Matthew Kneale: 'Writing novels is just like cooking'

Biography

Matthew Kneale was born in 1960, to Nigel Kneale, the Manx screenwriter responsible for the Quatermass series, and Judith Kerr, the author of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and The Tiger Who Came For Tea. He studied Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford, then taught English in Japan, where he started writing. He joined his father in winning the Somerset Maugham Award with his first novel, Whore Banquets, in 1987. Other books include Sweet Thames, winner of the 1992 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, English Passengers, which won the 2000 Whitbread Prize and was shortlisted for that year's Booker Prize and the collection Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance. When We Were Romans is published by Picador. He lives with his family in Rome.

When we meet in a quiet corner of the Hay Festival green room, Matthew Kneale is having a tough day. He has flown over from his new home in Rome, having just signed the first mortgage of his life. The airline has lost his luggage. He has been grilled onstage for an hour by Dr Raj Persaud and a hundred-strong audience of hard-to-please literati. One of them, who admits not having read his latest book, When We Were Romans, has crossly accused it of failing to address the political failures of the mental health system.

It is an accusation that could be levelled at many books (London Fields, Bridget Jones's Diary, War and Peace...), to be fair, and Kneale explains that it isn't really what the novel is about. But he also insists magnanimously that it is a valid point. When We Were Romans is a quirky road-trip novel, narrated by a young boy who can't work out why his mum is behaving increasingly weirdly, and Kneale cares deeply that her creepy descent into some unnamed madness should be real. He cares so much, in fact, that he sent the manuscript to Dr Persaud, a consultant psychiatrist at the Bethlem and Maudsley hospital, for his comments.

It seems a bold move, to turn over bales of artistic endeavour to an expert who may not care a jot for narrative structure. But Kneale says he does the same with many of his books. "I sent English Passengers to one person who was an expert in sailing and another who was an expert in Tasmania," he says. "In Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance there was a story set in the West Bank and another in Colombia. I sent those off to people I found on the internet who had written articles." Doesn't he worry that academics might not get the point of his fiction? "If you get comments saying, 'Well actually I don't think it's right, it doesn't make sense', then the novel you end up with will be richer," he shrugs. " Because the truth is richer, isn't it?"

Matthew Kneale is a novelist for whom doing things properly is obviously important. It took him seven years to write English Passengers, an epic, polyphonic tale of smuggling, colonialism and religious fervour that eventually won him the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 2000. Its narrative is shared between more than 20, wholly convincing voices: the irascible Manx ship's captain, Illiam Quillian Kewley; the dippy Reverend Geoffrey Wilson; the half-caste Tasmanian Aborigine Peevay; various secretaries, governors and wives of the prisons and colonies of Van Diemen's Land...

"You won't believe it but I was always trying to keep English Passengers as simple as possible - to have less rather than more characters," he laughs. "I only added a new one when something happened that couldn't be done by the characters who were already there. I was always trying to have the right angle on each event - usually the wrong angle, if you see what I mean. So sometimes the characters I had lined up were too right, and I had to bring in somebody who would misinterpret it or think something else. "

After English Passengers, the Booker shortlisting and the Whitbread win, which came just in time to save the young Kneale family from financial ruin, there followed a frustrating period of being "badly stuck". He spent some time in the beautiful Santa Maddelena writers' retreat near Florence, wrestling fruitlessly with a dystopian novel that he soon rejected. "It was probably the wrong time to be in a writers' retreat," he says, sadly. Then he published Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance, a multinational collection of short stories about arms dealers, Ethiopian mothers, Chinese wives and Middle England.

"After the short stories I decided to be proactive and just read as much as I could: science and geology, the Vietnam war and the IRA..." he says. "If I never found anything that remotely suggested something to write about, it didn't really matter because I would be wiser rather just annoyed about not having got anywhere." That's how he ended up stumbling across Persaud's From the Edge of the Couch: a series of " very writerly" psychiatric case studies that inspired When We Were Romans. Its hero, nine-year-old Lawrence, is another of fine example of Kneale's talent for ventriloquism.

Like his contemporary, David Mitchell, Kneale speaks several languages and spent some time teaching English in Japan, and I wonder whether this total immersion in other languages and cultures fosters a certain kind of far-ranging, multivocal writing. "I'm sure learning languages does nothing but good for a writer," he agrees. He modestly admits that he can "sort of get by in Spanish, Italian, French and German. I did try and learn a couple of others but I think I've forgotten all those. I learnt a bit of Japanese and Romanian... I'm trying to speak more Italian. It's a curious experience because in Italian you're basically hearing the Latin segment of English, which has a particular quality which is usually rather grand and intellectual. Whereas when you hear it in Roman Italian it's absolutely basic and rude. It gives you a curious feeling about your own language."

It is impossible, too, not to ask about his upbringing. His father, who died last year, was the screenwriter Nigel Kneale, the man responsible for scaring a generation of children with the invaders-from-Mars series The Quatermass Experiment and its successors. His mother is the children's writer Judith Kerr, author of loveable and moving titles such as The Tiger Who Came to Tea, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and the Mog the cat books.

So, I deduce brilliantly, one parent wrote humorous stories in the voices of friendly tigers and serious little kids; the other "was very good on structure. He was obsessed, very rigorous: things had to make sense. He would attack films or TV that he thought was failing to get everything right. The key thing is, does it still make sense if you know the ending, and you go over the whole plot backwards, like a detective story? Anything well-structured should make sense."

I begin to understand where the man who wrote English Passengers came from. He smiles, and offers another explanation. "I love cooking, and writing is like that. You think, 'Ah, I'll put a bit of that in, now that's right'. You have a feeling that somehow it will make a good meal."

Kneale says that writing comes easier now than in those difficult, " stuck" months after English Passengers. "Touch wood," he adds, touching it, "or the mortgage payments will be gone and I'll be in deep trouble." But, after talking too much about that aborted, dystopian novel, he is too superstitious to mention what he is working on now.

He will reveal that he is writing more and more about Rome - a city where he taught English for a year as an impoverished student and vowed to return if he could ever find a career that would allow it. "My thing is history, and Rome is a fascinating, extraordinary place," he says, boyishly excited. "I can't think of another large city on earth where so much has happened, and you can still actually go into the buildings where those people were." He sounds just like Lawrence, the gobsmacked boy narrator of When We Were Romans. In fact, he claims that all the voices in his novels are really his.

I wouldn't be surprised to find Kneale tackling more controversial topics in future books. He had complained to Persaud of "lazy thinking - people not trying to understand each other's cultures", and he says now that fiction has a responsibility to help people understand their enemies. " Yeah, it's important to write characters [like the suicide bomber and the arms dealer in Small Crimes...]," he nods. "And anyway, it's the most interesting thing about fiction."

In English Passengers, the author's views on English colonialism and the invaders' enforced "civilisation" of native people seem quite clear. So what does he think about British foreign policy, 21st century-style? "I think you can't invade democracy into people, it doesn't work," he says plainly. "When you get a foreign army turning up in your country, you don't know who they are, you don't speak their language, you are going to think the worst. And that is not the way to introduce a complex system of government to people. It's a shame. Like in English Passengers I was trying to introduce the idea that nothing was done on the British side from evil or conspiracy; it was the world going to hell through well-intentioned people making a bad mistake."

So is Kneale's secretive next novel going to satisfy the controversialists at Hay who want to see him tackling modern political failures? Not necessarily - but it's bound to be worth the wait.