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William Sutcliffe |
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William Sutcliffe was born in 1971 in London. He is the author of the novels, New Boy, Are You Experienced?, The Love Hexagon and Bad Influence and has been translated into eleven languages.
William Sutcliffe talks exclusively about Bad Influence, good humour and the dark side of childhood.
Bad Influence is your fourth novel. Does it mark a significant departure from your previous work, or an evolution in theme(s)?
I hope the book is an evolution from the novels I have written before. All my books have a tragi-comic tone, though so far most of them lean more towards the latter. In Bad Influence I have tried to write something that starts funny then gradually gets darker and darker, in such a way that you can't see the join, but that the reader finds him or herself taken somewhere they would not have expected.
I don't see humour and seriousness as opposites - I think good humour always has something serious to say, and the most serious things are often what we find the most funny - so I hope the novel doesn't feel like it flips from one state to the other. Both are present from the start to the end, but it is only when you have read the book as a whole that the darker undertow of the opening chapters becomes apparent.
You were a successful published author in your early twenties. How do you feel your concerns and preoccupations have changed over the last eight years?
There are very few successful novels written in which the protagonist is older than the writer. I think you just don't know how the world feels to someone older than yourself. As I have got older, the range of characters I feel confident enough to write about is expanding. Though, having said that, this time I have chosen to write about ten-year-old boys. Perhaps this has only become possible now because greater experience as a writer has given me the confidence to take on a more ambitious range of tone than before. To write interestingly about children you have to look under the surface to the real fears and dangers that children face, and this isn't easy to pull off without lapsing into tweeness or sentimentality.
Where did you find the original impulse to write Bad Influence? Is childhood a subject area that particularly interests you?
For a long time I've had an idea floating around in the back of my head about wanting to write something on the subject of how the bonds and betrayals of childhood friendship are as intensely lived as anything adults go through with their divorces and love affairs. I didn't really have any idea of a clear story to pin this on, but having planned successive novels more and more carefully before setting out to write them, this time I thought I'd try reverting to the technique with which I first started, which is to just launch in and see where it takes me. Perhaps "technique" is too fancy a word for it. I had the odd false start, but once the characters began to define themselves, a clear plot soon emerged. Oddly, this book has ended up more tightly plotted than the novels that preceded it, whose plots I planned more carefully.
Bad Influence is both a literary novel, and potentially also a story for young adults. Did you have a particular readership in mind when writing it?
I didn't specifically set out to aim this novel at any particular audience. I always aim for clarity and readability, but I don't imagine any specific reader sitting on my shoulder judging these things. If I did, I think it would be utterly paralysing.
Children's books, and books narrated by children, are currently enjoying huge crossover appeal, with Harry Potter, Phillip Pullman and Mark Haddon bestriding the bestseller charts. What attracts so many adult readers to the genre?
Any novel about children has the chance to achieve a universality that a novel about adults will struggle to attain. The lives of ten-year-olds have far more in common than the lives of forty-year-olds. Everyone has once been a child, and many of us relive a second childhood by becoming parents. The core of our personalities is formed when we are very young, so when we read about a child in some kind of peril, the stakes in the story are immediately very high. It is therefore perhaps easier to grip an audience when your protagonist is a child, because we are quicker to empathise with the plight of a child than an adult.
Does Ben's childhood in North London bear any relation to your own? After all, the book is set in the 1980s and for many readers in their late twenties/ early thirties will prove fantastically evocative.
His family set-up and his friends in the book don't have any correspondence to reality. However, the topography of the book, down to the layout of the houses and streets is exactly where I was brought up. I've moved one alleyway, but other than that you can pretty much follow the entire book on the Wembley/Kenton page of the A-Z. I set the book at roughly the time when I was a ten-year-old simply because I was afraid that if I set it now, the book would be stuffed with howling errors about how ten-year-olds spend their time these days. I tried to avoid playing the nostalgia card. The old ha-ha-isn't-it-funny-what-people-wore-twenty-years-ago joke is really very feeble.
Have you been reading anything good recently?
I recently discovered Bernard Malamud, having read that Philip Roth was a huge admirer of his. The Assistant, which is quite hard to find, is a near-perfect novel - sad, funny, and strangely moral without every being even slightly moralistic.
What's next for William Sutcliffe?
I'm currently working on an original screenplay - a sex comedy about students - which is quite possibly a futile exercise, but I haven't yet got a good idea for another book, so I might as well get on with it.
