An Introduction

I was bought up in the very last building in London. If you looked south out of the front window of our family’s flat, then you would see ten miles of built up, exciting city and hardly a single tree. But if you looked north, then it was low, wet countryside all the way through the eastern shires to the sea. My life ever since has occupied this borderland between the rural and the urban, the health and beauties of the natural world versus the seductive delights of city living. I live now in the industrial city of Birmingham but long to spend my time in a cottage on an isolated coast. Yet if I lived in that cottage then I’d want to move back to Birmingham. I’m still not sure if this restlessness is creatively productive or simply an aggravation.

My father worked both for the Co-op in London and as a groundsman at a sports club in the farmlands of Hertfordshire, so me and my brother were very much exposed to working class politics and to the less strident, more patient world of tree care and lawn maintenance. I had an immensely happy childhood. My parents were tolerant and open-minded ahead of their time, and were the kind of socialists who did not dismiss the bourgeois arts such as theatre, opera or literature as something for the toffs only but said, instead, 'I want my share of that'. I was never hit by my parents. I never saw them argue or drunk and I never heard them swear. I went on to enjoy a marriage which is now 30 years old, and to have two children of my own. My life has been very dull, in other words.

Maybe this pleasurable dullness is why my books have not been autobiographical at all. Who’d want to read an autobiographically based novel with a contented, optimistic protagonist who had known nothing but good fortune? As has been said, 'Happiness writes white'. It is not good material for fiction. Fiction likes distress, calamity, hardship, betrayal, dilemma, conflict. (What a thrilling list of words!) So each day as a writer, I close my office door on the happiness of the other rooms and delve into the darker corners of the universe, knowing full well that, in my case at least, life is sweeter than literature.

Read more ... The Prospect from the Silver Hill

Picture: © Basso Cannarsa