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Uncut Magazine praised Denby’s fiction as “finally putting vivid female rebe
ls on the page”, and this has been recognised in part by her shortlisting for the Orange Prize this year. Is Denby, or indeed her character Billie Morgan, a feminist? In the novel Billie swaps a traditional, beauty obsessed culture, for a rebel biker culture, but in many ways it’s swapping one form of sexism for another. She, for example, can not become a member of the gang – only by proxy through her husband. “Isn’t it weird that the term ‘feminist’ has become faintly (or not so faintly) pejorative? – Joolz responds. – I would think Billie would consider herself as a woman struggling to get along rather than in any specifically political way; but if you asked her (like many real-life women) certain questions such as ‘should women be paid the same as a bloke if they do the same job as that bloke’ or, ‘Should women be prevented from doing certain things because they’re women?’ their answers would be ‘yes’ and ‘no’ respectively. Feminism isn’t a fad or a folly; it’s a bloody necessity and part of most working women’s lives in a practical and matter-of-fact way; Billie fights her way from one male-dominated section of society to another because that’s what society is: male dominated. Admittedly, her choices of associate are extreme to some people’s eyes but that’s her milieu; the subtler forms of discrimination are as rife as they ever were, sadly.”
One of Denby’s key strengths as a novelist is her ability to paint characters – Billie Morgan‘s success as a novel lies partly in the fact that the characters come alive off the page. Bradford, where Denby lives and where the novel is set, seems almost to be one of these characters. It’s painted in detail, with its beauties and failings, like an actor in the story. How important is place and setting in her fiction [her debut novel Stone Baby, was also set in the Yorkshire town]? “It’s extremely important as people’s lives are so heavily influenced by their surroundings; they adapt, change, accommodate; they are influenced by the weather, the skies, the seasons, colours, smells, high and low pressure. Storms and the full moon affect people as does architecture and nature, temperature and squalor,” explains Denby. “I cannot imagine living in such a particularly intense and colourful place as Bradford and not being heavily influenced by the city’s changing moods and fluxes. People don’t live in a vacuum, they are sensual and emotional so ‘place’ is extremely important. Anyway, Bradford’s fascinating – weird, kaleidoscopic, temperamental, comic, quicksilver and shot through with savage contradictions.” She continues, as defensively as she portrays the bikers in Billie Morgan, “No-one not from Bradford knows Bradford; all assumptions made by outsiders based on media distortions are wholly erroneous.”
In a previous interview, Denby listed, amongst others, Mary Renault as a writer she particularly admired. Her admiration was for Renault’s ability to write “pure romance”. Strange, for the writer of Billie Morgan? Not really, as is apparent when she explains that to her “‘romance’ is a term which has been degraded into a sort of catch-all for tawdry St. Valentine’s tat and mawkish sentimental sloppiness; the ‘romance’ novel, the ‘romantic’ dinner-for-two, the ‘romance’ of a package-holiday resort. Real romance is a rose-mist moon rising over wild-thyme scented hillsides in a still evening where only the faint incense of night jasmine embroiders the soft air; it’s the moment when you pack up the last of the boxes on the tour-bus and look at your workmates and grin, filthy, knackered and elated from what you’ve achieved; it’s the dull rending of your heart breaking for a lover death takes from you and no amount of commonplace clichés can describe your pain, no drug can assuage it and no amount of time will distance you from your loss. Romance is wild and not marketable; it’s not to do with neatness or decency, it’s a high, savage song and Mary Renault is very good at reproducing its elusive tone”
In any artistic field there are lables, and those who strive to rise above them. Urban romantic, crime writer, performance poet – Denby ultimately has little time for labels: “the whole literary ‘genre’ thing is a ludicrous attempt to market books like soap powder. Buy ‘crime’ books! Buy ‘fine literature’ books’! Buy ‘family sagas’! All good writing crosses boundaries and breaks down attempts to compartmentalise the creative process, the same as any art form does and should. How many famous books have murders in them – they range from The Odyssey to Dostoevsky through to Tolkein etc., etc., etc., but you don’t see Lord Of The Rings in the crime section along with War And Peace, do you? It’s all bollocks, basically. We write what we write, as the spirit moves us and damn marketing.”