Three Hours

"Yes. It’s quite unusual for her. Her books defy easy categorization. They don’t fall easily into particular genres. Three Hours is set in a private school in the depths of Somerset. In terms of storytelling, the ticking clock is a great trope, this sense of three hours or 180 minutes. It’s played out in real time, which is a great feat of writing. If you really cracked on and read it, at pace, you could probably read it in three hours. So she’s using the well-known device of a time limit—in this case, a bomb that’s going to go off creates enormous tension—but she does something very clever with it. Again, it’s multiple stories, which appeals to me. We have the stories of lots of different students within the school, as well as the head teacher, who is very badly injured right at the beginning. One group is in the middle of a Macbeth rehearsal when they get the alert, and the school is locked down. They don’t know where the gunmen are, and where the bomb might be. They’ve barricaded themselves in, and the drama teacher tries to keep people going, rehearsing Macbeth . There are some subtle allusions between the story of Macbeth and what’s playing out in the school. It might sound heavy-handed, but it’s not. It’s also very contemporary. One really powerful storyline is about a 16-year-old refugee from Syria called Rafi. He hears this small explosion in the wood, recognises the sound of a bomb, and he’s the one who informs the head. Rafi is inside the school and his younger brother Basi, who’s very, very fragile, is somewhere out in the grounds. It has this extraordinary effect—it makes me feel slightly tingly just talking about it now—that love of a brother for his younger sibling. When refugees arrive in this country from Syria, it must feel like a real disconnect. And yet here was this person suddenly in a war situation with this ticking bomb in the ground of the school. The story of Rafi is just very, very believable. The head teacher, Matthew, is also extraordinary. At one point, as they try and keep each other going, he says, “In the end it is all about love, it is all that matters.” It sounds like a Love Actually -type movie, but it isn’t. It’s done without any sentimentality, it’s just a stark statement of the facts. Ultimately in that situation, you’re just looking after each other. Three Hours is very exciting as well. It’s really, really tense. It’s a fabulous book. It’s certainly one of my favorite books of recent years. It is. When you’re in this game, you live or die by a book’s readability. When I’m writing a book, I have in mind a reader at two o’clock in the morning who’s just finished a chapter, and thinks, ‘Just one more!’ I’m shameless, I’m afraid. I make sure that the end of each chapter has something in there to make them want to read on, a driver of some sort to make them turn the page and see what happens next. It’s quite fun. I spend maybe a year writing a book, and then someone will come up to me and say, ‘I read your book in an afternoon!’ Part of me thinks, ‘God! Do you know how long it took me to write the damn thing?’ And one part of me is thinking, ‘That’s fantastic, I couldn’t ask for more.’ It is just one of those things, that you spend all that time doing something and then it’s read that quickly. I remember when Ian McEwan wrote Sweet Tooth , I was a journalist and I interviewed him about the paperback. Sweet Tooth was his stab at a spy thriller, and it has a lot of unreliability in it. It’s a really good book. But I remember him saying that he was slightly worried people weren’t going to be savoring the nuances of every sentence he wrote. I said, ‘Yes, you are going to be having people speed reading your prose.’ I think he found that difficult because he takes so much care over how he crafts sentences. The idea that someone might just be flicking through the pages, not really observing how he balanced two clauses in a sentence and included internal rhymes…I had to say to him, ‘You’re probably going to have to let that go, because people are going to be reading this for the story.’ So readability is a big thing, but I think actually the next book on my list, The Talented Mr Ripley , I did savor more. I wouldn’t say I ripped through it in the way I did with Three Hours. With Three Hours , I actually read it twice. I was going to interview Rosamund Lupton at the Marlborough Literary Festival, so I read it again and felt it was even better the second time round. But with The Talented Mr Ripley , I enjoyed the language and the craft more. It’s a brilliant book. I didn’t read it just for its sheer flicking the pages, adrenaline rush of a helter-skelter ride."