INTERVIEW:IT'S HARD NOT to approach an interview with John Irving with some trepidation having read his latest novel, Last Night in Twisted River. The book's protagonist, Danny Angel, is a writer, like Irving, born in the early 1940s, like Irving, who studies at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, like Irving did, and who hates journalists, believing "most of them lacked the imagination to believe that anything credible in a novel had been wholly imagined".
It makes an interviewer feel slightly sheepish asking about the possible autobiographical elements in this, his 11th book, which is why it's a relief to find out that John Irving, while as darkly serious, is also as humorous as his fictions can be.
"There is an element of some playfulness in giving to Danny's biography as a writer so many details that are exactly mine," he admits. "Where he goes to school, in what year we are born - those things are self-referential in a deliberately playful way and nor do I think they're terribly important."
It's hard not to feel put in my place by a writer who has been on the other side of interviews for longer than I've been alive. It has been more than 40 years since his first book, Setting Free the Bears, was published, and he has written 11 others since. There have been other writer characters in his books, TS Garp from The World According to Garpbeing the best-known to date. So is Last Night in Twisted Riveras "wholly imagined" as he suggests, despite all the parallels?
"I think there are more serious things, more recurrent things in my novels that are autobiographical not in a literal way, but in a more important way," he responds, his voice deep, his sentences slow and deliberate. "Namely that, like Danny, I also write about what I fear, not about what has happened to me, but about those things I hope never happen to me or to anyone I love. I would say that is more emotionally and psychologically true to me autobiographically than these little facts that Danny and I share."
As he speaks of his fears and their work on his imagination in a small office space in central London, Irving looks strangely incongruous. With a tanned face that looks like it could have been carved from the bark of a tree in his birthplace, New Hampshire, he looks like he'd be more at ease among the hard-living loggers from Twisted River than in this tiny Soho study. For him it's not the urban setting that grates, however - he still has a home in Toronto, as well as in Vermont - but its location. "I feel a lot more at home in Ireland or Scotland than I do here," he says, "because as an American, we've all been historically at odds with the English."
He tells me how much he likes Dublin, a place where he believes writers are respected. "I have not made a study of this, but the last time I looked at the fiction bestseller lists in the UK and in the US were both awful," he says. "I would suspect that like Canada, a fiction bestseller list in Scotland and Ireland is notably better than it is in England." I make to interject, but Irving overrides my anticipated argument. "Better. I didn't say great - better."
It's hard to stop John Irving mid-flow: he answers questions either with one-word replies, or in lengthy, careful paragraphs that are not to be interrupted. When this writer has something to say, or a story to tell, he keeps going until he's done. This may explain why Last Night in Twisted River comes in at more than 550 pages. It spans five decades of Danny's life, from his beginnings in the logging communities of Coos County, New Hampshire through his flight to Boston with his father, a chef, and on to Iowa City and Toronto, among other locations, as they flee a crooked constable. And it has taken its author two decades of his own life to complete.
"I have had this novel in the back of my mind longer than any novel I've written. But I didn't begin it for the longest time because I didn't know the last sentence, and when I'm writing a book there are always two or three novels that I'm going to write next . . . and the one I will begin next isn't necessarily the one that's been in my mind the longest, it's the one that delivers the ending soonest."
The end comes first for Irving, who has often expounded on his writing process, which begins with a last sentence and works back from there. Just like Danny Angel does. In fact, the process is painstakingly - if also playfully - described in Last Night in Twisted River: "He plotted a story from back to front; hence he conceived of the first chapter last." Irving is the first to admit this is an accurate rendering of his own methodology as a novelist.
"He is the first character as a writer that I've given very much my same process as a writer to. I did not do that in the case of Garp or in the case of Ruth Cole in A Widow for One Year, so while my life has been little like Danny's, very little, my development as a writer and my descriptions of how Danny does it are very much modelled on myself."
For Last Night in Twisted River, Irving had long had a notion of the two central characters, a cook and his son, the latter's profession a given from the start. "I always knew the son would become a writer, in part because of the experiences he had, and also because of the things that have been hidden from him that make living in his imagination an almost necessary act."
Again, it feels like an allusion to Irving's own story. He never knew his biological father, having been raised by his mother and stepfather. Unbeknownst to Irving, his mother had denied his biological father access to his son, a fact he later said "forced me to imagine him, book after book".
Yet though the father and son of Last Night in Twisted River were long present in Irving's imagination, there was one important character who delayed its completion: "I knew there was a guy that was missing to the story, and I couldn't think of him for the longest time, so I had to wait."
The wait was for Ketchum, a hard-bitten, gun-toting, old-time logger friend of the cook's, who watches over Danny and his father as they attempt to outrun their fate. Irving already had all the knowledge he needed of the logging community that Ketchum belongs to, having grown up with an uncle and cousin in the logging business. What he needed was a real-life old-time logger: "I needed my cousin to introduce me to a Ketchum character," he says. All the while he was aware that time was of the essence if this book was ever to be completed. "If I'd waited another 10 years to write this book, it wouldn't have happened, because those guys are all 10 years older than I am. In order to find somebody who was a river driver in the 1950s, I knew I was looking for a man in his late 70s or early 80s, and those guys didn't live very long."
Once Ketchum came into focus, he still had to find that elusive last sentence with which to begin. "I felt really stupid when I finally, in January 2005, saw this last sentence. I thought, 'What took you so long? Of course!' " Without giving away the ending, there is a joy in the final pages that Irving at first found hard to explain. "I always knew what the emotion was at the end of this story. I knew that there was something that made Danny feel elated, almost euphoric," he says. It's a feeling Irving recognised. "I thought, well, the only thing that can make this guy happy is the elation he feels when he is starting something new again, another book."
Is that what Irving himself feels, the fire in his belly, even after 12 novels? "Yeah, every time. And the only thing that I could say is the same about all 12 novels is the last sentence, and the fact that not even the punctuation, not a single comma has ever changed."
Except in the case of his previous novel, Until I Find You, where Irving changed the voice in the last sentence - indeed, all the way through the book - from the first to the third person to give him the distance he needed to write it. It deals with the sexual abuse of its protagonist at a young age, which mirrors an incident in Irving's own life, when he was sexually abused by an older woman when he was 11. It took him four decades to address it in a book he has admitted he found particularly hard to write. "If I'd written about that story when I was in my 20s or 30s, the woman who sexually abuses Jack might have been like the woman in my case, when I was 11, who was really nice to me, who I really loved, and who was a woman in her 20s, whom I not once felt badly about, not once," he admits. "It was only later as I got older that I realised what damaging effects there were from what she had done with me."
Which is why he advocates putting some distance between writer and subject. "I think the way to see anything best is to create as much detachment as you can. It's why I wait so long to write about things that have affected me personally or politically."
Politics has played a part in Irving's work, though he is adamant that Last Night in Twisted Riveris not a political book. "There's a lot of political talk in this book, but it's not mine," he explains.
"I would still argue that only two of the 12 novels are what I would call political novels, A Prayer for Owen Meanybecause of Ronald Reagan as a character, because of the Vietnam war as an issue, and The Cider House Rules." The difference, he tells me, is that in these books, the characters - Johnny Wheelwright, Owen Meany, Dr Larch - are speaking for him. "They're my mouthpieces," he says. "But there's nobody in this novel who's speaking for me."
Though he does not see his 12th novel as "political", he does point to the social politics inherent in his depiction of an America where frontier violence still plays a role. "We are a frontier country, we came from that. And there are huge areas of rural country America that still believe essentially that the solution to everything is to get a bigger gun."
Does he feel this might be changing under the new administration? "Well, we might all hope for the best, but it's a little soon to say, isn't it?" This is not to say he isn't optimistic. "I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy," he says.
"I think he's absolutely the right guy at the right time. But he has inherited a mess. It's not a mess of his making, it's a mess that his opposites have made, and whether or not we as a country and you and the rest of the world will give him enough time to resolve the situations that other people have created, that remains to be seen. When these idiots in Sweden give him a peace prize, way premature, to me all they've done is given fuel to Obama's enemies."
John Irving abandons his controlled calm for the first time in the interview as he warms to his topic. "Once again they've demonstrated that that Nobel committee is much more interested in political meddling than they are in recognising who deserves what for doing what. I mean, the literature prize has been a joke more often than not, for years!"
It's clear he has strong political opinions, and he's glad to have a chance to voice them. "If I'm in the US, and I'm being interviewed, if someone asks me what I think about politics, it likely won't appear in the article or in the interview, and if I try to talk about politics, they often change the subject," he says. "But you can't go to Europe or be in Canada, and not be asked your opinion as a writer about anything, because writers' opinions matter."
What is clear is that Irving, at 67, is not finished writing, and though Last Night in Twisted Riverwas 20 years brewing, its completion brings him no relief. "This is my 12th novel and I recognise how many things in it I've already done in other novels, and some things just keep coming up, some things just keep coming back."
Like bears and violence and lost children, tropes that have appeared in his novels repeatedly, even inspiring an online Wikipedia grid that maps out the recurrences in his works. Though he now boasts a dozen novels and an Oscar for his adaptation of The Cider House Rules, he's definitely not done, not with the fire in him now.
"Let's just say I'm a little cautious about feeling relief because I have a suspicion that I will see some elements of this story again."
Last Night in Twisted Riveris published by Bloomsbury, £20
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