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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