My interview in THE IRISH TIMES

My interview with THE SUNDAY TIMES was published in July 2011. The interview is by Pavel Barter, the photograph by Kelvin Boyes.

"A BOY WHO'S DOWN WITH THE MEAN GIRLS"

Friends trashed his idea for a bitchy teen-fiction novel set in Belfast, but Gareth Russell's savagely witty debut wins out in the popularity stakes, says Pavel Barter.

When Gareth Russell said he wanted to write a novel about wealthy high-school kids in Belfast, everyone told him to wise up. Spoilt debutantes, popping into Victoria Square shopping centre for a spot of retail therapy, getting manicures, wearing Ralph Lauren, and sipping martinis at high-society functions? Not images you associate with Belfast.

The negativity bothered him. "Parents of friends told me that nobody would ever publish a book about being popular or a socialite set in Belfast," he says. "If it's not about the potato famine, the Titanic or the Troubles, no one cares. I thought, 'We'll see.' There is so much more to Belfast than  lot of literature and cinema has shown. It was great to set a comedy here. You can have craic in Belfast that you couldn't in New York, Miami, London or LA."

So Russell ignored the naysayers and the setting proved ideal. Popular, the 24-year-old's debut, is set in the fictional Mount Olivet Grammar School, on Belfast's Malone Park, a real-life private avenue. Sitting in the bar of the Europa hotel, the writer takes a gulp of Evian, and wonders if he should send the city's upwardly mobile princesses a thank-you note for providing his inspiration.

Cliques are commonplace in Northern Irish schools, Russell explains. An Oxford graduate, he is co-directing a stage adaptation for Belfast's Belvoir Players Studio, to be staged in early September. The cast includes Imogen ("the hot one"), Kerry ("she has Daddy's credit card") and queen bee, Meredith ("the one who'll kill you as you sleep"). With their token male pal Cameron, these filthy-rich beauty queens undergo rivalries, tantrums and faux emotional breakdowns. Popularity is considered the key to happiness; weakness is preyed upon. It's a ruthless social hierarchy, similar to prison, only with Marie Antoinette-themed parties and Gucci handbags.

In most high-school movies, prom queens are either villains or a plot device to teach the protagonist the error of her ways. This was the case in Mean Girls, which starred Lindsay Lohan, while in Clueless and The Breakfast Club the rich girls are vain yet good-natured at heart. In Popular, on the other hand, the characters are unrepentantly egotistical and superficial, owing more to reality fares such as The Hills, Perez Hilton blogs and Paris Hilton.

Russell has an affection for his characters, but understands if the reader loathes them. "There are times when I'm talking about the characters and people look at me with horror," he laughs. "Meredith and Imogen have their own fans, which, in a way, is a devastating reflection on [today's] morality."

His characters were created as a reaction to the political correctness that has crept into high-school fiction. "Glee went further down the line of feeling it had to tick every box," he says. "I wanted to write someone like Meredith who could say the things a lot of us secretly wish we could get away with. She's not particularly interested in what boys think of her. Meredith is much more interested in what girls think of her. She is a woman's woman."

Russell was inspired to create such an unapologetically savage character after reading a Julie Burchill article in which the journalist mourned the passing of the classic Hollywood bitch. "One of my favourite books is Gone with the Wind. You're not supposed to like Scarlett O'Hara at all because she's a husband-stealing, gold-digging, social-climbing hound," he says.

What Popular lacks in redeemable characters, it makes up for in humour. The writer excels at capturing the ability of teenagers to coin expressions and venomous put-downs. Case in point: "I hate her hair... It looks like someone stuck pubic hair on top of a potato." Popular's characters are routinely cruel, but the writer insists there is a difference between bitchiness and being a bully. It's also one of the few Irish teen novels to deal with gay themes, in the form of Cameron's awakening homosexuality.

Some of the incidences in Popular are gleaned from Russell's own experiences as a student in Downpatrick, but the story is not entirely autobiographical. It's as much influence by his history studies at Oxford University and his interest in Tudor history; Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, in particular. "There is a steel-butterfly element to her personality that I warm to," says Russell "In a strange way, she influenced Popular [by being] a good example of you can be bitchy without being evil. I liked the pageantry [of the Tudors] and their self-awareness. They knew everyone was watching them. They believed God was watching them. I found that an interesting idea: how would you live if you thought you were being watched all the time? It's Big Brother, with a change of purgatory at the end. It was a cauldron of big personalities and a society that valued outward appearance more than anything else."

At Oxford, Russell directed and wrote plays, including The Audacity of Ideas, set on the eve of the French Revolution. This experience spurred him to pen Popular after he graduated in 2008. The author received 17 rejection letters from agents before he hit gold. Penguin signed him for two books, and he hopes to write a third.

Russell plans to write a biography of Boleyn in a few years' time. "There is a popular version of her as the femme fatale, and a more recent academic trend to see her as incredibly political, like a 16th-century Margaret Thatcher. I don't think that's something she would have recognised. I'm trying to focus more on her position as a daughter of the aristocracy who had been trained to be pleasing, quick-witted, elegant, charming, but I don't think she was a social climber or a rabid politico."

There is a tactical decision to writing Popular now. The memories are fresh and a few years from now his insights may no longer be relevant. The unrepentant narcissism of these characters still feels like a stumbling block, however. Is there any merit in this lifestyle for teenagers? "It's totally vacuous," he admits. And is popularity really all that important? "No." He takes another sip of water. "In the grand scheme of things, the core clique in Popular are not going to damage your health. They're not promoting drugs or rampant sex [but] the scars they might leave on your confidence are another thing."

Bret Easton Ellis wrote his first book, Less Than Zero, about a similarly spoilt and cloistered gang. It became a grim tale of prostitution, drug addiction and snuff movies. Russell wants to keep a comedic tone - this is fiction for young adults - but plans on visiting darker places in the sequel. "Yes, there's the vacuousness, fabulousness and frivolity, but you have to acknowledge that schemes, rules and intrigues will eventually take their toll on the people doing them," he says.

"Nobody can control gossip. It's a liberated demon. There's no way that you can write a high-school book and not show that sometimes it can turn into the most awful experience imaginable."

Popular is out now from Penguin. 
British and European customers can purchase it here.
Australian readers can purchase here. Borders New Zealand also sells Popular.
Canadian and American readers can purchase here.
South African readers can purchase here.

March 18th, 1496: The Birth of Mary Tudor, Queen of France

For almost all her adult life, Henry VIII's youngest sister, Mary, was referred to as "the French Queen" by her brother's government, despite the fact that she had technically only held that title for three months, during her brief marriage to the aged King Louis XII, which ended with his death on New Year's Day 1515, when his teenage English bride was not yet nineteen. Almost immediately following her first husband's death, Mary did what the Tudor family apparently did best and caused an international scandal. She seduced her brother's best friend, the Duke of Suffolk, a handsome playboy more likely to think with his crotch than his brain and returned to England with the marriage already (vigorously) consummated. When her brother discovered what his sister and best friend had done, he went into convulsions of fury - firstly at the thought that Charles had dared go to bed with the king's sister and secondly because Mary had (perhaps deliberately) removed herself from being a matrimonial pawn in her brother's games of diplomacy. Mary felt lucky to have escaped one potentially hideous marriage to an old man in such a short space of time and she was determined not to give her brother the opportunity to put her in that situation again. Charles, duke of Suffolk was good-looking, entertaining and suitably reckless to agree to her plan. After living down their disgrace, they returned to Court, thanks to the intercession of Cardinal Wolsey and Queen Katherine. They remained staples of court high society until Mary refused to yield precedence to Anne Boleyn and Anne refused to back down on the issue either. Through their daughter, Frances, Charles and Mary eventually became the grandparents of Lady Jane Grey. 

 

However, despite its romantic (or scandalous) beginnings, the marriage of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor was not an especially happy one and having gotten over the novelty of being married to a princess, Charles went back to his bed-hopping ways with characteristic abandon. The couple's first son died as a baby and his brother, Henry, born a year later and created Earl of Lincoln by his royal uncle, died at the age of eleven. Their eldest daughter, Frances, Jane Grey's mother, inherited her father's duchy of Suffolk and married Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset; after his death, like her mother, she made a scandalous second marriage to a man who was her social inferior. Her younger sister, Eleanor, married the Earl of Cumberland and later acted as chief mourner at the funeral of Katherine of Aragon in 1536.

Mary's controversial choice for a second husband, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk (?1484 - 1545) was played in all four seasons of The Tudors by British actor, Henry Cavill (above.)

Yet for someone whose life was to become famous for scandal, the first Mary Tudor's life began fairly quietly. Like all of her siblings, bar the last, her birth was a relatively easy one for her mother, the thirty year-old Queen of England, Elizabeth of York. There is some debate over where the birth itself took place and Westminster has been put forward by some of Mary or Elizabeth's biographers, but it seems likely the real location was Richmond Palace, the sumptuous and magnificent royal residence recently completed by the baby's father, King Henry VII, as a tribute to his hard-won rule over England, Wales and Ireland. At the time of her birth, Mary joined three siblings at the pretty riverside manor of Eltham, where the royal nursery was kept. Her eldest brother, Arthur, the heir-presumptive, was already nine years-old and his education was more and more being placed into male hands chosen by his father the King, rather than those selected by his mother the Queen or his grandmother, the Countess of Derby. Mary's more regular childhood companions were her less-pretty but equally wilful big sister, Margaret, who later married the King of Scotland, and her four year-old brother, Henry, Duke of York. An elder sister, Elizabeth, had very sadly died whilst the Queen was pregnant with Mary, in what may have been a case of severe allergies, unrecognisable and certainly untreatable in the fifteenth century.

Even at the age of thirty, the pale and blonde Queen Elizabeth was generally considered a beautiful woman, which was expected since her mother, the late Queen Elizabeth Woodville, was described as the most beautiful woman in the British Isles. Mary too was thought to be a very attractive woman and if she did not quite have the once-in-a-generation beauty possessed by her maternal grandmother, there is no denying that, even accounting for flattery, Henry VIII's younger sister was physically lovely. 

After Mary's birth, there was a short lull in her mother's pregnancies. It was not until the middle of 1498, nearly two years after Mary, that Elizabeth was able to announce that she was with child again. As usual, her over-bearing mother-in-law oversaw all the arrangements and Elizabeth awaited the outcome of her sixth pregnancy as she had done the previous five. Few women in English history could claim to have been better-connected than Elizabeth of York, something which had been vital in convincing her husband to select her as his bride when he seized the throne in 1485. She was the daughter, sister, niece, wife, mother  and grandmother of kings, but in the final estimation, for most of her early life, these dazzling familial connections brought her nothing but misery.

Mary Tudor was destined to be the last of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York's brood to live past infancy. The death of little Elizabeth, a few months before Mary's birth, proved to be an indicator of things to come, rather than a tragic one-off. The next baby, born at Greenwich on February 21, 1499 was christened Edmund, Duke of Somerset, but he died shortly after his first birthday. His baby brother, Edward, named in honour of Elizabeth's late father, died not long after his christening and Mary's little sister, Katherine, led to their mother's death in childbirth of her thirty-seventh birthday in 1503. Princess Katherine joined her in the grave two weeks later, leaving Mary motherless at the age of six.

British actress Glynis Johns, perhaps best known for her work in Mary Poppins, is seen here in the role of Mary Tudor in the 1953 biopic The Sword and the Rose.

Defending the Belgian monarchy

The blog The Cross of Laeken, written by a regular reader of this blog and an expert on the Belgian monarchy, answers some of the rather lurid scandals flung at the modern Belgian royal family in Paul Beliën's controversial book, A Throne in Brussels: Britain, the Saxe-Coburgs and the Belgianisation of Europe (2005.) Please note this article is confined to the modern Belgian royals as covered in the latter half of book, rather than the earlier generations, which were covered in excellent if harrowing books like Adam Hochshild's ''King Leopold's Ghost'' (1998). I'm afraid I haven't read specific biographies of Leopold as a person, either the first or second. For the early twentieth century Belgian royals, Theo Aronson's "Crowns in Conflict" or Denis Judd's "Eclipse of Kings" both have good chapters. To the best of my knowledge there isn't a biography in English of Leopold III, the king during the Second World War, but I may be wrong. On this more modern focus, the principle gist of this book seems to be to try and attack the Belgian monarchy today through sexual slurs, as Matterhorn writes: -

"Of course, using sexual slurs to discredit public figures is nothing new. Consider, for example, all the feverish, torrid, and, in fact, false accusations launched against Anne Boleyn, Marie-Antoinette, Queen Maria Carolina of Naples and Queen Louise of Prussia by their political opponents. The same process is underway today, in Belgium. We need not be conspiracy theorists to conclude that many people, in powerful positions, simply do not want this battered little kingdom to exist. There is no other explanation for the endless, paralyzing political problems, the bitter divisions, growing ever greater and ever deeper, that afflict a nation which has weathered the worst storms in history triumphantly. Therefore, it is not surprising that sordid little tales are sedulously spread, to undermine Belgians' respect for their monarchy. The Saxe-Coburgs are portrayed as lascivious, promiscuous creatures by definition. How accurate is this image?" 

For The Cross of Laeken's full and thorough article on the royal house of Belgium, click here. It mentions the book covering the modern royals towards the end.