The only books visible in Ronan Bennett’s room are behind glass, obscured by reflection, but pride of place is given to a vast collection of chess pieces also in a glass case. Penelope Lively’s books are too far away in an alcove and all the stacks in the foreground reveal is a taste for Seamus Heaney. In the attic room of his house in Dublin, Seamus Heaney writes under the glass-eyed gaze of a stuffed yellow bittern in a bell jar. A short-haired cat tiptoes across Joshua Ferris’ desk, a tabby occupies the corner of Julie Myerson’s and a dog called Watson squats on Nicola Barker’s chair. Barker has some orange-spined books, but they’re easily identifiable as A-format Penguins.
Eric Hobsbawm, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Al Alvarez all have some larger-format orange spines with black writing, but they’re too far away to make out. The photographer’s job is to get as wide a view of the room as possible, not to allow you to read the spines of the books on view, which is what I am trying to do. Anyway, what could ever have motivated Eric Hobsbawm, Elizabeth Jane Howard or Al Alvarez to pick up a copy of a novel published in a limited edition by a tiny independent imprint in the early 90s?
A wooden artist’s figure with articulated joints strikes a ballet pose on John Banville’s desk, close to a neat pile of three Moleskine notebooks. His bookshelves are full of reference volumes and books on Bill Brandt and Koudelka. Siri Hustvedt keeps Gray’s Anatomy, Principles of Neural Science and The Norton Anthology of Poetry to the left of her desk. Most of her other books are just slightly too far away to read the titles or authors’ names. There is one orange and black spine that looks promising, but it’s impossible to say. Though why would a copy have crossed the Atlantic? It was barely distributed in the UK, never mind the US.
In Martin Amis’ room, in a separate building at the end of his garden, light pours in through a glass ceiling and there are numerous books scattered in an apparently random pattern on the floor: a huge book on Vladimir Nabokov and two or three spiral-bound manuscripts. On a table in the foreground, a paperback edition of J. G. Ballard’s Cocaine Nights with a yellow Waterstone’s 3-for-2 sticker showing that he didn’t blag a copy, he bought it. The shelves seem to house mainly non-fiction: books on Hitler, Islam, cultural amnesia. Amis’ own books are lined up on Catherine O’Flynn’s shelves in a large photograph appearing in another newspaper, the Independent: London Fields, Other People, Night Train. Hilary Mantel is there too with Beyond Black. James Ellroy, Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, Camus, Kafka. But there appears no order, alphabetical or otherwise. Still, I can see that the book I’m looking for is not there. Or not in shot, at least.
Julie Myerson is photographed, also in the Independent, in front of, or rather sitting below, a shelf of first editions protected by plastic covers. You can see the light glinting off them. Murdoch, Updike. When it’s her turn in the Guardian, it’s strikingly domestic: cat basket, baby photo, a tiny pile of books to the right of the desk. Joanne Harris, in the Observer Magazine, reveals that she collects French books, the Livre de Poche colophon and distinctive spine recognisable even across the room. Also in two separate Observer supplements, plastic covers are in evidence in different shots of, again, Siri Hustvedt, photographs clearly taken on the same day, unless she wears that black and white striped cardigan and dangly earrings for every photographer that comes to the house. In the background a wall-mounted bookcase, lines of serious-looking volumes in plastic sleeves. An olive-green leather sofa. In one shot, Hustvedt stretches out her long legs across the wide cushions; in the other she is sitting on the floor in front of the sofa leaning on the coffee table in the foreground on which are stacked various large-format books: Conjunctions 49: A Writers’ Aviary, a monograph of René Char, L’Oeil de Simenon, a visitors’ guide to New York City and The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard. To the right of the sofa is another bookcase on the adjoining wall. It contains a number of orange-spined books that could be Penguins but equally might not be.
Both Marina Warner and Simon Armitage have music stands.
Sarah Waters, Charlotte Mendelson and Sebastian Faulks all have the same poster on the wall, the wartime slogan ‘KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON’, in white on a red background.
Will Self and Sarah Waters have maps of London hanging on the wall. Robert Irwin has a map of the Middle East and North Africa. Esther Freud has an etching by her father Lucian, J. G. Ballard a copy of a painting by Paul Delvaux. Hanif Kureishi has a picture of Kate Moss above his desk. Kate Mosse has a photograph of sunrise in the Pyrenees.
William Boyd, Jacqueline Wilson, Adam Thirlwell, Anne Enright, Blake Morrison, Jonathan Bate, Sebastian Faulks and Deborah Moggach are all Mac users.
Simon Gray, John Mortimer and J. G. Ballard have all died since appearing.
Michael Holroyd and Margaret Drabble, husband and wife, have both been featured, separately, in the Guardian series. His room is much untidier than hers. Claire Tomalin’s room is caught in the photographer’s lens three months after that of her husband, Michael Frayn. Hunter Davies, still using an Amstrad PCW9512, is scarcely more technologically evolved than his wife, Margaret Forster, with her fountain pen and A4 paper. Joanna Briscoe and Charlotte Mendelson live together in north London; their respective rooms appear almost a year apart. Mendelson’s temporary lodging in the downstairs front room is dominated by children’s toys, kitchenware and an improvised barrier against the life of the street — a huge mountain of boxes blocking out the view of Dartmouth Park — while Briscoe’s beloved top-floor book-lined ‘tree house’ study is destined to become a bedroom.
Among the reference volumes on Briscoe’s bookshelves is an edition of the Time Out Film Guide, not recent enough to include Andrew Davies’ adaptation of her novel, Sleep With Me. Halliwell’s Film Guide sits on Marina Warner’s shelf; had he still been alive on its release, it’s doubtful Leslie Halliwell would have liked — or even included — Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s film Asylum, in which Warner appears as herself. Martin Amis and Siri Hustvedt each have a different edition of Ephraim Katz’s Film Encyclopedia.
Siri Hustvedt’s husband, Paul Auster, has not been included in the Writers’ Rooms series, but I doubt very much that it’s because he hasn’t been asked.
I have another look at Siri Hustvedt’s half-page in the Guardian. Top shelf, slightly to the left of centre. Orange spine, black text. With her long legs she’d be able to reach it with-out needing to stand on that chair — the same chair as Geoff Dyer, Alain de Botton and Francesca Simon. I imagine her lifting her left foot off the ground and standing on the toes of her right, extending her right arm and stretching her calf and trapezoid muscles, questing fingers latching on and extracting the book, taking it down, opening it, sniffing the pages. Has she read it? Is she intending to read it? I don’t know, but I’d like to find out.