Viva Lewes Issue #124 January 2017

ON THIS MONTH: LITERATURE
Charlotte Mendelson
Green-fingered procrastinator
Charlotte Mendelson
has built a reputation
as an author who
writes spare, fastmoving,
character-led
novels, with largely
Anglo-Jewish protagonists.
Her fourth,
Almost English, was
long-listed for the
Man Booker.
But she was having
problems with her
fifth novel. You see
she’s also a passionate gardener, having turned the
tiny yard of her North-West London house into
an allotment, of sorts. And when she wasn’t out in
the garden, neglecting her writing, she was trying
to shoe-horn material about her horticultural
passion into the novel. “It didn’t really fit there.”
she tells me, down the phone, from the smokers’
roof of the British Library.
So she turned it all into a non-fiction book,
instead, called Rhapsody in Green and subtitled A
novelist, an obsession, a laughably small excuse of a
vegetable garden. A memoir of her decreasingly
amateurish experiments in that space, it’s been
a big success, finding her a whole new audience.
“It’s not Gardeners’ Question Time,” she says. “It’s
more ‘which way up do I plant this?’”
She’s been told that it’s ‘a book about gardening
that reads like a novel’ though she hasn’t
consciously tried to use novelistic techniques to
pique the readers’ attention. “Though what I do
in my novels is to set up some sort of conflict and
go from there, and in this case the conflict is that
my garden is the size of a napkin and I want to
grow millions of things on it.”
I ask her if - like Hemingway’s Death in the
Afternoon - it’s a book that’s essentially about
writing, disguised
as a book about her
passion. But no.
“Though it’s helped
me understand what
sort of person I
am,” she says. “And
where all the writing
comes from: I’m very
much an enthusiast.
Mind you, there’s
more death than in
Hemingway, that
lightweight. There’s a
lot in it about killing slugs.”
She found writing Rhapsody in Green “much more
fun that writing fiction”, she continues. “All those
things I could spend hours talking about have
found it into my book… whether it was compost,
or not washing pots, or growing things to eat, or
why do so many people grow such disgustinglooking
roses, or can you get lion poo from
London Zoo to scare away cats.”
Has she got any more passions, I wonder, that she
needs to get out of her system, before she returns
to the fifth novel? “Like real ale?” she says. “Or
skateboarding? Or bullfighting?” It seems not:
the reason she’s in the British Library is because
that’s where she goes to write fiction, when she’s
not working as a magazine editor, or looking after
her family, or, of course, tending her garden.
Though now that she’s back in full flow with her
fifth novel again, her garden “is dingy and cold
and horrible,” having been put on the back burner
of her priorities. “Actually it’s like a neglected
hamster cage: I need to clean it so I’m hiding
from it. It’s a good way to get novels written.”
Alex Leith
Charlotte is the next guest at the Lewes Literary
Society, All Saints, Jan 24th
Photo by Graeme Robertson
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