Justin Cartwright interview: Out of the ordinary

Published on Wednesday 24 June 2009 14:53

I DON'T WANT TO BE A TEASE, BUT there's a scene in Justin Cartwright's latest novel To Heaven By Water that is so blatantly taboo-breaking that it's impossible to talk about without shattering one's enjoyment of the book.

Once it has happened – discreetly offstage but nevertheless devastating – and once the reader's jaw stops gaping, a few questions spring instantaneously to mind, "How on earth did he do that?" being the most obvious. But such is Cartwright's writerly sleight of hand, and so deep has he already taken you into his characters' yearning and despair, that you find your own moral codes being temporarily bent out of shape. Any writer who can do that, you realise, has to be a devilishly good one. But who else could?

Updike, for one – and that's the comparison most of Justin Cartwright's admirers reach for, perhaps in bewilderment that their man hasn't enjoyed anything like the American's fame. Although Cartwright has won a couple of significant literary prizes (the Whitbread in 1998 for Leading the Cheers and the Hawthornden in 2005 for The Promise of Happiness) and his novels have always had a steady stream of respectful reviews, it all hardly adds up to the full flood of acclaim you'd expect for a writer whom Allan Massie hails as "one of the best of his generation".

We meet in his north London house, where he ushers me into his spacious, suspiciously tidy study, where whole shelves are given over to Updike's novels (unsurprisingly: he wrote the introductions and afterwords to the new Penguin Modern Classics editions). He's tall, trim; at 63 he's reached the age when bald men who look after themselves start looking younger than their age. He's also engagingly intelligent, and good, gossipy company.

I forget to ask whether he works out at the gym, but it would be a safe bet. Leastways, that's how David Cross, the retired and widowed TV news anchor who is the protagonist of his new novel, spends half his mornings, and Cartwright's fiction often has discernible autobiographical elements.

Take Cross himself. Although Cartwright has never had such a job in front of the cameras, he's worked behind them often enough, whether in advertising, film directing (he made the 1970s soft porn comedy Rosie Dixon, Night Nurse, which he writes about, only lightly disguised, in his novel White Lightning) or working as media adviser for the SDP/Liberal Alliance. "I have a slight Scottish connection in that I used to direct all of David Steel's party political broadcasts. We became quite close. David was actually tremendous material, fantastically good in front of the cameras, obviously decent and honest.

"But no, he wasn't in my mind when I wrote about David Cross, though I am interested in the media and in fame and how the world is presented. I have researched things I knew nothing about – the German resistance, for example, in my last book (The Song Before It Is Sung]. But by and large, I like to start with what Updike called carpentry, you know, starting with something you know..."

With Cartwright, that emotional core includes growing up in South Africa, where his father edited the liberal-leaning Rand Daily Mail, and which he himself left to take up a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford in his early twenties. He's lived here ever since, and these days is happy to classify himself as "essentially a British writer" although he concedes that confusion over how to categorise him may have limited his sales in the past.

But he isn't purely a British writer either. True, To Heaven By Water has the keen eye for detail of everyday life (slang, adverts, fashion, even politics) in Noughties London that will one day make it required reading for social historians. But it also draws on Africa to push past this to the elemental things in society, as when Cross ventures out to join his mystical elder brother on one last safari to the Kalahari.

Cartwright still remembers the first time he went there himself. "I was still at school, and we went up to Mau (in Botswana] on the back of a lorry. We didn't even have a tent. We spent a month wandering around the Kalahari. I'm surprised, with what I know now, that we weren't eaten by lions."

You couldn't, even if you wanted to, draw any stronger contrast than between those September nights freezing in sleeping bags under the desert's star-dusted skies, and the frenetic media world that David Cross has left behind. In To Heaven by Water, the desert is what it's always been in literature – a place where one might escape, retreat from modern life's pettiness and either find spiritual solace or reset one's moral compass.

And Cross's needs resetting. His wife has died, and he and his friends are of that age when the final frontier is looming on the horizon, although this being Britain, none of them knows how to talk about it in anything other than an ironic way. His son and daughter, now in their twenties and each with relationship problems, worry that he doesn't seem to be mourning her as much as he ought, that he seems to be enjoying his new-found freedom a bit too much and will get involved with the very first woman who, impressed by his celebrity more than by anything else, tries to ensnare him.

As he tries to sort out his life, Cross keeps being drawn back to the one golden summer of his youth. He was at Oxford, where Richard Burton had staged a production of Faustus which he then had arranged to be filmed in Rome. Cross, and his girlfriend, are on the set; that summer they get caught up in the Burton/Taylor entourage as well as in their own heady romance.

Again, the scene contains trace elements from Cartwright's own life. He was at Oxford in 1966 when Burton played the lead role in Marlowe's tragedy with Elizabeth Taylor as Helen of Troy; Cartwright's undergraduate friend, the actor Andreas Teuber, played Mephistopheles in both the Oxford Playhouse production and the film made in Rome the following year, and he went there too.

"I was just a hanger-on, but that was a marvellous summer, quite idyllic and interesting too. I was always struck by just how much Burton put into the role. It was almost as if that Faustean compact was real: as if he realised that he had over-reached himself – he'd got the most beautiful woman in the world as his wife but he knew deep down that he was just a boy from a Welsh pit village.

"I didn't meet him in Rome, though I saw him a few times. But it really was a transcendent performance – and this is one of the themes of the book, that art can transcend life.

"It's almost the same with celebrity. I was once asked by Jeremy Paxman what is it about celebrity and said that people these days seem to think a celebrity is someone who has escaped the constraints of ordinary people, that they don't have the same kind of problems, almost as if they're classical gods.

"In my very few encounters with genuinely famous people, I've found that those around them really do seem to think that. You can even see it in the book world – people think that if they write a novel it will change their lives forever in this way – I'm not talking in money terms but in terms of giving their lives an almost spiritual dimension."

Yet amid all this talk of the celebrity and the spirituality of the desert, we've left behind the greater part of To Heaven By Water, the part that deals – sometimes ambiguously – with family, fidelity and has its finger on the pulse of the north London middle classes and, within character, shows their view of the world. In short, the Updikean bit.

"Updike once said that what writing is all about is taking the ordinary and by close observation turning it into the extraordinary and that's what I try to do, too. A good novel is something that challenges perception, that allows you to see the world anew through a different point of view – something that genre fiction doesn't do, although it sells more because it doesn't disturb people's innate sense of what a novel should be about. Often people want characters to be nice, for example.

"If you thought that, then you'd never read Dostoevsky. Or Updike – his Rabbit Angstrom, for example, is one of the least likeable people, and also completely different from his creator, but he is completely vivid."

And you'd never, I realise as he says this, thinking back to that taboo-busting scene in To Heaven By Water, read Justin Cartwright either. In which case, believe me, the loss would be entirely yours.

&#149 To Heaven By Water by Justin Cartwright is published by Bloomsbury, priced 16.99.