Crossing Over by Naomi Alderman / Features / Untitled Books

"There is something delicious, almost erotic, about donning the imaginary persona of a man to write."

Crossing Over by Naomi Alderman

In her novel The Lessons, Naomi Alderman tells the story of a group of friends at Oxford from the perspective of two men. Here, she considers literary ventriloquism and the transformative thrill of writing in a male tongue, from Patricia Highsmith's Ripley to Elizabeth Knox's angel Xas.

Jane Austen, famously, never wrote a scene between two men where a woman was not also present. When I was introduced to this fact as an A-level student, it was presented as a sign of her dedication to realism: she never wrote a scene in which she herself could not have been present. She did not attempt to imagine what men might be like when alone in one another's company. This, it was implied to me, was beyond her purview.

But for a writer so bold and insightful in giving motives and ruminations to her male characters, it's a curious choice. Male novelists had never been shy of imagining all-female conversations. Defoe didn't hesitate to write the racy confessions of Moll Flanders who was, among other things "Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother)". Samuel Richardson happily invented Clarissa's letters to her female friends.

When embarking on my own novel, The Lessons, narrated by an Oxford student, James Stieff, and partly occupied with his relationship with another man, Mark Winters, I took heart from the flowering, over the past 50 years, of novels written by women very much from the male perspective. I hadn't intended to write the novel from a man's perspective at first. The scene which was the seed of the book was written from a woman's point of view, but something about it didn't work. I tried changing some details. Still didn't work. I put it away for a while and when I found it again in a year-old notebook I thought "oh, of course. The narrator is a man."

It is an exciting transformation to write from the perspective of the other sex. There is something delicious, almost erotic, about donning the imaginary persona of a man to write. It feels illicit, like walking accidentally-on-purpose into the wrong changing room, or intimate, like putting on a boyfriend's cologne.

This sense of the forbidden, shameful and yet glorious transformation is everywhere in Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr Ripley. Tom Ripley, an amoral chancer, is sent to Italy by the wealthy parents of Dickie Greenleaf, in order to try to persuade Dickie to come home. Tom fails at this task, if he had ever intended to fulfil it at all, but becomes obsessed by the handsome, patrician Dickie. Eventually, forced - as he sees it - by necessity, Tom gets rid of Dickie and takes his place completely, pretending to be him.

"His very expression, Tom thought, was like Dickie's now. He wore a smile that was dangerously welcoming... It was Dickie's best and most typical smile when he was in a good humour. Tom was in a good humour. It was Paris. Wonderful to sit in a famous café, and to think of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow being Dickie Greenleaf! The cuff links, the white silk shirts... the old mustard-coloured coat sweater with the sagging pockets, they were all his and he loved them all."

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow is, of course, the petty pace lamented by Shakespeare's great usurper of another man's place: Macbeth. Is it too much to imagine Tom Ripley taking on a little of Highsmith's own delight at wearing the fictional suit of a man?

The writer Louise Welsh's three novels have all had a male protagonist. Her second, Tamburlaine Must Die, an atmospheric take on the mystery of Christopher Marlowe's death in Deptford in 1593, is narrated by Marlowe himself with crisp confidence. At the very start of the novel she has Marlowe sum himself up thus:

"I am of an adventurous nature. I have often invited danger and have even goaded men to violence for the sake of excitement. I like best what lies beyond my reach and admit to using friendship, State and Church to my own ends. I acknowledge breaking God's law and man's with few regrets."

The self-assurance and the wry acceptance of this passage seemed to me to ring true both for a man of this time and, specifically, for Marlowe. For a modern woman, it would perhaps be more difficult, even intolerable, to imagine oneself as a 16^th century woman - with all the strictures and perhaps the acceptance of subservience that might imply - than a man. The fear, though, is that however hard one tries the male voice might not ring true. Welsh's Marlowe seems to me utterly convincing; I'm not a man, but it persuaded male reviewers too.

In my own work, my senses were sharpened to false gender notes by my experience judging a short story prize a few years ago. We were given a list of the authors and the titles of their stories, but it was possible to read the stories without looking at that list. I found it quite easy to pick out, from the anonymous stories, three which had clearly been written by men, in a woman's voice. The tip off in all three cases was: extraneous breasts. The story would be proceeding quite normally, narrated by this fictional woman until, suddenly, breasts were mentioned for no obvious reason. "I took a bath, washing myself carefully, including my breasts." "The dress fitted perfectly, even over my breasts." That sort of thing. Perhaps Portnoy's Complaint would suggest otherwise, but I decided, in my own work, to try to steer clear of extraneous penises.

Rose Tremain's work has dealt with difficult gender distinctions, notably in Sacred Country, which tells the story of a girl convinced she should have been born a boy and The Way I Found Her, a haunting novel in which a teenage boy becomes obsessed with an older woman. One of her best-loved novels, Restoration is narrated by a man serving at the court of King Charles II, Robert Merivel. Tremain's description of a sexual encounter from Merivel's perspective makes it clear that the transaction is as much about power - a genderless quality - as about physical acts.

"I celebrated by visiting Mrs Pierpoint, getting drunk with her at the Leg Tavern and tumbling her in a muddy ditch on Hampstead Fields. Afterwards, she had the temerity to ask me whether, now that I was in the King's employ, I could get some position at Court for the uncouth Mr Pierpoint... I learned at once a lesson I never let myself forget: that power and success carry in their train a clamouring queue of greasers and supplicants."

This is the point, of course. Most qualities are genderless. Love has no gender, nor does desire, passion, greed, anger, hatred or joy. Bodies aside, men and women aren't so different, and it's this which enables us to don each other's fictional skin with relative ease.

Elizabeth Knox's beautiful and moving novel, The Vintner's Luck, traces the story of a 19^th century wine-maker's relationship with a male angel. The vintner, Sobran, loses his eight year old daughter Nicolette to a fever, and the angel, Xas, comforts him:

"Xas held Sobran all night, lying against the slope, on the raft of his wings.... Sobran's friends brought him brandy or laid their arms along his shoulders - but no one wrapped their body about his and bore him away. The angel was strong and tender and as fresh as a young river. The angel wasn't tentative or impatient. For hours through tears and the painful intimacy of mourning the angel held him. Sobran's grief lost its edge against Xas's body."

The poignant sensuality of this scene would have had a slightly different resonance played between a man and a woman, or between two women. But the emotions in it would have been the same, the intensity of touch as meaningful. The sense I take from it is that our bodies are physical and human first and foremost, and only gendered second.

When I'm asked, as I occasionally have been, why I chose to write The Lessons from a male perspective, I give roughly the same answer as I gave to the question of why I, a straight woman, chose to write my first novel about the lesbian relationship between two women. Broadly, it is because I am a feminist. Or perhaps a better phrase, though more of a mouthful, is "gender equalitarian". I do not believe that heterosexual love, passion, desire, betrayal are so very different to homosexual love, passion, desire and betrayal that they are mutually incomprehensible. I do not believe that men and women are so radically different that we cannot understand one another.

Novels are the triumph of empathy and hope over biology. Unlike Tiresias - the figure of Greek legend who spent part of life as a man and part as a woman - none of us can flick between genders at will. But via novels, we can enter into the minds of people who are different from us in all sorts of superficial ways and, looking out through their eyes, understand that the differences will never be as great as the similarities.

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The Lessons is published by Viking.

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Friday, 7 May, 2010