As part of the 2019 Marseille Book Festival, I have the privilege and the honor to propose an exclusive interview with Roger Jon Ellory, better known under the pseudonym "RJ Ellory", is the British author of the novels "Only the silence "and" The Song of the Killer "published by Sonatine.
The book festival of Marseille brings together more than 50 national and international authors gathered on December 7th and 8th at Parc Chanot in Marseille. The presidents of this second edition are Eric Emmanuel Schmitt and Aurélie Valognes. The guest of honor will be Jean-Michel Jarre!
Find the interview in French by clicking here
***
Can you tell us who are you ?
Well, what can be said? I am English. I am a writer, a musician, a photographer. I am a husband, a father, a traveller, an observer. I am someone who believes that life is there to be lived, and that the only things you regret at the end of your life are the things that you did not do.
I am interested in philosophy and religion, and I am very much orientated towards a spiritual viewpoint about the human condition. I am interested in quality of life, and doing everything I can to improve the quality of life of others. I believe that it is better to say ‘Yes’, and then work out how you can do something.
I don’t believe in being afraid. I don’t believe in holding yourself back from experience. I don’t believe that you are ever too old to try something new and challenging. I don’t like banality and ‘rules’ and reasons why things cannot be done.
I work to make every day important, and I never want to feel as though I have wasted my time doing something that was of no value.
You were orphaned very young and you discovered a real passion for reading. What did it bring you?
Reading was perhaps an escape from boredom, at least in the beginning. I was a shy child, and did not find it easy to communicate with people. Reading gave me a means to exist in a world that was far more interesting than the world in which I lived.
As for my reading tastes, I have always been far more interested in finding great writers, regardless of genre, and so I don’t limit myself to reading those novels that would be in the same categories as my own. I tend to gravitate towards writers that focus on great prose, writers who really utilize the language, and so I find myself reading McCarthy and Proulx and Truman Capote and Steinbeck.
As I have grown older I have become less patient with books, I think. I used to be one of those readers who would never leave a book incomplete once I had started it. Now, just looking at how many books are out there and how many years I have left, I can’t afford to do that anymore! If a book does not hold my attention, I will let it go and find another one.
I like to read novels that focus on the human condition and present me with characters I can really believe in. I do have a problem with thrillers that stretch my credibility. I have a problem with central characters who never seem to make mistakes and always get things right, because real life and real people are not like that. I want to finish a novel and feel as though I have been taken on a real journey.
That passion for great storytelling was something I discovered as a child, and it relates to film as well.
You are also a movie buff ?
I have a great love of film, especially the Golden Age of Hollywood with such actors as James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Edward G. Robinson and such people. Also the neo-realist movement of the 70s with Serpico, Klute, The Conversation, The French Connection, All The President’s Men etc.
To be honest, I actually think my storytelling style is influenced more by cinema than literature. Even though all my books are very different, the common denominator of an ordinary person in an extraordinary situation is right there in all of them.
That, to me, is a very Hitchcock-influenced theme.
Also passionate about music and photography, after writing, is it a way for you to express yourself ?
Yes, of course. Music is very collaborative. It is also very fast. I can write a song in the morning, rehearse it in the afternoon, play it to an audience in the evening. The response and effect you can create is immediate.
Photography is similar. An image can be captured and shared in a split second. It is all about engaging people on an aesthetic wavelength, no matter the medium. Photography is ‘writing with light’.
Music is taking an emotion, converting it to a sound, and then sending that sound to someone else who experiences an emotion. We all want to create effects. That’s what human beings do. We are doing it all the time.
The activities in which I am engaged are just a method of sharing what I see and hear and feel about the world, for no other reason than to create more communication, more friendships, more agreement, more activity.
Besides, how did you start writing ?
I had a strange childhood. My father, still unknown to me, left before I was born, and then my mother died when I was seven. My maternal grandfather had already drowned in the 50s, and so I never knew him. My maternal grandmother raised me, and she sent me to a series of different schools and orphanages when I was seven, and I stayed away from home until I was sixteen.
The common denominator of all the places I stayed as a child was that I had access to books. I read voraciously – starting with Enid Blyton, and then working through Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, and on towards Chandler, Hammett, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Capote. I always knew, fundamentally, that I wanted to do something creative, but I had no idea what it would be.
I was interested in music, art, photography, film, but in November of 1987 I had a conversation with someone about a book he was reading. He talked about this book with such passion and such intensity, and it was as if someone had switched a light on in my mind. ‘That’s what I want to do!’ I thought. ‘I want to write books that make people feel like that!’, and so – that evening – I started writing.
That was the simplicity of it. I just had the thought there that it would be great to write something capable of moving someone emotionally, to create that kind of effect, to have someone read something you’d written and be moved by it. That was the thing: to feel like you had something worth saying. That’s how it started.
The conversation was a catalyst, and I discovered one of the things I wanted to do with my life.
Between 1987 and 1993 you wrote about twenty novels but it was not until 2003 that your first novel was published. Explain !
Writing for years without publication is no different than acting or singing or any other creative venture where persistence has to be maintained. A long time ago I read a book about writing, and the author said that the harder you worked the luckier you got. This philosophy I ascribe to completely.
I wanted to write so much. I couldn’t think of doing anything else once I’d started, and yes, I do have the most impressive mountain of rejection letters. Now it seems like that was my learning curve. That was my training period, and though the books I wrote back then will more than likely never be published, I still consider that they were a tremendously valuable necessity to become the writer I wanted to be.
During those years I did numerous things, numerous jobs, but all of them seemed to be merely a means to pay the bills. I just wanted to write! Paul Auster once said that becoming a writer was not a ‘career decision’ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You didn’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accepted the fact that you were not fit for anything else, you had to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days, and I concur with his attitude.
I think I knew from a relatively early age that this wasn’t a job, but a vocation. It was something I had to do. There was no choice in it. I think for those sixteen years I just believed that I hadn’t found the right editor or the right publishing company, and it was simply a matter of persisting. I remember a quite from Disraeli where he said, ‘Success is entirely dependent upon constancy of purpose’, and I believed that this was the right attitude to have.
That it was just simply a matter of working harder, of putting more into it, of persisting, and it would all come out right in the end. Though even now, I still have utterly unattainable standards, and I always want it to be bigger and better and to have more books published and have more people reading them!
I think that this attitude is a reflection of my nature and personality, and I don’t think that drive and intention will ever change.
Is American and English literature different from French literature ?
That’s a tough question, because so little French literature is actually translated into English. Of course, we can find Dumas and Zola, Flaubert and Moliere, but very little contemporary French literature is translated.
It is a difficulty for me, because I have a great many French authors who are friends, and I cannot read their work.
Your first novel, 'Only the silence' was released in France in 2009 and is an immediate success! Tell us about this book …
I wrote the novel for a simple reason: To once again put an ordinary individual in an extraordinary situation, and at the same time highlight the sheer resilience and strength of the human spirit. It has always amazed me the degree to which a human being can rebound from loss or tragedy.
Sometimes I think of the terrible things that people have had to endure, and I am amazed that they can pull themselves back from the brink of personal disaster, and keep on going. The central character of 'A Quiet Belief In Angels' loses everything, and yet survives. I wanted to tell his story - a story about childhood, about the way children deal with things that they should never have to deal with, how their means and methods of coping are so very different from adults. I also wanted to write a book that was as lyrical and poetic as I could accomplish, really focusing on the power of language to describe locations, characters and emotions.
The basic idea actually came from a number of different sources. I wanted to set something in the Deep South, I wanted to take a boy who had grown up in a very small, rural, religious-minded community, and then send him to New York in the early 1950s. I kind of wanted to reverse what happened to Truman Capote, in that Capote left New York as an adult to go to Holcomb, Kansas, and there he investigated and wrote about a terrible crime that tore a community apart.
In A Quiet Belief In Angels, it was essentially a matter of taking a child from a small community like that, impacted and impinged upon by a terrible crime, and send him away to the big city. It was all about the themes of humanity, the loss of innocence, the way in which people deal with the awful things that can happen in life.
Did you expect such success ?
Well, the book was selected for a televised book club in the UK, and so it had already enjoyed a great deal more success than any earlier book. This was the book that opened my work up to other countries, and it was translated into twenty-six languages.
I didn’t expect the success, but it enabled me to travel the world and see many remarkable things. I met people who have remained friends ever since, and I am so very grateful for all the support that resulted from this.
Success is relative, of course, and I am still hoping to achieve the level of success I have always hoped for. I am one of those people who are never satisfied, and thus I keep working and working harder and doing my best to reach more people.
I am one of those people who believe that happiness comes from pursuing a purpose, and that even if you achieve something then you need to find a new purpose and a new game.
For those who do not know you, how can you describe your writing style ?
I do believe that I am a very visual writer. I am interested in the emotions and ideas and thoughts and feelings that can be created with words. This is just my style of writing. The best explanation of the difference between non-fiction and fiction, I feel, is that non- fiction's primary purpose is to convey information, whereas the purpose of fiction is to evoke an emotion in the reader.
So when I'm writing I try not to get too bogged down in the history and facts. I work towards the evocation of an emotional effect really, whether it be anger, frustration, love, hate, sympathy etc. The books that I remember, all the way back to things I read as a child, are the books that hooked me emotionally; those books where I identified with the central character, perhaps identified with a conflict they were going through, an emotional journey they were making.
The first thing I decide when I embark upon a new book is ‘What emotions do I want to create in the reader?’ or ‘When someone has finished this book and they think about it some weeks later, what do I want them to remember…what emotion do I want them to feel when they recall reading the book?’ That’s key for me. Those are the books that stay with me, and those are the books I am constantly trying to write.
There are a million books that are brilliantly written, but mechanically so. They are very clever, there are great plot twists, and a brilliant denouement, but if the reader is asked three weeks after reading the book what they thought of it they might have difficulty remembering it.
Why? Because it was all very objective. There was no subjective involvement. The characters weren’t very real, they didn’t experience real situations, or they didn’t react to them the way ordinary people react.
In fact, some of the greatest books ever published, the ones that are now rightfully regarded as classics, are those books that have a very simple storyline, but a very rich and powerful emotional pull. It’s the emotion that makes them memorable, and it’s the emotion that makes them special.
A book should be filled with the blood of the character, at least figuratively speaking!
You will be in France on December 7th and 8th to participate in the Festival du livre in Marseille. What can you tell us about this ?
I have nothing to say ! I have been to Marseille a couple of times before, but not to this festival. I actually don’t know anything about this festival. I was invited, and I said I would come!
Why did you agree to participate in this festival ?
I agreed to attend because I have already attended an infinite number of French literary festivals. I have been traveling in France for ten years.
I visited nearly a hundred cities, both to visit bookstores, to sign books, to hold debates, for television and radio, and to attend festivals. I have a huge debt to my French readers, so every time I'm invited to visit a festival, I go there.
The only time I refuse to attend is when I have already agreed to be elsewhere!
What is your best memory with them ?
It's impossible! I met thousands of readers and attended many incredible bookstores and festivals. It's like asking me what is my favorite book, movie, or song. We can not answer it !
During this festival, you will present your book "The song of the assassin" from Editions Sonatine. Can you tell us more about this novel ?
It is the story of a young man who does something stupid and ends up in prison. While he’s there, his cellmate saves his life.
As a result, the young man owes a debt to this man. When the young man leaves prison he is asked to deliver a letter. The letter is for the cellmate’s daughter. He sets off to fulfil this promise and pay off his debt, but things become challenging very quickly.
The book is about promises, about loyalty, about friendship, about betrayal and families and everything else! It is also a book about Texas, about music, and a love story, as well!
What were the 2 best reactions of the authors to your work?
Some years ago I was on a US tour. We had just released a book called 'Saints of New York' (in French, 'Les Anges de New York'). The central character was a cop called Frank Parrish. Frank was a very troubled and complex man, suffering from immense personal stress, the burden of alcoholism, an estranged family etc...
He dedicates himself to finding the truth of what happened to a murdered teenage girl, and he really puts his job on the line to find out what happened. Anyway, the book gives us a conclusion to the murder investigation, but we don't really know what happens to Frank on a personal level. I was at a booksigning doing a presentation of this novel, and a woman approached me. She did not have a book for me to sign. She said she had just come to the meeting to ask me a question. She wanted to know if Frank was okay.
That, for me, was a tremendous compliment. This reader had engaged and connected with this character to such a degree that she really wanted to know if he was okay. She knew that Frank was a fictional character. That didn't matter. That was not the point. It was just a case of someone really finding someone that they believed in to that degree, and taking the time to find me and make sure that he was okay.
The second compliment was an e-mail I received from someone in a reading group in England. She said that she and her friends had hated 'A Quiet Belief in Angels' so much that they took a copy outside and set it on fire.
I am not sure if that was true, but that was what she said. Why was that a compliment? Because it was an emotional effect. The power of fiction is not to entertain, but to evoke an emotion.
Even a bad reaction is a reaction. Perhaps the worst thing to say about a book is that it did not matter, that it was unimportant, that it was forgettable. Having someone set your book on fire is not nothing !
Do you have future plans that you can share with us ?
I am publishing the French translation of ‘Three Bullets’ in the early part of 2020. I have just completed a short film.
I have also completed a new novel for the UK which will be published in late 2020 or early 2021, and I am writing more music for the band. I am doing some magazine articles with my photography, and I am looking forward to touring a great deal more in 2020.
I am also very active looking for more film and television projects, and I also want to start a creative writing course for aspiring novelists.
Finally, are there any last words for your readers ?
There’s not a great deal more I can say about my readers. Especially in France, I am fortunate to have the support of some truly amazing people.
The reception I have enjoyed in France is like nowhere else in the world, and I am truly grateful for this.
I am always happy to come back, and I am very much looking forward to seeing Marseille again.
J.Ellory, thank you for giving me this interview, it's an honor ... See you soon for our meeting face to face at the Book Festival in Marseille!
Great ! Looking forward to it, my friend.
***