In his new novel, Tim Lott examines the upheavals of the 1980s through the story of one couple in his native south London. The era's ethos of greed and consumerism still prevails, he tells Helen Meany.
For Tim Lott, the 1980s was the decade that has never ended. The transformation of Britain from its 1970s state in which, he writes, coffee was instant, bread was sliced and the weather was rainy, is still in progress. All the more difficult, then, to try to capture the impact of the Thatcher years in a novel, as he has just done with Rumours Of A Hurricane. His third and most ambitious book, it is set in his native London, a city whose social geography is inscribed in his consciousness and which is also the setting of his previous novel, White City Blue (which won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1999) and his memoir, The Scent of Dried Roses. Talking to him on a recent visit to Dublin, it's clear that he has the acute awareness of the social, political and economic shifts of post-war Britain that is characteristic of his generation of English and Scottish writers.
Rumours of A Hurricane had two false starts, with 70,000 words consigned to the bin before Lott settled on a structure and a point of view. The narrative filters the upheavals of the decade through the perspective of Charlie Buck, a compositor at the Times who lives with his wife, Maureen, and their disaffected son, Robert, in a council house in west London.
"When you're confined by a time frame you have a cage around you," Lott says. "And, looking back at a period like this, there's a temptation to try to put too much in, to have too many characters. After a couple of attempts, I realised that I had to keep it simple."
Opening dramatically with Charlie's suicidal lunge under the wheels of a lorry in 1991, the novel circles back to the momentous general election of 1979, that "unacknowledged fulcrum of a year", when Charlie is 50 and senses, vaguely, that something is stirring. Over the years that follow, Charlie loses his job in the Wapping shake-up, Maureen finds work and self-esteem, they buy their council house and "trade up" for a dream house in Milton Keynes, where their marriage begins to disintegrate. The property boom, technological change, the Falklands war, privatisation, deregulation, tax cuts, race riots, trade union decline, the Big Bang - all the decade's fluctuations are chronicled with the pace - and broad brushstrokes - of a TV mini-series.
"It's hard to avoid featuring certain key events," Lott says, acknowledging that the novel sometimes sacrifices subtlety and ambiguity to the exigencies of plot and chronological fidelity. "One can be over-subtle. I wanted this to have a certain frankness and straightforwardness."
The novel observes Charlie and Maureen compassionately - and humorously - at key moments in their history, calibrating the ways in which change affects them. Charlie is persuaded by his brash brother into huge financial risks and is soon out of his depth; Maureen thrives on the possibility of material success and independence, of power.
Her gradual metamorphosis from a weight-obsessed housewife who puts on her best dress to watch Dallas to an entrepreneur who sacks an employee for turning up five minutes late is vividly portrayed. She and Charlie are both grappling with what the narrator calls "the secret truth": "that things change. That things are change".
"It's an attempt to draw a realistic portrait of a time in British history," Lott says, "and to sum up a decade through the minutiae of personal lives, the lives of ordinary people." Trawling through old newspapers and mail-order shopping catalogues, he immersed himself in the period, trying to recover and record the details of lives that "are otherwise not recorded", of clothes, consumer items, "things that are ephemeral and disposable".
His own memories of being "a Thatcherite yuppie" in south London were reawakened by his research, but he was determined to avoid the nostalgia of a 46-year-old writer remembering his youth. Above all, he did not want to be patronising towards the people he was writing about.
"It's difficult to create a portrait of any class, especially in England where class is so subtle and fluid. Yet, you can tell if it strikes a false note. I wrote from a position of sympathy, above all. The English literary scene is so steeped in disdain, in contempt. I worked hard to avoid that."
Lott's childhood in the "subtopia" of Southall, south London, was a touchstone too. In his fascinating, delicately wrought memoir, The Scent of Dried Roses (1996), he described his journey away from his working-class background and the pain that accompanied his estrangement. He is an acute and sympathetic observer of the signifiers of class, first noted by him as a child helping his father in his greengrocers shop in Notting Hill, where, he says, he was patronised by the middle classes.
Although he quotes the truism that we're all middle class now, this really only applies to economics, he thinks. The "enduring obscenity" of private schools is indicative of the divisions and barriers that still remain. "How many working-class doctors or lawyers are there?" he asks rhetorically. He is obviously angry about persistent inequalities, and punctuates his calm conversation with sudden bursts of irritation.
While he is reluctant to judge the credibly fallible characters he has created in Rumours of A Hurricane, he is unreservedly critical of the 1980s ethos of greed and consumerism, which, he thinks, still prevails in the UK - along with the culture of working as hard as possible. "We've got it all wrong, this idea that it's all about work, that work makes us happy and ennobles us. It's your personal relationships that determine whether you're happy, not money. Money is not important - unless you're poor, of course. The gap between being poor and being OK is huge but the gap between being OK and being wealthy is small."
This emphasis on work could perhaps reflect the absence of a sense of personal identity; if nothing else, work supplies people with a readymade role and self-definition, so that, increasingly, we are what we do. " Yes, of course. Also, we have a particular problem with identity in England, and a sense of guilt about Englishness itself. I used to have this, but I got sick of feeling bad about myself and feeling guilty about things, about being white, male, English . . ."
Lott's experience of four years of severe depression in his 30s changed him profoundly and is analysed with great insight in his memoir. It also has contributed to his sympathetic fictional characterisations. "If you want to understand people, you've got to find where they're damaged," he says.
"Depression forces you to think about yourself and your life very honestly. It's a humbling experience, it breaks your pride and makes you learn the truth about yourself. It makes you much more empathetic and responsive too . . . I cry now," he adds with some hesitation. "It has given me a much richer emotional life. Some of that is simply to do with getting older, I suppose. When you're young all you see is yourself and your ambitions. You start out with the ridiculous idea that you can determine your own destiny. Then you gradually learn that life is bigger than you, life can break you on its wheels. You don't know what's going to happen - but there's a comfort in that. If you have doubt, you have hope."
As "a true English pragmatist" he has adopted a practical Zen outlook that focuses on "one's helplessness in the world, that everything is in a state of fluidity. We can't concretise the world into a series of stiff and rigid postures. Our problems come from trying to control what cannot be controlled. The more you hold on to things, theworse they are. You have to let go, or you become a wreck. You have to embrace change."
Or else, as Charlie and Maureen discover in Rumours Of A Hurricane, change will sweep you in its wake.
Rumours Of A Hurricane is published by Viking. £14.99 sterling in UK