Q&A with Tim Robinson

2023-06-30 | Q&A

Tim Robinson Northside House

A straightforward question first. When did you decide writing was something you wanted to do?

All my life and then, twenty years ago, realising that i was reaching middle age with no novel to show for it, I began writing.

Did you consider practising any other art forms?

Having made many programmes including drama, I wanted to be a film director but realised I wasn’t tough enough. I’ve tried dystopian fiction and Muriel Spark-type satire but it’s with my own eccentric take on historical fiction that my writing caught fire.

Orphans of Hatham Hall is a fabulous book – when did you begin it?

first started with a xenophobic contemporary country house setting but that felt too Royston Vasey so I moved it back in time, realising that most English battlefields – town vs country, free trade vs protectionism, open or closed borders, English vs the Irish – were pretty eternal. Nothing’s new in today’s battles for Britain’s soul. Well, much isn’t.

Are you strict with yourself in terms of words per day? Or do you give yourself freedom some time not to write and walk away? 

At first I stuck to Graham Greene’s thousand words a day rule but recently got so obsessed with writing, it’s more stopping myself from doing it all the time that’s the struggle. Putting together pleasing sentences is the only way to order my troubled mind, I fear. Beats Valium.

Are you a pen and paper or laptop man? 

Laptop. can’t write by hand anymore. Lost the ability.

Do you do many rewrites?

Thousands. Sometimes feel my life is a Sisyphean struggle, rolling the same words up the hill, letting them roll back again in a different order, then up again. It does get easier – your unconscious takes over some of the work – but easier is not the same as easy.

Without wanting to give much away, we first meet Digby in an exotic location but something is dragging him towards Hatham Hall? Was that central idea the germ of the book or did it come from somewhere else?

I love Jonathan Harker’s journey at the start of Dracula. All those ignored warnings, crazed peasant women with trembling crucifixes who drop water jugs on the floor when he mentions his destiny. But I wanted the threat to exist not out there but in the heart of merry England. The heart of darkness is always inside us and Mr Kurtz, he is the undead.

Your style is very elegant – would you ever consider writing us a book of poems?

What a lovely idea. How much are you paying me?

You’ve said that this novel deals with the present in the past – can you talk a bit about the dangers of that for budding writers. Presumably you’ve got to be careful not to draw facile comparisons etc/…Can you talk a bit about that?

Absolutely. I loathe allegory and anachronism. The past is a different country, they do things differently there but not everything. I think you can give a flavour of similarities to today that resonate on an unconscious level – the most profound place for all proper writing to reverberate – but don’t try to make things fit when they don’t. Sir P could be seen as a militant Brexiter except that many of them are free market absolutists whereas he is the opposite: his philosophy is rooted in his youth, in the protectionist beliefs expounded by the Tories until Robert Peel came along. He’s a son of the young Disraeli’s thinking, until the latter – always our most delightfully opportunistic of great men – decided to change tack to achieve the power he craved. Had I given Sir P the philosophical ideas of Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher and Niall Fergusson it would have made no sense. The Brexit alliance itself has always been an uneasy coalition between free market capitalists and those favouring protection and state subsidies (an English brand of national socialism) and it would have been insane for a novel set in 1886 to try to deal with those subtleties. Perhaps I’m guilty of overplaying the line that my characters fight today’s battles for the soul of England. It’s both true and untrue.

You’ve taken on race in the novel – which is brave. I know you’re braced for possible pushback but I found it worked superbly. Can you talk about the importance of boldness and tackling difficult subjects in the novel?

I passionately believe that as human beings we are much more than our designated political identity group. I am a middle class, white, gay man but have never particularly wanted to write about middle class, white, gay men. I was involved in anti-racist stuff from as soon as I could think. My mum worked for an underground movement that sent money to the families of imprisoned political prisoners in South Africa and I read with horror their letters to her describing the state violence they were subjected to. Later, I made award winning programmes about racist violence. I was also bullied and mocked for being effeminate at school and knew what it’s like to want to literally smack the mocker in the face but have to walk away because I would probably come off worse and wouldn’t be supported by the majority of onlookers. That’s an experience every black person in this country knows too much about. Like my black heroine, I also knew what it was like to discover strength in myself and intelligence and, being honest, enough unscrupulous ambition to defeat my enemies by employing cunning and deceit when necessary. I didn’t myself make the moral rules supposedly governing me, and I was prepared to break them when it was to my advantage. You can believe me or not, but my black character, Hortense, was the easiest character ever for me to write. She almost wrote herself. I knew how she felt and would react without ever having to pause over it. Various black creatives – Zadie Smith has said similar things in her essay ‘In Defence of Fiction’ – understand where I’m coming from because they feel the same about the limits of assigned identities. Dogmatists and you preachy people who, to misquote Leonard Cohen, don’t care much for culture, do ya will stick to their cherished dogmas and if, like some modern day Savonarola or Mao Red Guard, they wish to chuck me and my book onto a bonfire of the vanities, then that’s their privilege but please don’t expect me subtitle my next one ‘A Response to Just Criticism’ because I’m not Shostakovich and my critics don’t yet have Stalin’s unlimited powers. If you ever find that you’re censoring yourself because of fear of what someone else, whose views you don’t share, will say, then give up writing and devote yourself to PR.