I am getting nowhere with Malcolm. He is very patient and has allocated two hours every morning for me. But none of my questions are being answered in a way that is useful for my piece. He spoke about his childhood at length this morning. But I couldn’t shake the suspicion that he was fabricating much of it. Why he should do so I have no idea. He will not speak at length about A Hundred Ways. I saw it was in the bestsellers lists and told him so. He didn’t seem to think that was a good thing. The trouble is, Malcolm is so obliging, so pleasant, so easygoing. I find it hard to press him for more details. With other authors it’s hard to get beyond what they want to tell me, their agenda, to get at what I want to hear. But with Malcolm, it’s different; he causes me to doubt myself.
I am here to interview a potential Booker winner, a man who has gone silent just when he was becoming interesting. Dozens of journalists would kill for the opportunity and I am failing.
I tried a few things to get him talking. I asked if he believed, like Will Self, that the novel was dead. He retorted, ‘Was it ever alive?’ There was no smile on his lips. I prompted him. He said, ‘The novel has never held a position of importance in society. This importance is a fantasy of novelists, their publishers, their critics and their most earnest admirers. Even amongst the privileged minority who read regularly, the novel is regarded as a form of entertainment only. As entertainment, the novel is very much alive. More novels are being read today than at any time in our history. They’re just not the kind of novels I, or Mr Self, would choose to read.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
‘There’s uphill reading and downhill reading. As you can imagine, uphill reading requires more effort. Downhill, less so. Readers will do both in their reading lives. Most will tend to favour downhill reading. It’s thrilling to race headlong through a book. Uphill reading is more taxing and requires a certain amount of humility. We need to accept that we won’t always enjoy or even understand all we read. It can be a hard slog at times. The ego takes a battering. But the rewards are great.’
I brought up the Nobel Prize. I told him Helen Owen was being listed on the betting sites as a chance. He didn’t think she was eligible this year. I assured him she was. And told him she was considered the best chance the UK has, ahead of A.S. Byatt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan.
And he said, ‘I like when they give it to a writer no one has ever heard of. That always makes me chuckle.’
‘Why do you think you’re never seen as a chance for the Nobel, Malcolm?’
‘I don’t know why. I don’t even know the criteria. I remember looking at the list of past winners and being unable to make much sense of it. I’d read many of them but at a glance I couldn’t discern any unifying characteristics. And many great writers are missing from that list, which defeats the purpose, I think, if the purpose is to promote and honour literature. If someone is on the list they’re literature and if they’re not, they’re not. It’s reductive. Imagine not reading Leo Tolstoy or Willa Cather because they didn’t win the Nobel. I’m sure it happens. People are drawn to these lists like life rafts. Lists make it easy for people who haven’t got the time or the wit to discover great writing on their own. But we’re talking about literature, anyway. No one can agree on what it is. How can you begin to work out who to honour when we can’t agree what it is we’re all trying to do? What I think is literature will differ greatly from what you think is literature.’
‘Are there any certainties? You mentioned Tolstoy. Can we say with conviction that War and Peace is literature?’
‘You and I might. But many years ago I overheard a man in a bookshop saying he preferred the abridged version to the unabridged.’
‘Shakespeare then. Surely everyone can agree that Shakespeare’s plays are great literature.’
Malcolm gave this a moment’s thought and then said, ‘Tolstoy didn’t think much of Shakespeare.’