Paul Willetts: I must admit that I’m not one of those people who’s obsessed by 1960s music, yet I was immediately captivated by The Pieces, which portrays the brief career and mysterious life of a fictional late 1960s British folk singer. I loved the way that it isn’t told from the protagonist’s point of view and is, instead, told by lots of people who knew him. Quite a few literary precedents for that approach spring to mind, three obvious ones being William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Martin Amis’s Success, and Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over, all of which provide distinctive voices for each narrator. Were you inspired by books such as these, or did your structural inspiration come from the resurgent oral biography genre? I’m also curious to know whether you considered telling your story from the perspective of your fictional folk singer, Adam Earnshaw.

James Wilson: That’s a good question, and – as often happens with good questions, because they take you straight to the heart of something quite complex – it’s hard to give a snappy answer. But – to be as brief as I can – no, I wasn’t directly influenced by the writers you mention, or by the recent interest in oral biography, nor did I ever consider telling the story from Adam’s point of view. To begin with, I was trying to scratch an itch that afflicts me every time I embark on a novel: Who is telling this story, and why?

That issue is, of course, an after-echo of the demise of the great nineteenth century fictional tradition – personified by Tolstoy, George Eliot, etc. – in which the Olympian narrator confidently (and brilliantly) migrates from one character’s head to another, while occasionally adding his or her own observations on what’s going on. Several writers – most notably Modernists like Faulkner and Woolf – tried to fill the resulting void by developing new techniques; but – at least in Britain – the literary mainstream simply left that question unanswered. It was as if Jane Austen had settled the point once and for all, and it was enough simply to follow in her footsteps. We’re in a fictional world that operates exactly like our world, and that’s that.

This approach has never satisfied me, and the polyphonic structure of The Pieces was a deliberate attempt to find a more satisfying and exhilarating way to write about the sixties. There are lots of books about the period, but – whether fiction, memoir or cultural history – they mostly tend to have a fairly narrow focus. (I talk about an exception in my next answer!)  I wanted, instead, to give a kaleidoscopic view of those crucial few years, illuminating their odd, cross-grained reality through a whole range of different perspectives, in a way that – as far as I know – has never been done before. And, in doing so, I was very conscious of trying to reclaim the nineteenth century novel’s ability to offer multiple perspectives, but in a form appropriate to the present.

James Wilson

PW: Several friends of mine who are interested in 1960s Britain as well as its music scene have spoken enthusiastically about Electric Eden, Rob Young’s nonfiction book about that world. I notice that it’s cited in your novel’s acknowledgements. As a nonfiction writer who produces books that often have a novelistic surface, I’m curious about the creative processes of novelists like you who sculpt fiction out of nonfiction ingredients. Did reading Electric Eden nudge you in the direction of writing The Pieces, or was it something that you read as part of a self-conscious research process?

JW: For those unfamiliar with it, Electric Eden charts the complex of different social, cultural and musical currents that contributed to the evolution of folk music in 60s Britain, and the way it morphed and bled into psychedelia and rock music. I hadn’t come upon it before, and was already starting the research process when our son Tom – a brilliant musician himself – gave me copy as a birthday present. I was immediately struck by the quality of the writing, the sympathy and insight the author brought to bear on his disparate cast of characters, and his sensitivity to the atmosphere of the time. His book is, quite simply, one of the best pieces of cultural history I have ever read.

It’s an oddity of writing fiction – one that other novelists I know have remarked on, and that I’ve been aware of when working on all my books – that, as you start to quarry the real world, in search of material to substantiate your invented one, you come upon all kinds of obscure facts and coincidences that confirm your intuitions about the time and the place in which your story is set. For me, these serendipitous collisions and mirror-images have become a kind of sine qua non: only when they begin to appear (and they usually do) can I feel confident that I’m more or less on the right track. And that was exactly my relationship with Electric Eden: again and again, it seemed to corroborate – and deepen – a knowledge that, in some way, I already had.

Paul Willetts. Photo: © Doralba Picerno/ doralba.com

PW: One of the things that struck me about The Pieces is how real its central character feels. Given that you were writing about a sub-culture that really existed, were you ever tempted to try to enhance that feeling by incorporating references to well-known personalities and places within the late ’60s British music scene? 

JW: Another good question. And the truth is, the decision I took about the use (or non-use) of real people was almost entirely instinctive, so now I have to rationalize why I made it! It’s not as if I’ve never incorporated historical characters in my books before: both Edmund Burke and George Washington make cameo appearances in The Bastard Boy, and my first novel, The Dark Clue, is not only about the painter J.M.W. Turner, but also borrows the narrator of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Walter Hartright, to act as Turner’s amateur biographer. So what is different about The Pieces?

The most obvious answer, of course, is that it’s set much nearer to our own time. As a result, many of the real-life candidates for inclusion are still alive. How to write dialogue for Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney when (if I were exceptionally lucky) they might read the words I’d imputed to them?

But there is another factor, I think: a dread of pastiche. This is something that, as a historical novelist, I’ve always been preoccupied with (for anyone interested, you can find an article I wrote about it for the Royal Literary Fund on my website). One of the reviews I’m proudest of is Alan Massie’s, in The Scotsman, for The Dark Clue, in which he said:

...Wilson hasn’t written a pastiche Victorian novel…Indeed he has brought off something which is really very difficult: to write a novel set in the period when the greatest English novels were written, and to come up with something which is not an imitation but never rings false.

And, irrespective of whether he’s going to read your efforts or not, how to introduce a McCartney or a Dylan without reducing him to a cardboard cut-out? How to make him say anything that advances the plot or deepens the reader’s understanding, rather than just tipping a knowing wink:  Look who this is? Someone who actually knew Dylan or McCartney might be able to do it. But I don’t, and I can’t!

PW: Though I was only a tiny kid during the 1960s, I have strong memories of that period. I know you’re a bit older than I am, so your memories of the ’60s must be stronger and more numerous. Your book gives me the impression that you’re quite ambivalent about that decade. Do you feel that it’s had a malign influence on present-day society? I’m not just thinking of the so-called sexual revolution, which arguably happened not in the 1960s but during World War Two. I’m thinking of today’s rampant narcissism, of a world where ostensibly intelligent people trot out oxymoronic phrases such as “my truth” and where so many of their opinions are rooted in status-signalling. 

Yes, I do have vivid memories of the sixties, though I was never really part of any of the worlds that feature in the book. And yes, too, I do have very mixed feelings about it. For better or worse, it did, in an astonishingly short time, transform post-war culture into something recognizably modern: in certain crucial ways, I’d argue, the gulf between 1960 and 1970 is greater than the gulf between 1970 and today. Part of that shift was an erosion of know-your-place deference –relating, particularly, to class in Britain, and race in the United States – and, concomitantly, a growth in the belief that we can discard inherited norms and live according to our own lights (a process you could enhance by the use of drugs to uncover your “true” self). And that did, undoubtedly, generate an exhilarating rush of excitement and energy – especially in the areas of music and fashion, but also more widely. Looking back, and comparing it with the experience of my children’s generation, what strikes me most is how optimistic (groundlessly, foolishly optimistic; but optimistic nonetheless) it felt, and how free from the puritan scolding of present-day radicalism.

And yet, and yet… It did, as you suggest, unquestionably promote a powerful strand of solipsism and narcissism (reality is what I say it is, and no one has the right to tell me otherwise)that is very much in evidence now. And, while it may be true that there had been earlier sexual revolutions, there was something unprecedented about the impact of the contraceptive pill: the sense that, for the first time in human history, sex could be completely decoupled from procreation. Again, the effects of that are visible all around us. And not merely in personal behaviour, the decline of the family, the difficulty many young people have in forming stable, committed relationships. It’s associated with a growth in a kind of secular Gnosticism – relentlessly promoted by Silicon Valley – that sees us not primarily as embodied beings, but as “meat computers”, whose data can be uploaded and stored on imperishable hardware. It’s no surprise, I think, that the roots of companies such as Apple lie partly in the hippy commune movement. (This is something I wrote about in my last novel, Coyote Fork. And Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind gives a good non-fiction account of it.)

So, all in all: a modern world without the sixties upheaval is now unimaginable. But some of its legacy has, in my view, been baleful!

PW: Most of your other novels are set much further in the past. Are you aware of themes that link them to The Pieces?

JW: Yes, definitely – although (as is usually the case with my books) it’s an awareness that grew on me gradually during the writing process, rather than being conscious from the beginning. Most of my novels are, to some extent, quests for the truth about something. Most of them have – however obliquely – a sense of the numinous. And all of them are concerned in one way or another with giving a voice to, and establishing some kind of relationship with, the past (something that seems to me ever-more important, as history is increasingly being edited and re-written to serve the ideologies of the present). In The Pieces, there’s a double relationship with the past: the way we now collectively remember and understand the sixties; and the way the central character, Adam Earnshaw, experiences the period, having arrived in a “modern” Britain for which he is totally unprepared.

PW: I have several novelist friends who’ve sometimes talked to me about how bereft they feel when they finish writing a novel. They’ve even likened this to being exiled from somewhere to which they have a strong attachment. Did you experience similar feelings when you completed the editing process for The Pieces?

JW: Yes, is the short answer! Being exiled from somewhere to which I have a strong attachment exactly describes the experience. It’s something I’ve felt with all my novels; but, for some reason I don’t fully understand, it’s particularly powerful with The Pieces – an intense poignancy that can suddenly take me completely unawares. Perhaps it’s just hunger for my lost youth!

James Wilson is the author of six previous novels: The Dark Clue, The Bastard Boy, The Woman in the Picture, Consolation (all published by Faber), The Summer of Broken Stories (Alma Books), and Coyote Fork (Slant Books). He has also written plays, radio and TV documentaries, and a prize-winning work of narrative non-fiction, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America. His work has been translated into ten languages. He lives in London with his artist wife, and a stone’s throw from their two musician sons. *** Paul Willetts is the author of five works of nonfiction, including Members Only, which was filmed as The Look of Love, starring Steve Coogan. His most recent book is King Con (US Penguin Random House). For more information about Paul and his work, please visit www.paulwilletts.com.

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