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| Connolly goes back to the 50s |
Joseph Connolly, one of London’s most
popular and prolific authors has just published a major new novel.
He spoke about it to Lew Matthews
Love is Strange by Joseph Connolly,
Faber & Faber, £12.99
THE 1950s was an awkward decade in a Britain still recovering
from the social and economic privations of the war.
The population was just beginning to taste the promise of the consumer
society and glimpse the future through television, and the results
of the post-war baby boom were just beginning to push at the boundaries
of a hitherto hidebound society.
It is a world remembered in flawless detail by Joseph Connolly in
his remarkable new novel, Love is Strange. It is as if he has dipped
his pen into a stream of memories that will strike a loud chord
with anyone who lived through the period, or will provide a vivid
picture to others. Connolly appears to have moved decisively away
from his earlier high-octane, frenetic comedies and, as with his
last book, The Works, published in 2003, the tone has now become
darker, more serious – but no less irreverent and outrageous,
and certainly no less enjoyable.
The book starts, startlingly, with a chapter called The End, in
which the narrator, Clifford, convinced that he is about to die,
plunges into memories of his life from the age of eight, growing
up in an apparently ordinary middle-class family in London. But,
as with even the quietest patches of water, there is always another
world going on underneath which may be nothing like as placid as
the surface would suggest.
“I have been unconsciously storing up the past, and particularly
the 1950s,” Connolly told me at his home off Fitzjohn’s
Avenue, Hampstead.
“I found that when I started writing the 1950s stuff that it
just sort of fell out of me; it was almost as if a tap had been
opened, and although it’s not my past that I have written about
in this book, it certainly is the world of my past,” he said.
He was born at the beginning of that decade, in Fitzjohn’s
Avenue and by the 1970s he was the proprietor of the famous Flask
Bookshop in Flask Walk when there were 10 bookshops between the
Tube and the police station down the hill.
And he started to write books too, the first being a guide to collecting
first editions, and then biographies of PG Wodehouse and Jerome
K Jerome, before he wrote his first novel in 1988.
Eight more novels have followed, including the exquisitely comic
Summer Things, which has sold well over 100,000 copies and was made
by a French director into an award-winning film starring Charlotte
Rampling which was on general release in London last year. But it
was clearly time, now, for the 1950s to come bursting out. “I
deliberately didn’t do any 1950s research, because I didn’t
want some kind of slab of knowledge stuck in,” he says. “It
was all what I actually remember, and I can remember the sights
and smells and the touch of things more clearly right now than I
can things just a few years ago.”
And so, those of us who are old enough to remember, are re-acquainted
delightfully with all the toys that arrived in cereal boxes, the
brands of soap and bottled drinks, those nasty rubber-topped bottles
of glue, the comics, sweets, early television programmes, slogan
on the Tubes of Pepsodent toothpaste and many other things besides
– although these details are, in a way, incidental to the plot
of the book.
“What I have tried to get across was not just lists of products
and things, but the tremendous importance they had to children in
those days,” he says. “If your mother was going to buy
a box of cereal you would be utterly jittery about what little toy
or gadget was going to be inside; these things sort of took you
over. And then there was the peer pressure everyone was under because
there were certain things you just had to have.”
Parts of the story is narrated by other members of the family –
the inadequate father, the (apparently) timid housewife and Clifford’s
wayward sister, Annette, who is subjected to the most brutal treatment
by nuns, and priests, at a convent school. It is not by any means
a complimentary view of the Catholic church.
“What I wanted to do here was to reflect the horror of this
great shield of purity that these church institutions held up, things
that because they did them all their lives they almost came to believe
themselves,” he says.
The plot gallops forward some decades, and it all gets much darker,
with the characters becoming more accepting of things that in the
1950s would have shocked them to their core. And the reader should
not expect the ending to be joyous although it is not short of drama
and surprise.
Connolly is in some ways an old fashioned writer, and he doesn’t
even use a typewriter. He writes by hand with a fountain pen in
foolscap notebooks (which are not easy to find nowadays). He sits
down to start writing. “When I start it is with a low moan
inside me because I realise there will be no more long lunches until
I finish, and the bloody characters are going to take me over,”
he says.
“But I like having written; there is no better feeling than
that.” |
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