Bookclub: Wilbur Smith

Editor's Note: This episode of Bookclub is available to listen online or for download.

To someone of my generation - and a boy, to boot - it’s not surprising that someone who writes in the spirit of John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard has sold more than 120 million books. I did ask, rhetorically, at our recording with the veteran novelist Wilbur Smith whether there comes a stage when even a publisher stops counting…but I suppose that’s not allowed.

The point is that he knows how to write an adventure story, and for those of us who were taken into dreamland by King Solomon’s Mines or by the adventures of Richard Hannay, or indeed by R.L. Stevenson and Jules Verne, the success of Smith’s stories - sagas, I suppose - is easy to explain.

But explaining why people want to read them isn’t the same as explaining how they’re written.

The art of story-telling - putting together a page-turner - is, I suspect, a skill that some people just develop naturally.

But the truth is that it is rare. We all know books that purport to spin a great yarn that simply don’t work, usually because they’re formulaic and the language is stale. Keeping a spring in your prose and turning every plot corner in style is a skill that is in short supply.

I asked Smith for the secret of a good story, and his answer was, I think, the perfect one: ‘You have to make the people believe in your characters, it’s just a matter of faith. Your characters have to act in a certain way, to be believable, and you have to generate an interest in your readers for them to follow the story - for it to be important for them that these people survive.’

That is part of the secret of his style, but there is also the setting - the Africa that he came to love as a boy. It was wild, dangerous and mysterious.

Our book this month is When the Lion Feeds, the first of his novels dealing with the Courtney family (published in 1964) and reflecting the excitements of his own youth. He was about 30 when he wrote the story of the twins Sean and Garrick, the first a lion-hearted adventurer and his brother a more thoughtful, emotional soul.

Smith says he identifies more easily with Garrick - ‘I was at boarding school and I know the top dogs are hard to compete with. I wasn’t top dog. I was third team rugby, not first, I didn’t get colours.’ But Sean’s appetite for the wildness of Africa in the era of the Zulu wars in the 1870s and 80s was a reflection of Wilbur’s own, when his father - a bushman, he calls him - introduced him to the sounds and smells of the open places, and the creatures of the forests and the veld. His boyhood gave him an enduring love of the continent - all its peoples and their customs, the incomers and the native.

This month’s group of readers were naturally interested in how his views had altered in the half century through which southern Africa has changed so radically. He was born in Broken Hill in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1933 and his world was unrecognisable to a contemporary generation. He acknowledged that he would certainly have written quite differently a generation later - that’s inevitable - but the guts of the story would have been the same.

He was always interested in the relationship between the colonisers and the colonised, and said that the relationships between his parents and grandparents and the indigenous people around them was a close and fascinating one. He doesn’t think that human nature has changed with the passage of time - ‘I have learnt in my life there are good people and bad people and the good ones outnumber the bad.’

In a way, it’s his motto. He likes stories that pit goodies against baddies - on the land, in the mines, in the scramble for wealth on the trading floor - and in the 37 books that followed this one he’s demonstrated that he understands instinctively how to draw his readers into his own enthusiasms.

That’s the mark of a born storyteller, and although he trained to become an accountant it’s hard to imagine him finding the excitements the he loves in the mysterious world of double-entry bookkeeping.

I hope you enjoy our conversation about When the Lion Feeds.

Next month, we’ll turn to a quite different kind of novel - The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds, a poetic story about the poet John Clare and his incarceration in an Essex asylum in the early Victorian era. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and if you don’t know it, you have a treat in store.

Happy reading

Jim

Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub on BBC Radio 4