Rose Tremain: Trespass
Confronting the past before the future comes into being
MBP: Congratulations on being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Are literary prizes important to you?
RT: Fiction writers work in a crowded world, in which the reading public is often adrift and confused. What literary prizes do is to guide readers out of that confusion towards specific titles. It would therefore be surprising if authors didn't feel grateful for this and extremely consoled if they go on to win a major prize. But the idea that you could write a book which has as its goal a specific literary prize is to misunderstand the nature of creative endeavour. A work of fiction is willed into life by the writer's passion for her subject and for the journey that subject is going to take her on, not by rewards that might or might not appear down the line.
MBP: Trespass is set in the French wilderness of the Cevennes. Can you tell us a bit more about your relationship with the region?
RT: I spent my second honeymoon in the Cevennes, in the summer of 1981. On the morning of our arrival, we stopped the car on one of those narrow, winding roads above a rocky gorge and clambered down to swim in the river. When we returned to the car, we found that a stone had been thrown through a side window and all our luggage stolen, and so we had nothing - not even a toothbrush. From that rather shocking moment, I felt that I understood one important aspect of the place: its absolute unpredictability. As readers of Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes and indeed of Richard Holmes's Footsteps already know, this is a wilderness like no other, with its own wild weather, its susceptibility to fire, its own violent history - from 17th Century Protestant rebellion to Second World War résistance - and its own impenetrable geography. In other words, it's a fantastic setting - both beautiful and terrifying - for a novel of drama and psychological intrigue. (It's just taken me 30 years to think one up, that's all...)
MBP: The novel investigates how we feel when we get older - how hope for the future is often replaced by reflections on the past. Why did you want to explore this?
RT: I am really fascinated by how - in a secular society devoid of belief in any afterlife - we approach the last third of our lives, when we begin to see the shape of the whole thing. Is it possible to remain hopeful, optimistic or even fitfully joyful when the great shadow of the end ("unresting death, a whole day nearer now") begins to fall across the path? Here, in Trespass I created a character, Anthony Verey, aged 64, who is chivvied endlessly from despair to hope and back again, desperate to find a way ahead, to find meaning in everyday things, to give and receive love, but who - the reader eventually realises - is sleepwalking towards his own death. Both for Verey and for the others in my quartet of protagonists, the past is vibrantly alive.
It's not that the past ‘replaces' the future; it's much more an understanding that certain events of the past have to be confronted before any future can truly come into being.
MBP: The British are obsessed with living in France. Do you think that our hopes and dreams can sometimes be naively pinned on a place in France?
RT: Society in rural southern France is ultra conservative. It's arranged around timeless work patterns: the arduous tending of the vines, the transportation of the grapes to the wine co-operatives, the growing of vegetables and fruit and sunflowers, the shooting of game and wild boar, the fabrication of charcuterie... It's also constructed around unchanging social ritual: games of boules, communal feasting, and café gossip... Nobody travels far, or wants to; the village is paradise enough. And in this way it resembles - at least in the minds of some Brits - society as it once was in the shires and dales in the 1950s. They see in it a kind of idyllic simplicity now gone from our ever-expanding, Tesco-blighted English burghs. They know that the sun will shine for a long part of the year. And they're not wrong. But I think what many don't foresee is how difficult it will be for them, in the end, to feel comfortable and ‘at home' in France. Because they're not at home and they never will be.
MBP: You were shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989 for Restoration and became known as a writer of historical fiction. Were you hoping to discard this label with your recent novels, The Road Home and Trespass?
RT: Restoration, my first historical novel, was born out of my frustration with how difficult it is for the novelist to capture the contemporary before it changes and moves on - thereby giving the book an out-of-date taint, before it's even appeared. I wanted to write about a materialist, a prime product of the Thatcher age and how he trades honour for money and gross reward. But I couldn't find the means to seize this subject fast enough and so I transposed the story to another age, where distant echoes of the 1980s could be found: obsession with money and show, conspicuous consumption of all kinds, an unstoppable drift towards selfishness, extreme taste in fashion, and the threat of plague mirroring the new horrors of the AIDS epidemic.
So you could say that I drifted into writing historical fiction and then, having drifted there, and finding that my readership increased tenfold, it was tempting to try to place my marker there. But I don't think I ever imagined I would stay forever and novels like Sacred Country, The Way I Found Her, The Road Home and Trespass reassert my willingness to confront the contemporary and try to make it work before time moves on and snatches my subject away.
MBP: Trespass is a powerful title for this novel as it conveys so much about different aspects of the story. Did you have this title before you began writing?
RT: Some titles arrive up front and linger and eventually stake their claim on the novel. Others are found very late. And I just couldn't say why this is so. But I do like one-word titles. They have a kind of power and punch to them that bite on the reader's memory. Restoration was with me from Day One. Trespass came late but felt absolutely right, as though it might have been a shard of some precious metal lying in the Cevenol earth at my feet all along.
