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.

27th September, 1501: Katherine of Aragon sets sail for England

On The Anne Boleyn Files, Claire Ridgeway discusses the day the fifteen year-old Katherine of Aragon left her native Spain to marry into the English royal family. Due to adverse weather conditions, the Infanta's trip had already been forced to turn back to Spain once before, but, this time, the new captain, Stephen Butt, sent all the way from England by King Henry VII, carried the flotilla out into the Atlantic and towards England.

The Kings and Queens of England

A full table of the Kings and Queens of England, with their consorts. I also profiled the same for the French monarchy in an earlier post. Ordinarily, the lists start in 1066 with William I's conquest of England, a move which many academics deplore, understandably. Although that is admittedly where I also usually start my list, under the influence of "1066 and all that," this list starts at a shakier point in our royal knowledge - 802 A.D. For some reason, we British lost France's excellent ability to pick amazing sobriquets for our monarchs at precisely the time we were conquered by a French duke... Elizabeth I made a solid effort to revive the custom in her favour, though.

THE HOUSE OF WESSEX

(802 - 1013, 1014 - 1016)

EGBERT (802 - 839). He is said to have married Redburga, a princess of the Franks and the Holy Roman Empire.

AETHELWULF (839 - 856). He married twice; firstly to Lady Osburga and after her death to Princess Judith of France. After his death, Queen Judith married the next King of England, Aethelbald.

AETHELBALD (856 - 860). He married Judith of France, Dowager Queen; after his death, Queen Judith married Baldwin I, Count of Flanders.

AETHELBERT (860 - 865). He never married.

AETHELRED (865 - 871). He married Lady Wulfthryth.

September 21st, 1819: The birth of a granddaughter of France

On the twenty-first day of September 1819 in the Élysée Palace, today the official residence of the French President, the most beautiful member of the French Royal Family, Princess Caroline, Duchesse de Berry, went into labour. A southern Italian princess by birth, Caroline was the daughter of Francesco I, King of the Two Sicilies, and his Austrian queen, Maria-Clementina. At the age of seventeen, Caroline had been married to Charles-Ferdinand, Duc de Berry, the King of France's youngest nephew. A glamorous and attractive pair, the Duke and Duchess had been married for just under three years when she gave birth to their first child and there was much expectation resting on the young Duchess for the event.

Despite the fact that the Duke was the younger son of another younger son, the genetic bad luck of that generation of the French royal family and the violence of the Revolution had placed him much closer to the throne than he might have been under ordinary circumstances. His eldest uncle, Louis XVI, and his little cousin, Louis XVII, had both perished in the Revolution. With the monarchy restored, his middle uncle had chosen to rule under the name Louis XVIII, to suggest continuity with his family's pre-revolutionary rule. But the current king, clever and morbidly obese, was childless and his queen had died years earlier, leaving the king's younger brother, the handsome and ultra-conserative Charles, Comte d'Artois, as next-in-line. Charles, the Duke's father and Caroline's father-in-law, had two sons, of which the Duke was only the youngest. Yet, the Duke's elder brother, Louis-Antoine, had been married for twenty years and there were still  no sign of any children. Depending on which clique you listened to at court, it was either because Louis-Antoine was impotent or because his wife was barren after the psychological traumas she had endured during her imprisonment under the revolution. Either way, in time, the crown would eventually pass from the current king to the Duke's father and then his brother and then, finally, to him. 

With the expectation that the Duke would one day sit on the French throne as King Charles XI, with Caroline as his queen, there was added pressure for her to produce a son. On September 21st 1819, however, she was unable to oblige. Instead, she gave birth to a daughter who was promptly christened Louise-Marie-Thérèse (above). "Louise" was given in honour of her godfather and great-uncle, the King, and "Marie-Thérèse", in honour of her aunt and godmother, Madame Royale.

As dramatised in Elena Maria Vidal's novel, Madame Royale, Princess Louise-Marie's life was not to be as happy or tranquil as royalists would have hoped. At the age of only five months, she lost her father when he was stabbed to death by a republican assassin as he left the opera one evening with his wife who was, already, two months pregnant as her husband bled to death in front of her. The Duke's death led to a backlash of anti-republican legislation and sentiment in France, with royalism in France losing its liberal base and becoming more and more dominated by conservatives of the far Right. When the old King died in 1824 and Louise-Marie's grandfather inherited the throne as King Charles X, he was determined to preside over a government with a policy of zero tolerance for compromise. Along with colonial expansion in Algeria and government support for the Industrial Revolution, Charles's government also curtailed the freedom of the press, limited the suffrage and promoted the Catholic religion so overzealously to the extent that one wit once quipped that it was a government for priests, by priests. Intent on atoning for the sins of his youth, Charles X apparently could not understand that the whole nation was not content for the government to insist they atone along with him. In 1830, the King was badly advised by those around him and betrayed by members of his own family, when he was swept off the throne in favour of his liberal cousin, Louis-Philippe. 

Louise-Marie, aged eleven, followed her poor grandfather into exile. She then lost her mother when Caroline bravely returned to France, determined to launch a counter-revolution and restore the crown to its rightful incumbent - her son, Henri. Caroline's attempt failed and she was placed under house arrest by Louis-Philippe's government. Locked up and isolated from friends or family, Princess Caroline fell in love with a handsome Italian nobleman, Count Lucchesi-Palli, whom she secretly married and had children with, much to the exiled Royal Family's fury.

Refusing to allow Henri or Louise-Marie to live with a mother they deemed so demonstrably unsuitable, the French Royal Family placed the children in alternative care. The real mother figure in the young Louise-Marie's life was not, therefore, the glamorous and unstable Caroline, but instead Caroline's former sister-in-law, Marie-Thérèse. The only surviving child of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Aunt Marie-Thérèse had all of her late mother's love for family life and children, and her father's solid and dependable attitudes. From then, until the day she married at the age of twenty-five, Marie-Thérèse was the centre of Louise-Marie's world and she adored her aunt and guardian.

Married in Vienna to Ferdinando-Carlo, Prince of Lucca, Louise-Marie was destined to spend her whole life dodging the revolutions which intermittently rocked Europe and which had first begun in her homeland, thirty years before her birth. In 1848, three years after her marriage, her husband was briefly imprisoned when a wave of continent-wide unrest spread to north Italy. After his release, the Prince and Princess sought refuge with their young family in the United Kingdom, where Louise-Marie had spent much of her adolescence.

A year later, Ferdinando-Carlo and Louise-Marie returned to Parma, with their three young children - Margherita, Roberto and Alicia. Another son, Enrico, followed two years later. Then, tragically, a mere five years after they returned in triumph, Louise-Marie was to experience the same agony her mother had endured, when her beloved husband was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant. He died a day after the attack and Louise-Marie was forced to assume the burden of leading the government in the name of her 6 year-old son, Roberto, who had now succeeded as Duke of Parma.

In 1859, Louise-Marie's time as regent ended, when war and revolution once more entered Parma and she and her children were forced into exile again. They settled in Venice, where, exhausted at the age of forty-four, Louise-Marie, Dowager Duchess of Parma, passed away. Her body was taken to the Kostanjevica Monastery in Slovenia, where she was buried next to the other members of her family who had died in exile in the pretty local Church of the Annunciation of Our Lady. There, the body of the woman who was born at a time that had seemed like the high point of monarchism's triumph in Europe, but whose life had been constantly disrupted and devastated by its traumas, rests to this day.

Sneak peak at the new Marie-Antoinette movie

Here are some stills from the new movie about the fall of the French monarchy, Les Adieux a la Reine, with Diane Kruger as Marie-Antoinette (above) and Virginie Ledoyen, as I expected, as Gabrielle, Duchesse de Polignac (below). The movie is based on the wonderful novel by Professor Chantal Thomas, the author of a non-fiction book on Marie-Antoinette's demonisation by the libellistes of the 1780s, and it tells the story of the final three days of life at Versailles from the viewpoint of Agathe, a fictional maid in the Queen's household, whose job it is to read to the Queen in the mornings. Agathe is played by Lea Seydoux, who also appeared as Queen Isabelle in Ridley Scott's recent adaptation of the Robin Hood legend, starring Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett. 

I'm very excited about this movie.

September 16th, 1701: The death of a deposed King

Stephanie A. Mann, author of Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation, marks the anniversary of James II's death in 1701. Having been overthrown in favour of his daughter and son-in-law in 1688, Britain's last Catholic monarch died in exile as a guest of his cousin, the King of France. He was survived by his second wife, Queen Maria-Beatrice, and their two children, Prince James-Francis-Edward and Princess Louisa-Maria-Theresa. In England, he was survived by his estranged daughter, Princess Anne, who had supported her father's deposition thirteen years earlier.

The late king was buried in Saint Edmund's Chapel in the Church of the English Benedictines, the main church of the English Roman Catholic community in Paris. Tragically, and as with most royal tombs in France, James's grave was desecrated during the French Revolution eight decades later and his body was destroyed.

Review of a new biography of Mary Tudor

The superb blog Mary Tudor: Renaissance Queen reviews yet another biography of Queen Mary Tudor, by Oxford linguist and historian, John Edwards. Mary Tudor: England's Catholic Queen seeks to put Mary in her proper context as a mid-century European sovereign, rather than merely focusing on the alleged tragedies of her adolescence and private life. 

For the blog's excellent and expert review of Edward's biography, click here.