The most recent novel by Justin Cartwright -once a Wits rugby player -won the Whitbread Prize. He spoke to Nicholas Dawes
`I was the Peter Mandelson of my era,” says Justin Cartwright of his years as spin- doctor-in-chief to Britain’s Liberal- Democratic party. He’s joking, of course, but then the Lib-Dems did slip rather rapidly toward insignificance after his departure.
It may seem an unlikely past for the author of In Every Face I Meet, Masai Dreaming, and last year’s Whitbread Prize winner, Leading the Cheers (Sceptre), but that isn’t the half of it.
Cartwright makes documentary films, writes for the screen, and flits around the world recording his impressions for London broadsheets and glossy magazines. “I’m fairly successful as a novelist,” he says by way of explanation, “but I still have to pay the school fees”.
Perhaps, but it must be a rather pleasant way to get it done. After all, monkish solitude and tireless dedication to the muse don’t allow time for meetings with Kristin Scott-Thomas and off-the-record conversations with Hollywood moguls. They also make for dull interviews.
It is often impossible to make any kind of obvious connection between the person of a writer and his work. It is a particularly strange experience then to reread Leading the Cheers after spending a morning with Cartwright in the pacific grounds of the Johanneburg Country Club.
The sound of his voice keeps on imposing itself on the page as Dan Silas, middle- aged English ad exec, returns to America for a high-school reunion. The prose is measured, urbane and ironic. It mixes anecdote and analysis in a manner which betrays its author as a travel writer, and it falls upon the ear with subtle but insistent rhythm. The result is that the novel builds to quiet effect without ever being crass enough to show its hand. One might expect a book that takes in serial killers, native-American history and sex in Thomas Jefferson’s bed to be strained by large and awkward gestures, but it isn’t.
“Novels,” Cartwright says, “are not about intellectual ideas. I’m much more interested in style and tone. I’ve done big things, like Masai Dreaming, but as your style matures I think the trend is generally to tone it down. I don’t like books that immediately blackmail you into thinking `God! This is important.’ I hope by the time you finish this book you might think it’s important but I hate this feeling that it’s coming at you like a truck.”
It is no doubt this attention to tone that enables him to pose the question of American narcissism so delicately despite the potentially lurid material he deploys. He is not, however, above laying bare some of the more gross machinery.
“In America it seems the self has become the ultimate entity, so that history has no meaning any longer except in so far as it relates to the self. There is a sort of new romantic age going on – people are far less interested in rationality than in the valuation and promotion of the self. Suburban Americans like to believe they have a guardian angel in their back yard, things like that.”
It’s not the most novel point to make; anyone who has watched television between 5pm and 6pm will agree. What makes Leading the Cheers worthwhile is Cartwright’s careful delineation of lives played out in that register.
Strangely enough, the book’s most obviously artificial device – its serial killer, “such a banal staple of bad television” – is the only factual detail Cartwright maintained from his own return visit to Michigan. Two girls from his old high school [Cartwright was an exchange student] had been killed. No other details of the visit are in Leading the Cheers. But Cartwright admits that he included many of his initial impressions of Genessee county almost without realising he had done so. The resulting portrait of the American heartland is candid and often less than flattering. One senses the unease of a thoroughly self-aware metropolitan sophisticate (“Oh, I lead a much more exciting life than Ian MacEwan,” he smiles) in the meat-and-potatoes middle west. When his Times essay on the trip was reprinted in The Flint Journal, a local paper, the reaction was not warm.
What then of South Africa, where Cartwright grew up and captained the Wits arts faculty to a famous victory in a rugby match against the engineers? It is the kind of anxious, unavoidable question that we seem compelled to ask of our more impressive exports. As it turns out, much of the answer is under embargo. Cartwright is writing an article for The Guardian in London, and all of his most revealing anecdotes begin well, but end disappointingly with “Well, I won’t tell you what happened because I am going to write about it in my Guardian piece.”
This, no doubt, is fair enough. The travel writer’s impressions are convertible to hard currency, and their value is not to be diluted by handing out stories for free.
Two concerns, however, do seem to stand out. One is that no major new black writers, talents “to rival Ben Okri, Chinua Achebe”, have appeared. “Perhaps the vein of literacy has been tied off. The strong basic tradition of mission education carried through places like Lovedale and Fort Hare … Good intentions don’t make good writers.”
The other is the smugness of white South Africans. “What’s happened is a very sinister thing, because a lot of white South Africans are sort of congratulating themselves for releasing Mandela and starting this wonderful new society, as if that’s what they’d been planning all along.”
Leaving the country club we pass a group of prosperous-looking men on a balcony. They are surveying the leafy domain maintained by their fees with contentment clearly evident. “Those are the bastards, aren’t they?” Cartwright says with a smile. If his Guardian article is ever published here, one suspects that South Africans will be just as irritated as the unfortunate residents of Flint, Michigan, were. It’s really the least one can hope for.