Barbara Trapido: As she likes it

Barbara Trapido, mistress of sparkling dark comedy, has set a novel in her native South Africa. Christina Patterson talks to her about literary homecoming, and the joys of fiction

It is more than 20 years since Barbara Trapido's first novel, Brother of the More Famous Jack, burst into the bookshops, trailing clouds of literary glory and triggering affectionate accolades from the most jaded reviewers. "I hope it is stocked by railway-station bookstalls," gushed the Financial Times. "I hope railway-station bookstalls have to build extensions to house the necessary copies." It won the Whitbread Special Prize for Fiction 1982 and an army of loyal fans.

I was working in a bookshop in Guildford when one of them took me by the hand and, literally, led me to it. Trapido's sparkling bildungsroman of a young suburban girl's life-changing encounters with Bohemia, love, loss and a knitting machine, instantly became my comfort book. I could soon quote great chunks of it.

I am pleased today that Barbara Trapido is, like her first heroine, Katherine, wearing some classy knitwear. A preoccupation with clothes, textures, and the careful juxtaposition of soft wool with silk or leather, is a consistent thread running through her work. It is clearly no academic enterprise.

She was, she tells me, alarmed to be reminded, at a recent meet-the-writer reading group discussion of her first novel, that "puce sheets" featured at an important moment. "Why couldn't it be nice white bed linen?" she laments, wincing. The group had also been upset by the fact that Jonathan Goldman, the brooding, romantic hero with whom Katherine finally finds redemptive love in a Kilburn bedsit, had a moustache. "Just pretend it wasn't there," she told them.

Barbara Trapido's own comfort book, she has said, is Iris Murdoch's first novel Under the Net, a book she admires for its "lightness, brightness and sparkle". These qualities are so pervasive in her own fiction that they are practically her trademark. Her three most recent novels form a trio of interlinked comedies, each with a cast of Shakespearian proportions and each structured around a different motif.

Temples of Delight is a tale of seduction, magic, stolen novels and orphan babies and draws on the structure and themes of Mozart's The Magic Flute. Juggling, full of strange pairings and partings, explores and echoes the Shakespearian comedy. Trapido was going to stop there but, she says, "A friend who's also a writer said, well, now you've got to write three, you can't just write two, so I seized that suggestion quite eagerly."

The result was The Travelling Hornplayer, structured around Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin cycle of lieder, which revisits Katherine and Jonathan in middle age and throws them together with characters from the first two novels in the trilogy. All three are infused with Trapido's love of literature and music, shot through with literary allusions, coincidences and plot entanglements and delivered with epigrammatic wit. They are funny, sexy and poignant and provoke reviews that make frequent use of words like "seductive", "irresistible" and "charming".

Trapido's new novel, Frankie & Stankie (Bloomsbury, £16.99), tells the story of weedy, arty Dinah and her sister Lisa, growing up with a dissenting liberal Dutch father and an anxious German mother in South Africa in the 1950s. In history lessons, Dinah learns that the oranges in Zululand are small "because the Zulus cause soil erosion by refusing to engage in contour ploughing, much as we have tried to educate them in this matter".

Even Miss Byrd, the inspirational art teacher, tells a cheery anecdote about seeing Bushmen on display in a cage at an Easter show. Confused by the tightening screws of racial repression, Dinah seeks solace in friendships, boys, English literature and dreams of escape to London, which are finally fulfilled. Although narrated in the third person, it is very clearly autobiographical, and the first of Trapido's books to address the subject of South Africa. Why has it taken her so long?

"When I left I just wanted to shut it out of my life," she explains, sipping her coffee thoughtfully, "and afterwards I had an idea that one had to write a rather earnest kind of documentary, a Nadine Gordimer kind of book that would document the trouble. I thought, 'I don't want to do that.' I think what makes me want to write is the idea of lightness and balance. I don't mean to be trivial, but I prefer a comic mode.

"In a way I think South Africa offered a kind of ready-made overwritten black comedy, and I didn't want to do that. It was too close to me and too searing and had damaged and killed too many of our friends for me to want to make a sitcom out of it."

It was, she says, the end of apartheid and the death of her mother that finally triggered the desire to confront the ghosts of her past and give some kind of shape to them. "I think that all of those things that I put in a box and labelled 'do not open' I felt I could suddenly take out," she adds. She started by buying "a whole bunch of exercise books" and writing a stream-of-consciousness recollection of her early life.

Uninterested in writing a straightforward memoir, she decided that the book would be "about telling stories", and that her self-imposed constraint would be that she only used "real-life" ones. This in itself posed problems. "For instance," Trapido confesses, "my sister tells me, when I made a reference to us falling in love with La Traviata, that I wasn't there, that she went on her own ... She must have evoked it for me so vividly that I thought I was."

The narrative voice is wry and ironic, more chatty and colloquial than that of Trapido's previous books. The sentences are shorter, more staccato and often begin with the word "Plus", as if the point is a casual afterthought. It is a slightly different voice, and markedly more South African. Does she agree? "Yes," she nods, "somebody said to me the other day, 'Your South African accent's come back.' You know," she adds, "in situations of terrible injustice and oppression, people don't sit about wringing their hands and going on about how terrible it is. They sort of get on with their lives ... I think I was just trying to get that sort of day-to-day matter-of-factness."

Trapido is surprised when her use of irony and restraint – the traditional tools of satire – leads to a perception of her work as sunny or superficial. "The books always make me cry like mad," she admits, "and afterwards people say they're so happy, they're such fun, they're so frothy, and I remember all those tears splashed all over the page." She is right to be surprised. There is a great deal of redemptive love in her work, but also plenty of darkness.

In her essay on Shakespearian comedy in Juggling, the central character, Christina, says: "The comedies are a better sort of tragedy because they make us laugh and because the characters stay alive. Survival is admirable. It is more difficult than death, since it takes more energy and guile." This could be seen as the driving force behind all Trapido's work. "If you actually think of the comedies," she points out, "they're about torture, they're about raped nuns, they're actually about people being betrayed and abandoned. They just take all those things and make an artefact that seems to lift and dance – and that's all about energy. I think I prefer to do that."

Frankie & Stankie is not a comedy in the same mode as her previous ones. It is less mannered, less gothic, and, in spite of the self-imposed constraints, reads as though it involves less artifice. The tone – of ironic and at times naïve detachment, echoing the confusions of its central character – only serves to underline the horrors of a society that sets out to rob an entire people of its dignity and power. But this is the grim background to a story that has the characteristic Trapido energy and sparkle.

During our hour-long conversation, Barbara Trapido barely paused for breath. She has the air of someone who still can't quite believe her luck in stumbling, over the kitchen table all those years ago, on a form of "obsessional playing" that gives her so much pleasure.

"There are times," she says, "when you mooch around thinking, 'I'm Mrs Nobody and everybody else has got a proper job and nicer clothes ...' and then," she adds with a twinkle, "there are other times when I think ... my job is to lie on the floor and listen to Monteverdi and wonder what madrigal it was that Jonathan was singing to Katherine. It's a job that's more like playing, and that's great."

BARBARA TRAPIDO: BIOGRAPHY

Barbara Trapido was born in South Africa in 1942, the daughter of a Dutch mathematician father and a German mother. She won the prize for the best Matric English essay in South Africa before going to read English in Durban. After graduating, she married historian Stanley Trapido and moved to London in 1963, where she taught in a primary school in Stoke Newington. After a spell in Durham, where she taught in Sunderland shipyards, they moved to Oxford, where they have lived ever since. She has written five previous novels: Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982), Noah's Ark (1984), Temples of Delight (1990), which was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, Juggling (1994) and The Travelling Hornplayer (1998), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. Frankie & Stankie (Bloomsbury) took four years to write.