Interview: William Boyd

Published on Monday 24 August 2009 18:55

WILLIAM BOYD is a wise, wise, writer and he knows what works with journalists.

He knows that when he says this they will shuffle a bit nearer the edge of the sofa facing him in his book-lined Chelsea sitting-room, discreetly check that their tape recorder isn't running out of batteries, and that they will concentrate a little bit more, listen a little bit harder. It's the hottest day in a hot June and he's just told me that this is the first time he's talked about his new novel, that he couldn't be fresher, and so that's me on the sofa, ears and empathy turned up to the max. Yes, William, you were saying…

I've interviewed him only once before, at the time of his masterpiece Any Human Heart, and when I did, I came away thinking that while he'd been professionally polite, the interview hadn't breached his natural reserve or got much beyond his innate charm. Transcribing it, I found myself listening to a completely different conversation. Although I hadn't picked it up at the time, really he'd been talking about the precariousness of the writer's life, had been entirely open about its inherent insecurities and contingencies. Kicking myself, I realised that I'd got William Boyd completely wrong. He's far more honest than I'd thought.

So that's where, eight years later, I start the interview. However I phrase it, the question's meant to say something like: "Look, William Boyd, what are you playing at talking about career insecurity? Show me any other novelist who's had 13 screenplays made? Whose last novel won the Costa Novel of the Year and sold 400,000 copies? Who, on top of all of that, is almost as successful in France as in Britain?"

Of course, saying all of that would be truly creepy, so the question comes out something like: "Look, you're William Boyd, for heaven's sake, why worry?" which, I realise, isn't much better. But that's when he starts telling me all the things he says he shouldn't, so it all works out in the end.

First, though, the novel. It's a compelling page-turner called Ordinary Thunderstorms. If he wants a tagline for it, I suggest, he could call it "the 21st century's The 39 Steps". "But it's set in London," he counters. OK. The 21st century's The 39 Steps – But set in London. No? All right.

"But yes," he concedes, "it's a chase. And the drive is that the man is being hunted. But like the last four of my novels, it's also about identity, about what happens when you lose everything that makes up your social identity, and how you then function in the modern city."

The book's action starts not a quarter of a mile from his house. Adam Kindred, on the run after a murder he has not committed, finds a place of safety in a small triangle of overgrown wasteland between the Embankment and Chelsea Bridge. For a few days, he lives rough, a wanted man with neither money, job, passport, or credit cards.

Chased by a psychopathic hitman and the police, he knows his only chance to restore his reputation lies in uncovering the murdered man's secret – and the only way in which he can do that lies in becoming a completely different person. Or a succession of them.

Boyd passes that triangle of wasteland every day he's in London. He loves walking along the Thames, he explains, the way it constantly changes because it's tidal, the way the river is half-hidden, all but ignored, snaking through a city that has almost turned its back on it.

"The idea for the novel started when I read that every year in London they take 60 bodies a year out of the Thames, usually at the bend in the river near Greenwich. That's more than one a week, but you never hear about them. And then I thought immediately about the opening scenes of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and the body being pulled out of the river. And I figured out that there was a way of writing a novel in the way that Our Mutual Friend does, from the very top of society to the very bottom. It all began to come together."

When did he realise it was going to be a novel and not a short story or (because when you read it, you easily imagine this) a film script too?

"I saw a potential there, a gravid quality that could be expanded into the first truly omniscient novel I've ever written. Most of mine are first-person or told from a restricted point of view. The nearest I've come to this is An Ice Cream War, in which there are four voices. Here there are nine, and the challenge is to move into the characters' minds in an as unthinkingly godlike way as the Victorians did."

The parallel with Our Mutual Friend works in other ways too. If that was largely about the power of money, so too is Ordinary Thunderstorms: the most darkly comic of Boyd's nine characters is Ingram Fryzer, a pharmaceuticals firm boss about to bring an anti-asthma drug to the market – with potentially massive rewards.

"Although I did most of my research on the internet, I do know some people who work in Big Pharma. I know of one man who's moved into it even though he'd got no knowledge of the industry apart from the potential rewards involved if his firm produced a so-called blockbuster drug. When I asked how much, a friend told me, 'Ten billion if he gets it right.' And when that kind of money is involved, your moral basis starts to shift."

Being a fugitive takes Adam Kindred into a very different kind of London – an underclass updated from the riverine body-hunters Dickens would have known to include drug-dealers, sink-estate gang leaders, prostitutes, rough-sleepers and immigrants struggling to get on the bottom rung of society's ladder. As all this is a world away from his elegant Chelsea sitting-room presided over by a bust of Sir Walter Scott, I ask about the extent to which he researched it at first hand.

A lot of the slang used by his sink-estate characters is, I point out, new to me.

And this is where Boyd's secrets start to spill out. "I probably shouldn't tell you, but I invented all those words. So the slang for crack cocaine in my novel is 'monkey', for 'good' is 'flat' or 'well flat', ordinary people are 'mims' and so on.

Why? "Because the point is not to pin this book down to this year or next year, so in, say, 2015, it shall still seem of the moment. There are lots of novelists I admire greatly, such as William Trevor and Justin Cartwright, who want to root their novels in a particular moment, who want to write novels full of references to now, with stock market crashes, references to who won the FA Cup and so on.

"To me, that's built-in obsolescence. In five years' time, novels like that begin to seem dated. So I've got none of the here-and-now: I've even changed some of the brand names in the shops for example – anything to avoid being trapped in contemporaneity. I take huge pains to stay clear of what I call the demon of specificity: if I'm talking about cars, I'll avoid mentioning specific models. I'll just talk about Mercs or 'old cars', anything to stop the book being rigidly and rootedly of its time."

Again, why? And pay attention now, because you don't often hear novelists talking as honestly as this.

"Because writing is a dangerous career and the trick is to make it last as long as you can. What's important to me is that all of my books are in print – and, in a way, that becomes the challenge, not winning this prize or getting that review. It's that the work is there and you can walk into many bookshops throughout the world and buy it.

"I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is.

"So the question is how do you finesse that? At a time when there's younger writers starting up and it's inevitable that you're becoming less fashionable, at a time when the industrial pressures apply more and more to books, how do you keep a book you wrote 28 years ago selling well year on year? Because it really is getting harder."

If you think that sounds like a whinge, you've got William Boyd as wrong as I did the first time. It's only the truth. It would be hard to imagine a more charming, urbane, accomplished writer. All his books deservedly remain in print, and his parallel career in films continues to blossom.

But the next time someone quotes Graham Greene's aphorism about novelists possessing "a splinter of ice in the heart", remember that even in the most successful of them, there's often a splinter of fear there too.

&#149 WIlliam Boyd is at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Friday. Ordinary Thunderstorms is published by Bloomsbury on 7 September, price 18.99