From what to what?
I discovered Fielding when I was 16, this is illustrative of "The Rotters' Club" books, the time we're talking about, and also this thing that runs through all my books that so many important things in our lives happen to us by accident. We were misinformed by a careless schoolteacher that Fielding was going to be a set text next term, we were made to read it over the holidays, and when we got back, he looked very apologetic and sheepish and said, sorry, it should have been Jane Austen, you've all got to go away and read "Emma." Everyone else was furious about this because of the weeks they'd wasted with this, but this had introduced me to "Joseph Andrews" and I would have found it eventually, but at that particular time, it was a revelatory reading moment for me. And up till then I'd been writing comic fiction, for recreation I guess. Kingsley Amis springs to mind, though I've never been a great fan of Kingsley Amis. I think I was trying to write like Evelyn Waugh and I wound up writing like Kingsley Amis. And then Fielding just opened up for what could be done with the novel in terms of architecture, you could have multiple plotting and complicated interrelationships on a large scale. That really set me thinking about the novel in a completely new way.
The portrayal of the Winshaws in "What a Carve Up!," the doctor in "The House of Sleep" and some of the characters in "The Rotters' Club" walk a line between caricature and an insistence that in extremity can be found their essence.
Yes, that's true. With "The Winshaw Legacy" there was a conscious aesthetic decision to have two different kinds of characters coexisting in the same book and to see how they got along, what sort of friction is produced. The nice people, if you like, in "The Winshaw Legacy" are the conventional, rounded, three-dimensional, psychologically fleshed-out 20th century characters, where the Winshaws are 19th century Dickensian villains, or to put it in 20th century terms, cartoon characters, more "Spitting Image" puppets. I carried on -- slightly unsuccessfully I think -- doing that in "The House of Sleep" where you have this mad scientist character, Gregory Dudden, a leftover Winshaw from the previous book in a way, and I've always felt in retrospect that he doesn't exactly inhabit that novel as successfully as he should. In "The Rotters' Club," you find these figures as well, but we're moving into the realm of realism here.
I came across a line in Rebecca West's novel "The Return of the Soldier" where an upper-class woman is describing a lower-middle-class woman and says, "I ... hated her as the rich hate the poor, as insect things that will struggle out of the crannies that are their decent homes, and introduce ugliness to the light of day." It struck me that it could have been said by one of the Winshaws, or by Margaret Thatcher. Since this is for an American publication, could you try to sum up the meaning of Thatcher's reign. Here, she's seen somewhat as a sort of British Reagan and that strikes me as pretty wide of the mark.
She was a Lincolnshire shopkeeper, that's what you have to remember about her. That was her background. Provincial and narrow-minded and unimaginative. A lack of a certain sort of imagination, a lack of feeling for how people who didn't share her values could have felt, distinguished her period in office.
Ruthlessness?
Yeah, a manic rigorousness and efficiency which is the flip side of ruthlessness, which can easily become ruthless. Definitely that, a very dynamic and forceful figure which, from this side of the water, is not how we perceive Reagan. What was she, 10 years younger than him, something like that? Revisionist historians are about to get their hands on the Thatcher years, she's probably going to be looked at again because she feels far enough away now, and we don't see her much on the political landscape in this country, she's kind of disappeared and she doesn't speak out much anymore. And quite an interesting debate was stirred up by another British novelist recently when he sort of claimed her as a feminist icon, or at least argued that she'd done far more to inspire female businesswomen and middle- and working-class women out there in the job market, and she'd done more to inspire them than any number of more highbrow feminists figureheads might have done.
I can tell you what my then British girlfriend said when Julie Burchill said the same thing in 1988.
Yeah, this is a Julie Burchill-esque line. What did your girlfriend say?
Horseshit.
[Laughs]. I think what it boils down to is that [Thatcher] inspired certain women to become as ruthless and unpleasant as the worst kind of businessmen and politicians, really. I can't see her as a positive role model for women, myself at all. The thing is, economically, we're still in the middle of her policies. We're in the midst of a government that's eagerly carrying it forward. Her mantle has been so explicitly inherited by Tony Blair that she as a figure has become not so important. Thatcherism has become bigger than she ever was.
About the writer
Charles Taylor is a Salon contributing writer.
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