CityLife

Interview with Rodge Glass

Rodge Glass

RODGE Glass is the Cheshire-born writer whose first novel, No Fireworks, a bleak and comic account of eight seminal days in the life of a disenfranchised Jewish man in south Manchester, was nominated for a First Book Award.

He is writer-in-residence at Glasgow University, where he spent three years writing an autobiography of the prolific and controversial Scottish author and artist Alisdair Gray.

City Life caught up with him to talk about his new novel, Hope for Newborns and encountered a writer whose preocupation with the idea of home keeps pulling him back to Manchester.

Hope for Newborns is described as a novel ‘about a dysfunctional family’ but equally it is a novel about politics and community, romance and internet culture. Could you explain how these themes are brought together in the narrative?

It’s set in a fictional barbershop on Oldham street in Manchester called the Victory Barbershop that was set up after the Second World War by the grandfather of the family, and there’s three generations of this army family that run the place.

There’s a picture of Churchill in a jeep in Berlin in 1945 with a big fat cigar and the whole thing is supposed to represent the pride of Britain.

The story is told from the perspective of the youngest member of the family who is trying to reconcile all of that history, when it’s not quite so clear any more who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

This character Lewis is quite a hopeless romantic type who really wants to escape and travel the world but he’s got no idea about the world at all really, he’s just seen it on the internet.

The whole book is about the difference between that fantasy that you can see everything that exists in the world, everywhere, all the time, and yet can’t touch it.

I was really interested by several of my friends who got involved in relationships over the internet around the same time; this was a mystery to me!

But there was a period at which it stopped being taboo or nerdy or uncool to look for love online so I came up with the idea of breaking up the narrative with these short MSN style messages back and forth between the two main characters.

My heroine is Christy, who calls herself Christy Columbus, and she’s a crazy feminist icon who runs the charity, Hope for Newborns, from her bedroom.

She persuades Lewis to change his life for the better; she galvanizes him, although for the vast majority of the novel they never meet.

You say that the idea of finding love online is a mystery to you. Is it something that you found it difficult not to judge your characters for?

I did at the beginning. I was way up there on my high horse when I started writing the novel but my attitude had changed completely by the time I finished it. I thought it was a good symbol for the way that we communicate in modern life.

Those things like Facebook and Twitter make me feel further away from other human beings rather than closer to them.

You can have a thousand friends, but it’s just a charade and that has always struck me as a profoundly lonely thing.

Lewis is an incredibly isolated character in his family and in his personal life; he’s desperate to find somebody to connect to, and he definitely gets that.

The book is set in Manchester. Was that a deliberate comment on the political climate of the North West of England or do you think it could have been set anywhere?

There’s certainly an element of that to it and it was symbolic for me that it was set in the Northern Quarter.

I wanted Lewis to be surrounded by a dynamic life everywhere but not recognize it. That part of the city is so vibrant and interesting; that character should have been able to find what he was looking for right there.

I did definitely did want to make a comment on politics and particularly in that part of England, but also something a bit wider about if British identity even exists, and if it does was there ever a time when the British were simply the good guys.

The novel at the beginning appears to be about the change in the attitudes toward the British army.

It’s set not long after the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and people are starting to ask themselves whether it’s really so obvious who the good guys and the bad guys are.

But hopefully it becomes more apparent as the novel goes on that it was never really that simple in the first place. That’s part of what the rest of the family has to deal with as well.

They get the shock attacks, they get graffiti all over the shop, they get a brick put through the window. Very direct violent things happen to them so they have to reanalyse whether this is something that they believe in or not.

You are a Jewish Brit raised in Cheshire and living in Glasgow. How does your background affect your writing? 

I think home is everything because it makes you who you are whether you like it or not.

I first left Manchester when I was 18 to go and live in Israel. I really had no idea what I was doing. I think by that age a huge amount of you is formed whether you want it to be or not and much of the rest of life is coming to terms with that.

The issue of home is a thread that runs through all of my work, particularly in a world where for many people in this country it so easy to travel and communities break up so easily.

That question of what happens when communities don’t have religion and have broken down, when you can get at anyone online but you can’t touch them, all that for me centres on the idea of belonging.

The question of what makes a home and what makes an identity fascinate me and I think that these are the central concerns of any interesting fiction in this country at the moment.

So where is home for you?

I don’t know. Manchester has actually become far more important to me, particularly in recent years because I’ve been lucky enough with my writing career to have done a lot of travelling, and it has made me think of the concept of home in a completely different way.

My Jewish upbringing taught me that Israel was home to all Jews, and it wasn’t until I got there that I realised that I didn’t believe that at all.

By that point I had already left Manchester, and I moved to Glasgow to go to university.

I don’t think that home is something that you ever get to the end of. I think that it’s a conversation that you’re always having with yourself.

Oh dear - that sounds incredibly pompous! I just mean that I don’t think that I know where home is, and that’s why I’m so obsessed with writing about it.

Hope for Newborns is published by Faber & Faber. It will be launched on Thursday,June 11, at Deansgate Waterstone’s, Manchesterf rom 6.30pm till 8pm. Entry is free.