Dressed in black and awaiting the publication of her 12th novel, The Gingerbread Woman, Jennifer Johnston sits in a trendy Dublin hotel and is as brisk and as wry as ever. Friendly and direct, she makes it clear that she knows she is speaking to a journalist. Distance thus established, Johnston is too honest to put on a performance; her comments are blunt and decisive, shaped by her emphatic, no-nonsense intelligence. Her new book is, she says, "about the end of an affair" but it is also, as is true of all her fiction, about many things, particularly about making sense of life. "Never an easy thing."
All of her narrators are watchers. Most of them live inside their heads, the place where she most intensely resides. Despite her ability to evoke a physical setting for her work, she has never been interested in surfaces. A Johnston character develops through his or her words and gestures. Appearances are irrelevant - you are what you say and do.
The title of the new book is deliberately intended to put the reader off guard. The cover, with its colourful pots of jams and preserves, suggests cosy domesticity. Johnston laughs: "it even looks like a cook book". Well, it is far from being a collection of recipes. It is as dark a slice of intense psychological realism as Johnston, now 70 and one of Ireland's senior international writers, has written. Clara, the narrator, has become a defiant survivor, having had to contend with far more than the loss of a lying lover. The book is, in a way, a romance - and romance has always had a role in her fiction, although Johnston has never regarded herself as a romantic. "I'm a realist. I see life as a very tough business. It is an endurance test. A long, sad joke." The broad-faced Johnston peers ever more closely in the semi-darkness of the lounge - "I can hardly see. I'm half blind. I've never even driven a car." - and speaks about how she became a writer.
It was a slow rite of passage for her. Johnston's first novel, The Captains and the Kings, was published when she was 42. But she was always a reader, even before she could read. "When I was a child we had an aunt who always read to us. She had these books she obviously thought she read well. And I have to say, even at that early age, now this is real arrogance, I always thought to myself, `I can read better than that'. I was impatient to read for myself."
Johnston has from her earliest years read in her head, just as she would later write from the voices she heard in her mind. Although she remains a shrewd, careful judge of fiction and is currently loud in her praise of Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief, she admits, surprisingly, that she finds it difficult to criticise a book she really loves. "I have this emotional thing." Even so, she is a harsh reader of her own fiction, dismissing The Gates as "a feeble book in which I did so many things wrong" and shrugs at the mention of The Railway Station Man, a book which set out to be political yet is far less political than her new one.
As a writer Johnston achieves a great deal by implication. In the new book Clara befriends a man called Lar, from Northern Ireland - but refuses to listen to his version of life there. By default the book makes its own statement.
Hatred and betrayal have always been major themes for her. In a more narrow way she has been consistently associated with the Big House novel through books such as The Captains and the Kings (1972), The Gates (1973), How Many Miles to Babylon? (1974), The Old Jest (1979) and The Invisible Worm (1991); and although it is true that it is she who moved that genre on from the Big House in the countryside to its logical conclusion in the suburbs of Dalkey and Killiney, she is, as a writer, most concerned with inner worlds.
If she has an affinity with any Irish writer, it is probably Elizabeth Bowen, whom she didn't read until she had reached her 30s. "When I first decided to write," says Johnston, "I said to myself, `I am going to write about middle class people' and that's what I've done. I write about the middle classes." She was always surrounded by words. Her father was the playwright Denis Johnston. His presence made itself felt mostly by its absence. "He went away to the war and then never came back." His marriage to Johnston's mother, actress, director and television producer Shelah Richards ended when the novelist was eight and her brother Michael was six.
From an early age Jennifer Johnston was aware of her mother learning her lines. Words mattered - and dialogue is very important in her work. Some of the exchanges are so intense they could almost have been written for the stage. She, however, has no doubts about being a novelist rather than a playwright. But talking was always a part of her life. "We grew up in Donnybrook. It was our patch. Dublin is still my patch. I miss it. I'm a Dubliner." She seems to feel more a Dubliner than Irish although she is, most definitely, an Irish writer.
Home has been, for close on 30 years now, Brook Hall in Derry, where she moved on marrying her second husband. Before that there were the years in London, mainly spent child-rearing. A mother of four, Johnston likes children - but drawing on her flair for a good phrase, once said, as naturally as would any of her narrators, "I do find that after a few hours with a small child, the inside of my head is rather hot". There is an Anglo quality to her spoken language and her accent, with its traces of south Dublin, the North and London, at times also has a West Country burr. Her mother once accused Johnston of inventing an accent. She may have had a point.
She speaks movingly in her non-sentimental way about her parents, leaving a sense that she only got to know them both near the end of their lives. "My father won a medal for playwriting at the 1932 Tailteann Games. It was a big silver thing, very heavy. He gave it to his mother." In time, however, he gave it to Johnston. "I was his only daughter." It seems a simple anecdote but Johnston's neutral delivery, her remote calmness, confers a strange sadness on the moment. In the same way the story of Constance Keating in The Christmas Tree (1981) calmly revisiting her life while waiting for death makes you cry.
Shelah Richards's death was abrupt. "She was only really ill for two weeks; she died six months after my father. It was a difficult year." She recalls the impossibility of being asked for "forgiveness" by her mother and a family friend; a churchman was called in to help, to reassure the dying woman. It is this understanding of the difficulties at the heart of emotion of all kinds that has consistently made Johnston's fiction so felt. In one of her finest, possibly her best book, The Illusionist (1995) Stella - one of her most clear-eyed and sympathetic of narrators, a writer - is waiting for her daughter to arrive. "I haven't known her to cry since she was a child. To be quite honest, I have hardly known her since she was a child."
Throughout Johnston's fiction there are memorable portraits of awkward mother/daughter relationships. In another of her best books, Two Moons (1998), she juxtaposes three generations of women - a daughter, a mother and a grandmother. Two of the women are still daughters, two of them are still mothers, while the character of the grandmother has the journey to death eased somewhat by the arrival of a kindly guardian angel. "I think we all need guardian angels," says the practical Johnston. "Living isn't easy." Yet for all the distance of mothers and daughters (most painfully felt by Laura in The Invisible Worm), in this new book Clara, ever shrugging off her caring mother, calls to her at her moment of crisis.
Stella, the narrator of The Illusionist, is a writer - "I have been writing novels for the past 15 years or so, with varying degrees of success" - while several of her narrators have turned to writing to make sense of their situations, from Alexander in How Many Miles to Babylon, to Helen in The Railway Station Man, to young Minnie in The Gates, to Clara in The Gingerbread Woman.
Johnston has always moved between the first and third person voices and has continually played with tense. It is her way of creating texture and voices within voices. Far bigger than the Big House in her work was the theme of the first World War. "Don't forget when I was young there were still people who had fought in it. People who had lost brothers, fathers, uncles, sons. They were all around me." Ireland for her has been more than just the North and the South; it has been about the conflict of another two Irelands, that of the Irish and the Anglo-Irish. She see it as the beginning of the conflict. Shadows on our Skins, short-listed for the 1977 Booker Prize, does confront the Northern conflict. All of which explains why this quiet, most consistently under-rated of Irish writers is looked to for her sophisticated grasp of what the many faces of Irishness means. "I'm taught in American universities but I'm not published in the States," she says with some irony.
For a writer with a given territory, she has also achieved, with this new book, the sense of writing something very different. It is also a young person's book, a cryptic romance set in a cynical present. "I'm not yet ready to write about ageing and immortality. Not as of today. I may be tomorrow."
The Gingerbread Woman by Jennifer Johnston is published by Review next Wednesday, price £14.99 in UK. Johnston will read from the novel at Waterstones, Dawson Street on Wednesday at 6 p.m.
