Readers Place

Andrew Nicoll interview/review

If asked to describe your novel in a paragraph, what would you say?

Oh, I don’t think it needs a paragraph. It’s a soppy love story.

Unusually you choose to have your story narrated by a bearded saint. Was this done for comic effect, or does it have some other underlying purpose for your novel?

Walpurnia is very definitely there for a reason. If you sit down to read a book that’s narrated by a 1,200 year old bearded nun, you’re not going to expect a “slice of life” documentary. This is not cinema verite. Nobody is on oath in the telling of this story and, from time to time, Walpurnia intrudes herself into her own narrative with “my cathedral” or “a picture of me”, just to remind the reader that she’s there and, as she says: “Nothing is as it seems.”

The town of Dot and the people in it are recognisable to our world, yet magical and rather extraordinary. Why did you decide to blend reality and fantasy in such a way in the telling of your love story?

I hope Dot is real and believable because I believed in it. I walked its streets and met its people, they tugged at my sleeve and demanded to tell me their stories. As for the blending of reality and fantasy, there was no plan for that. It was just what the people demanded. They told me their story and that was the story they told. I know it’s a very unfashionable approach. Serious modern literature seems to me to have gone down a cul de sac of gloomy, story-less writing but there’s no reason why that should be. The page is as limitless as imagination. Some stories simply must be written inside a naturalistic frame but stories narrated by 1,200 year old bearded nuns do not fall into that category.

The Good Mayor revolves around the many delusions the characters tell themselves. Would you agree? Do you think that the unravelling of these delusions make Agathe’s and Tibo’s love stronger?

Yes, I absolutely do agree. But I don’t think that’s true only of Tibo and Agathe. There would be no point in writing a book that applied only to two people. I wanted to use them to tell a story about all of us, about everybody. I think each of us lies to ourselves. We blame other people for our own actions, we excuse ourselves, we justify ourselves to ourselves and others. Everybody has to come up with a story to explain how we ended up here doing this badly and not someplace rather nicer doing something rather more important, better. It’s a very grown up thing to see life as it is and either accept it or to choose to change it and love is for grown ups.

Agathe’s beauty is idealised throughout the novel. Hektor tries to paint her many times and fails to finish each painting and Tibo sees her as the epitome of the nudes he so admires in the City Art Gallery. At first Agathe’s flattered by this idealisation but then becomes disillusioned. What does this say about Agathe’s suitors (if anything!)? Is there a time for Art and a time for action?

Your question shows an admirable precision. I understand completely now. However, it’s far too deep for a humble hack like me. I am as delighted as I am baffled when people find such interesting things to think about buried away in my story but I never considered any such thing. Hektor fails to finish because that’s the kind of wastrel he is, Tibo bought artistic postcards because they had pictures of naked ladies on them. He’s not so good as all that.

Would you agree that The Good Mayor is a morality tale? What is it that makes the Good Mayor truly good?

Well of course it’s a morality tale. The good guys win. It’s a very simple and traditional story. It’s been called a fairytale for adults and all fairy tales follow those precepts; virtue is rewarded, evil conquered. I hope it’s more of a parable than anything else. I hope it uses small things to illustrate bigger ideas. As for the Good Mayor being truly good, well, I don’t know that he is. He doesn’t believe that he is. It wasn’t my choice of title anyway.

What novels, if any, inspired you when writing The Good Mayor?

None. What inspired me to write The Good Mayor was a dream. I woke one day with an idea for a short story and I started to write it on the train to work. I thought it might make six or ten pages but, after eighteen months of commuting, there was a whole book. The authors I admire most are Graham Greene, Conrad, RL Stevenson and I can’t think of a book that could be more different from their terse, tight, journalistic styles but that’s not how they write stories in Dot. I’m also a big fan of Guiseppe Tomas Di Lampedusa. When I struggled to find a publisher, he was like my patron saint and it was a comfort to remember he died before anybody would publish The Leopard.