Sunday, November 17, 2002

The 1983 Granta list











The 1983 Granta list


This list defined a generation... but whatever happened to Christopher Priest and Ursula Bentley?

Sunday 17 November 2002 04.29 GMT

Martin Amis 
Pat Barker 
Julian Barnes 
Ursula Bentley
William Boyd 
Buchi Emecheta 
Maggie Gee 
Kazuo Ishiguro 
Alan Judd 
Adam Mars-Jones
Ian McEwan 
Shiva Naipaul 
Philip Norman 
Christopher Priest 
Salman Rushdie 
Lisa de Terán 
Clive Sinclair 
Graham Swift 
Rose Tremain 
AN Wilson



THE GUARDIAN







Wednesday, October 30, 2002

The Wolfe & Gaiman Show



Photo by Beth Gwinn

The Wolfe & Gaiman Show

September 2002

Gene Wolfe — author of The Fifth Head of Cerberus and the 12 books and various stories comprising the "Urth" universe, beginning with The Shadow of the Torturer (1980, first volume of "The Book of the New Sun") and concluding (at least for now) with Return to the Whorl (2001); winner of the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, and many others — and Neil Gaiman, well-known for the "Sandman" series of graphic novels and more recently for Hugo-finalist American Gods (2001) and current best- selling children's book Coraline — met in 1983 at the British Fantasy Convention in Birmingham, and became friends when Gaiman and his family moved to the US in 1992. They recently collaborated on A Walking Tour of the Shambles: Little Walks for Sightseers #16, published for the 2002 World Horror Convention where they were both guests. Their "interview" in the September issue of Locus was a series of talks with Gaiman interviewing Wolfe, overseen by Charles N. Brown and Jennifer A. Hall.


Excerpts from the interview:

    GW: “I’m not nearly as good a writer at e-mail as I am on paper. I’m an old-fashioned guy. I need time to print it out and look at it and revise, scratch my head, pencil out words and pencil in words. The computer drives me nuts. I always remind people who talk about how writing is going to be revolutionized by the computer that Shakespeare wrote with a feather that he had to resharpen every page or so, and look what he did!”

      NG: “And you, you started writing in college?”
     GW: “I started writing at Texas A&M, for The Commentator, which was the literary magazine. I wrote three or four little stories for it. I wish to god I could remember the name of the editor, because I learned more from the student editor of The Commentator than I have ever learned from any other editor.
     “He was an upperclassman and I was a sophomore, and I expected to be beaten. We were beaten all the time at Texas A&M. You had to take it — bend down, and they whaled away at you with a big wooden paddle. This happened with alarming frequency, and you never got time to heal. What he did was worse. He got my story and he got a blue pencil, and he edited it there in front of me. As I was standing there, with the drops of blood coursing down my face, I said to myself, ‘I see what he’s doing. He’s taking out every word the sentence doesn’t require. I’m going to write the next story so he can’t do that.’ And I tried to do it. I didn’t succeed, but he was crossing out less in that second story. If it wasn’t for that, I would probably be a bitter old retired engineer, whereas now I’m a bitter old still-active writer."

*


      NG: “Is feedback important to you? I thought the Washington Post article made some very sensible points. It said, ‘This is how good Gene Wolfe is, and this is why you haven’t heard of him.’ One point was that you make no effort in your fiction to be user-friendly.”
      GW: “What would I do that I don’t do, if I were being user-friendly?”
      NG: “It goes back to that line I’ve been using ever since I read it in a letter where you defined good literature: ‘My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.’ While ‘user-friendly’ may have been the wrong word, there is a level on which a lot of fiction these days is expected to give everything up first time to somebody, whether he knows something about the subject or not. You do not do that.”
      GW: “Phooey! I don’t want to write that kind of thing. Rats! I don’t like it and it would bore me to write it and I’m not gonna write it. And besides, I don’t know everything to give it up. You’re going to see things in there that I don’t see consciously. I like those things.”
      NG: “I take enormous pleasure in the fact that people are still arguing about the first four in the ‘Book of the New Sun’ sequence to this day. ‘Was the Autarch Severian’s mother?’ ‘Is the Clute theory valid?’ ‘Oh, we’ve got another Australian theory....’ You have these dueling theorists, pointing to the text and trying to second- and third- and outguess.”
      GW: “Yeah, but the thing is, too often people want me to go in and settle their argument. That’s exactly what I should not do. I am dealing from this position of presumed expertise. We don’t have a level playing field. If Arthur Conan Doyle had gone in and settled all this ‘Holmes’ stuff, there would be no Baker Street Irregulars today, yet people have made whole hobbies out of being Baker Street Irregulars — why shouldn’t they? There’s no sacredness to the text.”

*


      NG: “What’s the most important thing about fiction?”
      GW: “The most important thing is that it assures the reader that things need not be as they are now. In other words, the most important thing is hope.
      “Sure I’ve read Barry Malzberg. Barry is very black, but it seems to me one of the things he is saying to people is ‘Your life could be much worse. You could be like these lead characters but you’re not.’ So that’s hope too.”
      NG: “The various things SF can be include being predictive, but it can also be cautionary. Much of the bleakest fiction is cautionary — ‘Don’t go there.’”

*


     NG: “Not only can you lie in fiction, but I think Gene is the master of lying in fiction, both directly and indirectly. Peace is built on lies. And assume that, being who he is, Gene is pretty damn sure what the truth and what the lies are in Peace. The rest of us have to get through that as best we can. After three or four times through that text, you begin to be able to say, ‘I think he’s lying about this or that.’”
      GW: “I never lie.”


LOCUS

Saturday, August 24, 2002

Jon McGregor / Woolf at the door

 


Woolf at the door

Julie Myerson weighs up If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, a surprise Booker contender by Jon McGregor

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor
288pp, Bloomsbury, £12.99

Julie Myerson
Saturday 24 August 2002

About a quarter of the way through Jon McGregor's first novel - a surprise inclusion on the Booker longlist this week - an elderly, working-class man racked with lung cancer laughs and then "clutches at his throat, head tipped back, mouth gaping, silent, staring at the ceiling like a tourist in the Sistine Chapel".

If the alarm bells haven't already rung countless times, then they certainly do at that sudden, gratuitous lurch into the world of art history. This is a novel where the contrived metaphor, the struggling simile, the romantic reference all come first.

Here is a nameless urban contemporary street on "the last day of summer". It's a day when the many residents - few of them identified by more than house number or hair colour - experience a terrible, violent, communal event. What is it? You will have to wait till the final pages to find out. Meanwhile, McGregor's doom-laden narrative - told mostly by an omniscient (and well-travelled and cultured) narrator - is punctured now and then by the separate voice of a girl who, after an impulsive one-night stand in Scotland, is pregnant.

This girl spends a lot of time woefully contemplating the fluttery feeling in her belly - how you long to point her in the direction of a Marie Stopes - and feeling alone. Finally she receives a mysterious visit from a young man whose twin brother (who lives on that street on that last day of summer) fosters a secret love for her.

I know I ought just to go with the flow. This is a clean, bare, sensitive and undoubtedly well-intentioned piece of fiction by someone still in his 20s. It's admirably adventurous. Its determinedly unpunctuated dialogue more or less works. And I know what McGregor is aiming for - how he wants to create 360o pans with his juddery word-camera and show us what's going on in a whole neighbourhood. How stuff that seems small and insignificant can have huge consequences. How the whole darn street can be buzzing with life, yet people are still pregnant and dying and lonely and alone.

But the trouble with largeness, with this wide lens, is that it can be oddly ungripping, colourless, unfocused. And focus, at the end of the day, is what makes us turn the page. So here, though we can see the whole street, we can't believe in any of its backdrop people, these stuck-on fuzzy-felt figures. And their comings and goings are hardly enlivened by being compared to soppy things like "wool on a loom" or "figures in a Pompeii exhibition".

There's a fatal lack of humour, but even worse is the way the narrative voice pompously tells you what the characters feel in language they'd never use. Though these people seem to be a careful racial and social mix, their preoccupations are still conveniently English Whimsical. How would it be, wonders the boy with the pierced eyebrow, "to know your own existence is a miracle?"

Yes, this is a novel about how our lives are "paler and poorer" if we don't see "remarkable" things for what they are. And yes, it's a good and true idea. But, though you couldn't say this is a poor novel (there's a writerly energy here that suggests McGregor will go far), it would be hard to imagine a paler one, its lifeblood sucked out by a Virginia Woolfish adherence to the fey, the pretend, the fortuitously elegant.

· Julie Myerson's most recent novel is Laura Blundy (Fourth Estate).

THE GUARDIAN

Tuesday, August 20, 2002

Jon McGregor / New kid on the block



Jon McGregor


New kid on the block


Jon McGregor is 26, lives in Nottingham and has been working part-time in a vegetarian restaurant to fund his writing. Now his first novel has made it on to the Booker prize longlist - and he's as surprised as everyone else. He spoke to Matt Seaton

Matt Seaton
Tue 20 Aug 2002 01.55 BST


Among a Booker Prize longlist notable chiefly for containing a great many established writers and few surprises, the name Jon McGregor stands out as refreshingly unfamiliar. And there is a good reason why we haven't heard of him: McGregor's entry, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, is his first novel. Another good reason is that he is only 26.

Vogue magazine has included him in a line-up of new literary talent; his fiction has appeared in Granta, and, young though he is, he has already undergone that quintessential writer's rite of passage - an appearance at the Cheltenham literary festival. But if the buzz was already beginning to build before the Booker announcement, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is still the longlist's left-field choice. Even McGregor was taken by surprise: the first he knew of it was when his dad called early yesterday morning to say that Jon's name was in the paper. So did he go straight out and buy one?



"I got dressed first," he says, with his quietly dry sense of humour. "I was pretty shocked."

Published by Bloomsbury this month, McGregor's novel has caught most arbiters of literary taste unawares - it has scarcely been reviewed to date. The notable exception, besides inclusion in a round-up in the Observer, has been a rave from Erica Wagner, literary editor of the Times, who hailed it as "a dream of a novel" and an "assured debut". The fact that she is also a Booker judge this year may have had some bearing on the fact that If Nobody was "called in" (which is what happens when the judges decide they want to read a book that a publisher has not made one of its statutory two submissions). Still, McGregor finds the idea that his name is now bracketed with such literary big-hitters as William Boyd, Anita Brookner Will Self and Linda Grant, "quite alarming".

"I need to justify that," he says. "Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published."

A graduate in media production, McGregor became used to seeing his friends from Bradford university going to London and earning proper money in the television or internet industry, while he lived in Sheffield doing a series of shift-work jobs to support his writing: in bakeries, postrooms, textile factories. Since he moved to Nottingham with his wife, Alice, a mental health worker with homeless people, he has worked part-time in the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant. He may be only 26, but perhaps some dues have been paid. "Yeah, I reckon," he says.


"Now that I've had a book published, it is quite validating," he says, "but a bit embarrassing."

McGregor is decidedly not the type of author to be his own publicist. About 5ft 11ins, he is slim (a vegetarian since he was 12), freckled and bespectacled. With touches of grey in his hair, he looks a little older than his years and could easily pass for a youthful Ian McEwan - to whom he bears a rather striking resemblance.

He was born in Bermuda in 1976, where his father, a vicar, had a posting as a curate. The third of four siblings, most of McGregor's childhood was spent in Norwich (he is still a keen Norwich City supporter and can now afford to go and see the games). The family moved to Thetford, in south Norfolk, when he was 12; it was a rural upbringing, he says, "but with an edge of urban decay".

"There was very little to do in Thetford: no cinema, no nothing," he says. "As a teenager, you could sneak into pubs, but that was it."

He describes himself then as a "typical Thetford teenager", but one suspects that making films on Super 8, writing poetry and playing guitar were not quite typical.

"I once saw a picture in the paper of John Hegley with 'poet' written on his knuckles, and I thought that was pretty cool," he recalls, "so I was quite up front about it."

He was still making films (video shorts) while at Bradford, but it was there that he began writing in earnest. Inspired initially by Douglas Coupland's Generation X, he started on short fiction. The breakthrough came in 1998 (his final year at university), when a series entitled Cinema 100 was published by Pulp Faction in an anthology called Five Uneasy Pieces. The following year, he decided he needed a literary agent and sent some stories off to Rose Gaete at the Wylie Agency. A friend advised him that a good question to ask a prospective agent would be who else they represented. The answer - Borges, Bellow, Roth, Amis - impressed, but fortunately so did he and Gaete took him on. On the advice that there was no future in short stories, McGregor set about a novel.

"The sparking point was the whole Diana thing," he says. "It was thinking about the contrast between the reaction to her death and the reaction to everyone else's deaths. I knew a woman whose granddad had died on the same day as Diana did, and she was very upset about how everyone was talking about Diana but nobody wanted to hear about her granddad."

McGregor's only personal experience of death was witnessing his own grandfather dying in a hospice a few years ago. "I felt very privileged and somehow it was very helpful for us all to be there. I found it very interesting."

Death, or a death, you can gather from this, is at the centre of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. From the outset, the reader is aware that something bad is going to happen, although McGregor maintains a degree of suspense about precisely what until the final pages. But it is actually much more a novel about life; the presence of death in the story is counterpointed by the narration of one of the main characters, a young woman who reveals that she is pregnant.

The novel presents a "day in the life" of an unnamed inner-city street. Like one of the characters, a young man who collects litter and junk and obsessively documents his existence with Polaroids, McGregor records people's ordinary lives through a series of snapshots on a late summer day. While the style is avant-garde, a kind of collage, rather than realist (McGregor doesn't like quote marks to denote dialogue, for instance, and his prose dips into a strongly poetic idiom at times), there is a drive to render the direct experience of the characters who populate the street: the "remarkable things" of the novel's title are very much the everyday. With its strongly visual and aural sensibility, its short scenes and rapidly edited changes of focus, it is easy to see the influence of filmmaking on his writing.

So how will the new literary status change things for McGregor?

Not much, he says. He is already signed to Bloomsbury for a second book. He will continue to live in the small, terraced house in Nottingham he shares with Alice. He will go on meeting friends for the weekly pub quiz at his local, the Frog and Onion; and he plans to grow peas and beans on the allotment he has recently taken on.

But he has quit his washing-up job at the veggie restaurant.


THE GUARDIAN


Tuesday, August 13, 2002

Forster's cynicism / Where Angels Fear to Tread



Forster's cynicism

Where Angels Fear to Tread by EM Forster reviewed in the Guardian, August 30 1905

Where Angels Fear to Tread by EM Forster
William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London

Tuesday 13 August 2002

Where Angels Fear to Tread is not at all the kind of book that its title suggests. It is not mawkish or sentimental or commonplace. The motive of the story, the contest over the possession of a child between the parent who survives and the relatives of a parent who is dead, is familiar and ordinary enough, but the setting and treatment of this motive are almost startlingly original.
EM Forster writes in a persistent vein of cynicism which is apt to repel, but the cynicism is not deep-seated. It is a protest against the worship of conventionalities, and especially against the conventionalities of "refinement" and "respectability"; it takes the form of a sordid comedy culminating, unexpectedly and with a real dramatic force, in a grotesque tragedy.
There are half-a-dozen characters in the book which count, and two of them - Mrs. Herriton, the incarnation of spotless insincerity, and Harriet, purblind, heartless, and wholly bereft of the faculty of sympathy - are altogether repellent and hence not altogether real. The other four, whatever else they may be - and they are all more or less unpleasant - are undeniably and convincingly real. It is a trick of Fortune in her most freakish mood that brings about the union of Lilis, the vulgar, shallow Englishwoman, and Gino, the courteous, shallow, and discreditable Italian.
The results of the trick are at once fantastic and inevitable. The whole is a piece of comedy, as comedy is understood by George Meredith. We wonder whether EM Forster could be a little more charitable without losing in force and originality. An experiment might be worth trying.

Saturday, June 15, 2002

Rereading / One Fat Englishman by Kingsley Amis



That uncertain feeling


David Lodge on the prophetic self-portrait Kingsley Amis created in his least likeable novel, One Fat Englishman


One Fat Englishman 
Kingsley Amis Gollancz
1963

David Lodge
Saturday 15 June 2002

In 1963 I published one of the earliest articles about the novels of Kingsley Amis to appear in an academic journal. In it I discussed his first four novels, from Lucky Jim to Take A Girl Like You, but not One Fat Englishman, which came out in the same year. Nor, when I later reprinted my essay in a book, did I extend it to include consideration of that novel.
The reason for this silence was that I didn't quite know what to make of One Fat Englishman, and it certainly didn't fit the general drift of my argument. I hadn't really enjoyed reading it, and enjoyment was very much at the heart of my interest in Amis's earlier fiction. Those books, I wrote, "speak to me in an idiom, a tone of voice, to which I respond with immediate understanding and pleasure".
Lucky Jim and its successors had that effect on many readers of my generation, who came of age in the 1950s, especially those from lower-middle-class backgrounds who found themselves promoted into the professions by educational opportunity, but remained uneasy with, and critical of, the attitudes and values of the social and cultural Establishment.
The heroes of those novels were quick to identify and satirically subvert any hint of pretension, affectation, snobbery, vanity and hypocrisy in public and private life. What they stood for is most simply described as "decency", and when they didn't live up to their own code, they felt appropriate remorse.
The least ethical of these heroes, Patrick Standish in Take A Girl Like You, is balanced by the transparently decent heroine, Jenny Bunn, whose point of view complements his. Roger Micheldene, the corpulent British publisher whose adventures on a brief business trip to America are chronicled in One Fat Englishman, is a very different character. He is rude, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, treacherous, greedy and totally selfish.

While trying to revive an affair with Helene, the wife of a Danish philologist, he grabs every opportunity to copulate with other available women. His mind and often his speech are crammed with offensive observations about Jews, Negroes, women, homosexuals and Americans in general. He eats like a pig and drinks like a fish.
The story punishes Roger for his sins by submitting him to a series of farcical humiliations, and eventually he is sent home with his tail between his legs. But he is the hero, or anti-hero, of the novel, whose consciousness totally dominates it and with whom the authorial voice is rhetorically in collusion: that is to say, his obnoxious opinions and responses are articulated through the same distinctive stylistic devices that were associated with the earlier and more amiable Amis heroes.

The reader may guiltily catch himself sniggering at lines like: "At this evasion a part of Roger wanted to step forward and give Helene a medium-weight slap across the chops" or "a girl of Oriental appearance who would have been quite acceptable if she had had eye sockets as well as eyes".
In 1963, knowing nothing about Amis except through his writings, I was puzzled to know why he had taken such pains to create this vividly unpleasant character. In my memory, most reviewers were equally baffled and disappointed. Recently I picked up a second-hand copy of the first edition of One Fat Englishman, which prompted me to reread it. In the light of Amis's subsequent literary development, and all the biographical information that has emerged since his death, it seems a much more comprehensible and interesting novel - also much funnier, in its black way, than I remembered.
It now seems obvious that Roger Micheldene was in many respects a devastating and prophetic self-portrait. The character's promiscuous womanising and inordinate drinking certainly had autobiographical sources. For the novel's American setting, Amis would have been drawing on his experience as a visiting fellow at Princeton University in 1958-9, when, he informed Philip Larkin in a letter on his return: "I was boozing and fucking harder than at any time - On the second count I was at it practically full-time - you have to take what you can get when you can get it, you sam [sic]."
Amis's casual infidelities were a constant source of friction between him and his wife Hilly, but in 1962, when he would have been working on One Fat Englishman, he fell seriously in love with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, whom he met that autumn at the Cheltenham Literary Festival (appropriately enough as co-members of a forum on sex in literature); he commenced a passionate affair with her.
Shortly after Hilly discovered this, she accompanied Kingsley on a trip to Italy and Yugoslavia, and when he fell asleep on the beach one day, she wrote on his exposed back in lipstick: "1 FAT ENGLISHMAN I FUCK ANYTHING". (A photograph of this vengeful graffito is reproduced in Eric Jacobs's biography.) Before the novel was published, the marriage had ended.

Although Kingsley was not really fat at this time, he became so in due course, and as gluttonous as Roger Micheldene. But whereas for Roger this was an appetite that competed for priority with the sexual (at one point, having picked up a girl at a bring-your-own-picnic, he worries about "the problem of retaining contact with Suzanne without giving her anything to eat"), with Kingsley, according to his son Martin in his memoir Experience, "getting fat was more like a project, grimly inaugurated on the day Jane left him in the winter of 1980 - a complex symptom, repressive, self-isolating. It cancelled him out sexually."
One Fat Englishman was written on the cusp of Amis's ideological transformation, almost exactly halfway between the Fabian pamphlet of 1957 in which he declared his allegiance to the Labour party, and the 1967 essay, Why Lucky Jim Turned Right, which announced his conversion to conservatism. As time went on, he became more and more notorious for his politically incorrect opinions on education, war, women, and race, and domestically he enjoyed winding Martin up in this way. Many of his prejudices were anticipated by Roger Micheldene, but in the novel they have an ambivalent import because of the implied moral of the tale.
It is as if Kingsley Amis, conscious in the early 1960s of the way his values and opinions were changing, and, half-appalled himself at the process, projected them into a fictional character he could simultaneously identify with and condemn. In a curious and interesting way Roger himself is similarly divided. "Why are you so awful?" Helene asks him at a moment of post-coital candour. "Yes, I used to ask myself that quite a lot," he replies. "Not so much of late however." She finds this honesty disarming, which is exactly the effect he calculated, but it is not "just" calculation. Roger is really full of self-hatred - it is the source of the vitriolic anger he directs at almost everything and everybody in the world around him and it is hard to disagree with the judgment of the American priest, Father Colgate, absurd figure though he is: "You are in acute spiritual pain."
We take leave of Roger weeping tears he is unable to explain as his ship slides out of New York harbour, and resolving to lift his mood by surveying the shipboard totty. "Something in him was less than enthusiastic about this course of action but he resolved to ignore it. Better a bastard than a bloody fool."
Father Colgate would call that maxim "obstinacy in sin", while Jim Dixon would have turned it the other way round. One Fat Englishman is certainly a much less comfortable read than Lucky Jim, but no longer seems as inferior to it as I once thought.
· David Lodge's most recent novel is Thinks... published by Penguin

THE GUARDIAN



2002

2010

2013



Saturday, June 8, 2002

Rereading / Jane Austen / Emma´s pride

Jane Austen

Emma's pride

AC Grayling on Jane Austen's pre-Freudian analysis of humanity and folly

Emma
Jane Austen
First published by John Murray, 1816

Saturday 8 June 2002 00.06 BST

Jane Austen painted a large universe on her "two square inches of ivory". In the narrow round of life as lived by country gentry in late Georgian times, in the interesting but even narrower margin of that epoch in young ladies' lives when they are looking about them for a husband, she found and anatomised fundamental features of human sense, pride, prejudice and sensibility.

Sunday, May 12, 2002

Fay Weldon / This much I know / There's a time and a place for everything

Fay Weldon
Fay Weldon

This much I know

There's a time and a place for everything 

Fay Weldon, 70, writer, on the lessons she has learnt in life

Jonathan Heawood
Sunday 12 May 2002 01.57 BST

There's a time and a place for everything - even incest and morris dancing - in fiction.
Therapists say you should learn to live independently after a break-up: not rush into another relationship. Are they mad? Turn your back on God's gift and it may never come again.
Children will call their teacher a fascist because he makes them do things they don't want to, and Hitler called himself a socialist. I'd always prefer a funny fascist to a serious socialist.
When I arrived in London I saw the city as a challenge. I think I've won.
In autobiography you put a kind of shape on to the life. In the first half you set all the questions, and in the second half you answer them.

Which came first, chicken or egg? The egg. You can't go to work on a chicken. Of course I didn't write Go To Work On An Egg. But it's a long and boring story and no one has the patience for it - not even me.
Yesterday's boys are today's girls, guarding their sensibilities and their virtue against predatory attack, demanding commitment, affection and babies.
True creative freedom is these days reserved for children's authors, their editors silenced and their marketing departments struck dumb by the unexpected success of Harry Potter .
The media wears you out, there's so much of it. But it's our only protection against government.
People long for literature to be pure and writers to live in garrets, but someone has to do it, someone has to be morally responsible for society, and the bishops are a bit flaky these days.
Yesterday's truth is today's lie. Ibsen gave the process 20 years and he was right. Feminism started as a revolution, succeeded, and turned into an orthodoxy.
I once killed two friends of the family by putting them in a swimming pool with a diving board but no way out. I could get addicted to playing The Sims, although the game is limited by the imagination of its creators. They have a suburban idea of luxury.

I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a short story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.
Nothing stops me writing except flu.
A little recognition always goes a long way. Getting my CBE was like a school prizegiving. We stood in a queue with the other great and good, and we chatted a lot and were asked to be quiet by the footmen. (It is possible for the great and the good to become extremely noisy.) The Queen said: 'I believe you write television plays,' and I said: 'I write anything I'm asked, Ma'am.' I have been a royalist ever since.
Women always feel the need to apologise for the weather, as if it was their fault.
I write in short paragraphs because when I began there were always children around, and it was the most I could do to get three lines out between crises.
Learn to write with a computer. I've only recently begun to use a keyboard. It happened because I read one of my own stories in an anthology of mostly American writers, and my handwritten piece seemed gnarled and twisted compared to the easy flow of the other writers who I realised all used computers. So I decided gnarled and twisted was not the path of the future. I've yet to see if it makes much difference to my style.
I would write another sponsored novel [like The Bulgari Connection] if the opportunity came and I could do it with a degree of integrity. A young male Belgian writer has just finished a book sponsored by Harley-Davidson and is getting rave reviews, so it can be done, but not often. Companies have to choose their writer very carefully.
The only historical figure I identify with is Patient Grisel in The Canterbury Tales - a forlorn and self-pitying figure who came to a bad end.
I crave nothing but constant love and attention.



THIS MUCH I KNOW