The Golden Rule

The Golden Rule by Amanda Craig

When Hannah is invited into the First-Class carriage of the London to Penzance train by Jinni, she walks into a spider’s web.

‘The Golden Rule’ was long-listed for the 2021 Women’s Prize.

Overview

Now a poor young single mother, Hannah once escaped Cornwall to go to university. But once she married Jake and had his child, her dreams were crushed into bitter disillusion. Her husband has left her for Eve, rich and childless, and Hannah has been surviving by becoming a cleaner in London. Jinni is equally angry and bitter, and in the course of their journey the two women agree to murder each other's husbands. After all, they are strangers on a train - who could possibly connect them?

But when Hannah goes to Jinni's husband's home the next night, she finds Stan, a huge, hairy, ugly drunk who has his own problems - not least the care of a half-ruined house and garden. He claims Jinni is a very different person to the one who has persuaded Hannah to commit a terrible crime. Who is telling the truth - and who is the real victim?

Background

The Golden Rule is inspired by my enduring fascination with the gulf between rich and poor, and also with the temptation to commit that most terrible of all crimes, murder.

Unlike the Bredins in The Lie of the Land, my heroine Hannah is genuinely poor and underprivileged. With no safety-net, and nothing but her university degree, she comes from Cornwall, one of the most economically deprived areas in Europe – which, paradoxically, voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU. Although this is not another “Brexlit” novel, that fateful vote of 2016 is very much in the background, and the novel itself is set during the heatwave of 2018.

I myself know what it is like to be young and impoverished. Like Hannah, I worked briefly in advertising after graduation. It was not a good experience. I always knew that what I wanted, above all, was to write:  Fay Weldon, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis before me had shown it possible to combine a paying job with authorship. By the 1980s, this proved impossible. I lived on unemployment benefit for a year, and when that was cut, I, like my heroine, turned to cleaning other people’s homes, which at least left my mind free. Everything that Hannah experiences as a cleaner happened to me, and worse. I struggled not just to pay the rent but to feed myself on occasions. But I wrote and wrote, and I also rediscovered the love of reading that an English degree had nearly snuffed out, thanks to my local public library.

Gradually, thanks in no small measure to the opportunities then offered by freelance journalism, I crawled out of what felt like a bottomless pit. I had various setbacks with my first novel, Foreign Bodies – which included having the manuscript lost by the distinguished agent who was interested in my writing. I was too poor to afford a photocopy and had to rewrite it all. When Foreign Bodies was published, in 1990, it received excoriating reviews: by that time, I had won two prizes as a journalist, which probably did not help.

It was not easy to continue writing, but then it never is. By this time, I was happily married with two small children. My third novel, A Vicious Circle, was pulled from publication by Hamish Hamilton at proof stage on receiving a libel threat from a former boyfriend at university fifteen years previously, who believed he was identifiable as its villain. I faced ruin, ignominy, and the loss of the modest family home my husband and I had just managed to buy in North London. At this point, I was offered a contract killer by a sympathetic East End builder outraged by what I was going through. So I also know what it is like to wish someone dead, and I also know what it is like to turn away from this. It is my belief that everybody is capable of murder, especially where the protection of something or someone that you care about is concerned; but although the strong emotions wrapped up in a book are close to those of parenthood they are not (thank goodness) identical.

In the event, Penguin did not dare ask for its advance back and I received three times more from the new publisher who took A Vicious Circle on. Instead of losing my home, we were able to move to a bigger one; and my career began to improve. I have been called a State of the Nation novelist, and compared, most flatteringly, to heroes such as Dickens, Trollope, Hardy and Austen. Really, I am just interested in people, and how we treat each other. If fiction has any claim to virtue it is that of improving the understanding that we should treat others as ourselves – which is the Golden Rule, repeated in every world religion, from Judaism to Buddhism.

Reviews

Read Amanda Craig's 'The Golden Rule'. Don't wait. Do so at once. How to write about real people in a modern setting and infuse it with what used to be one of the great themes of literature - the difficulty and importance of moral goodness.

Just finished THE GOLDEN RULE by @AmandaPCraig, her 9th novel. It's a thrilling read, daringly plotted, negotiating class & poverty, power & privilege, marriage & abuse, inheritance & malevolence within the context of the politics & socioeconomic micro-climate of Cornwall today.

Wise, witty and seriously enjoyable... Craig is a writer at the top of her game.

Amanda Craig’s ninth novel has all the elements of an irresistible summer read: a rollicking plot, a heroine who is more than a match for anything the author throws at her and meaty social issues... As its title suggests, The Golden Rule has that rare thing: an ethical framework that’s not just implied, but explicit, and is neatly summed up as “Do as you would be done by”. It may be implausible and fantastical, but it makes you want to live a better life.

Craig’s ninth novel might be a sharp satire, an intriguing mystery and a touching romance, but it is also a timely reminder of the importance of fairy tales, myths and legends – both those found in books and played on consoles – to our understanding of ourselves.