Ross Raisin hunches over a cup of tea. The hunch, he explains, is a result of the garden shed he bought four years ago as a place in which to write. His daughter had turned one and he was just starting his latest novel, A Natural, locked up in there from nine till six with an electric heater to warm his legs and a jar of boiled sweets to keep him going. “It’s not much bigger than this table, is the shed,” he says, appraising the pine surface strewn with tea things. We are sitting in a cafe in Stoke Newington, north London, not far from the flat he shares with his wife, Anne, and their two young children.
The new book marks a departure from Raisin’s previous work, the award-winning God’s Own Country, and Waterline, which together earned him a place on Granta’s 2013 list of 20 best young novelists. Both books were celebrated for the brilliantly distinctive voices of their outsider protagonists – respectively the loner son of a Yorkshire farmer and a former shipbuilder exiled from his life by grief. God’s Own Country (2008) fused Yorkshire dialect with made-up words so the text pops and spurts with its main character’s distinctive idiom. Waterline (2011) was heavy on the Glaswegian vernacular, and was hailed by Alan Warner as “a triumph of ventriloquism and empathy”.
So it comes as something of a surprise to find that A Natural tells the story of a character who has no recognisable voice. Tom Pearman is a young gay footballer, struggling to come to terms with his identity in a sport in which homosexuality is scarcely allowed to exist. “That boy’s a player. A natural,” Pearman’s coach says of him. “And I’m going to turn him into a man.”
Pearman is so desperate to avoid being known, he pursues a sort of hyper-privacy. He hides his pot plants under the bed each time he leaves the hotel room his club has put him up in, so staff won’t discover that he likes cacti. He doesn’t say very much – an assertion of the commonplace that footballers must do their talking on the pitch. When Tom does speak, his words somehow sound wrong, off-key, as if language doesn’t belong to him.
This seems a striking disavowal of the qualities for which Raisin, 37, is celebrated. He may be known for his love of outsiders, but with this book he has placed himself outside his own reputation. “It’s just the way the books turned out,” he says. He has a habit of twirling his hair while he thinks. “But underneath that, I think, probably unconsciously there is some kind of a desire to write something that is new to me.”
A Natural took longer to write than the first two novels, and from Raisin’s wince when he recalls receiving feedback on his final draft from his three trusted readers (his wife, agent and editor), the process was also more fraught. Anne’s reaction on finishing was, “You bastard!”. The book’s initial ending, Raisin explains, “really didn’t give the reader what they wanted”.
Their comments demanded a rewrite, all the more painful given that he says writing is “never a joyous experience”. He rarely thinks, “Oh, I’ve nailed that, that’s really on song.” The last time that happened was in December 2012, and the happiness was partly owing to Bradford City’s victory over Arsenal the same day.
“I’ve worked on the book for somewhere between four and five years, and it just feels like an awfully long time,” he says. His children are now five and three, so A Natural was written during a period when he had less time and more tiredness – especially as he also teaches students ranging in age from primary school to postgraduate. “The longer it takes, the more you’re aware of the fact that your money is running out. And the more care and craft you invest in it, the more you start to really want people to read it, the thing you made.” This desire was a sensation he “barely felt” with his earlier books. “But now … I feel slight sheepishness even admitting it to myself, that I want people to read it – but it’s true.”
Raisin was born near Ilkley in West Yorkshire. His mum worked as a teacher, his dad an orthotist, providing devices and support for joints and muscles. He went from Bradford grammar school to King’s College London, where he studied English, and after graduating got a job at an El Vino wine bar as a trainee manager – but not in the Hollywood way of waiting tables in order to fund creative hopes. “Oh no! I wanted to be a restaurant manager. I wanted to have my own place,” he says. He progressed to assistant manager, and also signed up for the MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths, “writing nine to five and then going to work till one o’clock in the morning”.
When his wife, a theatre director, “got a position at Bristol Old Vic”, they left London and Raisin carried on writing and working in restaurants, even while he drafted his second book. In odd moments, the two lives blended, such as when he’d be “laying out the newspapers in the reception area” and catch sight of his own face on a page, around the time that God’s Own Country was nominated for prizes.
A Natural has none of that first book’s lyricism. The text is stripped to a wilful plainness, even, sometimes, bordering on the awkward – which, of course, is the point. “I want always to find a way of using language to express my idea most fittingly – and with this book, that was about a greater plainness and subtlety,” Raisin says. One crucial encounter, for instance, when Tom meets the club groundsman for a drink, a rare public outing for them, is scintillatingly obtuse. “Tom approached the passenger door and opened it. They sat in the darkness, unmoving. There was a machinery catalogue in the door storage pocket … Tom closed his eyes.”
So why football? Some sports are deemed more literary than others. Cricket and baseball, for instance, have a pedigree (recent examples being Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, respectively), but football has long been literature’s poor relation. “I never felt I was writing a book about football,” Raisin says. “I was writing a book set inside the world of football. It’s about identity and shame and love. But I am very aware of the fact football doesn’t fit neatly for publishing inside the label of literary fiction.”
Raisin’s first two novels were published by Penguin, but here too A Natural brought about a departure. He and Penguin “saw the book slightly differently”. The novel went on submission, to be bought by Jonathan Cape, and “even in conversations with publishers who saw the book, and some of them turned it down on the grounds that - they were quite upfront about saying this - ‘We don’t know how to sell it to women because it’s about football, but at the same time we don’t know how we sell it to football supporters because it’s got gay in it.’ And that’s incredible,” he says. “Well, it’s not incredible at all. It feels completely unsurprising. But I’m interested in how the book is received because it’s not a book for men, it’s not a book for football supporters, it’s a book for readers. You can write fiction that is searching and empathetically complicated about any subject.” He is drawn to situations – and this is the only time he sounds vehement – with a “dead crust of opinion around them”.
“The idea of what happens if you grow up inside a bubble, inside a world that is completely insular, and the whole experience of your childhood is one in which you are taught to believe that you are and need to be a certain kind of person, because that’s the only kind of person that exists in the bubble. And then what happens if you are forced outside of the bubble, and how prepared are you for that life?”
Raisin interviewed professional footballers while researching A Natural, but his description of the bubble applies to his other books too. “In terms of a line between the three novels, the biggest one is probably the fact that there is always some kind of outsider,” he says. Other people have told him, “‘You do tend to write about stereotypically masculine characters quite a lot’, and you think hmm, yeah, I suppose I have done that.” It’s always somebody else who points out these threads. “My wife said, ‘You write about the father-son relationship quite a lot in your novels’, and it’s true.”
From the age of seven Raisin went with his father to watch Bradford City. “Probably the central plank of our relationship was going to football matches. There was something very special about the whole experience of the matchday. It was just me and my dad and we’d go and meet up with some of the other fellas. The routine of it was so important. We’d go to the same pubs on the journey towards the ground and we’d stay in those pubs for the same number of pints” – bitter shandy for Ross – “and get to the ground and have the same in-stadium routine. For me a sausage roll, for my dad a pie, and a Bovril each. And it was a way, I think … perhaps for two quite Yorkshire men, especially my dad, to show their kind of refracted care and love for each other. That was easier on that day, Saturday, than during the rest of the week.”
Raisin’s dad has yet to see the book. “He’ll have a sentence at most. He’ll let me know he’s read it. And my mum, going on the experience of Waterline anyway – she told me that she hates it. She found it too depressing. Having enjoyed God’s Own Country, the fact she didn’t enjoy the second book was a disappointment to her, that she let be known at an event in Yorkshire.” They were in Haworth, and Raisin’s primary schoolteacher was in the audience. “He said something about the book and my mum shouted out in disagreement. I can’t remember what, but she basically said, ‘No, I didn’t like it at all! I much preferred the first one!’”
You’d think that would be mortifying – or maddening – but Raisin smiles. “Oh no. I don’t care. I found it quite funny. But I don’t know what she’ll think of this.” The question of how people will react is on his mind. He is twirling his hair again (a habit that did not please his restaurant managers). Half to himself he says, “I wonder whether the label of it being a football book is avoidable. Or the label I suppose typically is going to be ‘the gay football novel’. Well, we’ll see.”
• A Natural is published by Jonathan Cape. To order a copy for £11.24 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
