Starke's Twist in the Tale

LAUNCH OF RUTH STARKE'S A Twist in the Tale at Norwood on Friday 27 June 1997

Ladies and gentlemen.

The police, lawyers, priests - and lecturers in English literature.

They have one thing is common: they all get to hear more personal secrets than almost any other profession. They also get to hear more bare faced lies and tall stories. I recall how, some years ago, a student went about telling anyone in our English Department at Flinders who would listen to him that he had written a novel which had been accepted by Penguin Books. The book never materialised and, after a term or two, neither did the student.

Such embroideries of the truth aren’t uncommon. We quickly learn to take with a pinch of salt all tales of literary triumphs. For that reason, I remember clearly raising a skeptical eyebrow (mentally only; she says it didn’t show) when Ruth Starke, early on in her first year, mentioned – very cautiously and diffidently, I must say – that she had had a novel for teenagers published and that she was working on another one. Pretty soon, though, Ruth dropped on my desk a new paperback of her first novel, Casa Mia. I confess I’m not very interested in young adult’s fiction, but I read this one and I was bowled over by it. It was clever, sharp and witty. It had a heroine who is pretty, bright, of Italian descent and can cook like a dream. If I’d been a 15 year old male reader I’d have fallen in love with her on the spot.

That was back in 1992. Ruth followed Casa Mia up with a string of equally lively novels, as well as winning formidable academic honours. In between all this she won a national competition for a romantic short story, for which the prize was a trip to London and the prospect of a contract with Mills and Boon. I was in London too, and Ruth generously invited me, under the alias of being her professional adviser, to meet the publishers. This led to a fascinating occasion, a long, hilarious and extremely expensive lunch at a Mayfair restaurant, where we were introduced to the inner mysteries of the trade by two comfortable looking ladies who were soon discussing over the sweetbreads what they called the ‘masturbatory index’ of the ‘romantic product’, using sharply unsentimental terms that Rupert Murdoch might well have envied.

Some time after this, Ruth took my Honours topic on satirical novelists and I recall now how much she enjoyed Aldous Huxley’s horribly funny After Many a Summer. In this novel Jo Stoyt, a tycoon and a thinly disguised version of the real life Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst, lives in a Californian castle of ferroconcrete where he nurses his infinite fear of death. To live longer he will do anything. This includes putting himself on a diet, procured from the 200 year old diary of a dissolute British aristocrat, of raw carp guts. The carp is a very long lived fish. AMS is a long book. Ruth noticed that several students is her tutorial hadn’t got to the end of it.

That, she tells me, was the germ of the idea behind A Twist in the Tale. Gemma, the heroine, having skimmed the first part of Huxley’s book, decides to put her parents – who to her eye are aging far too quickly -- on the carp gut diet. Of the resulting complications, my lips are sealed. I will only say that if you read the story, you won’t be disappointed whatever your age.

At Flinders we have a division between Professional English and Creative Writing topics. How rare it is to find a blend of the two! The gift of writing to order, to deliberately adopt a particular style, vocabulary and register, to meet the demand of a market, is rare. At that Mills and Boon lunch I mentioned, I remember we talked about the delusion shared by many people, especially English students, that they could easily knock off a romance novel if they could only find the time to abandon their minds to the task.

In fact, it’s incredibly difficult. We were told that Mills and Boon get hundreds of manuscripts a week, of which 95% go into the bin instantly. To the remaining 5% of authors, who may show promise, they offer suggestions; they throw away more than half of those revisions, and finally publish under 2%.

In the same way, people think that writing for teenagers is a doddle. A simple plot, two-dimensional characters, a thin sauce of cosy moralising over the top. . .

But the truth is that teenagers are a very demanding audience. They are quick to resent the slightest sense that they are being talked down to. Pulling off the ventriloquism of a teenager’s narrating voice is extremely difficult; nothing dates faster than teenagers’ slang, for instance.

This book is masterly in this respect. It's Ruth at her freshest and liveliest: the story fairly hums and sparkles and bounces along. I may say also that the lugubrious sinister monochrome illustrations by Tom Jellett provide an interesting counterpoint and contrast. The story is, after all, about the fear of aging and death. As the poet Philip Larkin wrote to a friend: ‘What have I done to deserve being 50? It’s not fair!’

Curiously, experiments have shown a link between diet and longevity, though unfortunately it’s even less attractive than the fictional one posited by Ruth and Aldous Huxley. Severely cutting your intake of calories really does increase your life expectancy. Rats who are kept more than half starved live a lot longer than normally fed ones. Ironically, therefore, the secret of seeing your ninth or tenth decade may lie not in eating your delicious whiting, either with or without its guts. The secret may lie in refusing the chips that go with it. But hey, who wants to live forever? Let’s eat and drink to the success of A Twist in the Tale and its creators, and to hell with the consequences!

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