Gyles Brandreth may be well-known for a number of occupations, but being a writer of serious novels is not the first one that springs to mind. Many regard him as a master of trivia, an author of books about language and wordplay (The Joy Of Lex), children s stories (The Slippers That Talked), and mix em gather ems like Aargh! The Spooky Joke Book and The Bedside Book Of Sexual Disasters. Before he became a member of parliament he was probably most easily identifiable as a wearer of loud and obnoxious jumpers on breakfast television.
A little probing however, reveals a more serious side to Brandreth that sheds some light on his latest incarnation as a serious scribe. His first book, Created in Captivity, (commissioned while he was still a student at Oxford) was a sober study of the creative works done by prison inmates. As a journalist, he s worked for most of Britain s national newspapers and for several years wrote a syndicated column for Associated Press in the US. He s been a scriptwriter for the BBC, presents a regular report from London for CBS News, and at the last British General Election he entered parliament. He became parliamentary private secretary at the Treasury, then at the Department Of National Heritage, and is now a whip (something the Tory party seems to have more and more use for these days). But the reason I m meeting with Gyles Brandreth today is primarily to discuss his new book Who Is Nick Saint?
Alternately described as a witty psychological thriller, a romantic mystery, and an exercise in magic realism, Brandreth s first novel concerns itself with psychotherapist Kirsty MacDonald and her obsession with Nick Saint, a teacher at a small private school in South Carolina. Saint is a charming but enigmatic character, a man out of time who has no papers, passport or apparent past. Kirsty finds herself bewitched by this earthly angel/possible psychotic and follows his trail to the Chelsea Hotel in New York in order to unravel the mystery of this Man With No History.
Neither highbrow psychobabble nor parliamentary kiss n tell-all, Who Is Nick Saint? is nonetheless a well-crafted page-turner. Although it would be a little optimistic for Brandreth to be making space in his wallet for Booker Prize monies, it s a slick work of popular fiction that should hold its own against the Donna Tartts of this world. Hollywood seems to think so anyway; the writer has just signed a six-figure option deal for the film rights.
Gyles Brandreth is reclining in the tea-rooms of the Shelbourne Hotel when I meet him on a chilly December afternoon. A charming, self-deprecating Englishman, he plies me with tea and does everything but check the batteries in my Walkman for me before we begin. He s a willing subject, but also possesses a politician s skill at glossing over the more unpleasant aspects of my questions. Sometimes, during the course of the interview, as I pause the tape in order to interject with a comment of my own, he ll insist that I leave it running in order to capture my little gems . As interviewees go, JD Salinger he s not. Years of dealing with the media, politicians and the general public have left him as user-friendly as a banklink machine. I begin with the book (literally) in hand.
The novel is written in the voice of Kirsty, a female Californian psychotherapist. Did you do much research in order to be able to write in character as it were?
When I became a member of parliament in Britain about five years ago I assumed that I wouldn t be writing another book for ten, fifteen, twenty years, he admits. I d written a lot of non-fiction over the years, a lot of children s books and I thought I m a full-time member of parliament now, I m not going to do that . But during my summer holiday about three years ago the idea of Nick Saint came into my head. For me the satisfaction of the story was actually escaping into the word processor I very much wanted to create a work of fiction. Colleagues of mine assumed I was writing another parliamentary novel but that s not what I want to do. Writing about your own life with added sex is not my idea of fiction. So for me part of the pleasure of doing the job was not to be me, a middle-aged English conservative member of parliament but to be someone else, somewhere else. I felt the voice I wanted to have tell the story was this 28-year-old psychotherapist from Monterey, California.
Because she is a psychotherapist I certainly did background reading in order to know the kind of books she would ve read during her coursework etc., so yes, I did in that sense ensure that I researched. But I just sat down and got on with it. I wanted to use it as a means of escape. I tried to set it in a world I m familiar with, in the sense that my mother lives in California, I have a brother who lives in South Carolina and my great-grandfather was a New York senator it s a world I know but it s a world of fiction.
At this point the affable author pauses to ensure that the sun shining across our table is not annoying me too much. Satisfied that I haven t been blinded for life in the name of literature, he continues:
Here, I wanted to write the sort of novel you love to read when you lie back in the bath with a glass of wine in one hand and the novel in the other, or on a winter s evening with a roaring log fire and the snow falling outside the window, the labrador at your feet, the crumpets oozing with butter. I hasten to add that none of these things actually happen in my life, it s my fantasy of how I see myself reading a book on a cold winter s night. I wanted to write that kind of book with a beginning, middle, end and strong characters. For me the gratifying part is that some of the best reviews have been from women, and if you are a middle-aged man you have no idea what it s like to be a 28-year-old woman. So it has been wonderful that the women who ve written about it have on the whole, been enthusiastic.
The question of identity plays a large part in the book. Given that you ve been and done so many things in your life, do you have a clear idea of your place in the scheme of things?
Well, we re all a great rainbow of things, but we re usually perceived for just one or two of the colours in our personal rainbow, he reflects. If I was known at all a few years ago, it was because I appeared on television wearing colourful knitwear.
Did that bother you?
No it didn t. It was just something I did for many years. I was on TV AM for seven years, on Countdown for seven years, I was the guy who wore colourful knitwear. I loved doing that. When I went to TV AM it was great earning money before breakfast, but when I left the studio I took off the colourful jumper and put on a jacket and tie like anyone else and went to work. But understandably all people see is the tip of the iceberg and that s all they know. You mustn t complain about that, that s life, but also you know that in yourself there are a variety of things. The only time you see your bank manager is across the desk when asking him or her for an overdraft, you have a very distinct view of that person. If you meet the same person playing golf or singing in the church choir they're a very different person.
When I became a member of parliament, which was very much part and parcel of what I wanted to do, for the benefit of my constituency and in order to be elected, I had to in a sense reinvent myself. It was still me, but the presentation had to be reinvented.
Similarly now I ve found myself, having written this novel, in terms of selling the product having to reinvent myself. In fact I said to the publishers, who are wonderfully enthusiastic about the book and required virtually no changes at all in it, I said Why don t we publish it under another name? because this is a novel as a novel, not by the fellow who used to wear colourful jumpers on television or a member of parliament. And they said No, if you re serious about becoming a credible writer of popular fiction then you d better just put your name on there and see what happens, and I ve been very lucky in that there s been a generous reception and it s been sold in other countries.
My greatest pleasure is the German edition which arrived this week and on the back they described the book as a modern Christmas carol and I am likened to Charles Dickens. (speaks into tape recorder) At this point the interviewer suppressed a guffaw. Quite right too. You haven t laughed the way my wife laughed! I ve sent a fax to the German publishers demanding the name and address of the translator so I can use him or her on all my future works. And I m thinking of having the book translated back from German into English, because it certainly will improve the prose style!
The book s main protagonist is a psychotherapist and you quote liberally from Freud and Jung in the text. Have you ever been in therapy?
No, I ve not been in professional therapy, though there are many ways in which if you are a member of parliament you feel you re in permanent therapy! It s a field in which I ve a great deal of interest and I have relatives who have been (a) permanently in therapy and (b) a family who ve been involved in both psychology and psychiatry. It s a world that is fascinating to me. I hope the book works on two levels, I hope it just works as what I think of as a romantic mystery and what the publishers insist on calling a psychological thriller. Also, of course, it is a book about the search for identity, for happiness, something substantial in one s life and the nature of a variety of things that different writers particularly Jung talk about, like the collective subconscious. These are elements that are worn pretty lightly in the book. I don t want to, by talking about it, either to sound pretentious or to make the book sound as it were, in any sense heavy. But they are subjects that I do find intriguing.
You ve written for the screen before. Did you have one eye on Hollywood when writing this book?
Yes and no. I suppose when writing it, in my mind I saw the scenes very clearly and I hope there s a strong sense of place. It s set in Southern Carolina on the banks of the Ashley River and in New York, particularly around the Chelsea Hotel, this wonderful, slightly down-at-heel hotel that has this glorious, louche literary past going from Mark Twain through to Dylan Thomas who died there, and onto Andy Warhol. As I was writing I certainly pictured it in my mind, so in a way I suppose I saw it in filmic terms.
I was delighted when it was snapped up, but I m not holding my breath and booking my seats for the Oscars just yet because some friends of mine who ve had their novels bought for film rights, most of them are still waiting for the movie to be made. So I ve taken the money and run. I ve abandoned it, it s out of my hands, they own it, they can do what they like with it. I d just be very grateful if they manage to secure Johnny Depp to play my hero.
Gyles Brandreth has held down a variety of jobs in his life, many of them at the same time. Is he a workaholic?
My wife would probably say that I am, he admits. I m trying to be better about that. It s difficult. Because I m very much a full-time member of parliament and the parliamentary day is long, I m also a government whip which means that Monday to Thursday I m literally a prisoner of Westminster. The day often begins with the first meeting at seven-forty-five or eight in the morning and because of the strange way we run things at Westminster we re often still there at midnight. On Friday I go home to Chester and I ve got a very full weekend of engagements.
I tend to do my writing on Sunday afternoons and like many other members of parliament I collapse on a Sunday evening. Having stored up a host of things to be a fascinating husband and father on Sunday night I end up semi-comatose in front of a flickering television screen with a bowl of pasta in front of me, bereft of small talk, and worse from my wife s point of view, bereft of talk of substance. But I think it was Noel Coward who once said work is more fun than fun . And certainly I ve found writing Who Is Nick Saint? has been the most satisfying writing I ve done. As a member of parliament I only meet two kinds of people: those who have problems and those who are right. So it is quite satisfying to be able to create a world where the people in it are there at your command. These characters walk into a room and leave it when my finger tells the word processor, so that is rather gratifying.
You ve written a Bedside Book Of Sexual Disasters. Do you think this is essential reading for members of the Tory Party?
This is a book I wrote about 15 years ago, written I hasten to add, from observation rather than personal experience. I was asked to write it and it was great fun, largely because I think the reason these sort of books do sell well is that we love the frailties of others because it puts our own frailties in perspective. There s a great old Chinese saying There is no pleasure greater than watching your best friend fall off the roof . It s wrong, I know, but there s something wonderfully ridiculous about a sexual disaster whether it be, y know, the cardinal caught in a brothel or the politician with his trousers down. There is something splendidly farcical about it that is endearing.
In fact, what was interesting during that book is that I always had to stop each story after the second paragraph because reading on in the cuttings to gain the material, it always turned out sour and sad. Beyond skating the surface where the laughs are, run pretty chilly waters. For the next few years I can see myself concentrating on fiction because it s where you can explore hurt, cruelty and the dark side without intruding on individual privacy.
One of the things I regret is that we live in an age now where there is no discretion and much less privacy than once there was. People now keep diaries not for posterity or to give to their grandchildren, or even to record what s happened that day, but with an eye to publication. Of course I read and relished Alan Clarke s diaries because he writes like a dream, but actually he betrays everybody: his wife, his secretary, his colleagues, it s actually deeply unattractive while being utterly compelling. The joy of fiction is that you can be indiscreet and explore those areas without there being personal hurt and betrayal involved. I m now giving you a serious answer to your question about what was essentially a trivia book, a stocking filler written 15 years ago. But what interested me about that was that I was simply exploiting the frailty and foibles of others. The relationship between farce and tragedy fascinates me.
Well, to explore even more serious territory, what s the prevailing attitude toward Ireland in the Tory Party at the moment?
It would be impossible to briefly answer your question and it would be wrong in an interview essentially about a novel to do so, he replies. I believe that within the United Kingdom politicians in general, the British government in particular, and the Prime Minister most particularly, are absolutely committed to credible tangible progress. It s also worth saying, and I say this as someone who has worked in Belfast and knows Northern Ireland reasonably well, and as someone whose wife s family comes from Cork and as someone who simply loves visiting Dublin, my perception is that within the UK there is an enormous respect, affection, admiration for and fascination with the island of Ireland.
One very interesting thing which is happening which is partly to do with simple communication and I ve seen it ever since I first came over here to appear on The Late Late Show 25 years ago is that the view from the UK has changed. I find that many more colleagues visit Dublin and their view was one seeped in nostalgia and now it isn t. I think the European Union has also had an effect on that. What I think is quite exciting at the moment is that if you asked people ten or 15 years ago about Ireland, they would ve talked almost entirely in terms of people who were dead, from Sheridan to Wilde, O Casey, Yeats, all dead. If you asked about a female Irish person they d think of Lady Gregory. There was all this rather fey Irish mist.
Now people are actually enormously conscious of the cultural energy in terms of Irish literature, film, and music and that s quite new. My own general view of politics is that people who write for newspapers and only have a glancing view of political life often belong to the And in one bound he was free school of political thinking, looking for dramatics and ways of cutting through. My experience has been that it is by small accretions, by gradually moving forward, that lasting progress can be achieved. There s a wonderful line from the poet William Blake, who I m sure had both Irish and English blood coursing through his veins, He who would do good must do it by minute particulars . That for me is the satisfaction of politics. When I began I was interested in making a noise. Now what interests me more is the small ways in which one can make a difference. n
Who Is Nick Saint? by Gyles Brandreth is available in hardback for #14.99 from Little, Brown.