The world is becoming a shopping centre - Jeffrey Archer
INDIA: India remains an inspiration for acclaimed British novelist
and short story writer Jeffrey Archer with its “manic pace, more than 50
million readers and warm hospitality”.
The writer, in India to launch his new book, “Best Kept Secret”, the
third in the Clifton Chronicles series, says India is growing like any
other emerging world capital - high on consumerism and the culture of
brands.
“I came to India 30 years ago on a political trip. Every year, I come
to the country, the pace of change looks tremendous. Even the young are
changing. They have become homogenous (like the rest of the world),
Archer told IANS in an interview.
“The whole world is becoming a shopping centre - and this
homogenization of culture is getting worse everyday. You can’t turn the
clock back,” Archer said.
Explaining with an example, he said, “Women stopped wearing kimonos
in Japan 30 years ago. They began to wear western clothes. Now, the
young are wearing designer jeans. That is the influence of television
channels and magazines.
When I landed at the airport in the capital, I looked at the shopping
arcade and it could have been any country on earth,” mused the British
novelist, one of a growing tribe of foreign writers who have included
India on their book tour and launch maps.
Does Archer have a favourite city in India? Given a choice, he would
rather not live in Mumbai, but in Chennai and Bangalore - “two of
India’s most important cities,” he says, adding, “But I find Mumbai
fascinating”.
Archer’s new autobiographical fictional serial - “The Clifton
Chronicles” - begins in 1940, the year Archer was born, and spans the
transforming decades of the 1950s, 60s and thereafter to end roughly
around 2014, in a series of seven books. It looks at the struggle of the
middle-of-the-rung, through the life-stories of the Clifton and
Barringtons - two families at the opposite end of the social spectrum.
“Best Kept Secret” chronicles 20 years of hero Harry Clifton’s life
from 1940s to 1960s. Harry is now a best selling novelist and has built
a new life with Emma Barrington and their son Sebastian, but threat
looms on the horizon not only from the Barrington family, but from a
shady figure from Harry’s past.
“The series is autobiographical is nature. It is about the west
country of England where I had spent all my life. I am Harry, my wife is
Emma and my mother is Macey.
It is my life... What I perceived as a young person writing for the
first time. The beginning was a tough, hard battle. I captured the feel
of the era through the language my mother used,” Archer told IANS. It
stops short at the swinging 1960s: “The next book will have the Beatles
and the Rolling Stones, when the writer was in Oxford”, Archer says.
There were fads and phases in literary movements, the novelist says.
“We went through erotica, we have different phases. I had stuck to
telling a simple story - I did not do violence, but gave good tales with
beginning, middle and end. If you give people a simple story, they can
become involved with it,” Archer says.
DECCAN HERALD
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