Rose Tremain Meet the Author

eloquently, doesn't he? It takes us seamlessly to Meet The Author.

This week on Meet The Author Jim Naughtie talks to Rose Tremain

In the first sentence of Rose Tremain's novel,

The Gustav Sonata, we are told that Gustav loves his mother

He's growing up in Switzerland, just after the war, but he nerve

He's growing up in Switzerland, just after the war, but he nerver

His intense friendship with Anton, his own age, Jewish,

a brilliant music, is fulfilling and seems to offer his escape

and hope, but as the sonata enters its last movement,

when they are 60, we realise for Gustav, material success in life

can't necessarily bring him the contentment that he and Anton

have always looked for, but will always find a

This is a story about an intense relationship, which develops

into love, really, between Gustav and his friend Anton.

So it's a fantastically sad story, isn't it?

It is, it's a story built on hope, like so much of our lives are.

There is this old saying that happiness is impossible

because if you're living in the moment and you're

happy you are afraid it is going to disappear.

If it is in the past you can only recollect it,

and if it is in the future it might not happen.

So the story looks a that, and the condition of happiness

Getting through, and doing as much as you possibly can,

Despite a kind of unhappy childhood, despite a lot of things

working against him, this is a boy who becomes

a man in the story, who perseveres, he never gives up,

Well, we know him when he is a young boy, and we know him at the end

He never gives up, but he never reaches happiness,

what we would think of as happiness, does he?

Well, without doing a spoiler, JIm, there

There is a little lift, and it is up to the readers

to interpret to what extent this lift takes him right out

of his sort of former state into a different state.

The question for you is do you know whether it does or not?

I believe it does, when I write a novel, I never know -

in fact I deliberately don't know until somewhere quite near the end

exactly what ending this story has earned, because stories,

endings have to be earned, they can't be imposed.

That is interesting, because a lot of writers would say

"What happens in between, I don't know, but I know

the beginning, and I know the end", so you are unusual in that respect?

Yes, I'm not being prescriptive about it, I am not saying this

I am saying the process of writing for me is a discovery process.

I have to discover little by little as I go along,

and then find my route to the ending, which feels truthful.

It's true to say I toyed with one rather cataclysmic alternative

ending, and then I felt that actually, it was melodramatic,

it was not where I was leading these people.

Or where they - well, that is a huge question in writing,

This old thing that people say about characters taking over,

it isn't quite they take over, in my view, it is that once

you are a third of the way down the book, shall we say,

you understand that those characters, about who you knew very

little at the beginning, have their own kind of integrity.

The construction of the book, not surprisingly given its title,

which is a clue to people, that The Gustav Sonata

is in the form of three movements, really.

But there is a sense in this Swiss setting of a kind of,

not exactly timelessness, but a slow pace, a gradual feeling,

and after all we cover nearly 60 years in the course of the book,

It clearly interests you, this sort of, the gentleness with

What I risked to do in this book, there are a lot of elipses of time,

it is not continuuous, even in the first section which more

or less narrates the childhood, the continuous childhood of Gustav.

There are elipses of time, because I believe that

readers are really clever, they like to work with the book,

they don't like to be told everything, they are perfectly

If they see there is a year that has passed where you haven't been told

anything about it, they are perfectly capable of filling that

It also helps to engage them, if they have

What I'm establishing in the first section,

what we could call in musical terms the exposition, is the circumstances

in which this little boy grows up, and in particular, the unkindnesses

I feel that by the end of that section, what the reader is saying

is why is this person not kind to her son?

At that point I felt I had to go back to this very difficult time,

that Switzerland had before and during the war,

which people assume, I think, or we - I had assumed,

because Switzerland managed to retain their neutrality,

that they were kind of, there was a kind of serenity

When of course it was desperate for them.

They didn't know at any minute the Germans might not invade them.

So it needed to go back and look at the very difficult time

And the agony for Anton's family a Jewish family,

in this period of European history is, of course, intense.

Yes, and that was the sort of second element that came into the story,

It took, it is interesting to relate, again, in terms of things

that happen in novels, that you hadn't perfectly foreseen,

the question of Anton's family and the Jewish question.

It had a much greater centralty in the book than I first

Yeah, it's a book that really looked at moral rightness.

I mean, the sacrifice that Gustav's father makes in order to save Jewish

It's actually, he is actually punished.

There's a lack of justice in the story in that

Yes, there is, and that is, it seems to me, again we are back

to this old question of truth, it seems to me to be real that this

He might have got away with it and been feted

You do acts of extraordinary sort of magnanimity and moral rightness,

You talk about the way that the story developed

in your hands, the way the characters, if not

exactly leading you on, at least demanded certain things,

That throws light on, not just your method

but on the state of mind that you are in when you writing a books,

it must involve not just a lot of discipline,

I think it completely involves that, and I think...

I used to say when I was teaching creative writing, I used to say

to students in a bossy way, I used to say, if you can't be

alone, if you can't bear being alone, if you can't bear

Because the only way that books get written is you shut

yourself in your room and you're there for hours.

So, I have never found the solitude of writing difficult.

In fact, as I get older, it's more and what I crave.