Francis Spufford Meet the Author

Francis Spufford's first novel, Golden Hill, is typically energetic

and surprising. New York before the revolution. A hero known only as Mr

Smith. A mysterious fortune and a trial for murder. Above all, a piece

of storytelling that never lets you go. Welcome.

Nobody can turn the pages of Golden Hill, Francis Spufford, without

realising that you enjoy being in New York, and the 1740s, what is it

about that period, the state of the city, that clearly excited you so

much? It is the lost moment before the famous history of 18th-century

takes over. A generation before the American Revolution with all its

mythology and what you might call a very strongly moralised sense of

good and evil. It is the last moment that can be mysterious to

contemporary readers, with its own politics and rules, and its own

secrets hidden in places. It's own rules and secret but also the

feeling that anything goes. A man arrives, Mr Smith, Mr Smith goes to

New York, you might even say, rather like Mr Smith went to Washington in

the famous film, with ?1000, though but he knows where it has come from,

and there is the feeling that anything could happen. It is a

frontier town. One of the things that is hardest to get your head

around, the idea that New York is, in the first place, a small town

where everybody knows everybody, and that it is effectively a frontier,

the wild continent begins just north of Wall Street. Thus Mr Smith thinks

he can behave like a man in a big city, coming from London, but

instead he discovers that he is somewhere where gossip follows you,

biting at your heels all the time, and every single one of your actions

comes back to haunt you in short order. And so different from our own

time in the sense that New York is 100 times smaller, by population,

than London. So you go there, and if you have money and the gift of the

gab, which he has, pretty soon you know everybody. Yes, because

everybody is... It is only about 7000 people. From 1000 are slaves.

English, Dutch, and African slaves, perched on the very southern tip of

Manhattan island, basically down in what is the financial district of

New York these days. In this little transplanted bit of 18th-century

Europe, which is busy working out what else it can be. We should not

give the impression that this is a meditation on history, it is a

rollicking good story. It is an adventure story. An adventure which

produces the unexpected, in which there is a sense of mystery. In that

way, what you have done by setting it in the 18th century is also to

write a sort of picturesque novel, a man, on his own, heading off on his

adventures, to tell a story. I was very attracted by how loose the

rules were at the beginning of the novel. In the same way that New York

is a gold rush frontier town, the novel is a gold rush frontier form

of literature at that point, nobody knows what the rules are and what

you can and cannot do. So 18th-century novels tend to throw in

everything, and the kitchen sink, and ignore all of the later rules

about what counts is serious and light. In your nonfiction life you

can all sorts of rules, writing about strange subjects and sometimes

taking a slightly unusual, maybe even bizarre point of view. And you

brought that to fiction. What made you decide that you did want to

start making up stories? I have been working my race slowly toward it.

Like a crab like creep. For 20 years. A fistful of reasons. But I

suppose the main one is that I was tired of explaining, and I wanted to

hand at the reader all of my trust, and let them sort it out. Which is

why the story of Mr Smith is full of cheats and revelations and secrets

that ought not to be revealed until the last page. It hands the reader

an enigma and asks them to sort it out. The average reader will know on

page one that there is probably going to be something on page 300

and what ever, that will be a surprise. There is no secret about

that. Now, but they should still be surprised by the nature of the

surprise. Which we will not reveal. Naturally. One of the fascinating

things is that in sinking yourself into this time, New York of the

1740s, before the revolution, when it was beginning to find itself, you

adopted a form of storytelling and speech, that tries, inevitably

artificially, but tries to replicate the kind of way that people would

have spoken to each other at the time. It is quite an ambitious thing

to do. I think it is necessary. If you are genuinely interested in the

difference of the past, you have two come to some kind of artificial,

yes, but necessary linguistic settlement with the reader. You

cannot do the difference of the past in entirely modern language. You

must reach for one of the expedients, for example, Hilary

Mantell has developed that so well, you have to find a way to convey the

past and is the past in the language, even if are also taking

half a step toward the reader to make sure it works. And it is

inescapable that the reader brings our own experience, our knowledge of

New York, if you have been there, certainly of the USA, bring that to

bear on the period. So you cannot read it without knowing that it is a

world about to be transformed in an extraordinary way. I was relying on

that dramatic irony, caused by the reader being such a very different

position, I needed the reader is a call operator, knowing that my cast

are standing in the foreground raising a glass to the King, there

is a historical tsunami appearing in the distance which none of them have

noticed yet. Because New York was a very royalist place. Royalist and

loyalist. You, as a reader, should be able to see the fault lines that

will soon turn to the American Revolution. But they don't know

that. They think they are part of His Majesty's North American

domains. And one of the excitements of the book is to find yourself in a

very unexpected place, with New Yorkers toasting the King, it is a

lovely shift in our own consciousness, it sets you up for a

good story. I have strong the plot of it between both. One of the nice

things was that November and December, 1746, studied by feasts

which no contemporary Americans celebrate anymore. There was no

thanksgiving back so it runs from also stayed through the Kings

birthday, Guy Fawkes' Day, very big in the colonies, all the way through

to win the Dutch New Yorkers celebrate the arrival of a saint in

a red robe with white trimming, and then on towards, not Christmas,

which is deeply disapproved of by the Puritans, half of the New York

population, but with any luck the very things they celebrate should be

telling you that the pastors is another country. And there's nothing

like a journey into a vanished world, is there? Nothing like it.

Francis Spufford, thank you very