Christopher Wilson: A cheeky tale of life without limits

After a decade spent raising young children and working at a day job more lucrative than writing fiction, novelist Christopher Wilson--author of Bluegrass and Mischief--has returned with a new agent (Jonny Geller) and a new publisher (Little, Brown).

The Ballad of Lee Cotton (h/b, £14.99, 0316730262)--the tale of a black kid born with a white skin and a sixth sense in 1950s Mississippi, and destined for a picaresque life in which nothing about him, including his skin colour, remains the same for long--will be published on 5th May.

Wilson describes the book as his "jeu d'esprit", something he wrote just for the pleasure of it, with very little expectation that it would ever get published after his long absence from the literary scene, despite the critical acclaim that took Mischief (1993) onto the shortlist for the Whitbread Novel Award.

That playful spirit is certainly evident in the novel, in which the luckless hero's life takes more and more outrageous twists and turns. As a child Lee Cotton develops the ability to hear the secret thoughts of those around him--confusingly, they are usually about sex. As a youngster, he falls foul of the Ku Klux Klan, who are riled by having their simple concepts of black and white confused by his contradictory identity. Later he is co-opted into an élite corps of the US Army devoted to fighting the Cold War through the military application of psychic powers. And then there's his unplanned sex-change as the consequence of an accident incurred while attempting to drive a car and demonstrate an exotic sexual position at the same time. In fact, in the course of his varied life Lee Cotton finds himself occupying all of the different roles available in terms of gender, race and sexual orientation.

"I tried to naturalise each twist but the story's cheeky," acknowledges Wilson. "It's foolhardy to set a novel in America when you've no experience of it. And I did cheeky things like sending the draft to Jonny Geller--that was actually a joke."

Travelling to America was prohibited by "poverty and domestic responsibilities," he explains, but in fact he did research every detail exhaustively over the internet. "It's a real problem writing about another culture because you don't share really basic assumptions, what they have for breakfast or what the difference is between grits and chittlings. But you can go onto Google, get a Mississippi diner and look on the menu.

"There's a Mississippi oral history website, where you can get first-hand accounts of all the civil rights demonstrations. And I enrolled Lee Cotton in the American version of Friends Reunited, so that I could go in and see all the contemporary photographs."

Wilson says he's anxious about writing in the voice of a black man--"There's the issue of entitlement"-- but is glad that the book has been edited and rigorously fact-checked by his American publisher, Harcourt: "I don't want the dialect to read like a Dick Van Dyke cockney, but in fact the Americans bought The Ballad of Lee Cotton as a book, not as a book by a British writer."

While the author acknowledges the outward charm of the novel, describing it as "a soft teddy bear of a book", he explains that its central thesis is intended to be more challenging. "I've always written about misfits and freaks, and I think in a really mild way the book is autobiographical in the sense of always feeling on the outside, an observer rather than a participant.

"I taught in the media studies department at Goldsmiths' College for 10 years in the 1980s, and there were all these debates about the limits of personal responsibility--whether as a man you are still responsible for patriarchy, or whether as a white person you are still complicit in slavery. What really worried me about those debates was the fatalism, the idea that it's axiomatic that men can't understand women or that there's something qualitatively different about black experience or white experience. If you start accepting those arguments, then we can never understand each other.

"This is an empathic book, because it has a sliding, polymorphous character who goes through the whole range of social identities possible. He has to do really absurd things as a woman because women are required to do really absurd things. But there's no quantitative shift from being black to being white."

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