The Amanda Craig blog

Judging and being Judged - Literary Prizes

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

Judging and Being Judged

I'm in a curious state this week, coming to the end of two lots of prize judging - one for an unpublished children's author, for the Times/Chicken House annual prize, and the other for the Authors' Club First Novel Award.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the Fire, a Still Small Voice – Evie Wyld

Choke Chain – Jason Donald

Designs for a Happy Home – Matthew Reynolds

The Earth Hums in B-Flat – Mari Strachan

The Finest Type of English Womanhood – Rachel Heath

The Rescue Man – Anthony Quinn

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

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

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

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

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

Amazon readers' reviews, and professional critics

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

Columbus Breaks an Egg : Amazon reviewers and professional critics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Short Stories:a defence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Becoming Madonna: why celebrities turn to children's books

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

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

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

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

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

Jewish Writers and Jewish Book Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

books into films

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

BOOKS INTO FILMS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing in Winter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem of goodness in fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A writer's voice vs choirs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard & Judy turns Strictly: the TV bookclub evolves

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vampires and Werewolves: what women really want

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why writing about sex is a bad idea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Women Writers Are Excluded

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

THE EXCLUSION OF WOMEN AUTHORS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Not to Run a Literary Festival

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, some practicalities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Jenkins at 104

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the point of keeping on writing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snobs - why class war is still fun for novelists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Novelists as Nostradamus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

are libraries a good thing for authors?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the Hampstead Novel Dead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

motherhood and creativity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A writer's room

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

I blame Virginia Woolf.

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

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

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

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

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

Starting a new novel - or being a moving target

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfect novels, or not being on the Booker longlist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Groups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prize-itis, or all can't have prizes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

lunch with Alison Lurie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

why women writers remain handicapped

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tall Poppies: Zoe Heller and journalists who become novelists

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

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

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

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

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

Back from Bronte-land

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

BACK FROM BRONTE-LAND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Orange Prize and Elizabeth Jenkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to London

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

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

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

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

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

The Truth about Author Tours

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

THE TRUTH ABOUT AUTHOR TOURS

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bless the TLS

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

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

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

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

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

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

library appearances

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

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

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

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

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

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

Start the Week

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

Start the Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

up against The Wire

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

UP AGAINST THE WIRE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the death of critics

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

The death of critics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

libel - the novelist's curse

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

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

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

No wonder the Brontes used pseudonyms....On a long journey this week-end, we listened to the new Naxos recording of Jane Eyre, which has been abridged by the heroic teacher/journalist Francis Gilbert. I am a huge fan of his, and must have read his books on teaching in state schools (Help I’m a Teacher Get Me Out of Here, The New School Rules, etc) a dozen times for one of my new characters. The abridgement is pretty good, though it omits two crucial passages – the scene where Mr. Rochester dresses up as a gypsy during the house-party, and the creepy Gothic scene with Jane’s wedding veil. Just imagine what it would have been like had Charlotte been menaced by her former employers! “So Madame Heger, you are convinced that the mad Mrs. Rochester can only be yourself because you are married to the man with whom the real-life Charlotte was in love?” Given the fondness the Victorians had for moral censure, she’d have been shipped off to Botany Bay in no time.

Re-reading the Brontes, as I am for my forthcoming visit to the Bronte Society on June 6, I am struck by how conscious they are of foreigners and abroad, and wonder where this came from. I need to find a good biography of them, because although I know their father was an Irishman it is striking if you are accustomed to Victorian fiction to find foreigners being in any way protagonists. Apart from Trollope’s Madame Max and Melmotte, I can’t think of many....

romans a clefs - the truth

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Romans a clefs – the truth

I am in a temper, which is probably not the best state of mind in which to write a blog. Nevertheless, the news that, according to one informant, I am seen as a writer of romans a clefs has dismayed me, not least because it explains why one particular newspaper always gave me to its silliest reviewers. (You can probably work out which.)

The whole roman a clef tag got stuck to me over A Vicious Circle, which was set partly (and only partly) in the world of book reviewing – the rest being set in unglamorous and depressing places like collapsing housing estates and the NHS. It was there as a foil, and as a way of linking different worlds. The theme of A Vicious Circle was powerlessness, and whether you have to become as bad as your oppressors to beat them; it could scarcely have been based on real-life people because at that time I had myself done very little actual reviewing. However, the editor I had at Hamish Hamilton, Clare Alexander, was tremendously excited by romans a clefs, and vigorously marketed my novel as such, despite my protests – with the result that its publication was then threatened with a libel suit.

I can't believe how persistent this tag is, or how damaging. Let me say it again: I do not write romans a clefs. I'm not being coy about this. If I wrote them, I'd say so. I do satirise institutions and attitudes – much, I would hope, as David Lodge, and Alison Lurie do, and as Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and Balzac did. Why should I not? Laughter is the best pesticide, as Nabokov said. But I don’t really see the point of romans a clefs, not unless they’re giving an insight into world famous people, like Primary Colors, and the Clinton election. (I’ve often wondered why, for some years after A Vicious Circle, I got a signed Christmas card from the Clintons...)

I did wonder, when I subsequently wrote In a Dark Wood, why some journalists immediately decided that it must be about Sylvia Plath rather than the effect of maternal suicide on a wholly imaginary manic-depressive actor whose mother hung herself in Primrose Hill. Useless to point out that I spent my own childhood there. Useless to point out that a number of other women graduates besides Plath suffered deeply from frustration, infidelity and spite. I am bemused (and amused) by the way one journalist in particular has persistently put his hand up as my character, Ivo Sponge. I’m fond of this journalist, John Walsh and admire his wit (which far surpasses Ivo’s, I may add) but – he really isn’t.

Nor is the editor of the magazine in my new novel, Hearts and Minds, any real-life editor of any real-life magazine, though I have already had one call from someone claiming that he must of course be Boris Johnson on The Spectator. I never wrote for Boris, and have not had anything to do with the Spectator since the early 1990s. My only (brief) experience of a real-life magazine editor was Marc Boxer on Tatler. He certainly had my character Quentin’s ability to turn on the charm for important people and be perfectly vile to those whom he considered to be his inferiors – but that would be of no interest were it not a characteristic shared by a great many bosses and snobs.

What appals me about the eagerness with which people now seek for real-life models in my work is that it’s not only philistine, it undermines the imagination and care I put into each character. I take years writing each novel. If I were lazy, I'd write my autobiography, and make a fortune selling my kids out, betraying friends' confidences and making a lot of people REALLY uncomfortable.

Why, then, go to all the bother of making stuff up? Or researching it? Or spending months thinking about whether this character is dramatically plausible, interesting, moving or ridiculous until he or she becomes real to a reader? It really is enough to make me want to write my autobiography.

What I'm reading: Daphne du Maurier's The Glass-Blowers (I'm doing the DDM Festival on May 15)

Also a novel of harrowing depth and brilliance, Yiyun Li's The Vagrants.

Joseph Delaney's new Spooks book - spinetingling stuff, as the Spook's Apprentice goes to Greece with his mysterious Mam, pursued by bloodthirsty maenads. My son has to sleep with the lights on, it's so frightening.

the vanity of authors

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

I slept badly last night for two reasons: my ancient boiler has been broken for two days, and I read a terrifyingly good eco-thriller by Liz Jensen called The Rapture. It’s about a therapist who tries to help a matricidal teenager, Bethany, whose parents were part of a real-life evangelical Christian movement which believes they will all be saved on the day of world annihilation. Set a few years into the future, it paints a haunting vision of a world over-heating from global warming. Bethany turns out to be a kind of Nostradamus – only as she’s deemed mad as well as young, nobody will listen to her. It’s incredibly frightening and well-written, but the worst of it is that so much of it will come true. It’s the world that Dr. Seuss predicted in The Lorax, without trees or wonder, over thirty years ago, and what Tolkien feared in Lord of the Rings. Alas, nobody listens to writers. We are patted on the head and told (kindly or unkindly) that what we have to say is all very interesting but could we now shut up and let the grown-ups get on with making money in the real world. This is why the real world briefly took a bit of notice when Nick Sterne (who was my husband’s mentor as an economist) told us that if we let global warming continue it would cost as much as the Great Depression. Only, now we are actually in a depression, we have forgotten all about that.

For various reasons, I’ve spent today pondering the vanity of authors. No book, or novel in particular, would ever get finished if writers weren’t steeped in the kind of self-belief that can easily tip over into paranoia, solipsism and egoism. Stories of difficult or impossible authors abound – people who demand to speak to their agent or editor every single day, for instance, or who are abominably rude to sub editors. As a general rule, in my observation, the more genuinely gifted and hard-working a writer is, the less they’ll behave like a prima donna. And yet - you can’t expect someone to immerse themselves in their imaginary world, then emerge from it blinking, turn around and say, Well actually, my book isn’t all that good, and I quite understand why it isn’t a big event for the rest of the world.

Of course, there are plenty of novelists who can’t understand why they aren’t Ian McEwan or JK Rowling, and will even say, “I want to be them.” While it’d be nice to have their income, say, or fame (or boiler) you never know what nastiness is going on in somebody else’s life. When I was a much younger writer, I occasionally came across other young women writers who would cause me a pang of envy, both of their talent and at its public recognition through prizes, interviews and general fame. It is hard; harder still if, as can happen, they get the recognition without much real talent. Yet invariably, I would find out that envy became wholly inappropriate to the reality of their lives, because every gift, including being ravishingly beautiful, has its accompanying price. I sometimes envy writers who have no children, for instance, because it is true that they extract a huge toll of time and energy and creativity. I sometimes envy male authors, who are always the ones who are free to go off to spend a month at retreats like Hawthornden Castle in order to write, and who never have to worry about putting on the laundry, making sure there are potatoes for supper and getting children to do their homework. But I wouldn’t really want to be them. Would anyone really want the talent of George Eliot if what came with it were her looks, her love life and her ostracism? You can’t have one without the other.

gentrification

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

My car, or rather my husband’s mid-life crisis on wheels, has been broken into twice this week. No sooner was the windscreen replaced this morning, than the side window was smashed. No books or CDs were taken, only an out-of-date lumpy old Tom Tom sat nav, (which I never used because I can’t stand listening to a woman even bossier than I am.) Leaving the books doesn’t surprise me – who after all would buy those – but leaving the CDs shows how even petty thieves download their music free these days. It’s only the middle-aged who want to slip in something like Angela Hewitt playing the Well-Tempered Clavier (me) or Van Morrison (Himself.)

I live in a bit of Camden that’s half-gentrified and half very much not, much like Polly in Hearts & Minds, and this throws up a lot of interesting conversations. The older inhabitants all either solidly white working class (one comment, from an old man about how he carries a blade in case he gets attacked, I put in my novel) or genuinely bohemian. Then there are richer, more recent arrivals – lawyers, bankers etc - who try everyone’s patience by embarking on year-long renovation projects complete with drilling, underpinning and even a subterranean swimming pool (apparently the size of a sheep-dip). They’re thrilled with having improved the neighbourhood, and oblivious to the pain it’s caused to those unable to enjoy their underfloor heating. I’ve seen this process before, in Primrose Hill, now the haunt of Kate Moss, Jude Law etc but once full of writers like Fay Weldon, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes et al. For a while, as ordinary shops get replaced by delicatessens and smart little cafes and boutiques, you think it’s all rather lovely. But then the rents rise, and you find there is only one proper shop left; and franchises like Tesco lock on, hungrily.

The most cheering thing I’ve heard so far about the recession is that one town has let small traders open up in stores formerly rented by chains that have gone bust. Imagine if, instead of having to huddle in disused car-parks, farmers’ markets could open in defunct branches of Woolworths! I hate the dreary sameness of most British towns and high streets, with their metronomic Tescos, estate agents, Boots and charity shops and if the economic pain gives an opening to more individual stores then hurrah. Who knows, there might even be someone who could replace windscreens for less than £360 a pop.

What I’m reading:

From my children’s postbag: Jenny Valentine’s The Ant Colony, all set round Camden Town, and riveting. It’s about a teenaged runaway (my subject for the Times this week).

Also about to embark on re-reading the Brontes, as I’ll be speaking at the Bronte Parsonage on June 6. What mad, passionate, fascinating women they were. Mr. Rochester’s description of his unhappy marriage still makes me shudder.

waiting for spring

Tue, 3 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I looked at the Facebook entry my daughter had set up for me. How on earth do so many people, all working hard, find the time to keep checking their entries? The devil makes work...I'd rather practise the piano, or garden. Or (above all) read. I have a piece to write, and a second chapter to rewrite and a lunch to cook. Also an old contract to look up to send to my agent, train tickets to book ...it goes on and on. But somehow it all gets done. Those were the only good lines in Shakespeare in Love. It's always a panic, and the whole of the Queen's Men are in chaos, but somehow, nobody knows how, it's alright on the night.

I suspect everybody, everywhere, flies by the seat of their pants. Darwin's explanation for evolution has always struck me as much too slow; I have a suspicion that it's more like the moment when Dumbo discovers he can use his enormous ears to fly with. That dreadful moment when he's falling through the air, terrified, is exactly what being a writer is like. You never, ever believe you can do it. You never understand what it is that suddenly makes you able to turn a kind of disability into the very thing that makes a miracle happen. There's a good dinosaur book by Benedict Blathwayt along similar lines - a tiny reptile being chased across Jurassic mountains by great thuggish killers and suddenly jumping off a cliff to become the first bird. He's a very good picture book writer - obsessive attention to detail, best seen in Tangle and the Firesticks - but this one struck quite a chord with me.

I have the best job in the world, reviewing children's books. My children claim, superciliously, that it's because I'm still about eight. I tell them that only very adult people enjoy being children and remember exactly what it's like. Of all the stupid things that critics have ever said about my own books, (and there are plenty) none made me quite as cross as an American who claimed that children don't talk the way my child characters do. Well, the bit she objected to was taken down verbatim in a playground... Like Alison Lurie and the Opies, I am perennially fascinated by children. I see them as a lost tribe, much like the Little People of legend, forced underground and noticed only when their resentment and subversion affect the lumbering giants overhead.

March 2009

Thu, 5 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Like everyone I know, I'm riveted by the scandal over Julie Myerson's book about her son, The Lost Child. All writers use aspects of their lives in their work - the claim that I had used a real-life ex-boyfriend of mine for A Vicious Circle was what gave rise to my own problems with it - I have some sympathy. However, my own case was very different. It involved an adult, and a critic of legendary unpleasantness whom writers were queuing up to attack if it came to court. The Myersons' decision to lock out their 17 year old son because of his drug habit - smoking cannabis - and then to write a book on it smacks of parental irresponsibility and betrayal.

Every parent of teenagers goes through some difficult times. I'm not going to invade my own children's privacy by saying this; with luck, effort, trust and above all love you get through them. But what interests me is how you respond as a writer. Supposedly, we all have a chip of ice (as Graham Greene put it) in our hearts that means that we sacrifice our nearest and dearest for a book.

Sorry, but it doesn't work like that, unless you're just writing thinly disguised autobiography. I find it maddening the way people confuse what is an act of imagination and ventriloquism with what I'm actually like. People have believed I'm aristocratic, manic depressive, Irish Catholic, married to a doctor etc because of my characters having convinved them they must be true. This is a triumph of sorts - but please, none of it is true. I spend months researching my characters, thinking about them, having dreams and internal conversations with them. They are not me; nor are the men in them my husband or any ex-boyfriend, or the children mine. I am neurotic about invading privacy, both mine and that of others.

Even writing a blog is a bit of a violation of this. Not least because I'm not even getting paid for it. But at least it's not blood money.

The recession is hurting many writers, and stories abound of people having their contracts cancelled because they’ve delivered one day late. I’m incredibly lucky to have a new novel out this year, because I delivered it FOUR YEARS late, due to illness. A number of US publishers are not taking on any new authors. Many in Britain have had their advances cut to a tenth of what they were, and just can’t afford to keep on; journalists, too have had their fees slashed by 50% or lost their jobs altogether. Nick Cohen complained in the Observer recently that modern novelists fail to address debt, as Dickens once did. Well, curiously, the recession and debt are exactly what I’m writing about now. I am interested in money as a subject in fiction, because it affects people just as strongly as sex, hatred or death. I always try to give actual sums for what people need, or are paid in my books. I don’t think money should ever take possession of your true self – all the mistakes I’ve made in life were when I became frightened, and took the seemingly easy path – but I also think it’s stupid not to be aware of it as a powerful force. I love Austen, Dickens and Trollope, and a number of children’s authors like E.Nesbit and Dodie Smith for always telling us what things cost.

This website, incidentally, cost me 10% of my advance for Hearts and Minds. So do please make it worthwhile by writing a response.

What I’m reading:

From my weekly bag of children’ books, I’m reading Dido by Adele Geras. It's about the Carthginians left behind when Aeneas sailed away, and is lovely stuff.