Richard
Mason
Powell's on Hawthorne,
3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 238-1668
7:30 pm Tuesday, June 1
Free
The Drowning People
by Richard Mason
(Warner Books, 340 pages, $24)
In a cartoon published in The Times of London
last year, two college professors are discussing a front-page
newspaper headline: "Oxford Student's £200,000 Publishing
Deal." One of them quips about the young author's next novel,
"It's all about a student who's murdered by his contemporaries."
The writer under discussion is Richard Mason, who shook
the London literary world 12 months ago after sealing the
astounding two-book deal with Penguin. Now 21 years old,
Mason is indeed working on his second novel, but fortunately
he's not having to fend off an angry mob of peers. "The
people I know who have read it have really liked it," he
says of his debut novel, The Drowning People. "I've
been lucky like that."
He's also been lucky with foreign publishers. Since making
The Times best-seller list last year, The Drowning
People has been published in 21 other countries, including
the United States. Here, Mason signed a two-novel deal with
Warner Books for $800,000--not bad considering he wrote
the first novel, which Penguin initially rejected, at the
age of 18.
Mason worked on The Drowning People during the year
he took off between school (Eton) and university. Commissioned
to write the bicentennial edition of a travel diary of Eastern
Europe penned in the 1790s, he moved Prague, a city about
which he admits he knew very little. "I found it to be a
wonderful reinvention of 1930s Paris," Mason says. His stay
in Prague inspired him to write a novel. "It's the kind
of place where the longstanding dream of writing a book--one
which I'd held and then dismissed, along with wanting to
climb Everest or win an Oscar--suddenly seemed much more
possible."
While writing the novel and the travel diary, Mason supplemented
his income by playing jazz piano in a bar. "It was a wonderful
life," he says, "and I thought, this has to be part of my
book." Along with London and Cornwall, Prague did end up
being a significant location in The Drowning People.
Narrated by a 70-year-old man, who begins the story by admitting
that he has just killed his wife of more than 45 years,
the book is a remarkably ambitious tale of the perils of
first love and the strictures of upper-class English society.
As Mason says, "The murder story is really a framing device
for an exploration of the powers of that first time you
fall in love, an examination of its destructive as well
as its creative qualities, of the completely unspeakable
things that the sanest, most normal people do."
Ultimately, the work is about living with guilt and the
consequences of the follies of youth. "Part of The Drowning
People is the idea that moral mistakes made young and
left consciously uncorrected can corrupt things," says Mason.
"Oddly enough, that is what my second book is about, too."
Mason is currently on a tour of the States to promote The
Drowning People, with publicity befitting his book deals.
He's been featured in a variety of publications, from Entertainment
Weekly to Vogue, but it's not just his undeniable
literary talent that's garnering this attention--he looks
like a cross between Hugh Grant and Rupert Everett. The
New Yorker heralded his arrival in New York by throwing
him a party. "You have these moments in your life where
you can't actually believe it's real," says Mason, "and
the night of the party was absolutely one of those."
Mason also attracted the attention of The New York Times,
which covered a night out with the author. Instead of hitting
all the glamorous nightclubs in town, he chose to have the
kind of night out he ordinarily would have. In the end,
he went to the White Horse, "where Dylan Thomas drank himself
to death."
Mason will have to get used to such coverage during his
tour, especially since a CNN camera crew will be following
him from town to town. "I think I still get excited," Mason
says, "but if you're going to write good novels, you have
to be a little distanced from all this hype and keep your
feet squarely on the ground."
Mason gets a lot of help in remaining close to terra
firma. "I'm very lucky," he says. "I've got a really
lovely family and lots of close friends who obviously knew
me before all this happened, and they're excited and, I
think, proud but not impressed by the sort of superficial
glamness of it."
Mason plans to return to finish his studies at Oxford in
October, but in the meantime he's living in Paris and working
on his second novel, which is about "a group of Oxford undergraduates
who play cerebral games with each other." Asked if being
out of the country helps him in the writing process, the
author replies: "Of course it does. It's very difficult
to write. Books are such emotionally intensive things. You
can't write them in the world that you live in because your
friends want to see you and you want to see them. You're
in the middle of an emotional maelstrom that is real life,
and you need to be divorced from that just to find the concentration."
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Willamette Week | originally
published May 26, 1999
|
