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Q&A with Jayne Swinton

2023-06-30 | Q&A

Was it always literature? What was it that led you into writing?

I think it would be stretching it a bit to call it Literature. As soon as I could read I just consumed anything and everything, starting with the contents of the bookcase in the dining room read end to end; mostly Readers Digest Condensed Books, (brutally cut down versions of mostly American best sellers. ) Alongside them I found the poems of Rupert Brooke and Khahil Gibran (an enthusiasm of my mother’s); novels based on the life of Mary Queen of Scots and children’s classics. This collection was enlivened by the deliveries of the Daily Express; Pig Farmer and Farmer’s Weekly (I was brought up on a pig farm) and my Scottish grandmother’s habit of sending us her Sunday Post when she’d read it, with its comic strips Oor Wullie and The Broons. She also inflicted on me The Friendship Book of Francis Gay which annually landed on my Christmas stocking like a brick, with an uplifting Christian anecdote or homily for every day of the year. When Dorset County Council sent me to a state-funded Boarding School when I was 11 (possibly suspecting I was at risk of growing up rather peculiar, as an only child 8 miles from the nearest secondary school) the boarding house and school libraries were a fresh source of literary rubbish, with James Bond and Malory Towers side by side. I didn’t voluntarily read much actual Literature till I was in Higher Education, when a media lecturer called Paddy Scannell informed us – (a bunch of would-be-cool readers with Hunter S Thompson and Herman Hesse in our bags) – that in addition to media we were going to do Dickens, Brontes, Austen, Tolstoy, the whole 19th century mob, ‘and you are going to love it.’ He was right about this student, anyway. I acquired – mostly shoplifted – the lot. I owe a certain Oxford Street bookshop – (no longer there – maybe their lax security was a factor in its closure) – an apology and recompense.

This novel – I wouldn’t quite call it a hybrid – because that would be misleading but it feels like it’s both literary fiction and a wonderful story. Were you thinking in those terms when you began it?

Not consciously, no. All I wanted to do was tell a story that effectively ticked both the boxes that I judged from my own reading to be essential – gripping narrative and appropriate style. Like my narrator, I have been a storyteller throughout my career, 20 years a newspaper journalist; then teaching media students to create their own narratives; helping them ‘find their voice’. I don’t like the phrase, which is now an over-used staple of Creative Writing tuition, and can encourage self-indulgence. But the best writers never lose sight of their readers, and balance these key elements.

In some ways I think of it as A Line of Beauty but ‘of the left’. It’s very expansive, covers a large span of time, and has a large cast of characters. Does that ring true for you?

It’s extremely flattering! Both narratives do cover a very large span of time but my characters intrinsically more ‘scuff of the county’ (as they say in Ireland) than Hollinghurst’s. Caroline and Alan, particularly, are Passing for Bourgeois on the basis of their elocution lessons. But Caroline is the more fluent; even seems to take a certain pride in her ability to slip between identities; extemporising swiftly in tight spots, while Alan is stuck, immovable, unable to escape his false identity. Hollinghurst’s characters dread social ostracism, which, in his world, is social death. In Alan’s , it may be real.

I love the details of the past – the power cuts, the radical politics. Presumably, you’re delving a bit into your own past with this book? Readers will probably want to know how much.

Dead giveaway of age, remembering the powercuts timetables of 1973! The scene where Caroline is dishing up Powercut Stew to a bunch of flatmates and hangers on in an almost pitch dark bedroom, where she suspects ‘there are people in her bed’; her doctrinaire Marxist boyfriend is overseeing the distribution of the food while he and Alan argue left wing politics and everyone else, including the dog, are just trying to finagle more stew, is taken direct from memories of evenings just like that. Student shared flats: That one was particularly sordid. Flushing the loo involved getting either the heaviest male or 2 average sized inhabitants jumping for a rope that went up to a hole in the ceiling, leading to the cistern in an attic to which we had no access, and swinging on it, accompanied by howls of: ‘Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight!’

One of the things I love is the friendship between your heroine Caroline and her best friend Nina. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a feminist novel, but it’s definitely a novel aware of what it was to be a woman in the 1970s – lonely, unless you had a Nina to support you. I feel you’re on some quite exciting ground here, that hasn’t been written about much, and certainly not so well. Can you talk a bit about that dimension of the novel?

It’s interesting that you say it was ‘lonely’. I call that perceptive of you as a reader. I certainly was, but I was well-prepped for loneliness – (see above re only child/isolated pig farm) – and accepted it. I did, in fact, have one actual friend at boarding school, who was also considered weird and snotty, and we’re still friends. I’m intrigued that you’ve extracted that thread – makes me think I ought to unpick it further. Girls were socialised to be in opposition to other girls, competing with them for male attention, but also expected to support and comfort when the inevitable happened and a girl was ‘chucked’ by the boy she’d been ‘going out with.’ (The archaic vocabulary – alternately both prim and brutal – is in itself intriguing.) My own ‘Nina’ friend was seen as even weirder than me, but she was extremely slender – Twiggy-slender – and could wear even 11 year olds’ clothes. When she was going out with a boy she had a clear run of the clothes drawers of the whole boarding house, and it was considered an honour to have your best frock sashaying out of the door as a mini dress on her. Thanks Chris – you’ve given me a starting point for another novel!

You’re using quite complicated structures of time in this novel – can you talk a bit about pace and how you get that right? It’s not easy to go back and forth as you do and still keep what your character, who works in TV, might call that ‘through-line’.

I must admit I kicked myself more than once for doing this instead of taking the nice, straightforward chronological approach, and I’ve found myself somewhere inappropriate for literary panics – like Tesco’s fish counter – suddenly thinking: ‘ ***! How does she know that? Did I put that bit in before the 9/11 attacks? Wait a second – did I scrub that bit – do I need to rearrange it?’ I needed to have two (much scrawled-on) timelines; one purely chronological, one narrative-based which can flip back or forward. I think it makes sense…

Your hero is a remarkably complex creation – sometimes sly, sometimes banal. Can you talk – without giving the plot away – a bit about why you wanted to tell his story?

It started with a school photograph. No – not my own. In fact, it was the video for the 1999 song Driftwood, by the Scottish band Travis. In it, the ceremonial taking of the school photograph is disrupted by a sudden massive storm, with all the pupils racing for cover and 4 young schoolmasters sit stolidly, getting soaked. It got me thinking about school photographs in the newspapers, with digital circles ringing the future prime minister, the future terrorist….. The coded messages of innocence we read into these pictures, the tragedies, the scandals we now know are to follow….I started a story then which was something about identity theft but it got too convoluted and I ditched it. But the image of a boy with too-long hair, ‘letting down the school’ who goes on to be notorious, stuck around.

Readers are often interested to know the little things. When do you write? Do you have a routine? Are you on a laptop, or are you a pen-and-paper person?

Definitely not a pen and paper person. My handwriting, a multiple-personality job at the best of times, went completely to pot when I had to get 100wpm in order to pass the shorthand tests for my journalism diploma. I’ve been known to address envelopes in shorthand. (It isn’t even good shorthand. It’s sprinkled with personal hieroglyphs.) I have an iPad and a large evilly-behaved iMac which I bought when I was head of faculty for the creative arts in a large South London College, and my iMac there was wonderful. Of course what I also had there was an IT support team and a mob of Music Technicians who all knew that when the head of faculty had ballsed up her iMac or her iPod again they could easily gain many Brownie points for sorting them out. Unfortunately Apple didn’t give me one of those people with the machines. That iMac, purely out of spite, I believe, wiped my iTunes library.

John Mortimer said that you don’t need to know the end of the plot when you start, but you do need to know what you intend to say about the world? Do you think that’s true?

Oh yes. I had no idea when I was turning over that idea about the windswept boy ‘letting down the school’ what he was going to do, but several years later, when I’d given his story an accomplice, it began to build. The one thing I was determined upon was that my narrator is not that cliché ‘unreliable.’ My narrator lies to everyone – except the reader.

Is there anything you’d say to young writers about beginning in this industry?

Oh, everyone you ask is going to say this but: DON’T GIVE UP. When you get another literary agent telling you they ‘just didn’t fall in love with’ your book , that they weren’t ‘passionate enough about it’ to take it on. Or – slightly oddly – ‘they don’t have the right brain for it’ just remind yourself how many literary prize winners, like Shuggie Bain, were rejected – in the case of that Booker winner, Douglas Stuart, 32 times.

OK, it would be really helpful if you were already famous, or notorious, or you had some really juicy gossip about someone who is famous/notorious who could be lightly disguised…… but you could save yourself the time and trouble of writing a book if you just blackmailed them.

But if you find someone with the clout and the contacts that few first time writers have, who believe in your work, such people are as gold-dust. Where do you find them? One method is to consider investing in a creative writing course. Shop around – there are plenty out there. What tends to happen is that even if you don’t glide seamlessly into a book contract (you probably won’t…) some of the people you meet will maintain contact. These people read each others’ drafts, critique them, sometimes start businesses – literary businesses – of their own. Sara Sarre of the Blue Pencil Editorial Services Agency and Chris Jackson of this Northside Press fall into this category.

The Curtis Brown course I attended now has at least 5 published (or awaiting publication) writers. Good luck!