38 The Times Magazinefew weeks before Britain went
into lockdown the novelist Rose
Tremain, now 77, travelled to
Buckingham Palace, wearing
Chanel – “It cost the price of a
small car” – to be made a dame
by the Queen.
The honour, which followed
her CBE in 2007, was the ultimate
public celebration of how, for
40 years, she has contributed to Britain’s
literary landscape, slowly carving out her
space alongside all the male greats of her
generation with a body of work that is ever
changing in themes and styles: 14 novels – the
latest out this month, once again different
from anything before it – five collections of
short stories and a slim, perfectly written,
brutally honest memoir, Rosie, which lays bare
what she calls the derelictions of her parents
throughout her upper-middle-class childhood.
When Tremain meets me at the door of
her home, the central section of a large,
subdivided white Georgian house in a leafy
suburb of Norwich, it is hard not to be
petrified. Caroline Michel, her literary agent,
friend and one-time early publisher, says that
years ago, as a young woman, she too was
petrified of Tremain – positively awestruck.
“She is incredibly strong and determined
with a steeliness,” she says. “I was very
intimidated because of how beautiful and
smart she was. She does not take hostages
and she looks at you with such directness. You
had to be precise, professional and absolutely
straight with her. You do things well for Rose;
she raises everybody’s game. But she’s also
incredibly funny and witty.”
In 1983, Tremain was one of six women
on Granta magazine’s list of the 20 best young
British novelists. Almost all of them, Tremain
included, are today highly respected – what
Ian McEwan, her lifelong friend who was also
on the list, calls “the first rank”.
“It’s not only the range Rose has, but she
has got a very powerful and warm fictional
intelligence and is terrific at character,”
McEwan says.
Ten years after that seminal 1983 list, when
putting together the 1993 selection (which
again featured only six women), the novelist
AS Byatt, who was on the judging panel,
argued that the cut-off age should be raised
from 40 to 45. Female writers with children,
she said, often start doing their best work only
when they are in their fifth decade, when
motherhood releases its grasp a bit. The age
was not raised.
Tremain published her first book, Sadler’s
Birthday, in 1976, when she was 33, by which
time she had become a mother and was
grabbing the odd hour here and there to write
while her daughter was at nursery. She was
desperate not to short-change her emotionallyas Tremain had been by her parents.
It took six years after her inclusion on
the Granta list for her fortunes to really
change, when in 1989 she published the
book that made her.
Restoration, which was later made into
a terrible film by Miramax, charts the rise
and fall of a flawed but loveable doctor in
the court of Charles II. The success of the
book, followed 17 years later by Merivel,
a sequel, means that Tremain is often
typecast as a historical novelist, but in fact
her subjects and worlds are much more
diverse and often contemporary. Her style
is constantly changing, dictated by the
subject. Sacred Country, which won the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1992, is
about a transgender child; The Road Home,
which won the Orange Prize, looks at the
immigrant experience; The Gustav Sonata,
which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction,
explores the friendship of two little boys, one
Jewish, one not, bonded by music in postwar
Switzerland. And then there are the short
story collections (the latest called The
American Lover, full of bleak, polished gems),
which often explore life with a beady eye,
revealing how it can let us down with
disappointments or cruelty or both.
I am meeting Tremain today because
of the 14th novel, Islands of Mercy, set in
Victorian Bath and Borneo, another terrific
book in which, once again, her characters
search for meaning in their lives. It involves
lesbian love in Paris, homosexual longing in
Borneo, and what McEwan calls an ability to
capture “the stench behind the drawing room”.
There is an initial aloofness about Tremain.
She has a rather clipped voice, of a kind not
heard very often these days, a legacy of her
class and her formal, distant upbringing.
The general first impression of intellectual
refinement and emotional restraint – what
she talks about later as “self-mastery” – is
heightened by her home: high ceilings, tasteful
decor in shades of pale blue and cream,
gorgeous art, polished stone hallway floor, an
immaculate cream vacuumed drawing room
carpet (not a mark on it), shelves of books in
the study where she writes, its floor-to-ceiling
window framed by thick, well-made curtains,
a ticking and chiming grandfather clock and
French windows opening on to rolling lawns.
As I gasp at the view, the biographer
Richard Holmes, her partner of almost
30 years, cries, “Don’t look at that!” The lawns,
for all their landscaped beauty, are brown and
parched – hardly a priority given the medical
emergency that last year engulfed Tremain
out of the blue and almost took her life.
In October Tremain turned yellow. There
was no leading up to it. Suddenly, the pain in
her abdomen became unbearable. “Richard
and I are not the kind of people to normallycall an ambulance,” she says. It was on her
way to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in the
ambulance, in fact, that she took the call
informing her that she was to be made a
dame. It was as if fate had intervened,
throwing her an intellectual lifeline, a
professional reason to keep going, in addition
to not wanting to let go of those she loved:
Richard, her daughter, Eleanor, and her
beloved grandchildren, Martha and Archie,
who, in the end, went to the palace with her.
She had pancreatic cancer diagnosed and
underwent the gruelling Whipple operation, in
which a third of her stomach, a third of her
pancreas and a large section of her small
bowel was cut away. During the following
month and a half, she was strapped down
and hooked up to monitors and drains. She
couldn’t eat, and nausea made it impossible to
be fed by a tube. She became skeletally thin.
She spent 38 days at the hospital. Holmes
visited her every day, staying first with friends
and then in a hotel. Eleanor came often too,
trying to encourage her mother to play gin
rummy (a game that in The Gustav Sonata is
said to “still the heart”). But Tremain says that
most of the time she was either off her head
with drugs to quell the nausea or racked with
terrible pain.
Tremain says: “I remember thinking, once
I’d come out of the operation, ‘I need to get
well enough to go to the palace.’ It was one of
the things that sort of kept me alive, I think.”
She finally persuaded the surgeon to discharge
her so that she could recover at home.
Today, she is still very thin and she looks
tired, but beyond that, there is no sense of
frailty. She moves about with total ease.
“Would you like to see a picture of me with
Queenie?” she asks brightly. “Look!”
And there she is, looking stylish, albeit even
thinner, in her cream bouclé Chanel jacket,
with her sweet grandchildren, who threw
themselves on the floor with delight when she
told them they were going to BuckinghamA
In Les Diablerets, Switzerland, in 1960PA, GETTY IMAGES