The Sweet Smell Of Success Is Not Lost On O'flynn

The Age

Saturday February 9, 2008

Jason Steger

Catherine O'Flynn didn't expect to write a prize-winner, it just emerged from her day-to-day activities working in a shopping centre, writes Jason Steger.

CATHERINE O'FLYNN'S MOTHER TAUGHT AT THE school she attended and her father ran a sweet shop. As a child it couldn't get much better than that, could it?

Most of her friends assumed she was in the land of milk and honey - preferential treatment at school and all the sweets she could eat at home. Of course, it wasn't quite like that. "My mum was far harder on me at school than other kids and I was always a bit of a victim for the kids saying ,'Could you get us some Cadbury creme eggs?'," she says.

But as the youngest by 10 years in a family of six children, she passed many hours sitting in the shop with her father where he would entertain her by making up names for the customers - the Pink Panther, say, and the Gentleman. There was no question of creating a pathology of the sweet buyer then. That would come later.

In her much-admired first novel, What was Lost, the main character, 10-year-old Kate Meaney, who disappears a quarter of the way through but remains a very real presence throughout, and her next-door neighbour, Adrian, have a way of sizing up people who buy sweets from her father's shop.

Adrian reckons anyone who buys chocolate limes is a killer - "I'm horrified by that, too," O'Flynn says - their moral compass askew; a taste for plain chocolate suggests dark appetites. And Kate suspects people who buy prawn cocktail crisps but is adamant that "Kit Kat buyers were generally forces for good in society".

What was Lost was published by the small Birmingham publisher Tindall Street Press - headquarters: the Custard Factory - just over a year ago.

O'Flynn, who has had a varied working life including spells as a record shop manager, a "mystery shopper", a postman and, until last week, a box-office assistant, expected to get a couple of reviews, sell a few copies and then disappear from the radar. But 2007 turned into an extraordinary year. More a question of what was gained.

First, What was Lost was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Next came the Man Booker. Then it was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Prize, won the Costa (formerly Whitbread) first novel award, and last month finished runner-up to the overall Costa winner, Day by A .L. Kennedy.

"I didn't expect any of this. Not because you don't have faith in what you've written - obviously I like the book that I wrote - but equally there are hundreds of books that come out every year and no one pays a blind bit of notice. That's absolutely what I expected to happen to mine."

What was Lost is set mainly in a Birmingham shopping centre where the ghostly image of a little girl pops up disconcertingly on the CCTV screens. It's Kate, but she vanished more than 20 years earlier while prowling the centre playing at being a precocious private detective.

What does Kurt, the disgruntled security guard, make of it? As his relationship with Lisa, the assistant manager of a record shop in the centre, intensifies so the mystery of Kate's reappearance seems to assume greater importance. It is a tender, poignant and funny novel about what can be lost, mislaid and perhaps found.

O'Flynn was surprised that the opinions of the judges in the Costa prize - worth #25,000 ($A54,000) to the overall winner and #5000 each to the five category winners - were made public. It seems there was something of a bunfight on the panel and a couple of them told her on awards night that she was the runner-up. Apparently the panel was split 5-3 in favour of Kennedy's novel. "They were being very apologetic about it but I was quite delighted as I hadn't particularly expected to win."

Although there are strong autobiographical elements to the book - O'Flynn worked in a record shop in the Merry Hill shopping centre for many years; she briefly had a job as "mystery shopper"; and there was the sweet shop - it became a novel from writing that she did simply in order to put down her experiences in the centre.

"It wasn't as if I set out to write about elements of my life, it was more that the story emerged. I was working in a shopping centre and there was something about that place that I really wanted to write about because I found it an unusual and strange environment. I'd often be there late at night closing up the store and find myself alone and I found something really eerie about the place."

She heard the story of a mysterious child being seen on the monitors and the child never being found and it "played in my head all the time". Then she pulled in what she knew to write about.

Like Kate she was obsessed with amateur sleuthing. She had books about clues, suspects and forgeries but when she was a young girl was more intent on keeping an eye on the "gleaming and shiny" bank that was so out of character in the part of Birmingham in which she grew up.

"I used to sit outside there taking down car numbers," she says. She was expecting to see a robbery at the very least. "It was a source of constant disappointment to me that nothing ever remotely clandestine ever happened there."

When O'Flynn started at Merry Hill (known, of course, as Merry Hell) she was interested in the working conditions she found there and intrigued by what kept people working in wretched jobs that were clearly soul destroying - the camaraderie of the staff lining up against the customers and the management.

She was struck by the contrasts within the centre - the luxurious atrium and public spaces and then the darker, almost squalid conditions for staff, "the bleak breezeblock corridors". Yet most of the people who worked there, shopped there and suspended their disbelief and allowed the "whole vision to seduce them".

The shopping centre was on the site of a former steel works and had sucked the life out of the high streets in the surrounding little towns, she says.

So does she now loathe this sort of place? She confesses to ambivalence. "You inevitably end up getting sucked into them because they are just the centre of gravity.

"I recently spent an inordinate time there trying to find something to wear to the Costa (awards night) and I kept fearing that someone would see me and go 'Look at her, what a hypocrite'."

O'Flynn has found her success and her media exposure to be strange. Because she spent four months working as a postwoman and because she had about 20 rejections before her novel was taken on she says the usual line in the news media is "the dogged former postwoman". It is a picture that she doesn't recognise. "I'm one of the least dogged people on God's earth . . . I find it funny really but it bothers my brother. He can't believe they think I'm dogged."

But she still has a taste for chocolate.

What was Lost is published by Scribe at $24.95. Catherine O'Flynn will be a guest at next weekend's Writers at the Convent festival.