Chris Cleave Meet the Author

visitors are directors, thank you for being with us on BBC News. That

is a look at what the economy has on hold, now it is time for Meet the

Author. Chris Cleave knows

how to spin a story. His novels Incendiary and Gold

were huge bestsellers, gripping thrillers that

were also psychological studies. His new novel, Everyone Brave

Is Forgiven, takes us back to the early years

of the Second World War, to the London of the Blitz,

at a time when no one quite knew It is the story of unlikely,

enduring love, a picture of society pulled apart by the threat

of destruction, and an account of the human cost of war

and human resilience. Chris, many people have written

novels set in the Second World War. What made you want to

do it one more time? I'm always writing about the time

that we are living in now. I became really interested

in the idea of unity, and the idea of the country coming

together and putting aside its differences to face down

an existential threat. And the last time that we did that

really was the Second World War. And so I thought if I could go

back into that period, and research it with fresh eyes,

trying to understand how it had felt at the time,

at the outbreak of war, when people weren't sure

whether it was the right course of action to take,

when the country was still, at the beginning, disunited

about whether we should appease Hitler or whether we should fight,

that difficult time at the beginning of the war is a period that I think

is really unexamined. Those of us who were born

after the war like you and me tend to forget how uncertain

that time was. Most people felt strongly

about the threat, and strongly about people who had been caught up

and decided to go and fight, but We now look at the war movies

and the war novels and they tend to show these very stoical figures,

square-jawed and brave. They take these insane risks and it

always pays off for them. But in real life, these

people were frightened You tell the story through

the interlocking stories of I suppose four people really,

so it's through them It's through an individual that

you get a picture of London? Because I wanted to immerse

the reader in their experience of becoming part of that fighting

machine. It's the becoming that I found more

interesting than the being. I think that a muscle

is the best model for courage. At the beginning they were nervous,

they were frightened and they had And of course, bravery, your title

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is a beautifully ambiguous and sort

of penetrating title in the sense it makes you wonder,

what is this book really about? But you reveal how bravery comes

in all shapes and sizes. It means different things

to different people. To stand up in peace time

against a policy of one's own government might be construed

as a brave action but in wartime that is cowardice,

that is treachery, that is betrayal. That transitional period between

peace and war is interesting. Not just people's ability

to be brave changes, but the notion of what bravery means

changes and it changes with each individual at different

speeds and I like that. One of the ways you get

into that is to cross social The woman we meet at the very

beginning of the book comes from a particular

segment of society. Finishing school but didn't finish

it, I think you put it somewhere. And you meet people in different

walks of life and you've got a very acute sense of where those

boundaries were and however, I like the fact that the boundaries

haven't changed either. You could be living in 1939 and know

exactly where the fault lines in society were between the haves

and the have-nots, where the racial That society is very recognisable,

and as a writer, something I have often done is to look at things,

where are those fault lines in our society and how can I voice

people on both sides of those, and try to show the enormity

of the fractures in our society. They don't heal,

they haven't healed. And yet it's not a book

that is driven, it seems to me anyway as a reader,

by anger or bitterness or envy from one side

of society to the other. It's a very generous

book in that sense. I mean, you're quite inside yourself

I think, almost sentimental? I wouldn't write about people

unless I really liked them. I like people who have reinvented

themselves, who have been hurt. I think everybody has been hurt

by the time they are grown up. I liked the fact that people don't

just stay on the mat. They do get up and they do help each

other and they do help each other across those fragmentation

lines in society. I write about people because I do

think there's an enormous You're talking, in telling

the story of these people, That seems to be the characteristic

you find most inspiring I think it was amazing

the way people dug in. We know now, we can watch a war

movie or we can think back to the Second World War and think,

they only had to tough it out until 1945, and some

people as long as 1946. They didn't know what

they were embarking on. They didn't know how

long their suffering would continue. I liked the sense of humour

that was starting to develop. I wanted to show that the sense

of humour that my grandparents had, I remember talking to my grandfather

about his first parachute jump. He said in the back of the plane

the Sergeant Major would cheer us up and he said, never mind, lads,

if your parachutes don't open, you can just take them back

to the packing shed! They joked their way through the war

because they were terrified and that's what I liked about that

generation, and that's what I liked and still like actually

about British people. The more frightened we are,

the funnier we get. That for me is a very

civilised response to fear. I don't want to talk about the plot

in any detail because it will spoil it for people,

because it is a story which I think needs to keep its secrets

until the end, but we are talking in a way, you are talking

in the book about emotions that are released, really,

because of the threat, because of the darkness,

because of the uncertainty. And like the fact that

people's choices had to made in a split second,

and they were made, I think that's what

life does to you. It tests you when you are least

expecting it and the answers that you come up with,

that you reveal about your character are not always pleasant,

are not always expected, but are the inevitable result

of all the little habits you have What would you most like people

to take away from this story? Most of all I would like them to be

immersed in that experience of what we call the golden

generation, and to come away with a fresh appreciation of what

they did and what we could still do. Good evening. It has been bitterly

cold for many parts of the country today, and especially under the

cloud.