My Animal Life(53)

And there’s some truth to the idea that getting to the end was all that mattered. With novels, it’s the length that kills, as Robert Louis Stevenson remarked, and I’d proved I had the drive and the stamina to do it. Then, in my twenties, as I added degrees—an Oxford BLitt, the PhD—and between them, worked two years in publishing, I struggled to keep writing in the gaps. I wrote long narrative poems, tried out novellas. In a six-month interlude ‘on the dole’ between leaving publishing and moving to Wolverhampton to start a doctorate, I wrote, in an isolated cottage in Oxford, the book that would become my first published novel, an ‘experimental thriller’ called Dying in Other Words. I had a half-formed thought, from the depth of my innocence: I think this will win me the Booker Prize. But the two publishers I sent it to did not agree, though one of them asked me out to lunch, and said, in effect, he would probably publish if I would cut the last third of the book, a bizarre section of poems and prose supposedly written by my heroine, Moira.

Cut? I was shocked. Of course I would not. I was on the high horse of my higher degrees, and practical concerns were nothing to me. Nor did I understand what was obvious: you must keep sending books out, again and again. I somehow just felt my day would come.

And five years later, thanks (once again) to a friend (which one? I still don’t know) who told a publisher I had something worth seeing, a small publisher in Sussex, Harvester Press, wrote me a letter asking to see the manuscript, ‘with a view to finding the statue in the stone’.

Cheek! ‘Send us your rubbish, and we’ll turn it into art.’ But I posted the manuscript, which had only been greying and wrinkling in some corner, and forgot all about it when there was no response.

Six months later, a letter came offering a £500 advance to publish it. I learned much later that the manuscript had been read by that great man and novelist, David Hughes, author of The Little Book, who liked my strange tale, and recommended publication. Without him, who’s to say I would have continued? He didn’t reveal the role he had played until some years after we got to know each other in the mid-1990s. My first book, so odd and passionate, might have gone to a dozen other readers, but David was there at the crossroads, unseen, and gave me the secret benediction of luck. It had happened again: the universe split, and in the one I remember, I received the right letter.

I was amazed when I opened the envelope. I read it again and again for the catch. I called up my brother, and he, his girlfriend Liz and I sat out on Chiswick Green, under a sunset sky, and celebrated in the summer evening with a bottle of wine. We were, all three, as amazed as each other. I was clearly never, ever, going to get published. Then suddenly I was. And now we were here. The impossible was all about me: a crimson glory sinking into brilliant indigo, the dark grass stretching away into the trees where every mystery might be waiting for me, the lights of passing cars winging over our faces, the stars of happiness steadying above, becoming clearer and more confident.

I came out in July, when few books were published, and got ‘rave reviews’, the kind that welcome a new arrival. Thanks to my friend Tony Holden, who was deputy editor, The Times ran a full page extract. A team of judges who included Brian Aldiss and Hermione Lee put me in the top twelve of the Booker submissions, on what would now be called the Booker longlist. My luck seemed to grow exponentially, as if it had seeded in the dark of delay through the seven years the book was confined in its drawer, and had burst out, shining and fat, a pale puffball. I got a letter from Robert McCrum at Faber, declaring himself a huge fan of the novel and saying how delighted he would be to read anything I liked to send him. (What did I do with it? Did I write back? No, I was paralysed as well as delighted. My heart beat too fast. I put it in a frame.) I was included in the list of twenty ‘Best of Young British Writers’, the original one with Martin Amis, Pat Barker, William Boyd, Buchi Emecheta, Kazuo Ishiguro, Adam Mars Jones, Ian McEwan, Philip Norman, Clive Sinclair, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain, AN Wilson and other famous names. I was blonde, young for that group, photogenic, though in fact photo sessions were agony. In ninety per cent of the shots I would look taut and nervous, but a lucky few caught me beginning to smile at the absurd novelty of being half-famous. The Times sent a photographer to take my portrait, and spread it, huge, beside their two-page feature on our group. (It must have been annoying. I had only published one novel. But I revelled in that fifteen minutes in the sun.) Then I was awarded the prestigious University of East Anglia Writing Fellowship, against stiff competition that included Andrew Motion. I was suddenly shooting down the rapids, though I didn’t have a clue how to steer the canoe. I got an agent, Mark Hamilton, who took charge. My next novel, The Burning Book, was bought by Faber for the sum of £4,500; the third, Light Years, for £10,000.