WHAT DO YOU DO when your first novel has, with a little help from Richard and
Judy, sold a million copies and your publisher is baying for the follow-up?
If you're Victoria Hislop, wife of the still more famous Ian, the twinkly
panellist from Have I Got News For You, you do it all again. You'd be a fool
not to. As the Americans say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
So where her first, The Island, was a historical romance that told of the
unravelling of old family secrets, her new one, The Return, is a historical
romance that tells of the unravelling of old family secrets. And where The
Island was set in the leper colony on a Greek island, this one is set
largely in the town of Granada at the height of the Spanish Civil War. Both
came out of her own trips to those places, and so she has made it her
business to do as new novelists are meant to, and write about what she knows.
For The Return, she went to Spain to learn to dance, as does her heroine Sonia
with her best friend Maggie. Salsa to begin with, but then the real stuff,
pure and passionate flamenco. “Three women whom I've been close to took up
Latin American dancing as an emotional escape route,” the 49-year-old author
says. “They found that their husbands objected to it. They all eventually
separated. In one case the dancing stopped because the function had been
fulfilled. The others carried on. It is such a great release from the
mundane.”
Which begs the cheap but essential question of what Ian, stuck in Kent with
the children, made of her forays into a dance in which the vertical
expression of a horizontal desire (blame Bernard Shaw for that one) is so
emphatic. It's hard to represent her answer in print; it's a sort of wiggly
“hmmm” with a strangely ambivalent middle but a positive upturn at the end.
A beta-plus “hmmm”. She follows this with proper haste by explaining that
she was gone only for a week here and a week there. Mercifully there is no
resemblance between her husband and Sonia's, an icily drawn City boozer who
is effectively committing adultery with the bottle. You could have a long
search before you find a more insightful portrait of a practising alcoholic.
Best friend Maggie, however, seems closer to home. Hislop generalises the
character by saying “many women have friends who will dump them at a party
and go off with the first man they find”, but then concedes with a laugh:
“She is a lot of women I know, probably the most biographical person I've
written, and I'm expecting there to be quite a few women who will say 'Gosh,
that's me'.” The more, the safer, perhaps.
Dancing is serious territory here, and not to be dismissed as an indulgence.
Hislop's writing may be too functional, too unadorned to suggest an analogy
between national and domestic discord, but she agrees that such parallels
are probably not too fanciful. “Not that I've ever been like the London
girls who go twice a week and more,” she says, “but dancing is a massive
craze in England, and I think that the TV programmes have actually reflected
that rather than enhanced it.
“To me dancing and music are more important than words. I take part in violin
duets, and it is completely unlike anything else one does.” Commercially,
she has been made by The Island's inclusion on Richard and Judy's summer
reading list two years ago. While lit-snobs sneer, their book club, based on
Oprah Winfrey's in the US, has changed the landscape of the British book
trade.
This is largely down to Amanda Ross, the joint managing director of Cactus,
the TV company that makes the show. With a few assistants, she whittles down
the publishers' submissions, which run to several hundred, into a final
selection. These titles are then aired on the programme, with dramatic
results. For example The Star of the Sea, a novel about Irish refugees
during the potato famine, propelled Joseph O'Connor overnight from obscure
respectability to literary bestseller. Victoria Hislop's experience was no
less dramatic as her debut novel shot to the top of The Sunday Times
bestsellers list and stayed there for several weeks, earning her nearly
£500,000.
In that this process is instant and capricious, it is a sort of lottocracy,
and can change the winners' lives no less than a mighty Pools win. In terms
of exposure this is clearly the case for Hislop. Financially, less so. She
and Ian and their two teenage children are not a poor family, thanks to his
TV work and editorship of the satirical magazine Private Eye. Besides, she
says, hers wasn't a life that she wanted changed.
“Phrases like ‘beyond your wildest dreams' suggest that you have the dreams to
start with. I'd never really planned to write a novel anyway, let alone
dreamt of it being in the Top 20 or Top 10, or No 1. So unless you have the
dreams, the effect is slightly reduced.” The pair met while they were both
English students at Oxford, she at St. Hilda's College, nearly 30 years ago.
He was already declaring his professional hand by editing the satirical
magazine Passing Wind.
Like her books, she bears aspects of the thinking-person's Middle England.
Curious, tentative, bright, conservative with a middle-sized “c”, but pulled
farther to the left than her natural inclination by the sympathies she
developed for the Republican cause during her extensive research into the
Spanish Civil War. And there is, or was, a secret in her own family history.
The emergence of this was indeed life-changing, and very likely contributed
to her writing about families and secrecy in the way that she does.
Her parents divorced when she was a teenager. Her father remarried and had two
more children, giving him four in all. One day he made a passing remark
about his five children. It turned out that he and her mother had had a baby
girl who died of asthma at the age of 3, before Victoria was born.
“No one had ever talked about it,” she says, still shaking her head in
disbelief. “It had just been covered up as if it had never happened.”
Amateur psychology here, but shame spreads through her writing like weather.
It's not the kind of shame that relates to your own transgressions, but
rather something that has gone before, for which you are experiencing guilt
and responsibility.
Inappropriate but there nonetheless. It is present in her heroine, Sonia, who
is confused about her Spanish-born mother's early life, and it is there in
her portrayal of Spain today, where revisionist historians are joined in
battle over what really happened in the astonishingly bloody conflict that
tore the country apart. “One reason for this,” she explains, “is that for a
while many people who fought on the Left were unable to publish anything
about it. Now that they are are doing so, there are others who oppose them
with the argument that the repression of the Left was a myth, and that if
Franco hadn't been victorious, Spain would have become a communist
satellite...Most stories have the baddy getting his comeuppance. But Franco
goes on for more than 30 years after the [civil] war. In 1975 we
[holidaymakers] could have been lying by the sea in Benidorm while elsewhere
people were being executed.”
Even now, she argues, few of the Brits heading out on easyJet have a clue
about the causes or the fighting of that war. For her it became a matter of
crucial importance, as the family that links the Spanish and English strands
of the book is itself riven by political difference.
The Return may be a beach book, but it also goes inland and rummages around in
the cellars. Its author wonders aloud if she is doing something comparable
in relation to her own life, through the cipher of her heroine, Sonia.
Here's a clue. When asked the name of the baby sister who died, she replies
“Sonia”, and then puts her hands up to her face in surprise.
Excerpt from The Return
by Victoria Hislop
One girl, willowy, hollow-eyed, in black Lycra dance trousers and scoop-necked
top, stood up. In one hand she held a voluminous froth of dark green fabric
and she now stepped into it, for a moment struggling with a broken zip. She
seemed in no particular hurry. Then she fastened the buckles on her shoes.
They were pale with dust. Finally, she removed the clip that held the hair
away from her face and ringlets fell around her shoulders. She refastened
it, ensuring that all the strands were now firmly caught. The guitarist
continued and the clapped accompaniment went on. The pattern made by these
sounds was like hand-made lace. It was hard to see how individual groups of
stitches were going to fit in with the whole but after a while they formed
the most astonishing and symmetrical pattern.
The young woman was ready now. She began to join the clapping, as though
tuning herself into the rhythm. her hands held high, she moved seamlessly
into a series of sensuous hand-movements, her hips swaying in counterpoint
to the gestures of her arms. She danced in front of the guitarist, and he
held her in an unerring gaze, reading every nuance of her dance,
scrutinising every subtle flicker of her body and responding in rhythms and
notes. One moment his fingers would caress the strings, another they would
pluck them sharply to pick out a melody, anticipating rather than dictating.
She leaned backwards, limbo-like, twisting her torso as she turned. It was a
feat that was accomplished with gravity-defying balance. Sonia could not
imagine how she could have achieved this without falling to the ground, but
the woman repeated the movement four, five, even six times to prove that it
had been anything but a fluke, and each time her body curved itself into an
even more impossible arc.
Now, upright again, she performed a series of deft pirouettes, flicking her
body round at such a speed that Sonia wondered if she had actually turned at
all. One blink, and the spectator might have missed these breathtaking spins
entirely. All the while, her feet were hammering out angry patterns on the
floor. Every limb, every sinew of her body was engaged in the display, even
her facial muscles, which at times contorted her beautiful features into a
gargoyle-like grimace.
Sonia was frozen to the spot.
The Return
by Victoria Hislop
Headline Review, £17.99; 432pp
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