CAN THIS BE THE FIRST TIME A novel has come with a matching designer shoe? And
what does that say about modern literature and marketing? The shoe is
undeniably fine: a high-heeled, red velvet, peek-toed sandal. The
accompanying book, The Lollipop Shoes, is similar: entertaining,
pandering to female fantasy, extolling the art of bewitching.
The bestselling author Joanne Harris is the purveyor of this innovative
pedi-lit package: The Lollipop Shoesis a sequel to Chocolat,now
published in more than 40 countries, and made into a saccharine film with
Johnny Depp and Juliet Binoche. The shoe was created by L. K. Bennett in
homage to the latest novel (both are – thankfully – sold separately) and the
book launch will be in the company’s “flagship” London store. Will The
Lollipop Shoes do for footwear what Chocolat did for 70 per cent
cocoa solids? Harris is in Paris, ready to answer these questions.
She has been posing in the red shoes for the photographer, but is now
comfortably back in her Converse trainers. We meet in Montmartre, the
setting for the novel, and today the locals have been galvanised by the
spring sun into washing their doorsteps and polishing their door brasses.
The tourists have stripped off below the cake of the Sacré Coeur, and are
ogling Paris spread out below to its pollution-hazed horizon.
In The Lollipop Shoes, Harris’s ninth novel, the rural village sweet
shop of Chocolat has been resited, five years later, near the Sacré
Coeur. The cast remains much the same – witchy Vianne Rocher and her
daughter Anouk, but this time Zozie de l’Alba – a tall, dark, well-shod
(female) stranger – is tossed into the mix. Predictably, evil starts brewing
amid the truffles and fondant creams.
“I chose Montmartre because it had that villagey feel, although it’s in a
city,” says Harris, “but there’s also something about the atmosphere – it’s
very put on, the slightly ironic way the street musicians are playing
accordions, yet the tourists tend to think of it as the real Paris. So it
was a perfect setting for a complete fabrication. Zozie belongs perfectly
there because she revels in deception of all kinds.” It will be a popular
recipe: Montmartre, shoes and chocolate – what more does the middlebrow
matron want? Oh, a touch of black magic, not the confectionery kind. Lollipop
Shoes is a heavier book than Chocolat in both senses.
Harris finished writing it last winter: “I have seasonal affective disorder,
so it was much darker than usual.” The main female characters all have
supernatural powers. In Chocolat, white witchery and dark
confectionery were pitted against religion and asceticism. Of the new book,
Harris says: “You either believe in magic or you don’t. The occult,
religion, superstition – they’re part of the same spectrum for me. I don’t
distinguish. Strands of belief run through them all.”
Was Harris’s version of magic(al) realism influenced by Gabriel GarcÍa Márquez
or Isabelle Allende? “I haven’t read any Márquez, so I don’t know. I don’t
like any of those categories: middlebrow, gastromance, magic realism. I feel
like a big old parcel going from one end of the country to another. I think
only the media needs to cling to those categories. It’s so difficult to
label me. My last novel, Gentlemen and Players, was labelled a murder
mystery . . . and this latest one is more of an urban fairytale.” Harris
prefers to define her new work in terms of big-screen westerns: “This story
had a lot more at stake. Whereas Chocolat was a version of A
Fistful of Dollars – the hero blows in and out of town – The
Lollipop Shoes is more like High Noon.” Harris’s many fans
will go wild for it, and although Lollipop Shoes will not win the
Orange Prize, it will sell. Novels such as this are the cream centre of the
modern supermarket book trade.
She believes that adults gravitated to her and to Harry Potter through “a deep
down hunger for something”, which comes from our heritage of fairy and folk
tales. “We like the vanquishing of monsters, be they terrorists or the
supernatural. But adult books like this about stories rather than issues
tend to be perceived as middlebrow or lowbrow. There’s a lot of snobbery out
there, which doesn’t apply to the children’s market.”
Ever prolific, Harris has also just finished Runemarks,a 600-page
children’s book out in autumn and aimed at the preteen fantasy market. It’s
about “Norse gods after the end of the world”, she explains, and she
originally wrote it for her daughter Anouska, now 13. “She read it as we
went along, and soon she was poking me in the back, standing over me,
wanting another chapter.” Harris lives near Barnsley with her husband and
daughter. She has a barely-detectable Yorkshire accent, perhaps because she
grew up speaking French at home, after her English father brought back a
bride from Brittany. Harris was born 42 years ago above a sweet shop that
sold Yorkshire mix – “the sort of humbugs and hard-boiled sweets with sharp
holes that make your tongue bleed”. But she escaped every summer to family
in Paris and Brittany.
Her French is perfect, and her tastes Continental: on Rue St-Lazare we tuck in
to one of those Parisian meals where the food is beautifully arranged and
colour coded – most worryingly, boudin noir flavoured with geranium,
garnished with yellow egg and a purple pansy, which Harris bravely finishes.
Harris has a self-contained aura, and it turns out that her brother was ten
years younger. “It was like being an only child. After so many years of
being used to living in my own head so much, I found I was writing all the
time. I write anywhere I go – at 3am I woke up and wrote something in the
hotel. I love it, I don’t do it for money.” She confesses, weirdly, that
last night she was writing anonymous “fan fic” on someone else’s fanfiction
website.
Her own website is bulging with mail from expert fans, obsessed with detail.
She answers all the inquiries. Since Chocolat went global, Harris has
dedicated herself full time to promoting and writing books – previously she
was a language teacher in a boys’ school. “I like the human and intellectual
stimulus of being on tour and watching people. You can’t make up realistic
characters from scratch, so it helps. Besides, it would be terribly
ungrateful not to do it – the purpose of a tour is to thank people.”
This interview is a first blast in a year of solid international promotion:
“Australia and New Zealand, plus book festivals, meeting book reps . . .”
Like a member of the Royal Family, she is often forced to put on a white
coat and tour chocolate factories – or eat the produce. She sighs: “I feel
like the rock musician who has to play the hit single every time.” Harris
says chocolate and even shoes “are way of accessing sensuality without
actually writing sex scenes. You can hint without grinding through the
motions”. It appears that shoes are truly iconic for Harris. She reveals
that: “I was ill-advised enough to buy about ten pairs of fantastic shoes,
which I possibly will never wear, so I keep them in a glass cabinet at home.
The sort of cabinet where normal people keep their tea service and
silverware.” It’s a small French rebellion, in Yorkshire.
Lollipop shoes from L. K. Bennett stores, £139
THE LOLLIPOP SHOES by Joanne Harris Doubleday, £17.99; 352pp
£16.19 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
More than food
THE EVIL SEED (1989) A baroque Cambridge-set vampire yarn that remains
in print, much to Harris’s embarrassment. What did writing her first novel
teach her? “How to type”.
CHOCOLAT (1999) A single mum sets up sinful choc-shop in conservative
French village, leading to a stand-off with the uptight parish priest.
Shortlisted for the Whitbread, Harris’s breakthrough book is best read with
a stack of Green and Black’s at your elbow.
THE FRENCH KITCHEN (2002) You’ve read the books: now, er, cook them.
Four generations of family cooking are plundered for this book, which
includes recipes mentioned in Chocolat, and the subsequent foodie
novels Blackberry Wine and Five Quarters of the Orange.
HOLY FOOLS (2003) Harris breaks her postChocolat promise not to write
about the Catholic Church, as a nun and former ropedancer Juliette confronts
her evil lover and betrayer in a monastery in turbulent 17th-century France.
GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS (2005) Fruit, confectionery and France are
eschewed in a modern tale of scandals, rivalry and violence in a creaky old
grammar school.
