Thomson wins

Bloomsbury has just republished all eight of Rupert Thomson's novels. It's a brave move for a strangely undercelebrated writer. Perhaps his publisher's vote of confidence and the lack of attention Thomson seems to attract are due to his almost old-fashioned dedication to novel writing. These are chunky, thoughtful works, that perhaps only went slightly off course mid-career, with marketing-inspired Soft (1998) and The Book of Revelation (1999), which was made into a film with Greta Scacchi in 2006.

Thomson first came to attention in 1987 with Dreams of Leaving, his vision of a police-run village, New Egypt.  There followed a terrific run - The Five Gates of Hell (1991) and Air & Fire (1993) - before probably my favourite work of his: The Insult (1996). It's a tremendous celebration of imagination: a blind man goes in search of the invisible man, who's disappeared!

I've written before about how his Divided Kingdom (2005) reflected my emotional history growing up, while Thomson's most recent work - The Party's Got to Stop (published by Granta), is a retelling of his own relationship with his brothers. Like Geoff Dyer, Thomson is in part inspired by living in different places - The Book of Revelation grew out of a stint in Amsterdam and more recently he moved to Barcelona. The Book was also reflected in his last novel, Death of a Murderer (2007), inspired by Myra Hindley, which he told me was another work about 'a man in a room'.

Nine books isn't a bad return over 25 years. His next, Secrecy - a historical novel set in Florence - is due next spring and I can't wait.

Divided memories

I haven't read Rupert Thomson's This Party's Got to Stop yet. Though it mainly seems to deal with the author's relationship with his brothers, the book's roots lie in the deaths of the siblings' parents. The early death of his mother is something he worked through in part in novel Divided Kingdom, which tackled major state-of-the-nation themes with a drastic reordering of the country.

Citizens are moved into different quarters of Britain according to personality type (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic, the four ancient humours). What proved so powerful to me was the description of young central character Thomas Parry's relocation from his family; it reminded me of my own removal to boarding school when my father suddenly died and must have been based on Thomson's own experiences following his mother's death.

I mentioned this similarity to him, and how evocative I'd found the description of Parry's life and emotions at this point, and Thomson generously said the book could almost have been written for me. He also recommended I read William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, which deals with the effect of a parent's death on a boy of a similar age.

Maxwell couches his tale in a form closer to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood - historical reconstruction almost. An extremely short book, it drips in concentrated memory and can only be experienced in bursts. I'm having a similar experience at the moment with Tinkers, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novella by Paul Harding about a father and son's histories that is incredibly dense.

Thomas Parry, when he grows up, has a chance to revisit the past in Divided Kingdom, and the memories that were lost by wrenching him from the heart of his family. Would you take such an opportunity? Thomson asked me. He knew the answer, but you'll always wonder how things were.