Writing a different book every time – why I can’t seem to stick with a ‘brand’….

‘All your books are different,’ said a friend who’d just read the latest one. He meant it as a compliment, but I’m afraid that – given the way that the book world is these days – it’s a serious disadvantage. A cursory glance at the ‘three for two’ tables in any bookshop, or at the best-seller lists in any national newspaper will tell you this much: to be a successful author, you have to turn yourself into a ‘brand’. This, in a nutshell, means that everything you write has to resemble everything else; your best-selling book (which is usually, although not always, the first one) has to be the template for all the books that follow.

There’s a certain sense to this, of course – it’s much easier for publisher to market a series of broadly similar titles, rather than having to treat every book as a new departure. Easier, too, for book reviewers who’ve read an author’s earlier work to produce a snappy response – I should know, I’ve had to do it often enough, in my days reviewing for the Times. Still, I can’t help feeling that there’s something to be regretted about all this. Was fiction always this predictable, I wonder, or is it a recent phenomenon – another symptom of the much-lamented decline in publishing standards?

Certainly things have become more difficult in the past few years, if – like me – your books don’t fit neatly into one category or another. Of my five published novels, one might be (loosely) categorized as a ‘campus’ novel, one is a ‘coming-of-age’ novel set in 1950s Venezuela, another is a black comedy, and the most recent two might be called historical novels – the first being about war, with a nineteenth century setting, the second about science, set in the eighteenth century. I’m about to publish my sixth novel, and it’s different again: a murder story, set in 1920s London.

Yes, writing a different book every time can have its drawbacks. But for me there’s never been any other way to go about it. I’ve come to the conclusion that, far from being a random thing, there’s a specific reason for this. Because what interests me most about writing about any historical period – whether it’s the 1970s, as it was with my first novel, A Mild Suicide, or the 1780s, as it was with Variable Stars, my last – is getting the language right. This means immersing myself in the period, and particularly in the literature of the time.

So with The Dark Tower, which is set in South Africa in 1879, my reading of the novels of Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and the early novels of Henry James, offered valuable insights not only into how people of the late-nineteenth century spoke, and wrote, and thought, but also gave me a sense of the kind of books they read. When my heroine, Laura Brooke, is packing to go to Africa to find the grave of her lost love, she includes volumes of poetry by Tennyson and Browning, and a just-published copy of Hardy’s The Woodlanders; later, we learn that she has been reading another of Hardy’s novels: The Hand of Ethelberta, but ‘cannot get on with it’. These references are not meant to be just ‘period’ window-dressing, but to point to one of the novel’s themes, which is the way that people of the time (and indeed of every time) construe their experience according to prevailing literary and cultural models.

Looking back, I can see that what I was reading at the time had a shaping effect on the novel I was writing. Because while The Dark Tower certainly couldn’t be classed as a Victorian ‘three-decker’ (it’s much too short, for one thing), it does bear a resemblance, if only in the way the narrative unfolds, to some of those late-nineteenth century novels I had read and admired over the years. I hope it isn’t stretching a point to say that, with this novel as with all my books before and since, the form was as important as the style or subject; in fact, they were inextricably linked.

It was very much the same with Variable Stars, where the ‘models’ were drawn – naturally enough – from the mid-to-late eighteenth century. Richardson’s Clarissa, Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Goethe’s Elective Affinities, and Fanny Burney’s Cecilia were just some of the books that influenced, not only the style of the novel, but the way it was constructed. Again, I make no claims to having written anything as formally experimental as Sterne’s wonderful ‘shaggy dog’ tale, but there was certainly an element of Gothic romance in my story of star-crossed lovers.

Which brings me to my latest book. I’ve said in earlier posts that for me, the detective story is the quintessential literary form for the post-First World War generation. This is, incidentally, not to overlook the more experimental, and ‘difficult’, Modernist works of the period – by Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, E M Forster, Virginia Woolf and the rest – it’s just that the murder mystery was (and is) a popular form. Detective stories were read by everybody, from university professors to that mythical figure, ‘the man in the street’. Even Bertie Wooster had a passion for them.

And so it seems to me, in writing about the 1920s, in the immediate aftermath of ‘the war to end all wars’, I could have found no more fitting a genre than the ‘whodunnit’, in which death and destruction has a more manageable form. And I’m content to go on writing each book as a new departure, because for me that’s part of the fun. Although, ironically enough, Line of Sight is to be the first of a series. Maybe I can turn myself into a ‘brand’, after all.