Commercialism has taken over book publishing as clinically as it has usurped sport. Having long since relinquished its traditional aura of "gentleman's occupation", publishing is now a ruthless industry controlled by massive conglomerates and sustained by an ongoing supply of hype and big advances. It is an approach now as true of fiction as of books in general. The public demand, particularly for violence and special effects (and let's not forget the movie rights), is hard to satisfy. The US has led the way, particularly as regards the infiltration of the techno-language of computers and cyperspace. Books, particularly bestsellers, are of the moment. Language has become sharp and aggressive; descriptions graphic.
So, now more than ever, the writer is often businessman before artist. Novels are now called projects. All of which makes the bestseller success of Charles Frazier's gentle, old fashioned, meticulously slow-moving quest, Cold Mountain, even more surprising. Set in the south during the American Civil War, it is most assuredly not a retelling of Gone With The Wind, and avoids the cliches of the genre. The depressed central character, Inman, given to "brooding and pining for his lost self" is sick of war and while, recovering from a wound, decides to desert. He wants to go back to Ada, an intelligent variation of the classic southern belle with whom he has had a tentative romance before setting off to battle.
Raised by her adoring father, Ada "on his insistence had been educated beyond the point considered wise for females", which has made her unfit for practical existence. The narrative, Inman's odyssey, draws heavily on Homer's Odyssey - structurally as well as thematically. Not only does Inman meet his share of Homeric sirens along the way in an action which is extraordinary episodic, Ada even reads the Odyssey aloud to Ruby, the resourceful pragmatist who agrees to teach her about nature, the real world and the art of survival. So shrewd is Ruby she even doubts Odysseus, finding "his alibis for stretching out his trip to be suspect in the extreme, an opinion only confirmed by the current passage in which the characters were denned up in a swineherd's hut drinking and telling tales."
Having already sold more than 1.7 million copies of this first novel - which was initially considered an honourable risk when granted a 25,000 hardback print run - Frazier must be ecstatic. Add to that collecting the National Book Award and selling the film rights to The English Patient director Anthony Mingella. Tall, dishevelled, a bit apprehensive, Frazier is clearly a life-long exponent of the "yes" and "no" response to questions. "I'm pleased with the success of the book," he says, "but I'm worried about the bestseller thing. I'd hate for it to be seen as a `bestseller' - it's a literary book. I mean, I've never read a book by Stephen King or John Grisham, I'm sure they're, um, perfectly delightful" - said without irony - "but they're not the sort of books I'd read." If ego has any part in the shaping of Frazier's gracious, disciplined personality, he keeps it well concealed.
Too quiet to impress by presence alone, it is difficult to imagine Frazier standing before the classes of university students he taught before he turned to writing. He is nice looking, sympathetic rather than intimidatingly handsome. He gives the impression of being determined not to allow success to loosen his grasp on reality. Though dressed casually, he does have an old-world demeanour and his wonderful voice with its slow, soft Carolina accent evokes images of the southern gentleman of another era. His book appears to have been inspired by his belief in preserving stories.
History, archaeology, myth and the folklore of the American Indian all interest him. He could easily have been an archaeologist and says, brightening for a moment, "I would have done anthropology but I didn't like the idea of all the math." He studied English at Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina and subsequently taught literature there and in Colorado. "Mainly early American, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Poe." His favourite novels are mostly 19th-century European classics; Turgenev, Tolstoy, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy "and I try to re-read a Dickens novel each year. I guess I believe in the traditional delights of fiction." Having admired Michael Ondaatje for a long time "since the Billy The Kid book", he also praises Steven Millhauser's new book Martin Dressler: The Tale Of An American Dreamer. "I've always liked his work, it's thoughtful, very American, but European. I like that." Perhaps it is because his southern literary heritage is so much part of him that he says little about it - "I read Kate Chopin" and a nod at the mention of the late, great Peter Taylor. Frazier's preferred world is clearly of the past century and he seems to be more interested in the atmosphere created by the civil war, and its complex legacy, than in the battles. "I hate the theme park aspect of that war and the fact that so many people seem to like the idea of dressing up (as Yankees or Rebels) without any regard for what the war was about - a system which was sustained by slavery."
There is nothing disapproving about the mild Frazier: he controls his opinions and sustains his neutral tone. Later, when asked about the reaction to his book along the US west coast, he smiles at the memory of a reading in Seattle. "I had been apprehensive. Here was this southern writer, with a southern book. . . But standing at the back there were a number of people dressed up in Civil War uniforms from both sides and they seemed to be having some real fun."
Cold Mountain is, however, not ultimately a Civil War novel, he agrees. It is a book about the effects of war and yes, it is a romance. "I think I liked the idea of a man trying to make sense of things, of himself and of this situation he finds himself in." A typical pause is followed by Frazier recalling an initial dust jacket for the book - "it was going to have soldiers and flags and battle stuff and all . . . I didn't like it, it was all wrong." The book does not conform to notions of the standard romance, the love story being filtered through Frazier's cerebral approach to life. His central protagonists are a singular pairing, both outsiders, and both, he feels, "the type of people who are prone to depression. They want things to be perfect and suffer because they are not and can't be." Another aspect of the book which will surprise readers is that although he is most assuredly a southerner, and as a writer most assuredly believes in the importance of regionalism, he does not view his book as an obviously southern one. "I know that. I think people always think of the south, or at least of southern fiction and expect Faulkner, long sentences, lots of words." He shudders. Does he not admire Faulkner's work? Polite yet honest, he says, "well, I guess I read too much of him at college. I think it is bad what happens to the books we read at college. . . having to read them and all. I had this book of Faulkner's books and read them all. Maybe I should go back to him?"
Frazier's book has been compared with the work of Cormac MacCarthy. But though Mac Carthy's physical world is only about 40 miles removed from Frazier's, his writing is very different. The more one considers Cold Mountain as a traditional novel, the more offbeat it seems. The prose is highly descriptive but also curiously flat while the dialogue is often cryptic. Take a typical exchange between the dislocated, pilgrim-like Inman and a woman he meets on his travels -"You fresh from killing men in St Petersburg?" she said. He said: "Well, there's the other side to that. Seems like men have been doing their best to kill me for quite some time." Elsewhere, in one of the many flashbacks to Inman's war-experience, is a brief conversation about the name of a star. A boy asks Inman how he knows the name. Inman replies: "I read it in a book." When the boy disputes the information, announcing, "It ain't God's name." Inman as laconic as ever - as laconic as Frazier - says, "How would you ever come to know God's name for that star?"
Frazier's achievement is to have captured a period atmosphere without attempting pastiche. "I did a lot of research, about three times as much as I did for my college dissertation. I wanted the names of things people used, domestic utensils. Not to have people reaching for their dictionaries but by placing them in context, letting people know what these things were for. Yes, I wanted to create the world of the past, a past that seems to have been forgotten."
War remains awkwardly placed in the American collective memory. Born in 1950, Frazier was destined for Vietnam but for the vagaries of the draft lottery which kept him at home. "My roommate picked 19. That was it, he was on his way. I was lucky, I picked 300 and something." Aware that his generation never asked questions about the second World War, Frazier comments on his father, "he had a good job in the war. He had to deliver aircraft. They went all over the place. But they weren't allowed to open the orders until they were airborne." Vietnam veterans such as Tobias Wolff, Larry Heinemann, Michael Herr, Tim O'Brien and Robert Stone have turned their experiences into literature. Frazier still believes America is waiting for its great second World War novel. Mailer's The Naked And The Dead (1949) was too soon, too angry. "But I remember being here in Co Clare and a group of elderly Americans were discussing the war and one of them said how they had hit Japanese soldiers on the head with a hammer. The lady behind the bar said `we'll have enough of that now'." Early in the novel he uses that image, of dying men's skulls being smashed by hammer blows.
Americans remain both detached from and torn by their civil war. "The old hatreds are still there. My grandfather was born in 1876, he was very bitter . . . " Frazier's father always told him stories and that helped feed his own sense of history. But the story of his great grandfather - "on my father's mother's side" - which inspired his novel was one he was only told relatively recently. "It was about six or seven years ago. I don't know why it was so late, but I know had I heard it before, I would have remembered it. The idea of a man going to war, being wounded then deserting, only to die in a shoot-out - well, that's the sort of story a 12-year-old remembers."
The second-highest peak in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Cold Mountain is a place Frazier knows well. "It's about 6,000 feet . . . with all the trees there's not much of a view, I can remember going up with my father and he could remember it from the late 1920s or so when it was more open." The young Frazier grew up shooting "and all the usual outdoor stuff". Even now, where he lives outside Raleigh in North Carolina, he has witnessed the urbanisation of his horse ranch during the past six years. Yet in the novel he does not romanticise the landscape. Blasted by war, it is as if nature itself is in turmoil. "Yes," he thinks, "everything has become harder for Inman, even the land."
Quiet, gentle, remote rather like its author, Cold Mountain is a strange, even surreal book with flashes of bizarre humour. "I just think we should remember these stories, and pay closer attention to the things that have happened. Just because they're in the past, doesn't mean they're gone."
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier is published by Sceptre, price £10 in the UK