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Jim Crace

Jim Crace is the author of Continent, The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine and Being Dead. He has won the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, the Guardian Fiction Award and the GAP International Prize for Literature. His novels have been translated into fourteen languages. Quarantine won the 1997 Whitbread Novel Award and was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction.

Jim Crace lives in Birmingham with his wife and two children.

Award-winning novelist Jim Crace, talks about his latest novel, Six. Following the life of Felix Dern (or Lix), Six moves away from previous themes; religion in Quarantine, and death in Being Dead … and instead discovers sex, love, family and the power of women.

The main character in the book is a famous actor called Felix Dern. Do you imagine him to be a sympathetic character? In many ways he seems rather hopeless: slow to act, a bit cowardly, not in control of his life...
Lix’s imperfections are what make him attractive and sympathetic. He’s not a Hollywood hero, handsome, virtuous and faultless. He’s as hesitant and blemished as the rest of us. What’s wrong with being “hopeless”, “slow” and “cowardly” anyway?

I enjoyed Lix’s company – and related to his failings – while I was writing the novel. It is true that I make the leading characters in all of my books a challenge to like or admire. Readers sometimes imagine that this is evidence of my cynicism or pessimism. In fact, it is evidence of the opposite. One of the great optimisms of the world is our ability to love and our capacity to be loved despite our faults.

A related question: the women in the book seem so much more powerful than Lix – as a young man he's seduced by his first lover, at the end of the book he's about to have a child that he doesn't really want, and so on. Can we infer your views on the relations between the sexes from this?
You can infer the novel’s views from what I have written, but you still won’t have any idea of what I think. This is not an autobiographical novel. Nor are the women supposed to stand for Womankind, by the way. It’s just that Lix attracts women who are more powerful than him. And I like the company of strong women, even when I’m only inventing them for a piece of fiction.

One might say that Quarantine is about religion and the nature of religious beliefs, Being Dead about the process of dying and death. Did you set out to write about sex? In fact, do you see sex as the main theme of Six?
I always intended to write about sex, love and family. The lofty intention for the book, before I’d committed one single word to paper, was to see how well humankind measured up to the Darwinist imperative that the success of any species (and any individual within that species) could be judged by how well and often its gene packet was passed on to its offspring. The evolutionary winners were the most fertile, in other words. So I created fertile Lix who seemed to be a failure in almost all aspects of his life except that “every women he slept with bore his child.”

But, of course, as a novel progresses even the most lofty of intentions fall by the wayside. Pretty soon I discovered that I was writing a book about the emotional divide between men and women. At its harshest, that is expressed in the cynical and simplistic view that sex is the price that women pay for love (and children), and that love (and children) is the price that men pay for sex. I hope that my novel undermines that view.

In the book you write quite a lot about the physical act of sex – always a notorious trap for writers. Did you find it difficult?
No. I spend most of my time thinking about sex, so putting it down on paper was a breeze. I was keen to undermine the Hollywood version of sex, though, by presenting the tender truth of sexual encounters – the clumsiness, the comedy, the inequalities, the good intentions.

For a book, which is much concerned with procreation, the children are barely present. Was this deliberate?
I wanted Six to be pregnant with unseen children – as indeed Mouetta is pregnant throughout the novel – and for there to be a joyful nativity at the end. Labour and delivery.

Critics now often talk of Craceland, referring to some characteristic settings of your novels. Would you say this book has the same features? Did you deliberately place it somewhere different from your usual backgrounds?
Craceland is not one particular place. The world of Continent is in no respects the same as the city in Arcadia or the seashore in Being Dead. I don’t have any ‘usual backgrounds’. Craceland is more a series of destinations which exist in parallel to our known world. You ought to believe that the City of Kisses in Six actually exists and has just been added to the EasyJet timetable. You can go there for the weekend and if you’re lucky – or is it unlucky? – have sex – and a child – with Lix.