Revisiting your life in fiction

It’s twenty years since my first novel, A Mild Suicide, was published – years which have seen the most radical changes in publishing since the invention of the printing press. The rise – and fall – of the bookstore chains, the decline of mainstream publishing, the massive expansion of digital media, and the invention of electronic readers were all still yet to happen, in 1992. It was a world in which the smaller, more literary, publishers had not yet been absorbed by the bigger, commercial giants. A world in which first-time novelists might expect no more than a modest advance, but with the certainty of the next book – and all the other books after that – being published by the same imprint.

Of course, even then, change was in the air. The first draft of AMS was written on a portable Smith-Corona typewriter, although by the time the book came out, I’d switched to what was, at the time, a state-of-the-art Macintosh Classic, whose screen was no larger than that of the current (and infinitely more powerful) iPad. But it was a sign of things to come. I little imagined, as I explored the wonders of Spell-Check and Cut and Paste, that I was looking at the future of publishing. Because thanks to more recent developments in computer technology, my previously published work need no longer be consigned to the dustbin, as it were, of history. Instead, A Mild Suicide can join the rest of my books in a uniform edition which – speaking from an entirely unbiased perspective – I think is among the best-looking I have seen.

And so to the novel itself. It had been some years since I read it (not since 1999, in fact, when it had to be proof-read for the Penguin edition); I hoped it would withstand a critical eye. As I had no electronic copy of the work, it had to be entirely re-typed. This proved a good way of subjecting the book to close reading. Infelicities of style were immediately apparent. Solecisms could be instantly expunged. However, I tried to restrain the temptation to rewrite extensively. One’s early novels – pace Henry James – are an expression of the person one was at the time, for better or worse, and shouldn’t be tampered with too much. It may sound odd, but I couldn’t escape the feeling, as I read, that this was a novel written by somebody else. It was like looking through an old photograph album, and finding a picture of oneself in unfamiliar clothes, and with a different hairstyle. ‘My God,’ one thinks. ‘How young I was… and weren’t the fashions hideous?’

The strangeness of the experience was compounded, in the case of this novel, by the fact that it concerns events which took place fifteen years before it was published, and so I found myself revisiting not one era of my past, but two. A Mild Suicide is set in 1977, and revolves around a group of postgraduate students at Edinburgh university. It’s a story about love, and about not always getting what you want. The characters spent a lot of time talking about art and literature, but don’t have much clue about how real life relationships work. Re-reading the novel brought back sharp memories of that strange, slightly chaotic time, just before one settles down to more adult preoccupations, like marriage and children. I found myself envying the freedom my characters had, to make a mess or otherwise of their lives, at the same time as feeling some wry sympathy for the hell they were putting themselves through.

Perhaps because it is about a very specific time (the Summer of Punk, one might call it, for want of a better description), AMS has a feeling of intensity – almost of rawness – that makes it different from any of my other novels. Reading it now, I find myself instantly transported back to that era, with its self-consciously nihilistic attitudes:

As Catherine crossed North Bridge Street on her way up to the university, a girl in tartan trousers and a black T-shirt inscribed with the word DESTROY asked her for a light, then ambled off with her companions, all dressed to kill in bondage gear. Catherine watched their stately progress along the street. Pale warriors. ‘I think the end of the world is at hand,’ she said to Saul in the subterranean tea-room of the University Library.

Of course it wasn’t all pretentious posturing. By the late seventies, the ‘writing was on the wall’ (as one of my characters remarks) for the generation that had grown up during the 1960s. Ivory towers were crashing down, never to be rebuilt. Winters of Discontent were on the horizon.

The decade was not yet over, but already there was a feeling things had been played out. It was the end of an era, apparently. The end of the postwar boom. The end of the sexual revolution. Everything seemed tainted with a sepia wash of nostalgia.

It’s this faintly exhausted, fin de siècle mood that the novel sets out to capture, and which comes across most strongly when I read it now. It is of course a novel about growing up, and about learning that life isn’t always the way it’s portrayed in books. The person who wrote it – a harassed mother of two, tapping away on her Smith-Corona in a Deptford council flat – was already a world away from the slightly brittle young woman of those Edinburgh days, whose chief concern (apart from writing essays) was trying to maintain the appearance of sophistication in circumstances – usually of her own making – that seemed likely to expose her as anything but.

Yes, I couldn’t be happier that my difficult ‘first child’ is once more to see the light of day. Because books don’t die when they go out of print, although it can sometimes seem like that to the writer. Editing this novel for re-publication has been, for me, like opening a door into the past, with all its sharply felt joys and aching regrets. I can’t expect that others will feel the same way – but I hope that some of the things the book tries to say about being young, and making mistakes, and falling in love, will resonate with a new readership.