Against all this it can be argued that readings are the ‘purest’ form of book-advertisement: the book speaks for itself. True in theory, but readings are rarely just readings. According to how they pitch their introductions, authors can lard their renditions with as much baloney as they like. There are also the questions which follow the readings. Some authors avoid them; having submitted yourself to public exposure, why submit yourself to public dissection? But in for a penny in for a pound. Since it’s often beyond me to discuss my work in any structured way—spare me the straight ‘author talk’—I prefer to be drawn out by questions. But it’s a perilous procedure. It’s here that you encounter the lunatic fringe of your readership, or the man who has wandered into the wrong event, or the unrecognized figure from your past …
I suspect most people go to readings out of curiosity. Authors are not very visible and the reading public has an urge to witness these usually closeted creatures (there are exceptions: I once read to the English staff of an illustrious university, plainly flummoxed to behold a living author). And the process is reciprocal. I like to see my readers, it’s good to know they’re there. That they should appear at all on a wet winter’s night is really quite miraculous. And an encouraging word from one of them is worth more than anything the literary pages can afford.
Enjoyment, for both author and audience, perhaps depends most on the physical space provided. The cosy notion of the casual, huddled storytelling with perhaps some mulled wine on offer, invariably results in embarrassed discomfort. Then there are the noises off. Did nobody know there would be that thronged reception in the adjoining chamber of the Civic Suite? Bookshops, favoured for obvious reasons, often make appalling auditoria. So do tents.
The solo reading is really a species of theatre, which, given the right accompaniments—good acoustics, good seating, stage, lighting, microphones, concentration—can work wonderfully well. The best venue I know, the annual Harbourfront Festival in Toronto, provides all these things, attracts large audiences, and I believe no author appears there without feeling their work has been paid the immense respect of being offered a sense of occasion.
This is no Carnegie Hall complex, just a plea for professionalism. I suspect that the reality of readings will remain makeshift and multifarious, a thing of unpredictable splendours and miseries. How marvellous to read to this packed house in Canada—while forgetting that night in Covent Garden when no one showed up. The ego is fleetingly boosted. But the main lesson, which perhaps you can’t so rapidly learn at your desk, is humility. I shall always remember a question from a youngish member of an audience in Yorkshire. Why had I chosen that particular passage to read? I gave an adequate answer. ‘No, no, what I meant was, why did you choose that particular author?’
Required reading for John Major’s government, 1996.
I DO LIKE TO BE BESIDE
THE SEASIDE
NICE, 1997
Whenever I’m asked to speak or to write in broad terms about my work, or to give my views about writing in general, I find myself saying much the same things. Every interviewed writer knows the experience of having to give yet again a familiar answer to a common, familiar question: on the one hand it can be tedious; on the other, to concoct a different answer would be arbitrary and flippant. My repetitions haven’t altered much over the years, and, whether this is a good thing or not, it has the virtues of consistency and economy—writers can perhaps say too much about writing.
In 1997 I was asked to give the formal ‘plenary’ address at an annual conference, to be held in Nice, of French academics—the Société des Anglicistes de L’Enseignement Supérieur; a somewhat intimidating request softened by the appeal of the location, which also helped me to my subject matter. The theme of the conference was ‘L’esprit des lieux: passages et rivages’. I’d recently published Last Orders and it seemed to me that there might be a pleasant frisson in talking about the English seaside, which in my novel really means Margate, while visiting the French Riviera and, as it turned out, staying in a hotel on the Promenade des Anglais.
It remains my only formal lecture. I’ve redelivered it since, in slightly changed form (sometimes with the subtitle The Place of Place in Fiction), at Oxford and at Yale, and I’ve drawn on it in part, whether in speech or in print, on other occasions and in other contexts. It proved to be a useful exercise in gathering together my thoughts at the time about the writing of fiction, but I don’t think these have changed much since, or indeed were ever greatly different before.
I’ve made some small alterations for the purpose of this book, but have kept mainly to the format of the original spoken address to an audience in Nice. As it was then my latest novel, the lecture dwells particularly on Last Orders, but in subsequent versions it’s not been difficult to incorporate something about The Light of Day and Tomorrow.
One of the lecture’s articles of faith is a belief in the local as the route to the universal, combined with a belief that in the local (including those seemingly familiar localities, ourselves) the strange and the dislocated are never far away. The Light of Day is arguably an even more local novel for me than Last Orders. It’s set in Wimbledon, just one postcode away from my own patch of London, and as settings go it could hardly seem more unthreateningly normal. But the novel deals with some radically dislodged worlds—the world of prison, for example, and of refugees. In any case it deals with that capacity in us all to step, without physically going anywhere, into unsuspected zones; to cross, for better or worse, lines of inner geography.
Tomorrow is set in Putney—also adjacent, in another direction, to Wimbledon. Despite appearances, no territorial programme is at work here. In fact there’s little about Putney in Tomorrow, rather more about Herne Hill, and about several places beyond London. But what’s true of Wimbledon is also true of Putney: it’s a commonplace enough setting for two factors to be at work—both the sense of specific location and the sense that, within the broad range of suburban existence, we might be anywhere.
The suburbs, which, even more than the seaside, seem to exert a hold on my work, aspire to be indistinguishable and unremarkable, as bland as each other, but, whatever else they are, they’re densely populous: the great dormitories of humanity, rich with its privacies and dreams. This is the essential atmosphere of Tomorrow, which could be said to be set not even in Putney, but all inside one home, even inside one bedroom in that home, where, as a wakeful wife lies one night beside a sleeping husband, both dreaming and an intense nursing of secrets are going on.
Between Wimbledon and Putney is the beguilingly named Putney Vale. Most of it actually consists of a cemetery (next to an Asda supermarket). It’s here that George Webb goes in The Light of Day, charged with the far-from-normal task of placing flowers for Sarah Nash on the grave of the husband she murdered. When I went there myself to check out the topography, I don’t think I had any intimation of being, literally, on the edge of my next novel, but, looking back, I wonder if a passage in The Light of Day wasn’t a kind of prefigurement. George, as a private detective, is a fairly nocturnal animal, and there’s a moment when he wonders, if at night we could ‘lift off the roofs of houses’, what we might see:
What would the aggregate be? More misery and hatred than you could begin to imagine? Or more secret happiness, more goodness and mercy than you could ever have guessed?
Tomorrow is certainly a novel that lifts the roof off one particular house to expose—via Paula Hook’s thoughts—its contents. It’s sheer fancy (though I confess I do sometimes think of my characters as having a life beyond the bounds of my books), but it would have been perfectly possible for George, based in Wimbledon, to have sat outside the house in Putney and asked those questions, as he actually asks them parked in the dark outside the very similar house in Wimbledon, where once a murder occurred. Quite unconsciously, I gave both houses the same number: 14. How different the inner geographies and the contributions to ‘the aggregate’ under their seemingly interchangeable roofs.
br /> In the following lecture Montaigne makes the first of two appearances in this volume. As the lecture itself hastens to point out, this was not just a sop to my French audience. Montaigne already meant a lot to me, though I had no idea at this time that I’d one day have the opportunity to write the introduction to Montaigne, as anglicized by John Florio, that forms the last piece in this book. The lecture includes a long quotation from Florio’s translation of the essay ‘Of Exercise or Practice’, which was left out when I was in Nice. I felt that Florio’s Elizabethan English might have been a bit tough on my French audience, Anglicistes though they were—or, despite their being Anglicistes, might have come across as just plain cheeky, given that I was talking about a great French writer in France. So it never formed part of the lecture as originally delivered, but it was too lovely a passage not to be inserted in the lecture’s later airings; or here.
I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside
The title of this talk borrows one of two epigraphs I gave to my novel Last Orders. The innocuous piece of alliteration is the first line of a music-hall song, written in 1909, which may be little known, if at all, outside the English-speaking world, but is still perfectly familiar in Britain today and still conveys, for all its Edwardian origins, the jaunty, fancy-free image we retain of the seaside. The full first verse goes like this:
I do like to be beside the seaside,
I do like to be beside the sea!
I do like to stroll along the prom, prom, prom,
Where the brass band plays, tiddly-om-pom-pom!
Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside,
I do like to be beside the sea,
And there are lots of girls, besides,
I should like to be beside,
Beside the seaside, beside the sea!
You get the gist. The other epigraph to my novel is from Sir Thomas Browne and is a little more grandiloquent.
Last Orders takes as its main narrative a journey to the seaside —a special journey, since one of the travellers is no more than a heap of ashes in a plastic jar, though it’s he who has instigated the whole trip. A journey to the seaside, though specifically to the seaside town of Margate, a now-scruffy, tawdry, if once-popular resort on the north coast of Kent. The contrast between Margate, facing the North Sea, and Nice, on the glamorous Côte d’Azur, could hardly be stronger, yet both Nice and Margate represent, if at different pitches, the same dream: the dream of worldly delight, of life as sheer holiday, sheer play. And they both embody a peculiar conundrum: that we should most seek out, most seek to fabricate this worldly delight, where our natural world and habitation—land—ends.
‘Place’ suggests land—solid geography—but when I look over my work I see that it features quite a lot this shifting, beguiling zone at the very edge of land. In my collection of stories, Learning to Swim, the title story is set almost entirely on a beach, and there’s another story called ‘Cliffedge’, which begins with this paragraph:
What is it about the sea that summons people to it? That beckons the idle to play and ponder at its skirts? What was it that built these ice-cream-coloured colonies, these outposts of pleasure along the cliff tops and shingle of the south coast? Pleasure in being on the brink? Pleasure in the precariousness of pleasure? How would they have become so strangely intense, so strangely all-in-all, these little worlds (the pier, the lifeboat station, the aquarium) we once knew for two weeks out of every fifty-two, were it not for their being pressed against this sleeping monster, the sea?
The ‘Cliffedge’ of the title is the narrator’s invention, to hide the real name of the seaside resort in the story. The place Cliffedge doesn’t actually exist; nor, in its compound form, does the word, but it’s plausible enough and it suggests, graphically enough, that dangerous fringe where one element encroaches on another. And of course it’s a short leap—if that’s quite the right metaphor—from ‘Cliffedge’ to that other title of mine and invented compound word, Waterland.
If I’m interested in place, and I think I am, then it seems that I’m also interested in the opposite of place, in no-place—or in places where fixture and definition give way to indeterminacy. It’s all there in that ambiguous, amphibious title. The world not just of Waterland but perhaps of most of my fiction is a world in which, sometimes casually, sometimes critically, the familiar surrenders to the unknown, the tangible to the illusory, the present to the past, the solid and safe to the uncertain and confused. But then—and don’t we all know it?—isn’t life itself always like that? Don’t we all live, more or less, in this perpetual borderland, on this shoreline where the sand shifts constantly under our feet?
A feeling for place can be found in pretty well everything I’ve written, and yet for a good part of my writing career I would have said that place, in the sense of geographical setting, was one of the least important aspects of fiction. Novels have to be set some where and that’s an end of it. But many years ago now I found myself writing a novel that would be called Waterland, in which the physical setting, a flat, wet region of eastern England known as the Fens, would play, ironically, a dominant role; would come to have the force, almost, of a principal character. I say ‘ironically’ for more than one reason. When I try to explain why I set that book in the Fens—and this is frankly something I’ve failed to do satisfactorily ever since it was written—one possible reason I give myself is that the Fens may have first attracted me precisely because they seemed like an absence of setting: their flatness and apparent emptiness were like an unobtrusive, uncluttered stage on which I could set my drama. And the novel itself at one point characterizes, or rather de-characterizes them, in just such a way:
… what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing? And what are the Fens, which so imitate in their levelness the natural disposition of water, but a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates to Nothing? Every Fenman secretly concedes this; every Fenman suffers now and then the illusion that the land he walks over is not there, is floating … And every Fen-child, who is given picture books to read in which the sun bounces over mountain tops and the road of life winds through heaps of green cushions, and is taught nursery rhymes in which persons go up and down hills, is apt to demand of its elders: Why are the Fens so flat?
To which my father replied, first letting his face take on a wondering and vexed expression and letting his lips form for a moment the shape of an ‘O’: ‘Why are the Fens flat? So God has a clear view …’
But this passage itself already amply hints that the simple, empty stage is not nearly as simple or empty as I’d supposed. The stage itself has become fascinating. The apparently vacant physical landscape is full of metaphysical implication.
Yet the Fens are, after all, a real place, and the Fens of my novel are, I hope, real—that is, authentic. A fair number of people who live or have lived in the Fens have told me, much to my relief, that, yes, I’ve pretty well got it right. And ever since the novel was published, there has been quite a contingent of people who believe I must have been born in the Fens or at least have lived there; whereas the truth is I have never lived there and have no personal connection with the region whatsoever. I was born in London, SE23.
But Waterland taught me two things about place. First, that, almost in spite of myself, I do have—it’s most apparent in Water-land, perhaps, but it’s there in other work of mine—a genuine affection for English landscape, which I don’t think has anything to do with the chauvinistic, or the picturesque or the sentimental. I think it’s more the case that whatever I might find wrong with my country—and I could compile quite a list—I think its bone structure is good, the land itself is good, and I recognize in myself and in my work this rather bony, primitive instinct we call love of the land. So, just as Waterland pays its tribute to the Fens of East Anglia, and Ever After pays its tribute to the West Country of Devon, so Last Orders pays its passing tribute to the landscape of the so-called ‘G
arden of England’, the county of Kent. Yet—to stress again that for all this feeling for the countryside, I’m a city-dweller—Last Orders ought also to make it clear that my affection is not just for landscape but for townscape too; and, since I’m a Londoner, that townscape is principally London.
The second lesson Waterland taught me is this. When I’m forced to disabuse those people who think I must have been born in the Fens, they can be surprised, disappointed, even sometimes a little suspicious, as if in setting a novel in a place I don’t come from I’ve carried out some kind of fraud. This reaction seems to me to betray a very common misconception about fiction: that it is, after all—isn’t it?—some sort of disguised fact. It’s the writer’s own experience dressed up, or the result of some deliberate documentary research. Whereas, of course, if fiction is really going to be fiction, it must involve some sort of imaginative act. And what else is the imagination than a means of mental transport by which we can move from familiar to unfamiliar territory? Thus, although the landscape of Waterland reflects a real, existing external landscape, the world of that novel, like the world of all novels, is nonetheless an imagined world, and its landscape is to some degree a landscape of the mind.
But then, of course, when people, Fenlanders or otherwise, say to me that the world of Waterland feels real, I’m actually very gratified, since fiction can’t do its convincing work unless it is taken as real. But that very margin of mysterious transition by which fiction can become ‘real’, by which the merely imagined can yet spring to life, only reminds us of that other borderline near which we all dwell, yet which, as writers of fiction constantly learn, is virtually impossible to chart: the borderline of reality itself—the borderline between what actually exists and what exists, yes, but only somewhere in our heads.