Doom

She still writes every day and is currently “having a tremendous time with the surrealists and early psychoanalysts” researching a new novel. Her last, The Children’s Book, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 1990, aged 53, she won the Booker for her masterpiece, Possession, described by John Updike as “furiously bookish” and considered amongst the greatest English novels of the past 50 years. “I work very hard all morning,” she explains. “And another thing I’ve learnt as I’ve got older is to do several things at once. Never just do one thing because you get tired. The key is to do more, not less.”

What about when she does get tired? “Pick up another book,” is her instant reply. This has been a lifelong motto. No matter whether struggling with illness (as a child), grief (her only son was killed by a drunk driver at the age of 11) or writing (24 books and counting), picking up another book has always been a panacea in what she otherwise deems a dark, godless world.

Byatt is a fully paid-up pessimist. She thinks the human condition is dreadful and that tragedy, destruction and chaos are the order of the day. Though her gloomy outlook would make even Eeyore seem chipper, she is great fun and there is a lot more laughter during our encounter than I expected. She enjoys life (I think she mainly means books, which seem to take priority over most things) precisely because it won’t last. “If you’re a really good pessimist anything that comes along in your life that is not pessimistic makes you absolutely gleeful,” she says. “I enjoy everything that isn’t depressing, probably more than someone with a sunnier temperament.”

My first encounter with the dame takes place the night before. Byatt’s new book, Ragnarok, the latest in the celebrated Canongate myth series, is launching at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. After charming an adoring audience with her love of Terry Pratchett and her desire to “hurt” readers’ imaginations, there is a small party involving lots of fizz. Byatt apparently drinks nothing but champagne. This is just one of the rumours – or perhaps myths – that surround her. Most of them (her grandchildren call her AS Byatt; she doesn’t like being interviewed by women; she refuses to talk about her personal life) trade on her fearsome reputation for being donnish, prudish and very grand.

At the party, writers and publishers wait for their introduction and the chance to take a seat beside her. Byatt’s husband of more than 40 years, the retired economist Peter Duffy, is here too and comes across as a kind, devoted man. When I briefly meet Byatt, she says she doesn’t want to talk to me now because she would like to be indiscreet. This seems fair enough, but all the same I leave feeling intimidated.

The following day it’s a different story. Byatt is great company: artless, nervous, conspiratorial and a bit of a gas. She is terrified of doing interviews and insists a publicist sits in with us because I’ll get a better interview if she is less scared. “It’s not that I get all stiff and unrelaxed,” she explains. “It’s that I say what I really think.” You start to realise a lot of the myths around her probably persist because she is a female writer and an intellectual and therefore everyone expects her to be remote and forbidding. Similarly, her novels – dazzling, intricate tapestries of ideas, histories, curiosities and people – have been charged with favouring ideas over characters, a criticism you can’t imagine being levelled at male writers.

Much of our long, ranging and bookish conversation is taken up with the end of the world. It’s apocalyptic stuff, even in the mellow atmosphere of a hotel lounge with all its reassuring clunks of cups returning to saucers. Ragnarok is a powerful retelling of a Norse myth that doesn’t seek to reinvent it for our times (though it can’t help but have a doom-laden environmental message from the vantage point of now), instead placing it in the context of her own discovery of it: as a child in wartime. “When Canongate invited me to write a myth,” she writes in the afterword, “I knew immediately which myth I wanted to write. It should be Ragnarok, the myth to end all myths, the myth in which the gods themselves were all destroyed.”

Byatt’s mother, a fiercely intelligent working class woman who got herself to Cambridge University, gave her Asgard and the Gods, the book of Norse myths. “One of my mother’s great qualities was that as soon as you finished a book she gave you another one,” Byatt says. “This was when she was at her most human. She only ever told me not to read one book and that was George Orwell’s 1984.”

The young Byatt, evacuated from her native Sheffield during the war to the Yorkshire market town of Pontefract, devoured Asgard and the Gods. It formed and shaped the inside of her mind and turned her into a reader. It also gave her a sense of the kind of ending she desired as a world war continued: no Christian rebirth or resurrection, just “brilliant destruction … everything was burned in a red light and drowned in blackness. It was, you might say, satisfactory.”

The story of Ragnarok has been a huge influence on her. Myths in general abound in her fiction. The Victorian poet in Possession, Randolph Henry Ash, even writes his own version of Ragnarok. And now, Byatt has written hers, seen through the eyes of “a thin child in wartime”, which is about as close to autobiography as she gets.

Why is she still so drawn to this bleak sense of ending? “It’s more real,” she replies. “Even if you manage to escape destruction and disorder, it is waiting for you in one form or another. And a lot of stories we tell shape in ourselves an ability to face up to the fact that chaos is actually the normal order of things. That was a feeling I had as a child, that I shouldn’t be living in a little square house on a normal street when all this was going on. It was me that was unreal. The people being bombed and burnt out there were the real ones.

“I realised when I was writing Ragnarok that what I felt about Christianity as a child was embarrassment at not being able to respond to it,” she goes on. This continued to be the case when she was sent to a Quaker school. “I felt that good manners required me to consider it, but the more I considered it the more I wished it would go away. It was unreal too.” She once told the Archbishop of Canterbury she felt this way. “He said ‘ah yes, indeed’,” she notes with a wicked laugh.

In Ragnarok, the “thin child” understands that she is reading a German version of Asgard and the Gods, but also that the enemy is German. This is a crucial part of the opening up of her enquiring, reading mind. There are wonderful passages about the child’s terror of Germans sawing the legs off her bed and her night-time habit of sneaking the book into a shaft of light under the door so she can read. “The noise of the sawing of the legs was my sister snoring in bed,” Byatt laughs, which is the only time she mentions Margaret Drabble, the younger sister and fellow author with whom she has had a long-running and well publicised feud.

“I remember when I was quite little thinking out that the Germans must be people and that Germans were being bombed as the English were. We used to make what we called Hitler Humpties out of empty eggshells and then shoot things at them. Well, we were in a war. I was quite sure the world was going to come to an end, or at least my world.”

Ironically, Byatt thrived in Pontefract (just as her mother did in the war, away from the mind-numbing housework of peacetime). She suffered from terrible asthma and the steel mills of Sheffield made her almost constantly unwell and often bedridden. Away from the heavy sulphurous air, she could breathe. And when the war ended, her father miraculously returned. “I knew it would be all right if he came back and also I knew he wouldn’t. Well, I was wrong about that.” What happened the night he returned? “He had sent a telegram, which my mother hadn’t received. He arrived at midnight and banged on the door. My mother thought he was the air raid warden coming to say the light was getting through the blackout. I remember him coming into our bedroom and I did this huge leap over the bed with my sister in it. And he caught me.”

Her father was a district court judge and a Quaker. Her mother retired from teaching to raise four children but never got over the frustration of being a housewife. She is often cited as part of the reason for the fall-out between Drabble and Byatt. The sense of competition and the importance placed on cleverness must have been a burden for the children. She gave Byatt Robert Browning and Tennyson and repeatedly told all her children they would go to Cambridge. “I think they thought they had told us that we didn’t have to be clever, but they hadn’t,” Byatt says drily of her parents. “But it was nice too. They used to recite great chunks of poetry as we were driving along in the car. I think I developed a terror of the kitchen quite early.”

Was all this a pressure or a liberation? “Both, really,” she says. “I was a very narrow-minded child. I was only interested in reading.” She grew up timid and socially awkward, prone to hiding in cupboards and reading. By 13 she was writing novels and pronounced to a school teacher who advised her to try poetry that “prose is what I do”. She rewrote one story compulsively. “It was about a boy in an orphanage who managed to run away to the seaside,” she recalls. “When he got there everything was clean and beautiful and he met a woman with a very nice refridgerator.” She cracks up at this.

Books were never a refuge. Byatt is too engaged with the world to want to be excluded from it, and her interests range from watching the cricket to keeping up to date with the latest environmental science. But writing holds a special place and I do wonder if it helped her through the loss of her 11-year-old son. “It didn’t,” she says, but then she goes on to talk about writing and writers. “I remember thinking on that particular day that Wordsworth lost two children in one year and his writing deteriorated and never got as good as it had been. Tragedy sort of destroyed the great Wordsworth and left behind the good Wordsworth. And then I remember thinking that tragedy and disaster make writing seem rather pointless.”

Yet she continued to do it? “I had various books that were halfway through, including one about an accidental death that became much harder to write,” she sighs. “I don’t know that I had much choice. Writing just kept cropping up. I don’t think it was any form of consolation though.” She was recently asked to review some memoirs about grief. “I hate them and I don’t read them,” she says. “It’s partly my religious upbringing – we were taught not to think about ourselves. But also, I suspect writing them stops you grieving rather than letting you go through it.”

Byatt’s first novel, The Shadow of The Sun, was published in 1964 but she didn’t much like the Sixties. “I was too old for them,” she says. “I was a feminist until we got feminist literary theory and then I started backtracking. Well, I am still a feminist and there are all sorts of political things that make me angry but it was the partial approach to things I didn’t like. If you read a book looking for the condition of women, you miss a great deal else. It focused people too narrowly. One should be more open-minded.”

This, in the end, is the wonder of Ragnarok. Yes, we are destroying the world with our insatiable greed, cleverness and short-sightedness. And yes, the end will be terrible and black and absolute. But with this comes a compassionate acceptance of our limitations, a desire to see things as they are, and a passion for the mind. These are all things, too, that have characterised Byatt’s writing life. She is the very opposite of prudish: she is someone who is essentially open-minded. “I do think writing is a question of trying to tell the truth,” she says. “I want to describe the world in as complicated and beautiful a way as I can.”

This is why she sees writing as dangerous. “It makes an image of the world that isn’t true,” she says. “You can end up framing the world in the shape you want it to be and I think the greatest literature doesn’t do that. It looks at the world as it is, except none of us ever really get there, except maybe King Lear and the poems of Wallace Stevens.” So for AS Byatt, what is the truth? “It’s the end,” she says, and though she is being deeply pessimistic, she’s smiling. “It’s the piece of black water and it has a certain glittering beauty. I love it because it’s bleak. I find it strengthening because it makes me feel I’m in a real place.”

Ragnarok by AS Byatt is published by Canongate, priced £14.99.