Jim Crace, author of acclaimed novels like Quarantine, Being Dead and Harvest, will be returning to Malta for the launch of his novel The Melody.

Born in Hertfordshire, raised in London and resident in the English Midlands, author Jim Crace’s work has been consistently praised by critics for a distinctive style that combines precision and lyricism.

Jim Crace: Photo: Andrew Bainbridge

He is the winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the Whitbread Award and the James Black Tait Memorial Prize.

Around the time you were here as Writer in Residence at the Faculty of Arts, you had just published a very successful work, Harvest, and had thought you were more or less done with fiction, but you later come back with The Melody. What happened?

I’ve never been entirely convinced by the value of fiction. Remember, I was a journalist until I was 40, a profession in which you’re not supposed to make stuff up. The unadorned, uninvented truth was where the power and the emotion could be found. In comparison, fiction has always felt like trickery. So retiring from it was attractive.

I’d also come to realise that the writing life was not a healthy one. It begins with the writer filling empty pages and it ends with the reader tackling the completed pages.

Both are solitary acts and, in many ways, in this cluttered world, that process is magical. But it also means that the writer spends too much time alone. I’d decided I wanted to experience something more collaborative and sociable.

So, yes, Harvest was meant to be my final book. However, all humans, whether or not they are writers or readers, can’t resist a good story. You can’t retire from that.

Can you tell us about the inspiration that led you to use a disguised version of Malta as backdrop for your new novel?

I had a powerful, unnerving experience while I was in Chennai, India, a few years ago. In short, it pressed my nose against the realities of abject poverty. It couldn’t be ignored.

But it couldn’t be a novel set in India because that’s a country I only know and understand as a brief and wealthy visitor.

I didn’t want to impose yet another colonial view on a nation about which I knew very little. As you know, there are many gloriously talented Indian writers being published these days. This was their nation – so let them take charge of it both in fact and in fiction.

The novel needed a disguised version of reality. The subject would not only be poverty but also the ways in which the built world of humankind is always clashing with the natural world of animals and trees. Then I came to Malta for the first time, fell in love with it, but couldn’t help but notice that in Malta, almost more than in any other nation in Europe, here was a place where “the built world of humankind was clashing with the natural world of animals and trees”. So, that’s it really. I decided to steal Malta for my own purposes.

This seductive interplay between nowheres and everywheres extends beyond the pages of The Melody which you conclude with an acknowledgement to “the people of” without identifying who these people are. Such an unfinished acknowledgement ambiguously opens up the ending of the book instead of providing some form of closure to the reader. How did this idea which was erroneously interpreted by some readers as a misprint come about?

Yes, it’s interesting that you specify ‘nowheres’ and ‘everywheres’, but don’t mention ‘somewheres’ – because that’s exactly my narrative method and that’s precisely why any reader of The Melody would be hard-pressed to discern the Malta connection on the page.

Your real island has been my imaginative trigger but I have not attempted to hold up a mirror to it. I’ve simply wandered off, as if caught up in a convincing dream.

In musical terms, I feel most like a jazz saxophonist (that’s my fantasy) improvising and extending a standard tune to the point where the original melody, The Song of Malta, let’s call it,  is untraceable. It’s a tease, of course. But my novels tend to be as mischievously teasing as they are unembarrassedly – and unEnglishly – serious. But I want my readers to be uncertain where the truth begins and ends.

Reading The Melody, I was fascinated by the unexpected shift from first to third-person narrative and from the past tense to the present. To what extent is such a switch meant to disorient the reader?

The change of voice towards the end of the book was intuitive rather than studied. Actually, there is no change of tense or person between the two parts; there is simply a passing of time and an adjustment of tone.

The narrator is always the same person, but in the first half he is hidden – a mere observer – and in the second part he is revealed.

But you’re right, there is a quake at the centre of the novel and it is meant to test the readers, both their expectations and their patience. My editor thought this shift was the making of the book; my agent thought it was its ruin. Take your pick.

Your books have been described as very cinematic. However, so far a film has not been made. You once said that perhaps “your invented details are too internalised and organic to migrate readily from the page on to video”. Can you elaborate?

 Nearly all of my novels have been optioned for the cinema. Harvest is still under option, for example. Actually, I think that any book is filmable so long as the prose writer is prepared to let the screenwriter take liberties and, if necessary, to treat the original as being a guide rather than a template.

Do you ever experience writerly struggles in which you try things out and fail, or you tear up pages and despair?

It’s been boring at times, and lonely. But the writing life is hardly a struggle. Don’t let any writer tell you it is. It helps, of course, that I was a journalist for many years. There are no such things as The Muse or Writer’s Block in journalism. There’s just The Deadline. I’ve applied journalistic principles to writing fiction: Stop Whining and Type. 

I know that you are very much interested in fiction,  including on TV. Can you tell us more?

You’ve hit a nerve. If people ask how I’ve spent the last week, I’ll lie by saying I’ve been working on my new novel, Eden. The truth is that I’ve been secretly watching Series Two of the Netflix documentary, Making  a Murderer.

Before that I was hooked up to Vanity Fair, in which our daughter, Lauren, plays Betsy Horrocks, and next week I’ll be plunging into the latest Better Ask Saul. That’s why novels take so long to write.

It’s television that has defined our age, not prose fiction. And I, like almost everybody else, am a contented, guilt-free addict. There will always be a quiet place for readers, of course, but television offers a more communal experience. It has more influence and it has more power. We really ought to cherish it.

The book launch takes place on November 21 at 6pm at the Arts Lecture Theatre at the University of Malta. To attend the event send an e-mail to corinne.fenech@um.edu.mt or call 2340 3610.

Gloria Lauri Lucente is Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Head of the Department of Italian.