HOWZAT

Tony Parsons wouldn’t claim to be Graham Greene, but in My Favourite Wife, three years in the writing and more ambitious than his previous work, he has interwoven ill-starred romance, one man’s conscience and a singular time and place rather well. All that research is draped lightly over the story of an expat lawyer who falls in love with, if not China in general, one Chinese in particular. “I’d come back from a trip and talk to my editor about land grabs and pollution and oil production having gone up four per cent, and she’d say, ‘Don’t forget, it’s about men and women, it’s about Bill, Becca and JinJin.’”

That said, there’s still a fair bit of commentary on the current state of China. “It’s everything it’s cracked up to be,” says Parsons. “Everything is on an epic scale, the wealth and the poverty. There are more people rising into affluence than ever before and there are also unimaginable numbers of poor people making stuff for rich people. They are more free than they’ve ever been, but the inequalities are massive.” Where does he stand? “I’m a Westerner. I can’t pretend I don’t have Western notions of social justice.”

The idea, says Parsons, that Gordon Brown, with whom he has discussed China over dinner, “can wag his finger and lecture them about human rights and they’d give any kind of a toss is absurd”. On the other hand, China does not feel like an oppressive place. “It’s anarchic. It’s wild. It’s not a mass conformist society.” No people, he thinks, “have ever been less suited to communism” than the Chinese. “I admire them tremendously. They start on a rung so low we can barely comprehend it, and through education, hard work and resilience they make something of themselves.”

I can see why Parsons might identify with that. His own beginnings were, at least economically, inauspicious. His father worked at three jobs (greengrocer, truck driver, market stallholder) to move his wife and only child from a rented flat in Romford, East London, to a house in Billericay, Essex. “To most people Romford and Billericay sound the same, but to us it was a huge difference.”

A good deal has been written about Vic Parsons, who died over 20 years ago, not least by his son, both in his journalism and through the recurring salt-of-the-earth older dad character in his novels. “Do I romanticise him? Absolutely. But he was a romantic figure, a heroic figure, literally a heroic figure, he won a Distinguished Service Medal when he was 19 years old. He was tested and not found wanting.”

Parsons gives me a copy of Beachhead Assault, a history of the Royal Naval Commandos, his father’s unit, a book for which he wrote the foreword. At my request, he also fetches the treasured DSM in its worn leather case. Would he, Tony, have liked to have been in a war? “Well, I can’t say that because my memories of summer are the shrapnel scars on my dad’s body [Vic Parsons was badly wounded in an assault on Elba in 1944]. So I’m bloody lucky the most dangerous thing I did was take drugs with the Sex Pistols and the Clash.”

Still, he adds, when he found himself in Manila during the coup attempt last December, “part of me was glad when I heard machine-gun fire, because I feel like I haven’t been tested the way my dad was”. He felt the same way during an earthquake in Tokyo last summer. “Earthquakes and gunfire, always welcome. There is no question I mourn the loss of manly virtues I saw in my father. It wasn’t just the Second World War, it was the way he died too. He had lung cancer, but didn’t tell anyone, to protect us, then within a month he was gone. I’d have tried to get a book out of it. I’d have thought, ‘There’s a Ferrari in this.’”

For all his respect for his father, ambition and self-confidence were kindled in the young Parsons by his mother. “She used to play the piano and write poetry and spend so much time reading to me as a kid.” Not only was he an only child, his parents had tried for a decade to conceive and had resigned themselves to never doing so when he came along in 1953. Thus he was lavished with attention, by his mother if not his father, who worked all hours.

That earthquake, incidentally, which Parsons endured on the 32nd floor of his hotel with Yuriko and their five-year-old daughter Jasmine, wrecked a permanent move to his wife’s home country. “I love Tokyo and I was petitioning to move there last year. We were seriously thinking about it, then after the earthquake Yuriko said, ‘We’re never moving to Japan.’”

Parsons is learning Japanese, a class once a week, homework after he’s done his 1,000 words and his boxing training. How is he progressing? “My daughter doesn’t laugh at me any more.” He has mastered roughly half of the 48-character Hiragana syllabary. Can he read the street signs in Tokyo? “As long as they say sushi.” Jasmine goes to Japanese school on a Saturday, a private primary in Hampstead the rest of the week.

Parsons’ father left school in South London at 14. Such social mobility over three generations is swift, yet by no means unusual. What is rare is that, while plenty of writers start out working class, not many cease to be so without first passing a lot of exams. Yet Parsons left his school, a grammar that became a comprehensive while he was there, at 16.

When he started as one of the regular pundits on Late Review in the Nineties, “People couldn’t believe I hadn’t been to university, hadn’t done A levels. ‘Where did you go?’ they kept asking. I didn’t go anywhere. I went to work in the Gordon’s gin factory.” He wouldn’t recommend it, he says. “It’s tougher to be a working-class kid now. There’s less social mobility. At the BBC it seems just to order minicabs you’ve got to have been to Oxford or Cambridge.

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