Rupert Thomson: ‘We smashed the furniture in my dead dad’s house – and got a writ for noise pollution’

Novelist Rupert Thomson photographed outside Andrew Edmunds restaurant, Soho

Rupert Thomson is reliving the moment in 1993 when his girlfriend told him he was on Granta magazine’s decennial Best of Young British Novelists list, one of the most coveted of literary honours. “She did something she would never normally do: burst into the room I was working in, with the newspaper. My little heart leapt in my breast.”

Except, it transpired, Thomson wasn’t among the authors pictured in the paper: she had mistaken another writer’s headshot for him. “It was Jeanette Winterson.”

One can see why Thomson’s girlfriend – now his wife, the writer Katharine Norbury – so readily assumed he was on the list: a novelist of his gifts should have been a shoo-in. But in the years since, it’s been the same story over and over.

Thomson’s novels – other-worldly, ambiguous, but always as gripping as thrillers – get adoring reviews, but remain mysteriously overlooked by the panjandrums who bestow prizes and draw up literary rolls of honour. It’s a sad blot on the Booker Prize that he has never been so much as longlisted.

Now 68, Thomson – who I’m talking to in a pleasingly creaky and cramped single-room members’ club in Soho – is svelte and preternaturally youthful looking, although he no longer sports the slightly Winterson-esque bouffant hairstyle of yore. Passing writers greet him warmly: he is a much-loved fixture of the London literary scene.

And yet the paradox, as he admits with a wry grin, is that “I’ve become well known for being criminally overlooked. I’ve reached a point where I don’t care.”

Perhaps the problem is that Thomson’s novels are strong meat for soft-stomached prize jurors. The Book of Revelation (2000) centres on a male ballet dancer abducted and sexually abused over several weeks by three women. Death of a Murderer (2007) sees the policeman assigned to guard the freshly dead body of Myra Hindley communing with her ghost.

Thomson’s new novel has a typically macabre title: How to Make a Bomb. “My American publisher has changed it, because their lawyers said it might be seen as incitement. It’s got a kind of Jane Austen title, Dartmouth Park [named after the north London area where the protagonist lives]”.

The book was inspired by an alarming incident in Norway, when Thomson was travelling to the airport on the Bergen Light Rail after a literary festival. “A young woman got on and took out her travel card and dabbed it on the card reader, and it made that beep sound – and it suddenly filled me with a feeling of nausea. It was the fact that it was all unthinking, as if she no longer had any free will. I had this sense of being trapped in a world in which everything around me had been designed and manufactured.”

In the opening pages of this typically riveting and enigmatic book, Thomson’s protagonist, historian Philip Notman, undergoes an identical experience. But whereas for Thomson the sense of disorientation faded once he got home, Philip becomes so disturbed by having “seen through the fabric of reality” that he leaves his wife, travels across Europe in search of meaning, and eventually plots a terrorist atrocity to draw attention to the truths he’s discovered since throwing off his blinkers.

Suppressed grief: the death of Thomson’s parents left a profound effect on him – Rupert Thomson

In dealing with Philip’s sudden, unpleasant epiphany, the book shares with many of Thomson’s other novels what he calls “a preoccupation with a life interrupted in a dramatic and traumatic way”. This is hardly a surprising concern for somebody whose mother dropped dead while playing tennis when he was eight.

From the moment of her death, she became a blank space: he has no memories of her. Recently he has been trying to write about her: “I ended up having a dialogue with a part of myself I hadn’t known existed, that’s quite menacing and quite frightening: the part of myself that I perceive as guarding the memories of my mother. So it’s a kind of Cerberus figure.

“I would say to it: let me have my memories back before I die. I understand you tried to protect me when I was eight years old but I’m now 68, I don’t feel like I need protecting anymore.” A recent session with the psychotherapist Susie Orbach for her podcast, The Writer’s Dilemma – his first ever therapy session – has encouraged him to be “less combative, more tender” with this other self, and he is hopeful of unlocking his lost “eight years of memories”.

In 1984 his father died, an event which seems to have released a disorientating wave of suppressed grief within Thomson and his two younger brothers, Robin and Ralph: the three of them took the odd decision to return and live in the family home in Eastbourne for several months, along with Ralph’s wife and baby. Rupert and Robin went wild, downing their father’s unused prescription pills. “We didn’t know what to do with his furniture so we smashed it up. After a couple of days we received a writ for noise pollution”. Ralph and his wife took to carrying flick-knives to protect themselves from the pair.

‘I’ve become well known for being criminally overlooked. I’m at a point where I don’t care’ – Geoff Pugh for the Telegraph

Thomson covered this period in his superb 2010 memoir This Party’s Got to Stop and writing it prompted him to track down Ralph, then living in Shanghai, after a 20-year estrangement. I say I find it difficult to see the Rupert of the book, who wrecks nightclubs and pees on cinema floors, in the seemingly well-adjusted figure I’m talking to. “Is that the word you’d use? Well adjusted? I must have a very good front going.”

In the Eighties Thomson gave up a promising career in advertising to write. He answered an advert for a winter caretaker for a house in Tuscany, which turned out to belong to Miriam Margolyes. “Her first question was ‘are you gay?’ and I said, ‘I don’t usually sleep with men’ and she went ‘Nor do I’, so that was a good start. And then she said ‘are you a kleptomaniac?’ and I said there was a short period in my life when I used to steal books because I didn’t feel I could afford them, and she was pleased with my honesty.”

There he wrote his first novel, Dreams of Leaving (1987), and has returned there to write many times since. The generosity of friends like Margolyes in providing such havens is invaluable, he says, because of “the sea change in publishing after the financial crisis, when suddenly we weren’t paid according to how much our work was valued critically, but according to how many units we sold. The creative classes are part of the precariat now: we’re paid the absolute minimum, advances are now more or less non-existent”.

The Insult and How To Make a Bomb, both by Rupert Thomson

He has been “forced to diversify into TV and film a little” and is “creating a new TV series for a particular British actor – I can’t say who.”

Although prize money has never boosted his coffers, Thomson can draw consolation from the fervent admiration of famous fans. One passage from his 1996 novel The Insult has been set to music by John Cale; and David Bowie included the same work on a list of his 100 favourite books. “In the Seventies I loved [Bowie] so much I never dared to go and see him live in case he was a disappointment: I had too much invested in him.

“His manager told me she would pass on a copy of my memoir to him – I wrote about us playing Moonage Daydream while we were burning all our possessions – but I never heard from him. My wife says I’m idiotic: I should have tried harder to contact him. He really revered writers and she says maybe, difficult as it is to believe, he was shy of us. But I do sometimes think that being on that list makes up for all the prizes I’ve never won.”

‘How to Make a Bomb’, out now, is published by Apollo (RRP£20)

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