The novelist on England in the 50s, his teenage rock band, and how having children changed his writing
Your new novel, Expo 58, is set in Belgium in the 50s – why?
I'd been looking for a way to write about England in the 1950s but couldn't find anything at home that grabbed my imagination. I'd spent time in Belgium through a wonderful organisation, Het Beschrijf, that runs a writers-in-residence scheme near Brussels. I was taken to the Atomium [an iconic Brussels building] and found out about Expo 58. I realised how it looms in Belgian consciousness – their greatest moment of post-war glory. I started asking what the British had done at Expo 58. No one in Belgium could remember. I came back here, dug in the archives and found the pavilion had been designed by James Gardner after the success of the Festival of Britain. It had that wonderful air of 1950s modern design. And slap in the middle, Whitbread had stuck a pub: the Britannia. You couldn't get a more readymade metaphor. I ran with it immediately.
You're a huge name in Europe – more feted than here – where do Belgians come in your European fanbase?
Second tier, after France, Italy and Greece.
Interesting, this European devotion – in that defining Britishness has always been one of your strong suits. What did it mean to be British in 1958?
We lagged behind other European countries in modernism (Gardner was the exception). And, actually, I was writing the novel during the Olympics when Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce staged their fantastically impressive version of exportable Britishness for the opening ceremony. An inspirational moment: Britishness doesn't have to be as grumpy or muddle-headed as our presence at Expo 58.
I enjoyed the letters between your main character, Thomas, and his wife, Sylvia. What is the art of writing a love letter?
Understatement. Not saying straight out what you want to say. The British have a gift for it. We're a highly emotional people but were, until recently, completely buttoned up. I found it a struggle writing the dialogue because nobody in the 50s said what they felt. No British person would ask another British person: how do you feel about this?
Thomas's naivety is comical. Is it period naivety?
It is, but naivety is also a contemporary British theme. People occasionally ask why I'm not writing angry books. It's because we voted Blair in on a wave of enthusiasm in 1997, and now feel like chumps. We were taken for a ride. We yielded so much control of our lives to financial institutions. We've sleepwalked into a crisis. The past 15 years have made me feel naive in a way I didn't when I wrote What a Carve Up!
Do you enjoy the solitude of writing?
I love it. In the final scene of my last book: The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim , Janine – my wife – appears and asks: "Talking to your imaginary friends again?" She's never said these precise words but it's a feeling she has. My real world becomes unreal, the imagined world too real… The only other thing I have to do professionally is go on the road, which forces me to become a centre of attention. I'm more comfortable in the corner, watching everyone else chatting.
How would you compare your Birmingham grammar school with Cambridge University?
This is going to sound crazy because my family background is not especially humble. My dad was a research scientist in the car industry, my mother a PE and music teacher. I went to a direct-grant school where you were made to feel special. It gave you a slightly inflated opinion of yourself. This was knocked out of me very quickly at Cambridge. I was at Trinity, a big, intimidating college full of Harrovians, Etonians and Westminster school people who would not give me the time of day. I didn't know what had hit me but eventually found other provincial grammar school boys cowering in their rooms. We emerged timidly, nodded to each other, and long-lasting friendships were formed.
And after that?
An MA at Warwick and a PhD on Fielding's Tom Jones – my great inspiration, the English novel that towers over everything else. Eighteenth-century literature has influenced my writing most. I have a children's version of Gulliver's Travels coming out in the autumn.
As a teenager you played in a band called the Peer Group…
We wondered about calling ourselves the Train Set… I played piano and wrote most of the music but not the lyrics because I need 300 pages to say what I have to say. For the same reason, I can't write poetry.
Do you listen to music when you write?
I used to – minimalist music, Philip Glass, Steve Reich. The pop music I listen to now is mostly from the 80s: Everything But the Girl, Prefab Sprout, Aztec Camera. My daughters, nearly 13 and 16, don't get it because it's sung by ugly old men. Sometimes they find me watching archive concerts of bands like Cream on BBC4. Who are these Neanderthals making appalling faces as they masturbate their guitar necks? They find it grotesque.
Does having children have any impact on your writing?
Totally. It has transformed my work. I don't want to stick on adjectives to my writing but I think there's a tenderness to everything I've written since I had children, from The Rotters' Club onwards. I'm married to someone who has always stayed at home and looked after the kids. I'm very lucky. Children expand your emotional range massively. If you have empathy with them, you live with an emotional intensity you didn't have in your 20s and 30s. I'm a protective father – possibly over-protective. I've become squeamish about violence in films since having kids. I'm not sure I could write a book as cruel as What a Carve Up! now.
You dedicated Expo 58 to "Dad, who never got to finish it"?
He was halfway through when he died, and enjoying it – he didn't normally enjoy my books. Jeffrey Archer was his favourite author. But this was about his era. In January he went into hospital for an operation. I said: "Are you going to take the manuscript with you?" He said: "It's too big, I'll carry on when I get back." He never came out.
Do you know what's next?
Cameron's Britain (odd to call it that), a subject I found too depressing to consider writing about. But I may now have found a way in that works for me, although these could be famous last words.
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