Jim Crace

“Inimitably excellent, Jim Crace stands on his own ground
among living English novelists...”
– Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

'A writer of hallucinatory skill'
John Updike

[Website contact: Rafaelo Candori

rcandori@outlook.com ]

Latest:

The Melody,

to be published in USA by

Nan Talese (imprint of Doubleday-Random House)

and in Canada by

Hamish Hamilton

on June 19^th 2018

Here are endorsements from all the pre-pub reviews in the USA:

With devastating understatement, Crace offers a parable for a time

in which empathy has given way to callousness and fear.

KIRKUS (starred review)

Like the simple but subtle song from which this haunting and transfixing novel takes its title, the novel’s effects linger, coloring the reader’s feelings about the thin border between the natural world and human society.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Exploring ideas of myth, grief (the depiction of how Al copes with

his wife’s death is particularly moving), and inequality, Crace’s latest is an ethereal novel that ambles and simmers towards a delightful conclusion.

BOOKLIST

Jim Crace has written the following short introduction to his new novel:

My novels are hardly autobiographical. They tend to spring from something puzzling or troubling beyond my experience rather than from events in my own life. So it was with The Melody. About three years ago, I was on the tenth floor of a lavish hotel in Chennai, India, a guest of the Lit for Life Festival. Everything was perfect – except for one annoyance: I couldn’t sleep because of the ceaseless, metallic racket from the waste ground below my suite. I looked down from the window on my first restless night to watch the hotel’s garbage bins being toppled over and raided for food scraps by, mostly, feral dogs and a few other animals I couldn’t, in that half light, put a name to. A couple of them looked alarmingly like children. I lay awake, disturbed in every sense, until the waiter brought my breakfast on a tray.

What I’d witnessed at the bins had been a distressing and sobering sight, not just because of the disparity between my pampered life and theirs but also because it made me speculate from my elevated viewpoint how biologically debasing and destructive poverty must be. Those scavenging street children had seemed little more than animals.

That was the seed for the novel and it provided the question the narrative would hope to answer: What occupies the space between the human mammals in their hotel rooms and those amongst the bins? A realist, autobiographical writer, employing the pen as a camera, might have set the novel in 21^st century Chennai. I was wary of that. I was a white, privileged tourist there. Whatever I wrote would seem like a narrow, judgemental, post-colonial misrepresentation of a diverse nation about which I knew very little. India is so much more than poverty, of course. Besides, if a book were to be written on the subject of destitution in the sub-continent, there were plenty of talented Indian writers who would make a truer job of it than I ever could. Many have already done so. No, what I needed was a setting out of Asia and one which could not offend the citizens of any actual place. That meant making up an unnamed nation of my own, something I am very fond of doing. Minting a new world, rather than holding a mirror up to a real one, is a liberation I nearly always search for in my novels for the licence and the freedom it allows. Anything can happen in the realms of make-believe.

So The Melody is set in a time long lost (the late 1920s, say), on a coast unnamed (by the Mediterranean, perhaps) and in a town unbuilt, except within the pages of the novel. As in all the public places we enjoy, there is a throng of music, street life and romance, there are intrigues and shenanigans, there are good intentions and bad decisions. The only part of Chennai that survives is the night-time racket of the bins - but in The Melody these discords are relocated to disturb the wealth and poverty of an invented place that I hope can stand for Nowadays and Anywhere.

Thanks to Pan-Mac News and Picador Books, UK, for permission to reproduce the above. What follows is Picador’s own synopsis of the novel:

Alfred Busi, famed and beloved in his town for his music and songs, is now in his sixties, mourning the recent death of his wife and quietly living out his days alone in the large villa he has always called home. The night before he is due to attend a ceremony at the town’s avenue of fame, Busi is attacked by a creature he disturbs as it raids the contents of his larder. Busi is convinced that what assaulted him was no animal, but a child, ‘innocent and wild’, and his words fan the flames of old rumour – of an ancient race of people living in the woods surrounding the town – and new controversy: the town’s paupers, the feral wastrels at its edges must be dealt with. Once and for all.

As Busi’s nephew’s ambitious plans for himself and the town develop, he is able to fan the flames of rumour and soon Busi and the town he loves will be altered irrevocably.

The Melody by Jim Crace is a story about grief and ageing, about reputation and the loss of it, about love and music and the peculiar way myth seeps into real life. And it is a political novel too – a rallying cry to protect those we persecute. It is lyrical and warm, intimate and epic, a powerful future classic.

April 2018

Here’s an oddity! The following Crace memoir -about a shirt!- appeared in the Spring/Summer edition of Esquire’s Big Black Book:

I own a shirt that I’ve been wearing, on and off, for fifty years. In 1968, I was working in Khartoum, the then drowsy and cordial capital of the Sudan, and living in a biblically flat-roofed villa in al-Bahri, an unfashionable out-of-town neighbourhood across the Blue Nile bridge. I had not expected such openness and friendliness from my neighbours, nor -when I packed my bags for the triple-hop flight from London, via Rome and Cairo- had I foreseen the abrasive powers of the desert heat. Walking the streets was, according to one seasoned British colleague, “like wading through warm Guinness” except when the sun was screened by an haboob (or dust storm) and then it was “like wearing a sandpaper cloak.”

You can imagine how my factory-made, European clothes fared in such conditions. The elastic waists of my underpants were the first to stretch and sag, and then -given that I cycled everywhere- all my gussets and arm-pits were left embarrassingly threadbare by the twin attacks of sweat and friction. None of this was helped by the attentions of Sabino, the unusually tall and low-paid southerner whom I’d inherited by default as “a yardboy” along with the rental of the house and whose job it was to scrub my clothes. He used to sit cross-legged in his tatty jalabiya and assail my cuffs and collars with a rasping mixture of water, carbolic and sand. The best of Millets, Charing Cross, was soon reduced, like Hamlet’s king, to shreds and patches. What I needed now were some replacement clothes – and sturdier ones, built for hardship.

My Guinness-loving friend, directed me to Souk 2, the more authentic and less expensive of Khartoum’s market places where he said I’d find a row of fifty or so street tailors all of whom could make a lasting shirt and an enduring pair of trousers . “I know which one you’ll pick,” he said, with a mischievous grin. And he was right. What Englishman with little spoken Arabic but faced with such a bewildering choice of craftsmen equipped with identical hand-cranked Singer sewing machines would not select the one sitting behind a sign which announced his name in Roman script to be M.A.D ATTA. Those dozens of other outfitters must have been completely mystified by why it was their surly, unremarkable colleague got all the lucrative work from Europeans. We made a beeline for the Mad Hatter of Khartoum without so much as a glance elsewhere, ordered our bespoke clothes from him and then, like Alice, meekly drank his sugar-laden tea to close the deal. Bald and buck-toothed, he even looked the part; straight out of Wonderland. He should have paid the Estate of Lewis Carroll a hefty royalty.

The Mad Hatter rolled out his cloths and measured me without a word and one week later I returned to collect a full wardrobe in tough local cotton, with strengthened gussets and pits and with cuffs and collars designed to outwit the worst Sabino could offer them. None of my five new shirts were stylish, of course, or even mildly influenced by the Crushed Velvet revolution of that Summer of Love in Europe and America. They did not sport a single dart or pleat. Their tails were square-cut and unshaped. But they were undoubtedly made to last. Their plackets were as thick and serviceable as tea-cloths; the yokes across the shoulders were sturdy enough to endure a lifetime of labour

My particular favourite was a long-sleeved yellow shirt which didn’t suit my sun-reddened complexion one bit -it gave me that Blood and Urine look- but which I loved for its blaring cheerfulness. It is this shirt that outlived the others and is still hanging, half a century later, in my cupboard, with hardly any wear or tear to prove its age. It’s more than slightly faded now but still robust. Not a single thread has lifted. Every button is firm and intact. And to this day it fits me, I believe.

Why save that one shirt? The others that Mohamed Atta stitched for me were just as strongly-built but when I moved on from the Sudan to travel through Africa a year or so later with a small travel bag, I had to make a choice. I hung on to the toxic mustard one because of its amusing and affecting history; those had been exciting, joyful times. I let Sabino keep the rest, even though they didn’t truly fit. He accepted them with a complicit smile which both of us recognised to be a silent and long overdue admission of his guilty past. There’d come a time, a few weeks after my dealings with the Mad Hatter, when I began to realise that rather than attack my new bespoke outfits in the villa’s yard, Sabino had started taking them home to wash. And he was taking more time than was reasonable to return them. His tardiness made no difference, of course. I have never been a man excessively concerned with clothes or even one who wears them well. Too short and balding (even then). No-one has ever said that I look smart – or even tidy, come to that. So long as I had a clean set of gear every blistering Sudanese day, I was unbothered by mere laundry delays.

Unbothered, that is, until I ventured for the first time into al-Bahri market, a very rough and local place, not comfortable for outsiders, especially those dressed, as I was, in imperial attire. I was startled to see that I was not the only khawaga (or European) there that evening. Across, the street, drinking a Fanta at an open-air stall, and seemingly holding court to all and sundry was a tall and regal figure, wearing too short trousers and a familiar garish yellow shirt with sleeves that hardly reached his wrists . He looked like someone drawn by Tenniel and must be, I presumed, another one of the Mad Hatter’s customers, though one who’d not been measured very well. It wasn’t until he turned and the lantern light caught his face that I recognised Sabino. By day, he was the yardboy of an Englishman; by night, he was the ill-dressed dandy of the souk, the impostor of the borrowed shirt. I knew at once that I would have to keep and wear that shirt until -eternity?- it fell apart, not for its style or durability, but for the yarns stitched into it.

March 2018

The Guardian – The books that made me... Jim Crace

The book I am currently reading

I’m a Rathbones Folio Prize judge at the moment and so am shouldering my way through eighty volumes, mostly with great pleasure but sometimes just out of puritanical duty. The last book I read voluntarily, so to speak, was Andrea Mays’ The Millionaire and the Bard which, despite its seemingly narrow focus (collecting Shakespeare’s folios), was exciting, poignant and enriching.

The book I wish I’d written

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Inventing such bizarre and mischievous locations and describing them with such flair must have been a lot of fun.

The book that changed my life/the world

A parochial choice in the grand schemes of things, but it’s Robert Tressell’s socialist clarion call, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

The book that had the greatest influence on my writing

Roget’s Thesaurus - but it has to be the 1955 Everyman’s edition as that’s the one my father gave me on my tenth birthday. I thought it was an inexplicable present at the time (Where was my Meccano?) but it’s been at my side ever since and has given undeserved range and depth to my writing.

The books I couldn’t finish

I’ve never had much luck with Proust, Tolkien or Trollope.

The writer I’m most ashamed not to have read

Dickens. I shall start when I’m eighty.

Over/underrated

When we were teenagers, we all loved the bop prosody novels of Jack Kerouac and wanted to be him. He was overrated , mostly by me. We didn’t want to be Gary Snyder or Joyce Johnson but they were the best of The Beats.

The last book that made me cry/laugh

I’ve not blubbed recently – but my most valued weepers in the past have been Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, Ian McEwan’s A Child in Time and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. For sustained out-loud laughter, I recommend Ben Goldacre’s merciless I Think You’ll Find It’s a Bit More Complicated.

The book I most often give as a gift

Dr Seuss, for our children and their children.

The book I’d most like to be remembered for

You mean, after I’m dead? Not really bothered.

February 2018

The Melody was published in the United Kingdom and Ireland on February 8^th and received overwhelmingly admiring reviews (check out The Guardian, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, the TLS, the London Review of Books, the Daily Telegraph, the Irish Times, the Observer, the Daily Mail, the Big Issue, Metro, the Literary Review, amongst others. Equally enthusiastic were papers in Australia and the UAE.) The few dissenting voices can be found in the more conservative book pages – the Spectator, the Times, and the Sunday Times, where the chief reviewer of fiction, Peter Kemp, wrote a bizarrely careless review, calling The Melody and its author “feeble”.

October 2017

Jim Crace made the following contribution to the New Statesman’s Books of the Year feature:

Much of my reading nowadays includes anything remotely Shakespearean. 2017 has been a bumper year, including Fools and Mortals, an absorbing novel from Bernard Cornwell which invents the life of Shakespeare’s younger brother, Richard, and Margaret Atwood’s wickedly wise Hag-seed. She casts The Tempest adrift in a prison and makes a moving, magisterial case for the universal, timeless, classless relevance of Shakespeare’s plays?

The work I most enjoyed and valued, in any category, was a first book by the American economist, Andrea Mays. Her The Millionaire and the Bard tells the gripping story of Henry Folger’s amassment of First Folios and the establishment of his library in Washington DC – a narrow focus, perhaps, but one which not only fascinates about Tudor publishing but delves more broadly into Anglo-American relations and big business, obsession and privacy, marriage and money.

August 2017

In their Summer Double Issue, the British progressive magazine, New Statesman, published an article titled “Power with a Plot: In uncertain times, fiction can be better at politics than politicians. Here NS friends and contributors share the novels that make sense of the world.” Here is Jim Crace’s submission:

“I was brought up in a socialist household. Nearly all our books were of the left. Many of them influenced what I have taken as gospel ever since, especially -of course- The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, that sentimental clarion call to “organise”. But the work of fiction that affected me the most politically and still bears rereading for the boost of bloody-mindedness it provides was one I bought myself in about 1960 when I had just joined the Labour Party, was active in various peace movements and was discovering, as a timid teenager, the thrill of street demonstrations. It was Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner, a long short story and subsequently a film which rejoices in the power of the individual rather than the crowd. Sillitoe’s borstal boy protagonist lands an insolent, gleeful blow on the chins of his masters by refusing to excel. His politics are too spiteful, sullen and unbending, perhaps - but there is a dignity and glory to be celebrated, I think, in finding triumph in defeat and, therefore, never being cowed.”

Other novels nominated by novelists included All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (Stephen King), The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman by Andrzej Szczypiorski (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), The History of Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding (Jonathan Coe), The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow (Ali Smith), The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan (Colm Toibin), The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle (Lionel Shriver) and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (A. L. Kennedy.) Yes, it was a list of baffling variety.

July 2017

Many thanks to the various journalists, academics and readers who have contacted http://www.jim-crace.com/ since Andrew Hewitt moved on to Planet Hardy. Here (with the permission of both participants) is an exchange of emails between Jim Crace and a new writer seeking advice:

(To Jim)

Hello and I hope you are well. I am hoping you may be able to pass on this message to Jim Crace. I am a fan of his work and, as an unpublished writer struggling to secure an agent for my manuscript, I would dearly value some advice.

I've queried a lot of agents and had some positive responses regarding my writing ability and synopsis, however the consensus appears to be that in the current publishing climate my novel isn't commercial enough to get through.

I'd love to send Jim a short synopsis and the opening pages and ask for his advice on who best to approach.

(From Jim)

Thanks for making contact. I am very familiar with your situation as trying to find an agent can be a stumbling block for all new writers. I can’t give you much help with that as I have been with my own agent, David Godwin, since 1980 and so have no contacts elsewhere. I don’t hang out on the book scene. But I can give some general advice.

Please don’t mistake what I have to say as being pessimistic or despairing. It just has to be faced that at least nine out of ten novels that are completed never get published. If being published wasn’t such a rare achievement we wouldn’t desire it so much. What is important is to judge your submission very carefully, and that starts with making absolutely sure your manuscript cannot be improved. You might be able to fool yourself in this regard, but you won’t fool any editor or agent. Once you’ve sent off an unpolished manuscript, you’ve blown your chances. So that’s your first task: look at your novel again (and again).

Once you’ve reached the point where your novel is as free of blemishes as possible, there is no route ahead except a patient and a lonely one. No intervention by another published writer or a contact or a cousin will help. All that matters now is the opening sentence, and then the opening paragraph, and then the opening chapter. Nothing you can say in a covering letter or a synopsis can help in any way. In fact, both could be a hindrance. So they should be kept very short and businesslike: “I enclose for your consideration the manuscript of (Title), a detective novel set in Medieval France...or, a gothic romance set in the near future...or, a novelisation of the life of Mohamed Ali. No more than that.

What I would advise is that you now email every single agent you can put a name and address to, with your complete manuscript as an attachment. You have to give the agents the chance to read all of your book, because no positive decisions are ever reached over a partial manuscript. It might help if you can target a particular editor within an agency. You stand more chance, perhaps, with a junior editor who is building up a list and so is keen to find new talent. You can usually find a list of employees on an agency website.

Now you just have to take your chances. You are bound to get some stony rejections; you can’t please everyone. You might also get some encouraging rejections. These could just be kindly but insincere. Or they might be genuinely helpful. But they are still rejections. If it turns out that not a single agent is interested in your work, then it’s not their fault, it’s the book’s. It’s either not good enough, or it’s too similar to something already published, or it’s too arcane or bizarre a novel to ever find a commercial market. Whatever the reason, this is a manuscript that should now spend some time in a bottom drawer. You will have learnt a lot from this experience but should not be so disheartened that you do not proceed to write a second novel. Remember, most first novels are never published but they are essential for a published writer’s development and success.

Yes, I know, it’s grim and dispiriting. Every single writer has to go through a similar process. But do be stubborn and do bear in mind the success stories. An excellent novel will nearly always find a publisher. A writer who loses his or her nerve after one failure will never make it into print. Good luck; I’m just glad I have all these challenges behind me, because I know what a struggle it can be.

You have asked if I would look at your first chapter and a synopsis. If you’ve written a good novel then my approval won’t help. It’ll earn itself its own agent and publisher. If your work or your synopsis are not very good, then I do not want to be the one to either tell you or deceive you. I don’t want to puncture any writer’s confidence. Seriously, my best advice is Write your books in private and only show them to readers that matter, that is to say the editors and agents that control the entry gates to publishing. But you should feel free to contact me again at any time if you need more advice on strategy.

I have my fingers crossed for you.

[Website note: Jim Crace has asked me to point out that his advice to new writers tries to be sincere but cannot promise to be useful or accurate.]

May 2017

This website was created and administered by Andrew Hewitt from January 2000 until May 2017. You can still read his insightful and informative comments in many sections below. Sadly, Andrew has decided to concentrate on other activities and other writers (especially Thomas Hardy). So www.jim-crace.com has now become my inexpert responsibility. I hope to keep visitors up to date with news, with links and with a diary of events. I do not intend to make any critical or literary additions. My first post, below, is a brief chronology of Jim Crace’s writing career and his awards.

CANDORI, Rafaelo.

You can contact the website via rcandori@outlook.com

I am able to pass on mail to Jim Crace himself, to his agent in London, and his publishers in the USA and also in UK, but I cannot promise a reply from any third parties.

BIBLIOGRAPHY (Fiction only)

1977 Introduction 6 - Stories by New Writers

Faber& Faber

1986 Continent

Heinemann (UK) * Harper & Row (USA)

1988 The Gift of Stones

Secker& Warburg * Scribners

1992 Arcadia

Jonathan Cape * Atheneum

1994 Signals of Distress