Lesley Glaister has written numerous novels, as well as short stories, drama and poetry. Alongside her writing she has worked as a tutor and mentor in Creative Writing in settings ranging from Crete to The University of St Andrews. Her most recent novel, A Particular Man, is set in the 1940s, and looks at love, marriage and sexuality in the post-war period. Find out more on her website.
Jane Rogers: Congratulations on your 14th (??) novel, Lesley! It’s a completely engrossing read, and your characters continue to haunt me, especially Starling and Aida, that unlikely couple who almost certainly will not live happily ever after.
My first question is probably foolish, but I found myself puzzling over
whether the ‘particular man’ of the title was Starling, or the absent Edgar?
Lesley Glaister: Thank you, Jane. It’s my 16th
or 17th novel, depending on whether you count my YA novel, Aphra’s
Child. The title: A Particular Man, came late. I had several other
working titles including A Hole in the Corner Affair – but no-one else
seemed to like that! A Particular Man
jumped into my mind while I was washing up one evening and it immediately felt
right. It has both the meanings that you suggest. Starling is a particular man,
of course, and he’s the particular man Aida falls in love with. But in a larger
sense, the particular man who drives the whole dynamic of the novel is the
absent Edgar.
JR: Speaking of Edgar - one of the things I love in the book is that everyone has their own story and secrets; Clem’s affair with famous artist Corin; Starling’s forbidden homosexual love for Edgar; Aida’s attraction to Starling which she tries to blot out by getting engaged to Neville. But the link between all the characters is Edgar, as son, as brother, as beloved comrade. And he is dead, and remains a total mystery. We have no idea if he returned Starling’s love, and even Starling doesn’t know. What made you decide to keep such a key character blank?
LG: Ha, good question! It wasn’t a decision. When I set out to write this novel, which has connections with Blasted Things, set twenty-five years earlier, I intended that Edgar, who was an infant in that novel, should be a central character. I kept trying to write scenes for him but he remained stubbornly inanimate. I couldn’t breathe life into him, or see him or hear him, and eventually I realised he was dead. For me writing is full of discoveries like this, rather than decisions. But I did decide to leave ambiguous the question of whether Starling’s love might have been requited if Edgar had lived. I think it would or might have been, but Edgar died so, like Starling, we will never know.
JR: Your writing is wonderfully vivid, transporting the reader instantly into the scenes and characters’ feelings you describe. Here’s an example taken at random:
Aida hurries out of the hammering rain into the puddled shelter of St
Pancras. As arranged, he’s waiting outside W H Smith, and her heart jerks like
a bad dog on a lead.
How much revision does it take to achieve this kind of economy and joyous
precision?
LG: Thank you! That is a huge compliment coming from a writer of your calibre. The honest answer is that those kind of similes and metaphors just seem to come naturally. Like many writers (and, of course, many people who aren’t writers) I tend to think in metaphor most of the time. Sometimes I drive myself mad with my habit of always thinking things are like this or that other thing. I have to work much harder at revising other elements of the narrative though: scenes where people have to move and act, dialogue, shifts through time etc. I always cut huge swathes in the editing process, and hone and sharpen scenes to try and rid them of any flab. I always like to be utterly certain of each character’s motivation at any one time – even if they aren’t sure of it themselves.
JR: The novel is set in 1946 and also refers back to the war years and to the experiences of prisoners of war in Singapore. You don’t acknowledge any sources, but I’m guessing you did a huge amount of research, because the post-war world you conjure feels totally authentic. The menus are a particular delight (lobster mayonnaise and chocolate meringue!) and there are lots of details which are new to me, e.g. the choice of demob suits offered to ex-servicemen. Can you tell us a bit about researching the background?
LG: One of my main sources was
a box of family memorabilia. This includes photographs, letters, and artefacts
relating to my father and his family. My dad was a Far East Prisoner of War in
World War 2, a fact that was never spoken about in our family while he was
alive. It was only after his death that I became fascinated both by his
experience and the silence that surrounded it. In 1994 I wrote a novel called Easy
Peasy, which is about that silence within a family. At the time I did a fair amount of research,
met a friend of my father from his time in Burma, read letters and newsletters written
at the time. The tobacco tin of sketches in A Particular Man, was a real
thing, though in real life it was a secret diary written on minute scraps of
paper, also wrecked by a trapped ant. I find this idea very resonant. A letter
from Edgar that Aida reads out loud to her mother is, in part, a letter that my
father sent his mother when he was on his voyage to Singapore. There were also
letters from my dad’s sister Kitty, who was killed during the Blitz and I was
keeping her in mind for the character of Aida – though of course I never knew
her.
As well as this family research, I also read reams of fiction set (and preferably written) during or shortly after the war as well as social histories. I watched films and TV documentaries and visited the Imperial War Museum. From all of these sources, I magpied away details of everyday life, such as those you mentioned, and the vocabulary of the times too. And of course I spent a lot of time Googling!
JR: I very much enjoyed the unsent letters from Aida to Starling. It’s a clever way of letting the reader into her thoughts. You also have Starling’s diary entries to reveal his inner feelings. But the larger part of the novel is written in the third person, from the restricted points of view of Aida, Starling and Clementine. How did you arrive at that writerly choice?
LG: Point of View is one of my obsessions and that close third person viewpoint is my favourite position from which to write. It means there is as little of the narrator showing as possible and all the narrative is filtered through the consciousness of the character in question. Sometimes, because of this restriction, it can be frustrating. For instance, I might think up just the right word, or image, but know that it wouldn’t be in the character’s vocabulary, or experience. With each novel I write I tend to wait for the first inklings of a voice to arrive. If it arrives in first person, I’ll go with that. The novel I’m writing at the moment, which spins off in an unusual direction from this one, is in the first person. One point of view I haven’t attempted yet is an omniscient third person – it simply looks too hard to control. I enjoyed using the first person for the letters and diaries and found it gave me extra insight into the characters of Starling and Aida. It was also a way of getting through a great deal of story in a reasonably economical way.
JR: How difficult was it to write using the point of view of a gay man in 1946?
LG: Oddly, I didn’t find it hard at all. I did a fair amount of reading including from a book called Curing Queers: Mental Nurses and Their Patients 1935-74 by Tommy Dickinson, which was excellent. I also did a lot of Googling and I was careful to run it past a gay male reader to ensure I hadn’t made any real howlers.
JR: And, leading on from that question, where do you stand on the whole vexed issue of appropriation? Do you think it’s OK for writers to write about people from different cultural/racial/social backgrounds to their own?
LG: Yes I do! Of course, if a writer pretends to be something they’re not in order to write from a particular viewpoint, that’s wrong. If a writer writes cruelly or inaccurately or causes any hurt from their writing, that’s wrong too. But I can’t see why any human being can’t sensitively and intuitively try to enter into the experience of any other. Surely that’s part of what creative writing is about?
JR: I know this novel was originally slated to be published by Sandstone, and that Sandstone then went into receivership. Can you tell us about the bumpy road to publication?
LG: A miserable tale! It’s so hard to get a novel published these days unless one is already a best-seller or a new writer on the brink of being discovered. For those of us that have published several (or many) novels, none of which have won a major prize, or been turned into a major movie (or maybe even if they have) publishers just aren’t interested. We are quite simply, out of fashion. This is true in my experience of the major traditional publishers, at least. Fortunately, there are smaller independent publishers – Sandstone was one – which work on a similar model but have more regard for quality rather than simply profitability. Sandstone published Blasted Things and I’d signed a contract with them for A Particular Man before they went into liquidation. I was left rather in the wilderness until Bloodhound came to my rescue. They differ from traditional publishers in being more focused on selling digital and audio copies than hard copies of books, though they do produce these too. I am very grateful that they have not only published A Particular Man but will also be reissuing Blasted Things later this year.
JR: Finally – the limericks! They are great fun. Are they all your own work? I knew you were a poet, but I didn’t know you had a talent for limericks!
LG: They were fun to do. I sometimes
think of limericks when I’m out walking my dog – it seems to suit the rhythm of
my walking. Sometimes that rhythm drives me nuts. Most of the ones in the novel
are my own, though one is adapted from someone else’s and the one that Peter
quotes to Starling towards the end is, as he says, ‘an old chestnut’.
Thanks for these lovely questions. You have really made me think!
JR: Thank you for your generous answers, and for a fascinating novel! I think I like it even more now I know how closely it is based on your own family’s experiences.
A Particular Man is published by Bloodhound Books.
Jane Rogers' review choices for Writers Review:
How the One Armed Sister Sweeps her House by Cherie Jones
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh
On dramatising No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe
Jane's dramatisation of Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai, about one family's troubles during the partition of India in 1946, is currently on Radio 4. Listen here to the first of two parts.
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