Simon Winchester, a man of many layers

One book sold 11 copies, another got him sued, but now former foreign correspondent Simon Winchester is an outstanding publishing success. MARGIE THOMSON reports.

With The Surgeon of Crowthorne, Simon Winchester really made his mark on the world. Bizarrely, that lexicographical history of the Oxford English Dictionary, shaped around the tale of an incarcerated madman who was of major assistance to the OED's first editor, captured the imagination of at least a million people.

That's the number of copies sold so far. It's been translated into 17 languages (Icelandic is the most recent)and may yet become a Hollywood movie.

Rights were bought for around $US1 million by hunky Mel Gibson, who wants to play the role of editor James Murray. If plans unfold it will be directed by John Boorman (Deliverance, The Tailor of Panama), with the role of the unfortunate madman, William Minor, likely to be taken by Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman has been on the phone to Winchester several times in the past couple of weeks expressing enthusiasm, and asking if he's got his accent right.

"Yes, it's exciting, but on the other hand nothing has actually happened," Winchester says.

His circumspection, far from being dour, only adds to the charm of this plummy, yet archly self-deprecating and wildly discursive writer.

Winchester is on the phone from his new property in the hills of west Massachusetts, where he's been watching out the window as a bunch of wonderfully efficient labourers erect a historic red barn, disassembled from its original location and soon to function as the writer's library and studio, to which he envisions himself trudging in furious snowstorms.

It beats, he hopes, New York City, from where the nomadic Englishman has just moved.

At almost 57, this former foreign correspondent who walked the length of Korea, travelled the Yangtze and has been imprisoned in an Argentinian jail, claims to be considering, in tandem with his girlfriend, a more staid lifestyle. Having said that, he laughs and says that in a couple of days he's leaving for Java, from where he will travel to Australia, New Zealand (appearing at the New Zealand Herald literary lunch on August 28 ), Canada, Bangalore, Tasmania and Washington DC before heading home.

"It's crazy, and it never stops, but I still love it. I'm looking forward to getting on that plane with the excitement of a boy going on his first trip abroad," he says.

Part of the reason for this latest excursion is to publicise his new book, his hymn to the science of geology, The Map That Changed The World: The Tale Of William Smith And The Birth Of A Science (Viking, $34.95).

Looking for a subject after a planned biography of National Geographic founder Adolphus Greely fell through, his editor suggested there might be something in the world of geology. An idea for which Winchester, who has a degree in geology from Oxford and who worked as a geologist in Uganda, was perfectly suited.

Winchester took a core sample of memory, down to a depth of nearly 40 years, and came up with something his erstwhile and respected Oxford tutor Harold Reading had said: that William Smith, the man who in 1815 created the first geological map of England and therefore in the world, was one of his personal heroes. Winchester looked up Smith in the Encyclopedia Britannica and found a story begging to be told.

S mith's poor and unlikely beginnings as the son of an Oxfordshire blacksmith, and his unusual move out of the hamlet in which he was born into a career as engineer and canal-designer thanks to self-teaching, luck and determination were a promising start for a would-be biographer.

But Smith's life also encompassed an extraordinary amount of additional drama: his initial material success and social escalation was followed by what amounts to a backlash.

On the verge of scientific celebrity-status, he was plagiarised, his reputation rendered all but extinct. He fell victim to extreme social snobbery that resulted in rejection by his higher-born scientific peers and he was led, inexorably ( by his own over-ambition and rash decision-making) to the debtors' prison.

He married when aged almost 40 a woman of only 17 who proved unstable and, while Smith always looked after her, was a burden. Notes from the asylum at which she lived much later in life show her to have had a range of problems including nymphomania.

Little, however, is known about Smith's life with his Mary-Anne, as his faithful nephew and original biographer burned all material he thought embarrassing or too personal.

Nevertheless, thanks to remaining diaries and notes there was, like a seam of gold running through these different strata, the voluble and passionate personality of Smith himself waiting to be tapped. And, because of Winchester's excavation of this first geologist, we are able to appreciate the original-minded brilliance that allowed him to see what no one had seen before - that the rocks beneath our feet (and the fossils they contain) are in patterns that tell a story about the passage of time.

It was Smith's ambition to depict these findings as a map and make a name for himself in the annals of scientific achievement.

The significance of his thinking is hard to imagine today, but in the late 18th century it was impossible for most people to think outside the paradigm of God's creation of the world in six days, all of which was rigorously calculated to have occurred exactly 4004 years before the birth of Christ. A divergent insistence on a much greater age for the world, and on the evolution and extinction of species, was heretical in the extreme.

Smith became one of the godfathers of evolution, one whose own investigations and methodology of empirical measurement and physical proof were a vital step along the way.

Despite Winchester's personal rejection of geology, one can see a geologist's habit of mind in his subsequent career as journalist and author. He has never been the kind of person to see only what is in front of his eyes. Recently in the Independent, Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, who trained with Winchester in the 1960s, recalls how their trainers quickly decided that Winchester would never make the grade as a journalist. "He was too imaginative, too thoughtful, too critical in his approach," wrote Fisk.

Winchester went on to a glittering career as foreign correspondent for the Guardian in Belfast, and then Africa, India and Asia, Argentina, Russia and the United States. He wrote his first book, on Northern Ireland, in 1973, commissioned by the same editor who discovered William Golding. (In Winchester's talk, there are always connections, lines being drawn between people, always something or someone famous and exciting going on as names, dates and places are inevitably souped up to roar in a far more titillating way than the quiet purring of mere dull modesty.)

He found that writing books enabled him to tell a story in a way not really possible in a newspaper. So loquacious is he that one suspects he simply likes to get the shackles off and let rip. He has one of those minds that soak up facts and impressions - "I'm probably in danger of being a boring person, not to be cornered at a party," he says archly about his love for ephemera.

His books are full of footnotes and oddities, although he is the first to admit that, with one obvious exception, they haven't done well.

His second book, American Heartbeat, sold 11 copies one year and is now out of print. But it wasn't until book number three, about the British aristocracy, that his publishers lost faith in him. He got sued and, under the terms of his contract, had to pay costs of £25,000 ($83,200).

W hile he went on to write more books - this latest is number 14 - he didn't touch the House of Lords again. "That's like touching a porcupine!"

His book about the Yangtze, The River At The Centre Of The World, he considers his best, although he also loved writing his offering about the Balkans conflict, The Fracture Zone, which did dismally.

The Map That Changed The World has higher hopes pinned on it, and the bookshops already stock it partly in tribute to a story well told, and partly because of our generation's abiding fascination for popularised science. Stratigraphy is tricky, Winchester says of his attempts to communicate the science of Smith's accomplishment while not losing his layman readers.

One of the most poignant moments in The Map comes when, chipping away at history, Winchester uncovers some of his own: a rich vein of memory which seems to overlap and enfold part of Smith's story.

Winchester loathes the British class system, and its strangulating snobbery is one of the reasons he chooses to live in America.

Yet his own childhood was lived within one of the greatest of upper-class institutions, the public boarding school. In Winchester's case (his parents not being well off), at minor public schools in Dorset and Dorchester. Although he learned self-reliance and independence, he remains appalled at the number of beatings he and his fellow students were given.

However, where his own story intersects loosely with that of Smith is that from the age of 5 to 13 he was at a convent school in Dorset run by nuns who Winchester describes as stormtroopers, the Sisters of the Blessed Order of the Visitation, who forbade the use of names and simply called each boy by a number (Winchester was 46).

Winchester's mother, on reading her son's latest book, asked him if he was sure about this. Wait a minute, she said, and went upstairs to her sewing basket where, indeed, she found little caches of tapes with her son's number on them that she had sewn into his socks and cap.

"Was it as awful as that?" she asked her now middle-aged son.

"It was pretty bloody ... it was the castor oil that was the worst," he replied.

On the day about which he writes in his book, he and his classmates have been taken to the sea and, in a lazy after-swimming reverie, Winchester finds his first Jurassic fossil. He holds the ammonite, coiled in repose like a small and fat spiral spring, and is enraptured.

Many years later, in writing this book, he revisits this place, aware that Smith trod this shore as he collected evidence for his first geological map of England. It is in these wistful, still-enraptured asides, in these footnotes and oddities, that Winchester's indubitable charm resides.

His great success, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, probably owes its success to Winchester managing to keep the story relatively simple and straightforward.

In The Map he indulges wildly in digression, in relentless dilettantism but then, that's what makes him interesting, if not always commercially successful: a terrific storyteller and a man, like his subject, of passionate mind.

* Simon Winchester is the guest at a New Zealand Herald/Dymocks literary luncheon at the Carlton Hotel on Tuesday, August 28. For booking details see E6.