Hullfire met Kate Mosse, author of multi-million bestsellers Labyrinth and Sepulchre, in the bar of the Portland Hotel just an hour before she gave another interview and a reading of her upcoming novel, Citadel, in Staff House for the Larkin Centre. She talked fluently between sips of white wine. Hullfire gabbled out its questions between nervous gulps of Coke.
Hullfire: What attention do you pay to reviews once your book is out there in the public domain?
KM: None at all. Reviews are poisonous things, whether they are good or they are bad. Once your book is out there, the truth is, that you have done your best – it was the best book you could have written with the skills you had, with that story, at the time. So if the reviews are good, you don’t believe them, and if they’re bad you believe every word and it’s depressing.
Hullfire: I’m not sure I should bring this up now, but in one of the reviews on the inside cover of Labyrinth, The Guardian called it ‘Chick-Lit with A-levels’. Do you feel that’s fair?
KM (Laughing): It’s really interesting. Some people think I would be offended by that, but I was quite pleased with it. What that said to me was: this romps along, it’s got female stories at the heart of it, but it’s also brainy. So I thought, it’s not a terribly accurate description because I think I write quite male fiction. I’m not very interested by internal stories or traditional ‘This is women’s lives and this is how they fall out.’ I feel I’m an adventure writer and I like writing active books. Therefore I don’t think chick-lit is terribly comparable, but I took it to mean that the women are convincing.
Hullfire: Would you accept that your fiction is genre fiction?
KM: Oh yes, absolutely. Yes, except in France. In France I’m seen as a really literary writer.
Hullfire: What do you think defines the two then? What do you include in your writing, or not include in your writing, that excludes it from being classed as literary?
KM: People often don’t ask those of us who are professional writers how we define these things, but actually that tension between what is literary fiction and what is genre fiction or commercial fiction is at the heart of all of the publishing industry. For me, and this is a personal definition, not just of my work but how I would say I would divide it in general terms: in what is termed literary fiction, the ideas and the quality of the language – the sentence by sentence beauty of the language – are at the top of the list of what matters. In genre or commercial fiction, I would say that it is the characters and the momentum, and the plot are at the top of what matters.
So, do I care about whether I’m a good writer or not? Yes, of course I do. Do I care about the ideas? Of course. Do I care more than I care about the action? No. So for me, that’s how I square it.
Hullfire: You co-founded the Orange Prize for Fiction. [Best full-length novel written in English by a woman of any nationality] There was a survey by a feminist literary organisation in America called Vida, which showed a heavy bias still continuing towards men in the world of literary fiction. Did you see this?
KM: I did. As you can imagine, I’ve got thirty-eight foreign publishers to start with, and everybody sent it to me. So my inbox was going Ping! Ping! Ping!
Hullfire: So from your experience, having worked in the publishing industry, and your existing knowledge of it as a writer now, is it an inherently sexist industry?
KM: Again, you see, that’s a very good way of putting it. I’m not often put on the spot in that language. I’ve worked in publishing all of my working life since I left university, either in publishing, running the Orange Prize, as a broadcaster, and as a writer. So I’ve seen it, it’s where I’ve spent my grown-up time. And I am still astounded by when I say to the BBC, as I did a couple of weeks ago for the year of books, I said, ‘You do realise that only a quarter of the authors you are featuring are women, even though sixty percent of novels published are by women?’ And they were genuinely surprised.
So, is it sexist? No. Is there an inherent structure that still sees male fiction as neutral and female fiction as being for women? Yes.
Hullfire: Could you ever see a situation where the Orange Prize becomes irrelevant because the industry is completely egalitarian?
KM: Wouldn’t that be great? I’d be so much less tired. The Orange Prize has achieved enormous things in its time. Much more than any of us ever thought it would. But, depressingly – and this isn’t just the case in books, it’s the same in the election last May, the number of High Court judges, whatever particular mechanism you look at – unless there is a conscious decision that society should be reflected in any given organisation, whether it’s books or whatever else, the women start to vanish. It would be really fantastic if actually there were no need for the Vida survey, the Orange Prize or quotas or whatever. But there is, and actually we need to build in the opportunity for women and men. There are as many men who support the Orange Prize as there are women who don’t because people still feel queasy about quotas, and I really get that, but nobody has told me how it might work better.
Hullfire: Those dissenting voices have faded quite a lot though. Germaine Greer and A.S. Byatt and so on.
KM: They have faded because it has been really successful. Well, Germaine Greer was never anti- it, oddly, but she had her own quite weird way. A.S. Byatt, bless her heart…
Hullfire: Then her friend Iris Murdoch came…
KM: That was one of the most exciting moments of my whole life, second or third year I think it might have been, and it was just before she got ill, and that became poignant in a way that it wasn’t even poignant time. She would be up there, Iris Murdoch, for me, a really important writer and I’d studied her at university and all those things. They arrived really early, her and John Bailey. And it had been quite bloody and quite difficult – I was just a normal person that had got involved in setting up this prize. Suddenly I was all over the papers and I’d never done any media before, and it had been really quite shocking. None of us doubted that we were doing the right thing, but it was much tougher. Anyway, in they came – we were at The Liberal Club or somewhere hilarious so you walked up the stairs to the party with a whole load of men with whiskers all the way up, lining the stairs; the environment was ludicrous. Anyway, I looked across the room and I thought, ‘Fuck! That’s Iris Murdoch.’ And I thought I couldn’t go over. Now, I should have gone over.
Hullfire: She’s not exactly a dominating presence.
KM: No, exactly, but there are just certain people aren’t there? I just wasn’t experienced enough. I don’t really have any regrets in life, but I really regret not going over to her that day. But I was just so overwhelmed by it being her.
It was very interesting, I respect A.S. Byatt enormously; I’ve interviewed her a lot, I like her. She has every right to not feel that women-only things are the way to go. She has said to various people who now study the Orange Prize at various universities that she is not an opponent of the prize, she’s tried never to say anything about it, she regrets saying ‘I think it’s a silly idea,’ because it’s not what she meant – it just wasn’t for her.
So yes, the dissenters have fallen away because we were very clear about what we were doing. And it was two things. Firstly, a sensible discourse about gender and reading and writing matters. Secondly, we were very clear that we wanted to try and reverse this issue of women reading men and women and men thinking mostly about reading men. I think a lot of the dissenting voices are falling away because they start to look a bit daft. If they think reading matters and that books matters, they need to put up or shut up don’t they? And they have mostly done the latter.
Hullfire: Richard and Judy’s book club was an incredible phenomenon for a few years wasn’t it? Obviously, it served you very well. But do you think at the time it was healthy for such a small group of people, Amanda Ross, and that small clique, to be such arbiters of taste in the book world?
KM: This is another very good question about cliques. Because truthfully, Amanda is a good friend of mine now, we’re very close friends.
Hullfire: I was going to ask you about that.
KM: We didn’t know each other before, and we’ve subsequently become good friends. I admire her enormously, and there is absolutely no doubt; would Labyrinth have been the best-selling book in the UK, beating Dan Brown even in 2006 without Richard and Judy? No. It sold 1.2m copies in one year alone. And that is thanks to that.
But your question is the right one. If the sales rest on the shoulders of one promotion as opposed to a plurality of mechanisms to sell. At the height of the book club, and I was completely a beneficiary of this as were a number of other people – many people’s careers have been made by Amanda – it blotted out the sun. It was fantastic for those of us in the light. It did a massive amount for reading; it absolutely introduced new readers to books, no doubt about it.
Hullfire: Do you think we have to fight against the diminishing literary culture? People reading less and less, watching television more.
KM: Well, I’m optimistic. I think I’m more worried about Michael Gove and the EMA etc. I think that there is a pernicious snobbery involved in everything involved with literature and indeed the arts: the idea that only certain sorts of people are brainy enough to read these books or whatever. So the idea that people are reading less – I don’t buy that. I think that people are reading in different sorts of ways. That there is a lot of pressure on people’s leisure time, as it were, but I think that downloads and e-books and kindles and the stuff that we do with the Orange Prize are there to introduce people who feel phobic to the page, but happy with the screen, to great narrative. For me, I don’t actually care whether people borrow my books, they download them, they buy a hardback. I don’t care at all.
Hullfire: Are you not worried by the fact that if something can be digitised then it’s a lot easier for it to pirated?
KM: I know I should be, but I’m not. The stories and the sharing of ideas is more important than what is going into an author’s pocket. Obviously, I don’t want my work to be nicked or re-written in a way that I would find appalling or any of those things. But introducing fear into new technology gets away from the fact that there is an opportunity to engage with bigger numbers of readers. Now when the supermarkets started to sell books, publishers went: ‘Oh my God, we can’t have this – they’re going to undercut lovely independent bookshops.’ I do a lot of work with independent bookshops, but you know what? I’m more interested in people being able to buy cheap books. So, it’s complicated. Authors feel completely at sea, and publishers and agents are shilly-shallying around at the moment.
Hullfire: Do you think if you were a mid-list author the fear would be much greater?
KM: Yes. Indeed. Again, you are correct. But what’s happened is, publishing has changed – so essentially about one hundred of us are sold everywhere. What happens in publishing now is that those of us who sell a lot of copies are discounted heavily; those people who don’t are expensive. That’s bonkers. Publishing has gone the wrong way round. It’s absolutely right that because of my volume sales I can afford to be less concerned about the effect of not being sold at full-price, or discounted. But, there is an element in publishing where the people that sell a lot should be supporting and speaking for the people who don’t. For me, the balance comes in my work with prizes and with literacy, versus me as an author. So, as an author, it’s all fine. Is the industry fine? No. Should they be shutting libraries? No. You decided where you fight your battles, and I’m lucky that I don’t have to fight my battles as an author.
Hullfire: With Labyrinth, the book is being made into a four-part mini-series produced by Ridley and Tony Scott’s production company. Has that been in the works for a long time?
KM: Erm, no. The thing is, if I’d written twenty novels it wouldn’t matter how good or bad an adaptation was. But, I haven’t. I have a lot of friends who feel that their writing career has been damaged by the quality of film or television. The thing that I care about most is books, and the second thing I care about is theatre. Film is quite a long way down for me. So, my agent and I, we met with all the Hollywoody people, and we came out, and I said, ‘If one more person says to me that Orlando Bloom would be perfect…’ And who does he play? My agent was brilliant because the dollar signs were everywhere. He said, ‘You know, you sell to Hollywood, you have no control over this. It’s up to you – we don’t have to take any offers.’ And I said, ‘The only things that matters with Labyrinth, and Sepulchre, and Citadel that I’m writing now, is that they’re adventure stories, the history is accurate, and they are female adventure stories.’ So when somebody said to me, ‘We see Orlando Bloom in the lead role.’ You go, ‘Really?’ Why don’t you just write your own story, this is… you know.’
We said no to all of those things, and for Sepulchre as well. I’d always said to my agent if Ridley Scott comes, he can have it because his attention to historical detail and real determination to do those things. Everyone in movies knows that he is still going on about all the things that were wrong with Kingdom of Heaven. As we all know, Orlando Bloom could not lift a battle sword, bless his heart – he’s just too puny. He’s a poppet, I’m sure he’s lovely. He could belong in The Winter Ghosts, but not the others. So, we just decided we would sit on the rights; it wasn’t a priority for me. The priority for me is selling books because that’s what I am – a writer rather than a screenwriter. So, when, only a year ago, Ridley Scott’s people said, ‘Can we all have lunch?’ I thought, fine; you don’t take these things seriously. We’d had the similar lunch with Angelina Jolie’s people.. You know, these things don’t come to much, mostly. Each time something else has happened, I’ve thought that there is no point getting excited, lets just be calm – all the rest of it, and now they start shooting in September.
Hullfire: It’s going to be shown on British TV?
KM: Yes. But it’s an international co-production so the French television company, the German television company etc. and HBO.
Hullfire: There are hordes of students around the world now, including myself, that are being taught Creative Writing. Does this trend mean we’re going to get better fiction in the future?
KM: No.
Hullfire: Perhaps a lot of very similar fiction being produced?
KM: What will happen is, it will be no different. I absolutely think creative writing is something that should be taught. There has been, until recently, a sense that unlike every other arts discipline… that sort of old Egyptian idea almost, that writing comes directly from God, it is a gift. It’s not true. It’s the same as anything else – it’s about skill. If you’ve got a musical child, you get that child a teacher. They might have that thing that makes them the soloist, the Nigel Kennedy or whoever it is. They might not. Writing is about skill. The bricks and mortar – this is how you put a book together. The talent, and that thing that makes one book sing and one book not, belongs to you and yourself. So I do think that there will be a lot more quality of competency in the writing field, absolutely. I think that you can teach creative writing, you can teach how to The thing is, it’s a brilliant thing because the respect that is owed to writing, and how hard it is, and it as a job will be shown. It’s put on a par with artists, potters, and dancers – everyone else who is trained. But there has been this idea that somehow writers don’t need anything. At the same time, you can’t teach creativity. You can teach the skill of it. So, good luck.
Hullfire: Thank you.
Tristan Vere-Hoose
Photo by: Lizzie Bentley
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