Author Tim Lott: 'I believe in truth'

Born in 1956 in Southall, Middlesex, Tim Lott had a successful career as a magazine publisher and journalist before starting university at the LSE at 27. He returned to journalism briefly as editor of City Limits magazine, but resigned when depression took hold. He became a writer after his mother's suicide: his family memoir, The Scent of Dried Roses (1996), won the JR Ackerley Prize. His first novel, White City Blue (1999), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. It was followed by Rumours of a Hurricane, The Love Secrets of Don Juan and The Seymour Tapes. Fearless is published next week by Walker Books. Tim Lott has four daughters, and lives in west London.

Tim Lott is convinced - or perhaps is eager to convince me - that Fearless, his first novel for children, is the best book he has ever written. This is despite the fact that he won the JR Ackerley Prize for his remarkable memoir The Scent of Dried Roses, about the suicide of his mother, and the Whitbread First Novel Award with White City Blue. His other three novels have also been much praised for their humour, their plotting and their observation.

But Fearless (Walker, £9.99) is a very different kind of book and, he insists, an important one. And he is persuasive, although, if you have at the back of your mind Frankie Blue, the chancer estate-agent narrator of White City Blue, you might wonder if Lott could also talk you into anything. His speech is fluent, clever and emphatic, and his gaze is steady. He has a lived-in face, reflecting what he calls "more than the average share of misery" in his life, and the faintest of scars from a hare lip, which, if you didn't know, might make you think he had been a boxer.

The thought of smooth-talking Frankie Blue is dismissed, as Lott's conviction about Fearless evidently runs deep. Besides, his book is about moral absolutes, particularly courage, compassion and truth, which Lott believes in absolutely: "I don't believe in relative truth; I believe in truth." Fearless is a futuristic fable about an institution that purports to be a respectable school for girls, but which is in fact something between a workhouse and prison, where unnamed girls slave in a laundry and are cruelly punished. One girl, nicknamed Little Fearless, resists the regime and escapes three times to the oppressed City outside to tell the truth. She is not believed until it is too late, but she triggers the downfall of the school and the liberation of the City.

The novel, which Lott "intended to be a political book", is influenced by his two favourite writers, George Orwell and Oscar Wilde, and is both a political satire and a redemptive fairy tale in the vein of The Happy Prince. In some ways, says Lott, it is a "throwback" because it dares to have a message. "I often wander around London and look at statues that are tributes to, say, patience and courage, and think, 'What happened to those values?' Somehow they got lost and one person's values are as good as another's: I just don't believe that."

Lott did not set out to write a children's book. In fact, he never writes with an audience in mind: "Some themes start to obsess me." Fearless began as a story he told to his god-daughter in 2000. He started to write it down and "couldn't stop". At first it was a formless collection of pictures, ideas and narratives, which took six years to shape. Meanwhile, to his shock, given his successful record, he could not find a publisher willing to take it on and help to mould it.

He believes its unfashionable strangeness was a stumbling block, but he persistently reworked it: "an unbelievably difficult thing to do. Because I was not writing from the intellect, but from something much more fundamental. I was not sure what the rules were for this kind of fairy tale. In fairy tales characters are never really well developed, they are archetypes, and I am a character-driven novelist. In this case, the characters are deliberately archetypes... the story is all in the plot."

Although Walker Books, which embraced the novel, is a children's publisher, Lott also believes that adults will get as much from it. He now concludes, though this did not occur to him until after it was written, that it's an updating of Orwell's Animal Farm with authorities who use mythical hate figures to deflect anger from their own regime and encourage a collective forgetting. "Orwell took the political reality of the time and turned it into an instructive moral tale, and I have tried to update that concept by putting in global capitalism, terrorism, the exploited of the world." The girls are "a stand-in for people we don't want to see. Everyone knows the Institute is there, but they don't want to know." He equates this with the way "we exploit cheap labour to live in luxury, but we don't want to know... We just want the cheap T-shirt."

Despite big themes and mythological motifs, the relationships between the girls in the story will resonate with modern readers. "I have four daughters, so I am an expert on little girls and the way they relate to each other. Their loyalty to each other is very conditional." Fickleness, back-biting and bullying, of a kind recognisable in more benign institutions, feature in the Institute. The message for his own daughters, spelt out in the dedication, is the instruction Fearless lives by: "Be brave. Be yourself." It is also a message for the nation, which Lott believes should stand up for its liberal values.

What Lott aims at is "a very simple book full of complexity; I am vain enough to believe there are hidden depths to my work." His heroes, Orwell, Scott Fitzgerald and John Cheever, aspire to plainness of style, "but underneath there is a lot going on". The hidden-depths approach to Fearless is different from the in-your-face narratives of Frankie in White City Blue, or of the self-pitying divorcé Daniel in The Love Secrets of Don Juan, trying to improve his chances with the opposite sex. In The Seymour Tapes Lott even appears himself, playing detective and interviewing the characters. This is an author who likes to play with genres; whose books have never been predictable.

There are connections, though, between Fearless and Lott's other work. Rooted in realism as his novels are, "there is always a moment, however commonplace and naturalistic the scene is - whether it is Milton Keynes in Rumours of a Hurricane or Shepherd's Bush in White City Blue - when characters have a glimpse of something other than their dull everyday existence. It has always been a part of my life, the idea that there is some sort of reality beyond the everyday, which is not supernatural, but is mysterious and profound. In some ways this is an anti-religious book, but it's also a spiritual book. It says that even without God we live a miraculous existence."

Lott's memoir, The Scent of Dried Roses, is a precursor to a central motif in Fearless: loss. Lott acknowledges a Christian theme of "purification through sacrifice": "something I believe in as the fundamental human pattern of life". The suicide of his mother, his own depressions and divorce, have taught him that "loss is gain, if you let it be loss. John Updike said 'loss is growth' and I think he is absolutely right. Anyone who has felt tragedy knows that there is a strange sense in which it cleans you out, scours you; there is a kind of rebirth in it. The history of my life has been deaths and rebirths. I'm not saying at all that loss is to be desired... But it moves you up a notch to the next stage of your life. I look upon it as giving you more solidity, more weight. When I was younger and hadn't been through these things, I felt that a gust of wind could blow me away."

The loss in Fearless is a painful, tear-inducing death. The City is purified through it, "which is why I think it is acceptable as a children's story, because there is redemption through suffering". The scene is, Lott admits, "quite sentimental, but it moved me, and I don't quite know why." He believes he had "hit upon something important: writing is at its best when you really don't know what you are doing."

As a genre, children's fiction is attractive to Lott, not least because it has not lost its commitment to story. "I think the most interesting novels of the last ten years have been children's novels. There is no doubt that the Pullman trilogy should have won the Booker Prize; Mark Haddon should have been shortlisted; David Almond is magnificent.

"All children care about is a resonant story, so you have to have the greatest discipline writing for children. You can't blather on. You can't conceal the holes in your plot with flowery language. There's no room for fat - which is another reason writing Fearless was difficult. You can't hide in children's books."

Nicolette Jones's book 'The Plimsoll Sensation' is published by Abacus

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