210. Amanda Craig

0:01This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:11Well behaved women rarely make history. Bloody difficult women do.

0:22This week's Difficult Woman is probably the most incredible writer you've never read, Amanda Craig, whose third novel was cancelled after a boyfriend became slightly litigious. Welcome to Difficult Women.

1:04Amanda Craig is probably the best writer you've never heard of and should have read. She writes devastating State of the Nation novels to rival John Lanchester, Jonathan Coe, and she's been long-listed and shortlisted forever and for my money should have won the Women's Prize, if not the Booker. And yet, and yet, Amanda Craig, welcome to this conversation. Your new one, High and Low, crackles with humour and your trademark acute but not judgy observation and is, like your previous books, addictively readable. what do you put it down to that your lack of sort of national name recognition national treasure status that i have to say it men like uh you know what's he called nichols who wrote um one day john manchester jonathan co david nichols i think you're absolutely up there if not better than them What do you put it down to?

2:09I don't know. If I'd had a penny for every time someone has said, I've just discovered your work, why have I never heard of you before? I would be a wealthy woman. I think it's partly still there's a lot of prejudice against women. We're supposed to only write chick lit if you write at all. There's still this tendency to take men seriously when you're writing books about the state of the nation, which sounds a very gloomy subject, but actually, as we know, is full of fascination and irony and comedy as well as tragedy. There's also a lack of supportiveness. I mean, Jonathan Coe, to my eternal gratitude, has been so supportive.

2:53I mean, there are men who go out of their way to give other people in their field a lift up. And there other men who shall be nameless who never do a thing. You know, it's just the way of the world. But men in general still tend to be a lot more supportive of each other professionally than women. It's sad, but true. It's odd, isn't it? Because you would imagine men would compete with the other literary lions in the firmament and not feel threatened by the lionesses, but it turns out that they're not. Jonathan Coe's given you a nice cover quote. It says, Craig anatomizes the state of the nation with wit and empathy.

3:32I mean, I'd be even more generous than that. I was reading this and I actually was laughing out loud on the plane back from Geneva yesterday. I think for those who haven't read your work before, and I have from The Vicious Circle, can we kind of canter through the novels which do address the state of the nation or kind of have a a theme to them or do a sort of anatomy of a group like authors or an event like Brexit. So just bring our listeners up to date with your oeuvre. Well, I always say what I write are literary novels with a plot. I mean, I'm really hot on plot. And I think that part of the reason why people don't read what they think of as serious literature is that a lot of people have stopped remembering that a novel is supposed to entertain you.

4:23It's not supposed to be good for you. So you've got to have fun. And I spend a lot of time making sure that I hope my readers do have fun. I have jokes, I have drama, I have murders, I have romance. There's a lot of stuff in there. And I basically taught myself to write novels like these by reading the great Victorian novels, people like Charles Dickens and Trollope and Thackbury's Fantasy Fair. And what really kicked it off was someone who not many English people read now, who's Balzac, who wrote La Comédie aux Mennes. And he too did exactly this thing of having characters who are carried on from one world to the next.

5:04He created a whole fictional world in 19th century France, particularly Paris, full of villains and heroes and heroines and so And I think it's so much fun. And that's what I'm trying to do. So basically from a vicious circle onwards, and a vicious circle was set in the last decade of the 20th century, i.e. the 1990s. I've written six novels which are mostly concerned with how individual characters are affected by things that are happening all around us, whether that is Brexit or the great gulf between rich and poor, or increasingly the thing I'm very preoccupied that everybody's preoccupied by, which is the gulf between the boomer generation, to which you and I just belong, and our children.

5:54and the millennials. Gen Z. You know what I thought you were going to say? I thought you were going to say then was the sort of reform agenda and immigration, because that's such a theme of your newest book. But I don't want to interrupt this sequence. So stay with the vicious circle. Immigration is also a very big part of it. And that's been particularly since a novel I wrote called Hearts and Minds, which was about legal and illegal migrants in the early noughties London, because that is still such a huge issue. And I myself can't decide. I'm not a newspaper columnist like you. I can't take a line one way or the other.

6:37I just see all this stuff. And I understand why there are people who are furiously angry about immigration, and I strongly disapprove of violence. I can understand why some are even violently angry. And I also understand the terror of people who just want to try and have a better life, who do contribute, who do pay their taxes, who are absolutely upstanding British sisters of one generation or two. So I understand all of that. And my aim is to make people think and feel and laugh and cry and just kind of give them a great time while they're doing that. Yeah, you do humanize every single character.

7:25I mean, it sounds like a pathetic thing to say and a sort of idiot observation, but from the woman who sits tweeting about how we should burn down migrant hostels to the illegal, as it were, in inverted commas, asylum seeker who may have committed an offense. I'm looking at your newest book now. You get inside the heads of all of them and you do not other anybody. And I think that's your great gift, actually. And I don't read Dickens, but presumably I haven't read Dickens, I should say. Does Dickens have a similar love for all his characters, however awful? Yes, I think he does. And he has more energy than I'll ever have, you know, and more genius in one sentence of Dickens than any living novelist.

8:13No, listen, we do not do ourselves down on this podcast. Now, Amanda, I feel I should say something at this point before we go on any further, which is that one of the running jokes of the new book, which is high and low, is the terrible Wi-Fi in North London. And you are sitting in your North London study and the Wi-Fi is terrible. So it is breaking up the whole time. You write about the effect on individuals of great events, cultural events and transitions and moments in history. Yes, but they're also kind of people's personal lives. So for instance, in High and Low, there are all sorts of things going on in these characters' emotional lives.

8:59There's a particular group of them who are actually all novelists, which may sound like a lazy thing, but was very hard work. I want to get on to you writing about writers in a moment, but can we just a bit more of your start? You know, I know you won the Young Journalist of the Year. You won the Catherine Pakenham Award. So you had success from an early stage. And then a vicious circle was when you became well known for your writing. But there was a bit of a literary scandal attached to a vicious circle, wasn't there? and you were going to tell us about the milieu that you set it in. I remember it being London, Journalists and Intelligentsia and Chatterati.

9:41Yes. Well, A Vicious Circle was actually my third novel. And I'd had, I mean, although you say I was successful from the first, I'd had a really brutalising debut with the very first one, Foreign Bodies, because I think people thought in some weird way that I needed taking down a peg, although I was not rich, I was not famous. I just won a couple of minor awards as a young journalist. And that was very horrible. But what it revealed to me was very much what Balzac's Lost Illusion is about, which was how corrupt the literary world is and how much it goes on what I call the fear or favour market.

10:23When somebody gets a review, it's either somebody doing them a favour or someone sort of punching them in the face. And I'd had quite a lot of the punching in the face stuff. So I was very angry when I wrote that novel. And I also thought it was a ridiculous world that had really very little to do with either journalism, which is a totally honourable profession done properly, or literature. You know, it was this sort of awful halfway house. So you're talking about literary journalism. The revenge novel about literary journalism. And it was... It was a satin. Okay, but you said you were very angry about how foreign bodies had been received.

11:07And A Vicious Circle was, you know, your reaction in part to that. But it was sending up these people who, you know, I've got this character who is one of my recurring characters who's also in Heinle, called Ivo Spunsch. And Ivo Spunsch, when he was teaching the heroine how to review, you know, sends you don't need to bother to read novels at all. Just read the first chapter, the last chapter, and a few pages in the middle. And then he was taking an opinion. You know, that's all that matters is just skinning it. nobody sensible reads a book, which had actually been said to me, I may say. It's really terrible, this whole business.

11:47I mean, now it's almost impossible for a novel to be reviewed at all. You may notice if you read the book's pages, as few people do, that perhaps one novel a week is now reviewed. 30 years ago, when I wrote A Vicious Circle, it was more like six or seven, and we didn't realise it, but those were the happy days. So High and Low is a direct sequel to a vicious circle 30 years on. So some of the same characters, particularly the older heroine as she is now, Mary Quinn and Ivo Sponge, recur in this one. And they're all trying to write their books in a very different kind of market, but still one that's full of antagonism, rivalry, bitchiness.

12:34It's a very mixed portrait, let us say, of the writing world. But Ivo says that writers are the best of the best and the worst of the worst. It's really what you see because this story is wrapped up in a very, I hope, propulsive thriller, which is inspired by the fantastic 1970s film Assault on Precinct 13. In that film, there's a police station that comes under assault by a gang, violent, violent assault with guns. In my novel, it's a street of little shops and particularly this cafe called the Literary Cafe, where these writers are sitting and tapping away at their laptops. They are under siege from people who You do have guns.

13:26I haven't got to the siege of the daily bread yet.

13:46Amanda, we can't really not mention the fact that Penguin cancelled A Vicious Circle because of a libel suit. Just say something about that. Well, this was the extraordinary thing, was that this man who was a literary critic and an ex-boyfriend called David Sexton, who I'd gone out with 15 years earlier, 15 years before at university, claimed that he had been libeled in a vicious circle as its villain. And he wrote this letter that any sensible publisher would have just laughed at. But I did not have a sensible publisher in Penguin. They got very scared by it and said that I had lied to them, which I most certainly hadn't, about who this villain was based on.

14:39He was based on about three or four people who I could have quite clearly, had it come to court, I could have said, well, there's this person and that person. It was a ridiculous case. But there was so much publicity that five other publishers then said, no, no, we are going to bid for this book. So actually, it turned out to be the most enormous stroke of luck because I got not quite five times the money I had from Penguin, who did not dare ask for their advance back, by the way. So they knew that they'd messed up. But I got paid so much more money, and I think it was at least three times more, that I was able to move to my present home in Cowden Town.

15:21Oh, so that ended very well. And I'm looking at you in your study. And it looked, apart from the terrible Wi-Fi, it looks like a most commodious room. It is nice. Yes. No, it is nice. And it was lucky it turned out well. But, you know, this wretched man has, you know, I've continued to be as unpleasant as possible. He became the literary editor of The Standard. And since then, I have never been reviewed in The Evening Standard. Even though he's left. He's left. He's left. Yeah, I know. But, you know, when he left, I think the whole paper stopped. They put fatwa on Amanda Craig. Yes, I think there's a fatwa.

15:58And anybody who writes a really awful review turns out to be a mate of his. You know, it is that boys club thing that, you know, women are still up against, but with knobs on. anyway. I don't know what his role was when official circle was kind of in its sort of pre-publication form, but he then did become a bit of a power in the land. And he was literary editor of the Evening Standard when the Evening Standard was a power in the land. And you can imagine Penguin just being, you know, folding in the face of his threat. He wasn't literary editor then. He became it after. So why was he taken so seriously?

16:38Why was this, does that have taken so seriously? You know, I mean, he's an intelligent chap and he can write well as a critic. But how did I draw a novel in its proof form? He'd read it in the proof form and had obviously thought, oh, this awful man can only be me. Such a strange story. We were both just students. Yes, it was a very strange story. By the way, have you fictionalised that in the course of subsequent novels? What happened to you? No, no, it's not worth it. It's too silly. Give him the oxygen or the energy. It's just too ridiculous a story. I mean, anybody who hears this story thinks it's mad.

17:20Do you think you can track back to that, the fact that you are not celebrated in the way that the men we've mentioned are? Do you think that is part of it still? I have no idea, Rachel. It's just a weird thing because you are not the only person who said this. It would be very good if I did get a prize at long last. I'm not expecting it or whatever. Because one of the other things that I've always tried to do as a novelist is to lift up other women novelists. And, you know, there are many, many people who I gave their first review to, their first quote, who I sort of pushed. And I really do try to do the opposite in a way of what's been, and I know you do too, but it seems to me that there are not enough of us doing that.

18:16And it's terribly important. And if you want to really stand on equal terms with men, I mean, I think it's conscious on the part of a lot of men, but it's just the way the world wags. It's interesting you haven't won the Women's Prize, and I don't know what you think about there being a literary prize exclusively for women. I think it's unfortunately still necessary, because although there's been a lot of hoo-ha about men not being published now. White men, you mean? White men particularly, but I think also just men. you still notice that when the Booker Prize is announced, it's still five times more men who win than women.

18:57Just every five years, one woman wins. And not necessarily the best one. I couldn't agree more. I think most Booker winners are totally unreadable. I did read Flesh and I thought that was David Sesley, whatever you say it, was readable. But not a masterpiece. Let's talk a bit about the state of publishing and the writing life before we get onto your difficult time. I mean, this is the wonderful setting for me anyway, as somebody who's published a few books. the writer's daily, I mean, the way you brilliantly capture the sort of horror and pleasure of writing, the daily grind of the writer and how kind of accidental any bit of creative genius is and how it's interesting.

19:59Most of the time you'll spend thinking about the next piece of cake or cup of coffee or what you have to buy in the metro, Tesco metro. And the things that writers say to each other, there's passive aggressive put downs. Ivo Spange saying to Eva, still scribbling. I mean, if someone said still scribbling to me, I think I would probably strangle them. But can you explain why it's so funny to say that to somebody? By men? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because Because it's so insulting and it implies that what you're doing is like, you know, no more than what a child does when it first gets hold of a pencil.

20:37And Eva, in this character in High and Low, is someone who is incredibly distinguished and she has, long, long ago, won some big prize, probably the book of ways. But he still thinks that he can patronise her. and you know she's old she's poor she's fallen out of fashion and she's a woman exactly so he can he can do that to her in a way he he's less successful than she is in a literary way but he uses his power and status and sex to assert himself over her exactly let's just talk a bit about your names the names you choose that they signal to the reader that this is a satire don't they? From Ivo Sponge to Lee Delamere.

21:29That's just a tiny joke. But it's obviously a service station on the M4 as well. Is that your way of saying, it's kind of knowingness about, you're not trying to get the reader to immerse fully into the world you've created. There's always another level in your writing in which you're present because it's your artistic vision or unsatirical eye that's guiding the reader through each bit of the book. And as you say, something happens every three pages. So it must have been a deliberate choice not to be immersive. No, some of those characters I do take very seriously and they are immersive. And they are so Mary Quinn and Rose, I can't remember what she was originally, Rose Crawley.

22:25She's a daughter of this guy in a vicious circle who was supposed to be the villain. And various other people, they aren't taken. Eva Stern, the elderly novelist. I didn't mean to say they're not fully rounded characters and they do. They have their own lives and everything, but it's Dickensian and you're giving them names that are slightly cartoonish or comedic to signal something, some of them. And what is it you're trying to signal? Ivo Sponge? Yes. Well, there's some characters are there to make you laugh. They are there as satirical figures, which is exactly what Dickens did. And Dickens also had characters who were terribly serious, who were the heroes, the heroines, you know, who were saying something that the reader needed to know.

23:14I just love novels that have lots of different layers to them. There's a layer of comedy, there's a layer of satire, there's a layer of pathos, there's a layer of deep, deep, deep seriousness. because I think that if you don't have those different levels, it's a bit like a piece of really wonderful music. You get bored. No matter how good that one level is, you want more than that. And again, I think that is something that some critics, if not readers, find very difficult to cope with because they tend to like things that are all on one note. You mentioned David Silois Fletch, which won last year's Booker Prize.

23:58I was actually giving a talk about it at my son's old school last night, and I'm a bit tired. And I hated that book, really hated it for a number of reasons, partly one of them being that I think it's quite boring. It could have been so interesting, and he makes it so flat. And part of that dullness is that there are no different registers between, as it were, high and low. There could have been comedy in that. There could have been, you know, he won't let you feel for the character. And I think that part of what, you know, good fiction could do is that thing that Dickens said, you know, it makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it makes you seething brilliantly.

24:44And, you know, that's surely what we all want. You know, obviously if something is purely a comic novel or purely a serious novel, it has to succeed within its own arms. But most of us, and most of us as we experience life, we don't experience it, do we? On just one level. You know, you can be in the saddest situation in the world and then something incredibly funny happens to you and you just, you know, you laugh, you know, it's just lying. I mean, I remember after my father died, going and, you know, sitting with my mother and we were all in tears. And then we turned on some, you know, comic film and we were suddenly just rocking with Lutfsa, even though we were in pieces.

25:31Yeah, that was his life. That was very nice. I mean, I remember when we thought one of our children was terribly ill. Well, he was terribly ill. And we sat in and for some reason we turned on the television and Dumb and Dumber was on. And, you know, in the midst of this most terrifying crisis I'd ever had, we sat on the sofa crying with laughter. We didn't know whether one of our children was going to live or die. And we were, I mean, it was the most surreal thing. Well, that's exactly it.

26:21Just going back, it's, you know, you've had a writer's life. That's what you've done your entire career, Amanda. And I say, you know, you write how I wish I could write and you write the sorts of books I wish I could write. If I had the energy and commitment and drive that you've shown throughout your career. I mean, you've got such a body of work to be proud of. And I put my money on recognition. I mean, you've had a lot of recognition, but proper recognition in the way that your male counterparts have had very soon. High and low is so funny. Ivo Spunge saying something to one of his other writers.

27:11men didn't read books by women because women write about feelings made me cry with laughter. And it's true. And the man who was the bad time who'd been had by all, another laugh out loud moment. I think you must be the exception. I think men must read and enjoy your books. Have you done a kind of poll with it? Well, I know I have male readers and That's great. But, you know, there is a kind of inner circle, I think, in the literary world. And I still get the feeling that it would rather I didn't exist. Do you remember that whole thing about literary fiction and only certain writers were admitted into the magic circle, you know, Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan or Sebastian Foulkes?

28:03And I don't think there was a single woman. And so suddenly we had Zadie Smith and then it was all right because we had a successful female writer and then suddenly none of the others were ever given any end line. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I'm afraid there is a situation at the moment. I think one of the reasons why the younger generation of men have not had the oxygen they should have, which is that the older men, the Julian Barnes and the Eme Kurens and Kazuo Shugubos, have behaved as if they're just floating on some golden cloud above everybody else. And they've never looked down and thought, that young chap in his 30s or 40s or even 50s or 60s is good and could do with a bit of encouragement.

28:46I mean, I've been very lucky in the last sort of seven years in that two of that generation in the women, Rose Tremaine and Penelope Lively, suddenly began reading me and giving quotes unasked, which was really wonderful and I think did help a bit. But, you know, There's not enough oxygen being given. And I'm really worried. My story is difficult and painful, and I've needed every bit of obnoxiousness and stubbornness to keep going. But I think for people who are much younger, it's truly terrible. I mean, my daughter, Lea, is now a novelist too. And to be honest, although I'm very proud of her, I did everything I couldn't to dissuade her.