It’s just as well AL Kennedy has a Scottish accent, since the burr makes her
droll and almost compulsively ironic conversational manner slightly easier
to take.
Nonetheless, she is still a daunting prospect. There’s the formidable ability;
last week her novel Day, set in the second world war, scooped the £25,000 Costa
book of the year. The Costa is just the latest gong on a glittering list
including two appearances on Granta’s best of young British novelists, a
Somerset Maugham award, the Saltaire Scottish book of the year, and the
£75,000 Lannan literary award for fiction.
Then there is the public persona; like JK, she never goes by her full first
names (Alison Louise), but remains behind two stiff initials. Not to pretend
she was a man, or to indicate she is a feminist, or a lesbian (more of that
later), but from a childhood admiration for writers such as JRR Tolkien and
E Nesbit, whose personae, she felt, never got in the way of their stories.
Then there are the idiosyncrasies. The refusal to wear make-up (hates it),
read newspapers (ditto), drink alcohol (allergic), or fly willingly on a
plane (phobic). Flowing in and around all of this is her cutting-edge wit
which, as we speak, might or might not be taking mental notes for her next
stand-up gig in Glasgow.
Plus, I’ve woken her up. The 42-year-old associate professor in creative
writing at Warwick University is staying at the “palatial” Wolseley hotel in
New York, having just flown in from the celebrations in London.
But I thought you didn’t do flying. “I had to. I’ve been working out here and
had to fly back to London for the night.”
She was the hot favourite for the Costa. “I wasn’t aware I was the favourite.
I don’t read papers – 90% of a newspaper is rubbish.
“Papers are full of people I have never heard of doing something to their
breasts.”
How did she get out to New York in the first place? “I came by boat.” That’s
pretty grand; what sort of boat? “Well, this time of year there aren’t any
freighters,” says AL in a matter-of-fact manner implying a working knowledge
of international shipping systems. “So I sailed here on the Queen Victoria.”
A deserved result of all those prizes, no doubt. “No, I got a rather good
price by booking myself in an indoor cabin with no window, close to the
services. Only they upgraded me.”
What’s wrong with flying? “I just hate it. You feel as if they are trying to
kill you. If something goes wrong there is no fall-back position. At least
in a ship you will have two minutes of life in freezing water.”
Now, is that a joke, AL? “The book [Day] made it worse.”
Indeed, for a flying-phobic, research-oriented writer, choosing to write about
the experiences of a young tail gunner in a Lancaster bomber sounds rather
foolish. But at least she didn’t have to go up in one. She spent three years
researching Day,
immersing herself in the detail of air attacks, carpet bombing and gunnery
training manuals.
“It’s an enduring obsession of mine. The policy that if you kill enough
civilians from the air, you will not have to risk your own people. It rarely
works. Unless you carpet-bomb people who live in tents. And you end up
killing an awful lot of people, most of whom are noncombatants. Britain was
outraged by aerial bombing until Bomber Harris and Dresden. And, of course,
if we had bombed the oil refineries rather than the cities, then the German
army would have been unable to move. And then the war would have not been
waged.
“I spent years watching the bombings in Afghanistan reducing bricks into
rubble, and rubble into dust, and still the war was not won. And then there
were the preemptive strikes on Iraq.”
Unsurprisingly she managed to slot quite a lot in alongside Bomber Harris and
his ilk. “Well, I couldn’t spend three years just researching. I finished
another novel. I wrote screenplays. You can’t spend all your time thinking
about a book that doesn’t exist. I spent about 20 minutes a day thinking
about it. But if you do that for three years, you end up with a book. And I
also did lots of stand-up.”
It’s unlikely, one must admit. An academic writer of literary fiction doing
open-mic stints of comedy before a baying pub crowd.
“It’s a good training programme,” says AL, drolly. “And you know if it is
working, because they laugh.”
Perhaps after a day making things up, it’s a relief to get behind the
microphone and deal with the real world. “The interesting thing about comedy
is that you have to find your voice. It’s a cartoon version of you, but it
needs to be you.”
But who is AL Kennedy? She seems to excel at every area in the canon; novels,
screenplays, poems, columns, jokes. She’s a lecturer, a stand-up, and an
ordained minister (the position was bought on the web, apparently). She’s
been a Booker
judge.
Professionally, she could hardly be more out there. Privately, she’s as
mysterious as, well, E Nesbit. She lives alone in Glasgow and once admitted
to having sex only every five years. Her books don’t offer any answers.
Thinly disguised autobiography is not the AL way.
“My job is about me being the f*** out of the way,” she comments. “It’s about
writing the story and the less aware I am of me the better.” That’s not very
customary, I tell her. Many novelists are only too happy to insert
themselves into their novels. “Well, a lot of that stuff is a) boring and b)
really not useful.”
There are rather a lot of things that AL considers not useful. Putting on
make-up is one. “It’s a pain in the arse.” She admits her image has changed
quite a lot; old photos reveal AL as a bit of a long-haired babe, now she is
all short hair and sharp suits.
“Well, for years, a lot of the press thought I was a troglodyte living in a
cave,” she says, affably. “Basically I have gone from having absolutely no
money to being able to afford clothes that fit. And from having such a bad
back that nobody was able to touch my head to a back which is moderately
better, so I can have my hair cut properly.”
And if being thought of as a hermit irritates her, being thought of as a gay
hermit irritates her even more.
“It’s not useful, because all the wrong people come up and try to score. You
get put into the Big Gay Reading Event at book festivals. Gay people can
tell I’m not gay from about 400 yards. Plus, it’s a festival! I could be
hanging out with firefighters! Remember, I have a limited lifespan.”
She certainly has no time for idiots. Until recently, AL would review her
reviewers, categorising their efforts as good, which would include comments
saying that she was “a Booker contender”, bad, where they’d accuse her
writing of being a “sprawling and harshly seedy saga” and silly, where the
reviewer would say something like “ignore most of the plot”.
“It should be possible to review the reviewer’s language,” she says. “I care
about people who use words. If you want to be in a climate where people use
words with accuracy, you have to say what you mean.”
When she won the Costa she used her two minutes in the limelight to condemn
the education system in general, and public libraries in particular, for a
decline in the use of the English language. “It’s not those libraries which
have a couple of computers, but ones where there is a bank of computers with
no bloody books. You can’t use a computer if you don’t have a grip of
language! And if you have a grip on language you can defend yourself against
bad law. Or going off to war. Or a dodgy dossier.”
Ah, the infamous dossier. Does she think it was sexed up? “If you read that
dossier it was not a case for war. It was a bunch of excuses aimed at
defending the decision-makers against future prosecution. It was crafted in
an alarmist way. And people ran with it.”
AL’s patently abundant capability with language cranks into top gear when she
considers the press. This is not because she is a self-Googling narcissist
(apart from those reviews). She certainly has no intention of going on a
reality show. (“The clue is in the title. And I have read Nineteen
Eighty-Four, you know.”) No, it’s the general landscape that worries her. In
her view, everything has been diluted and demeaned. “It’s not a conspiracy.
It’s just stupidity. And in the worst instances, it kills people.”
Her meticulous research into the years of the second world war only
consolidated her view. “The press then was quite a different animal. Because
everyone was necessary during the war, and because ordinary people had been
so courageous, there was a different media. A media which was beautifully
written. Which was clear. And which liked people. There was none of the
underlying loathing.
“If you pick up a paper, so much of it is about how fat we are, or how stupid
we are. Or how our politicians are scum. Papers are full of gossip, spun
facts, and filler. With photos of people who forgot to put their knickers
on. Listen, I used to work in special care homes. There were loads of people
in them who forgot to put their knickers on every day. It just meant they
weren’t very well.”
When I stop laughing, I ask her what she is going to do with the Costa money.
Intriguingly, she tells me she is going to give some of it to the
investigative journalist Greg Palast. “I’m going to send him something so he
can carry on with his work. You can’t care about something and not do
something about it.”
Let other award winners spend their tax-free gains on trivia such as swimming
pools. But how much will AL give him? “Oh, only about £1,000. I’m not that
generous!”
