William Nicholson's Blog, page 5

May morning

The sun is now up on a glorious May morning, and I’m sitting in my work room looking out at the Downs in amazement and gratitude at the glory that is spring. It’s so commonplace, it’s been reduced to a metaphor, a cliché, but it still makes me gasp every year: the hundred shades of green, the intense brightness of young leaves, the creamy blossom of the cow parsley on the verges that soak you with dew as you pass, the last of the  bluebells – spring so early this year – and up on the Downs a wild and generous scattering of cowslips. Wherever I drive through these Sussex lanes, even on a cloudy day, I seem to pass through tunnels of dazzling brilliance, so like a child’s view of the road to heaven that I drive ever more slowly, not wanting the journey to end. All year I wait for spring, and now it’s here I’m greedy for every minute of it; and yet hours pass when I’m inattentive, and ungrateful. It only lasts two or three weeks, this explosion of life reborn, and I have only twenty or thirty more springs to watch in wonder: I need to remind myself that this is it, now, this is the best of  life, this is what I will remember on the dark evenings, and in old age. So I sit at my keyboard and lay down these thoughts, to pay public tribute to this May morning, before it’s gone again.

Twitter woes

I now have a Twitter account but it’s not going very well. My difficulty is that anything I want to say seems to require more than the allowed space, so since signing up I’ve produced only three or four tweets. But now I have another problem. Recently I’ve been notified of two cheering tweets that speak well of past books of mine – one of my philosophical fantasy adventure ‘The Society of Others’, the other of my teen love story ‘Rich and Mad’. Neither of them seem to me to be much read these days, so I was delighted. But my attempt to reply has not been a success. I’ve found my replies in my timeline of tweets, and they look as if I’m promoting my own work, rather than responding to a tweet. I just don’t understand how it works. What I do know is that as a reader of other people’s tweets, too many of them are self-promotional, and although I understand the need for that, it produces the wrong reaction in me. I don’t want to be hard-sold products on a chat medium. So I’m embarrassed to appear to be doing the same thing myself.

Fritillaries and interiority in West Dean

Just spent a night and a morning in West Dean, Edward James’s extraordinary estate in Sussex, now run as a foundation for musicians, artists, makers, writers. The glorious kitchen gardens are approached through a walled garden where an orchard is coming into leaf, with a carpet of fritillaries at the feet of the trees. I’ve never seen so many of these  flowers before. I find them moving, I’m not sure why. It may be the speckles, it may be the way they hang their heads. I was there to speak at a lit fest mostly for debut writers called First Fictions, and I talked about my own first novels, all of which failed, and why and how I kept going. Then in the morning I listened as an audience member to a panel of writers telling of their own way of working. A novel in iambic pentameters (multi-award winning), a graphic novel, a novel written in the second person – so many different ways of working – but all doing what only novels can do, which I now know is called ‘interiority’, the empathetic imagination that enters the minds and hearts of others. This is the reason I read and write.

Villa Balbianello

Just back from two nights on Lake Como, to celebrate Virginia finishing her latest book after three years research/writing: it’s called ‘Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes’ and is a history of women’s experience of the 1950s. It’s glorious, surprising, and very moving. We walked round the grounds of Villa Balbianello, the most beautiful lakeside villa on earth. I began to fantasise about having a party there. Look it up on the internet. It’s owned by the Italian equivalent of the National Trust, and they do rent it out for private occasions, but for a hefty fee. So for now I shall have to content myself with finding a way to build it into one of my novels, and so enjoy it in imagination.

Daily Mail on ‘Reckless’

Wendy Holden on RECKLESS in the Daily Mail: “Love, war, bombs and bombshells. An explosively interesting novel which I found hard to put down.”

New novel delivered

I’ve just sent off the final revised text of my next novel, AMHERST, which takes place as the title suggests in the Massachusetts town of Amherst. If you love the poetry of Emily Dickinson you’ll know this is where she was born, lived and died. My novel develops two parallel stories: the adulterous love affair of Emily’s older brother (conducted in part in Emily’s house), and the researches of a young British wannabe screenwriter into the same story, in the course of which she’s drawn into a love affair of her own. If you’ve followed my recent sequence of novels you may enjoy the fact that my contemporary heroine is Alice Dickinson (no relation to Emily, but the connection is obvious), who has appeared in my novels from the age of 11. She’s now 24, and making a mess of her love life. The 19th century part of AMHERST is historically accurate – the affair really happened, and was extremely passionate, as evidenced by letters and diaries; though we know very little about the poet’s reaction to it. The novel as a whole is a kind of meditation on romantic passion, its glories and its illusions, illuminated by Emily’s wry, complex, utterly distinctive poems. It’s published in the UK and the US in February 2015.

Daily Express review

‘IT’S all hot sex and Cold War in Cliveden with William Nicholson’s latest novel, Reckless – a cleverly plotted, spicy tale of passion and intrigue during the Cold War featuring the young Princess Elizabeth… You might think that fielding a team of characters as famous as the ones who appear in this novel is in itself pretty reckless. But William Nicholson copes with his usual effortless brilliance.’

New Statesman on ‘Reckless’

Kind words from Matthew Jennings in the New Statesman:

Reckless is a story about faith and love and the madness of nuclear war. It covers the two decades from the end of the Second World War to the culmination of the Cuban nuclear missile crisis in 1962 and draws the reader into the personal and political lives of both real and fictionalised characters who are affected by Kennedy and Khrushchev locking horns. The real-life characters include JFK and Khrushchev, Stephen Ward (with the Profumo affair starlets Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler), Harold Macmillan, Lady Astor and most memorably Lord Mountbatten. At the heart of the novel is Mountbatten’s (fictional) adviser Rupert Blundell, the man who tells Mountbatten “things I don’t want to hear … and that’s just what I want to hear”. Blundell is searching for an end to his loneliness. He feels that his chance for love passed him by in 1945 when, in Sri Lanka with Mountbatten, he dares to suggest to his colleague Joyce that he wants more than friendship. Back in London in the early 1960s, Rupert crosses paths with Mary, another lonely figure who, on a whim, he decides to help find what she is looking for. With the Cuban crisis looming, we also meet Pamela, a bored, beautiful girl who tries to find love in Ward’s set, a group of impossibly self-obsessed friends who weekend at the Astors’ Cliveden estate, where anything goes. Reckless leaves you wanting to know what happens next, even though, with the real life events, you know the answer. Nicholson also has a talent for capturing the minutiae of life. When Pamela’s marriage-obsessed friend Susie hears that nuclear war is imminent, she asks: “And you think this might happen before my wedding?” Reckless weaves together complex issues and manages to maintain suspense and intrigue throughout. It leaves you with the feeling that whenever madness is afoot, there are decent people behind the scenes, like Rupert, who are more significant than they think.

Press Association review of ‘Reckless’

Now here’s the kind of review that gladdens the heart of a writer. I’m told it goes out to a potential 2 million readers of newspapers all over the country:

“BAFTA-winning screenwriter and novelist William Nicholson has outdone himself with this sequel to Motherland. The ambitious ‘Reckless’ is set largely against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis. London is a complex social world: bachelor Rupert advises Mountbatten as the rhetoric escalates and governments wage a war of bluster; Pamela is 18, bored, beautiful, and desperate to fall in love but falls in with Stephen Ward and Christine Keeler instead; at 29, Mary lives anonymously, ashamed of the childhood visions of Jesus Christ that turned her into a child prophet in Ireland; Khrushchev and Kennedy swear and scheme and count warheads. It’s a Who’s Who of 1960s Britain, a masterful interweaving of the historical and the emotional, and in Nicholson’s hands, we almost expect the characters to walk off the page. As the political clouds gather, whirlwinds descend on the Londoners. National fears hatch in backstreet conversations, Pamela sails giddily out of her depth, marriages falter with delicate ambiguity, spiritual demons are laid to rest, and love and secrets bleed unexpectedly into the present. I raced through the 500 pages in 24 hours; full marks. 10/10 (Review by Kitty Wheater).”

‘Reckless’ publication day

Today’s the official publication day of my latest novel, but actually the day has little real significance. Books these days rarely get launched with a fanfare. They sidle out, looking a little sheepish, in small numbers, and hang about hoping someone will pick them up, like wallflowers at a party. The good news is that they remain available more or less for ever, both online and via print on demand. So I think of the publication of my books as the slow construction of a great building, a cathedral perhaps, that exists in all its glory only in my mind; but with each new book another buttress goes up, or maybe a side chapel. One day I’ll build the tower, with its impossibly soaring spire that can be seen for miles around. Then what? Then I’ll climb my tower,and scramble to the top of the spire, and look about me with the sun at my back and the wind in my face and see my own shadow tiny and far away on the treetops below, and I’ll shout out (though no no one will hear), Here I am! Glory to the world!