“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.”
Carey’s stories skew unpredictable: a waxwork artist’s progress in Little (2018), about Marie Tussaud, or Pinocchio’s shark-engulfed maker Geppetto in The Swallowed Man (2020). But a theatre setting was long-brewing. It’s the paradoxical reality of theatre that gets him: “There’s something about sitting in the darkness, like the darkness of the tomb. You’re stuck there with a story until it reaches its end.” Edith herself crisply describes the trajectory of tragedy as “four acts of hurtling disaster, culminating in calamity”. The novel most satisfyingly follows the pattern.
It was lockdown that returned Carey’s imagination to his home city of Norwich. “There’s something about being far away from home that frees you up to write about it,” he reflects. “I was stuck in Austin for the pandemic, and I missed Norwich. I fell in love with the city again from a distance. And I thought: now I can write about it.”
In the course of his research for the novel, he devoured material about the city’s myths, and especially its undercrofts – vaulted rooms beneath medieval houses, of which Norwich has more than any other British city. “Much of the city was destroyed by fire in 1508, but the old city is still underground. It hasn’t left us.” As the theatre becomes inhospitable to Edith, she retreats underground, but isn’t alone in the undercrofts. She is haunted by another architectural quirk – the proximity of Norwich’s theatre, its palace of dreams, and the asylum, where nightmares cluster. “Right opposite the theatre is the Bethlem hospital,” Carey says. “They were so close to each other, I was shivering with it.”
As well as Norwich, Carey was preoccupied with toy theatres – a world of paint and cardboard where Edith exerts rare agency. The novel includes character and set designs, proscenium arches and wings, everything needed for your own tabletop retelling (for those who would rather not shred the book, Carey’s website offers printable pdfs). The grey-toned figures carry a melancholy sense of their own fragility: as Edith remarks: “To die in cardboard is still to die”.
The young Carey wasn’t deep into toy theatres, but did grow up with a keen apprehension of the uncanny and the way the past can infiltrate the present. His childhood home, outside Norwich, was once owned by Anne of Cleves. Built on the foundations of a Saxon hall, it was later a first world war convalescent hospital. “History was everywhere,” Carey says. “The whole building moved and was always in conversation with itself.” In ways that filter into Edith Holler, it was riddled with deathwatch beetles (“We could hear them clicking”), and occasional phantom footsteps.
He saw his first pantomime at Norwich Theatre Royal, glorified as the novel’s Holler theatre. “I must have been four or five – I sat on the edge of my seat, gobsmacked.” V&A exhibits prompt memories of youthful theatregoing in a far-off era of affordable West End tickets. “I saw everything”: Judi Dench’s Cleopatra, Alec Guinness, John Gielgud’s final production. “Gielgud was very old – he lost his line several times, but covered it beautifully.” Carey himself studied drama at Hull, where he gave his Hamlet. “Someone likened my performance to Mickey Rooney,” he giggles happily.
Now 54, Carey has spent enough time in theatres for their atmosphere to seep beneath his skin. A stint as stage door keeper at London’s Comedy theatre (now the Harold Pinter) confronted him with Pinter himself, as both actor and author. “Pinter was extraordinary,” Carey recalls. “Very generous, but utterly terrifying. He took me out to dinner one night, and to his house. [Pinter’s wife] Antonia Fraser was writing a ghost story, and wanted a tour of the theatre when everybody else had gone, so we did that one night and frightened each other.”
Beyond encounters with the great and good, guarding the stage door was “the best thing in the world. I would get up in the morning, bike into town and unlock the theatre. It was just mine. I would lock up last thing at night, with the sounds of pubs and everybody screaming outside.” After “a series of crappy jobs after leaving university” (a stint at Madame Tussauds bore fruit in Little), “as a stage door keeper there was nothing to do once you unlocked. I just sat there and wrote.”
He longed to be a playwright, although “the sort of plays I wanted to put on would have big casts and large puppets”. British theatre budgets couldn’t stretch to his ambitions, though he did manage a large-scale show based on Pinocchio in Craiova, Romania. “I actually lived in the theatre, a huge, Ceausescu-era monster. The actors were dirt poor, and many were living in their dressing rooms. One day I went up into the lighting grid, and there was a sleeping bag up there.” Something of this inflects Holler’s theatre, its staff crammed into every tiny chamber.
Puppets remain a passion – Carey fizzes with excitement when he sees them up ahead at the V&A. He worked with puppets in the theatre company Faulty Optic. “These objects have life,” he reflects. “More lifelike than human beings, with more grace.”
Puppets make a decisive appearance in Edith Holler – there’s not a scrap of theatrical craft that Carey doesn’t cherish. One spine-tingling sequence conducts us through the theatre, backstage and front of house, above and below stage, through all the twisty passages and hidden crannies. Brilliantly, it’s written as a chase scene – Edith is evading her new stepmother, the disarmingly unscrupulous Margaret Unthank – so the building radiates peril.
Edith’s story began in images rather than words. “The very first illustration I did was of Edith, as a cutout figure in a grey smock.” Does illustration often kickstart his writing? “I always work with them in tandem. I can’t see my characters properly until I draw them.” Occasionally, they leave the page, like the 4ft doll Carey made when imagining Marie Tussaud. “You can move her arms and legs, and my wife had a haircut so that the doll has hair. She sits at home, and when our kids were very small they would sit on her lap.”
Carey’s narrators tend to the solitary, not always through choice. Disregarded, they emerge with almost plaintive force, insisting on our attention. Carey made the shift from stage to page when he came across The Tin Drum by Günter Grass. “The voice was so strange, wild and exciting. So far, all my books have been written in the first person – it feels like a voice coming on stage, declaring, ‘Here I am’.”
The settings of Carey’s works are wonderfully various. Does he see a connecting thread? “Many of my characters are artists, in one form or another,” he considers. “And there are lots of fake humans!” It took 15 years to find a voice for Marie Tussaud, fake-maker extraordinaire. Returning to the manuscript after writing his Iremonger trilogy, he took heart from Tussaud’s unreliable autobiography. “It’s full of lies!” he says. “I began to relax: she lied so I could too; she was her own fictional creation.”
Bouncing between exhibits, eyes shining, Carey absorbs all he misses in Texas. “Austin is not a theatre city, it’s a music city.” He followed his wife, American author Elizabeth McCracken, to the university that employs them both, 14 years ago (“You can tell by my Texas twang”). He relishes teaching, but speaking just weeks before the presidential election, America’s turbulent recent past weighs more heavily. “It can be devastating, particularly under Trump. If this election goes the wrong way, I don’t know what will happen. Back to theatre – how can you have a pantomime villain, and still want to vote for him?”
• Edith Holler by Edward Carey is published by Gallic (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
