I read William Nicholson’s new novel in proof before Christmas. ‘The must-read book for 2013 for lovers of William Boyd and Sebastian Faulks,’ it said on the back. Well, I like Boyd and Faulks, but I positively love William Nicholson, so I found that come-on slightly grating.
Then I saw what the publicity people meant. Nicholson has broken out of his small, square two inches of ivory. His previous three novels were set over the course of a few days in the southeast of England. A typical chapter was called ‘Saturday’.
Motherland spans 11 years, set in Sussex, France, India, Jamaica and New Orleans. Part One is called ‘War: 1942-45’. The pivotal scene of the book is a seaborne raid on the beaches of Dieppe.
‘He’s written a much more broad-sweeping novel this time,’ I told my friends with whom I’d been sharing a Nicholson passion for the past year. ‘It’s set in the second world war.’
‘No, not the second world war, please,’ said one friend. ‘I want him to carry on writing about being us, now.’
That, you see, is what Nicholson is so good at. It has been a great joy for us to discover this male (and heterosexual) writer who writes brilliantly about what it is really like to be a woman or a man, right now. His particular gift is to take you inside the contemporary mind, tracing our trains of thought with astonishing agility, sensitivity and honesty. He also writes very sexily about sex in an acceptably literary way, and we love this too.
But you can see his dilemma. He had finished the ‘Sussex trilogy’ and was aching to write more about the fictional family he had created. Where could he go from there? Of course: he could go to the past. He could write about the grandparents of the contemporary characters. Like building a loft-extension or digging out the basement, this is a clever way of expanding your empire without having to uproot yourself or your reading family.
He has every right to try his hand at a broad-canvassed novel in which big events happen: military catastrophe, voyages across oceans, the bloody dawn of Indian independence, ruptures in the banana trade, births, marriages, break-ups and deaths. It just takes some getting used to for his fans who really like him to describe in depth what it’s like to sit in a waiting-room. In his previous novels, events intervened on the train of thought, rather than the other way round.
After Christmas I was sent the hardback of the book and read it all over again, this time taking notes. Such a good writer is Nicholson that you’re inspired to do ‘prac. crit’ on him. I did, comparing the interior monologue of Henry in The Golden Hour sitting in the lobby of the television company (‘Then, tiring of the strain of smiling to himself, he closes his eyes and lets it be seen that he has chosen this chair in this lobby as an opportunity to catch up on the sleep he so desperately needs’) with Larry, the noble and infinitely patient main character in Motherland, waiting for his meeting with Mountbatten at Brook House on Park Lane:
Left to himself, Larry feels out of place in the grandeur and the aura of power of his surroundings. He goes to the wide window and stands gazing out at the bare trees and grey snow of Hyde Park… Strange to think that this little frozen island should govern a faraway continent where the hot sun is, presumably, shining even now.
You have to say, it’s not as good: not as probing, not as pinpoint accurate as that excruciatingly truthful ‘lets it be seen’ in The Golden Hour. Though he writes in the present tense for the sake of immediacy, Nicholson does not take us as deeply into the thought patterns of the characters in Motherland as he did in his previous novels.
There’s lots of dialogue, which is in its very nature an exterior, not an interior, pursuit. Nicholson is an acclaimed scriptwriter — he won a Bafta for Shadowlands and wrote the screenplay for Les Misérables — and I think his scriptwriter’s talent took over while writing this. I kept imagining the dialogue being in a film and the actors having to imbue their words with mouth-twitches of deep significance; and I imagined cameras swooping across Dieppe beach, or cameramen in a parallel car capturing the scene in which Larry saves a Muslim man’s life in India when the car is attacked by a Hindu mob. It’s all beautifully described, and Nicholson manages not to write a single clichéd sentence; but, please, William Nicholson, we already have a Sebastian Faulks and a William Boyd.
I did cry on finishing the novel the second time, which proves that the book grows on you. In fact, in its way, it’s extremely powerful. One thing you can do in an 11-year book, which you can’t do in a one-week book, is an 11-year unrequited love. (Is it requited in the end? Read it and find out.) There are two unhappy marriages, and you do live both of them in all their length and bleakness. There are strong Brideshead themes of Catholicism, alcoholism and the ‘Big House’. The drudgery of Kitty’s lonely early parenthood is well-drawn: ‘There always seems to be just a little more to do than there is time to do it, and yet she has the feeling that she does nothing.’
And perhaps there’s a reason why Nicholson makes us keep our distance from the real interior monologue of Kitty’s husband, Ed Avenell. After the traumatic experience at Dieppe which wins him a VC, Ed is psychologically scarred for life, and no one can get close enough to him: not his wife, not his best friend, and not us, the readers.
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