Inheritance Interview

Inheritance

What would you do if you suddenly inherited £17,000,000?

Andy Larkham is late. He is due at the funeral of his favourite school teacher, who once told him: 'It's hard work being anyone.' It's especially hard for Andy - stuck in a dead-end job, terminally short of cash and with a fiancée who is about to ditch him. When the funeral leads to unexpected consequences, Andy has to ask himself: how far will he go to change his life?

From early-twentieth-century Turkey to modern day London, Nicholas Shakespeare takes us on an extraordinary journey that explores the temptations of unexpected wealth, the secrets of damaged families and the price of being true to oneself. At once a love story spanning many decades and a tragedy of betrayal and missed opportunities, Inheritance is a romance for our times.

Nicholas Shakespeare was born in 1957. The son of a diplomat, much of his youth was spent in the Far East and South America. His novels have been translated into twenty languages. They include The Vision of Elena Silves, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, Snowleg and The Dancer Upstairs, which was chosen by the American Libraries Association in 1997 as the year's best novel, and in 2001 was made into a film of the same name by John Malkovich. In Tasmania won the inaugural Tasmania Book Prize in 2007.His most recent novel is Secrets of the Sea. He is married with two small boys and currently lives in Oxford

Inheritance
Random House
Author: Nicholas Shakespeare
Price: $32.95

Interview with Nicholas Shakespeare

Question: If Inheritance was made into a film, like The Dancer Upstairs, who do you envision playing Andy?

Nicholas Shakespeare: Hugh Grant. But I'd prefer someone I'd never seen before, someone fresh as Javier Bardem was.


Question: What would you do if you suddenly inherited £17,000,000?

Nicholas Shakespeare: I¹d take my wife to Venice (she's never been).
I'd update my 14 year-old Subaru.
I'd fly from London to Hobart on business class, because at my height and age it's no longer fun spending 26 hours like a splay-legged crab.
Otherwise, I've been through enough hedges not to want to shift my life radically. I suppose were I to receive an unexpected and ridiculous windfall, I'd endeavour, in the second half of my life, to dedicate some time, imagination and energy into brightening up other people's existences, even if just a little.

A cherished passage in the novel based on something that did happen to my father is when Andy observes a young man in love who is treating a girl to a dinner that plainly he cannot afford. Andy has left the restaurant by the time the waiter tells the young couple that their bill has already been paid, and gives them a handwritten message: 'Stay together.'
At the risk of sounding cheesy, I'd like to sit in a few anonymous corners and foot some strangers' bills, scribble some messages.


Question: What research went into Inheritance?

Nicholas Shakespeare: More than I wanted or expected. The central idea was gifted to me by Murray Bail. I was thrilled. Here at last was a story I could hold in my palm; further, one that I felt I could write quickly. (Some of my favourite novels were completed in a blaze Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma in 52 days, Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall in a mere few weeks and I longed, just this once, to emulate them). But it would be the work of three years for the novel to disclose the central character. My story, as inevitably it had to become, was not merely about a young man who inherits a stranger's money. It was about a young man who inherits his narrative as well: a narrative that would take him from a London crematorium on a rainy February afternoon, to the punching heat of the West Australian desert, via the disputed foothills of early twentieth-century Armenia. As well as teaching me the wisdom that there's no such thing as a free story.


Question: Can you talk about the process of creating a character like Andy Larkham?

Nicholas Shakespeare: I was lucky enough as a young man to meet Graham Greene, who told me that his favourite of his novels was The Honorary Consul, because the character of the narrator evolves. By the end of the novel he has become a different man. "That's not easy to bring off, but I think in this book I've succeeded." I never forgot this, or really understood it until I wrote Inheritance. I now can detect something of the same impulse behind my creation of Andy: a desire to push a shallowish young man into deeper, darker waters, so that he surfaces having earned the love of his benefactor's daughter. To achieve this, Andy has to discover the true story of her father, as well as confront the truth of his own father, corked away since childhood and impeding his development. In the closing pages, I hope he has become a richer, more angled person, one who is worthy of his desire.


Question: How much of your inspiration is based on real life and real people?

Nicholas Shakespeare: If you base a whole character on a real person, it tends for some reason not to work. At the same time, you never stop observing real life and real people, to strive to understand them. That's one of the job descriptions of a novelist. I'm with William Golding on this: "The greatest pleasure is not say sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity well, that's the job of the writer." At the same time, one's mission as a novelist is to see things differently. If it's the way everyone else sees them, there's no point in writing a novel.