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THESE FOOLISH THINGS (Chatto and Windus £12.99)
This is my latest novel. It came about because I’d
been thinking a lot about growing older, about what is going
to happen to us all. The population is ageing – for
the first time the over 50s outnumber the rest of us –
and it’s getting older. Where are we all going to live?
Care homes are closing, pensions are dwindling, and life expectancy
is rising. Then I had a brainwave. We live in a global age
– the internet, cheap travel, satellite TV…when
it comes to goods and services it hardly matters where we
live. “Geography is history.” Our healthcare is
sourced from the developing countries; how about turning the
tables and outsourcing the elderly? How about setting up retirement
homes in developing countries where it’s sunny and labour
is cheap? So I created an Indian whizz-kid called Sonny who
sets up a retirement home in Bangalore and fills it with Brits.
I wanted to explore questions of race and mortality,
but I also wanted it to be funny. I wanted to write a comedy
of manners between east and west, and chose Bangalore because
it’s both an old Raj cantonement town and Silicon City,
home to gleaming skyscrapers and high-tech offices. .And call
centres. In the novel Evelyn, one of my characters, wanders
into a call centre because she thinks she can phone from there.
And ends up befriending a young operative who has to pretend
she comes from England. (“What’s Enfield like,
aunty?”) Evelyn’s Enfield is a place of tea dances,
a place that no longer exists – except in India. For
in many ways India resembles the Britain of fifty years ago,
the Britain of my characters’ youth, where children
were polite and Morris Oxfords puttered along the streets.
Or so it seems. But that, too, can be an illusion.
There are many characters in the book, each with a reason
for going to India: escape, revenge, spiritual enlightenment,
marriage to a rich maharaja. And India changes them profoundly,
in ways they would never have expected. CLICK HERE for an
extract. Norman is a frightful old lech; Minoo and Mrs Cowasjee
are the Parsi couple who run the hotel – a shabby, former
guest house. Mrs Cowasjee is the resident nurse, though in
truth she has only worked, a long time ago, as a chiropdist’s
assistant. Evelyn is a gentle soul from Sussex. Muriel is
a working class Londoner who has come out to India because
she’s been mugged and robbed, back in Peckham.
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