Clare Chambers: ‘Iris Murdoch taught me that a novel could be about absolutely anything'

The Guardian

11-07-2025

My earliest reading memory
I have the fuzziest memory of an illustrated Grimms' fairy tale called Jorinde and Joringel from the time before I could read. I made my mum take it out of the library over and over again. It was about a quest for a flower with some special powers. I wish I could remember why it had such a hold over me.
My favourite book growing up
I think a sense of humour is forged in childhood and I remember crying with laughter as my older sister read me the Jennings books by Anthony Buckeridge. It didn't bother me that they were all about prep school boys – it was the comedy of embarrassment that really spoke to me.
The book that changed me as a teenager
I grew up during the Thatcher years. The brutal hardship of the life of 19th-century coal miners in Émile Zola's Germinal, which I read when I'd just left school, rattled me out of my comfortable middle-class certainties in a way that the social injustices happening under my nose had failed to do. That's the power of fiction.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I think I always wanted to be a writer, but The Bell by Iris Murdoch, about a lay religious community whose peaceful, unworldly exterior hides turbulent and destructive forces, was a landmark in my reading. I read it at 16 and it was perhaps the first time I realised that a novel, if perfectly executed, could be about absolutely anything.
The book I came back to
I first read Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway at university and found the constant shifting from one consciousness to another infuriating and tedious. I tried it again in my 50s, closer to the age of Clarissa Dalloway herself, and this time the ripples of thoughts and impressions and the intrusion of the past into the present made much more sense. Maybe in another 40 years I will find something to admire in The Waves.
The book I reread
When I was young, Persuasion was my least favourite Austen novel. It was too slow, too melancholy, its hero and heroine too lacking in charisma. Each time I've reread it since it moves up the rankings. It doesn't have the dazzle of Pride and Prejudice, but I have grown into its autumnal tone of regret for lost time.
The book I could never read again
I read Le Grand Meaulnes at 17 and thought it must have been written especially for me. Alain-Fournier's early death on the Somme only added to its tragic allure. It's a young person's book, full of romance and yearning, and should not be revisited in cynical middle age. I tried and soon regretted it – 'the lost domain' was well and truly lost.
The book I discovered later in life
I was in my 50s when I first read Anthony Trollope. I don't know what took me so long as his novels have all the elements I enjoy – psychological acuity, plot, moral dilemmas, wit, social commentary. My favourite is The Small House at Allington. Lily Dale is a delightful heroine in the Lizzie Bennet mould, but Trollope sets up the traditional good suitor/bad suitor predicament and then drives an elegant carriage and horses through our assumptions. I should add that Timothy West's masterful performances of the unabridged audiobooks take the reading experience to an even higher level.
The book I am currently readingNow We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller. I'm ashamed to say I had not read any of his books until The Land in Winter, which made me urgently seek out his earlier work. It's that rarest of treats – propulsive storytelling in sensuous prose.
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My comfort read
I find comfort in even the darkest book if the writing is brilliant, but for the quiet dignity of ordinary lives I turn to The Fortnight in September by RC Sherriff.
Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers is out in paperback from W&N. To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.