Do not try this at home
Alyssa McDonald
From: The Australian
March 13, 2010
Rose Tremain, a writer of novels both stylish and popular, talks to Alyssa McDonald about the rigours of her craft 

THESE are frightening times for bookish types. Supermarkets sell so many books that they can influence what is printed, while internet vampires such as Google's vast digitisation project threaten to suck the life (or, rather, the profits) out of publishing. Even the market for celebrity biographies, which until recently seemed as though it might keep the rest of the business afloat, isn't looking quite so hot in the wake of a global recession. Publishers fret and sales dwindle.

In the midst of the panic, bestselling British novelist Rose Tremain has a suggestion: publish less.
"There really is still too much rubbish, particularly fiction," she says, her voice spiking a notch above its usual serene polish. Each week, she says, she receives an unreadable number of books from publishers hoping for endorsements. But the sheer quantity isn't the real irritant: "Very often I think to myself, this is bad. It feels to me like the first draft of something," she says wearily, over the telephone from her home in Norfolk, on England's east coast. "Where was the editor who was meant to be working on this book? Why didn't they persuade the writer to go back and do another draft, which could have made it brilliant? And I don't know ... I just don't know the answer to that, whether editors don't have the knowledge, or they don't have the time, or they think editing is too lowly a job."

For someone so measured, it's quite an outburst. But then, as Tremain puts it, she is "pretty serious" about writing. Which is one way to describe a career entering its fifth decade and that has included nominations for almost every literary prize going. Who knows, publishers may do well to listen to Tremain. Her books sell in their hundreds of thousands as well as attracting admirers such as fellow novelists Charlotte Mendelson and Ian McEwan, who calls her "a true stylist ... a writer who cares about her novels at the level of the sentence". ("Well, that's very nice to know," Tremain says, pleasantly. "I certainly am a manic rewriter, to some extent in tandem with my editor.")

Tremain displays her descriptive powers to sinister effect in her new novel, Trespass. Its setting is the Cevennes mountain range in the south of France, a stunningly beautiful but barely accessible region, which Tremain describes as "one of the last great wildernesses of Europe". Ageing siblings Aramon and Audrun Lumel have spent all of their troubled lives there. Meanwhile English Veronica and her brother Anthony, once a well-known figure on the London art scene, now a near-bankrupt irrelevance to that world, both want to retire to the region.
Searching for a house, Anthony finds Mas Lumel, where Aramon lives in angry, alcohol-sodden chaos. His only neighbour for kilometres is Audrun, disinherited from the property but living in a bungalow on its grounds, with little to distract her from memories of a childhood poisoned by sexual abuse. Anthony's attempts to buy Mas Lumel lead, almost inevitably, to violence and the lid is pulled off the book's complex moral system, in which the punishment may fit the crime, but it almost certainly won't be in the way you would expect.
Read the full story at The Australian online.