He worked on the restaurant’s top floor, which housed the fine dining area and provided the perfect opportunity to indulge in a spot of social observation. “There’s a certain social awkwardness about being in a restaurant that brings people out a little bit and makes them more interesting, especially when they’re drinking. It can make some people much less socially awkward or just very unpleasant sometimes, particularly if you’re working with the City boys,” he says.
“If you have a table of businessmen who are maybe with clients, they unthinkingly feel they have to make themselves feel bigger. Quite often they like to show they’re a man of the people by having a bit of banter with the waiter and most of the time it’s absolutely fine and enjoyable. But one of the worst instances I ever had was when there was a group in and they asked me where I was from and when I said ‘near Bradford’ one of the businessmen said something flippant about the Bradford City fire disaster which was horrible and I immediately told him he was out of order and the other men at the table didn’t realize what was going on and it changed the atmosphere completely.”
Although Raisin has lived in London on and off for the past thirteen years, he grew up in Silsden Moor, near Ilkley. “I used to read quite a bit; I liked horror novels, people like James Herbert, Dean Koontz, and Stephen King started me off and then I got into Thomas Hardy and Graham Greene. One of my favorite books is The Return of the Native; the moor in the book is very dark; there’s nothing wishy-washy about it and it has a presence throughout the novel, which I liked.”
Despite this interest in books there was no burning desire to be a novelist from an early age. “I never had that thought ‘I want to be a writer’ and I still don’t think I have. I’ve wanted to write a particular book and then wanted to write another one.” After finishing university and deciding he wanted to write a book he enrolled on a creative writing course at Goldsmith’s College.
With Out Backward, his first attempt at a full-blown novel, he hit the ground running, securing a lucrative two-book deal and bypassing the usual pile of rejection letters that often greet even the most gifted fledgling novelists.
Although he’s not lived in Yorkshire since he was eighteen, he still has a fondness for the place. “My wife’s from Northallerton and even though we don’t have plans to move back at the moment, I’d see us going back there at some point; I certainly hope so.”
Despite all the critical acclaim, Raisin is wary of the pitfalls of believing your own hype. “I think it’s better to do things step by step than have this big, pressurizing career in front of you where you have to write X number of books and each one has to be brilliant and better than the last.”
In fact, he doesn’t even like to call himself a writer. “I still feel reticent to call myself that because it feels a bit naff. I think a lot of writers, not all, use it to try and sound impressive and I don’t feel that. Maybe there’s a certain part of me that thinks if you talk about it too much then you might chase it away. I can’t really do it now, but in the past I would usually say I’m a waiter when people asked what I did, because it was true.”
He’s recently started writing short stories and is enjoying the challenge of doing something a little different, not that he takes it for granted.
“There’s always that nagging feeling that you won’t be able to do it again. I never sit down and think ‘yes, I’ve nailed it, I know exactly what I’m doing.’ I always have to work for it and when I finish a book there’s no sense of tub-thumping euphoria, it’s more a sigh of relief.”
Read On
Have You Read?
More by Ross Raisin
OUT BACKWARD
Sam Marsdyke is a lonely young man, dogged by an incident in his past and forced to work his family farm instead of attending school in his Yorkshire village. He methodically fills his life with daily routines and adheres to strict boundaries that keep him at a remove from the townspeople. But one day he spies Josephine, his new neighbor from London. From that moment on, Sam’s carefully constructed protections begin to crumble — and what starts off as a harmless friendship between an isolated loner and a defiant teenage girl takes a most disturbing turn.
“Ross Raisin’s story of how a disturbed but basically well-intentioned rural youngster turns into a malevolent sociopath is both chilling in its effect and convincing in its execution.”—J. M. Coetzee
“The lush language in this debut novel has some fine literary ears (Colm Toibin, Stewart O’Nan, Mary Karr) in awe. . Your heart goes out to Sam, creature of the moors. There’s an ancient Celtic strain in Raisin’s writing, all but unspoken: the idea that monsters are the embodiments of our darkest selves, pushed to the edges of normal life, straining on the outskirts.”
— Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
“Out Backward more [than A Clockwork Orange] convincingly registers the internal logic of unredeemable delinquency, a dangerous subjectivity that perverts compassion and sees everything as an extension of itself.”
— Washington Post Book World
“Undeniably he’s made a new world. . Utterly frightening and electrifying.”
— Joshua Ferris, author of The Unnamed and Then We Came to the End
U.K. PRAISE FOR
Waterline
“Ross Raisin was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2009 following the success of his first novel, God’s Own Country, which had critics clutching at superlatives. If there’s any justice in the world of literary awards, he should now be heading for one of the big ones. Far from joining that teetering pile of disappointing second novels, Waterline is stunning — a poignant, shocking, wry, shaming, yet profoundly generous, and cunningly crafted classic in the making. Overselling it? If you’re looking for the definitive novel for our times, this is the strongest candidate I’ve read for ages.”
— Mary Crockett, The Scotsman
“[A] modern philosophical treatise that drips with dark humor. . The mere cadence of the sentences and the meandering storytelling, in a lilting Glaswegian accent, cannot help but carry you away. . The dialect throughout is mesmerizing. If Thomas Hardy had wanted to rewrite Trainspotting it might have ended up a bit like this.”
— Viv Groskop, The Times
“Waterline announces Raisin as a profound thinker as well as a distinctive voice.”
— Esquire
“The counterpoint of personal grief and insurmountable social problems are, through Mick’s decline, beautifully done. . The energy of the book comes from the language, which has the verve of a really good raconteur. . Harrowing, and powerfully expressed. . Raisin is a novelist of terrific ability and great verve. . One day he is going to write a masterpiece.”
— Philip Hensher, The Telegraph
“The vernacular is only one aspect of the vitality and inventiveness of Raisin’s writing. . A writer of outstanding talent and it will be fascinating to see what he comes up with next.”
— Peter Carty, The Independent
“Masterly. . There are rare novels that embed themselves in your sensibility so profoundly you can imagine conversations arising between characters that never occurred on the page. . Completely comprehensible, yet operatic in its tragedy. At no point do we sense the mechanics of a story: the writing is so subtle and controlled, so liberated from the need for dramatic gestures, that it is hard to single out the individual stations of Mick’s collapse. His disintegration is made all the more heartbreaking as the tragedies accumulate. Raisin’s creation of Mick is a work of grace: a human being rendered by a triumph of ventriloquism and empathy through a geographically specific Glaswegian working-class voice. The obvious and daunting comparison is with James Kelman: that same austere mastery, sparkling with its own humour, belligerent inner voices constructing a cage of language beyond which the wider society and its oppressions become apparent. . Full of compassion and moral imperative.”