Sebastian Faulks
If you’re a best-selling and award-winning novelist, you’d think that talking to an audience of admirers would be a great opportunity to have a bit of a swagger.
Not so, says Sebastian Faulks – Birdsong author and all-round literary legend - who takes to the stage in Cambridge tonight.
“When you have to stand up on your own, you feel a bit of an idiot - a cross between a complete dork and a sales rep,” he confides.
“Luckily Rowan Pelling is interviewing me. It's nicer chatting to someone, especially someone like Rowan, who's very good fun.”
Faulks is in town to promote his 12th and latest book, A Possible Life. A five-part novel that sweeps from Victorian London to futuristic Italy, it's winning rave reviews. But tonight's event will also include a Q&A session with the audience: is there one question he always dreads? “Where do you get your ideas from?” he laughs. “And I used to dread 'What first drew you to France?' which is why there's a five-and-a-half thousand word answer to that on my website…”
It’s no surprise that people are curious about Faulks’s French connection. Three of his best-loved novels – The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Charlotte Gray and Birdsong - are set across the channel, and he admits to being a full-on Francophile.
But Faulks is also rather partial to Cambridge. An undergraduate at Emmanuel in the 70s, his memories are happy ones. Well, those he can remember: “I was pretty spaced out as a student,” he admits. “I didn't really do much work. I didn't really do any work! I was asleep most of the day, and out in the pubs most of the evening.”
Nevertheless he managed “an OK degree”, a 2:1 in English, and was surprised (but delighted) to be invited to become an honorary college fellow five years ago.
For Faulks, who turns 60 next year, the literary seed was sown in childhood. Growing up in Berkshire, “shy, a loner, but quite content,” he was introduced to the delights of reading by his book-loving mother: “She knew all of Dickens backwards,” he says. “Those characters were real people to her.” Equally fired-up by the Victorian master, a teenage Faulks set his heart on becoming a novelist.
After university he pursued his dream. By night he wrote books and had a handful published, by day he was a journalist, working for years at the likes of the Daily Telegraph and The Independent. Why did he stop? “Because I lost my job!
“It was rather fortuitous: I left with a year's salary, so I thought well, rather than look for a job immediately, I'll write another book and see if I can make a living like this. And I couldn't.
“I was on the point of returning to journalism when Birdsong came out in paperback, and crept into the top 10 best-seller list - and sort of stayed there.”
Written in 1992, the hardback of Birdsong - a harrowing, deeply moving account of life and death in the trenches of wartime France - had been well-received: “It sold about 10,000 copies, which is pretty good for a hardback, but it wasn't enough to live on. We had two small children and a large mortgage, so there was obviously going to have to be another job.
“But I didn't have any problem with that. I always expected to work properly and just write books in the evening and at the weekends. I never set out thinking the world owed me a living through my books, it's just incredibly, fortunately, turned out that way.”
Surely he knew that Birdsong was special? “I thought I'd pulled off something pretty OK, but I didn't expect that anyone else would share my opinion of it. A lot of writers think that they've done something that's going to shake the world - and then they find out that the world couldn't care less. I was fully aware of this.”
But Birdsong did shake the world: a word-of-mouth hit, it went on to become a global best-seller. Faulks’s future was set, yet he remains modest: “I always expected that I would one day go back to a day job. But it's been 21 years, so the awful truth is that no-one would want me any more!”
Watching the BBC’s adaptation of Birdsong earlier this year was, he admits, a little odd: “It's partly rather exhilarating to see people that you imagined walking round as flesh and blood. But you also think 'well, this isn't quite what I meant', or 'he wouldn't have said that', so there's a lot of mixed feelings.”
He was less than happy with the 2001 film version of Charlotte Gray, which was “a very, very long way indeed” from the book. “But I did feel that Charlotte herself, Cate Blanchett, was the character I'd written. If you just took out all the stuff around her...”
Handing over complete control clearly doesn't suit Faulks. He's currently in negotiations with three books, but writing the screenplay and helping with the casting is, he says, non-negotiable. “A lot of producers don't like that: they want the novelist out of the picture because they're just a bloody nuisance. But my view now is 'well fine, if you don't want me in, then we don't do the deal'.”
For the moment, though, Faulks is concentrating on promoting A Possible Life. Spanning different eras, different countries and different lives, it explores how love, pain, joy and loss connect us all.
“It's a novel, but it's in five separate sections which, at first look, seem to have not much in common, but which are all linked together by the same ideas. It sounds a bit unusual, and it is a bit unusual.
“But I have a very loyal readership, and they know that even if at first glance they think 'gosh, this is a bit different', they’ll say to themselves 'well, they're all a bit different. He never writes the same book'.”
Compare his contemporary novels to his James Bond sequel Devil May Care, or his wartime sagas to the to the quirky Engleby, and you’ll know what exactly what Faulks means. The tale of a loathsome loner in 1970s Cambridge, Engleby remains one of his favourites: “I absolutely loved writing it,” he says.
“The thing about writing in the first person is that it's very difficult to get the tone of voice which is not your voice – it's a bit like ‘channelling’ someone. But once you've got it, and you can find it easily every day, then it's rather as though someone else is writing the book for you.” It is, he admits, a strange feeling: “but very enjoyable.”
Faulks is renowned for his discipline. Every morning he walks to his office in leafy West London, where he works from 10am to 6pm, “but a lot of it is spent on boring emails, and on the telephone to my accountant. It's not all sitting there with a bottle of whisky and hoping for inspiration.”
Ah yes, that inspiration: to pre-empt tonight's inevitable question, where DO his ideas come from? “They come from a small village in France,” he says, then laughs. “No, nobody knows.
“When you go to the pub with your friends, you talk about things which are on your mind, and as soon as they're out of your mouth they've gone. But sometimes you say something and people say 'God, that's interesting', and you chew it over.
“So the key, really, is to recognise when a thought is an idea. Make a note of it on the back of a beer mat in The Eagle, or wherever you are.”
What’s next for Sebastian Faulks? Another novel of course, and he can’t wait to get cracking: “A day when I don't get 1,000 words down is not a good day.”
And who knows? Perhaps this stint in the city might just inspire him: “What I like best about Cambridge is this time of year, actually,” he muses. “The smell of autumn in the air, and the sense of life starting again in an exciting new way. New friends, new courses. A new beginning.”
A Possible Life is published in hardback by Hutchinson, priced £18.99.
October 2012 (c) Cambridge News