The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson’s.
Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are.
It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.
As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife’s money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.
My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they’ve been far and away my most successful books, but I never saw a cent from any of it.
But you can try to read books at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons.
Thatcherism has become bigger than she ever was.
The writer I feel the most affinity with – you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they’re 18th century novels – is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he’s the guy who does it for me.
You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.
The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators – I don’t know whether that’s a coincidence, or if there’s something to be learned from it.
I had no sense of any reputation that What a Carve Up! might acquire – at the time I didnt even have a publisher, so my main worry was whether it was even going to see the light of day or not.
As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you’re into politics, aren’t you?
As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.
But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don’t write short stories because they turn into novels.
But I have always – ever since The Accidental Woman – written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over which they have no control.
Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me – but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn’t.
I’m one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.
I was mainly in a state of nervousness while I wrote it – nervousness that it was far bigger and more complicated than anything Id attempted before, and that maybe my talent just wasnt up to it and the book would have to be abandoned, or would turn out not to work at all when it was finished.
I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I’m not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.
I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.
Some people don’t realize that a straight ‘No’ can be the kindest answer in the world.