Books & Poetry

By the same token, feeling a little bit foreign in Britain has its bonuses. It alerts Cartwright to societal idiosyncrasies that natives wouldn’t notice, such as the fact that British people have no idea what to wear when they go to the theatre. It also frees him, he says, ‘from a lot of the hang-ups people have about, say, Oxford. For me, studying there was just a fantastic privilege and a pleasure, and I didn’t think even back then that it was elitist.’ (His next book will be a guide to Oxford, part of Bloomsbury’s ‘Writers and the City’ series.)

Cartwright is friendly with other writers, especially his fellow rugby fan William Boyd, but disdains ‘coterie flank-rubbing’. ‘I remember being interviewed by Will Self once and he said “You’re right in the middle of literary London” and I said “For Christ’s sake, you’re the licensed jester of the establishment. You’re the establishment, not me.” ’ Admitting his reliance in this new book on some unpublished memoirs by members of the Prussian resistance, he has great sympathy for Ian McEwan over the ridiculous allegation that the ‘Atonement’ author plagiarised a nurse’s memoir: ‘You can’t write a novel without stealing, in a way.’
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Cartwright likes novels with ‘complex but incompetent heroes, questing intellectuals who have problems with ordinary life’. (Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ and ‘Humboldt’s Gift’ are particular favourites.) But his own life appears pleasingly unproblematic, his happiness more than a mere promise. He lives at the end of a quiet mews street with his wife, a special-needs teacher specialising in dyslexia, and two grown-up sons. He’s 62 now, and relaxing into the role of literary elder statesman with a licence to pontificate.

‘When I first arrived in London what you noticed was the deference – yes sir, no sir – shown to anyone who wasn’t obviously working-class,’ he remembers. ‘That’s completely gone now. But what looked like orderly behaviour was really just lack of money. You didn’t go on holiday. You didn’t have a car so there was nobody to cut you up in a white van; no white-van man – an expression which, as it happens, I invented.’
The only doubt is whether, with this new novel, he’ll manage to retain his lucrative, but fickle, Richard & Judy readers. If he does, a new espresso machine should be top of his shopping list.

‘The Song Before It Is Sung’ is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99.