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| Interview with Kate Atkinson by Melanie Ashby You come to the Caledonian Hotel and you can order tea or coffee. If you have coffee, it’s accidentally poisoned with pesticides. If you choose tea you fall in love with someone at the next table – and in that story your lover dies of cancer. In the other story you’re in hospital for a long time and you meet a beautiful person. Then that story divides… ‘If you think about it you start getting a little tense, don’t you?’ says Kate Atkinson with high-pitched emphasis, sounding a little like ‘Queenie’ from Blackadder. She is giving an example of an endlessly bifurcating novel – the sort of book the principal character of her novel-after-next is writing, albeit cackhandedly. Panning away from the fictional scenario, we’re in a corner of the Caledonian, and have both ordered tea that comes, predictably, with shortbread for the Sassenachs at the Edinburgh Festival. I pour for both of us, because it’s an overly grand teapot and Atkinson suffers from Repetitive Strain Injury – from lots of typing. She is having a month’s grace from writing, between end of completed manuscript and re-write. It’s the middle of what her eldest daughter calls The Sorting, in which ‘all that domestic ordering underpinning life’ that stopped for the novel is resumed, and Atkinson becomes a concerted hausfrau for a brief interval before the manuscript returns. This is why it’s tea in a hotel, while the builders and decorators move in at home to complete overdue jobs. But this return to order is only an interlude. The novel recently sent to her editor – Jolly Murder Mystery, in which she reprises the detective protagonist of Case Histories – has been a slog. ‘I’ve been writing it for too long. But the next is very short, to make up for it,’ she chuckles. The aim is to write that one in a six-month sprint… For the whole interview, read Issue 27 » Subscribe! Go to » Kate Atkinson's Method |
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For more on KATE ATKINSON, go to www.contemporarywriters.com
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