In Their Own Words: British Novelists is a fantastic new online offering from the BBC Archives – interviews with remarkable modern writers.

Obviously we’re biased – we’d recommend you go straight to the interviews with William Golding, Kazuo Ishiguro and Hanif Kureishi. There’s also a chance to watch Robert Graves in conversation (in 1965) with Malcolm Muggeridge. Graves was an extraordinary, prolific writer – best-known as a war poet and then for his ‘I, Claudius’ books. Faber only published one of his books – The White Goddess – but it remains in print over 60 years later.

Elsewhere, there’s Virginia Woolf from 1937, Aldous Huxley from 1958, Iris Murdoch from 1965, Daphne du Maurier from 1971, V. S. Naipaul from 1994, Zadie Smith from 2009 …

Click here to visit the BBC’s Archives.

 

Jo Shapcott is the award-winning author of Electroplating the Baby, Phrase Book and My Life Asleep, which were gathered together in a selected poems, Her Book.

Her new collection Of Mutability explores the concept of change – in nature, in the body and in human interaction. As a collection it celebrates the small wonders of life, acting as a reminder of its transience.

Jo Shapcott discusses this new collection as well as her earlier work in the new Faber Podcast – listen here. The interview is interspersed with a selections of readings.

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Jo also recorded several video readings for us, which you can view on Faber’s Vimeo channel.

 

Jo Shapcott reads ‘A Letter to Dennis’ from FaberBooks on Vimeo.

Two police officers knock on Laura’s door. They tell her that her nine-year old daughter Betty has been hit by a car and killed …

So begins Whatever You Love, the new novel by Louise Doughty (and her first with Faber). Louise is the author five previous novels and one book of non-fiction. She has sat on numerous awards judging panels, and is an in-demand teacher of creative writing.

Whatever You Love is a compelling read – moving and topical, full of grief, lust and retribution – a potent mix. Here’s Louise explaining more to Faber Editor, Sarah Savitt.

‘Whatever You Love’ is set in a small, seaside town with an immigrant population and ethnic tensions – how much of a challenge was it to take on that setting and that social background?

My proudest boast as a novelist is a quote from a review in the Independent, which said of one of my books, ‘Louise Doughty writes about people who don’t normally get written about.’

The town Laura lives in is an out-of-the-way, run-down sort of place with a large community of economic migrants. The man who kills her daughter comes from that community and the battle between them is symptomatic of the ethnic tensions in the town. I was really interested in conjuring a small town torn apart by dramatic events, in the way that a lot of American novelists do really well, when you feel the town is almost like a character in the book. And although a lot has been written about the immigrant experience by writers like Monica Ali or Marina Lewycka, relatively little has been written about the social interaction between migrants and the settled communities they live in.

That said, the background to this book is incidental in that this is very much Laura’s story. It’s really about what one rather ordinary woman finds herself capable of when tragedy is visited upon her.

Laura and David’s relationship is intensely passionate, and your female characters are often frank and liberated about sex and sexuality, in a way that feels modern and even quietly daring. Is this something you’re aware of, or particularly interested in?

Absolutely! It floors me that in this day and age it is still considered controversial or noteworthy when a woman writes frankly about sex. I’ve been getting in trouble for it since my first novel was published in 1995 and suspect that with this book I will be in trouble again.

It was important to me that the flashbacks to when David and Laura first meet were very passionate and very sexual. That was partly because I felt I needed to counterbalance the tragedy of their daughter’s death – you can’t make a book too grim, after all – but also because I was really interested in exploring that strange compulsion you feel for someone when you first fall for them. It’s a form of madness, really. I do think that what we call ‘falling in love’ is often obsessive lust, which then, if you’re lucky, mutates into something calmer and saner and more settled.

I’m very interested in how we all balance the different sorts of love in our lives; sexual passion, married love, the love we feel for our children. Sometimes those sorts of love compete, sometimes they compliment each other. It’s so difficult to write about a couple meeting and falling in love without resorting to cliché – I found putting some interesting and slightly ambiguous sex in really helped …

You have two daughters. Did you find it difficult to imagine and write about the death of a child?

I’m afraid to say that aspect of writing this book was horribly easy, albeit traumatic. All parents live with the constant terror that something will happen to one of their children – you live with it every waking minute. If my daughter is even ten minutes late home from school I start imagining the worse – so the scenario in Whatever You Love is something I’ve been imagining for years.

The difficult bit came in describing what it was like to lose a child but in still keeping it readable and, for want of a better word, ‘entertaining’. That was where the revenge plot came in. Once I got that going, the novelist in me took over and I got over the maternal horror of the subject matter. That said, my partner found this book almost impossible to read. Laura’s daughter Betty inevitably has elements of our own daughters’ characteristics and he found that almost unbearable. He doesn’t like this one at all.

One of the most interesting relationships in the book is between Laura and Toni, the policewoman who initially comes to Laura’s door after the accident and then becomes her Family Liaison Officer. Did you speak to any police officers while writing the novel?

Yes, that was great fun. I interviewed three police officers, one of them an Inspector in charge of training Family Liaison Officers who deal with the relatives of traffic accident victims. The stories he told me made my hair curl. I really enjoyed finding out about police procedure but also developing a character  who is an officer with a human touch.

There was a lot I found out about policing, and what it does to the people who get involved with it, that I couldn’t squeeze into this book, so I am considering developing some of that material in another novel. One of the aspects of my research that was very funny was how sweet and helpful these senior officers were. I had a coffee in the Scotland Yard canteen with one of them and he was waving his fellow officers over and bragging about how he was talking to a novelist, and I was looking at him and thinking, ‘But you catch major criminals and terrorists for a living – and you think what I do is impressive?’

‘Whatever You Love’ is partly an exploration of how the desire for revenge pushes Laura to extreme emotions and actions. How did you imagine your way into her feelings? Have you ever been surprised by your behaviour in an extreme situation?

You know what, I’ve never belted anyone but there have a been a couple of situations when I’ve been really, really close. I think few people are willing to admit to their own capacity for violence, even to themselves. Most parents know though, in their heart of hearts. When another child picks on yours in the playground, you do the sensible and mature thing and talk to your child about coping strategies or go to the school – but the truth is, what you really want to do is storm in there and rip the little s**t’s head off. I have no doubt that, in Laura’s position, I would be capable of behaving how she does.

 

A lot of my fiction has been about how so-called ordinary people behave in extremis – it’s just that in this novel, it’s really close to home.

This seems like the most plot-driven novel you have written. Was that a deliberate decision?

Yes. I think all my novels are quite plot driven but this is the one where it is the most obvious. I was very interested in starting with a bang, a dramatic event – and you can’t get more dramatic than the police turning up on the main character’s doorstep in the first paragraph. It’s always a risky strategy, creating a high-octane story, because you have to work very hard on the structure and progress of the book to make sure you keep the tension up without becoming melodramatic – but I had great fun with that, and particularly with the twists at the end. I love revelations in a novel myself. I’m really hoping I pulled that one off.

Since publishing your last novel, you’ve judged several prizes – the Booker, the Orange New Writers and the John Llewellyn Rhys. Has the judging process – or simply the sheer amount of reading you had to do – affected your own writing?

I think all novelists should be avid readers of their contemporaries’ work so it’s been a great privilege to be paid and acknowledged for what I should be doing anyway. The Man Booker was a huge amount of work but throughout that year, I made sure that I set aside at least one day a week to work on Whatever You Love. I knew that if I didn’t keep up my own writing, I would go mad.

It’s a great honour to be asked to pass judgement on other people’s work and I think I’ve learned an enormous amount by doing it. Fiction in English is in such rude health in this country – there’s an amazing amount of wonderful books out there. We are so lucky.

You also teach creative writing and wrote a Telegraph column called ‘A Novel in a Year’ in 2006. Do you feel that you learn from teaching? Did you apply anything from your teaching to the writing of this novel?

I always tell my students that their craft is as important as their art. We all like to think we have the capacity for being ‘great writers’, whatever that means, but we also have to been down-to-earth about the basics like plot progression and sentence structure. Other than that, emotional stamina is enormously important because writing novels takes so long and the rewards are so uncertain. And you have to have the hide of a rhinocerous when you invite public exposure of any sort for your work.

Nobody can teach talent, of course, but it’s wonderful to meet a student with lots of raw ability and know that you kick them round the room a bit and knock them into shape. I love it.

Who are your major influences – or just your favourite writers?

Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Helen Dunmore, Kate Atkinson, Ian McEwan (the substantial novels, not the short ones), William Boyd – and from the younger generation, Jill Dawson, Julie Myerson, Naomi Alderman.

I suppose the writers I like best are the ones I aspire to be, writers who understand that there’s no conflict to writing a strong story and also having wonderful prose and a high degree of psychological insight – in an ideal world, you achieve all three.

– Louise Doughty’s Whatever You Love is published in June.

 

Joanna Kavenna’s first novel Inglorious – about a thirtysomething urbanite’s escape from city life – won the Orange Broadband New Writers Award. Her new book The Birth of Love is quite different but equally brilliant – interwoven stories exploring motherhood, often quite bleak and dystopian, featuring four characters (including real Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis) across multiple time zones.

Find out more about the novel in this Q & A with Joanna …

Why did you want to write ‘The Birth of Love’?

The idea for my book first came to me in the crazy-beautiful-annihilating months after I gave birth to my first child. Everything I had known before had been blasted to pieces and, in the middle of the debris, was my wonderful, precious son. The landscape around me seemed to have altered; when I went out for a walk I saw the usual motley array of humanity – people who looked robust and joyful, or disappointed and alone, and I thought that everyone around me, even the lost and mad, had been brought into existence by a mother who had lived through the suspense of a pregnancy, and the agony of labour, and who had loved her baby beyond measure – and I had never really understood this before.

And I started to think that there is a grave paradox within human existence, that we come from such love, the unconditional love of our families, and yet we manage to construct or foster systems of domination and violence, bind ourselves with ‘mind-forg’d manacles’. I found I wanted to write about four characters who exist in different periods of history, but who are linked together across hundreds of years, and who each in their own way set love and belief against impersonal annihilating systems of dogmatism and control.

I wanted to write, too, about certainty, really about the madness of absolute certainty, because it also struck me in that wonderful, strange period after the birth of my son that all my previous certainties had been blasted apart, and also that every zealot, every ideological tyrant had once been a tiny baby, knowing nothing of the world except the smiling faces of his or her parents, and it struck me as rather absurd that anyone should set themselves up as a grand authority over anyone else, when we all come from this mysterious process, this miraculous sparking of life within the human body.

So I think I wanted to write about the struggle – it seemed to me the defining struggle of human life – of unconditional love against angry dogmatism.

The character of Dr. Semmelweis is heartbreaking. Do you think he is overdue re-examination? Why did you think it important for him to be included in the novel?

In the early months of motherhood, and then during my pregnancy with my second child, I read a lot of histories of childbirth, accounts of labour in different eras, writings on motherhood and fatherhood. So I found out about this extraordinary man, Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor who realized that childbed fever – a deadly illness at the time, which struck women just after they had birthed their babies – could be prevented simply by doctors washing their hands. He suggested every doctor must wash their hands in chlorinated lime solution, and he was pilloried by his colleagues. They said he was insulting them, that he was suggesting they were unclean, and he was generally ignored. In Vienna he was ignored, at least; in his home city of Budapest he had more success promoting his theories.

Semmelweis could not bear the certainty of those doctors around him who would not do this small thing, who were so adamant that they were right to ignore him. He drove himself mad, trying to convince his colleagues, and died in an asylum, ranting about a ‘massacre of mothers.’ And it was later proved that Semmelweis had been right, and that those doctors who had refused to believe him had indeed caused the deaths of countless women.

This struck me as such a forceful and tragic story … I kept reading about Semmelweis and so when I came to write my novel it seemed inevitable that he should be a character in it.

Bridget’s birthing experience is incredibly graphic. Was it important for you to write it this way? Why?

I’ve always been interested in myth and part of what I am trying to do as a writer is to write about the epic in the ordinary. The struggles of so-called ‘ordinary’ life are far more compelling to me than tales of kings and knights and classically ‘heroic’ quests. And I think, for most women, childbirth is an epic process; it’s their trials of Hercules, and they have to use all their courage and strength to get to the end. So Bridget is faced with agony and danger – the agonies and dangers of an ordinary birth – and she has somehow to struggle through.

I didn’t want to write about my own particular experience of birth, though of course I do understand what Bridget is going through in terms of pain and anxiety. But I didn’t want it to be ‘my birthing story’, so I tried to combine several births I had heard about from friends, and I added in odd details that people had told me – often complete strangers, shop assistants, or people on buses, who saw me with my small children and suddenly came out with these fascinating memories of their own experiences.

Your vision of 2153 is quite bleak. Do you think that the authoritarian control over childbearing you depict in the future could be easily realized?

To me it is absolutely a fantasy. I have no idea what might happen in the future. I set this section of my book in the future because I wanted to create a very extreme society of a particular sort. So I realized it either had to be set in the future or in a parallel universe. I went for the future.

To me it’s not entirely bleak, because although the future society I portray is very oppressive, there is a small group of people who refuse to accept what is happening around them. This came naturally from Semmelweis – where you have a man who was regarded as a lunatic by the doctors of his age, and yet it transpired that he was right, and his medical peers were mad to ignore him.

So in 2153 I wanted to look at another sort of sanctioned madness – a hyper-scientific view of the world which has got completely out of hand. Effectively the science has become a religion, and the scientists have become priests of this religion. They believe man is engaged in a war against nature, that nature must be controlled by science. It has become illegal for women to become pregnant and to birth babies naturally. Instead everything is controlled in laboratories – this way you have no surprises, you can create precisely the sort of human being you want.

Despite this, a woman becomes pregnant. With some friends, she goes to an abandoned island to birth her child in secret. She and her friends are afraid the whole time – of being caught and punished or killed, of the child being destroyed as ‘imperfect’ and so on. Despite their fears, they are greatly moved by what they witness, an ordinary birth which has become – for them – an improbable miracle. And it gives them hope …

Do you think that men and women may respond differently to the issues raised in the novel?

I don’t quite know. To me the central themes of my book are not ‘gendered’ at all. Both men and women love their children beyond measure. Both men and women have to find ways to live for themselves and their families, despite the regimes and orthodoxies which may seek to control them.

The whole business of trying to find your way in life, of trying to work out what to believe, how to sift through the babble of contradictory voices telling you what to think – that applies equally to men and women. I think sometimes childbirth gets written about as a ‘women’s issue’, whatever that means, because it is women who physically birth children. But of course we all come from this process, and fathers who observe the births of their children are profoundly moved, shocked in a different way from the mothers but still completely transformed all the same. They go through their own initiation rite; they stand transfixed, watching their child emerge …

Do you think having your own children has influenced the way you have written your book?

Well it was very much written in the midst of early motherhood – I began it when my son was a small baby, reading and writing while he slept on my lap, and then I finished a first draft just before my second child was born – my daughter – and then I was rewriting that draft with her as a newborn, sleeping again on my lap.

I’m glad I wrote it during this time because although I was often very tired, I was in touch with a sense of deep strangeness, of the bizarre beauty of the whole thing – I was breast-feeding my children or pregnant, so I was physically very much involved in this process of creating and nurturing children. And that changes you a lot, and it’s astonishing – I see it now – how you forget it, how the memory of what it was like physically and emotionally fades.

Also for me it was a very different way of writing, technically. Prior to this novel, I always wrote on a computer. With The Birth of Love, I was so often writing with babies asleep on my lap, or next to me, so I had to write longhand, and the whole thing was written in notebooks and only typed up at the end.  Also, because I was writing in very intense bursts, always with this sense that at any moment the baby might wake, I would be prevented from continuing, I was much more focused than I usually am. I couldn’t move, half the time, because I didn’t want to disturb whichever baby was asleep on me, so it was a bit like being tied to a desk, perhaps ..!

I don’t know if this is the best way to write in general, but I think for me it was the only way I could have written this book, at this time, and so it was a necessary experiment.

What were your influences in writing the novel?

The usual ones really – Knut Hamsun, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, D. H. Lawarence, Mark Twain, Joseph Campbell, William James, Iain Sinclair, Charlotte Bronte, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Musil, Albert Camus, Saul Bellow, Philip K Dick, Jens Bjorneboe, Margaret Atwood and so on …

Do you feel a particular affinity to or sympathy for any one character? Why?

I sympathise with various characters in different ways, for different reasons. When we first meet Bridget she is a mother of one, preparing for the arrival of her second child, with a great deal of excitement and trepidation mingled. And I remember that state very vividly – being heavily pregnant with my second child and wondering how on earth I would manage with two children under 3, whether I would be a good enough mother, a patient enough person.

I was very moved by Semmelweis’s story when I read about it – by the way he persisted even in the face of general condemnation or indifference, and the way he felt so horribly guilty about the women he had infected with childbed fever, before he knew how it was spread, and so incredibly angry about the further lives that were lost because his colleagues wouldn’t believe him.

I wanted to give him a friend, someone who listened to him – and so I created the character of Robert von Lucius, a man who visits Semmelweis in the asylum during his final days, and becomes convinced that Semmelweis is right, though too late to save his life.

Then there are the prisoners in 2153, who haven’t done anything morally wrong, but again they are confronted with authority figures who invert everything, who tell them their love and compassion for others are in fact crimes against the social order.

– The Birth of Love is published in May.

 

As Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces there is no one better placed than Lucy Worsley to take us on a tour of the history of Kensington Palace.

In her new book Courtiers she gives us the men and women who considered it home, worked there and visited during the time of George II, and in this accompanying Q & A she explains why she considers it to be one of London’s great undiscovered secrets.

She tells us what life in the Georgian court would have been like, especially for ladies, and provides a guide to Georgian etiquette. She also explains what she does in her day job with Historic Royal Palaces, and when you might be seeing her on your television in 2010 …

On Courtiers

Why did you write ‘Courtiers’? How did it start?

I got the idea for Courtiers from my work as Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces. Several times a week, I climb up the King’s Grand Staircase leading to the state apartments at Kensington Palace. In the 1720s, William Kent painted the staircase with murals, including portraits of 45 servants in the royal household at the time. Looking up at their faces, I found myself increasingly curious to find out who they all were. When I started looking into the subject of who was who, I found that all the different guidebooks contradicted each other, and that many of their identifications were quite mistaken.

So, I decided I had to do the job properly, and start research from scratch. Five years later … Courtiers was the result. It tells the story of the Georgian court through the eyes of some of the people who knew it best: the royal servants.

Do you have a favourite courtier from the book? Why?

I have a soft spot for the three main female characters in the book: firstly, Queen Caroline, who was a fat, funny German immigrant who never expected or wanted to become queen. She would have preferred a life as a philosopher. She did a great job as queen, despite being cruelly abandoned by her husband George II, and suffered a horrible death with extreme bravery. She had an infectious laugh and her servants adored her. The way her husband left his mistress and came back to her towards the very end is one of the eighteenth century’s greatest love stories.

Secondly, there’s Henrietta Howard. Rather bizarrely, she was Queen Caroline’s bedchamber servant as well as being her husband’s mistress: a very odd love triangle. Caroline and Henrietta actually got on rather well together, as Henrietta only worked in the royal household to escape from her violent alcoholic husband. The queen sympathised with her and shielded her. Nor was it terribly shocking to the court as a whole that the German-born king was unfaithful to his wife. When his grandmother heard about Henrietta, she said ‘at least she will improve his English’.

Finally, there’s Molly Lepell, the young and glamorous Maid of Honour, who made an impulsive, secret and crazy marriage to the court’s bisexual Vice-Chamberlain, a mistake which could have wrecked her life. Molly, who struggled with depression and dabbled with laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol), eventually escaped from court to live serenely on her own, comforted by books.

Is there a courtier that you dislike? Why?

Oh, the more you know about people, the more you understand them, and the more you understand them, the harder it is to dislike them. On the surface, King George II is a deeply unpleasant man: unfaithful to his wonderful wife, constantly at daggers drawn with his father and with his children, bad-tempered and short-sighted. But I warmed to him when I understood what a poor hand life had dealt him.

When he was eleven, his mother was imprisoned for adultery. His father, King George I, kidnapped four of his children, and one of them died in his care. His wife and five of his eight children died before him, and he only realised too late how much he loved them. This helps to explain his celebrated blustering and bad temper.

You clearly think Kensington Palace is important: why so?

Kensington Palace is most famous as the home of Diana, Princess of Wales, but there’s much more to it than that. It’s one of the great undiscovered secrets of London, because most people don’t even realise that it’s open to visitors, or that it contains objects and stories covering the whole of royal history from the seventeenth century onwards. We’re carrying out a big project to open up the palace to many more visitors, which will be complete in 2012.

I particularly like the way the palace captures four centuries of royal history. We go from William and Mary and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, to spectacular eighteenth-century state apartments of the Hanoverians, to the childhood of Queen Victoria (who was born, grew up, met Albert and became queen at Kensington Palace), to the modern royal family: Princesses Margaret and Diana are key twentieth-century Kensington residents.

The other thing I like about Kensington Palace is the way that it’s a curiously feminine place, and many of the princesses who’ve lived here have been mad, sad and sometimes bad. I’m fascinated by the job of princess: duty and pleasure in constant conflict.

Why did so many people clamour to become courtiers if the job was so awful?

People made enormous efforts to obtain court posts, and underwent humiliation, gruelling work and financial ruin to keep them. The explanation is ambition. At court, you could potentially win power, royal favour or great riches. Although the eighteenth century sees the rise of Parliament and the gradual decline of royal power, the court still matters in this period. It’s really the last great gasp of palace life.

What are a few of your favourite anecdotes from the book?

I’ve always been horribly fascinated by Queen Caroline’s death. She collapsed in November 1737 with a pain in her stomach, and it turned out that for several years she’d an umbilical hernia – basically a hole in her belly – which she’d kept secret from everyone but her husband. She didn’t want to be examined by doctors, or to have to admit such an embarrassing, immodest complaint. In 1737, a loop of her intestine popped out through the hole. What the doctors should have done is push it back inside. What they actually did was to cut it off, destroying her digestive system. It took her ten days to die.

Another rather curious episode revolves around the missing letters in the courtier John Hervey’s letter book. Ancestor of the various frivolous Herveys of Ickworth House who are active upon today’s social scene, he was a likewise a great socialite, but nearly lost everything though his weakness for young men. Sodomy was still a crime still punishable by death. His relationship with his lover Ste Fox is well known to historians, but rather mysteriously letters from the period 1730-1732 have been cut out of his letter book, and his memoirs for those years are likewise missing. I argue that the excisions were made by a prudish, Victorian, Hervey, who wanted to cover up the evidence that his ancestor also had a second, secret and even more dangerous sexual relationship: with Frederick, the Prince of Wales.

Peter the Wild Boy has an incredible story; do you think the court showed compassion or cruelty when they decided to keep him as a type of ‘pet’?

Peter the Wild Boy had a heart-rending story: he was an autistic child found wandering in the woods near Hanover, and was brought to court as a kind of human pet. The courtiers loved the puzzle he presented: what did it mean to be human? Did Peter, who possessed no speech, possess a soul?  These questions were central to the Enlightenment.

Peter’s tutor, Dr John Arbuthnot, did his best to teach the Wild Boy to talk, but ‘he had a tendency to run away if not held by his coat’, and was beaten with a leather strap. He had to wear an iron collar (middle picture above) marked with his name.

You can’t help feeling sorry for Peter, but by the standards of the rest of the courtiers he had a happy ending. He did not end up crossed in love, or addicted to alcohol, but was sent to live on a farm in Berkhamstead where he passed the time in singing or stargazing.

The acceptance of mistresses at court is unimaginable by today’s standards. Do you think this role offered women more freedom, or was it just another type of constraint?

Ooh, interesting question. It’s tempting to see royal mistresses as feisty females, using their brains and wiles to get on in the world. And some of them did, very successfully. But you can also see, in the distressing story of Henrietta Howard, someone who was forced into the role of mistress. Her husband was a violent spendthrift, so she had to take a job as the queen’s servant in order to escape from him and to support herself. Then, to keep her job, she had to become the king’s mistress, which was clearly no joke. But Henrietta had a stroke of luck: an unexpected legacy allowed her to leave both her first husband and her royal lover, and to get married a second time to the true love of her life.

The next king after George II (George III) was determined never to have mistresses like his predecessor, because he thought that princes fallen into female hands ‘make miserable figures’. Morally he may have been correct, but women were much less influential at his court, and their voices less clearly heard.

A Fact Sheet on the Curious World of the Georgian Court

The Georgian royal household was staggeringly vast and complicated. The highest ranking of its members, the courtiers proper, were the ladies and gentlemen in waiting. These noblemen and women were glad to serve the king and queen in even quite menial ways because of the honour involved. Henrietta Howard, for example, had to hold the basin into which the queen spat while cleaning her teeth.

Beneath these top courtiers were about 950 other servants, organised into a byzantine web of departments ranging from hair-dressing to rat-catching, and extending right down to the four ‘necessary women’ who cleaned the palace and emptied the ‘necessaries’ or chamber-pots.

What did you wear at court?

If you were a lady, you had to wear the court uniform: the ‘mantua’. A coat-like dress spread out sideways over immensely wide hoops, this formal court dress became trapped in a fashion time warp when the rest of the world moved on. Tightly-laced, uncomfortable, and immensely heavy because of the silver thread, the skirts got wider and wider as the eighteenth century went on. Gentlemen wore a wig, an embroidered suit and a sword, and under their elbows they carried a flat, unwearable version of a hat. Because you had to bare your head in front of the king, no one wore real hats at court.

How do you walk in a dress like this?

It’s quite hard to walk in a mantua – the whalebone hoops force you to take tiny steps, and you have to go through doors sideways. (Grand palace doorways are just the right width to accommodate the hooped skirts.) Because of their tiny steps people said court ladies looked like they rolled about on wheels. Ladies in waiting weren’t allowed to sit down, or to fold their arms, and leave the royal presence they had to curtsey three times then back out of the room. Your dancing master trained you how to do all this.

How do you get about town?

Travelling by sedan chair, you would fold up your whalebone hoops on each side: ladies were described as looking like strange winged insects. This reveals everything underneath, and Georgian ladies didn’t wear underpants (not invented yet). But they didn’t mind what their footmen saw.  You also had to tilt your head back and remain motionless so the roof didn’t squash your piled-up hair.

How do you go to the loo in a dress like this?

Easier than it looks, as you weren’t wearing knickers. You would either squat over a chamberpot, or use a ‘bourdaloue’: a little jug like a gravy boat that you clenched between your thighs. However, if the queen didn’t grant you permission to go, you just had to try to hold on. Once, one of Queen Caroline’s ladies couldn’t wait, and a humiliating pool of urine crept out from under her skirt and ‘threatened the shoes of bystanders’.

What messages can you signal with your fan?

Most people think that the secret language of the fan – ‘beware, my husband approaches’, ‘you are cruel’, ‘don’t forget me’, etc. – is a Victorian invention. But I believe it was already in place in the 1720s. According to the language of the fan, the ladies painted by William Kent on the staircase at the Kensington Palace are all saying variations of the same thing: ‘I am married’, ‘I wish to get rid of you’ or just plain ‘no’. Either this is a very strange coincidence, or else William Kent was playing a joke in depicting all these ravishing ladies making such cruel denials.

Q & A on Historic Royal Palaces and life as its Chief Curator

What is Historic Royal Palaces and what is your job?

Historic Royal Palaces is the independent charity which looks after the five unoccupied royal palaces in London: Hampton Court, The Tower of London, the state apartments at Kensington Palace, the Banqueting House in Whitehall, and Kew Palace in Kew Gardens. We get no money from the Royal Family or the government, so we’re really grateful to every single person who buys a ticket to visit us!  As well as having a day out, they’re supporting our conservation and education work.

My team of fifteen curators are based across our various sites. It’s our job to research the history of each palace, make new acquisitions for the collections, put together new displays, supervise archaeological digs, write guidebooks, give tours, make TV programmes: all the fun stuff.

That sounds interesting! And where do you actually work?

My main office is at Hampton Court Palace, in what used to be a courtier’s apartment. It’s up a spiral staircase of fifty-one steps off Chapel Court, and it’s just like Hogwarts. My room is full of ‘resting’ exhibits, including a famous stuffed raven from the Tower of London called Black Jack. He was killed by the sound of the cannons going off at the Duke of Wellington’s funeral in 1851.

During the course of a week I usually visit the Tower of London or Kensington Palace as well. We’ve got a big project going on at Kensington at the moment, because the whole place needs opening up and re-presenting. That’ll be finished shortly; in the meantime we’re having an exhibition of eighteenth-century court dress.

And how did you become a curator?

My father’s a scientist, and when I was sixteen I chose to study maths, chemistry and biology to please him. But I just wasn’t enjoying it, and I decided to follow my heart and change to history instead. Golly, my dad was cross. ‘You’ll never earn your living with a history degree!’ he said. So now I really enjoy thinking ‘Ha! I do’.

I did my history degree at Oxford, and while I was living in a fourteenth-century building there (New College) I got interested in historic architecture. My first job after leaving college was at a minor stately home called Milton Manor, where I worked in the archives and fed the llamas. After that I became the administrator of the Wind and Watermills Section of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. This is a very august conservation charity that was founded by William Morris. Then I became Inspector of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings for English Heritage. I worked at Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire, putting together new exhibitions and doing research.

There I became rather obsessed with the character of the man who built the castle, the arch-Royalist Duke of Newcastle, whose interests were horses, women and architecture. He lost a vital battle in the English Civil War because he was sitting in his coach having a smoke at the wrong moment. I ended up writing about his life and houses in my book Cavalier (2007). When the job at Historic Royal Palaces came up I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do more. I’ve always had to work really hard, but you’ll hear no complaints from me: history is my vocation.

What TV programmes are you presenting during 2010?

First, in February, a half-hour programme for BBC1 South about King Alfred the Great. I present an assessment of his life kicking off from his jewel that survives in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Made in and around Winchester, capital of Alfred’s kingdom of Wessex, it’s part of the BBC’s festival called ‘A history of the world in 100 objects’.

Then in May, I’ll be appearing as a lead expert contributor for a Channel 4/The Smithsonian Channel documentary called The Curse of the Hope Diamond. I investigate the diamond’s theft, along with the rest of the French Crown Jewels, in 1792, and its subsequent possible ownership by George IV. I visit locations including the chateau of Versailles, the Grand-Meuble in the Place de la Concorde, the Musee Carnavalet, the British Library, Kensington Palace and the Wallace Collection in London.

Then, in the autumn, I’m presenting a series called If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home, first on BBC4 and then on primetime BBC2. Four one-hour episodes will explore the history of the bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen.

– There’s more from Lucy at her website: www.lucyworsley.com.

In 1599 James Shapiro looked solely at a year in the life of William Shakespeare – a momentous year, which changed the course of literature. In his new book Contested Will he investigates one of literature’s great mysteries – did Shakespeare actually write what we think he wrote?

What was the spark that made you consider writing this book?

[James Shapiro]: Having a 10-year-old ask me: ‘Did Shakespeare really write Romeo & Juliet? My brother told me he didn’t’ and realizing that I might have to spend the rest of my career trying to explain not just to students or popular audiences but to 10-year-olds that he in fact did.

For decades, a surprising number of influential people have variously doubted the true identity of Shakespeare - presumably there’s no smoke without fire?

There’s fire, all right: but the fires that threaten received wisdom has to do less with what we know about Shakespeare (which is plenty, though less than we would like) and more to do with two things.  First, the extent to which we all have become a bit too cozy with conspiracy theories. And second, and to me no less troubling, the extent to which we all now look for writers’ lives in their works. Since, in the absence of any documentary evidence, every rival authorship claim is based on an autobiographical reading of the plays and sonnets, this continues to fuel the controversy (giving, for example, the Earl of Oxford, who was captured by pirates and had three daughters, a better claim to have written Hamlet and Lear than Shakespeare, who never set sail and only had two).

What ‘missing’ document would you most like to find relating to Shakespeare’s life and work?

That one is easy: the account book for the Chamberlain’s Men, concerning company payments – the equivalent of Henslowe’s Diary for their rivals, the Admiral Men, which does survive. We would know who else was writing for Shakespeare’s company, what plays he acted in, what the company repertory was, when the theatre was closed for plague, which plays were box office hits, when plays were revived or revised, and so on. I’d rather have that than Shakespeare’s diary, if he kept one.

What if anything have non-academics added to our understanding of Shakespeare?

I learn something almost every day from following the on-line discussion groups of anti-Stratfordians; they are deeply interested in the plays, and in historical scholarship (though they are often driven by some pretty wrongheaded assumptions). The most recent example: just this week I read a terrific article of the dating of the main source of The Tempest by Tom Reedy, in response to another non-professor, on the same subject.  Brilliant stuff, and ahead of the scholars on this complicated issue.

What was your biggest breakthrough in researching the topic?

Scholarship grinds away slowly … but the greatest breakthrough was discovering that the Cowell manuscript was a forgery, and that, as I had suspected, the controversy could not have begun before the 1840s.

Which of the conspiracy theories surrounding Shakespeare are you most attracted to (even if you know it’s one based on a fundamental misapprehension)?

I like the fantasy that Christopher Marlowe didn’t die in 1593, but was spirited away and went on to write Shakespeare’s plays. Though dead he was – and we have the coroner’s report to confirm it. But I’m drawn to the theory because it answers a question that haunts me and many others: had Marlowe not been killed at that Inn at Deptford, what great things might he have done?

Are there parallels between recent developments in ‘Shakespeare Studies’ and the teaching of evolution?

I think the two have only one – dangerous - thing in common: the notion that there are two sides to every question, competing and necessarily valid positions that merit equal time. They don’t, and one of the things I explore in the book is when and why this notion of ‘fairness’ developed in our culture (predictably, post-war America, though it has spread everywhere, like an invasive species since).

 

Writing this book, have you come to the conclusion that literary biography - not just a life of Shakespeare - is an impossible genre?

Impossible, no; difficult yes, especially cradle-to-grave biographies. I like to think of this book as part of the increasingly interesting conversation on what kind of lives ought to be written, and how. Should lives be written backwards? Should they be slices of lives? Are there more interesting ways at getting to the creative and consequential moments in an artist’s life? I love biography – hope to write more of it, but not conventional lives. And you won’t find me mining Shakespeare’s works for evidence that he was Catholic, or bisexual, or angry at his wife, or hated dogs (an argument Stephen Greenblatt recently advanced in the pages of the New York Review of Books).

What do you want believers, non-believers and agnostics to take from ‘Contested Will’?

Three things, for all concerned: first, accept the fact that smart people often think dumb things, and it’s worth looking more deeply into why they do so, what assumptions led them astray.

Second, understand that when and why people think what they do can illuminate what they think – put another way, that theories have histories that are worth investigating, that attitudes – towards creativity, authorship, collaboration, genius – change over time.

Third, walk away understanding why, in the end, it was in fact Shakespeare who wrote the plays attributed to him, but also walk away with some compassion and understanding for those who don’t think so.

— Contested Will is available now in hardback.

Based on the notorious true story of the Teikoku Bank massacre, Occupied City is the second novel in David Peace’s Tokyo Trilogy.

‘A savagely beautiful, richly startling novel’ according to the Guardian; ‘bleak, unsentimental and brilliant’ according to GQ.

Earlier this year, to coincide with the book’s publication in paperback, David Peace spoke to George Miller for our Faber Podcast. It’s the second time we’ve captured David on tape – he was the launch author for the Faber Podcast when he spoke to us in June 2008 about Tokyo Year Zero.

The Setting

‘It’s Occupied Japan. It’s January 1948. The city is being rebuilt but is still, much of it, in ruins, disease is still rife …

The Americans are a presence but actually in terms of interaction with the general population it’s quite mimimal – they stick to their own areas …’

The Background

‘A man walks into a bank in the Ikibukero area of Tokyo. He is Japanese, but he is wearing the armband that marks him as a member of the Occupation in that he is representing the Occupation. He says that he’s a doctor. He says that there’s been an outbreak of dysentry in the area. He says that he needs to give each member of the bank the antidote …

The assistant manager gathers the sixteen [bank employees] around. The doctor pours out the medicine in sixteen teacups … Within minutes, ten are dead instantly, two die later in hospital, and four survive …

Six months later a man named Hirasawa, a slightly-known painter, is arrested, charged and sentenced to death. He will die years later, on Death Row.’

– Listen to our exclusive interview with David Peace here.

Alex Preston was born in 1979 and lives in London with his wife and children. He read English at Hertford College, Oxford. He works in finance. This Bleeding City is his first novel – more here. Find out more about Alex and read his blog here: http://alexhmpreston.com/.

Q. Why did you decide to write This Bleeding City?

Alex Preston: I was trading credit derivatives on the vast floor of an investment bank when the markets began to plummet (earlier for me than for others: this was mid-2007). It felt like I was at the heart of something huge and historical, something that would define not only the bizarre microcosm I inhabited, but also the real world (which I glimpsed, sometimes, at weekends). I saw the former superheroes around me sitting ashen-faced, their trembling fingers poised over their keyboards, and I wanted to capture this, to open up to a broader world the hubris, the fear, the shattered pride.

I also found it strange that this world hadn’t been better represented in fiction. American Psycho and The Bonfire of the Vanities are wonderful novels, but they are written from the outside, and because of this they seem intent on preserving rather than exploding the myth of the investment banker as the manipulative, towering ego who bends all to his will. This is also the error of Sebastian Faulks in A Week in December. He gets the arcana of the hedge-fund world spot-on but Veals (his hedge-fund manager) is one-dimensional, a schoolboy’s imagining of the evil capitalist pig.

This is not an apologia for the City boys. But nor does it portray them as monsters. The book tries instead to show how we fell into these jobs by accident, how little anyone really understood, and how young we all were. The Masters of the Universe were off playing golf and shooting whilst we screwed up the world’s financial system.

In my team of twenty people managing $20bn, only one of us was over thirty (I was twenty-seven when the Crash hit). I hardly knew my bosses - although one of them recently shot himself, unable to deal with the scale of losses we had run up. Perhaps the Crash was our subconscious revenge, our way of bringing down the system that had ensnared us, that made us old before our time.

Q. Is it a love story set in the City? Or a novel about the City which happens to have a romantic sub-plot?

It is firstly a love story. The interplay between Charlie and Vero’s turbulent relationship and the wildly oscillating financial markets demonstrates the humanity of the stock exchange, the primal fears and passions which drive the great abstract machine of the City. A reader without any knowledge of the complexities of finance will be able to understand the novel; a City roller who knows all about finance but has long forgotten what it means to have strong emotional connections will find it more difficult to grasp.

Q. So how did an Oxford English graduate who studied under Tom Paulin end up trading credit derivatives?

I always wanted to be a writer. I pictured myself banking for a few years - perhaps until I was twenty-five - and then retiring to a farmhouse in the South of France to write my masterpiece. I have stayed longer than I initially intended but have been lucky to work with some bright people in jobs that avoided the humdrum and boorish elements of the market. I still look forward to going to work in the mornings. I do think it is critical that, rather than a disillusioned former trader, or a journalist/novelist trying to unpick the abstractions of the City, I have been able to write my novel whilst the financial world unravelled around me. I was at the heart of this meltdown, trading through it every day, trying desperately to stay alive as my friends were fired or quit.

Q. You work in the City yourself. To what extent is the novel autobiographical?

This is not a roman á clef. It is not an indictment of any specific organisation or institution. It is an indictment of the system, and an indictment of my generation for getting so caught up in the bull-market nonsense. I am Head of Trading at a leading investment bank. I am a writer. I am a dad. It seems that these three statements will shuffle and reshuffle themselves until one or other wins out: either I end up, like Charlie in the novel, lost to the real world, the eternal banker; or perhaps this is the first move in my escape, a Tom Hodgkinson-esque turning away from the cash and the glamour (which Charlie tries but fails to achieve). So rather than an autobiography, it is perhaps an attempt at a future biography, testing out alternate strands of my life-to-come.

 

Q. Charlie seems like a good person. Why would he want to work in such an aggressive environment?

Firstly, I think Silverbirch, the imaginary hedge-fund presented in This Bleeding City, seems like a rather interesting and stimulating place to work next to some of the funds I have visited. At least people talk, they go out for drinks, they have something like lives outside of the office. Many funds don’t allow talking above a whisper, hire two people for the same job and fire one of them after three weeks just to keep the other on his or her toes, offer to pay for extravagant maternity care in exchange for employees waiving maternity/paternity leave.

Charlie needs money. He is a relic of a past age - a middle-class boy whose parents earn a middle-class wage. He goes to university and, instead of the other students having parents who are teachers and civil servants and doctors, he meets the sons of carpet-millionaires, the daughters of commercial real estate tycoons. He wants to live their magazine-bright lives, wants to leave behind his honest but dreary youth in a dying seaside town.

Finance seems like an easy way for Charlie to get where he wants. He is deeply in love with Vero, and believes (rightly or not) that he needs to shower her with gifts, offer her a life untouched by worries about money, eclipse even the wealthiest of his rivals for her affection. It’s sad but so many of the really successful people from the City are there because of over-ambitious parents; are scholarship boys from public schools who never went on ski trips and wore moth-eaten jumpers; are the husbands of exigent wives.

Q. The ending of the novel is very bleak for Charlie. Why was it written so?

That’s one way of seeing it, and many readers would agree. Another way of thinking about it is that Charlie has traded the financial uncertainty and emotional complexity of his life with Vero and the children for a return to the unambiguous, institutionalised world of banking. He lives in a beautiful if rather anodyne apartment and is wildly successful.

I wonder whether the Tom Hodgkinson dream has been rather over-played, if the Idler really is happier than City Boy. At least City Boy lives according to very clear rules, his goals are obvious and achievable, and all the mess and the stress of human relationships can be softened with money.

Q. Have other works inspired you in the writing of this novel?

Two key works prompted me to pick up the pen:

Fitzgerald’s short story Return to Babylon sees the protagonist - also called Charlie Wales - return to Paris after the Great Crash of 1929 to revisit his haunts of the boom years. It’s a painful, tragic story, and a rare classic of financial fiction. I wanted to do something similar for our Crash - provide a response which is partly an elegy for the good times, and partly a demonstration of how the markets are merely an expression of the individual psyches of the traders, speculators and lunatics who created them.

Oliver James’ Affluenza struck me as hugely poignant as I read it in early 2007. So many of my friends were trapped in the hedonic cycle, swamped by their mortgages, obsessed by property and the status they thought it conferred. The trader who sat next to me at ABN owned four cars and three houses but he was deeply unhappy. The Crash seemed like a release for him. I think that, despite its rather tawdry self-help packaging, Affluenza is a serious document of a ridiculous chapter in human history.

Another influence is my grandfather, Samuel Hynes. He is emeritus professor of English at Princeton University and his great work on English literature of the 1930s, The Auden Generation, was published by Faber in 1972. Everything I write is, ultimately, for him.

Q. Do you think that a novel can better explain the financial situation than a work of non-fiction?

Finance is a deliberately complex world that even those who inhabit it don’t really understand. Thus the economists and journalists who rushed out books trying to ‘explain’ the Crash missed the point entirely. It simply doesn’t help to know what ABS, CDOs and SIVs are if we don’t know what was going on in the minds of the people who traded them. I wanted to show how greed drove these people, how quickly they grew cowed, how they reacted when their world fell apart.

We understand the world through stories, our lives are dictated by the myths we wrap around them. The story of Charlie Wales’ experience of being at the heart of the crisis will, I hope, explain far more than any acronym-stuffed textbook.

Q. What will you write next?

I’m working on my next novel which will be finished in early 2010.

Q. You also write song lyrics. How does that fit into your writing routine?

I don’t have a writing routine. I write in any free time I get - whether early in the morning or late at night after work dinners. If I’m stuck for ideas on the novel, I write songs. My brother and I go into the studio every few weeks to record them. My lyrics have featured in several top-ten hits and I have recently written for a number of major international stars.

A decade since her first novel, As Meat Loves Salt, Faber is thrilled to be the publisher of Maria McCann’s second book, The Wilding. As in her debut, McCann recreates 17th-century England, but this time the setting is a generation later – a nation in the time of the Restoration, settling down after the Civil War. It’s a novel of families unravelling, vengeance and mystery.

We’re hoping to record a podcast with Maria, but in the meantime here’s an interview.

How and why did you start writing fiction?

 

I’ve been creating fictional worlds since I was a young child. Up to adolescence I had imaginary friends and invented adventures for them, but rarely wrote anything down. Sometimes I incorporated random elements from real life. For example, I remember being fascinated by the image of a melancholy little girl on a charity poster. I gave this girl a name and endowed her with magical powers.

As an adult I would occasionally write poems, sketches and stories but I never sent them off to competitions or  publishers. I didn’t know anyone who was a writer. Then a friend died prematurely at a time when she had a new life ahead of her and was full of plans. I realised that I couldn’t go on vaguely intending to write ‘some day’; if I ever wanted to achieve anything, I had to make a start and keep going.

Your first novel, ‘As Meat Loves Salt’, was also set in the 17th century, though a generation earlier than ‘The Wilding’. What attracted you to this period?

 

The choice of period is also connected with my friend who died, and who turns out to have been a major influence in my life. Shortly before her death, she told me she was reading a book by Christopher Hill on the English Civil War and wanted me to read it too since she was sure I’d enjoy it. On the day of her funeral I saw the book in her home and asked her widower if I might take it as a keepsake. Up until then I had known almost nothing about the Civil War.

The passionate political convictions of the seventeenth century excited me. Most of all I was fascinated by what Hill calls the ‘Cromwellian Underground’, which included people with extraordinarily egalitarian ideas, considering the period. It seems to me that nowadays, the jargon ‘thinking outside the box’ often means finding a way of taking even more away from those who already have little. Here were people who had been brought up to believe in the Divine Right of Kings, and that inequality and poverty were God’s will, who nevertheless were ‘thinking outside the box’ of such constricting beliefs. They were debating land ownership, suffrage, the class system and gender politics.

With my head full of these intoxicating ideas, I went on an Arvon course, and as I sat quietly in the garden at Lumb Bank I saw Jacob Cullen for the first time.

The Wilding is set during the Restoration. I wanted to move on to the period after the Commonwealth but not to write about the court of Charles II, fascinating though that is. I was more interested in the idea of small communities, apparently idyllic, colluding in denial and concealment. Writing about famous historical figures means that the story is already known and to some extent the writer is fleshing out a plot that history has already written; obscure or completely fictional characters allow for more scope. There’s also a part of me that wants to protest against our culture’s obsession with celebrity and royalty.  I admire novelists who reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary.

How do you approach the historical research for your books? And do you enjoy it?

It seems incredible now but when I wrote As Meat Loves Salt I didn’t have an internet connection for much of the time. I used the standard histories of the period and also pamphlets put out by small presses. The pamphlets tended to be the work of dedicated re-enactors and rich in obscure facts. (Anybody want to know the price of a pair of pockets for a Model Army jacket? Or which branch of Curry’s was once Cromwell’s headquarters?) I also visited the site of Basing House and was shown over the grounds by the curator. On one occasion I went to Wells market, saw a re-enactment being staged in the cathedral grounds and met someone there who told me about fading vegetable dyes in New Model Army jackets. That detail found its way into the novel. I went on researching as I was writing, which is partly why the novel took so long to complete.

 

The process of researching The Wilding has been different. While horror lies just beneath the surface, in this novel everything at first appears serene, even pastoral; all the battles are in the past and the hero is familiar with his surroundings (whereas Jacob in As Meat Loves Salt was constantly being uprooted and moving from one place to another). This means there isn’t the same need for obsessive detail, plotting the action against the dates of battles, and so on. My research was mainly into witchcraft and into the history of cider.

Do I like doing the research? During the time I was writing As Meat Loves Salt someone said to me, ‘I always enjoy coming to see you, and spending a weekend in the seventeenth century.’ I think that probably gives you some idea … While writing that novel I became more interested in the lives of soldiers than I would have thought possible, but what really intrigues me is social history: finding out how people cooked food in cauldrons, that sort of thing. At the moment I’m trying to learn about women gamblers in the 1700s, the tricks practised by professional card cheats and the song collections made by Cecil Sharp. Everything is interesting, once you apply yourself to studying it. The difficulty is to keep research under control so that it doesn’t swamp the novel.

What sparked the idea for ‘The Wilding’ – or its setting or characters?

Initially it was finding out about something that took place during the Civil War: the incident in the Guild Hall, which I can’t reveal here because some people reading this won’t be familiar with the plot. The historical event took place not far from my home in Somerset and I first became aware of it when researching for As Meat Loves Salt. I couldn’t write it into that novel as it would have been out of place but (despite the sketchiness of the accounts) the story is so shocking that it stayed with me for years.

The Wilding began as a way of answering the question, ‘How could this possibly have been allowed to happen?’ I have fictionalised the incident considerably and was surprised to discover, when I checked a source I didn’t have at the time of writing As Meat Loves Salt, that the name I’ve given the person most involved is almost exactly the same as the name of the historical personage. I wasn’t even aware that I knew that name. I must have seen it somewhere and stowed it in my unconscious until I was ready to write.

You write in such detail in ‘The Wilding’ about how old cider presses work – you must have had experience in this, or seen one in action. But were there many ‘travelling’ presses in action around the small villages in this time, and how did you come across stories of these? Was it a good trade to be in?  And where did your interest in it come from?

As I said previously, I’m always interested in how things were done in the past (cookery, printing, weapons drill). Sometimes the interest goes further and I develop fads and crazes. When you live in Somerset, however, you become aware that for some people here, cider is more than a craze, it’s a religion. (Take a look at James Crowden’s Cider: the Forgotten Miracle if you need any proof of that; if you haven’t time to do more, just look at the cover.) There are still splendid orchards, lots of presses tucked away in sheds, and quite a few wassails still going strong. Cider is surrounded by tradition and mystique.

Jon’s travelling press, however, is poetic licence. I got the idea when taking a group of students to see Max Gate, the house that Thomas Hardy designed for himself. We were shown the plans of the building and they included a space marked ‘room for itinerant men’ or words to that effect. When I asked about these men I was told that they were seasonal workers, only required for a short time each year, who kept up a ‘round’ in the area.

It is known that there were travelling cider makers during the nineteenth century, though their main work was probably milling the apples; Hardy’s poem ‘Shortening Days at the Homestead’ features a rather sinister cider maker who appears to be going the rounds from house to house. If Hardy made use of a travelling cider maker (and planned for his arrival as a regular occurrence) it seems likely enough that Jon could find work in the seventeenth century, and though there is no record of a portable press I see no reason why one couldn’t be built. Perhaps such presses were built.

During part of the 1970s I was living in a tiny village called Framwellgate Moor, in Co. Durham, and the hairdressing salon there had an extremely efficient hair-washing machine. Who would ever imagine, nowadays, that such a thing existed?

Which writers have most influenced your writing?

If I confine myself to historical novels, the first ones I remember reading were by Anya Seton and Jean Plaidy; we used to pass them round at school. Since those writers were best-sellers, the historical novel has been transformed by writers like Peter Ackroyd, Alan Garner, Rose Tremain and Peter Carey into something infinitely more ambitious.

Hawksmoor taught me, long before I ever thought of writing a book, that the days of ripped bodices and thigh-slapping were gone and that historical fiction could create a dark, alien, suffocating world, and in time liberated me to write As Meat Loves Salt. Golding’s Rites of Passage is another supremely accomplished novel, particularly in its use of an unreliable narrator and of diaries. I read it while writing As Meat Loves Salt and was so impressed that I considered redrafting my own novel to make use of diaries, but it would have been inappropriate.

What are you working on next?

A novel about an eighteenth-century ‘Corinthian’ (swindler and debauchee) seen through the eyes of various victims. It’s also about the way in which such careers are romanticised and mythologised until they come to seem glamorous. It’s at a very early stage, however, and could change dramatically before I’m finished with it.

Parrot and Olivier in America (available now in hardback) is the dazzling, complex and highly enjoyable eleventh novel from Peter Carey, twice-winner of the Booker Prize. Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the novel has wowed critics on both sides of the Atlantic, and beyond*.

The Australian author (soon to appear on a postage stamp) visits us this week from his home in New York so we couldn’t not ask him a few questions about the new book …

What was your starting point for Parrot and Olivier in America?

Peter Carey: I might say, ‘Reading Tocqueville’s Democracy in America‘, but in fact it began before that, during those twenty years I listened to how Americans quote Tocqueville. If one were to rely on these snippets one would think that Tocqueville fell head over heels in love with this new Democracy.

Tocqueville was in his twenties and was only in America for a very short time. He was a child of traumatised survivors of the French Revolution. He had good reason to fear the mob and the rule of the majority. You might think he had no chance of understanding anything. But in reading Democracy in America this reader was astonished to see that did indeed ‘get’ America, although in a much more qualified way than common quotation suggests.

It is eerie, really, to see him fearing the dumbing-down of society and the devastating conjunction of capitalism and culture. He is looking at the USA in the 1830s, but he clearly sees the art collecting hedgefund managers, the phantoms of Palin and the Bushes. Outrageously, he thought it was impossible to create culture without a leisured and educated class, and he is obviously wrong and less obviously right. He creates an unexpected argument in the modern readers mind.

Indeed, I conceived the novel as a kind of argument. In creating Parrot, the son of an itinerant printer, I was inventing someone much closer to my own cultural history. Parrot is that exotic impossible thing, the working class artist.

I would hope that the book is never simplistic, that the argument is always in flux, and one’s notion of who has won and who has lost jumps back and forth and won’t stay still, even when the final page is turned. I would also hope that it was very funny along the way.

How closely did you go back to reading De Tocqueville work and specifically Democracy in America? And in taking on this figure as inspiration did you feel any difficulty in moving away from the historical, factual records?

I read a great deal around my subject. In the end this does not matter too much, but people who are interested in this sort of thing can find it on my website. As for Democracy in America I read it closely in my own magpie way. People who know Tocqueville far better than I do will find some of his lines woven into Olivier’s narration. Anytime you stumble across anything dismissive or snobbish about America, that bit came from Tocqueville. These are the lines that have been forgotten in Washington and elsewhere. That is not to say there is not a love affair with America and a particular American. Indeed there is, and it is cerebral and physical and always passionate.

As for the historical record, I wanted to be fastidious in one way and reckless in another. I wanted to signal to those who know the territory that my departures from known history were informed choices. For instance, Tocqueville travelled with Beaumont and wrote a report on prisons with him. My Beaumont figure is called Blacqueville and I had him killed off in Le Havre before the journey can begin. I think that this is a clear sign that we are dealing with fiction. I was much more interested in expressing and testing ideas through the conflict and odd friendship with his very independently minded completely fictional servant.

Did you already have the master and servant dynamic in mind to tell the story from the start? And did the two voices develop side by side as they run through the narrative?

Yes, from the very beginning. The voices were born as the book was born. For some reason they did not have to be hunted for, or adjusted. They were just there. When I had the voices I knew I could write the book.

As an adopted New Yorker, how much do the characters’ views on America relate to your own? And have your views on America changed significantly over the 20-odd years you’ve lived there?

Well I’m an Australian. I’ll always be an Australian. So no matter how familiar America (or at least New York) becomes to me, there is a huge part of it that appears to be alien and mad. Both these things increase side by side, a huge fondness and a kind of terror.

I have spent twenty years explaining to my American friends that the US is in no way like Australia, so I was rather astonished to realise, in studying Tocqueville’s visit and its consequences, just how much it paralleled a certain aspect of Australian historical experience, I mean the insecure and boastful nature of the New World when showing itself to the Old World. It’s sometimes hard to remember the extremely radical nature of American Democracy, this nation without kings, and it was startlingly familiar for this Australian to see these proud republicans seeking the approval of an aristocrat. I never felt so at home in all my life.

What parallels do you think can be drawn with more recent American administrations?

Tocqueville saw them coming.

Do you think that this is a novel that you could only write now, is it one that you have been waiting to write?

Well, I’ve been thinking about Tocqueville for a long time now, but I held back. Why? Perhaps a sense that it was beyond me. In hindsight, it is clear that fearfulness has always been an extremely positive sign for me. It was true of Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang – the terrifying big idea which must be tackled because it will not lie down or go away.

Finally, do you think that different countries will react to the book’s themes in different ways?

I’ve seen individual Americans despise the snobbish Olivier, and English readers feel very fond of him.  The English engage with the master servant relationship in a more powerful way than I had expected.  My early French readers seem to have been interested and amused, and have not yet questioned my right to mess with their history. And in Australia, where Tocqueville is not a figure of historical consequence, where one cannot expect anyone to give a damn about anything but the success or failure of what exists inside the covers, the reviews have been almost uniformly good. That is a category all of its own – too many readers for me to simplify their responses, and the very pleasant sound of turning pages.

*Here’s just some of what the critics have said:

‘I finished it with unabated enjoyment … a dazzling, entertaining novel.’ Ursula K. LeGuin, Guardian

‘What [Carey] does with words: the power and delicacy, the complex orchestration of colour and theme, seems impossible – more like music than language.’ Jane Shilling, Evening Standard

‘The chapters alternate between two voices, and the contrast creates one of those comic masterpieces that seems effortless while making you realize that Carey writes some of the best sentences in English.’ Tom Sleigh on www.newyorker.com

‘Carey is a canny yarnspinner, feeding backstory into the action with the skill of a fisherman. He possesses the singular voodoo that manages to fuse ornately descriptive prose with barrelling narratives that are stitched with human intrigue.’ Peter Murphy, Irish Times

‘Parrot and Olivier in America is a tour de force, a wonderfully dizzying succession of adventures and vivid, at times caricatured, characters with great panache … A rich and dazzling novel that shows [this] writer at his best.’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘Parrot and Olivier transports us to the rough-and-tumble America of 1830, and it’s possibly the most charming and engaging novel this demon of a storyteller has yet written. His prose has never been more buoyant, more vigorous, more musical. Open this book and listen to Peter Carey sing.’ Paul Auster

www.petercareybooks.com

Here’s another great interview courtesy of Granta online (we’ve already featured their interview with Paul Auster). This time Granta editor John Freeman is in New York to ask Peter Carey about the origins and inspiration for his new book, Parrot and Olivier in America, which we publish in February. An extract from the book featured in Granta 108: Chicago, published towards the end of last year.

Check back soon for a very special Faber Podcast with Peter Carey.

Interview with Peter Carey from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

Tobias Jones’s first book for Faber was The Dark Heart of Italy (2006), his critically acclaimed exposé of the darker side of Italian life, the flip side of la dolce vita, a nation riddled with corruption and political skullduggery – an anti-tourist guide. For his second book Tobias went in search of the good life – Utopian Dreams (2007) investigated alternatives, both religious and secular, to a 21st-century way of life obsessed by materialism and selfish gain. Again, a travel book with a difference.

In his third book Tobias has returned to Italy, pursuing its dark heart, but this time through crime fiction. The Salati Case is the first in a series of crime novels set in the northern Italian city of Parma, featuring a new detective on the block, Castagnetti.

In a 20-minute interview for our December Faber Podcast, a Crime double-hander with Nicola Upson, Tobias Jones introduces his new detective and explains his fondness for bees; he reveals which writers and characters left their mark on him as a writer, in particular the influence of American crime writer Ross Macdonald; he outlines just what the Salati Case is; and he lets us in on what’s lined up for the second outing for Castagnetti, White Death.

You can download our interview with Tobias Jones here. Our interviewer, George Miller, also filmed this short piece.

The Salati Case is available now in paperback.

Published in Summer ‘09, Granta 106: Fiction Special included an extract from Paul Auster’s new novel, Invisible. Granta Editor John Freeman visited the author in New York and recorded an exclusive interview.

Granta Paul Auster Interview from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

Granta 108: Chicago is now available in shops and directly from the Granta website.