FICTION: The happier her personal life gets, the darker her novels become. Liz Jensen tells Donald Clarke about the peculiar family tragedy that inspired her latest book.
'Single mum saved by Anthony Minghella!" Liz Jensen snorts with - if such a tone is possible - good-natured disdain. The week before our meeting, The Observer ran a story describing how the author, who in fact shares custody of her children with her ex-husband, had been saved from a hand-to-mouth existence when Minghella, director of The English Patient, chose to make a film of her gripping new thriller, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax. The implied parallels with another writer did not escape Jensen.
"They just wanted to make me into J.K. Rowling," she snaps. "That seemed like such an easy slot to put me in to." The truth is, in fact, interesting enough in itself. Jensen's novel tells the story of nine-year-old Louis, who, after a serious fall, slips into a coma, but continues to maintain a peculiar contact with the world around him. As Louis, occasionally bursting into spectacular consciousness, tries to reconstruct the events surrounding the catastrophe, he listens as his mother drifts into an ethically dubious relationship with his doctor. Further peculiar events occur.
The Ninth Life of Louis Drax was inspired by a bizarre and tragic tale from the author's own family history. While on holiday in Switzerland in the 1930s, Jensen's uncle, then a boy, had an argument with his mother, the author's grandmother, and stormed off into the wilderness. Four days later the youngster had not reappeared and the distraught mother went off in search of him. Her body was found at the bottom of a cliff. The boy was never seen again. Jensen's own mother never quite came to terms with the incident.
"She was convinced it was suicide, but I don't think the psychology works," Jensen says. "If you are looking for somebody, you don't just kill yourself. It is a mystery, and it is the basis of the book. A family outing in the mountains and somebody ending up at the bottom of a cliff."
Jensen has a perky and energetic manner. Meeting her with no preconceptions, you would be more likely to take her for a lacrosse teacher at a posh girls' school than a writer of macabre novels.
And The Ninth Life of Louis Drax is, perhaps, something of a departure for her. Earlier novels - this is her fifth - such as Egg Dancing and Ark Baby had dark moments, but were essentially comedies. So, should we assume that something awful happened over the past few years that opened her up to the Gothic?
"Almost the opposite happened," she trills merrily. "Which is that I got divorced and I met a man who I am very happy with. Maybe that happiness gave me the confidence to go somewhere darker in my fiction."
In fact, one of the joys of Jensen's work is that it is so hard to categorise. The new book is similar to all the rest in the sense that they are all equally different. Critics searching for clues as to the source of her originality have inevitably focused on her interesting parentage. The daughter of a Moroccan mother and a Danish father, Jensen sees herself as being part of the new, more racially diverse wave of British writers (inevitably we discuss Monica Ali and Zadie Smith) that has emerged in the wake of Salman Rushdie's success.
"I see this as a very fruitful time," she says. "We are seeing all this variety and we are beginning to read more and more foreign fiction."
Beginning her professional life as a journalist, Jensen was offered a chance to get creative when her husband of the time, a doctor, moved to France.
"Sculpture, which I then enjoyed, was a nice half-way house between journalism, where you work as a team, and the total solitude of writing fiction. As a sculptor, you can listen to the radio and so forth. It is not complete solitude. But I realised quite quickly that I am far better writer than sculptor."
Her first few novels have sold respectably, but The Ninth Life of Louis Drax seems set to take her to a new level of popularity. Which brings us back to that movie deal. How did it come about? "Well, I could never see it as a film. When I delivered it to my agent I said: 'I'm sorry; here is yet another novel that can't be made into a film.' She read it and agreed. And then somebody else read it and said, this could definitely make a movie, and I just thought she was young and foolish and enthusiastic, and thought nothing more about it. Next thing I knew there was a bidding war and it completely surprised me."
She plans to continue her humble life in Wimbledon. Both she and her new partner, the Danish writer Carsten Jensen (it's a common name in that country), have children from previous relationships, so they cannot live together throughout the year.
"When we get together we stay on the island he grew up on," she says. "We will write together in this small space and every now and then we will talk. But sometimes one will catch the other in the middle of a thought and we will be unable to speak. We just sit there happily with our lap-tops touching."
The Ninth Life of Louis Drax is published by Bloomsbury, £16.99 in UK