Novels are an exercise in failure: Nicholas Shakespeare

You've been a journalist, a novelist, a biographer and professor. What is it like to juggle so many identities?

They are all part of the same identity, kind of like a potpourri. The novel bit of it is still the great game in town, although its magnetism is, possibly, getting less powerful.

So being a novelist isn't the same anymore?

Mario Vargas Llosa was telling me how he can envisage the novel being reduced to a handful of practitioners, like the medieval alchemist, who hand out the manuscript to one or two devotees or disciples. Our attention span now is much more limited. We are used to tweeting in 140 characters. You have no time. Why are you going to read a novel by me?

Novels still garner sustained interest, compared to other forms of writing, like say, poetry.

When you read a great novel, it is a victory against darkness, because it shows you that you are not alone. That you, too, have the same fears that the novelist is trying to banish. When you're curled up with a novel, you are less lonely. I have a great belief that if you read a great novel, like Love in the Time of Cholera, you are a different person at the end.

And what about the author? Do novels mirror their authors?

Every line, every bit of a novel carries its author's signature. You cannot escape it. You cannot hide behind your novel. Your novel is you.

Can you elaborate?

I had gone to Tasmania once, to escape from Bruce Chatwin, whose biography I was writing. I wanted to go away from my country and culture. There, I somehow discovered that I am linked to the founding colonial father of Tasmania. Then, I discovered his daughter had married poet Mathew Arnold's brother, Thomas Arnold. In Tasmania, the other end of the earth, I discovered that I am related to the Arnolds, the Huxleys. I like the metaphor in that. I had to go to the other end, because we cannot escape who we are.

What makes a good novel?

Luck! Why is Casablanca a great movie? No one predicted that it would be an amazing movie and yet you can watch it again and again. Besides, I think all movies, all novels are exercises in failure. In fact, all art is! Anyone who says this is a great movie or a great painting should be taken and strung up, quite painfully (laughs heartily).

Can current best-sellers go on to become classics? 

In a way, best-sellers are exhausting their energy now; they will have little left to survive into the future. Personally, I think, it takes a lot of time for a novelist to arrive at his best work. It takes a long time to see things clearly. Best-sellers are more immediate.

You share your name (Shakespeare) with a seminal literary figure and your work was once mistaken as his by a French presidential candidate. Is the connection relevant at all to you?

I get into trouble when I travel. I've tried to say, ‘I'm not the direct descendant. I've descended from his grandfather’s side; I'm a cousin thirteen times removed.’ For me, it's not important. I didn't become a writer because of my name.

Still, does he inspire you?

No. He has zero impact on my work. I recognise that he is very very great, admire his language. But he is a playwright, I'm a novelist. He too, has plundered from other sources to write his plays. We all plunder...

So is there a recipe for a good novel?

At least try and do it — is the recipe.