A life in books: Piers Paul Read
'I don't believe feminism has made women happy, and I think younger women are now seeing things differently to the Germaine Greer generation
Nicholas Wroe , The Guardian, Saturday 3 July 2010 

Piers Paul Read Photograph: Eamonn McCabe


In Julian Barnes's book meditating on death, Nothing to be Frightened Of, there is a lunch-party scene at which one of the guests, a writer identified only as P-, shocks a table of middle-aged agnostics with his concern that as a practising Catholic he was likely to be separated after death from his wife and four children, who were all unbelievers. "Yes, that was me worrying about my family going to hell," smiles Piers Paul Read, looking remarkably sanguine in the Shepherd's Bush home he shares with his wife of 43 years, Emily. "If you believe in Catholicism as I do, and a hell for unrepentant sinners, then you also have to believe that it could be your children in there. Not that it's something I have to think about every day. Catholicism is sort of regarded as 'Dad's hobby' within the family and the rest of them prefer not to talk about it too much. But even if it is more often a notional than an actual worry, it's still a nasty thought".

Read has always been an explicitly Catholic novelist and from the mid 1960s through to the mid 80s his books – repeatedly dealing with vexed moral choices, often pitting an individual against explicitly or tacitly malign social systems, often featuring generous dollops of sex – ensured he progressed smoothly from interesting new voice to respected literary figure to mainstream favourite via lavish TV adaptations of novels such as A Married Man and The Free Frenchman. And while his fiction was well reviewed and enjoyed healthy sales, his excursions into non-fiction made him both rich and internationally famous, with his account of Andes plane crash survivors resorting to cannibalism, Alive (1974), going on to become a hit movie.

But as the 1980s went on, Read seemed to become more the leading Catholic spokesman – of a very traditional type – who wrote books, rather than the leading novelist who happened to be Catholic. His social and religious conservatism fuelled "why-oh-why" columns in the Daily Mail denouncing homosexuality and feminism. He still had literary supporters, with DJ Taylor, Rachel Cusk and Anne Tyler all writing admiringly of his novels, but Read had become a more marginal artistic figure, and two years ago, after completing a new novel, the thrillerish The Death of a Pope, both his publisher and agent were concerned it was too Catholic and would not appeal to a wider readership. It was eventually published in America by the specialist Ignatius Press.


However, Read's 16th and latest novel, The Misogynist, is published this month by the mainstream house Bloomsbury. He says the leading character, Jomier, is based "a bit on myself and a bit on some people I know. We both live the wrong side of Shepherd's Bush, but the drains don't back up in my house. He's a divorced atheist and I'm a married Catholic. But we do share some views on modern life."


Read the full review/interview at The Guardian.