Wanted to write books that resembled life, not novels: Man Booker winner Alan Hollinghurst

JS: You start writing a novel when you are younger, and then you grow out of it. How do you know as a writer that this is an idea that's going to work?

AH: It's very hard to describe whether there's something about an idea that right from the start. Deep down you know it's not going to work - but you sort of have a go with it. To write a book you got to believe that you've got a good idea. And you could be mistaken in that belief, but nonetheless, you got to convince yourself...

To write without that would be a spiritless exercise. I think when I started writing my first novel, I just sort of knew that I was onto something that's going to work. I just had this sort of hunch. And that's very encouraging, it keeps you going.

JS: With the first novel were there themes that you had always thought of before you started writing in 1984? Were these themes always in your head, were you working on them?

AH: That book, which was very much about gay life, the present day of the book was in 1983 and it is narrated by a young man and he meets a man born in the beginning of the century. And it is partly about him finding about this older man, this older man's life. So it gives you various flashbacks, very selective pictures of how gay life in Britain had changed over the course of the century.

I had worked on that subject as a student at Oxford and I wrote my graduate thesis about it. So it was something which I had been thinking about a lot and I suppose I felt that I had a fresh view point on something that hadn't been written on very much.

JS: From the time you started writing at 14, were these themes any of the things you had thought that you would eventually write about it?

AH: Yes, as a student I longed to write some more explicit kind of gay fiction, but didn't. And I wrote other strange things. I tried to write a novel about a young man who has an affair with his father's mistress. So I was writing about slightly perverse sexuality...

JS: As an author who was one of the first to write about how gay life was in Britain, did you do so with a desire to regularise it?

AH: Yes. It's such a double thing I always felt. One thing you want to show is that gay life is completely ordinary, that gay people dress like other people and not the freaks. The other thing is that gay people are completely unlike non-gay people and they live all of their lives under this one particular, very special condition - it is the coexistence of those two things which I have always found rather fascinating.

JS: After The Line of Beauty when you wrote The Stranger's Child, what changed between the two books - in both you as an author and what you were writing about?

AH: The Line of Beauty covered about four years and had these gaps and I enjoyed the effect of jumping at the beginning of a new section. Then I thought one could do something much bolder with that and tell a story which covered a much longer period and have these quite large gaps.

In The Stranger's Child one of the gaps is about 40 years. And I think people generally enjoyed that thing of suddenly starting it and not knowing where the hell we were and who these people were. It seemed to me that it was more like life, you meet someone you haven't seen in 40 years and you wouldn't necessarily recognise them.

And that's perhaps what it was all about - it was about trying to write novels that were more like life and less like novels. And to try and create a sense of a passage of time and things that interest you more as you get older - the workings of memory and so forth - and to try and find a form in which to do that.

JS: The Line of Beauty won the Booker, did you take that as a form of acceptance of things that you'd been trying to say...

AH: Well, the book was a great critical and commercial success before it won the Booker Prize and that of course made a further huge change to it. I don't think it's quite as simple as that, the thing about a book is that it brings your name to the forefront and to thousands of readers who've never heard of it before. And it does have this amazing, global reach.

I was teaching in America at that time when I won it (the Booker), of course now Americans are eligible for it, they weren't in those days and the Booker then had more prestige in America. But I was amazed by the impact it had. I spent the next year-and-half going around the world talking about books I could not bear to hear the names of mentioned again!

So it does unmistakably mark a transition in a writer's career. It happened to me mid-career, and it's quite a nice time for it to happen, wouldn't be great to win the Booker with your first novel.

JS: With the latest book that's coming out this year, how much have your themes and thoughts changed?

AH: It's almost too early for me to say. Again, the new book is one that covers a wide time span, about 70 years. And it again has these alienating jumps. The new book hasn't quite settled enough for me yet...I only finished it two weeks ago. So far it's been read by only two people, my editor and my agent.

JS: Your editor has read the other two, so what do your editor and agent have to say about this new one?

AH: Well, I had all sorts of doubts about it. I had a lot of problems in writing it. And I was expecting a rather worried sort of phone call. But actually, they were both surprisingly enthusiastic!

JS: What were the doubts that you faced with this book?

AH: Hard to describe, but I think I got very interested in writing novels which not only have these gaps, but are also rather dis-articulated. And it is the question of how you sustain an overall narrative interest when you are breaking up the story in this way. And I think this one, more than The Stranger's Child, goes off in unexpected angles.

I made all the parts of it as good as I could make them, I was rather anxious about what the overall effect would be.

It is very, very hard for the writer himself to judge those things, because over the years of writing a book you become so familiar with the material, all the surprises in it and they are no longer surprises to you. So you absolutely need the judgement of someone who is coming to it fresh, so they can tell you whether it hangs together or not. But it seems it does.