Rose TremainRose Tremain
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Biography
Novelist Rose Tremain was born in 1943 in London. She was educated at the Sorbonne and is a graduate of the University of East Anglia, where she taught creative writing from 1988-95. Her publications include novels and short-story collections, and she is also the author of a number of radio and television plays, including Temporary Shelter, which won a Giles Cooper Award, and One Night In Winter, first broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in December 2001. She was awarded an honorary LittD by the University of East Anglia in 2000.
Her first novel, Sadler's Birthday, was published in 1976. This was followed by Letter to Sister Benedicta (1978), The Cupboard (1981) and The Swimming Pool Season (1985), which won the Angel Literary Award. Restoration (1989), set during the reign of Charles II, tells the story of Robert Merivel, an anatomy student and Court favourite, who falls in love with the King's mistress. The novel won the Angel Literary Award, the Sunday Express Book of the Year award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. It was made into a film in 1996.
Her other novels include Sacred Country (1992), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and the prestigious Prix Fémina Etranger (France), about a young girl's crisis of gender and identity; The Way I Found Her (1997), a psychological thriller set in Paris; and Music and Silence (1999), winner of the Whitbread Novel Award, a historical novel set in the early seventeenth century, the story of an English lute player, Peter Claire, employed at the Danish Court to play for King Christian IV. The Colour (2003), set in New Zealand at the time of the West Coast Gold Rush in the 1860s, was shortlisted for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Rose Tremain has published several collections of short stories, including The Colonel's Daughter and Other Stories (1984), The Garden of the Villa Mollini and Other Stories (1987) and Evangelista's Fan and Other Stories (1994).
She was chosen as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists' in a promotion by the literary magazine Granta in 1983, and was a judge for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1988 and in 2000. She reviews and broadcasts regularly for press and radio, and lives in Norfolk and London.
Rose Tremain's later books are a collection of short stories: The Darkness of Wallis Simpson (2005); and a novel, The Road Home (2007), shortlisted for the 2007 Costa Novel Award and winner of the 2008 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel is Trespass (2010).
Rose Tremain was awarded a CBE in 2007.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Drama, Fiction, Short stories
Bibliography
Sadler's Birthday Macdonald & Jane's, 1976
Letter to Sister Benedicta Macdonald & Jane's, 1978
The Cupboard Macdonald, 1981
The Colonel's Daughter and Other Stories Hamish Hamilton, 1984
Journey to the Volcano Hamish Hamilton, 1985
The Swimming Pool Season Hamish Hamilton, 1985
The Garden of the Villa Mollini and Other Stories Hamish Hamilton, 1987
Restoration Hamish Hamilton, 1989
Sacred Country Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992
Evangelista's Fan and Other Stories Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994
Collected Short Stories Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996
The Way I Found Her Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997
Music and Silence Chatto & Windus, 1999
The Colour Chatto & Windus, 2003
The Darkness of Wallis Simpson Bloomsbury, 2005
The Road Home Chatto & Windus, 2007
Great Escapes (contributor) Collins & Brown, 2008
Trespass Chatto & Windus, 2010
Prizes and awards
1984 Dylan Thomas Award (for four short stories, three from 'The Colonel's Daughter')
1984 Giles Cooper Award (radio play) Temporary Shelter
1985 Angel Literary Award The Swimming Pool Season
1989 Angel Literary Award Restoration
1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year Restoration
1990 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Restoration
1992 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) Sacred Country
1993 Prix Fémina Etranger (France) Sacred Country
1999 Whitbread Novel Award Music and Silence
2004 Orange Prize for Fiction (shortlist) The Colour
2006 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award (shortlist) The Darkness of Wallis Simpson
2007 CBE
2007 Costa Novel Award (shortlist) The Road Home
2008 Good Housekeeping Book Award (best fiction) The Road Home
2008 Orange Prize for Fiction The Road Home
Critical Perspective
Rose Tremain is an outstanding example of the way in which a fine 'literary' writer can sometimes develop into a popular one. Her novels are both sophisticated and entertaining: they can captivate readers with sensuous - and at times sensual - pleasures in return for the demands she makes. Her body of work is diverse: eight novels to date, several volumes of short stories, a children's book, as well as award-winning radio and television plays. Even the two 'historical novels' for which she is best known, Restoration (1989), set during the reign of Charles II, and Music and Silence (1999), which takes place in Denmark during 1629-30, are very different in tone. Both brilliantly fabricate their seventeeth century characters' mentality and language, that era's religious attitudes, medical practices, social customs. Their human fears and foibles - (over) indulgence in food, drink, and especially sex - bring them alive to us. Tremain's trademark is the atmospheric recreation of place and personality; tangible details of lives, whether peasant or aristocrat (and, in most of her other books, the modern middle-classes). However, they are playing with the genre, for instance, Restoration's main protagonist addresses the reader familiarly, while in Music and Silence the characters themselves narrate successive sections, giving a kaleidoscope of differing viewpoints. Tremain habitually sets several thematic threads running throughout a book; they criss-cross in certain incidents, their resolution having to be 'earned' as much as contrived. Such facility with modern fictional techniques is easily explainable. She taught for many years on the famed Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia, beneficently influencing numerous young novelists from Kazuo Ishiguro to Andrew Miller.
When Granta magazine selected Rose Tremain as one of its 'Best of Young British Novelists' back in 1983, she was the author of three novels dominated - in contrast to her later celebrations of the pleasure principle - by themes of ageing and death. Sadler's Birthday (1976) concerned the life of a veteran butler; The Cupboard (1981) reflected on a writer's past. Her second novel, Letter to Sister Benedict (1978), takes place in the mind of a widow coming to terms with her husband's paralysis then death following a stroke. It is written in the form of a series of letters addressed, though apparently never sent, to a favourite nun at the convent school she had attended many years before in India. What makes this otherwise modest book significant in Tremain's development is that an increasingly comic note begins to be heard above its ostensibly sombre theme, as Ruby Constant confesses her dysfunctional family's secrets to the silent nun, each more lurid than the last. Tremain's characters from then onwards typically indulge their sexual weaknesses, but are viewed with a kind of inclusive sympathy: the persistence of love in all its forms is an ongoing theme in her books.
Rose Tremain's own student years in France at the Sorbonne are no doubt the origin of her persistent celebration of the French food-and-drink culture, and incidental to a number of her best short stories such as 'My Wife is a White Russian', first published in that 1983 issue of Granta. The sensuous appreciation of food, and its tantalising absence, is also apparent in The Way I Found Her (1997), her Paris-based recent adventure novel about an adolescent English boy's attachment to a successful woman author of 'Medieval Romances', who then mysteriously disappears. A wonderfully exuberant birthday feast takes place midway through The Swimming Pool Season (1985), Tremain's most enjoyable early novel 'After the rich pots of pâté, the trout come steaming to the table smelling of caraway and wine crispy ducks surrounded by the vegetable compote and served with a frothy cider sauce'. The book switches between a collective portrait of Pomerac, a sleepy French village with a cast of locals both endearing and intransigent, and the more emotionally repressed Oxford associates of in-comers Larry and Miriam Kendall. A tangled network of fraught and loving relationships is revealed: between husbands and wives, children and parents, the old ways and the new, and, most decisively, between the village's social hierarchy and the land itself. Larry, having failed in business and apparently in his relationships, becomes fixated on constructing a swimming pool as his path to redemption.
Tremain's status changed decisively with the publication of her best-selling novel Restoration, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and later made into a film featuring Hugh Grant and Meg Ryan. On one level it is a lightly written 'bawdy romp' set in the London and Norfolk of Charles II's reign, which turns into something more serious. On another, it is a bravura exercise in storytelling, as its blustering protagonist, Robert Merivel, periodically makes clear to readers: 'You have all too clear a picture of me now, have you not? I am, precisely as I suggested, in the middle of a story, but who can say yet - not you, not I - how it will end?' During the first half he is a hard-drinking, randy medical student who gains the King's patronage by accidentally curing a favourite dog, and then agreeing to become a complaisant husband to 'fair Celia', the current royal mistress. Merivel's own spiritual 'restoration' takes place in the second half, when, apparently deserted by the fickle Charles, he is driven to serve as a physician in a Bedlam run by Quakers in the East Anglian Fens. Having enjoyed 'love of the most Profane kind' with one of the female inmates, he leaves with her to encounter the Great Plague and the Fire of London.
Tremain's book, the hauntingly intense Music and Silence, set initially at the court of the Danish King Christian IV, again focuses on royal servants and their relationship with the Crown. It is psychologically darker than Restoration, more poetic in its imagery, and told from a multiplicity of viewpoints. The superstitious and fearful King, obsessed by his wife's increasing indifference, can be soothed only by the lute-playing of Peter Claire, a handsome English musician whom he comes to think of as a protecting angel. Claire himself conducts a Romeo-and-Juliet affair with Emilia, a young servant of the Queen's with her own troubled past. Looming over all is the ruthless scheming of Queen Kirsten herself, determined to control her own destiny and join her German secret lover. Plot is really secondary to this novel's richly orchestral sweep of theme and counter-theme: magic and wonder, love and betrayal, darkness and light, music and silence.
Dr Jules Smith, 2002
Author statement
'I suspect that many writers deceive themselves about why they write. My self-deception is that I create in order to understand and that the final end of it all might be wisdom. This means that I deliberately seek out the strange, the unfamiliar, even the unknowable, as subjects for my novels and trust my imagination to illuminate them to the point where both I and the reader can see them with a new clarity. The writers I admire most seem to have this kind of goal: to comprehend experience distant from their own, in nature, place and time, and to let the extraordinary cast new light on the quotidian.'
Further reading on this site
Cambridge Seminar
The Cambridge Seminar takes place every two years. It was last held over a week in mid-July 2009. The British Council's Cambridge Seminar on contemporary literature has influenced discussion, performance... more... (30/06/2003)
Walberberg Seminar
The Walberberg Seminar is the British Council's largest and longest running annual literature seminar overseas. The most recent Walberberg Seminar was held in January 2009 at Akademie Schmockwitz, Berlin on... more... (15/12/2004)
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