Richard Mason tells the story of Us

Sharon Meyering

Us Author: Richard Mason Penguin Price: R140.00 ISBN: 0670915378 Softcover

In 2002, I was browsing through the shelves of my local library, when my eyes fell on a book. Intrigued by the title I picked it up and started reading the opening chapter. It was a keeper, but as I was supposed to be collecting material for my dissertation - and writing it - I reluctantly put the book back on the shelf. Then and there I knew I would be sorry I hadn't taken it and read it.

In June this year I realised why ...

In June, a South African-born author by the name of Richard Mason launched his new novel (his second) called Us. Penguin Books - South Africa gave LitNet the opportunity to interview him. Quite an opportunity, with the who's who of South African media queuing to do just that. Anxious and excited at the prospect it didn't take me long to remember that the book I'd put back on that shelf, two years earlier, was Richard Mason's first novel The Drowning People. The book had received enormous critical acclaim and Mason was hailed as "the current king of the hot young writers" by The Times. It has been translated into 20 languages and was awarded Italy's Grinzane Cavour Prize for Best First Novel.

Us is also published by Penguin. As the author will tell you, there's nothing easy about writing your second novel, especially when the first one was such an amazing and unexpected success. Us took five years to complete, a nightmarish five years at that. But Richard Mason clearly has what it takes to turn a challenge into a success. He spoke to LitNet about what goes into writing a novel and what it takes to be a writer ...

SM: Who is Richard Mason?

RM: I was born in South Africa, and I like to think of myself as South African even though I don't sound it - I went to school in England. But have only a South African passport.

I wrote my first novel at 18, The Drowning People. Very unexpectedly it was translated into 20 languages, and won a prize.

From the age of 21 to 26 I've been writing Us. Everything they say about a second anything is true - it was a nightmare.

The past five years have been a stiff learning curve.

SM: Is writing your career?

RM: Yes, after writing two novels I think so. I also run the Kay Mason Foundation, established in memory of my sister. Running the foundation is pretty fulltime work.

SM: Tell us more about the Kay Mason Foundation ...

RM: The idea for the Kay Mason Foundation - named after my sister Kay, who died when I was a child - grew out of the success of The Drowning People. For the first time in my life I had a disposable income and I turned my mind to thinking what best to do with it.

I have always believed passionately in education and in the urgent need for a multiracial, educated middle class in South Africa, the country I was born in. With the divisions of the Apartheid era only too apparent in the nation's fabric today, I thought that I might be able to build a bridge, however small, between the country's first- and third-world communities. It seemed sensible to make the most of what South Africa already has and to give people not merely aid, but empowerment.

SM: Do you physically have to make time to write?

RM: I'm doing publicity for my new book only until July and then that's it. Then I'm going to be at home quietly working on number three.

SM: Are the ideas there already, waiting impatiently to be explored?

RM: Yes. Number three is going to be set partly between 19th-century Glasgow and South Africa at time of the Boer War. There's going to be a lot of research. But I love to sit in libraries and read other people's diaries and letters, and poke around - I'm really looking forward to that.

SM: Is it likely to be as character-driven as Us?

RM: Characters make the plot - you have to have a plot that is the result of what your characters do. Which is not to say you can't start out with the story, but you have to be prepared to let the characters go free. You know that the writing is getting good when they stop following your plan and start doing what they want to do.

Critical elements in Us:

SM: Why did you narrate Us in three voices?

RM: It's very technically demanding - three voices. With your second novel you can either write a simple novel, get it out of the way and done - or try and do something a bit more challenging. And one of the things I like least about myself is my inability to pass up a challenge.

There are 400 pages of manuscript on my desk that no one will ever read - trying to get it to work. It's not easy. Novels in three voices fall into one of two traps - either it sounds like the same person writing all of them, and I didn't want that to be the case with Us, or the voices tend to be localised in one time and place - Love etc by Julian Barnes, for example. And I decided to write a book involving four different chronological layers, quite a complicated plot and three voices! To get that to work, to get the balance right between its being challenging and engaging to the reader, but not impossible to understand or follow … that was quite uphill work.

It was a very lonely thing writing it for five years, trying to believe in yourself long enough to get it finished.

SM: Readers don't always realise what is involved in naming characters. What went into your name-choosing process?

RM: They were pretty clear early on ... they walked into my head and said "Hi, I'm Julian, I'm Jake, I'm Adrienne, I'm Maggie."

[At this point his palm pilot alarm goes off, reminding him to attend to one of the items on his endless to-do list. In this case it's to take his medication. The travelling between Jo'burg and Cape Town has a way of causing a sudden onset of the 'flu.]

SM: Readers like to know how characters come about. What happens after they've walked into your head and introduced themselves?

RM: They come about in different ways - they're in your head, you suddenly start to see their outlines, try and begin to work out what makes them tick. Perhaps you visualise very strongly a scene with them and it gradually builds out from there. But as I said, you know when it's working - when they stop doing what they're meant to do and take on a life of their own.

SM: The ending? There was just no other way ...

RM: That was very clear in my head in from the beginning - it was the stuff in between that ... In fact, I was going to begin it with the ending. The Drowning People was written like that, and I very nearly did that with this one.

Strange thing with books, any number of different things could have happened, but once it's written and on the page and published that becomes what did happen and you very quickly forget the alternative versions and different drafts.

Particularly trying to manage all these different people with their complicated histories, and taking such a long time over it, slightly different things happen in different drafts, like Adrienne's parents stay together or don't. It was quite nice writing the final draft and thinking this is what happened: [you'll have to read the book to find out more!]

SM: The relationship between Julian and Adrienne - you leave the reader hanging. Was that the intention from the outset?

RM: In the draft before this one there was a tiny bit more of a hint. I like novels that end tantalisingly, giving you just a little less than you really want.

One thing I've loved about being published is that different people have quite different responses to the characters, which makes me feel: maybe they are two-dimensional characters. You have different responses to them as human beings. And it's always interesting to hear how women respond to Adrienne - some women are annoyed by her, others are moved by her, and some are in between.

Julian has inspired some quite strong emotions.

SM: How attached do you get to your characters?

RM: Very. People ask me which one I prefer, but it's much more like a family sort of relationship - you can choose your friends but you can't choose your characters. And when they've been with you for such a long time, in your head, you're attached to them. You know them so well. I don't know which one of them I would have been friends with, but that's not really the question. You feel empathy for them. [Musing …] I don't know if I would have been friends with any of this lot ...

SM: How do you feel on hearing "that's it, it's going to print"?

RM: Tremendous relief. It's an emotional marathon, but exciting to reach the end of it.

SM: Do you say goodbye to your characters and move on?

RM: Yip. After a while the novel completely falls out of your head. This one I can still quote large chunks of - some people say "I loved this line" and they start it and I can finish it for them. But then other people have whipped out their notebook and quoted something out of The Drowning People and I have no recollection of having written it, it's like a different life.

SM: What was the most challenging piece to write?

RM: The Oxford section. Just to balance different people talking about slightly different events happening at different times, and to make the reader interested and not totally confused, to work out how much plot to have in there.

There was this huge sequence where Adrienne did something to Chievely and in the end I took it out. Because it just complicated things ... we have enough here. And of course, when you decide to change anything in that section it's enormous amounts of rewriting because if you take one thing out then something happened on a different day or different time of day and you have to rewrite the same scene, except now it's the morning not the afternoon, and oh, my goodness! If I was getting an hourly wage to write this book I would have been better off as a waiter.

Yeah, that was the most technically difficult piece.

I had great fun writing all the parts at different points, a certain amount of anguish as a whole trying to get it finished and trying to create the three-dimensional shape (that came into my head).

SM: How much research did you have to put into Us?

RM: Not too much. I know the world they lived in. I know Adrienne's life in New York, perhaps a lot from my first book tour and Oxford and English public schools. So I didn't need details about what people said and what it looked like or what they wore.

I did some research on the drugging on Benedict - I didn't want to give him so much that he'd die. But that was pretty much the only thing I did research on, actually. The next book is going to be very much research-based.

It's a different thing, because if you're writing a book completely out of your imagination (based on your experience of course), every time you create a room you have to furnish it, you have to see everything. But if you're researching a novel, in a way all the furniture is there already, you just have to figure out how to describe it. It will be interesting to see what that's like.

SM: What about people who see you in Julian?

RM: It's dangerous to draw too literal a comparison between a writer and his own life - obviously the books that I've written come out of me, but in no kind of literal way.

My sister Kay died when I was a child, and Maggie dies, but Maggie is not a portrait of Kay. I had a sense of what loss is, the experiences and the emotions that come from your real life, and the detail. [Mason also attended Eton, where a part of the novel is set.]

I take one thing from one person and another from another person ... and bring them together and then the character starts doing its own thing. So it's very difficult to plot the absolute mix.

SM: What did you want people to feel when they put the book down?

RM: I want people to be moved, but I want everyone to experience it differently. Especially a book that draws you into itself … you have to have an experience that's uniquely yours and I want my readers to have that.

SM: How do you select a book to buy?

RM: I never read the blurb - they're very bad and tell you the whole plot. Like movie trailers. I pick up a book and open it randomly and if I like the paragraph / the way it's written, I buy the book.

SM: How did your peers react to your success?

RM: At university I had a very close group of friends, whom I spend a lot of time with. It was quite weird being the one everyone knew about ... to hear yourself getting discussed in public every time you did something - huge amounts of gossip. It can make you feel a bit watched. But by and large people were quite nice about it. My book went around 20-something England like wildfire and I found that quite difficult because it's difficult to be the one person who is being watched by everyone else. They also think that your life is incredibly enviable 'cause you get to be in Italian Vogue and blah, blah, but of course it's not really for you. It's just stressful and you wish you could be like them.

But as I say, I was very fortunate. I came back from doing a very long book tour in lots of different countries, and after 20 interviews every day for a year and a half, when I went back to university I would see only my ten best friends and sit on sofas with them and talk. And it was one of the loveliest times of my life.

SM: What picture did you have in mind of what being a published author would be like?

RM: I didn't intend/expect The Drowning People to be published at all, so I didn't really have a picture.

SM: And of being a writer?

RM: That's been in my head my whole life. Aristotle said, "Beware of what you ask the gods lest they grant it you." Because to have your dreams fulfilled is often a bit more problematic than it seems when you're 15 and dreaming about being published.

But I think having got through number two, I rediscovered the joy of writing - but I reserve the right to change my mind.

But I don't think I could do anything else ...

Critics and criticism

SM: How do you cope?

RM: This is such a difficult one to get right. Of course what other people say about your work makes an impact on you. In Italy it's just been published and it's got amazing reviews - comparing it to Balzac - and you just can't get too excited, because someone is going to do a massive hatchet job on you at some point. So I try to be distant from it. I don't always succeed, but I sort of know that I need to be. You've got to be strong, and a lot of great authors have had bad reviews and also a lot of pretty terrible authors have had great reviews. I try to be distanced from that. I try not to take offence.

But words have a way of getting into your head - lodging themselves in your subconscious. I can see why some people never read any of their reviews, but I'm too curious. Maybe ten books down the line I won't read them anymore.

SM: How does your family respond to criticism?

RM: I come from a great family - I adore them. They're supportive of it, but also not that impressed by it. We've all got very different careers: my sister runs a Montessori nursery school, and my brother designs the IC infrastructure for Old Mutual. But my parents have never been impressed by my being a celebrity; they hardly read any of it.

SM: And they don't get emotional if someone says something negative about you or your work?

RM: Particularly when I was 18 they would have done, but they didn't show me. If someone said something about my brother I'd be pissed off ... that's the way it works.

SM: What advice do you have for aspiring young South African writers?

RM: Many people can write a beautiful sentence, but what separates people who can write beautiful sentences and people who write novels is the psychological ability to deal with the self-belief barrier, and my advice is to keep going.

SM: And dealing with rejection? Your first novel was turned down.

RM: Well, JK Rowling was turned down by like 15 publishers and now she's the richest woman in books. It proves publishers don't know a thing.

SM: And the final question: So you wouldn't change it? Not even the past five nightmare years ...

RM: No. I wouldn't like to live through them again, but having got through them I wouldn't change it.



Click on the book cover to order the book from kalahari.net

Us Author: Richard Mason Penguin Price: R140.00 (this month only R112) ISBN: 0670915378 Softcover

© Kopiereg in die ontwerp en inhoud van hierdie webruimte behoort aan LitNet, uitgesluit die kopiereg in bydraes wat berus by die outeurs wat sodanige bydraes verskaf. LitNet streef na die plasing van oorspronklike materiaal en na die oop en onbeperkte uitruil van idees en menings. Die menings van bydraers tot hierdie werftuiste is dus hul eie en weerspieël nie noodwendig die mening van die redaksie en bestuur van LitNet nie. LitNet kan ongelukkig ook nie waarborg dat hierdie diens ononderbroke of foutloos sal wees nie en gebruikers wat steun op inligting wat hier verskaf word, doen dit op hul eie risiko. Media24, M-Web, Ligitprops 3042 BK en die bestuur en redaksie van LitNet aanvaar derhalwe geen aanspreeklikheid vir enige regstreekse of onregstreekse verlies of skade wat uit sodanige bydraes of die verskaffing van hierdie diens spruit nie. LitNet is ’n onafhanklike joernaal op die Internet, en word as gesamentlike onderneming deur Ligitprops 3042 BK en Media24 bedryf.