Mick Jackson: 'Taking pity on the reader'
Having begun his career setting out to write a Booker-shortlisted novel – and succeeding – the novelist tells Richard Lea that these days he's more worried about readers than prize judges
Richard Lea , guardian.co.uk, Thursday 8 April 2010
 

 Left - 'I was literally two-thirds of the way through before I thought "this is possibly quite mainstream''' ... Mick Jackson. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

"I think this is probably my funniest book," Mick Jackson says – before backing away from "funny" and searching for a "more grown-up word" in order to avoid giving the impression that his latest novel, The Widow's Tale, is just a piece of knockabout. The finely-judged story of a woman who holes up in a cottage on the Norfolk coast after her husband's sudden death certainly includes some good jokes, but there's a lot more to it than that. Assembled from the scraps of diary the widow writes while fuelled by a steady flow of G&Ts and Sauvignon Blanc, her Tale perfectly captures the disorientation that comes with grief and brings it to life against the big skies, grainy light and salt tang of an east coast winter. Over and over, Jackson's widow confronts some awful detail of her bereavement, then veers off into rage or black comedy before arriving at another unpalatable realisation. But the comedy, or the wit, or whatever grown-up word best describes Jackson's wry humour, combines with a deft narrative acceleration to give his story the kind of straightforward appeal that literary fiction often lacks.

The Widow's Tale
by Mick Jackson
256pp, Faber and Faber, £12.99

Born in 1960 in the Lancashire mill town of Great Harwood, Jackson studied drama at Dartington College of Arts in Devon and spent the 1980s singing and writing for a succession of bands, moving from an acappella group to an indie band called the Screaming Abdabs which played Womad and Glastonbury without ever quite making the big time. Flicking through the newspaper one weekend he saw a piece about the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, and idly thought that if his band were to break up it would be interesting to study there. "Two months later we did," he says "and it took me about a week to put those two things together and decide that I might as well be skint in Norwich as anywhere else." He got in at the second time of asking, a success he now attributes to Rose Tremain, who "took pity" on him at the interview.
The full report at The Guardian online.