Robert Hudson – The Book Swap Interview

by Melanie Gow on November 25, 2009

What made you realise you are a writer?

Getting paid. I have absolutely no problem with anyone else’s definition of what constitutes being a writer, but I always felt that what I am, as a grown-up, is the thing I am paid to be.

Which book are you currently reading/What was the last book you read? Or, who are your greatest influences?

On trains I am reading The Black Prince, which is my first Iris Murdoch. I’m loving it. In the bath I am re-reading various Terry Pratchetts. It’s very hard to know what’s influenced you, but of the things reviewers have pointed out, I would say that the South American de Bernieres trilogy probably has, and Jonathan Coe probably hasn’t. I mustn’t ever read EM Delafield when I am trying to write, because she infects my style to a ridiculous degree.

What achievement in your life are you most proud of?

True answers to this are all inglorious and/or cheesy. I’m really proud of having made the most out of going to Cambridge and of having an amazing group of friends. I’m also very proud of being published, of course, but it’s like when I was proud of getting into Cambridge in the first place. It’s a great first step: now I have to make the most of it.

If you were stranded on a desert island which three fictional characters, who would you like to be there with and why ?

George Bevan and Maud Marshmoreton, the protagonists of Damsel in Distress, the Wodehouse novel I am adapting for stage, are romantic but sensible, understated, funny and cool. Also Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred.

Screen fictional characters are easier, if I’m allowed them, and if part of this question is, as it sort of must be, ‘Who do you fancy?’ I fancy CJ from West Wing and Sam Stewart from Foyle’s War.

If characters have their fictional powers, then I am going for Albus Dumbledore, Uncle Fred and Sam Stewart. Maybe Jed Bartlet instead of Uncle Fred.

Oh. I once read a Modesty Blaise book. It was better than I expected and I fancied her. She can come instead of Sam Stewart, if it’s to be just characters from books.

What was the first book you ever bought with your own money?

Absolutely no idea. The odds are strongly on it being a Willard Price or Hardy Boys adventure. Maybe Famous Five. My favourite of each of these were South Seas Adventure, The Yellow Feather and Five Go To Mystery Moor.

What phrase do you find is the most played in your head?

‘Come on.’

What is your next book about and why?

I avoid being too specific, because it might never happen, or if it happens it might not work. However, I have mentioned that it’s a tuna western, and that is one plan. If so, then the simple reason is that I am obsessed with tunas. Time Magazine says that breeding tuna is the second best innovation of the year. Time Magazine is an idiot. Farming tuna is like farming wolves. The amount of fish you have to feed farmed tuna makes it a way to protect wild tuna, but an ecological nightmare.

Where does your fascination with Mermaids come from, or do you spend a lot of time on Starbucks takeout?

It’s a very recent fascination, and it won’t longer than most fascinations, I expect. I often chat with my friend Emma belgianwaffling.blogspot.com about the weirder Google searches that have led people to our sites, and I told her that one group of searches included ‘mermaid physiology’, ‘rate for a prostitute in moscow’ and ‘spider expert’, and Emma requested a post on mermaid-spider erotica. I Googled this, and found enough I found funny to fill several posts. This happened at exactly the same time as I was working on an idea for a short story, which will get its debut at a spoken word night in January…

Basically, I’m a freelance, and I’m interested in things, and I therefore spend a lot of time following Google chains in the same way that I once wrote a PhD by following references around the library. The result is more in the way of mermaid erotica and less in the way of liberal justifications for segregation.

Who has the game right, NFL or FIFA?

Ooh. I’m on shaky ground here, because I am really not an NFL expert. I think the crucial reasons I am preferring American football at the moment are:

- Liverpool are having a bad season so I have one eye closed in frustration

- the NFL is a shiny new enthusiasm

- because I live in England, I am endlessly assailed by overblown Premiership nonsense. I actively have to seek NFL info, so I only read the good stuff

- even so, I have thought for a number of years that American sports writing is much better than ours. Partly it’s because good American writers feel less self-conscious about investing sport with a sort of grandeur than we do. We, instead, tend to have good writers being ironical and bad writers being grandiose. There are many, many exceptions to this on both sides of the Atlantic

Having said which, in literal answer to the question, FIFA is so terrible that however bad the NFL is, I can’t see how it can possibly be worse

Are you very popular in pubs, because you can talk about sport in an enlightened and entertaining way?

I worry that I am coming across as sport-obsessed, at least partly because it might affect sales of my book. The Kilburn Social Club was not written for football fans – it’s a piece of literary fiction about a group of friends in London facing the changes that take place over ten years in their young lives. A football club’s a good setting, for various reasons.

Most of my friends aren’t interested in sport. This doesn’t mean that I don’t talk about sport to them, but it does mean that, if I am in a pub and I’m talking about sport I have to try and make sport interesting to people who don’t like it. Also I talk about other things. Like tuna ranching, mermaids and the mysterious deaths of Earls.

You seem the sort of man who would know if crop circles are alien visitations?

I am exactly that sort of man. They are not.

Who do you have to dinner and what do you cook your guests?

When I moved to London, a group of friends had been living in three downbeat Swiss Cottage flats for five years. They were about to be kicked out and had reached the stage where they could buy. They all bought in the Kilburn area, and I moved in with one of them. Since then, we have dragged various others into our orbit and we over aggressively maintain a sort of faux-village community whereby we have dinner at each other’s houses or pop in for tea at ten in the evening. I cook a lot because I don’t have a job. Mostly I make things my mother makes and recipes involving pasta and roast squash, but I indulge faddish exclusions (dairy, meat, ‘orange vegetables’, etc.). My mother, incidentally, is not impressed by my food. ‘If you can read you can cook,’ she says.

What do you carry on your person at all times?

Wallet, iPod, phone, book.

What, exactly, do you have to rush home to at night time that you say the Book Swap night won’t be going on for as long as advertised?

Because I am going out with [insert top movie star's name here] and she needs to get up early to film the next day. No, not really. I just meant to reassure Londoners that they are in no danger of missing the last train back to London, which was something I was worried about the first time I came.

How did you get involved in the Book Swap night?

Marie Phillips is a good friend of mine, and through a night of sketches I wrote with her I met Scott, and here we are…

What do you hope to achieve with the evening?

I think Book Swap is a terrific evening and I massively don’t want to let anyone down – the most important thing is that the audience has a great time.This will, I hope, be the best way to persuade people that they might enjoy my book.

Can you give one good reason to come along?

The book I am bringing to swap is a crackerjack, and I am throwing in a compilation CD as a blatantly unfair extra inducement. If you want this package, you’d better bring something pretty special to trade.