R.J. PRICE
About Richard Price
Richard Price was born in 1966 and grew up in Renfrewshire, southwest of Glasgow. He was educated at Napier College, Edinburgh, where he studied journalism, and at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, where he studied English and Librarianship. He has a PhD on the works of twentieth-century novelist Neil M. Gunn. An acclaimed poet, his poetry collections include Lucky Day, shortlisted for the Whitbread poetry prize, and Rays, a collection of love poems. His linked short stories, A Boy in Summer, revisit the half-rural half-urban communities of his childhood. He is Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library, London.
Richard's website is at www.hydrohotel.net.
Praise for R.J. Price
‘Understated yet devastating, controlled yet unpredictable – The Island is a story of rare qualities that many writers aim for and few achieve. Read it – it’ll be one of the most beautiful nightmares you’ll ever have.’ Toby Litt
'Richard Price explores the intersecting worlds of children and adults with a wild joy and sadness reminiscent of Salinger. Here Price’s lyric gifts are refined further towards the quintessence. A well-nigh perfect short novel.'
Bill Broady, author of Swimmer and Eternity is Temporary.
An interview with R.J. Price
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I first began writing stories when I was eight or nine, as part of school and as something to do in the rainy days of summer. Some of my first tales were written in an exercise book my mother must have bought at the Post Office in Laide, up in Wester Ross. We used to spend a week or two up in that part of the world every year.
I was a precocious reader. I was fascinated by different kinds of story and my own stumbling writing, whose models must have been obvious, had quite a bit of variety – a Tolkienesque one this week, a time-traveller yarn the next (in the manner of Mark Twain’s Yankee at the Court of King Arthur). Later, in my teens, I became more interested as a writer in poetry and in the song lyric but I have always been fascinated as a reader by fiction. I think a great narrative song-writer like Bob Dylan has also affected my prose – he is able to imply sweeps of time and physical distance with great economy and that kind of light-touch emotional density is something I’m trying to achieve in my fiction.
I try these days to read many different kinds of novel – a throwback I guess to my original immersion across the genres -- but in my twenties Dickens, and classic Scottish and American fiction were the most important to me. Neil Gunn’s novels – Morning Tide, Highland River, Bloodhunt – and the Lewis Grassic Gibbon of Sunset Song are particular favourites, Dickens’s Great Expectations, Malamud’s A New Life, the loquacious Saul Bellow, Melville of course. About fifteen years ago, as I entered my thirties, I began to write short stories and I very much had Chekhov in mind: concision and a kind of breathtaking humanity in speech; implicit analysis, keeping nuance in play – I was aiming for those. ‘Implicity’, if that’s a word, is particularly important to me – as a reader I love Proust’s rich digressions, his complicated meditations – but as a writer that is exactly the wrong direction for me. Henry Green is more like it. The other person I think about in terms of innovative fiction is Muriel Spark – I like, particularly, The Girls of Slender Means, and it seems to me that her self-image as a poet, which she applied to herself as a writer of novels, is bound up in the rhythm and refrains of so many of her novels. To layer and to set a low-frequency pulse of image and phrase across the novel as your plot propels it – those are elements of the best fiction and I especially aspire to do that across my short stories and in my longer fiction.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind The Island in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?
The new novel The Island starts from three places. Since a child I’ve been fascinated by the island of Gruinard in Wester Ross, where Churchill’s men experimented with biological warfare in the form of anthrax. Luckily for humans, but not for the poor animals, it was sheep that were killed and not people. Something persuaded the Prime Minister that this gruesome, cruel experiment could not be scaled up for an offensive on Germany. All the same – without giving too much away – that experiment still fascinates me and the book reflects that interest. Secondly, the two brothers in my short story “After a Wedding” in the Boy in Summer collection were characters I felt still had lives to live and I wanted to create those lives in a longer piece of fiction. If “After a Wedding” was about Andrew on one of the most important days of his life then the hero, or anti-hero, in The Island, would be the other brother, Graham, on one of the most important days of his. Thirdly and finally and most importantly, there is Graham’s relationship in The Island with his young daughter Jas. I wanted to take Graham and Jas on a trip through the horror of commercialised childhood, the insidious disgrace of it, but I wanted to also show how there is anarchy and endurance in the relationship between fathers and daughters, an affection that might just contain within it a kind of defiance.
How do you go about creating your voice on the page?
I wish I could say. I am as much in thrall to the mystery of writing as anyone: I am not always sure that I have written what I have written but a cctv camera would prove that no-one else entered or left the room. All I can say is that I ‘become’ my characters, all of them (even the ones I don’t like). The overall directing is down to slow incremental building and a ‘post-production’ self-editing that brings, I hope, better balance, pace, and flow.
How and when do you write?
For fiction I need to take days and days off if I want to write anything substantial because the weekends and evenings are too active with commitments. I waste most of the first morning on anything but writing. “Tidying” suddenly becomes interesting: it is at these times where I begin to lose books, notes and household objects previously placed in precise, placebo-sacred positions around my room. For fiction I write scraps of ideas in notebooks sometimes but most of the time it’s direct to the computer. Poetry is very different – it’s a handwritten task, obsessional, and written any time of the day (or night).
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
I like love stories: Hardy, Zola’s The Ladies Paradise, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. Books I’ve read more recently: Coetzee’s austerity fascinates: Disgrace. Alan Warner’s Morven Caller; pretty much anything by William Boyd; Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief is a brilliant fusion of traditional and modern storytelling, it’s such a powerful story of family under the slow-release pressure of a childhood catastrophe.
