Leo Benedictus: Or Is It All A Ploy?

This interview started out as a conversation with debut author Leo Benedictus but slowly became a meta-discussion of how the interviewer would eventually write him up.

That is to say, everything below is an accurate snippet of the author and his book.

But it is also all a lie.

For example, the interviewer has redacted from the transcription a lengthy anecdote about how he tweeted a celebrity who then replied, which led him to think they had a familiarity in real life.

For example, the interviewer has cut out a ten minute tangential discussion about celebrities who close themselves off from the world.

All these asides, however, are within the realm of The Afterparty, the debut novel from Leo Benedictus. Revealing too much of the plot would spoil the surprises contained within. All you need to know is, in The Afterparty, an aspiring author sends chapters from his book to a literary agent, a book about a whodunnit at an A list celebrity’s party. But all is definitely not what it seems. And Leo Benedictus will eventually appear in his own book.

As I listen to the transcription, I can clearly hear a loud conversation in French from the table next to us in the bustling café. It didn’t affect our conversation at the time but gives the recording a new reality on listening back to it as I auto-translate words I recognise.

Leo Benedictus is wearing a shirt, is mostly clean-shaven and very talkative about his book.

But enough of my lies about him. Here is the conversation itself…

> Who am I interviewing today?

You’re interviewing Leo Benedictus, author.

> Do you mean Leo Benedictus the writer, or ‘Leo Benedictus, the writer’ (you might have to read The Afterparty at this point to familiarise yourself with Leo’s mischievous writing technique)?

It’s something you’ll have to consider. I could, in fact, be an actor hired by Leo Benedictus, the writer, to pretend to be Leo Benedictus, the writer and you wouldn’t necessarily know. It’s been done before.

> Firstly, being a character in your book, what do you think of this niche strand of literature, where authors have appeared in their own work?

I love it. I’ve always enjoyed it as an idea but have usually found it unsatisfying by the end. I remember very clearly reading New York Trilogy by Paul Auster years ago, and in ‘City of Glass’, a phone rings, and the character, an author, answers it and the person says ‘Is this Paul Auster, the novelist?’ For me, when I read that, I hadn’t realised you could do that. It’s breaking a rule, surely! It was an incredibly exciting moment, really transformative. But much as I love Paul Auster’s work, that idea doesn’t really seem to go anywhere. It’s just an interesting spiral that turns in on itself. I am a nerd for tricks in storytelling. I was very clearly to set out to make the metafictional devices you’d see in Paul Auster or Calvino – usually men, oddly – work. To make the story turn on that.

> The Afterparty starts with the arrival of a manuscript in a literary agent’s hands. You very wryly early on comment on the work by having her refer to the manuscript as superb…

I have praised my own book a lot… in my own book.

> Where do you go from there?

On the one hand, you find yourself having to write things because of the story you’re telling. You have an idea for the story that isn’t fully-formed and as you write, you end up joining the dots. Clearly if I’m writing a novel about a novelist sending a novel to a literary agent who then represents them, the literary agent would say, ‘I really like your novel.’ That wouldn’t not occur. At the same time, I see a lot of humility from literary authors a lot of the time, particularly debutantes. It’s unattractive and inaccurate if you’re proclaiming yourself as a master. At the heart of what we’re all doing though is exultation and excitement that you’ve written something wonderful. I wouldn’t have written a book if I didn’t think I wasn’t writing something wonderful. It’s an interesting thing; it feels like a dirty secret that you love your own book.

> It’s almost like you have to be humble about it…

Well you have to say, ‘oh, I just hope you like it... It’s just something I did. Please don’t be unkind.’

> What interests me about that feeling within your book is that you almost have to purposefully write something that feels like an early draft that a literary agent sees potential in. But as a debut author, you have to sell the premise that something has been purposefully written rough around the edges. How did that work in your brain?

That’s one of the cheats in the book. The chapters of the novel, as they are delivered, are much more polished and finished than you would probably get at the point in the process. Often, a lot of ideas in books about books take you in the direction where you find yourself writing badly on purpose. I can’t have that. I want to write well. It does something interesting to the authority in the novel – that feeling of whether you trust the author, whether you feel you’re in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. It’s the same with stand-up comedy. If you feel that, you allow certain jokes to be good jokes because you have that confidence in them. I partly undermine because people are under the impression what they’re reading is a draft. But I hope there’s enough good stuff in there to win them round.

> So many timelines, a lot of characters in different places, occupying different levels of fiction… how do you sit down and write that?

The answer in my case was, take six years to do it and plan it like crazy, with notes and notes on the notes and notes on the notes on the notes. With regards to issues of continuity in the book, the response I’ve had often is, what an unbelievably complicated thing to try to juggle! Because you have four different characters experiencing the same eighteen hour period, overlapping one another, including each other’s company, the potential for continuity errors is gigantic. If one person lights up a cigarette in one scene, I have to remember that for three other places in the book. Essentially, I did it by having a go, planning it very carefully and fixing thousands of problems to make it work. So far, I haven’t heard of any massive howlers.

> I guess, the get-out clause for any howlers is ingrained in the structure of the book’s way with fiction…

I do have this massive ‘get out of jail free’ card. I can always say, that sentence wasn’t me writing it, it was William Mendes writing it. He’s a terrible writer, I’m a brilliant one! That was just me writing in character. But I don’t think that fools anyone. I certainly have not set out to make that excuse ever but I may have to if there are mistakes. But as with every book, there are mistakes. John Sutherland did a great collection about mistakes in classic fiction so even the best writers make mistakes, which is a comfort.

> Without giving too much away, how much did the spectre of Michael Barrymore loom over the proceedings of the book?

The Michael Barrymore story was absolutely an influence. The day the book is set on, 1 April 2005, is the day after Cheryl Barrymore died, which is mentioned in the book just to pull it out a bit more. I welcome the comparison. Any novel is based on a tissue of the experiences of the author and the things they’ve read about in the world. Mine is no different. I do a lot to draw readers into that, to lay that process bare, to make them wonder what is true and what isn’t. Again, the most common response I have is, people asking whether some of the characters are real people they don’t know about. Is that a real person with a changed name? I wanted to create that effect in the book.

> I had a moment three quarters in when I started Googling characters from the book, thinking ‘I read newspapers every day. Have I missed something?’ It’s a clever trick because you’re ultimately testing the reader’s grasp on what is and isn’t fiction.

Bear in mind that some of those cases are real. In some of those cases you will have been right but the names have been changed, which makes them hard to Google. Dialogue in the book is verbatim dialogue from celebrities on TV and in interviews that I’ve lifted. There is real celebrity experience buried in the book. It’s legally fine, I’m told. One of the things I’m interested in is, to what extent is anything you come across that is mediated by newspapers or television is real? This interview itself, when you sit down to write it, you will represent the experience by cutting out some of the things I’ve said and using some of the other things I’ve said and you’ll describe me in some way. It’ll be a lie. It won’t really be the totality of who I am. At best, it’ll be an accurate snippet. But it’ll also be an inaccurate snippet. How could it not be?

> But how much of yourself do you want to be represented? Sometimes the soundbite works better than everything around it.

You’re right – I’m not craving perfect accurate representation of me…

> And that’s what’s so fascinating about the book.

There’s a line in there that sums it up: ‘The world is a novel.’ The world as we perceive it, through the media, through meeting people, it’s a novel. If you think of Russell Brand… if I say Russell Brand, immediately you have an idea of who that is, but what you bring to mind is a character, a composite of news reports and representations on TV, either when he is acting in a certain way to make you think he’s something, or when a newspaper is playing up to that idea. They are literally fictional characters with bits of real dialogue. I think that’s fascinating and that’s what I wanted to do, to take that fiction beyond the novel into the world. You said it yourself – you’re Googling my characters to see if they’re real or not.

> So is the acclaimed Guardian journalist Leo Benedictus secretly fascinated with celebrities or fascinated with our fascination with celebrity?

I’m not fascinated with celebrity enough to subscribe to Heat or Grazia but I’m very interested in the process of presenting celebrity and how that works. It happens to all journalists – you become very familiar with how it all works and when I watch television, I’m constantly analysing the way they’ve represented people or quotes have been taken and I find that entertaining. I also think celebrities are appallingly mistreated. The number of things you frequently hear about celebrities – people slag them off routinely. The usual discourse is to hate them once they’ve become successful enough for the hate not to matter anymore. I think that’s very wrong.

> Why should we read the book?

It’s such fun; it’s such a cracking story. The people who have read it invariably finish it in a day or two. They don’t expect it to be such a romp; that builds up to a central event and rolls down the hill in the second half. If the ideas and everything sound interesting to you, that’s terrific… but you won’t be bored reading it!