Break in transmission
Francine Stock is an ace interviewer; I am not. Sabine Durrant is unwell and I am a late replacement, having barely started Stock’s debut novel. We meet at a soulless hotel near Broadcasting House; I drag her off to a hotel more conducive to the instant, in-depth conversation the conventions of ‘the interview’ demand; we get lost, she’s ridiculously nice about it; a taxi driver points us in the right direction; we eventually find it, start talking… and my tape recorder breaks down.
In the face of my inability to recover from this calamity and make usable notes, Francine Stock remains charming, civilised, utterly nice. It has taken two hours to get her lost in central London and walk three times as far as we needed to, but she doesn’t flinch. She bids me a mildly bemused farewell and goes back to the Beeb to present that evening’s Front Row on Radio 4; I go off to buy a new, enhanced tape recorder (with mike). We have arranged to start again at her home the following morning; which is fortunate or this would be the end.
I want to describe her house as “lovely”, but it isn’t quite that ostentatious: it is a delightful, serviceable, quiet house in the one nice bit of not-nice-at-all Roehampton. It seems absolutely right and I think about doing Mr Blobby-like things to test just how accommodating she is, but reckon that her capacity for understanding would outrun my destructiveness.
She introduces her husband, Robert Lance Hughes, who is not a property developer. This is how he is usually described in profiles, but the reality is more complicated – urban regeneration, social housing, “brownfield sites”; complicated stuff that gets in the way here. So he is not a property developer, and they did not meet when he was converting her loft, as is usually suggested; they had already met and he gave her an absurdly low quote just to get into a loft-converting situation with her. Loft at first sight.
She provides excellent coffee and a croissant; I am pawed by a lovable Labrador puppy – a cross, with an extra-playfulness gene; I catch a brief glimpse of elder daughter Rebecca, who is seven, unwell, off school but hungry and looking for a slice of bread.
We are here to talk about Stock’s first novel, A Foreign Country, published this week by Chatto. But also about life as a broadcaster and the fact that four years ago, just after the birth of her second daughter, Eleanor, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. It had spread to the lymph nodes of her armpit; the diagnosis was bleak. The novel; the media; the illness; take your pick.
The Express already has. It interviewed her last week and devoted one short paragraph to her novel, the rest of the page to her fight against cancer. “I was the woman with everything: A great job, a loving husband, two beautiful daughters … and breast cancer” ran the headline of the piece, by the unfortunately named Anna Pukas. All true, but all, Stock says, entirely beside the point.
“I was really pissed off by the article, but I wasn’t surprised. They said at the start we’ll mention the illness, but it was about nothing else. Being ill is so personal; it wasn’t a career move; I don’t like to see it turned into a simple story of triumph over adversity. The shit happens …” Her illness hangs over our conversation like the murky sky outside. We have to talk about it, but that time can’t be captured: the two years of mis-diagnosis; the year of treatment (chemotherapy and then a revolutionary treatment with a good chance of killing the cancer and a bad chance of killing the patient); the fact that she had a young daughter, a new baby, a gambler’s vision of the future. She made it, no one can ever say it won’t return, she has three-monthly check-ups; the anger of the mis-diagnosis, the fear, the pain have subsided; her hair has grown back – she is extremely beautiful. She has recovered and would rather not dwell on it.
“I don’t want to turn the illness into some kind of heroic narrative,” she says patiently. “Illness isn’t the first thing that I think about myself, and I would hate it to be the first thing others think about me. Even in cancer wards, when things seem pretty grim, people are still getting on with being themselves. Illness isn’t the great leveller it’s reckoned to be; illness brings out people’s characters even more clearly than before.
‘It’s a double bind: you don’t want to make it sound as if you don’t want to talk about it because you’re ashamed of it; but on the other hand I don’t think it has any heroic function and I hate this kind of double depiction that you are either the brave survivor or the tragic victim. You’re a person who gets ill, and some people get better and some people don’t.” Touching wood, she says the signs are good.
The central character in her book is a tough elderly lady called Daphne; the plot hinges on her actions during the war. Stock says that when she began the book, she thought of Daphne as the elderly lady she might never be but “now has every expectation of being”. The illness intensified her desire to write a novel and, by forcing her to reduce her broadcasting commitments, gave her the time to write it. “There is nothing like the prospect of dying to make you think about the things you value. I thought, if I do want to do this, I had better do it now, so I did.”
She already had a contract with Chatto to write a non-fiction book about marriage, but abandoned that to work on the novel. The germ of it was a brief reference in a book to the sinking of a ship carrying Italian deportees from the UK to Canada in which hundreds drowned. The fictional character Daphne was implicated in the decision to deport them and, 50 years on, has to explain her choices to her beloved son Oliver, a TV journalist reporting a war in a republic of the disintegrating Soviet Union (the book is set in 1990, with a long flashback to 1940).
I suspected another publisher-driven example of celebrity novel-writing, but this was dispelled by reading it and meeting the author. It is tightly plotted, intelligently written, at times very subtle; packed and breathless in places, but well-observed, believed in. “I don’t think it’s a brilliant book,” says Stock. “But I think it’s an interesting one. I surprised myself while I was writing it because I realised this was what I really liked doing.”
She had written short stories while studying languages at Jesus College, Oxford, and had always wanted to write fiction. High-profile jobs on The World At One, The Money Programme and Newsnight, and the need to pay the bills, intervened. Even before the cancer was diagnosed, she had been pulling back from the frontline (she left Newsnight in 1993) and would have written a novel eventually. Illness concentrated the mind. Age – she is now 40 – and the death of her father just as she was beginning the book were also factors. Almost two decades spent reporting and presenting – it’s Tuesday so it must be Uzbekistan – gave way to family, self-assessment and reckoning. The book is called A Foreign Country; you will understand the reference.
One pat theory is to see her moving from the neat, packaged world of TV news to the messy, ambiguous multi-layeredness of the novel: from the boxed-in fictions of TV reality to the open-ended truths of a book. Pat but plausible. “The novel tries to express the messiness of life, the way that life doesn’t resolve itself,” she says. “I was very much aware as I did it that there were easy options, ways I could tie things up, but they all felt completely wrong.
“I’m attracted by the ambiguity that is possible in a novel. I don’t like the way in journalism that you have to decide what you think about something immediately. There are some things that just can’t be expressed that way; there are a lot of things that can’t be expressed in terms of a string of abstract nouns, and there are some things that can only be expressed by describing the way someone moves their hands.”
In the book, Oliver, the journalist, takes some barbs from the author, who used to cover the same territory, make the same compromises. She writes: “Oliver had moved to the Balkans, where he was making a history of a town, which centuries of priests and generals had squabbled over. He would deliver his verdict in a month or so.” And: “By then, it would be stripped of its muddle, of the confusion and ambiguity that had dogged his previous visit. Audiences didn’t like muddle.”
Stock says she enjoyed her years reporting – the Wall came down, the world was being remade – but has drawn a line under that period. She is moving towards more culturally oriented broadcasting (Front Row twice a week, an upcoming Arena programme about Salman Rushdie) and is hard at work on a second novel. Occasionally she gets the media junkie’s twinge of regret that she isn’t doing that night’s big interview, but it soon passes. “My imaginative world has become the constant,” she says, then regrets it. Too pompous. But she means it: novel-writing has become a “compulsion”. Stock, in the nicest possible way, wants to leave the smooth certainties of the edit suite and search for truth among the rushes.
← Bach to the future
Beethoven's right-hand man →
