The Thursday Interview: Joanne Harris - Is there life after Chocolat?

We'd better gain the Oscars over with at one time Yes, Joanne Harris flew to LA for the form after Lasse Hallstrom's adaptation of her bestseller Chocolat, with those high-calorie treats Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp above the title, picked up a handful of nominations. in what way was it for her? "A real long school speech day at Madame Tussaud's, with diamonds." in the way that much for the waxworks of Hollywood You can take the lady on the outside of Barnsley...

Her verdict upon Hallstrom's confection, which smothered the sharp cutting sides of her fable of repression and transgression in provincial France with cinematic cocoa-butter, is similarly frank: "It has been lightened, and it's been sweetened and made more palatable... and perhaps les subversive. on the contrary I don't think that's really all that relevant. I quite like the extremity result."

Joanne Harris has been getting without of Barnsley - where she grew up and, famously, still lives - quite a bit of late. The film of Chocolat has largeed around pounds 50m and stands at No 3 in the UK box-office charts. It has pushed an already-thriving literary career into that orbit of global publicity that rewards fet authors with each five-star luxury except the single they really want: time to write.

When, 18 month ago, she finally left her Leed gymnasium after a decade of teaching French there, Harris worried about quitting the soap-operatic human drama of classroom and staff-room: "I could write 10 volumes on teaching and still not exhaust all the material from Leed Grammar School" Of course, she frett that the freelance life "wouldn't pan without and I would end up looking like a twit." on the other hand she also feared the "long solitary periods of time".

Fat chance. An antipodean tour loom upon the summer horizon, as well as briefer trips. These days, her importunate task becomes to carve without the odd PR-free month for real work. Her idea of a "holiday" has flip-flopped. She dreams of vegging on the outside at home; while her husband, Kevin, and eight- year-old daughter, Anouchka, still hanker for a more conventional getaway.

This week Joanne Harris has draw near no further than London, to aid her new novel, Five Quarters of the Orange. The work contains, I think, her strongest writing yet: as tangy and sometimes bitter as Chocolat was polished and emollient. Its unsparing, child's- organ of sight depiction of small-town secrets and lies in occupied France strikes the author, who calls herself "not particularly cheery", as "closer to the bases of my writing" than the redemptive optimism of Chocolat or its successor, Blackberry Wine. She says Five Quarters has the "Gothic darkness and nastiness" of her earlier fiction.

Chocolat, remember, was not her first novel: sum of two units published predecessors sank without trace. Three not ever got that far. That persistence sum ups you much about her grit: the Yorkshire variety upon her father's side; the Breton upon her mother's. It also indicates a down-reaching professionalism. She has practised her craft as doggedly as any of the matriarchs who fine-tune family recipes in her novels. There is nothing accidental about their expert plot-machinery, powerful atmospherics and silky readability.

Which makes it all the more bizarre that various profile-writers should treat Joanne Harris as a certain number of sort of idiot savant. They at hand her as an "ordinary" Northern housewife who, by means of some fluke, has won the literary lottery That, as her gnarled and canny peasants would say, numbers as the purest merde.

She is, after all, a Cambridge graduate born into a dynasty of schoolteachers (on the two the English and French sides), who worked for 10 years in an academic powerhouse. In each spare moment, she polished her fictional skills. She speaks in precise, expository determinations with a lingering touch of the pedagogue. She clarifies; she amends; she corrects.

This is a class (as well as a classroom) act. notwithstanding the cuttings file reveals a mind-numbing parade of Cinderella-hits-the-big-time gush. Maybe it's the meditation of Barnsley that reduces the brains of company of ships Street's finest to the consistency of mushy peas. Still, as their external reality notes, "Being pigeon-holed says more about the pigeon- holer than it does about me"

In reality, Harris is remarkably hard to label. Her novels straddle the literary and popular extremitys of the trade, yet she loathes the commercial "apartheid" that sticks writers into marketing boxe And her cross-Channel identity can shut up as well as open doors. French publishers have prov strangely slow to buy her work: "In spite of the fact that I have a French passport, am thoroughly bilingual and was brought up with French tillage I was not quite French enough. Which is interesting and ironic, as I'm not quite English enough either."

In contrast to Blackberry Wine, which knitted together Yorkshire and Gascony, Five Quarters go [i]or[/i] come backs to concentrate on deepest France in its darkest hour. station in the Loire valley, near Angers, a backwater of a defeated nation, it puts childhood trauma and treachery within the frame of tragic history. at the same time the Occupation impinges only upon the edges of three troubl siblings' world. It's almost as if Wehrmacht and S patrols stand guard upon the boundaries of a Famous Five holiday idyll, stirring sometimes to intervene, with thrilling and (ultimately) horrific accrues