Bold realities in fiction

“Why have I agreed to write another book, you ask yourself. Fear decreases as you write another book.”

Jim Crace starts simply, as if he is about to break it all down for me — then reveals an intense clutch of ideas that demonstrate the ambitiousness of his oeuvre. I first saw Crace, the 67-year-old author of the Booker shortlisted Harvest (2013), impress an audience at The Hindu ’s Lit for Life festival in Chennai this January, when he read a striking paragraph he had thought to pick out from co-panellist Abraham Verghese’s novel in explaining his own ideas of craft. A similar attention to killer details is evident when I meet him at the Jaipur Literature Festival, where he observes the fun most acutely.

“I write about the way in which land is stolen,” he says, speaking specifically of Harvest , where a pre-industrial English village faces wealthy interlopers. “This is about how people turn on each other in times of trouble and blame immigrants, about communities. These themes are explored in medieval times.”

A self-proclaimed fabulist who started out as a political realist, Crace deals in big, bold realities in his 13 works of fiction (novels and collections of short stories), for which he has won The Guardian Fiction Prize, the Whitbread Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among many other accolades. It is hard to pick out one book as less significant than another, the stories are novel-sized in their scope. They are set in invented continents or the distant past — at the tail end of the Stone Age ( The Gift of Stones , 1988), or just before the industrial revolution ( Signals of Distress , 1994) — and moved by cataclysmic events that thoroughly shake a community and loosen its great truths. Ultimately, however, despite the various backdrops and contemporary themes, Crace is an old-fashioned storyteller possessed by deep roots and grand, sweeping narrative arcs.

Class in my blood

Does he hold on to the idea of Englishness?

“I’m not in love with the English landscape, the English character, the idea of the dull and cold-hearted nation,” he says. “But my working-class roots are important to me. Class is the seawater in which all Englishmen must swim. Stories of class warfare are important. It’s something I feel in my blood. Ruling classes can never fit well in this world.”

Indeed, Crace’s characters are placed in opposition to the elite. “Oxford is a snobbish place,” he says. “What does it ultimately celebrate? Ruling-class intellectuals.”

He speaks with other writers comfortably, but at a slight remove; Crace once said to The Paris Review (2006), “To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing. All you get is a bad omelette and a worse tango.”

His is a self-deprecatory, self-taught style of talking about method. “The abstract ideas I have first: where it is located, who, when, what,” he says. “And when you have finished one-tenth of your novel, 50 per cent of your work is done.”

Crace’s first book, Continent (1986), took him to full-time writing — after a couple of years volunteering in Sudan and time at the BBC, he was a freelancer for a decade — and he has remained in that world since.

“I tried freelance journalism. Earlier, it was 6,000 words at a time,” he says. “Now I must write 80,000-odd words to finish a novel. Journalism is a meal made of lots of starters; writing a novel is the main course.”

Life has changed in lots of ways that channel Crace’s dystopian anxieties.

“Things are different today, more difficult,” says Crace of the current dystopia. “Life was easier for me, in terms of jobs, space, lifestyle, money, etc. I could be a hippie and manage. I managed till I got a family, settled down around 40. But my kids don’t want to be 67, they want to be 27.”

Crace’s nostalgia for the natural beauty of the English countryside reflects a North London childhood at the frontlines of the conflict between development and the pastoral.

Describing his idyllic childhood, he laughs: “If you love your parents, you turn into them.”

The next project takes him far away from the idyllic. “I am writing a stage play next,” he says. “Back to theatre. It is focused around the Minotaur legend, how civilization needs scapegoats to blame. But my minotaur is female; a her. The creature looks beastly, but it is a woman!”

It is this kind of fun that takes readers back, again and again, to Crace.

Rajni George is reader at Granta and literary editor at Punctum

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