Stories of Old Land

By MATTHEWS, Philip

Kate Mosse talks to PHILIP MATTHEWS about good plots and inspiration.

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Kate Mosse. No, not Kate Moss. Not the supermodel most famous for coke- snorting snapshots and cavorting with rock star Pete Doherty. Instead, this more grown-up Mosse, one could argue, gathers no stoners.

If she needs further introduction, Mosse is the author of two historical- supernatural bestsellers, Labyrinth and Sepulchre. She is the co-founder of the Orange Prize, which was set up in Britain in 1996 to celebrate quality fiction by women. She has a profile as a TV and radio presenter for the BBC, interviewing writers and commenting on the book world.

And she is an obliging interview subject herself, taking calls from New Zealand journalists during her otherwise peaceful West Sussex evenings. She and her family have another house too, in the southern French town of Carcassonne. It’s there Mosse dreams up her fiction.

Carcassonne is famous as the centre of the mediaeval heretic sect known as the Cathars, and it’s this kind of mysterious history, and its flow-on effect into Carcassonne’s heavily touristed present, that feeds into Mosse’s novels. Labyrinth dealt with Grail legends and reincarnation; Sepulchre has ghosts and Tarot cards on its unquiet mind.

Mosse can wax lyrical about Carcassonne, even when back in England.

“For me, in Carcassonne, there is everything,” she says. “There are the mountains, there are the lakes, there are the plains, and the sense of a very old landscape. You feel all the time you’re there that on the one hand you’re surrounded by history – small history, if you like, of everyday life – and on the other, this stunning natural landscape which everything is set against. The landscape is what inspires my writing more than anything else – you want to people it and tell stories against that backdrop.”

And then there are the supernatural ideas. Sepulchre is set in two periods – now and the late 19th century. The latter is the more fascinating. It was a time when writers and artists turned in droves to the occult, to secretive groups like the Theosophists and the Rosicrucians, who claimed to revive ancient understandings of the universe. Mosse goes into all this with an open mind.

But she gets plenty of letters from people who believe completely in such things and she finds that they vary from country to country. “When I was promoting Labyrinth, and I was on tour in Germany, I found that there is a really strong reincarnation movement in Germany. That was a huge surprise to me. Whereas in France, it was barely mentioned.”

Now, there is a dreaded name that must be invoked here: Dan Brown. The south of France, the Holy Grail, ancient secrets . . . er, The Da Vinci Code? Mosse has a story about this.

“I delivered the first draft of Labyrinth in February 2004 and then at the airport my son picked off the shelf an author I had never heard of named Dan Brown. He said, Mum, look, this sounds like your sort of story.

“I read The Da Vinci Code going, Oh my God, I can’t believe it! But I did enjoy it and it’s very different from my book. The purpose of my book is not the same as his.

“That was before it became the most successful adult novel of all time. It’s been very significant to me in terms of sales because I think that after The Da Vinci Code there was an appetite in male readers that had not been tapped before. That appetite was seeking books that might deal in history and mysticism and esoteric storytelling. I know that I have a 50/50 female/male readership and I’m not sure I would have that without Dan Brown.”

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to the Orange Prize. It’s unusual for men to read women at the level that they are reading Mosse. The standard view is that women will read books by men, but the reverse doesn’t apply. “All the surveys suggest it isn’t much of a two- way street,” she agrees. “Women will make choices on the style of the writing, certainly the subject matter, but also whether it grips them. Whereas there is an assumption which is not entirely to do with men – it’s often to do with how books are marketed – that if a book is by a woman, particularly if it has female lead characters, then it’s for women.

“Of course, women don’t feel that if a book is by a man and has a male lead character, it’s not for them – I mean, that would cut out most of classic literature.”

So it’s gratifying when winners of the Orange Prize become bestsellers in the UK, as Rose Tremain’s The Road Home just has. But as observers of our own Montanas know, there can’t be book awards without attendant whingeing. In the case of the Orange Prize, it’s been around accusations of reverse sexism, raised most recently by journalist Tim Lott. Mosse and an all- woman panel will tackle this at the The Press Christchurch Writers’ Festival next month.

This will be her first trip to New Zealand. As a diligent books journalist, Mosse likes to swot up on literature ahead of a visit so she has been checking out the New Zealand bestsellers list and asking around for recommendations.

“The UK is very poor at promoting writers from other countries, except for Americans. We miss out on a huge amount. The only New Zealand author I know well is Ngaio Marsh. I’m a big crime fan and I think she’s as good as Agatha Christie. But I know that her New Zealand is not there now, any more than Agatha Christie’s England.”

Perhaps we should turn the tables and hit Mosse up for some recommendations. What has she read lately? First, she says that while she is a massive fan of James Bond and Sebastian Faulks – “Human Traces should have won the Booker Prize” – she hasn’t had a spare moment to get into Faulks’ new Bond novel, Devil May Care. That’ll be in her luggage.

But during the recent Best of the Booker promotion, she caught up with J. G. Farrell’s Siege of Krishnapur – “a really fantastic book”. And, while she has quibbles with the editing, she thinks Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns is an important novel. How about some crime? Well, R. J. Ellory’s A Quiet Belief in Angels is a “near-perfect detective story”. And the new Michael Connelly – The Brass Verdict, out in October – is very good.

“You finish that and you think, boy, that was clever. The thing I admire most in writing is the ability to plot. It could be an old- fashioned detective story or it could be The Name of the Rose. Or a Margaret Atwood, which borders on science- fiction. What I enjoy is the puzzle.”

Kate Mosse appears in two sessions at the Christchurch Writers’ Festival: Beyond the Labyrinth? An Hour with Kate Mosse on Saturday, September 6, at 4.15pm, and Oranges are Not the Only Prize on Sunday, September 7, at 1.30pm.

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