Interview with Jim Crace Sameerah Mahmood

Interview with Jim Crace Sameerah Mahmood Jim Crace was born in Hertfordshire in 1946 and is the author of 11 novels. I first met him at a reading event at Chichester Festival on 25 June 2013, and my interview with him took place on 10 July 2013. Before becoming a novelist, he worked as a freelance journalist, and wrote educational plays and a number of short stories between 1968 and 1986. He has won numerous awards and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. His success began when his first book, Continent (1986), won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. His most recent novel, Harvest, won him the James Tait Black Prize for fiction. Crace also won a Windham Campbell literature prize in 2014 for his career in fiction writing. The epigraph of Jim Crace’s debut is a statement from a fictitious author: ‘“There and beyond is a seventh continent – seven peoples, seven masters, seven seas. And its business is trade and superstition.” PYCLETIUS, Histories. IV, 3’1 which introduces the subsequent worlds in his fiction. These worlds have made him a part of the mainstream of contemporary British fiction. Among British contemporary novelists, Jim Crace has made a space for himself which is uniquely his. It is known as ‘Craceland’, a term which describes his gift for setting his novels in mythically oriented landscapes. Crace is not holding a mirror to our real world but rather he is inventing his continent from the real world’s dark corners, worlds of his own making. These worlds are as simple as his description of them, but approaching them will uncover how they conceal universal moral issues of nowhere and everywhere. His fiction is a 1 Jim Crace, Continent (London: Picador, 1986). Interview with Jim Crace. Sameerah Mahmood. Writers in Conversation Vol. 2 no. 1, February 2015 http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/writers_in_conversation/ ARCHIVED AT FLINDERS UNIVERSITY: DSPACE.FLINDERS.EDU.AU Crace – 2 – Mahmood product of a man who knows the facts; Crace describes his fiction as dealing ‘with big issues, big moral issues, rather than smaller domestic issues. His inventions ask readers to respond to crucial universal issues rather than simple facts. His interest in natural history is obvious in his fiction, as his interest in walking and travelling inspires him to invent mythical worlds and communities. In this interview, Crace highlights inventions as the core of his fiction, but indicates that he starts with landscapes which he considers the basis for his unlimited re-shaping of his inventions. His Craceland is rendered in a multitude of forms but with the same key words and contents. Indeed, elements of themes, tropes and means of exploring them (archetypes, ambiguity and universal big issues) are present effectively in almost all of his novels. The prototype Craceland can be found in his debut, which marks the starting point for approaching Crace’s first form of mythification, Craceland. S.M. I’m at the beginning of my PhD and I started to read the novels Continent, Gift of Stones, Current Time and Arcadia, and I noticed these novels use the story within a story technique, can you explain this device? J.C. First of all, in every piece of writing I think, or certainly in my writing, there are purposeful things that you know you are doing, and instinctive things that you’re not thinking about. One of the big instinctive things I recognise in my books after I’ve written them is that I have a very exaggerated and strong belief in the power of narrative. I think that narrative is one of those transforming things that distinguishes humankind from all of the other animals in the world. And there are so many narratives, we make fire, we wear clothes, we feel embarrassment, we have anger, we understand death, we have narrative. So for a very straightforward traditional novelist, that narrative is the story. However, for me, narrative is a character in everybody’s life, everybody has a narrative strand in their lives, but they also have a narrative life. So narrative has this second value in all of my books, my books are narratives, but also within all those stories, the narrative of character is an important ingredient. The fact that I have stories within stories is a reminder to myself and to my readers that narrative is powerful, but I’m not aware that I’m doing this all the time. One of the odd things about writing fiction is that sometimes I see patterns in my novels after I’ve written them, I haven’t done it on purpose, for example, in nearly all of my books a long walk is always an ingredient. Now if you were an academic or if you were a critic you would think that was a purposeful thing that I had always included in my books, in fact I only noticed it after it was done. However, I am not mystified by that because I understand why it’s there, it’s because I am a walker myself. But sometimes in a book, you can find something occurring that even you as the author can’t explain! So there’s another theme in my books which was pointed out to me, that very often the women in the books are shaven-haired. Certainly in Being Dead and The Pest House the women shave their hair, and in Harvest the woman has her hair shaven, so there’s this strange coincidence of theme. Now, I was not doing that on purpose, it was instinctive, so what is the instinct that makes me want to make women have their hair shaved? It’s a gender related thing. If you look at the men and the women in my books, what I’m trying Interview with Jim Crace. Sameerah Mahmood. Writers in Conversation Vol. 2 no. 1, February 2015. http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/writers_in_conversation/ ARCHIVED AT FLINDERS UNIVERSITY: DSPACE.FLINDERS.EDU.AU Crace – 3 – Mahmood to do is to avoid heroic, Hollywood-style clichés about men and women. So if you have the ideal of maleness which is to be strong and adventurous and brave, you will not find that in my men, most of my heroes are not cowardly, but they’re timorous and very often have got some kind of physical disability which stops them being strong. So for example, both of the main characters in Harvest have damaged hands, which means that these characters are robbed of their Hollywood-style masculinity so that you have to think of them as being weak rather than strong. But for the women the opposite is true. I try to rob them of their Hollywood attributes, so a typical Hollywood attribute is a beautiful head of hair, so to remove the hair is also to remind the reader that this person has to be judged by other values. So, now I’m what they call ‘wise after the event’, I can mention all the books that influenced me, and I can see the pattern, but when I was writing it I didn’t see the pattern, it was instinctive, it was subconscious. So the same is true I think of the stories within a story, I recognise that they’re there after the event, but when I was writing them it was something instinctive, and that instinctive thing I now realise is to do with the fact that I have a very deep belief in the power of narrative in all of our lives. S.M. That’s a very interesting point, because some writers have a template they follow, they have some points in mind, but you write instinctively and then find out later that these themes appeared subconsciously. J.C. Well that’s an important thing you see because if you believe, as I do, that narrative itself has a character, and it confers upon us an advantage, then you have to allow it to breathe its own oxygen, you can’t force it into a straight-jacket, you can’t have a template for it, and so when I write my books I like to not impose my own ideas, I like to allow the narrative itself to express itself. For example, if you look at folk tales throughout the world very often you will find an example of the young man who’s made a fool of by the wise older man. It’s not very often the other way around, so in a way that’s quite a conservative view of the world, that older people are right and younger people are wrong. So my book Continent really is full of traditional conservative ideas in which the old ways of human kind are shown to be superior in many ways to the new ways of human kind, so in that instance the book is more conservative than I am; the narrative is more conservative than I am. S.M. Philip Tew, in Contemporary British Novelists, states that you employ the pastoral as genre and setting. To what extent do you feel this is important to your novels? J.C. Setting is hugely important, because none of my books get going before the setting is clear in my mind, so I know the time period and I start to get a sense of the geography and landscape. Also, it is true that if you were to look at my books and you were to ask which of my books were books set in cities and which are set in the countryside, the vast majority are set in the countryside.

Load more