Mavis Cheek: On not being heroic

The latest Faber author to get a jacket redesign is Mavis Cheek, whose new book Patrick Parker's Progress (22nd January 2004, £12.99, 0571214525) sports a photographic look in place of the distinctive illustrated covers that have helped build her brand over the past few years.

Cheek has now produced 10 of her coolly observant comic novels, often exploring the lives of single, middle-aged women, most recently in Mrs Fytton's Country Life and The Sex Life of My Aunt. Sales are up steadily title by title: each of her novels sells 50% more than the previous one in trade paperback, says the publisher, with B-format sales doubling each time.

Faber has sold 100,000 copies of Aunt Margaret's Lover in B-format; The Sex Life of My Aunt, shortlisted for the new Saga prize, is "set to top this by quite some way," says sales director Will Atkinson.

"The real turning point came when I did a bit of a tour for Three Men on a Plane [published in 1999]," explains Cheek. "It was exciting realising that people living up in Nottingham or in Exeter were actually waiting for the next book. Coming from a background where the expectation of becoming a novelist was zero, it took me a while to realise it was OK to have fans. It's a big thing to say--'I have fans.'"

Cheek, the grand-daughter of an Islington cleaning woman and mother of 10, was born into a marriage that turned out to be both violent and actually bigamous--her father, a Scotsman from the Royal Army Medical Corps, had a second family hidden away in another part of London.

Cheek left school at 16 without qualifications, and worked as a receptionist for an art publisher. A brief early marriage to a physicist broke down; she later took up writing in a pragmatic spirit as an occupation that would allow her to look after her daughter Bella, now 24: "Authors with a mortgage never get writer's block," she observes.

Cheek spent several years living with the painter Basil Beattie, but now lives alone in the Berkshire countryside. She has loved the move out of London, she says, although her cottage--in need of renovation--is "my delightful catastrophe".

She has been described (by Jan Moir in the Telegraph) as "the supreme chronicler of women's mid-life angst". There has often been a dark strand in her novels. "The comedy that touches you is always connected to pain," she points out. None is darker than Patrick Parker's Progress, which explores the career of an architect born in the war years.

Cheek's take on the gender divide is stark. Although initially a humble Coventry lad, Parker--who has an obsession with bridge design and whose idol is Isambard Kingdom Brunel--is bolstered all his life by an adoring mother and compliant wife.

Meanwhile Audrey Wapshott--his childhood playmate and first girlfriend--is equally talented, but never encouraged. As the man's career soars, leading to professional acclaim and eventually a knighthood, the woman drifts--eventually finding a tolerable way of life in Paris, as mistress to a calculating, older Frenchman.

"I grew up in the art world, and while things are changing, and we do acknowledge that there are women who are really important artists, you do still think, 'Why are there no Mrs Rembrandts and Mrs Titians?'" says Cheek. "For all this liberation, it is still happening that women are not fulfilling themselves in that grand way.

"I thought, 'I don't want to write about artists any more', so I started to think about architecture, because it seemed to be rather a masculine world. I discovered that no woman had ever built and designed a bridge, and I thought, 'That's interesting, why?' Then it was perfectly obvious why--bridges are big, thrusting, penis-like structures that go as far as they possibly can.

"At the beginning of time, women were the bridge-builders, because they were about getting from a to b--in South America, women still plait the bridges from reeds. Later it wasn't really about anything as necessary as transportation, it was about heroism, the heroic--and on the whole, women are still not out there being heroic."

Women, Cheek points out, tend to be bridges of a different kind: the bridges within families, making the emotional connections. However, Cheek is not entirely sympathetic to her unfulfilled female lead: "Audrey goes with the flow, she's never voted. When the barricades go up in Paris in 1968, she's making love all night. She's not really engaging with the tough bit, which means you have a right as a woman to become what Patrick is becoming."

Although the book is set across the '50s, '60s and '70s, Cheek is disappointed by what she sees about her now: "In this country the female representation in parliament is 18%--at the end of the day, the power is still with the lads. The sad message I was saying to myself in this book is that I don't think a lot has changed since Audrey." On a personal level, it constantly irritates her that workmen sorting out her problematic cottage appear to find it difficult when she--not some husband, or boyfriend--writes out the cheque. "It's very weird."

Humour is her way of dealing with it all--"I do think women are naturally funny together; if you go to any of these book launches, on the whole everyone there ends up having a terrific laugh." Sometimes it is either that, or fall to pieces. On the morning of her interview, Cheek found herself reversing down a motorway slip road on her way to London, to avoid a colossal tailback which would have caused her to miss her morning meeting at Faber.

"Behind me was a man in a white Land Rover, looking at me with goggle eyes. Then suddenly he gave me a big thumbs up, and we both backed down the slip road together. I thought, 'I could either be in tears and think this was the most horrific moment, or think it was terribly funny.' This is the kind of thing that happens to my heroines."

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