:00:00. > :00:00.eloquently, doesn't he? It takes us seamlessly to Meet The Author.
:00:00. > :00:00.This week on Meet The Author Jim Naughtie talks to Rose Tremain
:00:00. > :00:07.In the first sentence of Rose Tremain's novel,
:00:08. > :00:10.The Gustav Sonata, we are told that Gustav loves his mother
:00:11. > :00:16.He's growing up in Switzerland, just after the war, but he nerve
:00:17. > :00:19.He's growing up in Switzerland, just after the war, but he nerver
:00:20. > :00:23.His intense friendship with Anton, his own age, Jewish,
:00:24. > :00:26.a brilliant music, is fulfilling and seems to offer his escape
:00:27. > :00:32.and hope, but as the sonata enters its last movement,
:00:33. > :00:34.when they are 60, we realise for Gustav, material success in life
:00:35. > :00:37.can't necessarily bring him the contentment that he and Anton
:00:38. > :00:39.have always looked for, but will always find a
:00:40. > :01:02.This is a story about an intense relationship, which develops
:01:03. > :01:04.into love, really, between Gustav and his friend Anton.
:01:05. > :01:16.So it's a fantastically sad story, isn't it?
:01:17. > :01:20.It is, it's a story built on hope, like so much of our lives are.
:01:21. > :01:27.There is this old saying that happiness is impossible
:01:28. > :01:33.because if you're living in the moment and you're
:01:34. > :01:35.happy you are afraid it is going to disappear.
:01:36. > :01:38.If it is in the past you can only recollect it,
:01:39. > :01:41.and if it is in the future it might not happen.
:01:42. > :01:43.So the story looks a that, and the condition of happiness
:01:44. > :01:54.Getting through, and doing as much as you possibly can,
:01:55. > :02:01.Despite a kind of unhappy childhood, despite a lot of things
:02:02. > :02:04.working against him, this is a boy who becomes
:02:05. > :02:06.a man in the story, who perseveres, he never gives up,
:02:07. > :02:15.Well, we know him when he is a young boy, and we know him at the end
:02:16. > :02:19.He never gives up, but he never reaches happiness,
:02:20. > :02:24.what we would think of as happiness, does he?
:02:25. > :02:26.Well, without doing a spoiler, JIm, there
:02:27. > :02:35.There is a little lift, and it is up to the readers
:02:36. > :02:37.to interpret to what extent this lift takes him right out
:02:38. > :02:41.of his sort of former state into a different state.
:02:42. > :02:44.The question for you is do you know whether it does or not?
:02:45. > :02:52.I believe it does, when I write a novel, I never know -
:02:53. > :02:55.in fact I deliberately don't know until somewhere quite near the end
:02:56. > :02:58.exactly what ending this story has earned, because stories,
:02:59. > :03:02.endings have to be earned, they can't be imposed.
:03:03. > :03:05.That is interesting, because a lot of writers would say
:03:06. > :03:08."What happens in between, I don't know, but I know
:03:09. > :03:15.the beginning, and I know the end", so you are unusual in that respect?
:03:16. > :03:17.Yes, I'm not being prescriptive about it, I am not saying this
:03:18. > :03:26.I am saying the process of writing for me is a discovery process.
:03:27. > :03:28.I have to discover little by little as I go along,
:03:29. > :03:31.and then find my route to the ending, which feels truthful.
:03:32. > :03:34.It's true to say I toyed with one rather cataclysmic alternative
:03:35. > :03:37.ending, and then I felt that actually, it was melodramatic,
:03:38. > :03:41.it was not where I was leading these people.
:03:42. > :03:47.Or where they - well, that is a huge question in writing,
:03:48. > :03:53.This old thing that people say about characters taking over,
:03:54. > :03:59.it isn't quite they take over, in my view, it is that once
:04:00. > :04:04.you are a third of the way down the book, shall we say,
:04:05. > :04:07.you understand that those characters, about who you knew very
:04:08. > :04:11.little at the beginning, have their own kind of integrity.
:04:12. > :04:14.The construction of the book, not surprisingly given its title,
:04:15. > :04:17.which is a clue to people, that The Gustav Sonata
:04:18. > :04:20.is in the form of three movements, really.
:04:21. > :04:28.But there is a sense in this Swiss setting of a kind of,
:04:29. > :04:33.not exactly timelessness, but a slow pace, a gradual feeling,
:04:34. > :04:37.and after all we cover nearly 60 years in the course of the book,
:04:38. > :04:46.It clearly interests you, this sort of, the gentleness with
:04:47. > :04:56.What I risked to do in this book, there are a lot of elipses of time,
:04:57. > :05:01.it is not continuuous, even in the first section which more
:05:02. > :05:05.or less narrates the childhood, the continuous childhood of Gustav.
:05:06. > :05:10.There are elipses of time, because I believe that
:05:11. > :05:13.readers are really clever, they like to work with the book,
:05:14. > :05:18.they don't like to be told everything, they are perfectly
:05:19. > :05:24.If they see there is a year that has passed where you haven't been told
:05:25. > :05:26.anything about it, they are perfectly capable of filling that
:05:27. > :05:30.It also helps to engage them, if they have
:05:31. > :05:34.What I'm establishing in the first section,
:05:35. > :05:37.what we could call in musical terms the exposition, is the circumstances
:05:38. > :05:40.in which this little boy grows up, and in particular, the unkindnesses
:05:41. > :05:46.I feel that by the end of that section, what the reader is saying
:05:47. > :05:48.is why is this person not kind to her son?
:05:49. > :05:57.At that point I felt I had to go back to this very difficult time,
:05:58. > :06:00.that Switzerland had before and during the war,
:06:01. > :06:04.which people assume, I think, or we - I had assumed,
:06:05. > :06:09.because Switzerland managed to retain their neutrality,
:06:10. > :06:12.that they were kind of, there was a kind of serenity
:06:13. > :06:17.When of course it was desperate for them.
:06:18. > :06:22.They didn't know at any minute the Germans might not invade them.
:06:23. > :06:25.So it needed to go back and look at the very difficult time
:06:26. > :06:28.And the agony for Anton's family a Jewish family,
:06:29. > :06:30.in this period of European history is, of course, intense.
:06:31. > :06:34.Yes, and that was the sort of second element that came into the story,
:06:35. > :06:39.It took, it is interesting to relate, again, in terms of things
:06:40. > :06:44.that happen in novels, that you hadn't perfectly foreseen,
:06:45. > :06:49.the question of Anton's family and the Jewish question.
:06:50. > :06:52.It had a much greater centralty in the book than I first
:06:53. > :07:00.Yeah, it's a book that really looked at moral rightness.
:07:01. > :07:04.I mean, the sacrifice that Gustav's father makes in order to save Jewish
:07:05. > :07:10.It's actually, he is actually punished.
:07:11. > :07:14.There's a lack of justice in the story in that
:07:15. > :07:20.Yes, there is, and that is, it seems to me, again we are back
:07:21. > :07:23.to this old question of truth, it seems to me to be real that this
:07:24. > :07:27.He might have got away with it and been feted
:07:28. > :07:35.You do acts of extraordinary sort of magnanimity and moral rightness,
:07:36. > :07:46.You talk about the way that the story developed
:07:47. > :07:50.in your hands, the way the characters, if not
:07:51. > :07:52.exactly leading you on, at least demanded certain things,
:07:53. > :07:56.That throws light on, not just your method
:07:57. > :07:59.but on the state of mind that you are in when you writing a books,
:08:00. > :08:02.it must involve not just a lot of discipline,
:08:03. > :08:13.I think it completely involves that, and I think...
:08:14. > :08:16.I used to say when I was teaching creative writing, I used to say
:08:17. > :08:20.to students in a bossy way, I used to say, if you can't be
:08:21. > :08:22.alone, if you can't bear being alone, if you can't bear
:08:23. > :08:26.Because the only way that books get written is you shut
:08:27. > :08:28.yourself in your room and you're there for hours.
:08:29. > :08:34.So, I have never found the solitude of writing difficult.
:08:35. > :08:39.In fact, as I get older, it's more and what I crave.