen as being "jumped up", pretentious, vain or just mad, even if the journalism was always simply a means of earning a living - like teaching. (I usually can't even spell "journalism", as some have noticed!) The Novel is still, despite its dwindling audience and pitiful advances, seen as something journalists should aspire to. But it is a very different kind of writing, as those accustomed to turning in 1,000 brilliant words discover. It requires stamina, for one thing, and the kind of solitary misery which is anathema to the born journalist. Yes, many novelists can do journalism (though less than is supposed) at a pinch. I do it myself, but am never comfortable. Heller is equally at ease in either field, but when she jumped horses it was seen as a betrayal of her charming, ditsy column. My own former editor, Katie Owen, at Fourth Estate, turned it down and then, when it was published, wrote a withering review. Somehow, simply because she'd been a columnist, Heller was supposed to have a thicker skin... I can not only imagine what she went through to then produce Notes on a Scandal, I know. At least she then experienced one of those reversals of critical opinion which make such a pleasant story for interviewers.

Before the credit crunch, there were always one or two journalists a year who would scoop large advances for first novels that invariably sank without a trace. If they were tall poppies, they were quickly felled. The rest of us, however, made quite serious economic sacrifices to stop writing for newspapers and pursue a vocation. We are not tall poppies, but worms beneath the harrow. I myself think that one of the things that is wrong with much modern fiction is that, unlike that of the best 19th century writers, it doesn't have enough journalistic content - largely I suspect because critics now regard historical fiction, and the research that demands as superior to actually going out and finding out about our own time. (Yes, I have written about this elsewhere.) Novelists have become so terrified of being mistaken for jounralists that they pass up on a feast of fictional possibilities. The very best aspects of Heller's Notes on a Scandal, the stuff that I think got it short-listed for the Booker, was not its self-delusion and obsession but its narrator's poisonous perception of what is going so wrong in Britain today. Not that you'd get any journalist to admit it.

Back from Bronte-land

Mon, 8 Jun 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

BACK FROM BRONTE-LAND

I spent the week-end travelling up to Yorkshire to talk to the Bronte Society, and visitors to the famous Parsonage at Haworth. It’s quite a long journey from London – over three hours – and as usual I sold about as many books. However, it’s a place I had long wanted to visit.

It’s said that you’re either a Charlotte person or an Emily person, and I’ve definitely been the former ever since I read Jane Eyre during a particularly unhappy time at boarding school. Jane’s indomitable spirit, her outspokenness, her rectitude and her passionate love not only for Mr. Rochester but the dying Helen Burns (said to be modelled on her own sister, who also died at the abominable boarding school which the four eldest all suffered) impressed me deeply. I am much less keen on Wuthering Heights, though I admire its technical skill and boldness. All Bronte heroes strike me a repugnant (my own model, needless to say, being Mr. Darcy/Captain Wentworth) due to their violent tempers and selfishness, and I am always horrified when they are described as “romantic” as opposed to Romantic.

However, my fellow panellists (Jude Morgan – who turns out to be a bloke called Tim – Joanne Harris and a delightfully funny Mills and Boon author, Kate Walker who told us that her novel Bedded by the Greek Billionaire is Wuthering Heights but with a happy ending) all had a good time debating this and answering questions from the audience. Apart from one chap who quoted Michel Houellebecq, to the mystification of many and the ire of Joanne (who has read him in French and shares my low opinion of him) everyone asked good questions and entered into the fun of it all.

The Parsonage itself is strangely moving, largely because it gives an unforgettable impression of precarious gentility and the extreme smallness of all the Bronte family. They must have been the size of leprechauns; the room where the four children played with Bramwell’s soldiers and invented Angria and Gondal is the size of a walk-in wardrobe – barely wide enough for a child’s cot. Of course, I’ve always preferred small spaces myself for writing, but every room was redolent of Jane Eyre’s fairy-like smallness and plainness, and the sound of the grandfather-clock seemed to drip through every room like blood. The churchyard, with its slab-like tombs, right in front of the house. No wonder they were so gloomy. I had a rather strange couple of hours re-reading Juliet Barker’s biography while someone crashed through various spooky pieces on an electric organ next door.

Maybe it was the ghost of Bramwell. Bramwell painted himself out of this famous, but very bad portrait of the four of them, and his ghostly outline has excited far more interest than if he had left himself in. I love the way some people still persist in believing he was the true genius of the family – as parodied by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm – who secretly wrote his sisters’ masterpieces while pretending to be drunk....

My father came from the North of England, from Bishop Auckland, but I’ve only ever visited it once, as a child. I was immensely interested in all I saw – the beautiful landscape, the lovely granite cottages and magnificent municipal buildings, and also the abominable red-brick ugliness of everything post 1900. The mills that brought more wealth to Bradford, and TS Eliot’s sneering line about silk hats, long gone; these days the villages and small towns are clearly dormitories for the bigger cities. I liked the faces, partly because I’d expected everyone would look like Sean Bean (and my dear Dad) but instead of big, blond brawny types they all seemed much more in the DH Lawrence mould – fine-boned, dark and rather gentle, with lovely drawling voices. It seemed impossible to buy any newspapers, but I noticed that far more people were reading books on the trains.

I was lucky enough to be put up for the night in Huddersfield by Joanne Harris, one of my favourite authors and friends. We got hopelessly lost in Halifax, and passed a number of teenage girls in tiny skirts and stilts, all tottering dangerously. Joanna can’t map-read and hadn’t brought a map so it was a miracle we got there after several false turns and much energetic discussion about fiction.

Her house is exactly right – being both lovely and full of grand Gothic touches both Victorian and modern, with glorious stained glass and a huge garden dappled with rhododendrons, ferns and mysterious woodland glades. I could hear tawny owls hunting. Contrary to rumour, we did not dance naked round to the full moon but drank a good bottle of claret with her charming, well-read husband and discussed why the English and the French treat each other’s writers with excessive respect.

It somehow seemed entirely appropriate that when we said goodbye at Huddersfield railway station the next day, somebody had put a striped traffic cone, Harry Potter style, on the head of the statue of Harold Wilson outside.

Orange Prize and Elizabeth Jenkins

Thu, 4 Jun 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

I went to the Orange Prize ceremony last night, something that made me both glad and sad. The party itself is a kind of glamorous feminist Walpurgis Night, held in the Royal Festival Hall with Tattinger champagne, a tall and gorgeous saxophonist (whom many suspect may be a tranny) playing jazz, and a heaving crowd of brilliant women interspersed by men who look about as comfortable as the male black widow spider...All good fun, with the energy and enthusiasm women bring to such events.

I was delighted by the winner, for although I haven't yet read Marylynne Robinson's 'Home' it's high on my list, after 'Gilead.' Describing good people is, as I've discovered, one of the most interesting challenges a novelist can face, and a deeply unfashionable one too. Maybe 'Home' will change that....

However, my sadness stems from having just finished Elizabeth Jenkins's The Tortoise and the Hare. It is one of the best novels I've ever read - a near-perfect work of art, like The Leopard and Emma. Yet its author is almost entirely unread, and has no presence on the Web. She should be feted as one of our most extraordinary authors simply on the basis of this one book.

Amazingly, Elizabeth Jenkins is still alive, at 105. She was made an OBE in 1995, and I was familiar with her only through her biography of Jane Austen, one of the few I feel sure JA herself would have approved of both for its elegance of expression and its insight.

But The Tortoise and the Hare...to describe it as a portrait of an agonising marriage is to do it an injustice. It is about Imogen, whose fading beauty and graceful self-effacement are insufficinet to keep the interest of her husband, Evelyn. A 52 year old barrister - rich, successful, beautiful in an almost feminine way and selfish - he falls for the last person anyone would expect., a plain, dowdly middle-aged woman of wealth but no tact or taste. In a Bronte novel, our sympathies would perhaps be with Blanche, but it is Imogen in her passivity and silent agony who is the heroine. She can't even drive, she doesn't enjoy sex, she is bullied and derided by her own son... she is the kind of woman in a class which, according to Carmen Callil, has vanished since the early 19850s and yet I feel I know all too many Imogens. You want to scream at her to wake up, fight, do something more than sufer - like Nora in The Doll's House - and by the end of the novel it seems that she may yet make a life for herself, and the one person in the book who sees and loves her.

That makes it sound too grim, though, for the novel is shot through with dazzling wit. There is a gloriously funny portrait of a couple who would be all too familiar to denizens of North Oxford and North London - a women writer, no less, whose pretentions and lack of maternal care are horribly satirised. Every character is drawn with an even-handed assurance. It's one of those books that I read, and learnt from in the way that you can only learn from a superior. I haven't been so impressed by anything so much since I read 'Suite Francaise' for although this is about a very different kind of battle, it's just as tense. Who is the Tortoise, and who the Hare? The answers may surprise you.

It is exactly the kind of novel that will never, ever win the Orange but which deserves to be read by anyone who loves what a novel can give. It has a foreword by Hilary Mantel, which reminds me of what a good essayist she is, and which casts new light on her own best work. I can't recommend it too highly.

Back to London

Mon, 1 Jun 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Many readers and reviewers have remarked on the dark, Dickensian portrait of London in Hearts and Minds, and ask whether I hate the city. Far from it - though right now as I'm writing about both rural poverty and urban debt, and the tug of the beautiful West Country, the frenzy of London is particularly unappealing.

I love London, and have tried to show both sides of it. One of the writers who most influences me is Juvenal, and especially his Sixth satire on the vanity of human wishes. He took a dim view of Rome, and all its corruption - and not for the first time, I'm finding that my original plot is being overtaken by reality with the scandal over MPs expenses. Juvenal outlines the reactions of two philosophers, one of whom bursts into tears while the other laughs. I'm all for "saeva indignation" or savage indignation, where appropriate... but as well as experiencing London as a great, grim, dark place awash with crime and rootlessness, I also experience it as full of unexpected kindness, charm, beauty and brilliance. I don't just mean in my immediate circle of arty types. It's the great mixture of people, and the way we all rub along that I love. I live between a couple who have fostered over thirty children, and turned their lives around (as well as successfully bringing up three lovely ones of their own), and whose goodness is so famous that on occasion when catching a taxi and saying my address, the driver has said - "You must live next to D and S then!" They called me when I absent-mindedly left a pot of chicken stock to boil dry on the stove, almost setting the house on fire, and managed to put it out through the window one summer.

The other is the son of a postman. He lives with his father, brother, wife and son. He used to be quite shy and surly, but since the son came along he's actually started smiling and gardening the tiny plot we all have at the back. He's stopped my "motor" being broken into twice. It's that kind of thing that I love about London.

Of course there are people who play music too loudly...but they've always stopped when I asked them if they'd mind turning it down, even on the really rough estate a block away. Maybe I'm just lucky. I've had one or two bad experiences too - partly out of trying to look out for kids, a couple of burglaries (one violent), an attempted mugging. I'll never forget the horror of the King's Cross fire, or the bombings. But above all, I don't believe that the famous Blitz spirit is ever very far away. LOndoners don't make a big deal about being Londoners. We're used to seeing famous people and giving them privacy - my husband and I were once in a tiny restuarant in Primrose Hill, wherre Paul McCartney was romancing Heather Mills and explaining about the Beat poets to her, while everyone tried very hard not to listen...because that's what being a Londer is about. And yes, I expect we did all think he was making an awful mistake, but unlike some we were all determined to give the man some space.

The Truth about Author Tours

Mon, 18 May 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

THE TRUTH ABOUT AUTHOR TOURS

I have a heavy-duty week of talks at libraries this week, broken only by seeing Waiting for Godot on Thursday with my daughter. It says something for what is expected of modern authors that Beckett’s play looks like being a spot of light relief.

When I last published a novel, seven years ago, you might be asked to do Edinburgh, Dartington, and if very grand Hay-on-Wye festival. Now, festivals have mushroomed. So tonight I’m doing Lambeth, tomorrow the Author’s Club in Dover St., the Hampstead Library on Wednesday evening and the Primrose Hill Library on Friday. Having just returned from the Daphne du Maurier festival in Fowey, a five-hour train journey each way, where I sold four copies I’m a little apprehensive.

Nothing is nicer than meeting readers, of course. There is no kind of human being I would rather meet than someone who is passionate about books – especially if they happen to be my own. At the Stoke Newington Bookshop reading I gave last week they not only asked intelligent, interesting questions but to my amazement contained people who had been reading my novels since I began being published. You never know who picks up your book, perhaps years after publication, and find that it excites or moves them. I still remember a fourteen-year-old fan (now reading English at Cambridge) who exclaimed excitedly, “Oh, I can’t believe I’m meeting all those characters!”

Author visits are supposed to build our brand – but it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that authors are not only supposed to write books but sell them too. Many of us are naturally quite retiring people, who find it a huge effort to switch from introvert to extrovert. Many are absolutely rotten at reading from their own work. A few, such as Will Self and AL Kennedy, are natural performers who can and do have parallel careers as stand-up comics, but as a general rule, the better the performer the worse the writer. “The best part of an author is in his books” as Dr Johnson said.

However, the point of all these appearances is to sell books, and when you have made a great effort and got on well with a lovely audience...and then don’t sell, you wonder what has gone wrong. Authors are not, despite the popular misconception fostered by libraries, a public service. We have bills to pay, just like everyone else. Yes, some books are expensive – though my own comes in two formats, the eye-watering £17.99 hardback, and the much cheaper £11.99 paperback (discounted to £14.39 and £8.39 respectively on amazon). Yes, I’d choose the cheap one too. However, if you consider it as two cinema tickets – or half a theatre ticket – and it may not look so steep, especially if you are then able to pass it on as a present to somebody else. Personally, I think no novel should be more than £10, but it’s publishers not authors who set the price.

Please remember that if you buy a book second-hand, then the author who has toiled on it for years gets absolutely nothing at all; and if you borrow it from a public library, we get 0.02p. I receive £200 a year from the Public Lending Agreement, in return for all the thousands of people who have borrowed my books. I very much hope these borrowers are students and pensioners and people who genuinely couldn’t afford to buy them; but if they could, it would help no end to actually pay for the entertainment in a bookshop. Otherwise – much as I enjoy meeting my readers – I simply will not be able to afford to keep writing fiction.

Bless the TLS

Wed, 6 May 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Every so often (very rarely in my case) you get a review that's so wonderful that you think, So that's why I write books! It isn't, of course. But when somebody seems to completely understand and approve of your work it's a very nice feeling; and this happened to me last week in the TLS thanks to a Cambridge academic called Stephanie Cross. I will be posting the link ... unless it was All A Dream.

A certain type of critic seems to believe that authors, and especially novelists, write out of a kind of egotism or vanity. There certainly are some writers who display this trait in abundance (I'll never forget hearing William Golding, when drunk at a party, crying out "I am a genius!" - though in his case, he was probably correct). Few novelists really feel this way, however. Maybe if more did then we'd have more masterpieces; but as it is, even to have the ambition to write such a thing is derided.

Certainly, novelists need to have some kind of arrogance to persist in writing a book, let alone publishing it. The truism that writing is a thankless task is one that sinks in, slowly and painfully, somewhere between the first and second novel. I dimly recall a certain Tiggerishness before my own debut came out, just because I was so relieved to discover that all those years of either writing it secretly in the office or living on beans and rice hadn't been a complete waste of my twenties. I believed, wrongly as it turned out, that novels were read with the same kind of intelligence that, er, Cambridge academics brought to bear on them. I didn't realise that the battle just to get your book read, let alone reviewed by that order of reader, is a brutal one; and that most debut novels are chucked to the lowliest kind of hack . I lost a baby due to the shock of that experience - though I also gained the subject of my third novel, A Vicious Circle.

I still don't know why I write. Perhaps if I did, I'd stop. All kinds of reasons present themselves - the desire to make a story, or pattern, out of random events; interest in people and their possible, alternative destinies; moral outrage; entertainment; an insane need for hard work. It certainly isn't the delusion that I'm going to make money by writing! There are about 12 literary writers who make money each year through fiction, usually by appearing on a prize short-list or the Richard & Judy TV show. Then there are the rest of us who often feel like we might as well not have bothered. Except...for when those rare and wonderful readers not only buy our books, but let us know that they've enjoyed them.

So to all those who have written reviews of my books on amazon - thank-you! I really do need them, especially in this mad month of May when three of the best women writers of contemporary fiction are also bringing out new novels. And to those who keep writing to ask if Hearts and Minds is being published in the US - alas, my former publisher Nan A. Talese at Doubleday has passed on it. So if you know any good editors out there, tell them!

library appearances

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

You know those cartoon characters who run off the edge of a cliff then look down and find they're treading on thin air? That's what it feels like. The only solution is to keep working and not look down...

Today I was emailed by the heavenly dovegreyreader to say that Hearts and Minds has been keeping her up until 1am. Now that's something every writer likes to hear! The DGR is exactly my kind of reader, to judge from her choices and tastes - an intellegent omnivore, curious about a wide range of fiction and taking no notice of anyone in the media. So that is wonderfully cheering news.

I've also been contacted by the Primrose Hill Bookshop to remind me to post up a notice about doing a reading at the Primrose Hill Library on May22 at 5.30. This was the library I went to both as a child and as an unemployed graduate on the dole. It's still just the same, but needs every bit of local support it can get - so unless you're coming to the Stoke Newington reading on May 11, please come.

Local libraries as a whole are increasingly embattled by the loss of love and respect for books. I was appalled to hear of a couple in Manchester which now play pop music supposedly to entice younger people. As if they didn't have this at home! What on earth do libraries have to do with lending toys, DVDs and CDs? They are or should be about BOOKS.

The only library I have ever feared and loathed was the University Library at Cambridge. Both its bleak industrial architecture (so reminsicent of a chimeny at Auschwitz, I thought) and its cataloguing system (not the humane Dewey) cowed me. Some people cracked the system, but I would wander about hopelessly, feeling very stupid, until I discovered the English Faculty library in my second year. (My old college, Clare, now has a good library of its own but in my day was appalling.) The result of this was that I wound up buying as many books as I could (no bad thing, but hard on a student grant) and had much of my real education after university, thanks to places like my little local lending library in Primrose Hill, and the Primrose Hill Bookshop's excellent second-hand basement (now also gone.)

Start the Week

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Start the Week

I did the BBC's radio show Start the Week on Easter Monday, which has to be the single most petrifying media experience I’ve had to date. Normally, I feel very comfortable doing radio – I love Woman’s Hour, for instance, with its eclectic mixture of subjects and keen, kindly intelligence. But Start the Week is what everybody in your world listens to if you're an author, so you can’t fool yourself (as I otherwise do) that nobody is going to hear it apart from your Mum.

The other reason why STW is scary is that it is very much a Boys’ Own show – despite its researchers and producer being female. Women rarely seem to number more than one, and I was definitely a minnow among whales such as Michael Portillo, John Gray and Peter Ackroyd, not to mention Andrew Marr himself. All of them utterly charming men and, it turned out, Oxbridge graduates like myself; Ackroyd had been to my college and remembered my old tutor and Marr had been next door the year ahead of me, and probably unrecognisable as he described himself as “a bearded Trot.” Having been a raving Thatcherite myself at the same time, we'd both come a long way since then.

We talked briefly about Melmotte and Maxwell and Madoff (never trust a financier whose name begins with M) before going on air; I enjoyed the fact that we had all clearly read JK Galbraith on the Crash, and were too polite to tell Mr. Marr so as he quoted from it.

Politeness is one of the more intriguing aspects of the show, alongside the terrible shaking that afflicts most speakers, which is invisible to the audience. The exception, of course, was Michael Portillo, but then you’d expect a politician to be in his element, and he was. The mildly annoying supportiveness of the questions when each subject is thrown open to the panel is due to this; it really was as scary as an Oxbridge entrance interview. Of course, you’re very grateful not to be publically eviscerated on air yourself, so unlikely to do it to others... but now that it’s all over, I did have severe reservations about Ackroyd’s prose translation of The Canterbury Tales which I couldn’t express because you aren’t allowed to say the word “fuck” on air. This is how he translates delicate and witty metaphors like the rooster Chanticleer “feathering” his hen-wife in the Nun Priest’s Tale.

In general, I loathe coming across “fuck” in a book. It wasn’t necessary for Joyce when he wrote the only great sex scene in literature, so it doesn’t make the rest of us look any cleverer. I used it myself in my first novel, largely as a way of illustrating my narrator’s silliness, but have always regretted it since. It strikes me as appropriate as a swear word in dialogue, but just no longer funny or shocking. I hear my teenage children say it constantly, and when I object get accused of being old-fashioned, middle-aged etc.. Not that I was much better at their age, having picked up the idiotic idea that swearing was cool. It was only later that I made a conscious effort to stop – exactly as I stopped smoking – realising how nasty it is to hear. Anglo-Saxon English is all very well, in context, but littered all over the page – or the air – is just irritating.

Anyway, I’m tremendously glad to have been asked to go n the show, and even more glad it’s all over. Thanks to all who sent me supportive emails.

up against The Wire

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

UP AGAINST THE WIRE

What joy to turn on the Today programme and find Andrew Billen, TV critic of the Times, attacking the BBC for not making modern drama like HBO! Not everyone is going to find The Wire as easy to watch as Cranford, and yet – how thrilling to see gritty street life on our screens instead of carriages and carts. If I see one more candle lit, or one more petticoat starched, I will be tempted to join the band of license-fee protesters.

Yes, I am as tired as anyone else at the end of a week-end of Living With Teenagers. I, too, fantasise about retreating to Pemberley and Mr. Darcy’s wet shirt while chopping up the Friday night roast for supper. Sunday night are different. But that still leaves us with six other nights a week in which we could actually see Britain as it is now reflected on our screens. Is the only response to economic crisis sticking our heads in another bonnet?

Yet this nostalgia-fest, which would be met with scornful laughter in art, or architecture, is also rampant in literature. I have the misfortune to be being published in the same month as AS Byatt, Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters. All of these are very fine writers, and all, it so happens, have written period novels. Anyone who is interested in Tudor England, in Victorian England or in post-War England will probably be buying them, and all are pretty much guaranteed places on the best-seller lists and prizes. Whereas what I’ve written is a novel that is so up-to-the minute that journalists are asking me, a little suspiciously, how I knew the crash was coming. (Being married to an economist is one answer.) The point is, nobody thinks there is anything remarkable about writing a big novel set in the present rather than, say, the fashionable 1970s. Who is interested in the here and now when we could be revelling in purple flared velvet bell-bottoms? Or crinolines?

Actually, writing about the present is the hardest thing of all to do. You might think it easy because there are so many good journalists on newspapers and magazines around. Yet that kind of writing tends to be extremely superficial – from a novelist’s point of view. Yes, you can name-check currently fashionable brands or concerns, but you won’t get at what it really feels like to be living now. It’s like trying to capture the moment when a fried egg turns from liquid into solid, as in Velazquez’s painting, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha. What is it now that will still have resonance in fifty or a hundred years time? A good contemporary novel is a perfect time-capsule that will transport its reader into the concerns, tastes, opinions and feelings of the moment that it was written. To capture that, to make those characters feel real even though they are ordinary people – not kings, princes, geniuses or generals – is indescribably hard. History presents us with stories, but the novelist of contemporary life has to go out and find them. I went out and found teenaged prostitutes, illegal immigrants and the rest for Hearts and Minds; I talked to them, as Dickens did when he found out about the abuse of schoolboys in Hard Times, and I wove stories out of the appalling things they told me. My characters are given more hope than the real people; they are placed in a kind of fairy-tale in which escape, riches, love and kindness are possible. It is a mirror, and what gives it its dark backing is the present.

If you write about the present in the way that Victorian novelists did, then even if you concentrate on the private lives of imaginary individuals, you are going to capture something that moves beyond pastiche. For pastiche, really, is what almost all historical fiction is. Yes: it’s an imaginative achievement to convince us, as Byatt does in Possession, that her poet Ash really existed, and it works because we are still obsessed by the Victorian era, and shaped by it. It worked when Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, not just because he was a genius but because he had served with veterans of the war of 1812. It was still part of living memory.

I am not against the writing or reading of historical fiction; but I am mystified by the way it dominates the acceptable face of literary fiction quite so much. Is it that readers distrust anything that is purely the product of a writer’s imagination and powers of observation? It certainly carries with it the tendency to be read as “history-lite”; ie, you can’t be bothered to read a decent biography of Henry Vlll, and you’re too posh to watch The Tudors on TV, so you’ll buy Wolf Hall. Or, you can’t be bothered to read Wilkie Collins’s authentic Victorian thriller, The Woman in White, so why not try the lesbian version in Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith?

Of course, I enjoy this kind of thing as much as anyone else. But here’s the difference: I don’t for one moment believe it to be literature. It doesn’t tell us the truth about human nature, or ourselves. Shakespeare could set his plays in any time or place, including outer space because we believe his people are real. Mere mortals, however, could try harder at staying in the here and now. Who knows, it could even have some stories of its own worth telling – just like The Wire.

the death of critics

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

The death of critics.

I don’t mind saying that there are a couple of critics who, were they to pass the bonnet of my car, I would happily run over. Whoops, my foot must have slipped Your Honour, I imagine myself saying... surely, a few less critics here or there would add to the sum of human happiness?

But in general, I find I have more respect for critics as a breed since the days when I wrote A Vicious Circle. This isn’t so much due to joining their ranks, as to the fact that book reviewers, and indeed Literary Editors have become a seriously endangered breed. Regrettably, I am always on the side of the underdog. It was a different matter in the 1980s and 1990s when reviewers attitude to fiction was pretty much on a par with slashing and burning the Amazonian rainforest. In those days, a successful reviewer was a Big Beast whose arrival at a launch party was a matter of note as he (it usually was a he) swaggered in to be immediately surrounded by acolytes. They had their pets, their hates, their foibles and their fans – all of which were studied as anxiously by authors as the hunted study the hunter.

Now, at the few literary launches left (always paid for by authors not publishers) reviewers and literary editors huddle together looking bereft and wrinkly. Their jobs have been axed, their wages slashed and their patch is being given over to some other hack who does Obituaries or Sport. If critics were looked after by a Royal Society, in the way of birds, we’d be on the red list right now, along with the corn bunting. Reviews have become ever-shorter, pay has in most cases been cut by 50% and books pages are thinner by the month. Should authors rejoice? No, because even when reduced to a kind of haiku reviews are, at best, the product of years of reading and thinking about books. There are some good reviewers on amazon and the Web, but remember - a lot more who can’t even spell...

Taste is something that, like perfect pitch, can’t be taught. Nor might you agree with it. Most of us would probably agree that the Georgian era represented a high-water-mark in taste of all kind, yet even then there were those who must have found Beau Brummel absurd. Learning is another matter. If you have a particular speciality such as (in my own case) children’s literature you do bring more knowledge to a book than your average obituarist or sports writer with kids. I may not always get it right, and know perfectly well that there are one or two children’s authors whose work I simply do not “get” at all, and who are therefore, despite my very wide tastes, unlikely to get reviewed. For which I am honestly regretful. I can only do my job if I don’t lie. However, at worst what I can do for parents, librarians etc is act as a kind of waste-trap. I get about 100 books a week, which is far too many. Some of these are reprints, and some parts of series that I don’t have space for and so go winging off to numerous state schools but a good proportion should never have been published at all. They are inexcusably bad.

What is much harder to choose from is the 5% left that are quite good but often not quite good enough. Writing for children is, contrary to appearances, very much harder than writing for adults. I should know, because I have published six adult novels and have two unfinished children’s ones in my sock drawer (a sock drawer novel, for the uninitiated, are novels like your first one which teach you a great deal but which should never be published.) They were each perfectly publishable and well-written, but just weren’t good enough.

This does not stop aspiring JK Rowlings from sending me their work, always with a covering letter that they read my column in The Times, and their various children or grandchildren all love it. If you are even contemplating doing this, please don’t. I have no power to get a book published, and my work comes at the end of publication not the beginning. There are people called agents who, if they think you have what it takes, will sign you up and take a percentage of your earnings if they manage to sell you. I am only paid to read published works. I get very cross at receiving manuscripts because on the occasions when I have been foolish enough to read unpublished books, and give an opinion, all I got was hurt feelings.

As an author, I know what this feels like. When I am negative about a book, it is (I hope) without malice. I get angry if a bad book has a lot of hype, and angrier still if a good book looks like disappearing. But in the end, any critic is just one person expressing one point of view.

Why, then, should it matter if one person is replaced by another? If we live in a democracy, why should the opinion of, say, John Carey or James Wood matter more than that of, say, another kind of journalist? After all, the person who reads a book will almost certainly not be so deeply-read or knowledgeable. In my own field, a child encountering a picture book is encountering the very concept of a book or a story for the first time, so why not give it a book by Madonna rather than Maurice Sendak? You know the answer to this, I hope: because a child deserves the very best, and not the very worst that a culture produces. The same goes for time-pressed adults. Yet how many of us have been bludgeoned by fashion into buying something like (you can fill in the blank spaces here) because it got some prize, or a glowing notice in the newspaper we read? Worse still, how many of us have picked up a modest paperback on a second-hand bookstall and discovered with amazement something quite wonderful which had entirely escaped our notice when published? I discovered any number of authors, from Christina Stead to Elizabeth Taylor in this way (and if you want to find out more about the latter, and why she has been so neglected, you couldn’t do better than to read Nicola Beauman’s new biography of her.)

Far too often it’s the foot of the impatient critic that slips on the accelerator pedal, running a book over and disappearing over the horizon with a cheery Poop-Poop!

What I’m reading: James Thurber’s The Thirteen Clocks, with a foreword by Neil Gaiman. Almost as funny as Shrek.

libel - the novelist's curse

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Libel is possibly the biggest headache for anyone writing contemporary fiction – for those interested in this, I’m currently writing a big piece for The Independent, and would love to hear from other novelists on or off the record. So I was riveted to hear on the Today programme that reforming our antiquated libel laws, which date back to the time of the Star Chamber, has now moved up the agenda. Let us hope that Geordie Greig, and Alexander Lebedev, respectively the new editor and the new proprietor of The Evening Standard bear this in mind when considering that their present Literary Editor attempted to stop a novel by claiming he had been libelled in its proofs.

The burden of proof in a libel case rests not upon the accuser but upon the defendant: that is, if you as a novelist are accused of libelling someone in a work of fiction then you have to prove they aren’t the real-life person rather than the real-life person proving that they are. How do you do that? Well, search me, because the late Malcolm Bradbury, who ran into this problem with his most famous novel The History Man was told that any academic who carried a row of biros in his breast pocket could claim to be his hero’s boss. Furthermore, the truth is no defence. Britain, supposedly the upholder of free speech and a free press, is shamed by these laws internationally. They mean that the bad, the rich and the powerful get away with their misdeeds. And that’s only libel; any media insider knows about the way court injunctions are used to prevent the wider public from knowing about X’s love trial or Y’s rape.

No wonder the Brontes used pseudonyms....On a long journey this week-end, we listened to the new Naxos recording of Jane Eyre, which has been abridged by the heroic teacher/journalist Francis Gilbert. I am a huge fan of his, and must have read his books on teaching in state schools (Help I’m a Teacher Get Me Out of Here, The New School Rules, etc) a dozen times for one of my new characters. The abridgement is pretty good, though it omits two crucial passages – the scene where Mr. Rochester dresses up as a gypsy during the house-party, and the creepy Gothic scene with Jane’s wedding veil. Just imagine what it would have been like had Charlotte been menaced by her former employers! “So Madame Heger, you are convinced that the mad Mrs. Rochester can only be yourself because you are married to the man with whom the real-life Charlotte was in love?” Given the fondness the Victorians had for moral censure, she’d have been shipped off to Botany Bay in no time.

Re-reading the Brontes, as I am for my forthcoming visit to the Bronte Society on June 6, I am struck by how conscious they are of foreigners and abroad, and wonder where this came from. I need to find a good biography of them, because although I know their father was an Irishman it is striking if you are accustomed to Victorian fiction to find foreigners being in any way protagonists. Apart from Trollope’s Madame Max and Melmotte, I can’t think of many....

romans a clefs - the truth

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Romans a clefs – the truth

I am in a temper, which is probably not the best state of mind in which to write a blog. Nevertheless, the news that, according to one informant, I am seen as a writer of romans a clefs has dismayed me, not least because it explains why one particular newspaper always gave me to its silliest reviewers. (You can probably work out which.)

The whole roman a clef tag got stuck to me over A Vicious Circle, which was set partly (and only partly) in the world of book reviewing – the rest being set in unglamorous and depressing places like collapsing housing estates and the NHS. It was there as a foil, and as a way of linking different worlds. The theme of A Vicious Circle was powerlessness, and whether you have to become as bad as your oppressors to beat them; it could scarcely have been based on real-life people because at that time I had myself done very little actual reviewing. However, the editor I had at Hamish Hamilton, Clare Alexander, was tremendously excited by romans a clefs, and vigorously marketed my novel as such, despite my protests – with the result that its publication was then threatened with a libel suit.

I can't believe how persistent this tag is, or how damaging. Let me say it again: I do not write romans a clefs. I'm not being coy about this. If I wrote them, I'd say so. I do satirise institutions and attitudes – much, I would hope, as David Lodge, and Alison Lurie do, and as Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and Balzac did. Why should I not? Laughter is the best pesticide, as Nabokov said. But I don’t really see the point of romans a clefs, not unless they’re giving an insight into world famous people, like Primary Colors, and the Clinton election. (I’ve often wondered why, for some years after A Vicious Circle, I got a signed Christmas card from the Clintons...)

I did wonder, when I subsequently wrote In a Dark Wood, why some journalists immediately decided that it must be about Sylvia Plath rather than the effect of maternal suicide on a wholly imaginary manic-depressive actor whose mother hung herself in Primrose Hill. Useless to point out that I spent my own childhood there. Useless to point out that a number of other women graduates besides Plath suffered deeply from frustration, infidelity and spite. I am bemused (and amused) by the way one journalist in particular has persistently put his hand up as my character, Ivo Sponge. I’m fond of this journalist, John Walsh and admire his wit (which far surpasses Ivo’s, I may add) but – he really isn’t.

Nor is the editor of the magazine in my new novel, Hearts and Minds, any real-life editor of any real-life magazine, though I have already had one call from someone claiming that he must of course be Boris Johnson on The Spectator. I never wrote for Boris, and have not had anything to do with the Spectator since the early 1990s. My only (brief) experience of a real-life magazine editor was Marc Boxer on Tatler. He certainly had my character Quentin’s ability to turn on the charm for important people and be perfectly vile to those whom he considered to be his inferiors – but that would be of no interest were it not a characteristic shared by a great many bosses and snobs.

What appals me about the eagerness with which people now seek for real-life models in my work is that it’s not only philistine, it undermines the imagination and care I put into each character. I take years writing each novel. If I were lazy, I'd write my autobiography, and make a fortune selling my kids out, betraying friends' confidences and making a lot of people REALLY uncomfortable.

Why, then, go to all the bother of making stuff up? Or researching it? Or spending months thinking about whether this character is dramatically plausible, interesting, moving or ridiculous until he or she becomes real to a reader? It really is enough to make me want to write my autobiography.

What I'm reading: Daphne du Maurier's The Glass-Blowers (I'm doing the DDM Festival on May 15)

Also a novel of harrowing depth and brilliance, Yiyun Li's The Vagrants.

Joseph Delaney's new Spooks book - spinetingling stuff, as the Spook's Apprentice goes to Greece with his mysterious Mam, pursued by bloodthirsty maenads. My son has to sleep with the lights on, it's so frightening.

the vanity of authors

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

I slept badly last night for two reasons: my ancient boiler has been broken for two days, and I read a terrifyingly good eco-thriller by Liz Jensen called The Rapture. It’s about a therapist who tries to help a matricidal teenager, Bethany, whose parents were part of a real-life evangelical Christian movement which believes they will all be saved on the day of world annihilation. Set a few years into the future, it paints a haunting vision of a world over-heating from global warming. Bethany turns out to be a kind of Nostradamus – only as she’s deemed mad as well as young, nobody will listen to her. It’s incredibly frightening and well-written, but the worst of it is that so much of it will come true. It’s the world that Dr. Seuss predicted in The Lorax, without trees or wonder, over thirty years ago, and what Tolkien feared in Lord of the Rings. Alas, nobody listens to writers. We are patted on the head and told (kindly or unkindly) that what we have to say is all very interesting but could we now shut up and let the grown-ups get on with making money in the real world. This is why the real world briefly took a bit of notice when Nick Sterne (who was my husband’s mentor as an economist) told us that if we let global warming continue it would cost as much as the Great Depression. Only, now we are actually in a depression, we have forgotten all about that.

For various reasons, I’ve spent today pondering the vanity of authors. No book, or novel in particular, would ever get finished if writers weren’t steeped in the kind of self-belief that can easily tip over into paranoia, solipsism and egoism. Stories of difficult or impossible authors abound – people who demand to speak to their agent or editor every single day, for instance, or who are abominably rude to sub editors. As a general rule, in my observation, the more genuinely gifted and hard-working a writer is, the less they’ll behave like a prima donna. And yet - you can’t expect someone to immerse themselves in their imaginary world, then emerge from it blinking, turn around and say, Well actually, my book isn’t all that good, and I quite understand why it isn’t a big event for the rest of the world.

Of course, there are plenty of novelists who can’t understand why they aren’t Ian McEwan or JK Rowling, and will even say, “I want to be them.” While it’d be nice to have their income, say, or fame (or boiler) you never know what nastiness is going on in somebody else’s life. When I was a much younger writer, I occasionally came across other young women writers who would cause me a pang of envy, both of their talent and at its public recognition through prizes, interviews and general fame. It is hard; harder still if, as can happen, they get the recognition without much real talent. Yet invariably, I would find out that envy became wholly inappropriate to the reality of their lives, because every gift, including being ravishingly beautiful, has its accompanying price. I sometimes envy writers who have no children, for instance, because it is true that they extract a huge toll of time and energy and creativity. I sometimes envy male authors, who are always the ones who are free to go off to spend a month at retreats like Hawthornden Castle in order to write, and who never have to worry about putting on the laundry, making sure there are potatoes for supper and getting children to do their homework. But I wouldn’t really want to be them. Would anyone really want the talent of George Eliot if what came with it were her looks, her love life and her ostracism? You can’t have one without the other.

gentrification

Mon, 9 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

My car, or rather my husband’s mid-life crisis on wheels, has been broken into twice this week. No sooner was the windscreen replaced this morning, than the side window was smashed. No books or CDs were taken, only an out-of-date lumpy old Tom Tom sat nav, (which I never used because I can’t stand listening to a woman even bossier than I am.) Leaving the books doesn’t surprise me – who after all would buy those – but leaving the CDs shows how even petty thieves download their music free these days. It’s only the middle-aged who want to slip in something like Angela Hewitt playing the Well-Tempered Clavier (me) or Van Morrison (Himself.)

I live in a bit of Camden that’s half-gentrified and half very much not, much like Polly in Hearts & Minds, and this throws up a lot of interesting conversations. The older inhabitants all either solidly white working class (one comment, from an old man about how he carries a blade in case he gets attacked, I put in my novel) or genuinely bohemian. Then there are richer, more recent arrivals – lawyers, bankers etc - who try everyone’s patience by embarking on year-long renovation projects complete with drilling, underpinning and even a subterranean swimming pool (apparently the size of a sheep-dip). They’re thrilled with having improved the neighbourhood, and oblivious to the pain it’s caused to those unable to enjoy their underfloor heating. I’ve seen this process before, in Primrose Hill, now the haunt of Kate Moss, Jude Law etc but once full of writers like Fay Weldon, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes et al. For a while, as ordinary shops get replaced by delicatessens and smart little cafes and boutiques, you think it’s all rather lovely. But then the rents rise, and you find there is only one proper shop left; and franchises like Tesco lock on, hungrily.

The most cheering thing I’ve heard so far about the recession is that one town has let small traders open up in stores formerly rented by chains that have gone bust. Imagine if, instead of having to huddle in disused car-parks, farmers’ markets could open in defunct branches of Woolworths! I hate the dreary sameness of most British towns and high streets, with their metronomic Tescos, estate agents, Boots and charity shops and if the economic pain gives an opening to more individual stores then hurrah. Who knows, there might even be someone who could replace windscreens for less than £360 a pop.

What I’m reading:

From my children’s postbag: Jenny Valentine’s The Ant Colony, all set round Camden Town, and riveting. It’s about a teenaged runaway (my subject for the Times this week).

Also about to embark on re-reading the Brontes, as I’ll be speaking at the Bronte Parsonage on June 6. What mad, passionate, fascinating women they were. Mr. Rochester’s description of his unhappy marriage still makes me shudder.

waiting for spring

Tue, 3 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I looked at the Facebook entry my daughter had set up for me. How on earth do so many people, all working hard, find the time to keep checking their entries? The devil makes work...I'd rather practise the piano, or garden. Or (above all) read. I have a piece to write, and a second chapter to rewrite and a lunch to cook. Also an old contract to look up to send to my agent, train tickets to book ...it goes on and on. But somehow it all gets done. Those were the only good lines in Shakespeare in Love. It's always a panic, and the whole of the Queen's Men are in chaos, but somehow, nobody knows how, it's alright on the night.

I suspect everybody, everywhere, flies by the seat of their pants. Darwin's explanation for evolution has always struck me as much too slow; I have a suspicion that it's more like the moment when Dumbo discovers he can use his enormous ears to fly with. That dreadful moment when he's falling through the air, terrified, is exactly what being a writer is like. You never, ever believe you can do it. You never understand what it is that suddenly makes you able to turn a kind of disability into the very thing that makes a miracle happen. There's a good dinosaur book by Benedict Blathwayt along similar lines - a tiny reptile being chased across Jurassic mountains by great thuggish killers and suddenly jumping off a cliff to become the first bird. He's a very good picture book writer - obsessive attention to detail, best seen in Tangle and the Firesticks - but this one struck quite a chord with me.

I have the best job in the world, reviewing children's books. My children claim, superciliously, that it's because I'm still about eight. I tell them that only very adult people enjoy being children and remember exactly what it's like. Of all the stupid things that critics have ever said about my own books, (and there are plenty) none made me quite as cross as an American who claimed that children don't talk the way my child characters do. Well, the bit she objected to was taken down verbatim in a playground... Like Alison Lurie and the Opies, I am perennially fascinated by children. I see them as a lost tribe, much like the Little People of legend, forced underground and noticed only when their resentment and subversion affect the lumbering giants overhead.

March 2009

Thu, 5 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Like everyone I know, I'm riveted by the scandal over Julie Myerson's book about her son, The Lost Child. All writers use aspects of their lives in their work - the claim that I had used a real-life ex-boyfriend of mine for A Vicious Circle was what gave rise to my own problems with it - I have some sympathy. However, my own case was very different. It involved an adult, and a critic of legendary unpleasantness whom writers were queuing up to attack if it came to court. The Myersons' decision to lock out their 17 year old son because of his drug habit - smoking cannabis - and then to write a book on it smacks of parental irresponsibility and betrayal.

Every parent of teenagers goes through some difficult times. I'm not going to invade my own children's privacy by saying this; with luck, effort, trust and above all love you get through them. But what interests me is how you respond as a writer. Supposedly, we all have a chip of ice (as Graham Greene put it) in our hearts that means that we sacrifice our nearest and dearest for a book.

Sorry, but it doesn't work like that, unless you're just writing thinly disguised autobiography. I find it maddening the way people confuse what is an act of imagination and ventriloquism with what I'm actually like. People have believed I'm aristocratic, manic depressive, Irish Catholic, married to a doctor etc because of my characters having convinved them they must be true. This is a triumph of sorts - but please, none of it is true. I spend months researching my characters, thinking about them, having dreams and internal conversations with them. They are not me; nor are the men in them my husband or any ex-boyfriend, or the children mine. I am neurotic about invading privacy, both mine and that of others.

Even writing a blog is a bit of a violation of this. Not least because I'm not even getting paid for it. But at least it's not blood money.

The recession is hurting many writers, and stories abound of people having their contracts cancelled because they’ve delivered one day late. I’m incredibly lucky to have a new novel out this year, because I delivered it FOUR YEARS late, due to illness. A number of US publishers are not taking on any new authors. Many in Britain have had their advances cut to a tenth of what they were, and just can’t afford to keep on; journalists, too have had their fees slashed by 50% or lost their jobs altogether. Nick Cohen complained in the Observer recently that modern novelists fail to address debt, as Dickens once did. Well, curiously, the recession and debt are exactly what I’m writing about now. I am interested in money as a subject in fiction, because it affects people just as strongly as sex, hatred or death. I always try to give actual sums for what people need, or are paid in my books. I don’t think money should ever take possession of your true self – all the mistakes I’ve made in life were when I became frightened, and took the seemingly easy path – but I also think it’s stupid not to be aware of it as a powerful force. I love Austen, Dickens and Trollope, and a number of children’s authors like E.Nesbit and Dodie Smith for always telling us what things cost.

This website, incidentally, cost me 10% of my advance for Hearts and Minds. So do please make it worthwhile by writing a response.

What I’m reading:

From my weekly bag of children’ books, I’m reading Dido by Adele Geras. It's about the Carthginians left behind when Aeneas sailed away, and is lovely stuff.