'Will I ever be rid of Gerald?'

Published on Saturday 25 November 2006 00:09

BEING THE PERFECT HOST, JAMES Hamilton-Paterson offers supper when we finally make it through the swirling Austrian mists to his new home, an hour's late-night drive from Salzburg. Set amid rolling pastures and pine forests, the place seems oddly reminiscent of the Scottish Borders; it's so dark and foggy you can't see a single mountain.

I refuse a meal and take only tea and toast, with his homemade apricot jam ("complete with kernels"), for fear that the reclusive Hamilton-Paterson might offer me a snack of deep-fried mice, or worse, have me dine more substantially on Badger Wellington, with gun-dog pt - a bit much after two flights from Edinburgh.

The cult travel writer, memoirist, poet and award-winning novelist, whose devoted fans include Alex Garland, Michael Ondaatje and JG Ballard, is an urbane and genial gentleman, with impeccable manners, not at all the type to inflict either of these bizarre recipes on any guest - unlike his camp protagonist Gerald Samper, who first appeared in 2004 in his deliciously vicious satire Cooking With Fernet Branca, and now returns in Amazing Disgrace - a novel that's laugh-out-loud good.

He worries that there will have to be a third to complete the trilogy (his publishers wish it), a prospect he dreads. Hamilton-Paterson - who has published six non-fiction works, two volumes of poetry, six novels, three children's books and two short-story collections - thinks of himself as a serious writer rather than a comic novelist, even though the best-selling Cooking With Fernet Branca was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and was reviewed in one quality paper as "a work of comic genius".

Nonetheless, when we talk in his book-lined sitting-room, with its huge porcelain stove (which reminds him of a bright green Dalek), Hamilton-Paterson sighs heavily. "Will I never be rid of the egregious Gerald?" he asks.

Whether he likes it or not, with this bitchy, sub-Wildean queen he has created one of the great comic characters of English fiction, ranking alongside Bertie Wooster or EF Benson's Georgie. Vain, snobbish and effete, Gerald is a ghostwriter for ghastly celebrities; he lives alone up a mountain in Tuscany, where he footers about in his kitchen whipping up exotica such as mussels in chocolate, smoked Jack Russell ("a bugger to bone") and Liver Sorbet Pudding.

In Amazing Disgrace the scurrilously witty and very likeable Gerald is recovering from the effects of a vindaloo blancmange - "an intriguing marriage between the incandescent and the gelid" - and ghosting the memoirs of a a foul-mouthed, one-armed yachtswoman, whom he loathes with a passion. Life becomes ever more complicated and nasty, as do Gerald's recipes. Death roe, anyone?

When I tell Hamilton-Paterson, who turned 65 on 6 November, that I found Amazing Disgrace even more side-splittingly funny than its predecessor, he thanks me and then says gloomily: "I suppose I am hoist with my own petard." He knows he should be far more famous than he is for his prolific back catalogue, but he refuses to do the literary circuit, preferring to live the life of an Anchorite. He shudders at the idea of book signings and readings. Indeed, considerable arm-twisting was necessary before he agreed to this interview.

He also knows he has written far better books than Cooking or Disgrace, ranging from his superb novel, Gerontius, on Elgar's Amazon journey, winner of the 1989 Whitbread first novel prize, to the wonderful semi-autobiographical travelogue Playing with Water and his masterpiece, the strange, beautifully constructed, melancholic novel, Griefwork.

IRONICALLY, HE EMBARKED UPON Cooking to cheer himself up. "About six years ago, I went through a bad patch. My 93-year-old mother was in hospital dying, several friends, all younger than me, died suddenly, then I had a medical crisis of my own," he says. "I had to have my gall bladder removed the week my mother died. It was all a bit grim, going from frightful crematoria to awful hospitals, and of course there were the inevitable intimations of mortality. So I decided I needed to write something therapeutic. It was actually very efficient. It did work, it made me think outside myself. You know how obsessed one gets with oneself as the woes mount up."

Also, he continues, he knew he was going to have to leave his previous house. For 20-odd years he lived on top of a mountain in southern Tuscany, accessible only by a dirt track. Three years ago he moved into half of a large villa near Lucca, in the north, although he's always spent one third of every year in a bamboo hut on the Philippine island of Tiwarik. Two months ago, however, he ended up moving to Austria because he couldn't afford the sort of house, with acres of solitude, in Italy, which he needs for his writing, piano-playing and bee-keeping, minus friends, neighbours and other worldly distractions.

Born in the north London suburb of Stanmore, Hamilton-Pearson is of Scots descent, the son of two eminent doctors. His indomitable Swiss-born mother was an anaesthetist; his father, born in China to "earnest missionaries and lower middle-class bourgeois doctors" from Coatbridge, was a neurologist whose patients included the Aga Khan and Stirling Moss. He was educated - and badly bullied, "often overtly sexually" - at King's Canterbury public school from where he went up to Oxford, winning the Newdigate Poetry Prize in 1964.

He had an uneasy relationship with his father, who died of stomach cancer at 46, when he was in his first year at Oxford. "I didn't miss him at all," he says. Nonetheless, he now mourns the fact that he never knew this emotionally cold man, a powerful, distant figure who came back from the war when Hamilton-Paterson was four and his sister Jane, to whom he is still close, was two. "I resented him and I think it was mutual, because he was this perfect stranger I was told I had to love," he recalls. He now finds it disconcerting that, with his patrician features, he resembles his father more with each passing day.

After Oxford, Hamilton-Paterson taught English at a school in an Arab neighbourhood in Libya, where he was subjected to an appalling assault. Sunbathing one afternoon, he looked up to find himself surrounded by "five Bedouin pastoralists" who took turns to rape him. He wrote a tough-minded article, "Asking for It", for Granta magazine in 1999, about the rape. Today he can still remember "the smell of sheep's grease on their clothes and the sand in my mouth".

BACK HOME, ONE OF HIS FIRST JOBS was ghosting a documentary script for the late Irish comedian Dave Allen. By his mid-twenties, however, he knew he wanted to write seriously. He became a hospital porter, then travelled through Vietnam and Brazil. He covered the Vietnam war and the Troubles in Northern Ireland for the New Statesman, before becoming features editor of Nova, the long-defunct thinking women's magazine. Meanwhile, he published his first children's book, Flight Underground, two volumes of poetry and a collection of short stories.

In 1979 he discovered the Philippines, which changed his life. He came to love the people, learned to speak the local language - in which he's more fluent than the schoolboy German he's getting by with in Austria - and taught himself to spear fish, forever testing himself physically. "That's where I ate dog, a delicacy in the islands," he says. He published his classic account of the Philippines and the Marcos family, America's Boy, in 1998, in which he sought to correct western misconceptions about the dictatorship.

Nowadays, he sometimes thinks it would have been nice to have been a father, but insists he's useless at relationships. He's had affairs and lived with people, "both male and female", but they never lasted more than two or three months.

And yet, despite his solitary nature, Hamilton-Paterson is a most entertaining companion, a terrific conversationalist and a wicked gossip. As he chauffeurs me to the airport, he tells me he'll miss me when I've gone. I am reminded of "James", the narrator of his strange "flawed" novel, Loving Monsters, who from time to time would drive a visitor back to the station, then "change the sheets with that mixture of relief and regret which is the hallmark of the failed hermit".

• Amazing Disgrace is published by Faber & Faber, priced 10.99.

JAMES HAMILTON-PATERSON ON ...

His cult status: "Publishers find it hard to pigeonhole me - I don't specialise. Many of my books are out of print because I won't publicise them. I'm sure my publishers say, 'Why doesn't the bastard stick to one genre?'"

Fiction: "I don't believe in most of the fiction being written in England. It's all ideas stuff, profoundly boring."

Sex: "Someone asked recently if I was gay. I said, 'I've no idea. Honestly, I don't know.' In the Sixties I had sex with everybody - girls and boys."

Inspiration: "My friend Ronald Blythe, the author of Akenfield, has been a great influence on me as a writer, not stylistically, but it was he who taught me to be absolutely professional and serious about my work."

Ambition: "I always wanted to be a classical composer, but I gave up when I realised I didn't have the requisite gifts. I'd have ended up in some organ loft."