I picked up Eleanor Catton’s latest novel, Birnam Wood, the other week, excited that a Booker prizewinner had found a plot so close to home. The Birnam Wood in question is not, however, about the village next to Dunkeld but an elaborate mystery that unravels in the patchwork fields of 19th-century New Zealand. Catton, as you’ll remember, scooped the Booker for her previous offering, The Luminaries, a big old stormer of a historical novel. She was 22 when her first book, The Rehearsal, came out, was 28 when she won the Booker and is 38 now.
I didn’t enjoy Birnam Wood as much, and it doesn’t have anything to do with it not being set in Perthshire. The writing doesn’t dazzle me. It doesn’t keep me up until 2am reading under the glare of my iPhone, while my partner grumbles at me in his sleep. Birnam Wood also goes against my personal belief about writing, which is that you get better at it the older you get. Like The Luminaries it hangs together beautifully, but it’s missing some magic which I can’t name.
This theory of mine extends to music, art and film: that experience directly correlates with improvement. It sounds logical, and it applies to my own life (although admittedly more for DIY than for Booker prizes), so why wouldn’t it make sense for the stars? I used to keep a clutch of names in my metaphorical back-pocket ready to brandish whenever anyone disagreed with my theory — the film-maker Derek Jarman and singer Scott Walker among those I use to support it. After Birnam Wood I am not sure what to think any more. Do artistic wunderkinds generally peak early, or do your creative faculties sharpen with age?
Possibly it is less binary than that. With books it is, at least, a little bit about the idea. Many novelists admit to only ever having one great one. Then they’re stuck in a two, three, even five-book publishing contract, trying desperately to reach the heights of a previous sparkling work.
This bears out in real life. I once interviewed a non-fiction writer whose first book, a memoir, had sold 150,000 copies in various languages. It had taken a long time to come up with an outline for a second book and they were worried it wasn’t as good. “I’m scared that I had one brilliant idea and I’ll never do anything like it again,” they told me off the record. “I think this one might be a bit shit.” It wasn’t, but the sales figures backed up their fear. Book two didn’t shift nearly as many copies.
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Closer inspection of other authors suggests that it is possible to run out of good ideas. Or suffer from rehashing old ones. Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and The Driver’s Seat (1970) represent the writer at her most nimble. Towards the end of her oeuvre, Aiding and Abetting (2000) is laboured. Did the earlier titles pour out of her, like good writing should? It’s likely. Sally Rooney has spoken about how questions that arose in the writing of her first two novels answered themselves, so natural did the process feel. No mention of her third bestseller, still a blinder but whose construction shows itself more visibly than the others, and which feels somehow rehearsed in an unwelcome way.
When done right, that sense of rehearsal ends up as a literary hallmark, a stamp of quality by which you come to know your writer. The same goes for bands: a jazzy flute here, or a mournful string arrangement there becomes a secret language that only fans know.
Before Christmas I went to the Barrowlands to see PJ Harvey, who I have loved since teenagehood. Her final song, White Chalk, came from album seven of ten. It could have been a liminal no-man’s land of an encore, written neither at the inception nor supernova of a career but somewhere in the fudgy middle. Actually it was the best four minutes of my life, mostly because it is a perfect song. That is the thing about perfection. The conditions don’t matter. A perfect debut weighs the same as a perfect release two decades later.
Of course, perfection is subjective. Here I think about Alison Watt, my favourite artist, whose Self-Portrait (1986-87) painted as a 21-year-old got me through the worst of high school. I used to study it forensically in art class, trying to reach out and grasp the softness missing from my own life. No one could understand why I was so obsessed with this painting, least of all me. But this is the thing: I feel the same about Watt’s most recent work, a delicate lace collar that sprung embarrassing tears when I went to see it at the National Galleries of Scotland. The magic comes from its own light source, I realise now, far removed from an artist’s DOB. In the end it is not a question of age but what leaves us feeling changed.
@palebackwriter
That first great idea
Extra reading this week comes in the form of Eleanor Catton’s debut, The Rehearsal (£9.99 Granta Books), a murky tale of morality between a teacher and his pupils. Buy from timesbookshop.co.uk. Discount available for Times+ members.
