WRITING TRUE AND FALSE

Christopher Williams, Linhof Technika, Dirk Schaper Studio, Berlin, June 19, 2007, 2008, C-Print 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

Dear Readers,

I ask that if you enjoy The Kureishi Chronicles, believe in paying for good writing, and want to help with my recovery, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Below is an answer to a question posed by Nina Tree: How do you draw lines for what is appropriate to share and what is not?

My first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, is often called autobiographical, and, to a certain extent, it is. I did grow up in that place. Those parents were my parents, that house was my house; those streets were my streets, even Charlie Hero was based on a friend of mine from school, David, with whom I still speak most days. But in another sense, the book is a fairy tale; it is charming and light, the characters are valiant and active. Looking back on it, despite everything - the racism and politics of the time - it is an optimistic book, which is why it has been so popular.  Although many of the events in the book sort of happened, they were heightened, rendered comic and exciting in the retelling. It is a fiction, not an autobiography; I never made the attempt to write events as they really happened, that would have been too boring, what I wanted to do was write a story for others to enjoy. I wanted it to be as fun as the books about young people I had loved, like The Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy’s Complaint. And it is that voice, teenager Karim Amir’s, which dominates the book and sets the tone. That was the trick I stole from my favourite novels, which was to be as honest and authentic as I could be.

I originally started to write the book in the third person – he did this, he did that. But I found it didn’t work and I laboured on it for a while. But when I turned it into a first-person narrative, I found that the book took off, and became more lively and true.  As for the question that one of my readers asked, which is about how closely one can and cannot keep to the contours of a real person’s life, that has never bothered me so much. I do take from real people, bits and pieces here and there, but most characters in a novel are taken from a number of sources, and in the end it all becomes fictionalised. There are events that did happen to me: Karim’s visit to Helen’s house, her father setting the dog on him, clambering over the fence to escape with the hound’s semen on his jeans.  That did actually occur more or less how I wrote it, and it certainly wasn’t funny at the time. I always advise my students to write as freely as they can, taking whatever they want from real life. Later they can change the circumstances of the characters so they won’t be recognisable, it is easy to do. When you are writing a book, the main purpose is to delight the reader, that should be the focus of the work.

Previously I had worked on theatre plays and in the cinema, collaborating with the director Stephen Frears. But in writing a novel I was on my own; as I was working on it, I had to learn how to do it at the same time, by which I mean I didn’t have much sense of structure and organisation, I had never built such a long piece of writing before. So I had a hell of a job shaping the whole thing, and in the end I just followed the adventures of Karim and the characters I had made around him. So it is a kind of picaresque, not a story based around plot, but one which leaps from incident to incident, as the character develops and matures.

But I knew at the time, as I was writing the book, that it was the first novel about a character or a person like me. There had been plenty of growing up novels written since the war, but oddly enough, no one in Britain was writing about race. The country had completely changed in the previous decades because of people like my father and other immigrants from the Caribbean, Bangladesh and India. They had landed, settled and had children, who had grown up mixed-raced, as I was. But their stories were yet to be told. There was a whole new demographic here, accompanied by massive social change; whole cities were altering in their racial and religious makeup. Political figures like Enoch Powell had commented on the situation, but there was very little fiction you could read to find out about the inner lives of immigrants and their families, their children, their hopes and ambitions, and what it was like to move from a former colony to the mother country. So I began to understand that these would be dramatic, exciting and moving stories about a social revolution. I wrote the book as quickly as I could, for fear there was somebody around the corner writing another one on the same subject and would get their first. I had already read Salman Rushdie’s remarkable Midnight’s Children, and that book had created a huge literary stir and won the Booker Prize. He was a good friend to me, an encourager, and a fine example to follow. But he wasn’t at that time writing about Britain. So this was my opportunity, and off I went.

Hanif