10:42am Monday 8th March 2010
Bestselling writer Joanna Trollope walked the streets of the North-East researching her latest novel. She tells Steve Pratt why she came North and why she finds the term Aga saga patronising.
"YOU know, I was just about to give you a gold star for not mentioning it,” novelist Joanna Trollope tells me. I should have known better than to let the phrase “Aga saga” pass my lips.
These are two little words she doesn’t want to hear. It’s not a label she cares to have attached to her work, perhaps because Agas are the sort of stoves most people associate with posh Southerners.
“I don’t know we need a tag,” says Trollope firmly. “It keeps the tabloids happy, possibly. I just feel it is so patronising to the readers somehow – and inaccurate. I have fantastic readers, none better.”
I make fresh efforts to regain that gold star by talking about the setting for her latest novel, The Other Family, – the North-East.
We’re sitting in Newcastle’s new central library, scene for the first of two Meet the Author gigs in the city. Later, she’ll cross the Tyne for the second at the Sage. Clearly believing that attack is the strongest form of defence, she opens by correcting something in the book that has the potential to displease locals.
“Before we go anywhere, I just have to say for all those who know Newcastle so much better than me, that I do actually know the Tyne bridge is a road bridge and not a rail bridge. I’m very sorry,” she says.
She means it, having grown fond of the North-East researching the book. So much so, that returning, she found it “unbelievably exciting crossing the river today on the train – it was really wonderful to be back here”.
While the neo-classical city centre earns her approval as “absolutely fantastic”, she rates the most exciting thing as taking the Metro out to Tynemouth.
“Going through Byker and Walker and all those places I’d known about and were suddently there. You go from Earl Grey, this end of the Metro line, to Admiral Collingwood, on his column, at the far end. There’s something about all these layers and types of history here that are very moving.”
The story of her latest novel is about inheritance, meaning she has to kill somebody off at the beginning, she says. The dead man is Richie Rossiter, a musical legend from the North-East who leaves a family in London and another back up North.
“I chose a musician because I wanted his legacy to be all the practical stuff you might leave behind after a death, but also an emotional legacy. The man in question has two families and music seemed to me to be a wonderfully emotional legacy to leave, as well as a house and car and all the dull stuff.
“I was looking in my mind around the UK for a city that embodied a very strong local identity and also music – and, of course, Newcastle fits the bill with bells on.”
She didn’t really consider any other city because she wanted to feature folk music and Northumbria is the only UK university offering a folk music degree.
The novel’s theme led to her composing the lyrics for a song, Chase The Dream, and recording it with musician Jason Kouchak.
She admits to knowing little of Newcastle before researching The Other Family. “I came up here for a week and walked all the streets to find real places,” she says.
“I actually went into an estate agent to pretend to be a buyer to see around a flat in a warehouse.
I went out to Tynemouth to find Margaret’s house in the book, and had a cup of coffee at the Grand Hotel, was on the Metro a lot and walked all the streets in South Shields that I send Amy down.”
She’s very much aware it’s an outsider’s Newcastle, but hopes it comes across as very affectionate.
“Coming up here, sounding as I do, I thought every time I opened my mouth people would fall about laughing. Yet everyone was so welcoming, warm and enthusiastic. They were absolutely lovely. I was handed from person to person all round the city centre.”
She announced herself on a fact-finding trip for a novel. “If you say you are a writer, people often assume you’re a journalist and that makes them a bit nervous. But if you’re just an innocent novelist, they feel more confiding.”
In some ways, she’s following in the footsteps of the North-East’s best-known author, Catherine Cookson. They shared a publisher for a long time. “We all read Catherine Cookson madly,” she says. “In her last years, she was writing them in bed because she was so sick.
But she went on writing.”
Trollope doesn’t write in bed. Now, she has a desk in a study although most of her novels were written on her kitchen table. “When I was living in the country it was the warmest place as well,” she says – a remark that led me to that unfortunate “Aga saga” moment.
She hopes The Other Family will draw attention to the thorny problem of inheritance, admitting that a will is wonderful device for a novel.
“The business of inheritance obsesses every generation because of our propensity to measure how much the dead person loved us by how much they’ve left us. Families who’ve behaved absolutely beautifully for generations behave badly over inheritance,” she says.
‘OF course, unfortunately for life, but wonderfully for novels, difficult human situations make the most page-turning fiction.”
The inequality of the inheritance laws are of particular interest to her. “I’ve been very conscious about how much there has been in the press about inheritance and wills, and the really distressing anomalies depending whether you marry or cohabit,” she says.
“Even co-habitees with decades’ worth of fidelity and good behaviour and citizenship are treated as if they were morally beyond the pale.
It’s really wrong. I rather hope this novel will act to ginger the law up.”
A three-date tour takes her to Harrogate Theatre in June, to talk about 30 years of writing.
For the moment, our talk is over and she has the Sage appearance before her.
“Last week, I sat next to John Eliot Gardiner, the conductor, at lunch and he said, ‘are you going to the Sage?’ and I said, ‘indeed I am’. He said – and this is a world-class conductor – ‘that is the best concert hall in Europe’.
“And I’m appearing there. It’s a great honour.”
■ The Other Family (Doubleday £18.99).
■ Tickets for Joanna Trollope at Harrogate Theatre, on June 7, are available from 01423- 502116 or online at harrogatetheatre.co.uk
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