Despite having written several of the finest English novels of recent years, Jim Crace - author of Continent, The Gifts of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine and Being Dead - is not exactly a household name. This does not bother him. He appears quite pleased to have sustained a life well removed from the literary world. "I think I present something of a problem. You see there's nothing to say about me. I'm just a white, middle-aged, heterosexual, working-class socialist that's managed to stay married to the same woman - we've two kids - and my books aren't autobiographical."
Compact, open-faced, interested, and still very much the opinionated north Londoner, Crace seems ordinary, well in touch with the everyday reality of Britain. In Ireland to read at Cuirt from his new novel, The Devil's Larder, a narrative composed of 64 pieces on the often black politics of food, his normality does contrast with his fiction's graceful sophistication. Aside from his disgust with Blair's bogus version of labour politics, Crace also appears more than happy. No torment, no elaborate rituals, no mention of yoga or crisis.
He does not write his books in a glamorous glass cube perched on the side of a mountain. "I walk the dog, mow the lawn, still manage to play tennis to a pretty good standard - I used to run, but the knees go. I've had keyhole surgery on my knees. So now it's tennis. I write in our converted garage [in Birmingham, where he has lived for more than 20 years]. And that's pretty much it." He smiles. "I'm a nightmare to interview, there's nothing interesting to say about me." He is, however, delighted to announce, "I'm a third-generation atheist."
It does no disservice to Crace to say he appears the most unlikely candidate to have written any of his books, least of all the dark exploration of life emerging through decay, Being Dead, which has just won the US National Book Critics' Circle Award. Yet his highly imaginative fiction is as strange and as unexpected as that of J.G. Ballard, another of Britain's handful of consistently interesting writers.
But then Ballard the man is obviously unusual; Crace with all his eerie originality is not. This makes him laugh again - which he does quite a lot. He also smiles and gives the impression that, unlike many established writers, he does not hold interviewers in contempt. "I was a journalist. I think journalism is important. I was the pet lefty on the Sunday Telegraph." The Sunday Telegraph? My horrified expression amuses him. "I wrote opinion pieces and features, mainly news features. Then, about 1976, I moved to the Sunday Times."
But by then he had already begun writing fiction. His first short story had been published in 1974. By the late 1970s he was settled in Birmingham, where his wife was studying as a mature student.
Individual parts of his first book appeared in various literary magazines. Continent was published in 1986. It won several awards, including the Whitbread First Novel prize. Crace first attempt impressed the critics, as did his second novel, The Gift of Stones (1988), about a pre-Bronze Age community of stone workers. This theme of a society in flux is important to his work and is used quite brilliantly in Signals of Distress (1994). This wonderful book, his fourth, is a dazzling and inventive variation on the 19th-century sea-faring novel.
Neither traditional nor pastiche, Signals of Distress explores the theme of displacement with an exactness comparable to that of Don DeLillo's The Names. It is also the novel that best demonstrates how well Crace writes dialogue. The characterisation and wit make it a fine novel; its exploration of the notion of community as lived in an impoverished place that "seemed entirely indiscriminate, a reckless labyrinth of farm outbuildings but without the redeeming focus of a farmhouse" ensures it's a great one.
Two years earlier, Crace's third novel, Arcadia, had been published. It presents his heavily politicised vision at its most ambitious and also at its most Ballard-like. It is a strange, frightening novel, at once futuristic and medieval, in which are the early shoots of the thought that would later create the remarkable Being Dead.
Taking the community theme a stage further, Arcadia is a study of the modern city. It goes beyond the crazed citizens and looks instead at the produce packed on the stalls of a fruit and vegetable market. It is the life story of Victor, now 80 and no longer in control of his market empire. Crace takes the image of the large market rotting from within and presents it as more than a city: it is a world gone wrong. It is one of those sleeper novels that will gain its second life. It deserves it.
Born in London in 1946, Crace and his brother were the sons of a life-long socialist. "My father had worked in the co-op, delivering milk. Then he became a trade unionist." He grew up in a world of flats. But Crace's home was also full of books. "My father wasn't one of those working-class people who says, `Oh, I hate opera, that's for toffs'. " He makes it clear there was none of that defiance. If he was interested, he was interested, not because he wasn't supposed to be, but because he wanted to be. "He was a great man. My mother is still alive, she lives around the corner from us in Birmingham."
Crace studied English as an external student at London University. He had a stint in Khartoum working as an assistant in Sudanese educational television. His time there may explain some of the atmosphere that dominates Continent. Above all, though, Crace is a highly moralistic story-teller.
After Signals of Distress came Quarantine in 1997: "There were five of them - not in a group, but strung out along the road where, earlier that morning, the caravan of uncles had passed by. Three men, a woman and, too far behind for anyone to guess its gender, a fifth. And this fifth one was bare-footed, and without a staff. No water-skin, or bag of clothes. No food. A slow, painstaking figure, made thin and watery by the rising, mirage heat, as if someone had thrown a stone into the pool of air through which it walked and ripples had diluted it." Set in the Judea of 2,000 years ago, there is a Christ character. Quarantine is a beautiful, atmospheric book. "Not bad for a third-generation atheist." Short-listed for the 1997 Booker Prize - it should have won - it did take the Whitbread Novel of the Year award, and two years later emerged among the contenders for the IMPAC prize. Later, in 1999, Crace received awe-struck reviews for Being Dead.
Having looked like the only novel capable of challenging J.M. Coetzee for the Booker Prize, Being Dead was not even short-listed. "It is the second part of the trilogy begun in Quarantine. That was about sin; Being Dead is about death. The one I'm writing now is Genesis; it's about sex and birth." There's no more to say. Except, read all his books.