Kitchenly 434, your first novel since 2014 – is this something you’ve been working on since then (or earlier), or did it take you some time to arrive at this story you wished to tell?

I knew I wanted to write it long before 2010, because in my novel, ‘The Stars in the Bright Sky,’ there is actually a reference to Kitchenly Mill Race in a conversation between Kay and Ava, when they fall to talking about architecture. In my novel of 2014, ‘Their Lips Talk of Mischief,’ Lou and Cunningham are propositioned by Toby, the dodgy publisher, to write a trashy, exploitative biography of Marko Morrell of Fear Taker – a commission which Toby seems to use as a form of bait, so he can get them doing lesser jobs, like captioning cat calendars. So the idea of a novel which would focus around a rock star and the sense of his big house, was percolating up in my head. I really believe that these days, I have several particular novel ideas, just resting in my head and my subconscious is actually working away at them when I am not even aware of it doing so. I know that sounds bonkers but it’s the way it is. Of course that doesn’t help you write them. Thinking a novel up is fun, but writing it is where the trouble starts – it starts to wriggle away into something else.

It’s your first book on the White Rabbit Books imprint, although of course you’ve known and worked with Lee Brackstone for many years now. I’ll briefly drop my attempt at an interviewer’s neutrality to say that I think this hardback edition is genuinely a bloody beautiful thing. How has your experience with White Rabbit been, and are you very pleased with how the novel has turned out?

Well it’s an imprint at Hachette, home of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a huge publisher, who have big offices which overlook the River Thames, and most importantly they are near one of my favourite pubs in London: The Blackfriar. I adore old English pubs. So all the boxes are ticked. White Rabbit is Lee’s excellent imprint there, which he set up after all his ground-breaking work at Faber. After Lee moved from Faber, where we did my novel, ‘Their Lips Talk of Mischief,’ he moved over, principally to do music books but with a fiction list as well. I went with him and since this was a book with a music-related theme, we thought we would do this one on White Rabbit. The experience has been great as Lee and the team there have produced such a luscious looking book – you are right, it is beautiful. You have to recall when me and Duncan McLean, and Irvine and Janice Galloway were starting out, this thing called a Paperback Original was all the rage. It was a good idea which the editor, Robin Robertson, really innovated at Secker, and then at Jonathan Cape. Rather than messing about with all the costs of a hardback then negotiating paperback rights later at an out-of-house paperback publisher, the industry was changing – the book was first published in a good-looking paperback of a slightly larger size and quality – that’s how ‘Morvern Callar,’ and ‘Trainspotting,’ were done. Then you published the smaller paperback in the same house. It had a slight punk rock feel to it and it set you apart from the Old Fogeys - of which I now am. It got, if not a generation, then at least a constituency of readers and book lovers who were just not going to splash out on the cost of a hardback; it got them buying books again. So it’s been a treat to sort of experience the whole thing the wrong way round, maturing in to being done in hardback. And it’s lovely because ten years and more ago we were being told it was the end of the physical book – we were being sold this crap from people within the industry. I tell you – the barbarians aren’t always outside the walls of the castle – some are within it too. It was like when vinyl disappeared, and you were told it was finished forever. I was broken hearted. I thought: Dash & Tarnation. It’s the end of the book, so it’s the end of this life for me. Now you might know Brian, I hate electronic books. Can’t stand them. I like paper books. I know plenty folk are into their Kindle and all that, so fine, on you go, enjoy another book for 42 pence or whatever. But I am not spending my life goggling into my bloody phone then the rest of it goggling into my Kindle. I got given one once when I was in Canada, staying at this posh hotel – the company gave me a free one. I gave it to the housemaid in its box. Didn’t even charge it up. I said, ‘Have you got kids in school?’ she was like, ‘Yeah’ - I said ‘Here – you have this thing, Give it to your kids.’ Can’t stand the things. The best bit of technology is the bound book and a well-made paperback – it’s technology which has been working since the 17th century pretty well.

The novel is split into chapters that each begin with a fantastic illustrative plates by the artist Mark Edward Geyer, and a kind of short chapter summary. Is this a homage to a certain form of novel? Why does this story lend itself to this serialized style?

Rather than a homage, I feel there is a touch of tongue-in-cheek about it; it’s a sort of send up of the on the inconsequentiality of any grand or dramatic narrative nestling therein. This sort of frontispiece style, I suppose it goes back to Blake and ‘The Pickwick Papers,’ and Tenniel’s illustrations in ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass,’...that was the one that broke the mould. Some interesting books came as first editions with illustrations: ‘Tender is the Night,’ had illustrations. And ‘The Bridge of San Luis Rey,’ as well. I have always loved the touch, and adored Mervyn Peake’s work – he illustrated his own novels. I suppose I would be a bit fussy about characters being depicted; I feel that’s a private thing the reader has to generate – but this novel, ‘Kitchenly 434,’ was so about the house I thought it was a perfect fit. It was Lee who encouraged me to have more illustrations, not less, which is very rare for a publisher – believe me.

The book is, in a fairly oblique way, about music and the world of the professional musician. It is also dedicated to a musician – the great Irmin Schmidt of CAN. Were Irmin and CAN a direct influence on Fear Taker and this story, or on your own practice of art in general?

Oh god no. Perish the thought. Can were, in the 70s pretty much an underground band who could never have aspired to the massive commercial success of Fear Taker – for which you pretty much needed to break the American market. Can, never even got to America, though they were offered to support Pink Floyd there. They turned them down, which I always thought was a mistake. The bands of the 70s that I imagine Fear Taker sounding a bit like: Genesis, and Nice, ELP and Yes, later Pink Floyd and King Crimson, Deep Purple; they were very different bands from Irmin’s Can. A feature of these bands was that they thought by taking western classical and orchestral music, and using motifs and themes from that, rather than the blues, it would be a springboard for inspiration and also for improvisation. They also seemed to think it would be hallmark of ‘quality and loftiness.’ When The Nice first did it, with Keith Emerson it was interesting – The Nice’s version of Bernstein’s ‘America,’ is subversive and a good laugh, but these musicians could not improvise as imaginatively as say Cream did – or as Can did, so the music got really pretentious and grandiloquent, it started to seem pompous, as if the musicians thought they were continuing the tonal functional harmony tradition of the western musical canon. A band crashing through themes from Rachmaninov started to sound like what it was: Kitch; bad fairground music. That doesn’t mean I don’t quite like side one of Brain Salad Surgery, by ELP…it’s funny, veering from Keith doing Jimmy Smith, to knees up Cockney, Ian Dury stuff, to him tearing up the keyboards. Listen to the 2nd side of Yes’s ‘Relayer.’ Wow. It’s dazzling, wild, edgy and even funky at times. But Can were a totally different band, Can were an improvising band from start to finish really. They knew music was made from simple sounds, not playing Mozart scales through a Marshall amp while wearing a wizard’s cloak, like old Rick Wakeman, bless him, ha ha!. And some of Can were ex-‘classical’ musicians themselves, but they weren’t obvious enough to let that show. They just ATTACKED music. They were fearless like so much good art. Especially Irmin, who is a piano virtuoso, though he will deny it. But he did the opposite of prog rock, he underplayed and joined the greater harmony and never played any licks from Debussy.

The journalist Stuart Kelly gave the novel a warm and insightful review in the Scotsman, yet he also admitted to being “flummoxed” by it. I’m interested in whether the character of Crofton and his version of events were intended to confuse, or if you found yourself being a bit flummoxed by his behaviour too?

Well I am surprised Stuart’s mighty brain – one the biggest in the country – was flummoxed – but he is on to something in the sense of Nabokovian intentions, which he mentions in a copy of the review I have here – I think it’s always been there in my work, that attempt to grace objects and surroundings with inner meanings; to have a highly developed sensitivity to the environment which surrounds the character, so the character and the environment seem richer There is another element here though that people have been shy of mentioning. This is a mystical novel in many ways and that makes many people uncomfortable. Also – the ending of this novel is absolutely, undisguised in its Christian need to give thanks. Our modern, liberal atheism, for all its sophistication, is often absolutely short circuited in dealing with humble faith. Crofton’s Christianity seems eccentric and unorthodox, but it’s implicit in the text. When Crofton kneels at the end to give thanks for everything – just for life – to either God or Jesus – he doesn’t know which – he states that he is being utterly sincere. I believe he is. Is this a moment of conversion for him? Was the book building to this state of ever-thankfulness just for being alive, for this modest reaction to the lavish, vulgar materialism which surrounds him?

There are junctures all through the novel where Crofton seems to acknowledge an audience (“Not a lot of you will remember Ray Fenwick now…”) – is this account of his a written memoir, an oral confession? Who do you think he is telling the story to, and why?

That kind of follows on from your last question. I think it’s a written text – he states doesn’t he: ‘This is the voice of an old man..’ it’s similar to ‘Morvern Callar,’ in that it is implicit it’s a text, but as a writer I try to get the surface of the writing light and subtle so you don’t have a, ‘Reader, I married him,’ working away at the audience like a hot hair dryer in the face. ‘These years I meet kids who genuinely believe nobody in Britain got rich before Maggie Thatcher…’ lines like that come from a lived reality up in Stafford, decades after the 1970s. I sort of imagine him surviving on a state pension in his Mum’s old, terraced house, as so many folk are in our country today. I imagine him lonely, saddened and near the end and comes forth, pours out, this prayer in delachrimatorious (how about that one!) flow. “As I did two or three times a month during those…” It is movement of the consciousness humming like a machine...it’s also the voice of his soul.

I found it a really poignant moment when Crofton remembers how he once said to the love of his young life…


…And she’s just utterly unmoved by this. Is Crofton essentially just an ineffectual person who missed his chance at building his own life, and has relegated himself to the periphery inescapably? Or is there hope for him?

It’s kind of bloody heart breaking isn’t it? Oh God. ☹ I think there is hope for him but he seems to have no family of his own in later life. I think he’s a lonely old man when he writes this chronicle, trying to evoke a world which must seem hopelessly distant to him – even hallucinatory. Yet – all this humour comes pouring out – it’s as if his love for Marko – or at least what Marko and the music once represented is still there. In a way - though it’s not a good analogy - I keep thinking of Prince Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV. And Hal’s cruel, business-like rejection of Falstaff in the end, in the name of nobility - which of course kills Falstaff with a broken heart. Crofton is hardly Falstaffian, but at the same time…he lives by his wits he glories in English history and tradition and chances his way in life and he underestimates the change that Marko will embrace. It’s so English and so beautiful. And in Henry IV you sense that change – a political and cultural change in the air from a more carefree, bucolic time to a time of hard-edge ambition and cold practicality. I suppose I am clumsily trying to draw a parallel with the onset of the Thatcher Era.

Humour is such an important and central feature of Kitchenly 434. Crofton himself is extremely, horribly funny – both intentionally in his narrative asides, and unwittingly at times through some of his actions and choices. Yet he’s darker and more complex than a straightforward comic lead. Was he conceived of as a character that would allow you to work with black comedy and farce in different ways?

Yes…following on from your last question. Humour is important but I didn’t just want him to be a buffoon and a nincompoop, so that we can dismiss him. He was conceived of as man on the edge. But look. He is in a way just one of us who likes to read, who likes books and music, but he has been let loose in this huge house and has no ties. I am sure many of us would go the way Crofton goes. The place starts to corrupt him - he gets quite pompous, doesn’t he? Even superior and snobbish, and he does behave as if the property belongs to him. The sin of Pride. But I think all of us would have that weakness in us if we were presented with those temptations. In a way Crofton get what our whole culture wants. He gets it instantly: The Lottery Winner Dream. The big house, the fast cars. He is experiencing that. But…he gets it at a tangent: what of his soul? This book seems to be saying: beware: easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle…

As funny as the book is, it also contains some of your most luscious descriptive writing, with wonderful passages detailing the landscape of Kitchenly Mill Race and its surrounding community. Was a type of lyrical evocation of this environment something you really wanted to capture in this novel? Is the visual sense of the book’s terrain something you place more importance on now than earlier in your career?

Well, it’s veering toward cliché, but I guess I have to say it, and the big house, Kitchenly Mill Race is, “another character in the novel.” That’s often the case in novels with big houses. I see the big house novel as a splendid and significant Irish literary phenomenon, because of course - in Ireland, the big house of the district had a very specific and powerful symbolism, and I have to say, I mean if you think of good big house novels, like Aidan Higgins’ ‘Langrishe, Go Down,’ or Richard Hughes’ beautiful, ‘The Fox in the Attic,’ Elizabeth Bowen’s exquisite, ‘The Last September,’ or Waugh’s ‘A Handful of Dust,’ or Brideshead, you could even say de Maurier’s ‘Rebecca,’ too; The big houses are always, strong presences in the book, BUT that’s because the story is ALWAYS told from the point of view of the bloody owners – never those that have to clean the rim of the toilet bowls. Now I hate housework. I get a sense of moral improvement when it’s done, but sloth is my sin. It’s one of the worst sins – it’s only good side, is that if you are truly slothful and steeped in its badness – you are actually too slothful to get round to some of the other sins.

I had to capture the house in the book – it is the enchanter and the prison of Crofton.

The relationship between Crofton and Marko is revealed in such an interesting manner – these glimpses that appear throughout the book; Crofton bristling at being thought of as Marko’s staff, thinking his underwear is unworthy to be on the same washing-line as Marko’s, and then memories that suggest Marko quite callously used him as a resource in the past. Is the novel Crofton’s slow unravelling of this dynamic – does he learn? What does he get from Natandra that he doesn’t get from anyone else in the story?

That’s a brilliant point Brian that I hadn’t really thought of explicitly before. What he gets from Natandra is what we often get from frank young people. He gets the truth, doesn’t he? In many ways Crofton’s life is one of intrigue and power games between all those surrounding Marko. Mrs H is sneaky in her own way, Barraclough, Dan Mullan, the accountants, the power broker mother, Maude – they are all playing power games in reaction to the power and wealth Marko exudes and possesses – Nat doesn’t lie to Crofton, she’s not mixed up in any of the adult power games, the fly Machiavellianism of adulthood. That’s one of the beauties of youth, isn’t it? Rose and Nat are so frank and honest and I think he - being a male, as often males do – probably mistakes this raw honesty for a form of attraction. In life when we meet truth talkers, each one is like a blessing as they give us a chance to unburden all the mendacity that’s built up in us.

In your recent interview with the Observer about the book, you said: “This is a book about a guy who does the right thing.” In the end, this is unquestionably true, but there are points in the novel when Crofton has some questionable thoughts and urges. Did you ever feel him sliding towards doing the wrong thing? Why is he being so honest about his every thought, even those which may not reflect so greatly on him?

Well, he is weak and vulnerable to temptation like all of us, but I knew he would never slip anywhere really dark – Sexually he is clearly frustrated and it leads him…eh…astray, but that’s a dramatic product of this isolated life he has chosen - where he doesn’t interact with the world anymore. Why is he so honest about his every thought? Because he has to fall to his knees at the end.

The book is very much rooted in the culture of the 1970s, in merry rural England, in the daily civilian world of the great rock band – are there any particular books or writers (or films or music) that you were enjoying or found inspirational while you were painting the world of Kitchenly Mill?

Not really. I recognise that there could exist and image of me heading homeward with wads of 70s supergroup albums and archival copes of The Radio Times under my arms, to get on with a good dose of “research” - and often you do end up doing research. For instance, I had to try to learn to ride a specific low powered motorbike for my novel, ‘The Deadman’s Pedal.’ Had to meet a bloke in a carpark who owned one of these bikes! But with ‘Kitchenly 434,’ it’s really just a process of transposition. I can remember the late 70s very clearly, there were plenty folk in the small town where I grew up who were really into ELP and Yes, even 70s King Crimson – back then I was actually listening to 80s King Crimson: ‘Discipline,’ is it called? – that was a good album with the guitar player from The Talking Heads. So I didn’t do much research oddly enough. I have always had an interest in architecture, and I like big houses as much as the next person – but I tell you. Watch out for the housework. I had to let the novel build up in my mind. I don’t even particularly know that area of England well.

What next? Are you working on any new writing projects at the moment? What does the near future hold?

It might sound odd, but I am writing a short novel about Bonnie Prince Charlie. It was commissioned by Polygon Books. It’s the first time I have ever tried something when the subject has been suggested by someone else - and that’s interesting. I would probably have got snooty about that twenty years back, but now it seems exciting. They have been patient and it’s much delayed, but I am writing it now. I note that as I get older I work in shorter but more frequent sessions which is a good thing.

I am also writing this novel which shifts between contemporary Scotland and a journal/diary during World War 2. And a few other things as well, but you it’s like a piping bag of cream for baking, that spout when you squeeze the cream out for the cake edging. Only so much will come out at a time. I promise you, I don’t watch the Great British Bake-Off. ●