On Balance – John Harvey

John Harvey is supposedly retired from writing, but you wouldn’t know it from his output. Last year he published the exquisite tiny collection of poems, Summer Notebook. This year, Shoestring Press have published On Balance.

I read some of the poems from On Balance pre-publication, so reading them now in book form is like meeting an old friend. There are some tremendous poems in the collection, but my favourites are the ones which riff on Peter Sansom’s Lanyard. I met John through Peter, so that connection has always resonated with me.

Anyway, it allows me to flag up the interview I did with John last year. I’d never done an interview before, and though John was managing all sorts of health issues, the most prominent of which was a broken collar bone, he kindly gave me two hours’ worth of wonderful copy to take home with me.

The interview was published on the Mechanics’ Institute Review.

I was influenced by a Scottish writer, William McIlvanney, who wrote three novels about a Glasgow-There was a move towards what I hoped was a greater authenticity. It was social realism plus crime. Crime gives you the story, but the background is social realism. I was working toward a picture of Nottingham that was as accurate as possible, where the characters were as accurate as possible, and the storyline opened up things about living in that place while providing a narrative to follow.
Instead of writing 12 books a year, I wrote one book, so I could expand those parts which I couldn’t linger over in the shorter stuff. I could spend more time on character, on describing place. I could have some kind of political attitude, if it fitted with the story. I could be more careful about language. I could do a lot more rewriting. There was no rewriting on the early stuff because there wasn’t time.
I had plenty of time to write the first Resnick novel, Lonely Hearts. I had time to revise it. I had a proper editor who went through it and told me ways in which it could be improved. I had an agent. I was operating on a wholly different level.