Ben Masters Interview / Blog / Untitled Books

Issue 41 / February 2012

Ben Masters Interview

"The writers I admire have a certain amount of literary swagger. They write with literary inheritance. But at the same time I'd say they're fiercely individualistic writers, and that's what I'm aspiring to, a voice that's completely my own."

Noughties is 24-year-old Ben Masters' debut novel. It's a coming of age story, set over the course of a group of students' final night at Oxford as we follow them from pub to bar to club in what Masters explains is a "tongue-in-cheek Miltonic descent". The novel is told through the voice of Eliot Lamb, English undergraduate and, as we learn as we piece together the events of his university years through his flashbacks, our somewhat unreliable narrator.

Masters wrote the novel after his own student days in Oxford. Regarding it as "prentice work", he completed the first draft in a mere five months. "I just wanted to get it done," he says, "I was always quite hesitant about spending too much time on it. I knew I wanted to be a writer so I wanted quick feedback, I wanted someone to tell me whether I could write or not. I was always going to carry on regardless, but I wanted that affirmation from an agent and publisher."

By far the best advice he received during this period came from his "then literary god", Martin Amis. Queuing up to have a him sign a copy of one of his books after hearing the author speak, Masters told him that he was an aspiring novelist. "Get it finished" was Amis's recommendation, and so that became Masters' working motto.

Although, he assures me, the novel is not autobiographical in the strict sense of the term - "my university experience was too standard, too boring, to be turned into a novel" - Masters, like his protagonist Eliot, also read English at Oxford. He admits that he drew on his experiences to a certain degree though; after all, he was only 22 with "very little life lived" when he wrote it, so "what else are you going to write about?" he admits.

"But I don't see it as an 'Oxford novel' per se," he adds, "so much as a university novel. After all, the last fifteen to twenty years has been quite a peculiar time in university student history, what with the idea of mass university-going - something that could be about to come to end now. If you think about it, it's a standardized experience, but where's the novel that encapsulates that?"

"Perhaps Noughties fills a hole there," he suggests, not least because campus novels like Lucky Jim or Wonder Boys tend to focus on the university staff rather than the students.

But Masters' experience at Oxford informs the novel in more ways than one. Knowing that he wanted to be a writer, he saw his degree as "preparation", again referring to his work as a vocation: "I saw my apprenticeship as reading the canon."

Noughties is an incredibly intertextual piece as well as being markedly stylised, and is self-consciously literary in terms of the many allusions and quotations that pepper its pages. This doesn't necessarily mean that a reader has to be well versed in literature to appreciate the novel, but Masters admits the intertextual moments "are there for a reason".

He describes the book as a "comedy of the intellect": it's a novel about Eliot's maturation, "the story of three years of his head being filled with this highbrow arcane knowledge, and he's finding his voice and working out what to do with it."

It seems fair to make a comparison here with what Masters himself is doing: finding his own voice amongst those already out there, not least because of the emphasis he places on reading as his preparation.

"The writers I admire have a certain amount of literary swagger," he explains, "they write with literary inheritance. But at the same time I'd say they're fiercely individualistic writers, and that's what I'm aspiring to, a voice that's completely my own."

He goes on to tell me that his second novel - which he's working on right now - is even more intertextual than Noughties. It's full of pastiches, or what he prefers to call "loving emulations". It's style however that really excites him - he's currently writing a PhD on the subject at Cambridge - and I have to admit that that's what really stood out for me in his own work.

"I don't like critics who dismiss ornate writing as being all style and no substance," he declares. "So much substance is in the style, and style can shape content."

This is something he feels particularly passionately about when it comes to debut novels: "If you're a first novelist and you haven't got a certain amount of stylistic gusto, what are you doing?" he asks. "There should be an energy there. So many of the works I admire - The Rachel Papers, Lucky Jim, White Teeth - that's how it should be, something that overflows its boundaries. There has to be a certain amount of joy in the prose if you're a young writer."

Despite the fact that his own prose is well articulated, it's clear that Masters is aware he's a young novelist still finding his voice. Noughties, he says, is "the beginning of something. I'm not happy with it, it's going to be bigger and better, I'm going to go on and write more."

I joke that it's refreshing to hear that he sees himself as an evolving author with a trajectory ahead of them, rather than resting on more egotistical laurels. "Oh, there's a lot of egoism," he replies with a laugh, "of course there is. But I'm also well aware that there's the danger of seeing the publication of Noughties as an 'I've arrived' moment. I prefer to maintain the attitude that I'm only as good as my next novel."

Noughties is published by Hamish Hamilton.

Lucy Scholes, January 2012

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Issue 41 / February 2012