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Tim Lott |
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Tim Lott has founded several successful businesses and worked as a broadcaster, a magazine editor and television producer. He read Politics and History at the London School of Economics and lives in Notting Hill, London. Tim Lott’s previous books include The Scent of Dried Roses which was awarded the 1996 J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, White City Blue which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and Rumours of a Hurricane which Tony Parsons called ‘the first great British novel of the 21st century’. Tim Lott’s most recent book is The Love Secrets of Don Juan.
Currently billed as one of the leading male authors of his generation, Tim Lott, bestselling chronicler of real working-class London, and Whitbread prize-winning author of White City Blue, returns with Rumours of a Hurricane.
It's 1991, who is the street drunk who ends up in casualty, an apparently willing victim of a traffic accident? What do his meagre and enigmatic possessions tell us about him? What led him to end up on the streets? In what is a powerful meditation on money, power and families, Lott offers a revealing and often disturbing shot of contemporary Britain, and of a Britain before greed became good, before the big bang, before the hurricane.
Here, in an exclusive interview for penguin.co.uk, Tim opens up for us on class, politics and ambition.
You have declared yourself 'the sole representative of contemporary working class literary fiction': why do you think it is that you're one of the only ones ?
I think that statement needs qualifying (even if I made it). Firstly, recent contemporary working class fiction. There is a fair amount of working class fiction, but it's been a while since it's heyday. John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey are all examples. Secondly, the gap is mainly Southern English white working class - there are voices from the North, from Scotland, from Ireland, from post-colonial black and asian writers. Still, even with all these qualifications, it is still a hell of a big gap.
Other reasons: I think it is partly because there is a popular misconception in literature that 'ordinary lives', by virtue of being ordinary, are therefore uninteresting. An odd misconception, not shared by TV. A further reason is that it is obviously easier to write about one's own background than a distant one, and very few people from my kind of background had a decent education, I suppose.
Rumours of a Hurricane is quite a political book - what effect do you think Thatcher's Britain had on people?
An enormous and largely unanswerable question. I don't know if Hurricane is a political book - political books tend towards polemic which, I hope, Hurricane doesn't. The effects of the Thatcher decade were so various, it hardly bears answering head-on. Clearly many unfamiliar concepts were introduced into British life from both the right and the left. The idea of non-consensus government, of low taxation, of encouraging private enterprise, of, in effect, punishing the poor, was all novel. On the left, gay rights, an emerging black consciousness and feminism all served to heighten the dislocation. Meanwhile, off the political agenda, drug use became mainstream. If you want me to sum up what was good and bad about the decade, I put it this way:
Bad - the attack on public services and the public service ethic.
Good - the limiting of union power and the taming of inflation.
Bad - the shift away from a public sensibility to a private.
Good - the fact you could get a nice cup of coffee and a decent suit at last.
In Maureen, you have a woman who changes radically over a decade, in Charlie a man who doesn't - do you think attitudes to change and perhaps to success and ambition are related to gender?
Duh. I'm not sure. Increasingly, there's less to choose between attitudes to change and success between men and women since the 80s. Women have increasingly taken on men's idealisation and definitions of 'success'. Whether that represents progress, I'm not sure. Women, it seems to me, do cope with change better. And many of the changes over the last few decades have been in their favour (and overdue). It is a far more healthy place to be psychologically, I suspect, to be a somewhat marginalised group moving forward to a kind of justice than being a member of a dominant group being forced to abandon its traditional privileges.
One of the things that is unusual about this novel is that it is also about money and property, something which the Americans have written about in fiction but which rarely comes up in contemporary British fiction - why?
I find it hard to speak for British fiction. Is it true that money and property have not featured in contemporary British fiction? I would find it hard myself to write an interesting book that was centred on property. As for money - well, notwithstanding Amis's Money and Coe's What a Carve Up, I find it difficult to believe that there haven't been a fair number of books written in which money is an important element. It's true that I can't bring any to mind though. Then, I am blissfully ill-read. I should just say, that I never approached Hurricane to write about money per se. It's just a family drama in which money plays a part - as it would in any family.
Like White City Blue, Rumours is often a very funny book - but your humour is always very dark - why's that?
Because at heart, I'm a miserable bastard.
Rumours of a Hurricane is about the 80s - how did you spend the 80s?
Being miserable, being a bastard, failing in relationships, losing my mind.
What are you writing next?
The Love Secrets of Don Juan - what you might call a sex-war novel. From the man's point of view.
What's your ambition as a writer?
To never write a dull book. To never write a dumb book. To engage both people's minds and emotions. To win a major literary prize. To sell a million. To maintain respect. To write a successful play, screenplay and children's story. To write one decent poem.
