MARCH 10 2018 LISTENER 27
O
n another dazzling Wai-
rarapa day, writer Lloyd
Jones, a genial and cheerful
character, is sitting on the
veranda of a chichi Grey-
town pub talking about
dark things, those fears that
come in the night. “I almost
can’t bear to say it. I’m in a narrow drain, a
culvert that runs under the ground. The idea
of crawling through there and, at a certain
point, you think, ‘Oh, shit. This isn’t leading
anywhere. I might turn around.’ And you
can’t turn around, you can only keep going
forward. Then I lurch awake. That’s my cage
moment.”
His new book is The Cage. It’s a terrible
book. I had been thinking how to construct
that sentence. After all, you don’t tend to
turn up to interview an author and tell them
their book is so terrible that it gave you
nightmares, that it had given you a phobia
about going into the berry cage, never mind
having to put the chickens in theirs. I have
never said these things to an author.
He laughs. He’s pleased. “You should
hate it. The whole purpose, actu-
ally, was to make the reader slightly
complicitous in the whole thing.”It is also brilliant. It compels and repels.
“Oh, thank you. It’s really nice of you to say
that. It’s at that moment where I haven’t
actually had feedback, except in-house feed-
back, which is like asking your mother, you
know, what they think of you.”
Except that his mother would have said
something like, “Oh, it’s all right, I suppose.”
“Ha. You’re right there.”
He comes from a family of door-slammers,
table-thumpers and voice-raisers who never
actually said anything. His mother would
retire, silently wounded, to her bed and cups
of tea would have to be used to cajole her
back into family life. His memoir is called A
History of Silence. He is a good talker, but not
a show-offy one. He likes conversation, but
not the one-upmanship storytelling so many
male writers compete at. He is a good chap
to have a drink with.NEWSPIXLloyd Jones: once said
that at university he
was about as “clever as
a sack of spuds”.But he is a bit tricky. He’d splutter at that. I
spluttered at him. “This,” I say, “is going hor-
ribly awry.” I am supposed to be asking him
questions, but he is asking me questions. He
points out, entirely reasonably, I suppose,
that he won’t be writing about me and that
he is genuinely interested. I am genuinely
interested in the private life of someone
who could write a book like The Cage, but
good luck finding the key. He is also good at
silence.I
n 2007, he was widely tipped to win the
Man Booker Prize for Mister Pip. He didn’t.
He might have minded, but he says he
didn’t. “No. And you never know that until
the actual moment.” I believe him. He is not
much good at the other job of the writer:
promoting his books. I wasn’t able to help. I
tell him I’m still not sure I’m glad I read his
book. On balance, I think I am. But that now
I’d like to forget all about it, thanks.
“Ha, ha. Yeah, but don’t you think that’s
exactly what happens in the world we live
in? We’re witness to so much and we do
exactly that, don’t you think? We’re all wit-
nesses and we see too much and we’re never
there in the right way of being there.”
His point, the point of the book, is thatpeople don’t want to know. So, why would
people want to read his book? “I don’t care if
they do or they don’t.” His publisher might.
“Well, obviously.” Of course he wants people
to read it, otherwise why write it? “That’s me
being contradictory.”
It is also him putting up a defence in case
nobody wants to read it. “Well, yeah. It’s
a sort of ‘f--- you!’ No, obviously I do want
people to read it. And I do think the position
the narrator finds himself in shouldn’t be
a foreign position to the reader. We see the
most extraordinary, bloody shocking things,
then we go and make a cup of tea or we go
and tend the garden.”
The Cage came out of what he and his
partner, Australian author Carrie Tiffany,
saw at the Budapest Keleti railway station in- They had gone for a holiday, to meet
his daughter, Sophia Duckor-Jones, who had
“We see the most extraordinary, bloody
shocking things, then we go and make a
cup of tea or we go and tend the garden.”