Sarah Hall: ‘I love writing about sex, the civil veneer stripped off’
The books interview: the author of The Electric Michelangelo talks about her new book, The Wolf Border, how motherhood has affected her work and why avoiding politics in fiction is juvenile
Sarah Crown
Saturday 28 March 2015 09.00 GMT
W
ant to know what it takes for a literary author to become a household name? Ask Hilary Mantel. Never mind the three decades-worth of praise and prizes she garnered for her pre-Wolf Hall output, it wasn’t until she tackled the Tudors that she made the step-change. These days, of course, she’s Dame Hilary, universally revered – but not so very long ago she was writing in relative obscurity, vigorously championed by her supporters, but little known by the wider public.
Four novels and one short-story collection into her career, Sarah Hall finds herself in a similar position. On the back of her fifth novel, out this month, her publisher, Faber, lists her achievements in bold. “Winner”, it declares, simply: “Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. BBC National Short Story Award. Portico Prize for Fiction. John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. EM Forster Award.” It’s an exceptional record for a novelist only just entering her 40s – and that’s without her inclusion in the Granta list of best young British novelists and her numerous short- and longlistings: for the Man Booker (twice), the Impac, the Frank O’Connor prize, the Arthur C Clarke award. But despite the laurels, the eulogies (“the best British writer around right now”, according to Foyles’s Jonathan Ruppin) and glowing comparisons to the likes of Raymond Carver and Alice Munro, the odd sense lingers of Hall as a well-kept secret. If you’re currently revelling in your membership of the initiate, however, be warned: her new novel looks set to blow the lid off. “Honestly,” says Hall, “I think it’s the best thing I’ve done. Everything I’ve learned about writing over the years, it’s in this book.”
The Wolf Border is set in Cumbria, on the fictional estate of Annerdale – the largest private estate in a country that is, as the central character Rachel observes with lightly jaundiced eye, “particularly owned”. A Cumbrian native, Rachel has been living a nomadic existence overseas, setting up camp wherever her zoological work took her. Now home is calling. Her once indomitable mother is dying by degrees, and Annerdale’s cavalier earl wants her help in furthering his precious scheme to reintroduce the grey wolf to England. Fans of Hall’s fiction will spot the signature notes: the northern setting, the civic engagement, the dynamic, faceted female lead. But there is also a sense that she has moved up a gear; the canvas is broader and the plot appreciably thicker than in her earlier works. Questions of inheritance, national and familial, echo back and forth across a novel in which the political and personal meet and mingle. The wolves themselves, meanwhile, furnish both metaphysical resonance and profound, physical reality: fairytale monsters, flesh-and-blood predators, they ghost through the pages like shadows; rarely seen but deeply felt.
Hall’s first encounter with wolves came when she was a child, at Lowther Wildlife Park. The park has long since closed, but it crops up under an alias in The Wolf Border; Hall, like Rachel, was raised in Cumbria, and it soon becomes clear that the novel is threaded with autobiography. As well as a shared geography, Hall gives her main character her own alma mater, Aberystwyth, and has her spend time on an Idaho reservation that Hall visited in her 20s.
We are talking in the living room of Hall’s house in Norwich on a bright day in early spring; publicity for The Wolf Border has been cut to fit around the schedule of her seven-month-old daughter, who is currently being promenaded around the local park by Hall’s partner. The state of motherhood provides the novel with its emotional core; Hall wrestles intently with the questions it raises, and describes the bodily ordeal of pregnancy and birth in such visceral detail that I took it for granted that this, too, was drawn directly from life. But it turns out she wasn’t pregnant when she began the book; in a rare case of life mirroring art, that came later.
“It was the thing I was most worried about,” she says now. “Motherhood’s such a personal thing, a fugue state; I didn’t know if, not having been through it, I could pull it off. Then, when I’d finished the first draft, I did get pregnant.” She laughs. “I finished the copy-editing two weeks before the baby came – horrendously uncomfortable, lying on the bed with the computer balanced – so I was able to check through the pregnancy stuff, but not what came after.”
Hall was born in 1974, just within the boundaries of the Lake District national park, in a “tiny hamlet, near the village of Bampton, which is near the bigger village of Shap, which is on the A6”. The sense her description gives of her birthplace as the still centre from which the wider world spins out is reflected in her work. Although it is years now since she headed down the A6, in her fiction, she is continually drawn back to this remote, well-written corner of the north-west. She puts its pull down to a “combination of intimacy and unknowability. When people think of the Lake District they think of Wordsworth and the other Romantic-with-a‑capital-R writers, but I always saw it as a great setting for adventure. In my third novel, The Carhullan Army” – a near-future dystopia set in a Britain of limited resources and repressive, military-style law – “fanatics go up into the mountains and use them to their advantage. In The Wolf Border, there are political debates about what the national park is for. I like the act of rewriting the Lakes: of pushing back against history and trying to decide what the modern way is.”
The presence of Cumbria in each of Hall’s novels means she is often spoken of as a “northern” writer. She is wry about the label (“the further away from the capital you are, the more exotic you seem”), but quick to point out that “we’re a small country: what affects the north affects the rest. In The Wolf Border, the Earl sits in the House of Lords and has his finger on the nation’s pulse. You can feel the vectors of power.” On the place of politics in her work, she is emphatic. “I don’t see that books can be written without political context – not if they’re relevant and ambitious. Our lives are politically wound. There seems to be such fear in this country of saying that outright about literature, as if it makes for lesser work, as if you’re writing a reductive manifesto. But to avoid politics seems somehow juvenile.”
A northern writer Hall may be, but it wasn’t until she put some serious distance between herself and her birthplace that she found herself writing about it. While studying for an MA at St Andrews she met an American law student whom she went on to marry; though the marriage was shortlived, its legacy was substantial: a move to the US proved the catalyst she needed to embark on novel-writing. The pair fetched up in the small town of Lexington, Virginia, after her husband was awarded a scholarship to a nearby law school. It was, she says, “kind of a brilliant place, but very southern and Christian: a serious culture shock. I walked dogs for this mad lady who had a loaded civil war cannon on her porch, pointed at the house of a neighbour she hated”. Uprooted, with time on her hands, she began writing the book that would become Haweswater, her version of the real-life story of the drowned village of Mardale. “It was like burying myself in the soil of the valley, not to sound too vampiric about it,” she says. “I was brought up three miles from the reservoir: there were people in my village who’d lived in Mardale; our church choir used to sing at the annual memorial service. The story was right there, but I needed to go away to write it. You can’t see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.”
The presence of Cumbria in each of Hall’s novels means she is often spoken of as a “northern” writer. She is wry about the label (“the further away from the capital you are, the more exotic you seem”), but quick to point out that “we’re a small country: what affects the north affects the rest. In The Wolf Border, the Earl sits in the House of Lords and has his finger on the nation’s pulse. You can feel the vectors of power.” On the place of politics in her work, she is emphatic. “I don’t see that books can be written without political context – not if they’re relevant and ambitious. Our lives are politically wound. There seems to be such fear in this country of saying that outright about literature, as if it makes for lesser work, as if you’re writing a reductive manifesto. But to avoid politics seems somehow juvenile.”
A northern writer Hall may be, but it wasn’t until she put some serious distance between herself and her birthplace that she found herself writing about it. While studying for an MA at St Andrews she met an American law student whom she went on to marry; though the marriage was shortlived, its legacy was substantial: a move to the US proved the catalyst she needed to embark on novel-writing. The pair fetched up in the small town of Lexington, Virginia, after her husband was awarded a scholarship to a nearby law school. It was, she says, “kind of a brilliant place, but very southern and Christian: a serious culture shock. I walked dogs for this mad lady who had a loaded civil war cannon on her porch, pointed at the house of a neighbour she hated”. Uprooted, with time on her hands, she began writing the book that would become Haweswater, her version of the real-life story of the drowned village of Mardale. “It was like burying myself in the soil of the valley, not to sound too vampiric about it,” she says. “I was brought up three miles from the reservoir: there were people in my village who’d lived in Mardale; our church choir used to sing at the annual memorial service. The story was right there, but I needed to go away to write it. You can’t see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.”
If Haweswater is inward-looking, a close-up study of an isolated community drawn in wintry greys and browns, Hall’s second Booker-shortlisted novel, The Electric Michelangelo, the story of a tattoo artist who sets up shop on Coney Island amid the freak shows and fairground rides, is, by contrast, an explosion outwards; fireworks on the fourth of July. Writing it was, she says, “an act of exuberance. I was thrilled to find that I was allowed to be a writer, so I threw everything at it: language, rhyming sentences, non-existent plot.” Funnily enough, she says, “they love it in France. It riffs on concepts – pages and pages about what it means to get tattooed – and they like that. Here, it’s like, ‘Where’s the plot?’ Ideally, I guess, you strike a balance, but there’s no balance in that book. I look at it now and think, what were the Booker judges thinking? Rowan Pelling was on the panel; she was editing The Erotic Review at the time, and it’s full of sex, maybe that was it. Most novels avoid sex like the plague, but I love writing about it.”
Really? Why?
“I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off. Sex does that.” Also, she says, “it’s a challenge. You have to get the language right when writing about sex: if you want it to live on the page, you have to consider your choice of expression, the power of an image, the sound of a word. It gets down to the absolute essence of writing.”
Really? Why?
“I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off. Sex does that.” Also, she says, “it’s a challenge. You have to get the language right when writing about sex: if you want it to live on the page, you have to consider your choice of expression, the power of an image, the sound of a word. It gets down to the absolute essence of writing.”
The same is true, she believes, of short stories. Her first collection, The Beautiful Indifference, came out in 2011 to rapturous reviews; the form proved the perfect vehicle for Hall’s particular brand of brawny artistry. Val McDermid said of the taut, brutal opening story, “Butcher’s Perfume”, that it exemplified “the power of fiction to get to the grim heart of things”. With short stories, Hall says, “you’re required to fit much more in. It’s the world-on-the-head-of-a-pin thing. It was excellent discipline for me, the baggy, sloppy novelist, to think about form and plot.”
Now, in The Wolf Border, she is reaping the benefits. This is a mature novel, coming at a transitional point in Hall’s own life. And just as the landscape of her childhood infuses her work to date, so she is excited about the way in which the shift in her personal landscape might affect her fiction. “Children make you vulnerable: it’s like having a wound that anyone can pour salt in. But as a novelist, that’s a plus: you’re aiming for direct empathy with the world. And in terms of the practicalities, it’s just something I’ll manage, because I love writing. It’s a question not of if, but of how.”
• The Wolf Border is published by Faber.
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