‘Very generous and utterly terrifying’: novelist Edward Carey on Pinter, puppets and his spell living in a theatre

Edward Carey at home in Austin, Texas. Photograph: Lizzie Chen/The Guardian

“I need to take a picture of this for my wife. She absolutely adores Kenneth Williams.” We’re in the recently revamped performance gallery of the V&A, a dazzle of theatrical memorabilia. “This” is Kenneth Williams’s costume from Carry on Cleopatra, worn while protesting “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!” And wielding the cameraphone is British novelist Edward Carey, visiting from his home in Texas to launch his eighth novel, Edith Holler. It’s an irresistible, darkly gothic story set in a theatre and full of the author’s trademark illustrations – so the gallery makes a fittingly immersive interview location.

We dart between costumes, playbills and set models. For Carey’s heroine, a 12-year-old girl in 1901 Norwich, the Holler theatre is all she knows: she believes that to step outside the building will bring disaster. “She has been fed on fancy, on nothing,” Carey says. “But to her, all these fanciful ideas are real.”