Michele Roberts Meet the Author

talks to Michele Roberts about her new book

The Walworth Beauty.

Dickensian London in the year of the Great Exhibition,

and the churning metropolis of our own time.

Brought together by two characters whose stories are intertwined

and this and who reach for each other across the years

that separates them.

Michele Roberts' new novel, The Walworth Beauty,

is a hymn to London.

Its changing ways and its enduring character.

And also a book about how we live now, that celebrate timeless

longings and desires.

Welcome.

There is a ghostly element to this story.

Do you like ghost stories?

I do love them, and that's partly because I have felt haunted

myself a couple of times, and they have had to work

out what was going on, and I worked out that to explain

a ghost, and the fear itit induced in me, I had to tell a little story

to myself to make sense of it.

One of the things about the ghostly element in this book is that it is

very delicate and gentle.

It's not somebody clunking along with his head under his arm

or chains, it's just a breath on the neck, that kind of thing.

Was that your experience?

Yes, it was on the back of my neck, is if someone was pressing

cold cobwebs against it.

Gosh.

And then a mirror fell off the wall in the middle

of the night and crashed.

And I just felt full of terror, the atmosphere

was charged with terror.

The ghost in my novel, I think, is a bit of a kinder

ghost, it's not so scary.

Well, I didn't know any of this when we started,

but that's really a very interesting story, because the book

is wonderfully atmospheric, 1851 Dickensian London.

And the London that anybody who lives there now in 2011, 2012.

You see them, really, part of a continuous story, don't you?

I do, and I think anyone who loves large cities with ancient buildings

and streets in them, and he walks in, as I do,

has a sense, always of history being just below the pavement.

It's as though the city is layers and layers of mystery.

Sometimes, it's popping up, a pavement tilts up,

something happens, you pass by an old graveyard,

you see an old industrial building.

Now, the story's told, essentially, by two characters,

Joseph and Madeleine.

Whose stories are more than a century apart,

and they are told in separate chapters which are

interwoven in the book.

And it's quite clear that you see something,

despite all the differences between them, that connects them.

What is it?

I think they are both very concerned with the lives

and fates of young women.

Joseph is charging around South London doing research

on to the lodgings of prostitutes, of young girls working

with prostitutes.

And Madeleine, a century later, is very concerned with two young

female friends of hers, how they survive in the big city,

and learning that, obviously, not all young women these days,

despite their poverty, feels the need to sell

themselves as prostitutes.

So Josef and Madeline are having the kind of conversation

that they are in a sense, haunting each other

as much is being haunted.

Madeleine finds in her back garden, shards of bone, old buttons,

cloth buttons, little bits of china, and she can't bear

to throw them away.

She's been digging the plot.

So she brings them indoors, and that's when the hauntings start.

By the end of the novel, we understand what those little tiny

broken pieces refer to.

And do you have a constant sense of the past?

Not just in what happens if you dig up the street,

but in the characters who walk those streets, what

they thought and felt?

And what, in a sense, has been passed on to us?

Yes, one of my characters is the grandmother of Madeleine.

She's dead, long since, Nellie.

But she talks to Madeleine, sort of, over her shoulder all the time.

And she is a real bridge with the past, because that's

how I remember my own London grandmother.

Her quips and saying, her amazing cockney accent.

Her bawdiness, her funny stories.

I mentioned that the chapters are intermittent, one called Joseph

and one called Madeleine.

And the story unfolds way.

Technically, that's quite a tricky thing to carry off.

Did you find it difficult and did you simply write a Joseph chapter,

then a Madeleine chapter?

Or did you do a lot of Joseph chapters then stick Madeleine in?

I started with Madeleine.

And it was clear, quite quickly, that it wasn't going to work

with just her as the narrator.

And I was thinking, oh dear, is there really a novel here?

And then went Joseph erupted and just opened a door,

went up a staircase in darkness, opened another door, I thought, yes,

the story starts now.

Well, of course, if we didn't know that you were a

Londoner before this,

anyone reading the book would understand that you are,

because it's just pulses with a love of the city and its history,

its ways and voices.

Yes, and I've always lived in London.

I grew up in the suburbs in London and moved to London

as fast as I could.

And I walk around it all the time, on my own, often at night.

Always trying to take a different route, happily getting lost,

going to a pub, someone will come and talk to you.

London is very alive for me, full of ghosts but full of people

in the present as well.

In that sense, it is still, especially in parts of south London

that you set the bar again, it still has a Dickensian feel,

that sort of churning, nonstop life.

The characters who inhabit it.

I suppose it's like any big city, but London seems

to have that quality.

I think partly it is because we've got the City of London.

And it is always renewing itself, following up new buildings,

old ones come tumbling down.

And people are very energised, very driven, they hurtle about.

Even where I live in Southeast London, on the main street,

a sort of hurtling that goes on.

This is the London that you love.

The London I love is very much the modern city,

but the city with all its echoes of Dickensian times,

through old industrial buildings.

They are Venetian, they are neo-Byzantine,

they are neo-Gothic, they just send me into rapture.

I assume you love Dickens?

Do you know, I have a lot of trouble with Dickens.

I find him a very difficult writer to read.

That's interesting, why?

Partly, it's the carnivalesque, elaborate baroque prose.

Partly, it's the length of the novel.

To my shame.

Partly, it's his absolute incapacity to create interesting women

characters who aren't just sugar dolls.

Well, there we are, we'll get some letters about that.

But there is that wonderful capture of a life that is, I suppose,

now people would talk about it as being magic realism.

You know, spontaneous combustion, all the things that happen,

there's a kind of life that takes us out of the here and now

with wonderful beeps of the imagination.

That, I suspect to you, must be exciting.

It is, and I actually find that in Dickens' essay, Night Walks,

when he describes walking at night, roaming the city, coming across all

kinds of strange characters, pausing to chat to them.

That is the Dickens I love.

When did you start this business of wandering around London at night?

When I was very young, I came to London when I was

21, after university.

And I just began to wander the streets.

And of course, for women, there is a sexual double standard.

If you're always told, it's dangerous, you mustn't do it,

a woman who wanders the streets is called a streetwalker

which means a prostitute, a man who wanders the streets

is called a psycho geographer, or a flaneur.

But I always thought, I'm not going to let anyone

take my freedom away.

I have always walked around the streets.

So you discovered a parallel universe of your own?

I have, because as a reader, I've thought a lot about women

writers who love the city like I do.

So every time I'm in the City of London, I'll think

of Charlotte Bronte coming to the coffee house before

setting sail for Brussels.

Or as I move up towards Hampstead, I think of Elizabeth Gaskell,

walking from Harley Street to Hampstead, for an evening picnic.

People like that.

And many people will associate that with The Walworth Beauty,

when they pick up your novel.

Michele Roberts, thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Jim.

Good