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In Their Own Words

This is the section where we give the authors the chance to describe their latest books, what inspired them, the process of writing, the backdrop to their novel. And best of all, if you're inspired to read more, you can make great savings when you buy their books.

Click here to view the In Their Own Words archive

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March 2010

Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

An Exclusive Q&A with Rebecca Goldstein, author of the newly published 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.

You were born into an Orthodox Jewish family, as was your protagonist Cass Seltzer. Were you drawn towards a position of atheism for similar reasons?

Cass's mother had broken away from her very insular Orthodox background, and Cass is only brought back occasionally to visit his grandmother, whom his mother can't stand, but of whom he is rather fond. His grandmother bakes him special goodies, though he is required by her to make the special blessing for each thing before he can put in his mouth, which is a bit unnerving. Still, though he is confused by the self-contained world of extreme Orthodoxy, he is also intrigued by it. I, on the other hand, was actually raised within Orthodoxy and, like Cass's own mother, abandoned the ways of my foremothers. My reasons were probably more intellectual than hers were. She simply found it intolerably claustrophobic. I, on the other hand, found much to love about it—especially in its close sense of community—but ultimately could not reconcile it with what I believe to be true of the world. I also came to regard the very intimacy of that world, as comfortable as it felt, to be incompatible with my vision of how we ought to live together in the world and to regard one another. For me it was far more heart-wrenching to leave than for Cass's mother. I suppose that's why I can write about it sympathetically in the novel, non-believer though I am.

36 Arguments for the Existence of God features, as an appendix these 36 arguments and why, in each case, they are flawed. Are there any of them which you still feel might have some validity?

I'm quite partial to #35, which is the argument for Spinoza's God. But it's a very strange sort of God that Spinoza argues for, a God that doesn't stand outside of the universe and whose will has nothing to do with the existence of the universe. In fact, will and desire and attitudes can't be ascribed to Spinoza's God on pain of incoherence. Spinoza's God is more like a cosmologist's idea of The Final Theory of Everything, the theory that will explain exactly why the universe had to be this way and no other way, and why it went through the trouble of existing. Spinoza's God is so incompatible with traditional ideas of God that he was, in his own lifetime and for centuries after, considered the most pernicious of all atheists. After all, he's claiming that if we really understood the universe right down to its core, we'd see that it explains itself, and there is no reason whatsoever to infer a being outside of it to explain it. Still, he finds this notion of God worthy of reverence and exaltation. What he is telling us is to revere and revel in existence itself, offering us a spiritualized atheism. This is right up my alley!

Your writing has an intellectual rigour which is absent in much of what is popular in literary fiction in the UK. Do you feel that intelligence and knowledge are characteristics which are respected and valued in American society?

Novels that take on ideas aren't particularly popular in the US either. It's not that intelligence and knowledge aren't valued; they are very much. But this tends to work against fiction, since it's assumed that novels can't do anything serious in the way of intellectual work—that if they do, they're going to be seriously flawed as novels. This leads many serious people to just forego reading novels altogether. My last two previous book were non-fiction, one called Incompleteness: The Proof And Paradox of Kurt Gödel, and the other Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. Sometimes fans of those books would assure me that, of course, they'd never read my fiction, as if to impress me with what serious people they are.

Like your earlier fiction, your new novel presents to critics and readers, many of whom do not have your academic background, many complex ideas, just as Cass Seltzer's bestseller, 'The Varieties of Religious Illusion', would have done. Do you find it hard to deal with criticism of your ideas from those who don't have your lifetime's knowledge of philosophy?

It's my job to be able to make whatever I've learned as clear and accessible as possible. I can never fall back on the excuse that I've been studying and contemplating these issues for a lifetime. So long as I sense the criticism is coming from an honest attempt to deal with what I'm saying, I'm grateful. I'm grateful for the opportunity to deal with readers on a deep level, including trying to answer their thoughtful criticisms. It's the thoughtless ones that are trying!

Richard Dawkins' recent bestseller, The God Delusion, is a book that engages very aggressively with the debate on the role of religion in a scientific age. Do you feel that criticising religious belief on purely rational grounds is a productive approach?

I think that all beliefs should be examined on rational grounds. If someone is claiming to know how the world is, and offering us arguments as to how he knows the world to be this way, then it's fair game to subject those arguments to rigorous analysis. So if someone thinks he has good grounds for believing that God exists, it's entirely appropriate to evaluate those grounds. But I also believe that religion is about far more than argued beliefs in God's existence. Religion is a place where people can take their existential dilemmas, and their need for community, and their sense of the mystery of existence, and their fear of death, and their moral uncertainties, and their need to feel their lives to be of significance, and their disgust at their own distasteful impulses, and . . I could go on and on. Scientific knowledge is not going to make these needs disappear for those for whom they are a pressing presence. Showing the inadequacy of arguments for God's existence is not going to make these needs disappear. So treating religion as a simple propositional affair seems to miss a great deal. Is it not possible to point out the weakness of these propositions without insulting those who find their existential needs nourished within the religious life? I think the first part is important—I wouldn't give up criticizing those propositional arguments—precisely because it reminds even those who find comfort within religion that those who do not are not making a mistake that calls for correcting.

Do you feel that religious conviction is a product of a lack of intellectual rigour?

No, I don't. First of all, I think that the propositional element is so often beside the point. But let's put that to the side and just consider the great number of arguments that I try to round up in the Appendix to '36 Arguments.' These can be ranked from those which are truly awful—including those which are just viciously circular, assuming the conclusion in order to prove it—to those which are, I'd say, inconclusive but require some pretty fancy thinking to get around. As an example of the former, I'd offer The Argument from Holy Books, (#23 in my Appendix)— appealing to the holy books as revealing the word of God, and then arguing for God on this basis. This lacks intellectual rigour in spades! As an example of the latter I'd propose what I dub The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants, (#5). This tries to argue for God's existence by pointing out that a universe hospitable to the appearance of life has to conform to some very strict conditions: everything from the mass ratios of atomic particles and the number of dimensions of space to the cosmological parameters that rule the expansion of the universe must be calibrated just right in order for stable galaxies, solar systems, planets and complex life to appear. So how come our universe, out of all the possible universes, gets this right? Answering this argument requires some creatively speculative hypotheses, concerning such things as a possible 'multiverse or an 'oscillatory universe' or perhaps a Spinoza-like self-explanatory Final Theory of Everything. Many might counter, quite reasonably, that these speculations are even more unlikely than God. I don't think that's right, but it's clearly not an intellectually lazy argument.

Religion is often cited as a source of society's ethical standards. Do you think that the religious can claim any authority in matters of acceptable behaviour?

I think that secular moral philosophy—and in particular the thinkers of the Enlightenment—have done more to help pull us into a moral life and a moral vision, based on the recognition of our common humanity, than the centuries of religious thinking have done. It was Enlightenment thinking that helped to pull religion itself into a more progressive outlook, so that even believers now interpret various sections of Scripture—for example those dealing with the permissibility of slavery or with the stoning of adulterers—as not to be understood literally. The great human rights movements—female suffrage, abolition of slavery, universal literacy and schooling, democracy itself—were the results of the Enlightenment. Interestingly, you can actually plot decreases in violence across Europe as the ideas of the Enlightenment spread.

Do you still feel that your Jewish heritage is an important part of your identity?

It is, in the sense that my family is. I don't claim that my husband and my two daughters are more objectively worthy of love than all others in the world, even though I do love them more than all others in the world. My life is tied to theirs, nothing about them is indifferent to me. To a far lesser extent, I have an involvement with my Jewish heritage. I am not indifferent to it. When I go to various far-flung points on the globe, I'm always interested in searching out whatever Jewish history there is to be found there. But that's quite normal, isn't it, to feel a certain identification with one's ethnic background.

Your writing has similarities in style with that of your husband, the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, in that you both inject a real warmth to your writing which very much invites readers to engage actively with your ideas. Do you share your artistic ideas with each other as much as you evidently do your intellectual ones?

Before I'd met Steve, which was seven years ago, I rarely shared my novels-in-progress. I liked the feeling that I was creating an entirely private world, and I didn't like to think of anyone ever entering into it. All that changed when I met and moved in with Steve. It's taken some getting used to, but now I do share the fiction with Steve, and his reactions have become so important to me that I sometimes wonder how I wrote all those books without him! On his part, he gives me every chapter as he writes it, and then gives me each revision. One of the things that Steve and I continue to marvel at is that, even though we met each other in our, um, full maturity, so that we didn't have any influence on each other when we were younger, we independently arrived at such similar views and intuitions. Neither of us ever has to say very much to get the other to understand what we're up to. I've noticed that recently it's made me impatient when I speak to other people. I have to explain so very much, and, living with Steve, I'm not used to that anymore.

As well as your novels and short stories, you've recently written biographies of the mathematician Kurt Gödel and the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Do you find fiction or non-fiction writing more satisfying?

Oh, they're both terrifically satisfying. Fiction is harder, at least for me. It's hard to create something out of nothing. But more and more, I've been trying to erode the wall between my fiction and non-fiction. In 36 Arguments, for example, there's that Appendix. And there's also a formal debate between Cass Seltzer and a theist (Resolved: God exists) that hovers somewhere between fiction and non-fiction. And in my last two non-fiction books I used many of the narrative tricks of the novelist to bring the stories alive. I even did a sort of imaginative telling of Spinoza's life from the inside—a first-person narrative—at the end of Betraying Spinoza. It was a little novella of what it might have been like to be Baruch Spinoza, what the world felt like to him. That's the novelist breaking out in a philosophical work.

Are there specific ideas or scientific or philosophical figures you haven't yet written about which you'd like to in the future?

I'm under contract to write a non-fiction book on Plato. And carrying through on my project of eroding the separation between fiction and non-fiction, I plan to write it in dialogue form—as Plato himself wrote. They'll be anachronistic dialogues, Plato arguing with thinkers who came after him about the philosophical problems that Plato himself discovered. Plato, of course, took a dim view of the arts, banishing the epic poets from his utopia. I think I'll have him in dialogue on that issue with George Eliot. She'll know exactly how to take him to task over his denying any intellectual merit to literature. Yes, we're not going to let him get away with that.

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March 2010

Kat Banyard -The Equality Illusion

Kat Banyard introduces her new book, The Equality Illusion, part of the Faber Manifesto series.

Today it is widely thought that women and men have achieved equality. This, quite simply, is an illusion.

Some commentators insist that we are living in a 'post-feminist age' - the proud inheritors of a gender-equal society. Sir Stuart Rose, Chairman of Marks & Spencer, insists that 'there really are no glass ceilings despite the fact that some of you moan about it all the time . . . You've got a woman fighter pilot who went on to join the Red Arrows . . . I mean what else do you want, for God's sake? Women astronauts. Women miners. Women dentists. Women doctors. Women managing directors. What is it you haven't got?”

It's a fair question; what is it we still haven't got? The following statistics provide a clue:

:: Women in the UK are paid on average 22.6% less per hour than men

:: Women do two-thirds of the world's work, yet receive 10% of the world’s income and own 1% of the means of production

:: At least 100,000 women are raped each year in the UK and the rape conviction rate is 6.5%

:: Only 18.3% of the world's members of parliament are women (the UK figure is under 20%)

:: 1.5 million people in the UK have an eating disorder - 90% of them female

In short, what we don't yet have is equality. While massive strides have been made over the past four decades, we are still very early on in the process of unpicking from our society the cultures and attitudes that have accumulated over millennia to enshrine women's secondary status. Many legal victories, such as the right to equal pay won in 1970, remain abstract pledges that are yet to translate into reality. Hard-fought gains, such as the right to a legal, safe abortion, are under continual attack. The constantly evolving economic and political world order means the ground we are working on for gender equality is constantly shifting, and new technological developments present challenges unique to this age.

Insidiously, though, the problems that remain seem to have become an accepted part of the landscape of our everyday lives - normal and inevitable. 'Rape happens; women hate their bodies; and world leaders are usually male - that's just the way it is'. The links between these problems and women's inequality have been hidden in the equality illusion. It is time to expose them.

The experiences of over 100 women and girls interviewed for The Equality Illusion put paid to any notion that we are 'there' yet, that equality has been achieved. From the time they get up to the moment they go to bed, women's lives bear the stamp of inequality.

“I hate the fatness, the flesh, the excess. I can't see myself ever liking it.” Ellen

Today women's bodies are denigrated as inanimate objects to be publicly scrutinised, maintained and manipulated for the benefit of others. The result is an epidemic of body hatred, eating disorders, and a meteoric rise in the number of women turning to cosmetic surgery.

“I don't think we have a girl/boy problem here. There is an innate thing with boys. Boys like cars. Boys like more vigorous activities.” Primary school teacher

While the common perception is that it is boys being failed by school, every day girls are being taught a hidden curriculum of stereotyped behaviours, discouraged from maths and science, steered away from physical education, and subjected to sexual harassment. In fact, the World Health Organisation reports that school is the most common setting for sexual harassment and coercion.

“It is only a 40p [an hour] difference to the day shift, but I try and do the night shift so I can do the school runs. I can't make alternative arrangements or pay someone to take the kids to school.” Elizabeth

Despite discrimination against women in the workplace having been outlawed nearly forty years ago, 30,000 women lose their jobs every year simply for being pregnant, just 12% of FTSE 100 company directors are women, and many women - like Elizabeth - are trapped by the sticky floor of low paid part-time work because those are the only jobs they can fit around their caring responsibilities.

“He strangled me for real, with both hands. I knew it was for real because the more I struggled the tighter he squeezed.” Amy

One in four women will, like Amy, be subjected to domestic violence at the hands of a current or former partner. It is just one of many forms of violence against women driven by sexist attitudes and cultures. Yet all too often, the victims are blamed and the perpetrators escape justice.

“Whoever says that prostitution is just ordinary work has never walked even a minute in my shoes, or any other girl that I know. Prostitution is actually a trap that most women believe for far too long.” Rebecca (former 'high-end call girl')

Never before has the sex industry been as profitable as it is today, with prostitution, pornography and stripping taking place on an unprecedented scale and influencing the very heart of mainstream western culture. Yet behind the industry's rhetoric of 'choice' and 'empowerment', women involved reveal that exploitation and abuse are intrinsic to these practices. The sex industry transports its consumers to a land that feminism forgot, and everyone pays a price.

“She called me names, told me I was a slut and that I was wrong.” Olivia

Despite the much vaunted sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s, women and girls today are still subject to a sexual double standard, frequently pressurised into sex, and subject to stigma and abuse if they - like Olivia - exercise their right to an abortion. Unequal power relations between women and men remain present in every sphere - and that includes in the bedroom.

Today, gender equality is an illusion. But it can be made a reality. None of the problems identified in The Equality Illusion are inevitable. Body hatred, violence, sexual exploitation - these things can be prevented. And a burgeoning movement of women and men are stepping forward to do just that. Feminist activism in the UK is on the rise, with marches, conferences and groups springing up across the country. From changing the law on how lap dancing clubs are licensed to stopping a branch of Hooters opening, the achievements being racked up by these activists testify to the power individuals have to bring about change.

Everyone will benefit from a world in which women and men live equally. Help create it.

To coincide with the launch of The Equality Illusion a unique new organisation - UK Feminista - has been set up to support women and men in campaigning for a more gender-equal society. To find out how you can get involved visit www.ukfeminista.org.uk today.

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February 2010

Robin Dunbar - How Many Friends Does One Person Need?

‘Why you can never have more than 150 friends … and other evolutionary quirks’ - Robin Dunbar introduces his latest book How Many Friends Does One Person Need?

We are the product of our evolutionary history, and that history colours our experience of everyday life, from the number of friends we have to how religious we are. Did you know, for example, that you can only have 150 friends, acquaintances and relatives in your social world? Now known as ‘Dunbar’s Number’, 150 defines the boundaries of our social lives. It was the average size of villages in the Domesday Book way back in 1086, and still is the typical size for villages all over the world! So don’t even think of having more than 150 people on your Facebook file if you want to keep an ordered life…

And because you are limited to just 150 friends and we give precedence to relatives, you will have fewer friends if you come from a big family. In fact, kinship turns out to be incredibly important in our lives: we really will lay down our lives for them. The story of the Donner Party is part of the iconic folklore of the American West: trapped in the Rockies in winter on their way to California, they suffered terrible privations and many deaths, but it was the strapping young men travelling on their own who died, whereas the frail grannies travelling with families made it. One curious marker of kinship is sharing a name: you are 12 times more likely to be willing to help someone who has the same names as you than someone who doesn’t, especially if they are rare names.

Speaking of kin, did you know that one in two hundred of all the men alive today are the descendants of the Mongol warrior Genghis Khan – and the figure rises to 1 in 12 of all the men living in the area covered by the old Mongol empire from Japan right across to the Black Sea. In fact, modern genetics has turned up a whole basket of surprises. Several of the tribes in northern Pakistan, notably the famous Pathans, claim to be the descendants of Alexander the Great’s soldiers, and it turns out that the men have a genetic marker that is found only in Greece and Macedonia. And while we reflect on how certain Icelandic banks managed to do a disappearing act with a lot of people’s money, we might like to reflect on the fact that, while Icelandic men are all of solid Scandinavian stock, no less than half of all Icelandic women are actually of Celtic origin – presumably picked up unwillingly on the way over when sensible Scandinavian women shook their heads in disbelief when offered a chance of a new life on a barren rocky outcrop in the middle of the Atlantic.

We have the biggest brains of all animals, and our brains are what have given us our big evolutionary advantage. But did you know that you inherited the social side of your brain from your mother, and the emotional side from your father? And as if that isn’t enough to have the men throwing tantrums, did you know that around a third of women see the world in four or even five different colours, whereas men only ever have the conventional red, green and blue? Which might explain why women often think their clothes clash when men can’t see the problem. And while we are talking about sex, did you know that pregnancy sickness is actually good for you, because it evolved to protect the growing baby from foods that might harm it? But, if you really want to avoid pregnancy sickness altogether, then you can’t do worse than that good old Scots recipe for everything, porridge – but add some chilli to it for good measure!

And speaking of our big brains, I imagine you pride yourself on belonging to an advanced democracy where you cast your vote at each election after carefully evaluating the various parties’ past performance and future promises … not a bit of it! In fact, it seems that you have been basing your votes on how pretty the two candidates looked. Barack Obama didn’t win the American Presidential election last year because he had the best ideas. He just looked the nicer of the two candidates on two key counts – he was taller than McCain (the taller candidate has won 80% of all US Presidential elections) and he had the more symmetrical face. Depressing as it may seem, you can predict the proportion of votes in UK elections to within half a percentage point just on the facial symmetry of the two party leaders.

But there are some benefits from having a big brain. Way back in 1921, every single 11-year-old in Scotland had the day off school to sit an IQ test, a unique record of an entire nation’s mental state. The records from the tests were only rediscovered mouldering in a basement a few years ago, having been lost for three-quarters of a century. One of the remarkable findings to emerge from these data is that those who did best on the tests in 1921 lived longer. Every point increase in IQ at age 11 years reduces your risk of dying before the age of 77 by 1%.

Our evolutionary history as a species has been quite remarkable, and as a result of that we have managed to achieve things that are really quite spectacular – we have colonised the whole world, produced the works of Shakespeare, worked out Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and landed men on the moon. Yet it seems that we are also still lumbered by some quite spectacular blind spots.

About Robin Dunbar: Robin Dunbar is currently Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University and a Fellow of Magdalen College. His principal research interest is the evolution of sociality. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998. His books include The Trouble with Science, Grooming (currently unavailable), Gossip and the Evolution of Language (currently unavailable) and The Human Story.

 

Sarah Rayner - One Moment, One Morning

We interviewed Sarah Rayner on the publication of her novel, One Moment, One Morning

The book opens with the death of a man on a commuter train travelling from Brighton into London. You live in Brighton yourself; was there a specific incident that prompted the idea for this opening?

As well as writing novels, from time to time I also work as a freelance advertising copywriter. One morning I was sitting on the train going into London and I was flicking through a magazine, when, suddenly, a man on board collapsed, seriously ill. The train was stopped, an ambulance was called, and we all had to get out at a station en route. To get into work, I ended up sharing a taxi with a group of women I'd not met before. A few weeks later, I lay awake, unable to sleep, and remembered this event, and thought it would be a great premise for a novel. I started writing the very next day, but rather than simply tell the tale of strangers in a taxi, I twisted events to my own ends. The result was the plot of One Moment, One Morning - the story of how one incident on a train changes the lives of three different passengers forever.

The characters and the plot are held together by the bonds of female friendship. Do you feel there are distinct differences in the nature of female friendship and that between men?

I have a lovely partner and I wouldn't change him, or our relationship, for the world, but there are going to be female friends in my life, I hope, until the day I pop my clogs. I think it is human nature to bond with people of the same sex. We share so many experiences, both physical and emotional, that it makes perfect sense to me to connect with other women. My earliest memory is of walking along a wall with another little girl at nursery school, just the two of us, while all the boys were in a paddling pool, splashing us. I must have been about two years old - and even then, it was the two of us against the world.

What, for you, are the most important qualities of a friendship?

I have lots of friends, and I get different things from different people. I don't believe any one person, male or female, can give you everything in life; that would be a waste of all those millions of lovely people. But still, there are characteristics I especially treasure, and which most of my dearest friends share. Probably at the top of the list I would put kindness. Then honesty (within reason though, let's face it, no one wants to be told all their faults). And humour. It's amazing how humour can get us through the toughest of experiences. Plus intelligence, of course - I like to learn from my friends and their experiences. And creativity too - that's my personal one, as many of my friends are also writers and artists we do a huge amount to encourage and support one another in our endeavours. But I don't want to sound schmultzy here; so I'm also going to say a little bit of cynicism - or perhaps more rightly an appreciation of irony - goes a long way too.

One of your main characters, Lou, is a counsellor and seemingly a very good one, capable of helping anyone from the bereaved to unruly teenagers. How did you go about making her empathy so authentic? ?

It's no secret the Lou character was inspired by one of my friends. I asked her if I might do so and she was pleased to be included - I hope she still feels that way now the book is about to hit the shops! My friend works in the caring professions and we chatted a lot about her job both as I was writing One Moment, One Morning and once it was done. She read through all the counselling scenes and told me where I'd got things wrong - saying she'd never behave like that - and so on. Though at one point she did take the parallel a bit too far, and got most indignant, saying 'I'd never sleep on a futon', which Lou does. She's a lot more detached about it now, but right then she was very involved in the process - as was I - and I had to gently point out that whilst Lou was based on her, she wasn't actually her!

Some of the most touching, striking aspects of the book are the changing moods of Karen's children as they react to the death of their father; how did you approach exploring the feelings of such young characters?

As with Lou, I drew on what I knew or could relatively easily find out. As well as using the web for research - I read real-life memoirs by people who'd lost close family members - I also wrote a large chunk of the book whilst on holiday with my brother and his young family. At the time my nephew and niece were similar in age to Molly and Luke. One night when I was babysitting, my nephew threw an almighty tantrum rather like Molly's in the novel. Though my nephew's was inspired by something far more innocuous than the death of his father, it did mean I could get right into the headspace of such small children and the way they express things. 'I-WANT-A-MUMMY-CUDDLE!' was exactly what he said, though in this instance he was just communicating I wasn't the babysitter he was after.

The male character with perhaps the largest role in the book is Anna's boyfriend Steve, who is often emotionally clumsy or worse. Was he meant to contrast more with Karen's supportive female friends or with the husband, Simon, she has lost?

Steve was not written to contrast specifically with anyone. All my characters are written in their own right, not simply to contrast with others, or they would seem very cardboard. I felt I had a lot to say about his kind of personality and the issues Steve faces - namely addiction - and how that affects his partner, Anna. But whilst he can be emotionally clumsy and aggressive, I don't believe he is completely unsympathetic. He might not be as emotionally mature as Simon, but he is not entirely without redeeming features, because I don't believe most people are all good or all bad - male or female.

How did your book come to be taken on by Picador?

Several years ago I wrote two novels which were published by a different publisher. However they were lighter in feel and subject matter, more (though I hate to categorise) 'chick-lit' if you like; certainly that was how they were marketed. But since then my life has changed and my writing too. I'm interested in different subjects, have read and enjoyed a great deal in the interim, plus I wanted to raise the bar for myself as an author. Hence my tackling meatier issues in One Moment, One Morning. When I submitted this manuscript to my agent, she felt it was such a radical departure from my earlier writing that she decided to submit it to publishers anonymously, as she was concerned that otherwise I'd be judged - and pigeonholed - by my earlier work. So that's what we did: it went out with no name, and I had to climb the same mountain to get published a second time. Although I knew this was a risky strategy, I have a great deal of respect for her, and in the end she was proved right: being with Picador is great - they are a lovely bunch of people and a really classy publishing house.

Are you looking forward to seeing how the book will be received or does the idea of reading reviews fill you with trepidation?

I am both excited and anxious about how the book is received. I certainly can't imagine not reading the reviews - that would take far more restraint than I possess! I did get a number of my friends - many of whom are professional writers - to read the final draft of One Moment, and I found their feedback invaluable. And my editor at Picador - Sam Humphreys - had a great understanding of my characters and is extremely thorough, so I feel the final result is as good a novel as - at this point in time - I am able to deliver. I appreciate that it won't be to everyone's taste, however - no book ever is.

Are there any authors who you cite as an inspiration for your writing?

Not directly, as I try to be original and break new ground, although there are authors whose writing I enjoy and see as occupying similarish territory. My feeling is that One Moment, One Morning will appeal to people who like Patrick Gale, for instance, and Maggie O'Farrell, Joanna Briscoe and Sadie Jones.

Can you tell us anything about what you might be working on next?

I am working on another novel and currently it's called And Then It Rained. Though I did change the name of One Moment, One Morning once it was finished, so this may not stay the same! It's a cross-generational story, with characters - and viewpoints - ranging from 82 to 12 years old. It's set on a camping holiday; three families go away together and one of the children goes missing... That's all I'm prepared to give away - you'll have to wait until 2011 for the rest.

January 2010

Simon Lelic - Rupture

On the eve of the publication of his debut novel, Rupture, we talk to its author, Simon Lelic.

Was there a specific event which triggered the idea of writing about a teacher who loses control?

Some time before I started work on Rupture, I came across a short news piece in the Guardian about a college professor in the US who shot and killed one of his colleagues. The story was barely a paragraph long and contained few details but it started me thinking about what could possibly have driven an obviously intelligent and emotionally mature man to commit to such a desperate act. I was also reminded of incidents from my own time at school - teachers, for instance, being subject to victimisation that was often more vicious than anything I had witnessed in the playground. Classes sometimes became unteachable; I recall a teacher, on one occasion, fleeing the classroom in tears. Pupils were usually to blame but there was a sense, too, that the staffroom had its own hierarchy and cliques - that the experience of teaching in a school could never be entirely distanced from that of being a pupil there.

Much of the time, the action of the book takes place in oppressive heat. Is this for symbolic reasons or were you using the persistently hot weather almost as another character influencing the actions of the teachers and pupils?

It is symbolic, largely: of the sense of entrapment - of pressure from without - that afflicts Samuel (the teacher who commits the crime), and subsequently Lucia (the police woman who attempts to unravel it). But you are right, too, that the pervasive, unrelenting heat might also be seen as an entity influencing characters' behaviour. Or, at least, drawing their urges to act in certain ways towards the surface.

Rupture raises the issue of where the dividing line between the responsibilities of parents or teachers for educating children might be. Do you feel that teachers' responsibilities have moved too far beyond education now?

My mother is a retired deputy headteacher, so I cannot perhaps speak entirely objectively on this subject, but I do have the sense that teachers are today expected to carry a disproportionate burden of responsibility. In every school, at every level, they are expected to do more and more with less and less resources - and, most importantly, with very little leeway to decide how best to achieve what is being asked of them. Teaching should be a rewarding, and revered, career. There is a host of reasons why it so often fails to fulfil that promise, and why so many trainees, and even veteran teachers, become disillusioned enough that they see no other option but to take their talents elsewhere.

Your book has several narrators and although you switch between them regularly, the narrative doesn't seem to lose its flow. How did you manage to knit them together so seamlessly?

Thank you, first, for phrasing the question so generously! The story as told by the interviewees in every other chapter essentially unfolds chronologically (or thematically, at least), so this obviously helps. More important, I think, are the chapters that come in between the first-person testimonies - those told in the third person featuring Lucia. My hope was that Lucia would act as a needle (to borrow your analogy for a moment), drawing a thread through the narrative and, ultimately, stitching it together. At one point I was tempted to try and write the book entirely through first-person testimonies but I think, had I done so, the novel might well have become disjointed. Also, once I started to write Lucia's character, I became fascinated by the juxtaposition of her story and Samuel's. Again, I tried to use this to help generate a sense of flow within the novel.

Lucia, the policewoman investigating the shooting, is perhaps the only character whose life we follow beyond her involvement in the case. Why did you choose to focus on her?

I wanted to explore bullying in its various manifestations beyond the school playground - in adult, professional life in particular - and telling Lucia's story seemed the appropriate way for me to do this (in conjunction, as I say, with Samuel's). These days there seems to be a sense that sexism and sexual bullying is something society has moved beyond, or perhaps even that it is not something that needs to be taken especially seriously. My aim, with the book, was to challenge these assumptions. Lucia has to contend with some fairly egregious treatment at the hands of her colleagues but I have no doubt that the reality for many women, particularly in professions such as Lucia's, is equally harsh and equally disempowering.

Did your own experiences at school help you develop your cast of characters?

I can see myself getting into trouble answering this question...

The short answer, I suppose, is yes - inevitably. I would add the usual disclaimer (any resemblance to persons living or dead etc etc) but really there is no need. It was, as you say, my experiences at school that helped to develop the characters rather than the specific individuals with whom, or under whom, I studied. I find it is emotions - felt, observed, perceived, misconceived perhaps - that continue to resonate, and that most help to generate characters.

Some writers stop reading other people's fiction when they're writing their own, in order to avoid being distracted from the world they're creating themselves. Is the case with you?

The only author I have to ban myself from reading when I am writing is Cormac McCarthy. I find his style so compelling, so consuming, that I subconsciously attempt to imitate it - and inevitably, needless to say, fail miserably. McCarthy's books are now my reward for when I am between drafts. Otherwise, the only thing that stops me reading when I am writing is lack of time. The urge to read is for me as irresistible as the compulsion to write. I may read in shorter, rarer bursts when I am writing but I cannot not have a novel bookmarked on my bedside table. Whenever I have tried abstaining (with a view, for example, to pinning to the page a particularly intractable section of a new draft) I have found myself agitated, anxious - the same sensation I get when I am late for an appointment and the bus is still nowhere in sight.

Every new writer these days has to make himself available to the media to help promote the book. Are you looking forward to that side of things or would you rather be writing?

I am happiest, in terms of my writing career, shut away in my office with a blinking cursor and a mug of liquid caffeine but that does not mean I take exception to the other responsibilities that come with being a published writer. On the contrary, I find any and all interest in what I have written to be tremendously flattering. And I am writing, after all, to be read. Given the competition for shelf space and public attention, any kind of coverage is therefore invaluable - if at times a little terrifying.

Are there any particular authors or books which first fired your desire to be a writer?

To be honest, I cannot remember a time when I did not want to be a writer. If pressed to pinpoint a single book from my childhood that most fired my determination to write fiction, I would have to say The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, together with writers like Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander, evoked most memorably my wonder at words on a page: they wrote stories into which a boy could crawl. As an adult reader I have little time for fantasy or science fiction or even magical realism but I love that these genres thrive as they do. I owe them a debt.

Can you tell us anything about what you're working on now?

I can tell you that I am working on something. I am actually beyond the first-draft stage of my next novel but, though I am not superstitious, some instinct or other impairs my ability to talk freely about it. I will say that, unlike in Rupture, there is no element of crime writing. The structure is very different too. Also, in case you were wondering, it is not fantasy or science fiction or magical realism.

December 2009

Michael Scott - From Democrats to Kings

An Exclusive Q&A with Michael Scott, author of the recently published From Democrats to Kings, the dramatic and little-known story of how the ancient world was turned on its head in the 4th century BC.

Why do you think this period in classical history has received so little attention?

The period covered in From Democrats to Kings - the 4th century BC - has been called the 'sickly cousin' of the glorious 5th century (the time of the Parthenon, the Persian wars, those 300 Spartans at Thermopylae). In part that is because the major ancient historians writing about these periods (Herodotus and Thucydides for the 5th and Xenophon for the 4th century) create an impression of 5th century rise and 4th century decline - a picture followed by many early scholars. But there is a gathering body of evidence which demonstrates - and scholars who argue, as I do - that the 4th century is actually a key period for Greece's development: an exciting, turbulent period of intense political, military and cultural rivalry and change, but a period which also brought with it incredible advances in philosophy, medicine, science, law as well as fascinating artistic, theatrical and poetic creations.

What aspects of the character of Alexander III of Macedon, more popularly known as Alexander the Great, do you think enabled him to become so feared and respected?

The problem in studying Alexander the Great is the number of different, often conflicting, ancient sources that characterize him in different ways. That is why, in part, there are so many modern biographies of Alexander the Great, each of which also gives a different picture of him as a man - from a ruthless pragmatist to a Homeric hero. I think few would disagree though that Alexander is always portrayed as a man with huge desire and ambition (what in Greek was called pothos), but also as a man with great and ingenious tactical skill and that these factors were crucial in his success. What I think, however, needs to be more emphasized is the contribution Alexander's father, Philip, made towards Alexander's success. Philip of Macedon made great strides towards reforming Macedon's armed forces and subduing the rest of Greece - fundamental steps that Alexander the Great subsequently built on.

You're keen to draw parallels between this period in history and the present day. Do you think that Athens' relative weakness at this time shows that democracies generally are poor at waging war?

Athens' democracy proved very effectively in the 5th century that it could wage war - Athens' democracy was after all at the head of a huge empire! What changed in the 4th century compared to the 5th century, I think, was the scale, nature, speed and complexity of the fighting. Wars in the 4th century were fought simultaneously on several fronts (from Greece to the North Aegean coast, to Asia Minor and to the Black sea). They were fought sometimes continuously through out the year as opposed to short seasonal campaigns in-between the important periods of the agricultural year. They were fought by larger, full time, professionally trained armies instead of by citizens who were first and foremost farmers or traders and only part time soldiers. Coupled with this was the fact that Athens was a single city whereas places like Macedon were a much larger state with bigger natural and human resources at their disposal. In addition, diplomatic maneuvers in the 4th century happened at even greater pace, treaties and alliances were made and broken ever faster than ever before. Within this kind of environment the relatively small city of Athens was at a significant disadvantage. As a result, its democracy often had difficulty deciding how to react, as the detailed, lengthy and sometimes vicious discussions and debates that went on in the Athenian assembly show only too clearly.

How did the Spartans come to lose their fearsome fighting reputation?

The Spartans had reveled, both before and after the 300's stand at Thermopylae, in their fearsome fighting reputation. That was only confirmed by their victory in the Peloponnesian war over Athens at the end of the 5th century. But that victory saddled them with the opportunity to step into Athens' shoes - to become what they had never chosen to be before - a dominating force across Greece, the Aegean and the coast of Asia Minor. Sparta's small force of elite soldiers - under strain already from a 30-year war, now sought to spread themselves too thinly across the Greek world. Spartan military numbers simply could not keep up with that kind of deployment, and the resultant pressure caused significant difficulties back home within Spartan society. It was, in a way, only a matter of time till Spartan forces were beaten on the battlefield and Spartan society back home began to crack under the strain.

How do you feel about he fact that so few schools teach Latin and Greek these days?

I often go to talk to students not only in schools who study Latin, Greek or Classical Civilization, but also to schools that don't teach any of those subjects but are keen for their students to be given a taste of it. As a result I see the great work that is done by teachers across the country to enthuse students about the ancient world; the important impact of films like 300 and Alexander on students' imaginations, the key role of Classics magazines for schools in both the private and state sector like Omnibus and Iris, as well as the fantastic response for innovative learning programmes for Latin in schools (like Minimus). At the same time, universities across the country, including Oxford and Cambridge, now offer classics courses, which require no previous knowledge of Latin or Greek. All you need is an interest to learn about the ancient world. Classics must of course continue to fight hard for its place in our education system - but there is every sign, I think, that it is not just surviving, but growing in strength.

Which classical figure would you most like to have had the chance to interview?

Many I think would love to interview Alexander the Great - to hear his side of the story for once! But I would like to interview Diogenes the Cynic - the man who sat in Athens during the second half of the 4th century, who watched the world change so much around him, who rejected the material nature of life and the shackles of society by violating every social taboo. He was beholden to no man - he even told Alexander the Great, for example, to stop blocking his sunshine when Alexander came to talk to him while he was sunbathing! And yet Diogenes was also the man who, I think, understood better than anyone how, why and with what future importance the world around him had changed. He would be a fascinating man to interview.

How did you come to develop such a passion for ancient history?

I first went to Greece when I was 17 and was inspired by being in and amongst the real ruins of this extraordinary culture. But my desire to continue studying the ancient world was really ignited by spending two months during my Masters at the British School at Athens - the research centre for British investigation into the Greek world (www.bsa.ac.uk) based in Athens. It was there, working closely with other students and with our teachers, visiting the many archaeological sites across Greece and immersing myself in the fascinating intricacies of the ancient world, that I became convinced this is what I wanted to do.

Which archaeological site in ancient Greece did you find the most exciting in terms of its historical importance?

There are so many - and each has its own particular importance in helping us construct the story of ancient Greece! But my favourite would either be the sanctuary of Delphi - known as the omphalos - the belly button - of the ancient Greek world, or the Kerameikos - the graveyard of Athens situated just outside the city gates. Each site gives you a very special feeling of being transported through time - back into the footsteps of the ancients.

How do you feel about the media's description of you as 'England's answer to Indiana Jones'?

In many ways Indiana Jones is the worst example for the study of the ancient world! He walks into an undiscovered archaeological site, finds what he wants (normally something shiny and expensive) and walks out again - leaving destruction in his wake. Where is the careful analysis of the site, its contexts, its finds?! But at the same time, there is something embodied within the Indiana Jones story that I do fully agree with. In the latest Indiana Jones movie (The Crystal Skull), Indiana says to students in the university library: 'if you want to be a good archaeologist, you have to get out of the library.' The important point is that the ancient world does not exist only in books. To study the ancient world is to study a world that is still out there, to be seen and experienced, a world which still profoundly affects our society today. It is the duty, I believe, of academics regularly to get out of the library not only for the benefit of their own understanding of the ancient world, but also so as to play their role in widening the public understanding of the importance and impact of the ancient world in our own. That is the essence of the Indiana Jones legend that I am definitely proud to be associated with.

September 2009

Pauline Melville - Eating Air

Comic and frightening, satirical and poetic, Eating Air is Pauline Melville’s most audacious work yet. Here she talks exclusively to Foyles about writing, political activism and her new novel.

Eating Air is a book of a number of intertwining lives. What was your starting point and how did you go about drawing together all the threads?

As a matter of fact the first section I wrote was the final cataclysmic event in the novel. I rarely work through from beginning to end (although I wish I could). The model of work was more like a jigsaw. I wrote different sections hoping that the whole picture would emerge. But pulling it all together was difficult.

Donny is such a wilful and headstrong character, prepared to step in and out of people’s lives according to his own whims. Did trying to make him true to his nature make him a harder character to write?

Keeping Donny true to his wild nature made him the easiest character to write.

No matter where she is living or what is happening in her life, Ella never loses her love of dancing. Is this the anchor of identity and purpose which allows her to embrace Donny's rootlessness?

One of the themes I wanted to explore in the novel was the lure of excitement and danger as opposed to the desire for safety and domesticity. I decided to re-work, in a very loose way, some of the themes of the Bacchae in which Dionysus is followed by a group of women who dance in a sort of ecstasy. That is why I made Ella a dancer who is drawn to Donny’s restlessness. She is one of the Maenads. But I tried to apply some of those ideas to politics and revolutionary excitement.

Some of your characters are involved in political activism both in the 1970s and in the present day. As the world changes around them, do they lose their innocence or are they simply more pragmatic?

There is a sort of euphoria in belonging to a mass movement or uprising against perceived oppression. I wanted to look at what is common in different sorts of rebellious extremism at different periods. People can maintain their ideals, but when the movement around them subsides or changes or achieves some of its goals over a long period of time, it becomes more difficult to put those ideals into practice. Also youth has more energy!

Why did you decided to frame the book with the words of a narrator, the enigmatic Baron S?

 

This is the second time I have used a magical framing character in a novel. I am not sure why I do it - writers don’t always know why they do things - but I suspect it’s because the device gives me a chance to be omniscient and not stuck with having to see everything through the eyes of one or more of the characters. I also like the theatrical effect of having a narrator step out and address the reader directly. It’s a bit like one of Shakespeare’s plays where a chorus figure tells the audience what the play is going to be about. Those familiar with Haitian/Caribbean/South American culture will recognize Baron S although I have not given his full name.

The world of high finance is depicted as quite philistine, despite its occasional gestures of philanthropy. Do you feel that business and art can co-exist harmoniously?

I don’t think the world of high finance is depicted as totally philistine in the book - the character of the banker Caspers, for instance, is deeply involved in the arts. There has been a long history of patronage and business sponsorship of the arts. Personally, I always find that a bit spooky. I don’t much like the idea of business using art to make itself look good. However, before the era of state sponsorship it was necessary. The purpose of business is to make profit. That is not the purpose of art - although, hopefully in my case, it might be a side effect.

Before you were a writer, you were an actress; did you find the adjustment to a more solitary way of working difficult to make?

I like working out of my own imagination but I miss the camaraderie and collective excitement of the theatre.

Between them, your earlier books won several awards including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Whitbread First Novel award. Aside from the benefit to sales, how do you feel about literary awards?

Love the money, hate the banquets.

Are there any authors whom you feel have influenced or inspired your writing?

There would be a huge list, were I to name all the authors, especially the Russians, who have influenced and inspired me but there are some who more directly started me writing: Flannery O’Connor; Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Toni Morrison.

Victor Lodato - Mathilda Savitch

The debut novel from playwright Victor Lodato, a Guggenheim fellow and winner of both the Helen Merrill Award and the Weissberger Award, introduces the mischievous, meditative and occasionally maleficent Mathilda Savitch, a girl on the verge of adulthood determined to discover the secret life her sister led before she was pushed under a train. He tells us a little about how he brought this memorable character to life.

 

Strangely, I didn’t find it difficult at all. Mathilda’s voice arrived in my head one morning, with great force and clarity. I knew immediately that this was the voice of a child; and though the first words seemed a bit ominous (’I want to be awful. I want to do awful things’), I knew that the words had no evil in them, but rather issued forth from a character of incredible wilfulness and energy, someone refusing to be contained. I really can’t begin any piece of writing without this deep connection to a voice. If I have to struggle with the voice, to get it right, I simply accept that this is not my story to tell, this is not a character to whom I can do justice. With Mathilda, I felt, from the start, that I knew her in my body, in my breath. The music of her voice was natural to me, and I spoke every word out loud, for years, as I was writing the book. Truly, I felt more like a secretary than a writer. Where such voices come from is one of the mysteries of the writing process, and one that I tend not to question.

Why did you choose to name the novel after Mathilda herself, even though the events of the book are driven by Helene’s life and death?

As I see it, this is clearly Mathilda’s book. Yes, Helene is a vital part of the story, but it is Mathilda’s quest to understand her sister that truly gives the novel its centre, its heart. Mathilda is asking the questions, Mathilda is the one trapped on the island of grief, as she calls it. And, really, the book is about much more than the mystery of Helene’s death. This tragedy sets the stage for Mathilda to act out her deep confusion, her anger, her sexuality. And though she does find some answers about her sister, the real reward is that she finds herself.

The world in which Mathilda and her sister are growing up is inevitably partly a creation of post-9/11 America, but you also describe a second major terrorist attack at a later date. Why did you decide to move the political landscape on from an entirely contemporary setting?

It was sort of an intuitive choice. But I guess, in some ways, by pushing the novel five minutes into the future, it allowed me to put myself (and ultimately the reader) in the same position as Mathilda, the position of an innocent in an unsteady world, not knowing what might happen next. This seemed to increase the danger and excitement of the story. The novel unfolds in a very present-tense sort of way, with Mathilda recording events as they happen. During the writing process, I was breathing with Mathilda, breath for breath, and rarely ahead of her. In wanting the reader to have this same experience, it was useful to include certain events in the larger world that would be as new to the reader as they are to Mathilda.

Mathilda’s social life reflects the intensity of friendships between teenage girls and the way that such bonds can be quite calculating. Did you find this tricky, as a man, to depict?

Again, not really. I grew up, surrounded by women, living in a house with my mother and both grandmothers; and I spent my summers at the home of my female cousins. Being a very quiet and shy child, I often put myself in corners, saying little, but watching everything. In my plays, my main characters are usually women. I tend to write from outside myself, sometimes from way outside myself. I have a play with all black characters (I am white). It just seems to be fertile territory for me. And it doesn’t seem so strange to me, to write from the perspective of a woman, or from a person of another race. Don’t we all have a bit of the other inside us? To recognize this, to accept this, is, I think, a very civilizing thing.

Mathilda is often very manipulative; is this more of a hangover from childhood or the emergence of an adult trait?

Your question brings to mind the epigraph I included in the book, a quote from the writer G K Chesterton: ’For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.’ Yes, Mathilda is manipulative, but she feels great wrongs have been perpetrated, and she is willing to do whatever is necessary to bring the culprits, as she perceives them, to justice. She often lies, not least of all to herself. Over the course of the novel, she begins to see her own faults more clearly, and, in doing so, she becomes more forgiving of others. She moves from a merciless campaign for justice to her first fitful attempts at offering mercy. This movement, which is essentially one toward adulthood, brings her to a more grounded place, a place where her wiles and manipulations are less necessary.

Are there novels and novelists you would cite as an inspiration for writing Mathilda Savitch?

I have sometimes, playfully, imagined my book as a strange combination of Marguerite Duras' The Lover and J D Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye: two books, two voices, that I love—and books that, when I was young, made me want to write a novel. I’m generally inspired by a gripping voice, one with great authority, capable of taking me inside the heart and mind of another person (the ultimate virtual reality). Other first person novels that I adore: William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow; Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day; F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping; Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy; Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Anne Enright’s The Gathering; Willa Cather’s My Antonia; Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal; Dennis Cooper’sGuide; and W G Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.

Did writing something which you knew didn’t have to be realised as a stage production give you more freedom to tell the story just as you wanted?

One of the things that delighted me, in writing the novel, was the freedom to let the story unfold over a greater length of time. In a play, the magic circle drawn around the characters is usually, by necessity, much tighter. When crafting a play, I invariably find that I write more scenes than I can actually use. In a play, too much extra material, too many diversions, can be fatal, especially if these things impede the sense of inevitability, the sense that we are witnessing characters caught in the wheels of fate. And while a novel’s power can be reduced by excess baggage, as well (and, in writing mine, I do think I applied my playwright’s habit of precision), the form is, without a doubt, a roomier affair, one that allows the characters to have a few more detours of thought and situation. And, having fallen so deeply in love with Mathilda, I thoroughly enjoyed being able to give her a more generous life.

 

I loved writing this novel. It was incredibly challenging, and I had to use all these new parts of my brain. I’ve already started a second book. And if your next question is ’Can you tell us something about it?’, my answer would be ’No, I like to keep secrets.’ And the truth is, I really couldn't tell you very much about it. Similar to how Mathilda Savitch began, all I have, at this point, is a voice, and a vague intuition as to where the story is going. As Arthur Miller once said (I'll paraphrase): there’s a play in your blood and you write until you find it. Play, novel, poem, it doesn't matter what I’m working on; at the beginning, the writing is always a simple, and terrifying, act of faith.

Sadie Jones- Small Wars

Sadie Jones' The Outcast was one of the best-selling debut novels in recent years, with thousands of readers discovering her through Richard & Judy’s Book Club or when she won the Costa First Novel Award.

Her superb second novel, Small Wars , is also set in the 1950s, but this time in Cyprus. As the British army battle with local activists fighting for independence, a young army major struggles to keep his young family together.

Sadie kindly took the time to answer a few questions about writing that difficult second novel.

Your father was born in Jamaica. Did that play a part in your choice of a land under British occupation as a setting?

What a good question; I hadn't thought about that - I suppose because of my background, issues of empire and colonialism have always been interesting to me, but I certainly didn’t think about that when I began Small Wars.

The ups and down of the marriage between Hal and Clara come across as very authentic, a mixture of the dramatic and the mundane. When writing the book, which came first: their relationship or the events which shape it?

I was writing a love triangle between Hal, Clara and England. Hal has two great loves: England and his wife; England leads him to do things of which he is ashamed and those things then impact on his marriage. The ’first’ story is Hal’s moral struggle, and everything else that happens in the book is in reaction to that.

Even when describing more distressing episodes, you retain a fairly dispassionate tone, letting events speak for themselves. Do you feel this encourages the reader to engage more with the issues you raise, as well as the fortunes of your characters?

It’s important to me that I don’t manipulate the reader or sentimentalize. When I read, I dislike books that assume I need to be led by the hand through a series of emotions or responses, and I believe the much harder - and better - job is to describe events as truthfully as possible, and let them speak for themselves. The more intense or painful the event, the more important it is to respect it - both it and the reader I am asking to go through it.

The use of propaganda by both sides in the conflict makes an objective historical account elusive; did you feel that in writing about it fictionally you could convey how elusive the truth can become?

Yes, I hope so! One of the essential themes of the book is the virtual impossibility of truth and the absurdity of side-taking.

Do you think human nature makes the sort of atrocities committed by the British in Cyprus inevitable in a military occupation?

No… I think human nature is only as good as its social structures. Atrocities were committed on both sides.

Both Small Wars and The Outcast feature characters shackled by the often complex proprieties of middle-class behaviour. Would you say that this is something which informs English identity particularly?

I know this theme of middle-class behaviour must seem overriding, but it’s not one I ever set out to explore. I think that whatever class, country - or era - people are in, they tend not to communicate with one another effectively. These two stories happened to be set among the 1950s middle class, but I think whether we miscommunicate with silence and good manners, or psycho-babble and have long passive-aggressive discussions, we do tend, as humans, to miscommunicate. And if we didn’t, there would be no drama.

What was the most useful thing you learned in writing The Outcast that you were able to bring to working on this book?

Probably that I had got to the end once, so perhaps I could do it again.

You were a screenwriter before you became a novelist. What have you found to be the biggest difference in telling story on the page as compared to the screen?

Bearing in mind that none of my scripts ever actually made it onto the screen (!), I would say the process is essentially very similar. In both, having imagined a whole, you are deciding what to leave in and what to take out. In both, it’s easy to get distracted by style - visual, prose, atmospheric - and duck out of the very hard work of telling a story, and making that story work.

Did you find the enthusiastic reception for - and excellent sales of - The Outcast a distraction from writing this book, or was it an encouragement?

It was both. I was very busy with promoting The Outcast, so it was a very different writing experience. With The Outcast I had a very quiet, structured, lonely time, and with Small Wars I was having to work at train stations, occasionally airports, and having to miss days here and there, and still keep working. It didn’t help that everywhere I went people would fix me with a knowing eye and say ’ in the middle of your difficult second novel then? That must be AWFUL.’ Often it was awful, but mostly because writing is very hard, and it was an ambitious and difficult book. Perhaps they all are.

What’s the latest news on the film version of The Outcast?

The book was optioned by the Film Council, BBC Films and Blueprint, with John Madden attached to direct. I’ve delivered the script, which I was pleased with, and I’m waiting to see what revisions I will be doing. Who knows what will happen next?

Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

To mark the publication of his new novel, our September book of the month, Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann granted Foyles an exclusive interview.

Your writing never shies away from social and political issues; does this stem from your starting out as a journalist?

Perhaps. No, probably. I remember my first major journalistic assignment. I was 17. I did an article about battered women. This was the early 80s in Dublin. It was still a relatively taboo subject. I took my bike from the tony Southside where I grew up to the flatlands of Dublin. I will never forget the profound fear I felt when I stepped into an elevator with heroin needles strewn across the floor. It was either hide or face it at that stage. I think I’ve been facing that moment for a long while now.

Many of your characters speak in 70s New York street slang. How did you go about making this sound authentic?

Lots of hard work. Lots of movies. Lots of documentaries. Some nights on the town with cops. Lots of checking and re-checking, especially with the character of Tillie, the 38-year-old prostitute. But you have to parcel it out carefully. There are some words that, on the page, just look really naff. Like funky or cool or, well, naff.

There are important and sympathetic characters in Let The Great World Spin who die early on. Is there are an emotional aspect to doing this as a writer or are you focussed on the more dispassionate issue of the book’s direction?

I never realised this until close to the end of the book. I kept wondering why I had killed them off. I was in a sort of blind grief. I kept thinking I’d resurrect them, but along came a sort of eureka moment towards the end of the novel… the two main towers of the book had collapsed early on and I had spent the rest of the book trying to build them back up again. There is of course a lot of religious imagery in the book but I will leave that up to the reader, I’m not here to interpret it. In fact I shouldn’t really interpret anything. You hear a writer shoot his mouth off, he generally gets it wrong.

You depict much police and court corruption, but little of it seems to have a particularly negative influence on society. Do you think that many officials involved in such activity were motivated by a belief that the system didn’t help those at the bottom?

Well, I think it did have a negative influence. Its very existence is part of its insidiousness. But you&rsquore right… at that stage much of ’officialdom’ didn’t believe in the right to exist for so many people. In the 70s the supposed curse-term ’political correctness’ was getting invented, or developed, but it didn’t come into play until the 80s. I don’t think there is anything wrong with political correctness. What is wrong with equality? What’s wrong with empathy. It’s the old Elvis Costello song, isn’t it? ’What’s so funny about peace love and understanding?’

You give an account of both a tight-rope walk between the Twin Towers and of the preparation involved. Have you tried it yourself?

I have a severe case of vertigo. I would not be caught dead more than five feet in the air.

Do you find that your readers on either side of the Atlantic respond differently to your writing?

Yes, though this book seems to be crossing the divide quite nicely. I have always had a lot of very good critical attention in the US, but the sales were low. My books have done very well in Ireland, which is an enormous relief to me, as I still see myself as Irish, it’s the only thing I can ever be. And the books have done quite well in Britain too. But this time it seems to be about to break out in the US, which is gratifying. My best country of all is France. And the Germans tend to like my writing also. What a great privilege that is, to be translated. I like the idea of a story being inter-and-extra-national.

Some writers stop reading other people’s fiction when they are writing their own, in order to avoid being distracted from the world they are creating themselves. Is this the case with you?

No, not really. But I tend to read a lot of poetry. I try not to read too much within my own contemporaries for fear that a line will pop up, it’s easy to happen, I&rsqio;ve caught it before in my own work. My early work was influenced by Ben Kiely, for instance. I see his style popping up all around my early stories.

You usually write about ordinary people, even if their lives turn out to be quite dramatic, but Dancer was about the life of Rudolph Nureyev. What made him such an appealing subject?

To be honest, he wasn’t all that appealing. The times were. The politics were. The war was. In other words, the people around him… the soldiers and rentboys and shoemakers and nurses were the ones that fascinated me. If there are elements of biography in Dancer, they are there because it is, in fact, a collection of accidental stories that all happen to centre in Nureyev. Of course he was the inspiration for it all. But I knew nothing about dance or dancing. I had never even been to a ballet before I started work on that book.

At the end of the book, in your acknowledgments, you quote from the Mu'allaqat, Arabic poems from the sixth century: ’Is there any hope that desolation can bring me solace?’ Is this the driving force behind Corrigan’s need to assist first the down-and-outs of his home town in Ireland and then the prostitutes of New York?

Yes. He says at one stage: ’Some day the meek might actually want it.’ He wants to see a world that the meek might happily inherit, rather than the shitbox it happens to be.

Given your ability to explore great themes of humanity through small lives, are you at all tempted by the idea of writing non-fiction?

I am sort of torn on this question since I’ve often said that I doubt the word fiction. I'm not sure it’s a good word to use, since most people assume it means ’made up’. But what is made up? What is real? Clifford Getz says the real is as imagined as the imaginary. And Leopold Bloom is more real to me than my grandfather or great-grandfather, who actually walked the streets of Dublin in 1904. So, I think I write stories. I think we all write stories.

Also by Colum McCann

Songdogs

Fishing the Sloe-black river

Dancer

Zoli

Everything in this country must

This Side of Brightness (currently unavailable)

August 2009

Monique Roffey - The White Woman on the Green Bicycle

Monique Roffey’s second novel is a searing account of the bitter disappointment suffered by Trinidadians on securing their independence from British colonial rule and of the mixed feelings felt by a white couple who decide to stay on.

From the opening pages, a graphic description of a beating meted out by corrupt police, this is an earthy and full-blooded piece of writing, steaming with West Indian heat.

Exclusively for Foyles, Monique tells us how she came to write the book.

When my parents travelled by boat to Trinidad in the mid 1950s, they took with them just a couple of suitcases and my mother’s green Raleigh Bicycle. She quickly discovered sea travel didn’t agree with her and was seasick all the way. They’d travelled over Christmas and arrived in January 1956, the same month Eric Williams launched the new national party: the People’s National Movement (PNM). My parents arrived to a time of imminent political change: in the 1950s Trinidad was to go from English Crown Colony to independent nation. It was a time of great optimism, mostly in the form of this new leader and party and their ideas for the future. My mother discovered the streets of Port of Spain on her green bicycle, often cycling down Frederick Street to the foreshore. A French woman, she was blonde, beautiful and vivacious. She often wore shorts and a halter top. With her blonde curls and Dior sunglasses, I’m sure she was a sight. When she was introduced to people at parties people would exclaim: ‘So you’re the white woman on the green bicycle!’

As a child, I loved hearing stories of my parents’ lives together in 50s Port of Spain. I always knew I would write about my mother and her life then. One day – the 13th of December 2001 to be exact – I made a commitment to writing about my mother and her green bicycle. I wrote the following words down on a piece of paper: ‘The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, Novel #3’. I then went to work for The Arvon Foundation. I began writing another novel – which failed. I carried this piece of paper around, tucked into my Filofax for a number of years, until 2005, when I began to work on the novel of the same title. I had no idea what I would write. I only had this one image as my guide, the image of my mother as a young woman riding her green bicycle through the streets of Port of Spain.

Like many modern European visitors to the Caribbean, my mother had little knowledge of the dark history and background of the Caribbean. She knew nothing of the genocide of the native Carib and Aruac populations, the former system of slavery of people of African descent, of the indenture of east Indians. She didn’t fully understand the troubled nature of human relations in the small but beautiful island.

In my novel, Sabine Harwood soon comes to understand these underlying tensions. One day she rides her green bicycle into a political rally held by Eric Williams and the PNM in Woodford Square. She hears him speak and is electrified by his words. Another time she arrives to witness his famous speech, ‘Massa Day Done’, the most emphatic call to end the colonial era made by any head of state in the Caribbean. As her husband falls more and more in love with the island, building a home and planning to stay, Sabine realises that the colonial era is well and truly over. It is time to depart. In staying, however, she bears witness to the failures of the post-colonial era – through the 1970 Black Power uprising to today’s bleak, crime-ridden Port of Spain.

The political nature of this novel came about mostly from living in Trinidad for a few months in 2006. Every day a murder was reported. The newspapers were full of news of police brutality, kidnappings and gang-related violence. A huge surveillance blimp cruised over Port of Spain. Our local supermarket was riddled with bullets in a drive-by shooting. My romantic fantasies of my mother on her green bicycle was a stark contrast to the grim realities of modern day Trinidad. I wanted to paint a realistic portrait of this small island, which, like many others in the Caribbean, Westerners think of as a Paradise.

Primarily, however, my book is a love story, one which spans fifty years. It is the love story between two people a bit like my parents and the love story I, as an author, have for the island of Trinidad. In some respects, it is the story of a love triangle. Eric Williams gets in between George and Sabine. The island, its place and politics, intervenes in their marriage.

But there is no doubt about the strength of their love:

‘If George died, she might stop living too. That happened to couples who’d lived together as long as they had. One dies and the other fails to continue. It was that simple. Would that happen? She felt sure it would. Weeks later, she would be found sat upright, eyes closed, under a mango tree.’

Behind Sabine and George’s love story, the novel is a snapshot of a world, the New World of the Caribbean. This world was created by force, first by European colonisers and later by economic immigrants, mostly at a huge and neglected human cost. Today, in Trinidad, a murder is reported every day. The taking of a human life has become commonplace. As a writer, I cannot avoid writing about this. Somewhere there is a natural cause and effect. Violence gets more violence. The violence of the past was never addressed, only propagated. The way things were established in Trinidad seems accepted and has provided a model for how things continue today. In The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, my ambitions were simple: I wanted to write what I knew about the place of my birth.

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August 2009

Salley Vickers - Dancing Backwards

Q&A WITH SALLEY VICKERS on the publication of her latest novel.

The story interweaves Violet’s past and present. Do you write the two strands separately or concurrently?

No, I wrote the strands concurrently, always waiting in the present strand to see what would be thrown up from the past. I had no idea myself what had happened to Violet, or what the nature of the rift with Edwin was. So it was intriguing to find this out as I wrote. I never do know what is going to happen or what has happened in my books.

Dino, the dance host with whom she strikes up a friendship, has a reason to feel guilty about something, but Violet forgives him; is this because her trip is motivated by her own guilt at betraying Edwin the old friend she is going to see?

I think it is a bit more complex that that. She has a fellow feeling with Dino – an affinity of damage, perhaps because both have lost, in a sense, mothers. As she thinks later, when considering her relationship with Dino, In sparing others we our selves may be spared. So it is in the sparing of him that she feels herself forgiven. For me that is the key line in the novel

The cruise ship setting for the book came to you after you gave a talk on the Queen Mary II and took ballroom dancing lessons while on board. Are any of the characters in the book based on anyone you encountered at sea?

I never base characters on anyone but myself. They spring from within entirely. I’m simply uninterested in taking things from outside. For me it is always inside out.

The opportunity to dance seems to free several of the characters from their more reserved personalities. Was it a similarly liberating experience when you learned to dance?

I have a history of dancing. I was prescribed dancing lesson as a child by an enlightened nutritionist as I had a very deficient respiratory system and I became a not bad ballet dancer. So I am familiar with the liberation it can bring. But I do think, like Miss Foot, a character who makes only a small appearance but has a large impact, that certain movements can deinhibit the mind and emotions.

You started working on Dancing Backwards some years ago. What was it made you put it aside and what made you come back to it?

I lost the thread due to various life upheavals but it was always in my mind waiting for me to return. It’s a very different book from the one started seven years ago. That, for me, is most interesting: how much it has changed while it was sitting there marooned waiting

Does your training as a psychoanalyst make it easier to create believable characters or do you find that you end up paying too much attention to even the smallest details of authenticity in their behaviour?

My analytic training taught me to find aspects of myself with which I was not consciously familiar in order to communicate with the people I was seeing whose lives and experiences were quite unlike mine. So it taught me to pay attention to the unlived personalities within me. It is that rather than attention to outer detail that has been the help in my writing life.

The book concludes with a poem supposedly written by Violet. How difficult did you find it to compose something suitable?

I’d already written that poem and it is what set the book going. It appears in my second novel, Instances of the Number 3. It was when I began to receive letters from US doctoral students asking where they could find information about this H V St John that I became aware she had taken on an independent existence. It was this poem that planted the seed of the idea for a book about her.

Your previous book, Where Three Roads Meet, your contribution to Canongate’s ongoing Myths series, is centered on a dialogue between Freud and Tiresias, the seer of Greek myth. Freud’s dream theory also gets a mention in Dancing Backwards, but you also explore characters through their interaction with the arts, which is quite Jungian. Are you a particular adherent of either psychoanalytical school?

I was trained as a Jungian and Jungians are supposed to be more arts friendly. I don’t know if this is really the case. I have a huge admiration for Freud, particularly Freud the man, though I think he got many things wrong. He was a major intellectual force, an artist really, more than a scientist. Though he himself aspired to make psychoanalysis a science, it is not and never could be.

You have a passion for opera, but unlike many other areas of the fine arts, this interest has not featured in your books so far. Is this something you might do in the future?

Music is notoriously hard to write about but in my next novel there is a musical thread.

Your knowledge of classical literature has come in useful for several of your books, particularly Where Three Roads Meet. Are there another classical figures or stories which you’d like to adapt?

It’s really ancient stories which appeal to me. Not simply myth. I am very drawn to the time-honed tales: Tobias and the Angel, Hamlet, The Journey to Emmaus, Oedipus. My next novel takes its title from the Aeneid. But I had better say no more as once I divulge what a book is about I tend to set it aside.

© Salley Vickers 2009

Salley Vickers’ books include:

Miss Garnet’s Angel
Instances of the Number 3
Mr Golightly’s Holiday
The Other Side of You
Where Three Roads Meet

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August 2009

Jane Robinson - Bluestockings

When five women were admitted to Cambridge University in 1869, doctors were concerned that if they studied too hard their wombs would wither and die. There were professors who refused to lecture when no male students were present and it was decades before these prejudices were overcome. In this piece, written exclusively for Foyles, Jane Robinson, the author of Bluestockings tells us a little about why she finds the story of these 'undergraduettes' so inspiring.

This time last year our eldest child was preparing to leave home for university for the first time. Exam results were safely gathered in, we’d done the shopping for mugs and duvet covers; books were ordered, fees paid and the excitement was mounting fast.

It’s easy to forget in these educationally enlightened days that for young women, the experience of being a ‘fresher’, a first-year university student, is a comparative novelty. There have been undergraduates in England for over 800 years, but until 1869, all of them were men. And women couldn’t take degrees at Cambridge until 1948: well within living memory. The history of the ‘undergraduette’ really is shockingly short.

These days, going to university is an exercise in freedom; an acknowledgement of new-found adulthood; an adventure. For 19th-century freshers at women’s colleges and Halls of Residence, it was nothing of the kind. They were assumed inherently feeble, and incapable of keeping themselves either physically or morally safe. So they were broken in gently, allowed to bring their mothers, maids and pets with them at the beginning of their first term. Mothers and maids were dispatched once the students felt comfortable, but the animals could stay. Many an early college photograph has the odd kitten or pony smuggled into the ranks, and I know of at least one Oxbridge-educated black rat.

Once settled into their accommodation, they were comparatively free, as long as all their visitors were women, there was nothing more potent than lemonade, cocoa or rock buns on offer at parties, and they were never, never late at daily chapel. Their fathers and occasionally a brother or uncle were allowed to come to their rooms with the Principal’s permission, but not until the bed had first been removed, and the door propped open. No unrelated males were permitted within the college precincts. A tight mesh of rules and regulations was put in place to protect (or control) these fragile female scholars, some of which must even then have been hard to fathom. Why no bicycling on Sundays, for example? Why no eggs allowed in college rooms? And why should hats be worn, and both feet be on the ground, at all times in mixed company?

The most constant feature of any female fresher’s life was her chaperone, a respectable wife or widow employed to accompany her anywhere men might be present. Most ‘chaps’ spent their time noisily knitting in the corner of lecture rooms, theatre stalls or cafes, like irritating daemons. Some lecturers entirely refused to teach women (with or without their Chaperones), believing their presence to be some kind of radical joke, a phase academia would soon, please God, get out of its system. Others admitted them to classes, but only if the students kept on their jackets and bonnets, and sat demurely at the back. At Manchester, women students were allowed a ‘ladies’ common-room’ in which to relax between lectures (their Hall of Residence being out of town), but it was nothing special: just a dusty corner of the Museum attic, where particularly unpopular or moth-eaten stuffed animals were stored, with a chamber-pot behind a screen.

It’s a wonder any of these bluestockings got any work done at all. Within a few years of being allowed into English universities, however, through sheer strength of character, they were achieving at least as highly as their male counterparts. So if you’re a female fresher just about to set out on your university career, do spare these pioneers a thought. They paved the way that you’re about to follow.

 

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Exclusively for Foyles, Justin Cartwright introduces his latest novel, To Heaven by Water

Justin Cartwright

When I was younger I wasn’t much interested in family as a concept. Family seemed simply to be a fact of life, for better or for worse, but as my children grew up - I have two sons – I found myself fascinated by the family, both as a benevolent institution and as a sort of Mafia, from which you can’t really escape. And it struck me that family members have unreal expectations of the family; usually they believe that the family owes them something, although it is never quite clear what the limits of this generosity and understanding are and whether any reciprocity is required. But what I did find, and it surprised me, was that love for your children is something utterly different and boundless.

So in a way I saw To Heaven by Water as a companion piece to The Promise of Happiness, which dealt with a family imploding because of a crime. In To Heaven by Water I decided to try to imagine what would happen to a family with two grown up children when the mother, who is the centre of the family, dies suddenly. In the course of the novel – the plan was – the reader should get a pretty good idea of what she was like. David Cross, the husband, has a guilty secret: with his wife’s death he feels in some ways liberated. But in the course of the novel he discovers, and we discover, his true feelings for his wife.

When you write a family novel – or any novel for that matter – I think you have to be honest, even ruthless. It is no good hiding behind the conventional. The premise underlying this book is that we all believe we could have lived another life, perhaps a more fulfilling or spiritual life, and this is one of the themes of the book. All three surviving members of the Cross family have to adjust to their new circumstances, and achieve a resolution in their own way. As the novel progresses, they make up their own minds about family, and cope with some awful shocks on the way. Yet I like to think that it is funny and very humane.

Also by Justin Cartwright

Fiction
The Song Before it is Sung
The Promise of Happiness
White Lightning
Half in Love (currently unavailable)
Look at this Way
Interior
Leading the Cheers
Not Yet Home (currently unavailable)
In Every Face I Meet (currently unavailable)
Masai Dreaming

Non-fiction
The Secret Garden

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