BOOKS / Hothouse blues: James Hamilton-Paterson lives in Tuscany, but not in Chiantishire. Reclusive, publicity-shy and unpredictable, he has yet to find a wide audience. But at least one admirer thinks him 'our best writer by far'

IF THERE is a corner of Italy that is forever England, it can be found in a small, neatly arranged, classically Tuscan house perched like an eagle's nest a very long way up an Apennine. In it lives one of our most original writers.

There is no taste of Chiantishire here, though. James Hamilton- Paterson has been known to dine with Muriel Spark, who lives nearby, but keeps well away from the John Mortimer crowd, or any other holidaying British Tuscanites. He guards his privacy by simple means: from halfway up the mountain (which is the height of Snowdon), the track to his house becomes unnavigable by normal transport. He has no phone. He doesn't like visiting London unless he absolutely has to, not even for the publication and promotion of a new book: when he flies over at the end of May to deliver a new manuscript, his latest novel, Griefwork, will have been out for a good three weeks.

'I hope you don't want to talk about Griefwork,' he says within five minutes of our meeting. Actually, that is why I'm here, but it is early in the day, so I keep quiet. 'I'm so involved in this new novel that

I've almost forgotten what Griefwork is about.'

As it turns out, this is not quite true, but it is typical of his conversation: direct, full of bluff and bravado, and entirely affable. I'd been expecting someone less than friendly. A Vanity Fair article last year carried a photo of him peering out of the gloom of a London pub looking like a real bruiser; the piece described his privacy as almost 'anchorite'. I had also been instructed to take walking shoes - 'JHP (as his publishers insist on calling him) will probably take you for a hike' - and had been advised that, instead of something warming like scotch or port, I should take him 'a bottle of Listerine'. Was this man really a monk, with problems of oral hygiene to boot?

Equally daunting was Hamilton- Paterson's literary reputation. Though unpublished at the time of the 1983 Best of Young British novelists campaign, and too old, at 52, to be on this year's list, he has been described in extravagant terms by Andrew Harvey, a fellow of All Souls: 'Forget Bruce Chatwin, forget Martin Amis, forget Julian Barnes,' Harvey told Vanity Fair, and declared Hamilton-Paterson 'our best writer by far'. Martin Amis is, in fact, an admirer of Hamilton- Paterson. Ronald Blythe, author of Akenfield, thinks him a remarkable writer too: 'His novels are most unusual and audacious. He's really a poet who writes in prose. There's no one quite like him.'

He has indeed published verse, two slim volumes entitled Option Three and Dutch Alps, and while at Oxford he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. Craig Raine, who remembers Hamilton-Paterson's student poems, has called them 'extraordinary . . . much more sophisticated than the work the rest of us were doing'. 'JHP' might appear, from all this, to be a writer of forbidding seriousness.

But the trim figure who ambles towards me at the foot of his hill is dressed casually and smiles broadly. Sandy-haired and blue-eyed, he bears a passing resemblance to the former Conservative Party chairman Chris Patten - thinner on top and thinner everywhere else, too. There, any likeness ends: Mrs Thatcher

is referred to throughout the day

as 'that woman', John Major as

'an airhead'.

We drive up to his eyrie in a new Toyota jeep; Hamilton-Paterson used to have a Land-Rover which the rough track finally shook to pieces after a decade. He strikes me as being about as monklike as an actor or a cricketer. His arms, when not steering, are mobile, his gestures quick. He speaks rapidly, in a rather old-fashioned way, rolling the 'r' in 'very' and throwing out phrases like 'jolly good'; his gravelly speech is punctuated by guffaws of infectious laughter. Hamilton-Paterson is the essence of the expatriate writer, in love with his exile; but after 12 years away he remains defiantly English.

'When I first got here, after an incredibly long walk, I sat down outside the house and said: 'This is for me. You don't get better than this'.' He bought the house from a friend of a friend in 1981 for pounds 4,500. It was in a state of near collapse - 'the local shepherds used it as a knocking shop' - but he turned it into the home where he spends nine months of the year. The other three are spent in a bamboo hut in the Philippines, which is the setting for his new novel, the first time he's written about the place in a full-length fiction.

From the front of the house, the view across the valley below is breathtaking. For miles, with not a pylon in sight, the flat, fertile fields of the Val di Chiana sweep towards the elegant blue hills of western Tuscany. Somewhere among them lies Siena. Beyond can be glimpsed a segment of Lake Trasimeno. Immediately below is an 11th-century castle once lived in by an Englishman, Sir John Hawkwood; Arthur Conan Doyle used it as a setting for his novel The White Company.

The local English connnection seems not to affect James Hamilton- Paterson. A measure of his sense of belonging to the area can be gleaned from his response to a question about nearby Cortona, a place which to the casual visitor seems as perfectly Italian as could be desired. Like any regionalist native, he says: 'I am not really partial to Cortona myself. I feel more Castiglionese. I do all my telephoning from there.' The towns are five miles apart.

Beyond his own five acres of unfashionable Tuscany, though, his interest in Italian food, Italian art, Italian anything is slight. He has found his island, far from the madding metropolitan crowd of Florence or Rome or London. He has laid an underground waterpipe from a spring up the hill ('not on my land, but I bought the rights'), planted fruit and olive-trees, and organised the re-routing of that bone-shaking track away from the house.

'Even if to you it looks like a backwater, I actually work quite hard here,' he says - the understatement of the day. So far, he has also survived without electricity. Future labours include digging a well, for which he will need electricity to pump the water up efficiently. 'But the Italians have caught the British disease: privatising everything. Before, state electricity would have come as soon as I asked. Now I won't get it for 18 months.'

After 12 years, another 18 months doesn't seem much of a wait. He grins: 'If lamps were good enough for Shakespeare, they are good enough for me.'

SINCE 1986, when he made his fictional debut with a collection of short stories, The View from Mount Dog, Hamilton-Paterson has produced three novels (Gerontius in 1989, The Bell-Boy a year later, and now Griefwork) and two works of non-fiction. Adding the novel-in- progress, at present untitled, that's an average of a book a year.

He was 45 when he was first published - by most standards, a late start. He admits that neither at school nor at Oxford, where he was an undergraduate from 1961-4, did he have the faintest idea of what he wanted to do. 'I just had a huge list of the things I knew I didn't want to do,' he says.

Born into a medical family - his father was a neurologist, his mother an anaesthetist - he was sent away four years after the end of the war to prep school on the south coast of England. It was a long way from Footscray in Kent, where his family lived, and he felt rejected: 'And the cold, God, I remember the cold. It was the kind of place where the windows were left open at night, and in winter you'd wake in the morning to find snow on your bed.'

Bullied and showing little aptitude for work, he was taken away and put in a more congenial school. From there he went on to King's School, Canterbury, where he developed a taste for music, both composing and improvising for hours on the piano. He also wrote poetry.

'I was extremely sensitive to sound as a child,' he remembers. 'I was bullied for crying to poetry. If I was asked in class to read Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur, I'd refuse, as I'd end up crying. The same with certain passages from the Bible. Hopeless.'

These aesthetic tendencies ran alongside a complete inability in science or maths (he took maths O- level at least six times, and never passed), and to everyone's amazement, his father's above all, he got into Exeter College, Oxford, to read modern languages.

His father died soon afterwards. It ended what had become a troubled relationship; so relieved were he and his younger sister Jane (to whom he is close) that they said to each other 'Thank God he's gone.' 'It was a terrible thing to say,' Hamilton-Paterson now thinks. 'But he was both a neglectful and an over-anxious father, and he was always grotesquely over-worked.' Brother and sister remain close to their 84-year-old mother, who has visited him, even though 'the road up here is very tricky for old bones.'

In the late 1960s, he drifted - from Libya to Vietnam to Brazil - teaching a bit here, filing articles there (mainly for the New Statesman), and even spending some time as an orderly at St Stephen's Hospital, to 'kill the medical bug', the doctor's instincts inherited from his parents. In the 1970s, he wrote scripts for video promotions in Cambridge, which was anonymous and well-paid - and still he wasn't

writing seriously.

Before Tuscany, in 1979, he discovered the Philippines, the only place in South-East Asia he hadn't already visited. At first he hated it - 'it felt completely Coca-Colaised' - but gradually he came to love the culture and the people, learning the language, as well as local customs, spearing fish, and building out of bamboo. His hut lasts about three years, 'before termites get it, or a hurricane blows it down, and I have to rebuild it. In the last hurricane, in '84, I'd been keeping a pig, which was blown two and a half miles out

to sea . . . '

One of his friends says that with Hamilton-Paterson's love of the Philippines go the instincts of a scout-master: 'James is really a throwback to colonial times. He'd have been happy administering some vast tract of jungle. In the Philippines, he helps the locals with water, things like that.'

Other friends speculate about his love-life: no one quite knows, fishing and creating day-centres aside, what he gets up to in the Philippines - or elsewhere. As always, he is categorical about what he doesn't want: 'I discovered sex well before Oxford, and slept with everything and everybody, but I couldn't actually live with anyone. I mean, you can't go for a walk at 2 am, leaving behind someone who says: 'Where are you going, it's snowing?' At a trivial level, I'm afraid you just get used to your own company, your own rhythms.'

FOR OUR hike up the hill beyond his house, Hamilton-Paterson has put on a mangy old blue boiler-suit. Lunch is workmanlike - plain meats, salad and beer - and we relax in the garden overlooking what appears to be the whole of central Italy.

It was in this place of industrious solitude that he wrote Gerontius, which some critics consider one of the best English novels of the 1980s. Before it had come the short stories, and an autobiographical work, Playing with Water, about the Philippines; after it came a book about the sea, Seven Tenths, once again based on his own experiences and reflecting his interest in natural science. But it was Gerontius - with its intimate depiction of the lonely Edward Elgar travelling up the Amazon - which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and put James Hamilton- Paterson on the map.

Griefwork, his new book, is written in a similarly meticulous style, but its subject couldn't be more different. Set in a north European city under Nazi occupation, it concerns a hot- house full of tropical vegetation. The weird thing is, the plants and trees speak.

The curator is a loner called Leon; he lost his mother when young, and has suffered bitterly from unrequited love. Retreating obsessively into a world of palms and pot- plants, he holds the hothouse together during the war, and protects a gypsy, who might be real or imagined - either way, his erotic significance for Leon is unmistakable. The plants, meanwhile, are expressions of Leon's displaced emotions - their speech and thoughts are really his own.

The device, which sounds dotty, works. Leon's favourite tree, Tamarindus indica, explains: 'We're all of us devoted to our gardener, of course, as he moves among us with his golden wand. However, those of us capable of thought - which is most of the species in this House with the obvious exception of the bananas, who are famously dim - object now and then to the ludicrous qualities he assigns us. We've come to the conclusion he can't help his anthropomorphism, and leave it at that.'

Hamilton-Paterson's prose is witty, understated, perfectly pitched: these are his hallmarks. He will be criticised for talking plants in 1993, but he knows exactly what he's doing: 'On an impulse one morning I flew to Amsterdam, and noticed a small hothouse in the botanical gardens. Interested, I went in, and thought: 'Did it stay intact during the war?' Back here, the whole idea of the talking plants came to me in half an hour. I said to myself: 'James, is this whimsy, or is this whimsy? But no, sorry, the plants have got to talk.' And talk they do.' In fact, Griefwork is - as its title suggests - a melancholy book. It deals with loss, psychic and actual, and the thin line between order and chaos.

Should Griefwork win any kind of award, it will be hard to extract the author from his surroundings to receive it. Hamilton-Paterson accepts that he, like his characters, is a loner - and enjoys being so. It is how he writes as well as he does. Still, I put it to him that his way of life, up here, is quite extreme. 'What, this?' he replies, gesturing across the valley, towards his house, the sky. 'It's nooaat]' But isn't it a bit out of the way? 'What way?'

Try again: doesn't he feel cut off, dislocated? 'From what? What is happening that I ought to know about that I don't know about?' There is no answer to that.

'Griefwork' is published this week by Cape at pounds 14.99