‘I’ll be watching The Mighty Walzer with my head in my hands’

The author on staging his deeply personal Manchester novel in the city to which it belongs

Next month the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester stages a dramatisation of my novel The Mighty Walzer, by Simon Bent, so in an important sense it’s his not mine. But I can’t pretend I don’t feel possessive of it still. And I’m fighting against feeling sentimental about the staging of it, too. Manchester – where it belongs! It’s like a long-awaited homecoming, because The Mighty Walzer, though it is steeped in the Manchester of the 1950s, was written much later than that and far from it – the first chapters at a little folding table in campsites in western Australia, the rest on an exploding laptop in Melbourne Public Library.

That was in 1998 – a difficult year for me for many reasons, not least the breakdown of a marriage. A sad confusion hung about me. I find Australia compelling and vexatious at the best of times; I’ve never been able to get it out of my system since going there as a young lecturer, and yet however much I love revisiting it, I always feel I have to leave again. As it turned out, these were the perfect circumstances in which to write a novel about the past, love and loss, not belonging, homesickness, failure and the lingering ignominies of adolescence.

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