Award-winning fiction novelist and former editor Clare Chambers talks to us about her latest novel 'Shy Creatures' and what it was like working alongside Diana Athill at the publisher André Deutsch.
Clare Chambers was born in south east London in 1966. She studied English at Oxford and spent the year after graduating in New Zealand, where she wrote her first novel, Uncertain Terms, published when she was 25. Learning to Swim won the Romantic Novelists' Association best novel award and was adapted as a Radio 4 play, and In a Good Light was longlisted for the Whitbread best novel prize.
Clare began her career as a secretary at the publisher André Deutsch. Some of the experiences of working for an eccentric, independent publisher in the pre-digital era found their way into her novel The Editor's Wife. When her three children were teenagers, inspired by their reading habits, she produced two YA novels, Bright Girls and Burning Secrets.
Small Pleasures was the winner of the British Book Awards 2022 Pageturner Book of the Year and was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021. Clare's latest novel Shy Creatures is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson on 29 August. You can find Shy Creatures and Clare's other books on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
My Dad was an English teacher and I grew up in a house full of books. He used to read to me and my siblings from the Arabian Nights and the fruitier bits of Chaucer, and then my older sister took over and read me all the things she had enjoyed – Winnie the Pooh, Jennings and eventually Jane Austen. I’ve never grown out of a love of being read to and am now an avid consumer of audiobooks.
When I started work as a secretary at Andre Deutsch in 1990, recently graduated from university and knowing practically nothing, I wasn’t aware of her reputation. I just noticed this (to my youthful eyes) ‘elderly’ woman (then in her early seventies) in the untidy office behind the little landing at the top of the stairs where I had my desk, and thought, ‘That poor old lady. Why is she still having to work at her age?’ I later realised that she had another twenty years of productive literary work and indeed fame ahead of her. It was only when I read her memoirs, Instead of a Letter, Make Believe, and After a Funeral, that I realised what incredible experiences lay behind her deceptively sweet and harmless appearance.
I don’t really have a typical day, because my books have been written in different circumstances. During the writing of Small Pleasures I worked in a school exams office in the mornings, and wrote at home in the afternoons, when I am not at my brightest. During the writing of Shy Creatures I was working as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Kent University two days a week and used to write on the other three days – I start at about 9 in the morning and write until I’ve done about 600 words and then stop. Unfortunately, this rather unambitious target still takes me all day.
I didn’t have high expectations for Small Pleasures – my goal was only to be published again, something which, after ten years out of the industry and with a poor sales record, seemed unlikely enough. It didn’t earn a huge advance and the associated fanfares; instead, success came gradually, helped I’m sure by the eye-catching jacket and the contagious nature of online enthusiasm.
Shy Creatures is set in a large progressive 1960s psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of London and it concerns the relationship between an art therapist called Helen and a silent patient called William who was discovered living as a recluse or a prisoner with his elderly aunt, unknown to the outside world for over twenty years. When it emerges that he is a gifted artist, Helen comes to see his salvation as something of a personal project. In the process her own private and professional life become somewhat compromised with nearly disastrous consequences. We are in the year 1964 – an interesting time for psychiatry and society. Change is all around – the old pieties are being swept away by youth culture, pop music, the pill. Times are a-changing, but for my characters, looking on at this brave new world with some alarm, the sixties are definitely not swinging.
William’s story was suggested to me by a report that I came across in a newspaper archive while I was researching Small Pleasures. In the factual version, the man was removed to a psychiatric hospital and seemed to be making good progress, though his history was unexplained. I couldn’t find any more information about his progress until a newspaper report a year later recorded his death by drowning in a nearby river. I became preoccupied by his sad fate and decided to write him a past and a more hopeful future.
This is an interesting question and one I haven’t considered before. I don’t think of myself as being a particularly ‘kind’ writer; I just try to be an honest one. But when you write as slowly as I do, and therefore get to spend a few years in the company of your characters, you need to empathise with even the less admirable ones.
There always seems to be an indecent gap between finishing one book and starting another. I am still at the day-dreaming stage, and who knows how long that may last?
The novels that I have most enjoyed this year are The New Life by Tom Crewe, set around the time of the Oscar Wilde scandal and in non-fiction This House of Grief by Helen Garner, about a man in Australia accused of killing his children. Both concern infamous trials and both are absolutely gripping and brilliantly written.
There is almost nothing to know about me – I lead a very quiet life of suburban gentility and curtain-twitching, enlivened by the occasional pub quiz.
