Author(s): Jim Crace

Literature

'A subtle, thoughtful, often brilliant writer. As a study in love, sex and relationships Six is as involving and original as anything Crace has written'
Literary Review

?A tender, erotic comedy set in a fictitious European city so intricately imagined that you itch to book a weekend break there soon?
Boyd Tonkin, Independent

?Furiously frank and tender: no-one has written a more original and mischievous exploration of what men and women are fated to do to each other. Crace makes you feel as if you have never read a single true word about love, sex or babies until now?
Julie Myerson

?A comedy of unrestrained, unwanted fertility ? in prose of seamless beauty, rich with playful metaphors and eerily accurate adjectives?
Daily Telegraph

?Lovely, playful and imaginative. An illuminating look at ?love and lovemaking, of children, marriages and lives? ?
Daily Mail

?Against a paranoid urban landscape, Crace explores the politics of love with uncannily luminous precision?
Metro



Celebrated actor Felix Dern lives in the glorious and mysterious City of Kisses. His joy is that he has loved several wonderful women. His curse is that every one he sleeps with bears him a child. Even his dramatic successes as Don Juan on stage are matched by his emotional failures off it. For Felix, there is no escape from his past entanglements. His six children are an ever-present reminder of his astonishing potency ? of what he did and who with, in pursuit of an elusive and all-transforming love.


Every woman he dares to sleep with bears his child. So now it is Mouetta?s turn. Whispering and smudging his ear with her lipstick, her breath a little sour from the garlic in her lunch, she confirms her first, his sixth pregnancy. His sixth at least. She's 'passed the urine test,' she says ? an unintended play on words, which she acknowledges in the matin?e darkness with half an optimistic smile. The doctor thinks she's twelve or thirteen weeks. A baby's due by May. It's early days.

Mouetta feels, of course (before the morning sickness and the backaches start, before the lifetime of anxiety and love), that her pregnancy is a personal blessing. The raven of good fortune has chosen her. It has alighted in her yard and she's been brushed by its great wing. No other, adult, explanation matters to her for the time being. She is the lucky one. This is her miracle.

They sit together in the cinema, that draughty art house cinema down on the wharf, their elbows touching and their jackets spread across their knees, to watch young lovers on the screen, young actors making love, or seeming to. She wishes Lix would speak to her, do something more than press her forearm with his own, a kiss perhaps. But he's a film buff and an actor himself. 'Silence for the colleagues,' he usually insists. He won't ever speak, not once a movie has begun. Perhaps it's just as well, this winterish afternoon, the perfect weather for the cinema, that he will make her wait until The End before he answers. He wants to say he feels besieged. Another child? He only has himself to blame. To be so fertile is a curse.

Lix could never say exactly when the pregnancies began. They always took him by surprise. Mouetta?s pregnancy as well. Especially hers. He had been privy to her ovulation dates, those gaping opportunities when intercourse was ill-advised for teeming alpha-males like him. They'd not been careless, had they, at the wrong time of the month? Twelve weeks? He counted back the weeks and counted back the times that they'd had sex. Still no clues. The days were fused and distant. How could he ever tell which time, which place had fathered this new child? Mother Nature doesn't ring a bell. Whatever other noises might be made, the egg is punctured silently. If only he could call on chemistry and then biology, unsentimental disciplines, calculating, tidy and precise. They could pinpoint for him (had they the mind) that careless and productive day in his beleaguered, complicated life, could specify the hour, even.

Science has the answers every time: it was two a.m. or thereabouts on 18 August - the week of the Banking Riots, three dead already, the city devalued and deranged, and interest rates 'settled by decree' at a quarter of one per cent - when Lix's latest child was conceived. Conceived's a charmless and misleading word, too immaculate and cerebral, too purposeful and too hygienic, to truly represent the headlong thoughtlessness, the selfishness - that night, especially - of making love. (Headlong for him at least.) It is a strangely cold and scientific word, as well. No passion. You'd think some calm technician had been employed to fit a tiny battery of genes. Conceived suggests a meeting of like minds, dedication, diligence, technology, and not the rain-damp, springing seats in the front of Lix's grey Panache where no two minds and no two thoughts achieved on that occasion even the briefest instant of concord or shared a common cause. That's one of the reoccurring oddities of sex, where it falls short, again, again. Opposing poles attract when lovers magnetize. His north of lust, Mouettas south of love. Crossed-purposes. And, surely, not a grand and proper way for children to begin. This child.

Sometimes our city, our once famous City of Kisses, with its deep parks, its balconies, and its prolific and disrupting river, like any other city, seems to have a climate of its own, a window of clear sky, perhaps, unshiftable for days, or more commonly a random storm attracted to the concrete and the bricks while all the countryside around is calm. That August night was such a night. Vague summer winds till after ten, too many stars, oppressive in their multitude, but then the concentrated, local rain, clearing the streets and pavement cafes, and breaking up the wayward, trouble-seeking crowds, few of whom had thought to arm themselves with hats or waterproofs or umbrellas. Though folk rhymes promise us that 'Storms at night/Blow out the light/Conceal the killer/Blind the King', wet weather doesn't truly favour assassins and Molotovs, or fires, or leafleting. The revolution likes it dry.

The theatre had not been busy all summer. Times were hard and tickets, though subsidized, were still not cheap or fashionable. Moliere's Tartuffe, updated as a New Age satire, with songs, dance and video, was not much of an attraction, either, even though the cast (including 'Lix', the celebrated Felix Dern, in the lead as L'Imposteur) was 'glittering' by regional standards and all the notices - in magazines and newspapers that, against the logic of the age, had sponsored that summer?s Stage and Concert season -had been dutifully enthusiastic. For once, that Thursday evening, he could leave through the foyer without too much danger of being waylaid by an autograph bibber, a theatre limpet, or ? worse ? an ancient friend or colleague whom it might be difficult to ignore. He was hoping for the sole company of his wife. It was their second anniversary.

As yet the rain was only light, drumming plugs of smoke and steam out of the coals of braziers at pavement stalls where kebabs and roasted beets were sold to retreating theatre-goers, but making little impact yet on all the distant mayhem in the streets. The brick-trapped wind delivered its reports of chanting crowds, the sirens of what could be fire engines, ambulances or the police, and, occasionally, the detonation of dispersal crackers or smoke bombs. But the protests had been restricted largely to the city boulevards on the east side of the river where many of the institutions had their offices and where, if you could trust as evidence the daily lines of chauffeured limousines, the savings of the towns-people had mostly disappeared. The narrower streets, known as the Hives, on this side of the river, near the market halls, had not been targeted. No one wants to burn down bars and restaurants these days (except the police). Yet the back ways near the theatre were not their usual carefree selves. The army, armed and keen to start an argument, had been deployed to break up demonstrations. The surplus, unarmed militia, the bail conscripts (who'd chosen public service rather than the jail) and the civic police, in and out of uniform, had set up barriers throughout the city to turn back traffic, check IDs, and generally put a stop to everything. The kind of people who seemed likely protesters or immigrants or undergraduates or bitter, newly minted bankrupts were lined up at the back of army buses with their hands on their heads, like kids, and - a recent police procedure to keep a suspect quiet - their identity documents held between their teeth. Try remonstrating with a booklet in your mouth. The best you'll manage is ventriloquy.

Lix looked a likely candidate. Not bankrupt, obviously. And not a student. But artistic. Intellectual. Dressed like a writer or a lecturer, at once shabby and elegant. He was known to the militia and the police, from television work and films. Who'd fail to recognize that celebrated granite head, those expressively nervous beryl eyes, that cherry-sized, cherry-shaped and cherry-coloured birthmark on the ridge of bone below his left eye? They waved him through. They cleared a way for him. He wished he'd brought a jacket. Then he'd turn its collar up, against the rain, and hide his famous face, his famous blemished face. It would make a change to go unrecognized, once in a while, not to be greeted on the street by strangers as if he were a neighbour or a cousin. For that, he had to go abroad these days, to theatres and studios in Britain, France, America and Italy, where his success had not been shackled yet with any intrusive fame. He wanted the applause and the bouquets, the prizes and the statuettes, the fees, but he'd enjoy, as well, some public anonymity. For one so fertile and flamboyant, for one so arrogant in costume, Felix Dern, the showman, was -offstage - surprisingly shy and timid. That was, in rising middle age, his major flaw, his main regret - and also his saving grace.

He met Mouetta in the back room of the Habit Bar, the city's best-kept secret - or so the newspapers and radio had been saying for a year or more. He was obliged to stop and be polite at one or two tables before he'd crossed the excited, overcrowded room to hers. The Habit Bar could always boast a celebrity or two, other than himself, particularly journalists and heroes of the left and particularly when there were protests and comrades to support across town by eating out in reckless solidarity. You'd never catch a politician there or someone ministerial or military, except in disguise, wired for gossip. Even the waiters and the chefs, it was claimed, were impeccably progressive. The meals were progressive, too. No boycott goods, no shed meat, no reactionary wines, no condescending sauces. The Habit was the place to come if you were on the left and indiscreet ? and, incidentally, not hard up. Its motto should have been, according to the shanty-boys who touted for scraps and coins on the terrace outside, 'One meal for the price of six'. Its nickname was the Debit Bar. And so its clientele were Debitors and not Habituals.

Mouetta was not alone. Her cousin, Freda, was sitting opposite in Lix's chair, her back against the room, but unmistakable ? and dangerous. She shared an ancient, awkward history with Lix. Awkward for Mouetta, too. Her hair was up, of course, coiled and clipped in place by an ochre lavawood barrette. She had the longest neck and the heaviest earrings in the Debit, and that, for such a restaurant where short-necked diners were a rarity and jewellery was always immodest, was quite a boast.

Lix had been wondering all evening, even as he laboured through the Moliere, his thirty-eighth performance of the play, what Mouetta might be wearing for their anniversary. For him. A skirt or dress, not trousers, if there was a god. And buttons down the front. And musky, ancient perfume as a sign that she had not forgotten what the night might signify. But now, as he excused himself a passage past the backs of diners' chairs, through smoke, through kitchen smells, through wine-induced curses against the army, banks and Church, he could not take his eyes off that long, cousin's neck and when he did ? he shamed himself with his disloyalty, with his nostalgia, perhaps ? it was only to look down beyond her chest, her modest chest, into her lap where her fine hands were crossed and resting on, of course, what else?, her uniform: a loose black skirt.

It was a photojournalist with Life magazine who, in 1979, when Lix was in his first term at the theatre academy, came up with the phrase the City of Kisses to replace the more alluring, truer title given us by Rousseau, the City of Balconies. That was the year of khaki skirts and tunic tops, when all the brighter girls were feminist, and rudely militant in bed. The photographer was one of fifty, sent to Fifty Cities of the World, to record the flavour of the place on one particular Sunday. His picture essay concentrated on our city's better-looking girls - and all of them were kissing. A boyfriend kissed, full on the mouth. A girlfriend chastely kissed in greeting from behind on the high loop of her ponytail. A grandma blessed by her granddaughter's lips. A teenage mother with a child. A puppy kissed. A couple kissing at the swimming-pool, their hair like weed. It was a city doing little else but kiss, you'd think. In a way, that is exactly how it was that year. But, famously, the photograph that truly caught the spirit of the place, so Life would claim, the photograph that sold countless posters and, for several years, was responsible for packed hotels and the resurrection of our red-light district, was taken at the Debit Bar. A woman in a Cuban beret applying lipstick to a glass of wine with her red mouth. Reflected in the glass, two men, their own mouths gaping and both encircled by the kiss.

Life could, of course, have photographed this essay anywhere. They kiss in Rome and Paris, too. They kiss in Tokyo. The whole world osculates. Yet this was public kissing, and unusual for us. That was the year the post-war ban on all public demonstrations of affection, even in the theatre, was lifted. Using your lips became the simple evidence of progress. We all made up for those lost opportunities. We had the kisses that our parents missed. That was the year, indeed, when Lix first kissed in earnest - and inadvertently provided us with his first child.

There was still a framed copy of the original Lipstick poster in the lobby of the Debit on the night of Lix and Mouetta?s anniversary, the first evening of the riots when interest rates seemed so much more relevant than kissing. Lix did not perform his usual playful pout for it when, a minute after midnight, he left the bar. He was exasperated. His wife and her cousin had sabotaged their anniversary He'd planned a little hand-holding, some eye-contact, some drinks, a light exciting meal, no garlic certainly (actors and lovers should not be 'cloven-mouthed'). He'd hoped that he and Mouetta would go home to bed quite soon. Well, not 'to bed', perhaps, but somewhere on the way to bed. The car. The hall. The study couch. The stairs? The stairs had always seemed a tantalizing possibility.




Award-winning novelist Jim Crace, talks about his latest novel, Six. Following the life of Felix Dern (or Lix), Six moves away from previous themes; religion in Quarantine, and death in Being Dead ? and instead discovers sex, love, family and the power of women.


The main character in the book is a famous actor called Felix Dern. Do you imagine him to be a sympathetic character? In many ways he seems rather hopeless: slow to act, a bit cowardly, not in control of his life...
Lix?s imperfections are what make him attractive and sympathetic. He?s not a Hollywood hero, handsome, virtuous and faultless. He?s as hesitant and blemished as the rest of us. What?s wrong with being ?hopeless?, ?slow? and ?cowardly? anyway?


I enjoyed Lix?s company ? and related to his failings ? while I was writing the novel. It is true that I make the leading characters in all of my books a challenge to like or admire. Readers sometimes imagine that this is evidence of my cynicism or pessimism. In fact, it is evidence of the opposite. One of the great optimisms of the world is our ability to love and our capacity to be loved despite our faults.


A related question: the women in the book seem so much more powerful than Lix ? as a young man he's seduced by his first lover, at the end of the book he's about to have a child that he doesn't really want, and so on. Can we infer your views on the relations between the sexes from this?
You can infer the novel?s views from what I have written, but you still won?t have any idea of what I think. This is not an autobiographical novel. Nor are the women supposed to stand for Womankind, by the way. It?s just that Lix attracts women who are more powerful than him. And I like the company of strong women, even when I?m only inventing them for a piece of fiction.


One might say that Quarantine is about religion and the nature of religious beliefs, Being Dead about the process of dying and death. Did you set out to write about sex? In fact, do you see sex as the main theme of Six?
I always intended to write about sex, love and family. The lofty intention for the book, before I?d committed one single word to paper, was to see how well humankind measured up to the Darwinist imperative that the success of any species (and any individual within that species) could be judged by how well and often its gene packet was passed on to its offspring. The evolutionary winners were the most fertile, in other words. So I created fertile Lix who seemed to be a failure in almost all aspects of his life except that ?every women he slept with bore his child.?

But, of course, as a novel progresses even the most lofty of intentions fall by the wayside. Pretty soon I discovered that I was writing a book about the emotional divide between men and women. At its harshest, that is expressed in the cynical and simplistic view that sex is the price that women pay for love (and children), and that love (and children) is the price that men pay for sex. I hope that my novel undermines that view.


In the book you write quite a lot about the physical act of sex ? always a notorious trap for writers. Did you find it difficult?
No. I spend most of my time thinking about sex, so putting it down on paper was a breeze. I was keen to undermine the Hollywood version of sex, though, by presenting the tender truth of sexual encounters ? the clumsiness, the comedy, the inequalities, the good intentions.


For a book, which is much concerned with procreation, the children are barely present. Was this deliberate?
I wanted Six to be pregnant with unseen children ? as indeed Mouetta is pregnant throughout the novel ? and for there to be a joyful nativity at the end. Labour and delivery.


Critics now often talk of Craceland, referring to some characteristic settings of your novels. Would you say this book has the same features? Did you deliberately place it somewhere different from your usual backgrounds?
Craceland is not one particular place. The world of Continent is in no respects the same as the city in Arcadia or the seashore in Being Dead. I don?t have any ?usual backgrounds?. Craceland is more a series of destinations which exist in parallel to our known world. You ought to believe that the City of Kisses in Six actually exists and has just been added to the EasyJet timetable. You can go there for the weekend and if you?re lucky ? or is it unlucky? ? have sex ? and a child ? with Lix.