Me for BBC Radio 4 Open Book: "Why put real people in novels? What gives you the right?"

Literary platforms don’t come lovelier than the column slot on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book with Mariella Frostrup, and the other week I took a turn on the subject of putting real people into novels: Marx, Freud, Tom Cruise, Tony Blair, Emperor Hadrian, Her Majesty... Many thanks to producer Ellie Bury for inviting me in. You can listen to the programme on iPlayer here and my slot is from 08:31-12:40. My text is pretty much as below:

If you call yourself a fiction writer, why put real people in your novels – rather than characters you’ve made up, whom you can claim as your own inventions? What gives you the right to appropriate the lives of others?

Well, for starters you might say that storytelling – from Homer’s time, to Shakespeare’s, and ours – has relied hugely on the compelling lives or legends of people who actually existed. And fans of historical fiction expect – even demand – the special pleasure of meeting historical figures on the page.

We all enjoy novels that mix famous individuals with fictional ones: Sigmund Freud treating Sherlock Holmes for cocaine addiction in Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution; Karl Marx encountering a serial killer in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem; Mohandas Gandhi popping up as a Boer War stretcher-bearer in Giles Foden’s Ladysmith. Cameos of this kind, short and sweet, play cleverly on one or two things we know for sure about eminent figures of the past.

But what about fictionalising figures of the present day? Tom Cruise might have been un-amused to see a version of himself in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, making small talk in an elevator with Ellis’s murderous protagonist. But, as far as we know, he made no fuss. I gave the young Tony Blair a walk-on part in my novel Crusaders, and I’ve never heard from the former PM’s lawyers, so presumably my imaginative work didn’t amount to any slur on Blair’s reputation. 

Many writers evade a debt to the actualité by creating composite characters, amalgamated from various traits of assorted real people – who, like Frankenstein’s monster, leave no identifiable fingerprint. That method runs into trouble, though, if any reader can spot the unmistakable shape of one real person – as when the poet Stephen Spender read David Leavitt’s historical novel While England Sleeps and saw a character based all too clearly on passages from his own memoir, World Within World.

So, this is risky ground for writers; and some might say that any intermingling of fact and fiction is an insult to historical truth. I began by asking, what gives a novelist the right? Marguerite Yourcenar, author of the masterpiece Memoirs of Hadrian, argued that a novelist possesses a mysterious faculty – she calls it ‘sympathetic magic’ – to enter the minds of others. But that won’t stand up in court against a charge of libel; which is why the wisest course for a writer still is to wait until the person they want to write about is no longer with us.

Strangely, the public figure of our time who seems above all to defy that wisdom is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. We’ve seen the well-known dramas of her reign depicted in Peter Morgan’s movie The Queen, and his TV serial The Crown. But Alan Bennett, in his story The Uncommon Reader, was so bold as to transport himself into the Queen’s head for a fanciful tale of how she discovers the joys of promiscuous reading by way of a mobile library parked in the grounds of Windsor Castle. In Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I, the monarch suffers the indignity of eviction from the Palace by a republican government and has to eke out an existence on a sink estate in the Midlands.

Of all people to find themselves so persistently fictionalised – why Her Majesty? Is it because the Royal Family, famously, ‘can’t answer back?’ Or because the Queen recognises her likeness in these fictions? Or, that she simply doesn’t care? Whatever the truth – as a fiction writer I must confess, I rather wish there were a few more like her.

BBC Radio 4 Open Book: 'Glad to be Unhappy'

The other week I was delighted to have another turn in the regular Column slot for BBC Radio 4's unmissable Open Book show with Mariella Frostrup.

It's a lovely opportunity for a writer to address some literary theme of their fancy with reference to current or recent events and one's own writing practice.

For a while at least you can listen to my latest effort on BBC I-Player here, between 10:03 and 14:05. My argument, as the producers pithily encapsulated it, was that 'unhappy books can help us have a Happy New Year.' And below is the text of my lesson.

* * *

"You must change your life. Don’t you think? That’s the customary message of New Year – that any pockets of dissatisfaction you’re carrying about your person are not just ‘winter blues’ – but, rather, – a reminder that the future is now; we have but one life; and the sands in the glass are running.

I imagine all of us who love books also look to them, at times, for help and advice – with our resolutions, our indecisions and predicaments. Every publishing year ends with the round-ups of ‘best new books.’ But come the New Year it’s usually old books that are on my mind – old and trusted friends I’ve come to count on.

In publishing terms, the notion of a book that’s ‘good for you’ is vested mainly in the non-fiction genre of ‘self-help’ – or ‘positive psychology’, since ‘the positive’ is what these books want to accentuate. I’ve never read Dr Thomas A. Harris’s I’m OK, You’re OK, or Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do it. But that’s not to say they wouldn’t do me the power of good.

A few years ago the Reading Agency actually persuaded GPs to offer ‘books on prescription’: an approved set of self-help titles for people experiencing various mental health issues. Sometimes a bestseller addresses a similar readership: like Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive, a layperson’s testament to how the ordinary problem of depression might be confronted.

Of course, depression is not easily dispelled by an £8.99 paperback, however insightful. I suspect a lot of self-help titles are targeted not at sufferers per se so much as interested readers who want some idea of how to prepare themselves for the worst. But then, good fiction gives us that, too.

The Reading Agency also recommends a number of fictional works it describes as ‘mood-boosting’ and ‘uplifting’ – from Poldark to Winnie the Pooh. But what really makes a book ‘uplifting’? ‘The good ends happily, the bad unhappily’ – that’s the famous definition proposed by Oscar Wilde’s Miss Prism. But I was reminded of old Prism recently when a poet friend told me that he just can’t be bothered with ‘gloomy’ literature – that poetry, for him, is all about making clear that life is good and the world is beautiful. 

I do endorse those feelings; but there’s more than one way to relish what it means to be alive. A book that brings solace is not necessarily one that tries to tell us that everything’s OK. Kafka speaks to many when he writes that books, rather than cheering us up, ought to ‘wake us up with a blow to the head’ and ‘affect us like a disaster.’  

For the characters in my novels, things tend to end disastrously. If I’m honest, I plan it that way. Life is good, yes, but one or two of the ineluctable truths of life are tragic. And as a reader I feel braced – uplifted – when a book shows me that these things just have to be faced. ‘Death,’ as Saul Bellow writes in Humboldt's Gift, ‘is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.’ 

We should all take our uplift where we can, whether it’s Bridget Jones or Jeeves and Wooster or whatever. But there’s a lot to be said, too, for the Kafkas and Becketts, the supposed merchants of gloom. I’m not saying that Waiting for Godot is a feel-good night out, but in the midst of its desolation is a huge moment of uplift, when Vladimir cries out: ‘Let us do something, while we have the chance!’ I accept that King Lear is widely felt to be a bleak sort of a play – all its wisest words coming too late to save the characters from their evil fates. But I can think of few more mood-boosting moments in literature than the stoicism of Cordelia when she’s facing the end. ‘We are not the first / Who, with best meaning, have incurr'd the worst.’ 

This is 2017, and it’s dark out there – cold, too – and it will be that way for a while. But we’ve faced it all before, and we’ll just have to face it again. On that score, the great books never lie to us."

My column on 'Politicians in Fiction' for BBC Radio 4 Open Book, recorded at Edinburgh Book Festival

The Open Book crew at Edinburgh, 17.08.2016

BBC Radio 4's Open Book, presented by Mariella Frostrup, is a terrific platform for literary discussion, and I was thrilled to make my first appearance on the show in 2015, discussing the centenary of Kafka's Metamorphosis with playwright Mark Ravenhill. Coinciding with the publication of The Knives, producers Nicola Holloway and Kirsten Locke offered me a treasured opportunity to write and deliver the show's regular column feature from a given writer on a personal theme; and as both Open Book and myself were at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Wednesday August 17, I got the chance to say my piece in front of a live audience.

You can listen to the full Open Book broadcast - my column (starting 00:11:30) amid a discussion chaired by Mariella, the panel being myself, Ben Markovits, Raja Alem and Nick Barley - here.

And for the boon, here is my text:

I’ve just written a novel about a politician. In idle moments I wonder if I’d have been better off making my story about a serial killer of kittens; or some job that’s equally popular with the general public – a traffic warden, say, or a bailiff.

This thought first came to me when I was describing the plot of my novel, The Knives, to a friend. As I told her that it’s about a fictional Home Secretary trying to manage the multiple daily crises that come with his job – I could see she looked troubled, somehow. And when I was done, her first question was simply: ‘Are we supposed to like him?’

Our sympathies are important to us, in our reading as in our lives. And right now, as a public, we seem to hold our elected politicians in very low esteem – lower than a snake’s belly. Routinely, they are characterised as careerists, connivers, charlatans, backstabbers – fingers in the till, noses in the trough.

This is nothing new, though. There’s never been a time when politicians were very much loved or trusted – and literature provides all the evidence we need. Take PG Wodehouse’s novel Cocktail Time in which Lord Ickenham tries to dissuade an old friend from seeking election as an MP: ‘Have you ever been in the House of Commons’, he asks, ‘and taken a good square look at the inmates? As weird a gaggle of freaks and sub-humans as was ever collected in one spot.’

If fictional politicians are not portrayed as freaks, then they’re usually villains. Which is fine in a novel such as Michael Dobbs’ House of Cards, where Francis Urquhart is clearly a murdering psychopath and we’re supposed to ‘love to hate him’; or Robert Harris's Roman trilogy about Cicero and Julius Caesar, which is brutally honest about power and corruption but, conveniently, takes place two thousand years ago.

I’m not saying that people – including writers – shouldn’t be disapproving – even cynical – about politicians. In a democracy, that’s probably healthy. And it’s the nature of democracy that you will always find a largish group of people sweating with hatred over the fact they are governed by a party they themselves did not vote for.

It is, however, a problem for writers if they lose the empathetic gift they’re supposed to possess – the gift for seeing themselves in others, and others in themselves.

Norman Mailer, politically a man of the left, spent seven years writing a novel called Harlot’s Ghost about the C.I.A. – those bogeymen and women of the liberal imagination. When asked why on earth he bothered with such people, Mailer replied, 'They really are pretty awful. But on the other hand, who isn't?’

In The Human Stain by Philip Roth – set in 1998 when President Clinton was facing impeachment for sexual indiscretions in the Oval Office – Roth’s narrator Nathan Zuckerman becomes so wearied by the widespread damnation of Clinton’s failings that he imagines a banner wrapped round the White House, labelled to remind the public: A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.

If that sounds a little extreme, nonetheless I think it contains a truth. In researching The Knives I met and talked to a lot of politicians – and, to put it mildly, I found them recognisably human. They do highly demanding jobs in which, sometimes, in spite of best efforts, things go wrong – just like in your job and mine. To suppose they are indifferent to the consequences of their actions or inactions is to deny their humanity – and a part of your own.

We look to fiction for a true reflection of what we’re like – what Elvis Costello calls ‘the deep, dark truthful mirror.’ As writers and readers, I think we should try to see at least the shadow of ourselves in our politicians.

Edinburgh Book Festival 2016: Happy Days

I've had a lot of fine times in Edinburgh but this week's visit was the best, no doubt about it. Beautiful summer weather, for one, and it lasted until the morning of my departure when things took a turn back toward the dreich city we know and love. Above all, though, the events were fascinating, the company great, the sense of literary community hugely lively. The Festival Bookshop was even stocking my entire oeuvre, which I've never before seen all in one place outside of my bedroom.

My spot of Tuesday night chairing with Ian Rankin was great fun and surprisingly simple, just because Ian is a hugely assured and at-ease performer, with an audience of readers who are avidly interested in the minutiae of his work. In a world exclusive he read some manuscript pages from the forthcoming Rebus, Rather Be The Devil, which takes its title, to my delight, from John Martyn.

The R4 Open Book panel at EIBF, snapped by Jose Machado

Wednesday was a huge engrossing morning, beginning with a special recording for BBC Radio 4's Open Book, a symposium on the novel, politics and our times, with my friend and fellow Faber novelist Ben Markovits, winner of this year's James Tait Black Prize for fiction; the Festival's hugely impressive director Nick Barley; our emcee Mariella Frostrup; the recent winner of the 'Arabic Booker' Raja Alem; and your correspondent. My thanks to Kirsten Locke, Nicola Holloway and Di Spiers at Open Book for inviting me. Do listen in this Sunday August 21, 1600.

Mark Lawson, me, & Val McDermid (by Phoebe Grigor)

And on Wednesday evening I shared an author event in the Spiegeltent with Mark Lawson, who spoke feelingly and with impressive candour about the personal experiences that shaped his recent novel The Allegations. I chatted away about The Knives, and found the capacity crowd very engaged and encouraging. To my joy a French gentleman in the crowd (himself a novelist, as he revealed to me in the signing tent later) asked me to expound about Dostoyevsky.

Mark and I had the benefit of being chaired by Val McDermid, literary royalty in the locality and elsewhere, and I was quite stunned by the generosity of how fastidiously Val had prepared for the discussion, taking great care in the choice of questions and conversational linkages. A star, for sure.

The Knives & me at Edinburgh Book Festival 2016

The 2016 edition of the Edinburgh International Book Festival is now afoot, and I’m calling in next week. It’s a brilliant festival that offers a splendid time for authors: the set-up in Charlotte Square is really handsome and well-organised, the team first-rate, the hospitality lovely, and they draw terrific crowds of curious book lovers. I’m very grateful to have had invitations to present all of my novels there, this year no exception – my thanks to the festival’s first-rate director Nick Barley.

I have a hand in three different events this time round:

On Tuesday night I will be handling emcee duties for Ian Rankin’s event framed round the paperback of his most recent Rebus bestseller, Even Dogs in the Wild. That’s from 8:15pm - 9:15pm in the Baillie Gifford Main Theatre.

On Wednesday morning I’m a guest for a special recording of BBC Radio 4’s Open Book with Mariella Frostrup, involving Nick Barley and the novelist Raja Alem. I’ll be delivering Open Book’s regular author’s column, a piece I’ve written specially on depictions of politicians in fiction. That’s from 10:00am - 11:00am, again in the Baillie Gifford.

On Wednesday evening I will be discussing The Knives, and Mark Lawson his new novel The Allegations, in an authors event chaired by Val McDermid. Mark’s book is a reflection on real events, and the Festival brochure asks: ‘With such sensitive social contexts involved, what personal risks did the authors take in approaching the material?’ That event is 7:00pm - 8:00pm in The Spiegeltent, tickets £8.00 or £6.00.

So maybe I’ll see you there, do say hello, et cetera.