Interview: Clare Morall, author of The Roundabout Man

Published on Saturday 18 February 2012 00:00

33 agents turned down Clare Morrall before the Man Booker proved them wrong. She tells SUSAN MANSFIELD about her latest novel

THE music room of a Birmingham prep school: an upright piano, with a teacher’s chair placed for optimum view of pupil, keyboard and music. A rack of violins. The sound of a piano being played inexpertly in a neighbouring room. The smell of shoe polish and pre-lesson nerves.

Clare Morrall’s classroom seems an appropriate place to be talking about childhood and how it shapes adult life. While the raucous sounds of a primary school at lunchtime erupt around us, we talk about Quinn Smith, the eponymous protagonist of Morrall’s new novel, The Roundabout Man, a man trying to escape the shadow of a very strange childhood.

Morrall’s first novel, Astonishing Splashes of Colour, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003. Famously, it had been turned down by 33 agents, and was published by small Birmingham-based Tindal Street Press with an initial print run of 2,000. Morrall, then 51, swiftly found herself cast as the plucky outsider, contending for Britain’s biggest literary prize with the likes of Margaret Atwood and DBC Pierre (who won).

Since then, she has kept up a steady output of critically acclaimed books – The Roundabout Man is her fifth – while continuing to work as a music teacher. Businesslike and practical, she says she is “not a hugely ambitious person”. But her books stand apart from the crowd, because of the people in them – troubled, awkward individuals, the kind of well-rounded characters who don’t ask to be liked.

Characters such as Quinn Smith, who lives in a caravan on a roundabout off the M6 eking out a living from what others throw away and the kindness of staff at the nearby service station. “I always thought a round- about would be quite a nice place to live,” says Morrall, half-smiling. “If it was a big motorway roundabout, you could live there and nobody would know. It would be a bit like living in a lighthouse [home to the protagonist of her second novel, Natural Flights of the Human Mind].”

Quinn is a refugee from his past, particularly from The Triplets and Quinn adventures, the best-selling series of children’s books written by his mother and based on himself and his three sisters. Not only was he bullied by the domineering triplets, and neglected by his mother – who preferred the fictional versions of her children to the real thing – he is frozen in the nation’s collective memory as the loveable four-year-old stooge in his sisters’ adventures. In adulthood, the only future he could imagine for himself was as a tour guide in the family home, and a brief, unhappy marriage to one of his mother’s adoring fans. You can hardly blame him for walking out on it all for it for a caravan on a roundabout.

But Quinn’s past is about to creep out of the woodwork. The novel moves effortlessly between his present day life, tentatively building relationships with the staff at the service station, and flashbacks to his childhood. “I’ve tried and failed to write books which are chronological,” says Morrall. “I think we are the sum of everything that we’ve experienced.”

Quinn is an eccentric, but he’s also self-contained, not a character one warms to immediately, perhaps because his past has left him less than ready to show warmth to others. Morrall does this kind of person very well, from Kitty in Astonishing Splashes of Colour to Asperger’s sufferer Jessica Fontaine in The Language of Others. “I’m interested in odd people. I think that just because someone is eccentric or has difficulty with communicating doesn’t mean that the person within is not a nice person. People are never straightforward – this is about the complexities of human nature.

“I’m interested in people on the edges looking in. People who are not quite in the centre of things often get a more interesting perspective. They see things slightly differently.” Talking to Morrall, the word which keeps coming up again and again is “perspective”.

“I was never going to be the sort of person who was going to write about normal everyday life, people having affairs, that sort of thing. I know people like to write books about the state of the nation or the state the world, I’d rather see that from a different angle. The books I enjoy reading need to do that as well. Sometimes I’ll read a book and think: ‘That was a good book, but what was the point of it?’ I always want a different perspective. You’ve got to do something a bit more startling, a bit out of the ordinary.”

At the same time, The Roundabout Man offers a sharp eye on ordinary life. Its locus is a motorway service station, a faceless, non- destination of the 21st century, built to service people in motion. The backdrop is credit-crunch Britain. In this, it is reminiscent of another Birmingham writer discovered by Tindal Street, Catherine O’Flynn, whose first novel What Was Lost – set largely in a shopping mall – went on to win the Costa Award in 2007.

“When you think of places like service stations, you think of inhuman piles of bricks on the side of the motorway. I like the idea that they are a community of people in their own right, though we don’t think about that very much because we’re just passing through. It’s about how somebody like Quinn draws out the humanity in them.”

She says she was also fascinated by children’s books, the kind which endure and achieve worldwide popularity not necessarily because they’re well written, but because they perpetuate a nostalgic world-view which parents and grandparents love, a kind of perpetual 1950s where intelligent children have great adventures, but come back in time for lemonade and macaroons.

Then there is the potential disjunction between the fictional world of such books and the real lives of those involved. Edith Nesbit, author of The Railway Children, lived in a ménage à trois with her husband and his mistress, whose two children she raised as her own. AA Milne’s son, Christopher Robin, protested as an adult about the use of his name in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. Enid Blyton was described by one of her daughters as a troubled and difficult woman “without a trace of maternal instinct”. “I’m sure everyone will say the book is based on her, but actually I didn’t read about her until after I’d written it,” says Morrall.

Childhood may shape us, she says, as the sounds of the playground filter in through the music room window, but it doesn’t cast the future in stone. It’s more complex than that, and here is the kind of complexity that writers revel in. “Childhood is a significant part of everybody’s life, and we all look back but I don’t think we necessarily see things correctly. You can see things with a rosy glow – or the opposite, that everything that happened was terrible. In most cases, it’s not an excuse for a person’s behaviour.”

Never is this more true than in the case of Quinn’s troubled mother, Larissa. When Hetty, one of the triplets, discovers that she lost her two brothers during the Second World War, she says to Quinn: “It explains her, but it doesn’t excuse her.” “Some people are able to move on, make decisions in other directions,” says Morrall. “You can look at what happened to her and say, that’s why she was how she was, but it doesn’t excuse her appalling behaviour.”

As a teacher, Morrall is fascinated by children. They constantly surprise her and amuse her, she marvels at the sharpness of their group dynamics, the ways they respond to discipline. When a timid face at the door asks to borrow some Grade Two piano music, she is told: “If you don’t bring it back, I really will have to shoot you.” She’s joking, of course. Probably. “I like the world of children,” she says. “Often they have a different perspective (that word again) on things from what we would expect.”

Morrall herself grew up in a rambling house in Devon, one of four siblings. “But we tended not to meet very often, we did our own thing, just argued at meal times! I read excessively: fiction was always the world where I was.” She wrote a lot too, at least until she reached her teens and fell in love with music. In her thirties, a single mum with two daughters, she took up writing again.

Over the next ten years, she wrote four novels, always beginning a new one as she submitted the last to a raft of publishers. All were rejected. Why did she keep going? “I saw it as good for me. I believe that deep intelligent thought is good for you, it removes you from everyday life. I was better for having done it.”

Even she was beginning to have doubts that Astonishing Splashes of Colour would see the light of day. Then came the Booker Prize. “We had a wonderful time. It was a new world for me and Tindal Street. All the other writers were there with their publicists. It was nice being people who were naive, innocent. I had no aspirations about winning it at all. I think winning might have killed me.” There it is again, the outsider’s perspective, which sees everything a little differently. Both startling and wise.

• The Roundabout Man, by Clare Morrall, is published by Sceptre, £17.99.

Logged in as:

Comment here. Start typing your comment here:

Post comment

Please adhere to our Community guidelines

Your view

Please sign in to be able to comment on this story.