Words by Erica Wagner. Photograph by Jason Bye for the Times.

William Golding nicked Rose Tremain’s suitcase. Yes, really. “It was a British Council tour I did with Richard to Lisbon” — Richard Holmes, that is, biographer of Coleridge and Shelley, author most recently of The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, and Tremain’s partner — “it was an amazing group of people, and it included William Golding — one of the last tours he did before he died. We had identical suitcases, and at the airport he took mine, which caused a deal of ructions. I never got to see what was in his,” she says, laughing at the memory and arching an eyebrow. “Richard had to handle it. He’s such a diplomat. ‘Sir Bill … I think you’ve got Rose’s underwear . . .’ ”

We’re in the pretty, pale sitting room of Tremain’s house on the outskirts of Norwich; beyond the tall windows the garden looks lush, even in February. It’s an elegant setting, and so matches its owner. Listening to her low and lovely voice, it would be hard to believe, if you didn’t know better, that this self-possessed woman contained such multitudes — and indeed, such violence of emotion and imagination.

Golding has come up in the conversation because we are discussing the habit of some novelists to offer themselves up as cultural and political commentators; not something Tremain’s been known to do, and so she offers the counter-example of Sir Bill. “In one of the sessions, which were open to the public, there were a lot of political questions which came his way, and he sat on the stage and said, ‘Look, just because I have won the Nobel prize doesn’t mean I am an authority on everything that’s happened in the world. I am an authority on very, very little. I know a lot about … the sea.’ I thought that was wonderful. That’s true of most writers. We know a lot about certain, small things. I think it’s not difficult in this day and age to keep phoning journalists, though, to have your say. But writers on the whole are very bad at instant comment.”

Some authors, of course, won’t be put off: look at Martin Amis and the fuss over his apparent call for euthanasia booths to cope with the burden of the elderly. “People forget when they criticise Martin that he is a satirist. The idea of the booth on the corner — it’s a joke, for God’s sake! It’s what he does best. And he’s not talking about old people walking around today, he’s talking about us. Us, the irritating old people in 20 years’ time. But you know, he was a prodigy — and he’s the son of Kingsley Amis, and he has courted the media, and now they are giving him a hard time.”

Amis and Tremain have this in common: they both appeared, in 1983, on Granta’s famous “Best of Young British Novelists” list — a strikingly prescient selection of names made by the magazine’s editor, Bill Buford. On that list along with Tremain were Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Pat Barker, Amis, Salman Rushdie, Maggie Gee, Kazuo Ishiguro … a remarkable collection of 14 men and 6 women, a balance worth noting. “For the women writers in the group, for myself and for Pat Barker, it’s been a kind of mixed blessing because we were in it with these very . . .” She hesitates, always careful to find the correct way of expressing herself. “Well, they had huge success terribly young. And success young, in the writing world, is stellar. It’s Shelley, it’s very big. So in that sense that cast a shadow over all the rest of us. But it was a very talented group of people.”

She deserves to come out of the shadow of that list: her back catalogue, and her new novel, Trespass, are as strong as anything from her contemporaries. You might argue that the trouble with Rose Tremain is that she is too good at what she does: her work is so varied, and she is such an able ventriloquist, that she has been hard to pin down. Not that it hasn’t been tried: it was Restoration — published in 1989 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize — that first brought her wide acclaim. It was her fifth book, but it might as well have been her first: its success saw her labelled as an historical novelist. It is not a label she rejects: but she is rightly keen to stress that it is not her only mode.

“I think I got stuck with this label because when Restoration came out it was a big breakthrough for me; there were a great host of people who didn’t know I’d written anything before that. And yes, it’s sometimes my mode, and sometimes not.” And look at Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall: a critical success, winner of the Man Booker prize and still storming the bestseller charts. “You win a game, or a prize, you go up,” Tremain says. “People are now starting to talk seriously about Hilary Mantel. Well — they didn’t much, before, you know.” All this means that “I don’t feel the need to defend the form any more. I think that when you are exploring the human condition, these eternal dilemmas, the idea that comes to you is just a little bit random. I am quite glad that I’ve been able to achieve two contemporary novels quite close together, though, because I feel it may break this awful chain which locks on to me, as exclusively an historical novelist.”

Trespass, her eleventh novel, is set in a very different present, however, from that of The Road Home, which took the Orange Prize (of winning in 2008 she says that “it was nice not to have to put on my loser’s smile”). The Road Home was a pin-sharp depiction of a an Eastern European immigrant’s journey into British life and back again; Lev leaves his homeland after his wife dies, wishing, by taking on a new world, to remake his life. He could not be more different from Anthony Verey, the refined Pimlico antiques dealer who sets the cracking plot of Trespass in motion. What kind of person does Tremain write about? Every kind. There is Merivel, the loveably dissolute hero of Restoration; there is Mary Ward of 1992’s Sacred Country, a girl who wishes she had been born a boy and works to make that dream as true as she can. Or Christian IV, king of Denmark in the 17th century, found in Music & Silence (1999) — winner of the Whitbread Novel Award and now set to be a film directed by Lone Scherfig, lately of the Oscar-nominated An Education. Or Harriet Blackstone, scraping a living from the bleak plains of New Zealand’s South Island in the 19th century in The Colour, published in 2003 (and shortlisted for the Orange Prize).

Perhaps at this point I should confess a bias: 20 years ago Tremain was my teacher at the University of East Anglia (where she was herself a student), when I did the MA in creative writing there. Along with the late Sir Malcolm Bradbury, who founded the course (famously Ian McEwan was his first, and at the time sole, pupil), she taught there from 1988-95, and the writers who worked with her there include Andrew Miller, Tracy Chevalier and Mick Jackson. She had, it seemed to me then, an uncanny ability to listen to her students, to listen carefully; and discern what it was that they needed to do. She elucidated, rather than imposed: a rare ability.

When I suggest that this skill of empathy is unusual, however, she shrugs. “The act of writing is — should be — an act of discovery,” she says. “Particularly in long fiction. If you are literally just turning in on yourself, the process of discovery is going to be limited. I think I’ve learnt more about the world from writing novels like The Road Home than I ever would have in the normal course of my life. It may have to do with having quite a low boredom threshold?” Her voice rises, and she smiles. “I’ve never seen the act of writing as what Saul Bellow called a bulletin on my own condition. I’ve always seen it as a chance to take a different road, to explore something that perhaps I know a little about. For instance, inTrespass, I know that terrain quite well; but having done the research for the book, I know it a thousand times better.”

The terrain in question is the Cévennes, the mountainous region of south-central France that is part of the Massif Central. It is, in Tremain’s conjuring, a savage, strange place, inhospitable to strangers and holding those who are born there close. Anthony Verey begins to find his antique-dealing life in London wearisome; his sister, Veronica, his only surviving family, has moved there; he goes out to join her. There, in the process of looking for a house, he encounters Audrun and Aramon Lunel, a brother and sister who have never left the village of La Callune and are locked in a destructive relationship. How their lives intersect is the motor of this novel, which is a sophisticated psychological examination of human connection and, in the purest sense, a compelling thriller. But the landscape of the Cévennes is as much a character in this book as any of its vivid human beings.

This ability to capture a landscape, to imbue it with feeling, goes back a long way. “I was a very dreamy girl,” Tremain says. She is telling me about a summer evening at her boarding school, when she was, she thinks, 11 or 12. “I was slightly in my own world. I was walking back from the tennis courts, by a hayfield — it really was a beautiful bit of countryside. I stopped and looked at this hayfield, and I thought, it’s not enough to just be looking at it. I want to capture it in some way: I realised what I wanted to do was write about it. I wanted to go back and open an exercise book and describe the place and the light and the beauty of it, and the sounds, and my feelings for it — all intermingled, which is what descriptive writing is. So I went and I did that, and got great satisfaction from it. So it all really began at that school: but then there’s a long gap between baby writing and real writing,” she says.

But long gaps can be useful to writers: the spark for Trespass came ten years ago, when she was house-hunting in France with Holmes — who knew the Cévennes well from his 1985 book Footsteps, in which he retraced the journey of Robert Louis Stevenson through the region. One of the houses they saw had a crack down the middle, an image that reappears strongly in Trespass. “Some images, ideas, things that happen to you — they have an impact at the time, but you aren’t necessarily thinking, oh, I’ll use this one day. But I’ve always been attracted to wildernesses in my fiction, a place that is a bit unknowable, a closed world, in a way. And the Cévennes is very much one of those wildernesses, and I felt that beautiful as it is, it would just be too closed to live in.” That closed world, however, is the perfect setting for this intense, riveting novel: her characters bound up in its atmosphere, its weather systems, its violent storms and raging fires — external parallels to their inner lives.

You can never guess what Tremain might do next: and certainly, I am surprised — and thrilled — when she reveals to me what her new project will be. I ask casually if she doesn’t tire of people asking her whether she’ll ever write a sequel to Restoration, certainly her best-loved novel (with its “blindingly happy ending”, in Tremain’s words). “Well, you know, I’m going to do that,” she says simply, grinning. You are? I ask, a little dumbfounded. “I’m going to do that,” she confirms. “I feel it’s now or never. It’s 20 years, 21 years. Merivel and I are in our sixties; and it’s the end of Charles II’s reign. Restoration was the peak, the height, the great clap of laughter, the party — but now everyone is broke and tired and trying to make sense of something that’s over. So I think this is the perfect moment to do it, and could have huge pathos. Restoration was inspired by High Thatcherism, by peak materialism — like Merivel we have traded on material possessions. And the way things are now — well, it seems the perfect moment to do this next.”

Her publishers, she notes, are “overjoyed”; I don’t blame them. But it’s clear that she is too: and when she speaks of Merivel — that loveable rogue, the King’s fool, a man in search of himself — her face is lit from within. She says: “I feel that there is more mileage in that character” — but I sense that she just plain loves him. “He makes me laugh so much,” she says, and who wouldn’t want to spend time with someone who makes you laugh? That he is so real to his author reveals why he — and every character she has created, it must be said — has been so real to readers for the past two decades.

Trespass is about “the way the past is not enslaving”; but the same could be said of Restoration, of The Road Home. If her books don’t always have blindingly happy endings, they are filled with a sense of possibility and hope, of excitement at life’s journey, an excitement that Tremain clearly shares.

Trespass is published on March 4 by Chatto & Windus. To buy it for £16.19 inc p&p (rrp £17.99) call 0845 271234 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Extract from Trespass

Audrun made her way slowly and carefully up to the old house, vigilant every step, alert to all that was there, to all that might be there . . .

You could never predict what Aramon was going to do. One day, he’d chucked out his old television and bought a new one, wide as a wardrobe. Last winter, he’d taken delivery of a pile of sand but never said — never even seemed to know — what the sand was for.

Already, weeds had sown themselves in its shifting and collapsing mass; the sand pile and the ruined old television sat side by side on the grass and the snow fell on them in January and the warm breezes blew on them in this new springtime, and Aramon just walked on by them. Sometimes, Audrun noticed, the dogs did their business in the sand pile, cocked their legs against the television. So the screen was yellowish now, a stripy yellow that occasionally took light from the sunshine, as though some old broadcaster were trying to get his faltering signal through.

When Audrun was a child, the Mas Lunel had been a U-shaped house. Now, all that was left of it was the back section of the U. The roofs of the two wings, where once the cattle had been housed and grain stored and silkworms reared, had been damaged in the storms of 1950 and the father, Serge, had said: “Good. Now we can get to work on them.”

Bernadette had told Audrun that she’d thought that “getting to work” on them meant rebuilding them, filling the cracks in the walls, attending to the damp, relaying the brick floors, replacing doors and windows. But no, Serge had begun to dismantle both edifices. He tore off the clay tiles and stacked them up in his cart and drove the cart down the old, pitted road to Ruasse and sold them to a builder’s merchant by the river. Then he hacked his way through the grey mortar that covered the walls of the two wings of the Mas Lunel and began gouging out the stones. He proudly told his neighbours, the Vialas and the Molezons, that stones were his “inheritance” and now — in this post-war time when nobody had anything left to sell — he was going to make his fortune out of this, out of selling stones.

Selling stones.

Bernadette had pleaded with Serge: “Don’t destroy the house, pardi! Don’t leave us with nothing.”

“I’m not leaving us with nothing,” he said. “You women don’t understand how the world works. I’m making us rich.”

But they never became rich. Not that anybody could tell. Unless Serge kept the money somewhere else: in an old fertiliser sack? In a hole in the ground?

On the ground, still, were the ghostly outlines of the former east and west wings of the Mas Lunel. It had been grand, a true Cévenol mas, with space for everything and everyone, with all the machinery kept out of the rain and all the animals sheltered in winter and, above this the magnaneries, the attics where, season by season, the silkworms were hatched and where they ate their vast quantities of mulberry leaves and spun their cocoons and were sent down to the last filature at Ruasse to be boiled alive as the precious silk was unwound onto bobbins.

Audrun could just remember the old magnaneries at the mas, the smell of them, and the chill in the air as you climbed the steps towards the well-ventilated rooms, and the sound of the thirty thousand worms chomping on leaves, like the sound of hail on the roof.

“It was terrible work,” Bernadette had told her. “Terrible, terrible work. You had to collect bunches and bunches of mulberry leaves every single day. And if it had been raining and the leaves were wet, you knew a lot of the worms were going to die, because the damp gave them some intestinal infection. But there was nothing you could do. Every morning, you just had to pick out the dead ones and carry on. And the stink up there, of the dead worms and all the horrible excretions, was vile. I used to gag, sometimes. I hated every minute of that work.”

Yet, she’d done it without complaining. Still hanging on the wall of Audrun’s small sitting room was a photograph of Bernadette with, on her lap, a basket full of silk cocoons and on her face not a trace of anguish or disgust, but only the smile of a tired and beautiful harvester, her labour complete. The picture was faded and brown, but the white of the silk cocoons still had about it an obstinate kind of light.

All the silk in France came from the Far East now. What once had been a flourishing trade, and had kept thousands of Cévenol families alive, had died in the 1950s. When Serge sold the stones of the Mas Lunel, he’d already known that it was finished. The wooden hatching trays were chopped up and thrown on the fire. The last filature at Ruasse was demolished. And though Bernadette had been terrified by the violent way Serge tore down the two wings of the U-shaped Mas Lunel, she’d sighed with relief once the magnaneries were burned and gone. She told Audrun: “When that ended, I slept easier in my soul.”

This article originally appeared in the Times’ Review Section on 27th February 2010 and can be seen online at:

Rose Tremain: more than ‘just’ an historical novelist – Times Online