After an entertaining literary row last year, the IoS columnist uses his new novel to exact revenge on the paper's ex-deputy editor
By Katy Guest
Sunday, 21 March 2010, Independent on Sunday
Tit for tat? Sebastian Faulks (above) and fellow author and IoS writer DJ Taylor were once great friends-david sandison photo.
There is a long tradition of novelists naming characters after people they have known. Some honoured in this way are more pleased than others. A A Milne's son Christopher Robin, for instance, grew to resent his fictional counterpart in the Winnie-the-Pooh books. Ian Rankin once named a character for a fan who had paid for the opportunity in a charity auction. That fan later wrote a novel in which a character called Ian Rankin misappropriates his name. So how would one successful author appreciate his name appearing in another's novel? We may soon find out.
A new novel by D J Taylor, At the Chime of a City Clock, is published on Thursday by Constable – and already readers have spotted a familiar name. Midway through the novel, we are introduced to a seedy detective, "a spindly-looking bloke in a brown mac with a strand or two of silvery hair plastered across his head...". This minor character's name is Faulks.
Taylor's fans will not have forgotten that last summer his name was dragged into a spat about another novel: Sebastian Faulks's A Week in December featured an unpleasant book reviewer, R Tranter, whom many immediately pegged as Taylor. Both Tranter and Taylor contributed to satirical magazines, it was murmured. Both wrote under their initials. Taylor had recently written an unflattering review of Faulks's Human Traces. Not only were the authors once great friends, but they have also been colleagues on this very newspaper. So how is their relationship now?
Find out at The Independent online.
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