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Islington author Charles Palliser outside Le Sacré Coeur |
Take time to digest novels
After making fans wait for his latest offering, author Charles Palliser heads for a ‘slow food’ specialist, writes Simon Wroe
CHARLES Palliser looks relieved – he has just finished his first novel in nine years.
“I delivered it to my agent last week,” he tells me as we take our seats among the blue and white checkered tables of Le Sacré Coeur, the French bistro off Upper Street.
“I’ve been working on two novels simultaneously, which is complete madness,” he admits ruefully, “but it does mean when I get sick of one I can always switch to the other.”
The American-born author, who now lives in Highbury Hill, doesn’t approach writing conventionally.
“I try to get to the desk by 9.30 every morning and I have no trouble starting,” he says. “I don’t get writer’s block, and I write straight on to the computer, which a lot of writers detest doing.”
The only thing Mr Palliser is puritanical about is his peace and quiet. He loves Islington’s tree-lined streets and big gardens, describing the area as a “quiet little island cut off by the railway” with the exception of Arsenal, which he sees as an “awful neighbour, entirely out for profit”.
After starters of fish soup with saffron (£3.90) and an asparagus salad with goats cheese and toasted pine kernels (£5.50), we opted for a pair of hearty mains: medallions of beef fillet with port wine sauce and horseradish mashed potatoes (£13.90) for me and a wild boar stew cooked with cider and diced apples (£10.50) for Charles.
The food is simple, unpretentious fare, generously sized and very tasty, so talk of dessert dissolves into a round of powerfully strong coffees instead.
The “slow food” philosophy of cooking, such as the stews Le Sacré Coeur does so well, is perhaps appropriate for Mr Palliser, who took 12 years to write his first, best-selling novel, The Quincunx.
Set in the 1820s, it is about a Victorian gentleman cheated out of his inheritance who tells his story from the madhouses and prisons on the fringes of society.
“I wanted to take a Victorian novel and play with its conventions,” says Charles. “I set myself up as a Victorian novelist who writes about things that he’s not supposed to. I should have written a nice short first novel, but instead it was a half-a-million-word epic.”
In his fourth book, The Unburied, and his latest, The Conservatory (not yet published), Charles has once again returned to the Victorian era, albeit the latter end of it.
He has also been working on a children’s novel, Wolf Summer, which he intends to be the first of a trilogy about a group of children unwittingly caught up in the Nazi fervour in a fictional Eastern European country in 1938.
“I wanted to write a political thriller for 12-year-olds,” says Charles. “I don’t think anyone has really dealt with the ideology of it for children. The Nazis appealed to people, especially the young. They were taken in by the marching and the singing and the summer camps.”
He added: “I had great fun inventing a country, with its own language and uniforms and customs, though I’ve had to cut a lot of it back now.”
He believes this book will be ready soon as well, leaving me to conclude that Charles Palliser must be a literary work-horse, despite the lengthy intervals between his publications.
“I enjoy writing – that’s the crucial thing,” he shrugs. “I don’t believe in taking a break.”
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