In the first of a short series of articles from the London Book Fair about publishing and China, BizChinaUpdate talks to 'My Favourite Wife' author Tony Parsons. | Publishing China Week |
"The world seems to be on course to ruin the Olympics," says British
author Tony Parsons. Speaking at the London Book Fair, the former punk
music journalist and television host turned 'bloke lit' novelist argues
that the violent human rights protests that have marred the Olympic
torch relay in several cities could prove to be counter-productive. "I
am pro-China and try to write compassionately about the country,"
Parsons says. "The only way to change China is to engage it. If China
is humiliated and the Olympics are wrecked, then it will crack down
much further. That could be catastrophic."
Parsons most recent novel, My Favourite Wife, is set in modern-day
Shanghai, a city he describes as "iconic of what is now becoming the
Chinese century." The book centres on a young lawyer and his wife and
child as they swap London for a big salary, large-apartment and the
life-defining realities of China's commercial capital. For many people
who live and work in China, it makes for uncomfortable reading for, if
it does read uncannily like a movie screenplay at times, it is widely
regarded as an accurate fictional representation of the corrosive
elements of expat life in Shanghai.
It was for those reasons that Parsons chose to migrate his characters
from his normal urban London setting to a Chinese city he first visited
20 years ago. "I wanted to write an Asian novel. I've spent a lot of
time there. But I was waiting for years to find the right theme, story
and city," Parsons says. "I felt I could write a good contemporary
novel set in Shanghai. It's not my favourite city in the world, nor
even in Asia, but it is almost shorthand now for how the world is
changing. It's like the industrial revolution on crack, and this is
what I wanted to write about. Shanghai is like a meeting of sex and
economics on an epic scale."
Just like any major city in history, people from all different
backgrounds are migrating to Shanghai to change their lives, Parsons
says. "It's an exciting place, a boomtown, and there's a real energy
about the place, a shot of adrenalin. But like most gold-rush towns you
must sift through a huge amount of silt and dirt. Dickens' London
wasn't a pleasant or just place, it too was full of greed, avarice and
inequalities of wealth."
While researching, and since publishing, My Favourite Wife, Parsons
says he has noticed a changed perception of how the world seeks to
understand China. "A few years ago, people wanted to know about the
economic miracle in China and how that was changing lives," he says.
"But now it is more negative. People only want to know what's bad about
China."
Parsons spent three years researching and writing My Favourite Wife,
and for some of that time he lived in Shanghai. "It was too long," he
says. "The next book will be written more quickly." That next novel
will focus around a young man who has a heart transplant, which leads
to him assuming a different emotional persona, and is due for
publication in 2009.
