The Rationalist

"You’ve got this young doctor working in 18th-century Lymington. He is interested in philosophy and the way of the world at a time when most things were still unknown. Doctors didn’t know all the things they needed to know to cure people. He befriends an older doctor, and they meet regularly to have philosophical chats, and these philosophical chats are in the book. He is also introduced to a woman, who is probably in her 30s, who has bought a big house in Lymington. She suggests that they have a ‘conversation.’ What happens is: she – and what’s interesting about it is it’s all written in the style of the time, so you have to deduce a lot of this because they never say anything explicitly – says to him: ‘You’re an attractive young man, there are lots of middle-aged women who don’t get to have sex, why don’t you pay them a visit?’ And that’s basically the premise. So he starts an affair with her, and then she arranges for him to meet and visit certain married women in and around the area whose husbands are away. It’s not erotic in the sense that you don’t get much description, and it’s quite ambiguous. You think: ‘I think he may have just slept with this woman, I’m not sure.’ A spanner is thrown into the works when the woman’s daughter turns up and he completely falls for her and wants to run away and marry her. That causes the whole arrangement to blow up. It’s an interesting premise. What’s great about the book is its subtlety – there’s a great economy of language. The paperback edition I have has five pages of rave reviews at the front, from every publication. One of them said: ‘Almost certain to be on the Booker list.’ It was talked about in those terms. “The edition I have has five pages of rave reviews, from every publication, and one of them said: ‘Almost certain to be on the Booker list’ – it was talked about in those terms” I worked with the author, actually – nothing to do with this book, but about 10-12 years ago, I republished one of his books, Gents (1997), about cottaging in public toilets. It had been out of print for a while, another lost gem. When we brought it out, even the Times did a piece on it, saying it was great to have this lost classic back in print. The author died a few years ago. He was the same age as Ian McEwan and Martin Amis and Julian Barnes , and all that group. And for a while, for a very short while, he was spoken of in that circle. But then, when his subsequent work was not as successful, he sort of – not vanished – but moved to the sidelines. I think he resented it. He felt he was every bit as good as the others. He’s a classic example of how great writers need luck and timing, and the right reviews at the right times. He never quite caught. Yes, he would jump about genre a lot so that does make it difficult. His poetry was published by Stephen Spender in Encounter . He was acclaimed, and people knew he was a great writer, but he just didn’t catch somehow. He wrote sailing thrillers as well, and he designed a special keel that was used in the America’s Cup. That’s right, and then he wrote a book that was an alternative theory of evolution. In fact, it was one of the ones he presented to me. He said, ‘Will you publish it?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s presented like a scientific paper. If you want to rewrite it as a popular science book, I’ll do it,’ and he said, ‘No, it’s got to be published like this.’ He then published it with an academic press and a few years later he came back to me and said, ‘I should really have done it as a popular science book.’ Exactly, and actually his theory – I’m not a biologist – made logical sense to me. It wasn’t necessarily correct, but it made sense. He was his own worst enemy at times – he didn’t take editing very well. He wasn’t the easiest person to work with. But The Rationalist is wonderful. There was a follow-up called The Marriage of Souls (1990), and then there was a third book that never got published. It was intended as a trilogy. There’s a certain romance to the idea that here was this, at the time, very popular and well-received book, and for whatever reason, the third and final instalment never came out. There may well be people who read the first and second books and loved them. The third one does exist in manuscript form, but of course the problem is if it’s ever going to appear, you’d have to republish the first two, otherwise it doesn’t really make sense. Two and three are quite long, so you couldn’t really do an omnibus – it would be about 1,500 pages long. Some books do fall by the wayside. I think that’s sad, but it is inevitable. Although I try to champion these sorts of ‘forgotten’ books, I also think there’s an inevitability to it. Not everything stays in print. In fact these days, if you’re still in print three or four years after your book came out, you’re doing pretty well."