Issue 44 / May 2012
Interview with Gavin James Bower
Gavin James Bower's second novel, Made in Britain, was published yesterday by Quartet Books - the small independent publishers based in central London that Bower joyfully describes as a "family". He tells me who sits in which room on which floor; a set-up he knows well considering one of the offices is his. When they published his first novel, Dazed and Aroused, two years ago, there was an "obvious gap" in the publishers' editorial team which he quickly filled: making what he calls "the perfect marriage" between writing and publishing.
His days are now spent working on Quartet's website and editing the works of others, then in the evening he heads to the British Library for a couple of hours of his own writing. When I ask him how he has time to fit it all in, he jokes that publishing isn't exactly "back-breaking work", but, on a more serious note, he explains that he thrives on the variety. "Part of me would love to live off writing," he admits. "But there's a bigger part of me that knows I wouldn't be happy just writing alone in the library. I'm not sure that would be enough". In fact, he continues, "I get a bigger sense of pride" from editing the works of others.
He describes himself as someone who can "scatter" his skills; a bit of writing, a bit of editing, some work on the website, some pitching, and then out of everything "hopefully", he guardedly admits, "comes a career". It sounds to me though that he's made it already - a much sought after job in publishing, two novels under his belt and a third book already in the pipeline (the story of Claude Cahun, the French artist, photographer and writer, which he's planning to write this winter).
He describes working at Quartet as having meant that Dazed and Aroused was a "sort of dry-run" of a book. Now he understands how publishing works, this time around he took an active part in all stages of the writing, editing, publishing and marketing process. He jokes that he's being both "subject" and "publicist" in this interview, but it's not too far from the truth. He's interested in what I thought of the book's cover (it was designed by a good friend from a photograph Bower himself took of a wall in an old mining town in Derbyshire), and he has the canny ability to turn even the slightest bit of criticism into a compliment. At the same time, he's well aware that he's in what he calls "an extremely privileged position" to be able to have had this much control over his own work, as in larger publishing houses only authors of consistent best-sellers would have a say in every aspect of their book's development.
Made in Britain is told through the eyes of three sixteen-year-olds living in the Lancashire town of Burnley as they take their GCSE's. Told as a first-person narrative in the three different voices, Bower does an admirable job of maintaining the distinction between them, a task that he admits was "really hard, a constant struggle of redrafting". It's a gritty, raw and uncompromising depiction of today's disaffected youth - in many ways a timely book, given the recent rioting and the debates that raged in the aftermath, but when I ask him whether he was ahead of the zeitgeist in writing about the problems facing the youth of today, he reminds me that his characters aren't rioters or looters, they're simply three teenagers who live in a society that offers them a distinct lack of opportunities. But, he continues, "anything that sharpens the discourse around how we treat and view the young working class, can surely only help the situation."
He talks eloquently and informatively about the problems facing what he aptly calls "the rudderless, not the lost, generation". "What generation in the past fifty, or even hundred years," he asks, "has grown up thinking they can't change anything? Even amongst the shallow capitalism of the 80s there was a sense that you could change the world." He then refers to the phrase "reflexive impotence", as used by Mark Fisher in his book Capitalist Realism. "It's not apathy," Bower explains. "It's not ambivalence. It's the feeling that you don't have the power to change anything, so what's the point in bothering."
In a less overtly political way, we see the exploration of this attitude in his novel - his teenagers are already trapped, for the most part, in the lives they're living (though he professes that there's a slightly brighter glimmer of hope at the end of the novel than I had inferred) and he does little to provide answers to their, or indeed, the bigger problems in society as a whole. Contemplating their GCSE results, these are children about to turn into adults, but, Bower says, "I didn't want to paint the picture that university is the answer to everything, it certainly wasn't for me" - an interesting comment considering his career would seem to suggest that he's done well out of his own education.
Like his protagonists, Bower too grew up in Burnley so the book is also, as he's been quoted elsewhere as admitting, the product of his "love-hate relationship" with his home town. It shares its title with Evan Davis' recent book and television series about the British economy - work that Bower took umbrage with in an article he wrote for The Guardian earlier this year in which he argued that Davis didn't address the real ramifications of Britain's decision to relocate much of its manufacturing abroad. In its depiction of the dilapidation and poverty facing these now "ghost towns", Bower's novel directly engages with "the legacy of Thatcherism on the post-industrial North of England".
So, I ask, would he leave London and move back up North again? Not immediately he says. After all, if he wants to stay in publishing, London is the place to be. But eventually, yes. "As I've gone further away, I'm more and more in love with it. I'm always going to be pulled back there," he explains. He would like to live somewhere else in the meantime though, somewhere like Paris he says. After all, he left Lancashire in the first place because there was "a lot of world out there".
Lucy Scholes
Friday, 30 September, 2011
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