Odd corners and weird angles

Lloyd Jones says emotions are tricky things but, in the end, people have to take charge of their lives and get a bit of self-belief and pride back. Photo / Glenn Jeffrey

The last time I saw Lloyd Jones, he was looking pretty smooth in a formal dinner suit, clutching a huge glass of beer. It was October 2007, and Man Booker Prize night in London, the most prestigious book awards in the world. Bookmakers and critics had been consistently predicting that his novel Mister Pip - which had already won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and the Montana NZ Book Award for fiction - was hands-down favourite.

After a dinner in the atmospheric and ancient Guildhall Great Hall, the name of the winner was called: Irish writer Anne Enright.

At his publisher's party at Covent Garden private club Two Brydges, his supporters could hardly believe their ears. The room filled with cries of "Who? Who?" When Jones finally turned up, he raised his glass and told the cheering crowd, "Actually, I'm quite relieved."

Two years later, on the eve of the publication of his new book The Man in the Shed, Jones reflects on those words - but only because I've asked him to - and says, "That was a funny old night ... it would be a different conversation now. I don't think it's such a great thing to win the Booker. I knew what lay in store in terms of the public commitments because the shortlisted authors were all made to sign a contract to say we'd do XYZ, from memory, and XYZ was pretty demanding. If you don't like that public side of things - I don't particularly like it but I accept it's part of the deal - I think it's pretty tough.

"What can I say? You just don't know what you're going to feel until that moment your name is read out or it isn't read out. I suppose you might have expected me to feel disappointed but in fact I didn't. I did a few days later when I reflected on it, you know."

Nevertheless, Jones and the Mister Pip phenomenon kept rolling along. Part of the Commonwealth Writer's Prize package involved a meeting with the Queen, a few days after the Booker. It was a busy day for the Wellington writer, who sums it up as: "I met the Queen in the morning, did a book reading in the afternoon, then jumped on a plane to Toronto."

The Queen, he recalls, was "a little old lady in a lime green dress, very nice. It's slightly surreal when you grow up with this person who is kind of a media construction. The doors open and there she is standing in the room. She is tiny. It was a blast, actually. I came away from that feeling a little bit sorry for her - here I was, a complete stranger, we sat down and had a chat for 20-25 minutes. Kofi Annan [the former United Nations secretary-general] was waiting in the Empire Room next door, to have his honorary knighthood bestowed upon him.

"I would have been one of five or six such occasions that day and that's quite a lot of pressure to put on an older person, having to meet new people all the time and having to carry a conversation with complete strangers - that's a tall order."

* * *

Jones doesn't particularly want to dwell on the past but, in a way, that's what his latest book does. It's a collection of short stories, all but one of which have been previously published in either his earlier books such as Swimming to Australia and Other Stories or in anthologies like The Best New Zealand Fiction, Are Angels OK? and Sport. Their dates range from 1991-2006, with the title story the single, new creation.

Australian Text Publishing head Michael Heyward and Penguin Group NZ publisher Geoff Walker made the choices and, adds Jones, "If I wanted to go to war on any particular story, that was fine."

Heyward observes via email from Melbourne, "So many of the stories are about kids in suburban situations grappling with adult realities that the adults themselves can scarcely control. But don't be fooled: the suburbs in Lloyd's imagination aren't ever tame, predictable places. They're strange and dangerous, full of odd corners and offering weird angles of vision.

"What the stories, which do go back a couple of decades, taught me was that from the start Lloyd wanted to write fiction which would make imaginary worlds seem more real than our own. There are clear lines from the kids in The Man in the Shed to Matilda in Mister Pip."

The collection's title story is narrated by a boy whose mother is pregnant to a man who has moved into the backyard shed while her husband, the kid's father, is still living in the house. "The stranger is never really properly described," says Jones. "He's a presence and a threat. He has inveigled his way into the heart of the family - he's not a bad guy, I suppose. The idea running through that story is an imperfectly grasped world and that comes back to the child's perspective, the impossibility of making any sense of anything, only getting bits and pieces of information."

The story Swimming to Australia, first published in 1991, and narrated by young "Jimbo", is about a solo mother whose slightly sinister, dimwit boyfriend Warren drags the family over to Australia where things do not go well. As Jimbo notes, "For the first time it occurred to me that her problem had become our problem." It's a sadly familiar puzzle: why do decent women hook up with abusive guys?

"I ask myself that all the time," says Jones. "She is stuck in a hard place, the kids are the victims of the mother's fragility ... I suppose it's not an uncommon scenario but in the end they have to take charge of their lives and in doing so, get a bit of self-belief and pride back."

While we don't have room to discuss each story, Dogs, first published in The Best New Zealand Fiction Vol 1, compiled by Fiona Kidman, surely earns a mention. A story about another marriage in trouble - "all marriages are moving towards floundering or are moving away from floundering, it's a tricky business," comments the once-married writer - it involves a bizarre encounter between an unhappy husband taking his Jack Russell for an evening walk and a double-amputee woman (wearing prosthetics) walking her dog.

"Fiona Kidman liked it but she was horrified in equal amounts," laughs Jones when I say it's the first time I've read a story about a man having sex with a literally legless woman. "Yeah, well, some of these things I have heard of, you know? It would be slightly perverse of me if my imagination did race into that territory unassisted but I have actually heard of such an event so I thought, well, hell, ha ha ha ... I shouldn't be laughing like this."

The Simpsons in Russia, also from the Swimming to Australia collection, is about a New Zealand couple travelling through the former Soviet Union on a bus on which a remarkably intimate transformation occurs. Quite surprising, as Mr Simpson is not a man who even likes his hand to be held by his wife, a view Jones supports, saying, "Lots of blokes are like that - I'm like that. It's just that holding hands seems so lame and pointless."

He later goes on to comment, when we are talking about a story called Broken Machinery - yes, another marriage in meltdown - "I have heard of calm families and people being civilised to each other and it's always struck me as a kind of abnormality, something to marvel at rather than think, 'Gosh, I wish that had been me."'

Jones, who "dovetails" between homes in a Wellington warehouse and the Wairarapa, says he is asked "quite a lot" if the success of Mister Pip has put him under pressure.

"The answer is not really because I am always under pressure. Some people would think [of the next book], 'That's not very good' or, 'Gosh, that's completely different' or some people will think, 'That's really good.'

"I can't anticipate. I think all writers are the same. The first reader they must satisfy is themselves and on that score I am fairly demanding on myself, always.

"I suppose the question behind your question is stage fright or something like that and the answer is no. That's what I do - I am a writer."

Naturally, Jones sounds delighted with the news that director Andrew Adamson is making a movie of Mister Pip. "Just thinking a bit selfishly, it'll give another lease of life to the book as these things often do.

"Andrew is writing the script and he'll bring others in when needs be. I think my technical description is script consultant or something like that. We've had a few conversations about where he's thinking or what he's thinking. He is a very close reader which is very gratifying. I think he'll do a great job."

Jones, who is working on a new novel, is off to highland Bali in a few weeks as a guest at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival alongside big names such as Vikas Swarup, Hari Kunzru, Mohammed Hanif, Kate Grenville and Fatima Bhutto, where the festival's theme is "suka-duka" - "compassion and solidarity", qualities which seem to fit his writing so well.

The Man in the Shed (Penguin $37) is out on Monday.