SADIE JONES: “It seemed like such a daunting thing.”

Sadie Jones’s debut novel The Outcast (Random House, 2008) has received international acclaim and was short-listed for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. 

NATHANIEL G. MOORE talked with the British author while she was in Toronto promoting her novel earlier this year.

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[October 2008]

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When I meet up with Sadie Jones it’s still cold. It’s April and we both apologize for our clammy hands. She is polite and stunning. With the exception of the weather, she’s feeling all right. She’s been doing sit down interviews all day with the various magazines and newspapers buzzing with her recent debut novel The Outcast a portrait of small-town set in post-WWII suburban London, that “charts the downward spiral and tortured redemption of a young man shattered by loss.” (Publisher’s Weekly)

I asked the author when she started working on the novel. “It was about three years ago,” Jones says in a conference room at her Toronto publisher’s office, “and it started as a screenplay that would not sell and then when I finished it, there was more to tell so I put it in a book.”

The process of putting the story into novel form was done in secrecy; only when a friend in the film business said she was thinking of moving into the literary industry did things change. “It was completely serendipitous,” Jones begins, “because I had no faith in it and I didn’t think that I would sell it and I was doing it to stay sane and the screenplay was being produced by an independent producer and she was trying to put a film together and doing all that normal stuff and I had just finished typing the last page and she rang me up and said she was having lunch with a publishing friend and had I ever thought of writing it as a book and so I couldn’t sort of hide it, and I had to admit that I’d been doing this thing.” Her friend who would later become her agent, was “keeping her cards close to her chest because she was planning to leave the film industry in which she was having a horrible time.”

After showing it to her friend, who was now acting as her agent, The Outcast was sold. For Jones the experience of selling the book was new and a big relief. “I just didn’t think of it as a commodity,” Jones says, “but I was always connected to it, I was completely obsessed by it.”

The process of writing the novel--though enjoyable because of Jones’s attachment to the characters--was at times exhausting. “It seemed like such a daunting thing.”

In a recent review, The Georgia Straight’s Jillian Hull cited Jones’s experience as a screenwriter as a positive strength for the dramatic scenarios prevalent in the novel. “Trained as a screenwriter,” Hull writes, “Jones brings a dramatic arc to every scene, while her restrained prose renders the repression and sublimation at this novel’s core into something combustible.”

I asked Sadie how The Outcast’s protagonist, 19-year-old Lewis Aldridge (who leaves Brixton Prison after serving two years for burning down a local church) spoke to her.

“The connection with him was I think his need to seek something better. He’s not naturally a dark person; he’s sort of forced towards darkness,” Jones comments. “Obviously he has weakness and flaws that make him so self-destructive. He’s looking for a moment of a connection with people, with Jeannie or Alex. He doesn’t seek darkness, he seeks light.”

In a previous interview with Harper’s, Jones roughly likened her protagonist to a James Dean type character. Jones balked slightly with the mention of Dean, perhaps too quotidian an image for a character by and large still living in Jones’s psyche. “At the very beginning when I was thinking about the 1950s and that iconography, that was when those sorts of people and images were coming to me.”

I asked Jones about the process of writing both male characters from a specific period in time not known for its masculine emotionalism. “I didn’t find any problems writing the male characters. I was very close to Lewis. His maleness didn’t seem a leap or jolt for me. Maybe gender is less important than we think it is.”

The Outcast is at times an unsettling novel: the ongoing domestic and social confrontations in the book is both heartfelt and anxious; the brooding shame and guilty seemed authentic and at times uncomfortable. I asked Jones if The Outcast was intended to be a commentary on the family. “It wasn’t a social commentary in any sense. I used that time to tell the story of that family and it was just that surrounding and that era that made that telling easier. I’m sure there are probably as many families now who find it impossible to speak to one another and who hit each other and who drink as there ever has been.”

Currently, when not touring, Jones is working on a new novel, and is about a third of the way through.


Nathaniel G. Moore is the author of Let’s Pretend We Never Met (Pedlar, 2007)