A reader’s writer

Some people say that nothing happens to them, but everything happens to the writer who sees the world around him as material for fiction. Francis King is such a writer, which explains why he has been able to go on writing novels and stories for longer than many of his readers and indeed publishers have been alive.

When someone who brought out his first book in 1946 while an Oxford undergraduate publishes a novel as good, fresh, intelligent and moving as Cold Snap more than 60 years later, it is almost inevitable that reviewers should remark on his extraordinary literary longevity and his seemingly inexhaustible vitality. And yet this is, in all ways but one, beside the point. To dwell on his age is invidious and misleading. This is not a remarkable novel for a man in his middle eighties to have written. It is quite simply a remarkable novel.

There is indeed only one good reason to draw attention to his age. Though his books have generally been well and widely reviewed — I remember Auberon Waugh insisting that Act of Darkness was the outstanding novel of 1984 — and though one trusts that he has a wide circle of devoted readers, his admirers believe that he has never been given his full due. Perhaps his failure to receive this may be accounted for by his refusal to play to the gallery, to strike attitudes or become a public figure seeking and enjoying modish celebrity.

Instead he has simply got on with his job, transmuting what he has experienced, observed and imagined into fictional form. It may be too that his versatility has told against him. He has written fine comedies like The Firewalkers and The Ant Colony and dark, sometimes chilling studies of obsession and betrayal, such as The Man on the Rock and A Domestic Animal.