Daniel Clay Goes To See Sadie Jones, Author of The Outcast and Small Wars, Talk in Southampton

Hello HedgeEnders.  I went along to see Sadie Jones, author of The Outcast and Small Wars, at Southampton Guild Hall last Thursday, and thought I’d share the evening with you. 

    The Outcast, Sadie’s debut novel, is set in an English commuter-belt village in the forties and fifties.  It primarily tells the story of Lewis, a young man just returning home from a spell in jail when we first meet him, and it’s immediately clear his relationship with his emotionally stunted father and over-eager stepmother is damaged, possibly beyond repair.   The novel then jumps back to Lewis’s childhood and what unfolds explains how Lewis came to end up in jail, followed by a further instalment of what happens to him after he’s released:  In many ways the novel is a study of how people back then failed to talk or cope with grief, with a strong love story mixed in as well.     

    I read it within a few weeks of its initial release as I’d heard a lot of good things about it: there was a general buzz it was a stand-out debut.  Although I had mixed feelings and it wasn’t my sort of novel, I thought the writing was superb and some of the imagery was brilliant.  My main problem was with its portrayal of fifties’ England, very strait-laced and with everyone knowing their place – I know we’re told it was like that, but was it, was it really? – and a scene that takes place towards the end between Lewis and his step-mother that I simply didn’t believe was feasible given the way the two characters had been portrayed up till then. 

Even with these reservations, though, I wasn’t surprised when it went on to win the Costa First Novel Award that year, be picked as a Richard & Judy Summer Read, and also get shortlisted for The Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction (among a clutch of other nominations for further awards).  It was also, more recently, voted one of the top fifty novels of the noughties. 

    London-born Sadie came from a creative family – her father’s a poet and screenwriter and her mother’s an actress. Her sister’s a writer as well.  Sadie’s own background, before she turned her hand to novel-writing, was as a screenwriter.  The image, and the promotional photos of her, seem to reek of easy success, but she freely admitted she often had to take on waitressing work between screenwriting commissions and it’s often the case, when you hear successful people talk, that there’s a period of struggle and doubt tucked away in their pasts:  The Outcast actually started life as a screenplay and was roundly rejected by all who saw it.  Sadie, though, felt there was something in the story she wasn’t prepared to give up on, and did the slightly unconventional thing of turning her screenplay into a novel, rather than approaching things the other way around.     

Now promoting her second novel, Small Wars, Sadie opened the evening by reading the opening pages, then chatted about her life and writing with Richard Ashman, the manager at Southampton’s Central Library. I’ve seen Richard interview three writers now – Sadie, Mags McKean and RJ Ellory (who wrote A Quiet Belief In Angels) – and really enjoyed each one.  He’s very good at letting his subjects talk and also has the happy knack of choosing questions that seem to naturally follow on from where the writer last stopped speaking, which makes for a really natural sounding conversation.   

    This one was no exception, with Sadie freely admitting her early writing life was far from a stunning success.  Although her first attempt at a screenplay won her representation from an influential agent the production company ditched her several years later.  Plenty of rejections and disappointments followed, and, in many ways, the fact she was writing at such a prominent level – with all the pressure and scrutiny that brings – meant she found it hard to develop and find her own voice.     

Although we never found out exactly what scripts she worked on there was one exchange – when Richard asked what it was like taking criticism from her editor – when Sadie said something like, “Nerve wracking, but better that than taking it from some minor script-editor at the BBC,” with all the weariness of someone who’s had to take their fair share of knocks in the past.  

She also mentioned an occasion when she was chatting with the much published Faye Weldon at a literary festival recently and felt, compared to everything Weldon had achieved, as if she’d wasted half her life doing nothing (she’s forty-two now):  “That was your apprenticeship,” Weldon told her when Sadie voiced these concerns.   “I served mine in advertising, you served yours in screenwriting.”  (Weldon wrote advertising jingles, including the famous seventies’ slogan, “Go to work on an egg.”).  

The conversation moved on, still primarily concerned with Sadie’s motivation for writing The Outcast and how she reacted to getting picked for Richard & Judy (the equivalent of winning the literary lottery), when her publicist, obviously getting a bit twitchy about the fact Small Wars was hardly being mentioned, pretended to be an everyday member of the audience and stuck her hand up.  “Sadie, can you tell us about what motivated you to write Small Wars and set it in Cyprus?  I’d really like to know about that.” 

So, you see, even in sleepy literary circles, we’re being subjected to spin as much as anyone else.    

I’ve not read Small Wars and haven’t been tempted to buy it following a quick scan of its first ten or so pages, but I might think again after hearing Sadie talk about it.  Again set in the fifties it deals with one of the many ‘end of Empire’ skirmishes Britain was involved in but are now mainly forgotten about.  The main character, Hal, an army officer, is joined by his wife and young children at his post in Cyprus and the novel studies the effect Hal’s sense of duty has on his relationship with his family.  Sadie said, when researching, she was shocked by the parallels between these wars and the ones against terrorism we’re involved in today, and this was echoed by members of the audience who’d read the novel – judging from the way they talked, they’d definitely enjoyed it as much as The Outcast.

The conversation moved on to what Sadie’s up to now.  She’s working on her third novel but didn’t really give much away.  She’s also working on the screenplay of The Outcast.  In one of those funny twists of fate you couldn’t make up, one of the directors who’d turned it down first time around approached her after reading it in novel form and asked her to work on it with him.

    And, to counter my earlier criticism of The Outcast painting a slightly clichéd picture of life in fifties’ Britain, a woman in the audience who’d lived through the period herself congratulated Sadie on the way she’d portrayed it “perfectly, just right.”

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If anyone would like to go on the mailing list for any future literary events organised in and around Southampton by the staff at Southampton library, please drop Allison Kirby (allison.kirby@southampton.gov.uk) an e-mail and she’ll be happy to add your name.  Talks by best-selling writers such as Sadie Jones often cost as little as £5 and, in some cases, are free to attend.