Born in London in 1943, Rose Tremain is the award-winning author of 14 novels including Sacred Country, which is the title for this year’s City Reads. The premise of City Reads is for as many people as possible to read the same book from World Book Night, on Monday, to May 13, when Tremain will be in conversation as part of Brighton Festival. Sacred Country revolves around transgender person Mary’s transition to become Martin. Tremain, who was awarded a CBE in 2007, tells EDWIN GILSON about the book

How do you reflect on Sacred Country more than 25 years after its publication?

I feel great tenderness towards this book. I see some flaws in it, but it took on one of the great human dilemmas at a time when almost nobody else was talking about this subject and tried to explore it with integrity and humour, and I allow myself to feel proud of that.

Sacred Country has often been credited with being “ahead of its time”. Before writing it, had you ever read a novel with a trans person at the centre?

There was Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal, but the tone of this novel is satirical and mildly pornographic, and this was not what I wanted to emulate. A far greater influence on my writing of Sacred Country was Conundrum, Jan Morris’s honest, sympathetic and wonderfully quiet autobiographical account of her trans journey.

Did you write the book with the aim of bringing about greater representation for the trans community in literature?

I think you could say that in 1992, when I wrote the novel, there was no “trans community” but just a scattering of isolated individuals wrestling with a dilemma which hardly anybody understood. And we still don’t fully understand it. It is one of life’s great mysteries, and as such, deeply appealing to the novelist.

Fiction exists to explore the mysteries, uncertainties and doubts that form part of our lives. I hoped the novel would bring the subject into mainstream dialogue, but this didn’t happen in the 1990s. Indeed, many people said they were puzzled by the fact that I had chosen such a “marginal” subject.

How did you get the idea in the first place to write about a trans person?

I watched Joan Bakewell’s TV work with the late Janine Jacono and members of the Gender Dysphoria Trust and was spellbound by the individual stories. It seemed to me straight away that a powerful novel could be written about this almost mystical subject – if the research was done well and the tone was right. I had to ask myself whether I, as a non trans person, had the moral right to create a trans protagonist and I decided that I did, provided that she/he could be created with sufficient imaginative power.

How did you go about trying to understand the inner conflict and desire for belonging of a trans person before transition?

I went first to talk to Joan Bakewell. She generously shared some of her research with me and put me in touch with the Gender Dysphoria Trust. I got several male to female trans people to tell me their stories, while reassuring them that I didn’t want to steal these, rather just understand what united them in their long journeys and then create my own unique version of the experience.

I had hoped to talk to two female to male people, but meetings were arranged and cancelled, arranged again and cancelled again – and so on – so I concluded that actually these folk wanted to be left alone. I had also hoped to talk to Jan Morris, but although I met her, she really didn’t want to go over her story again with me, and I had to accept that. So I just had to read everything I could get my hands on, then begin the book with what I had and keep in mind the importance of writing something that was morally and emotionally truthful.

One review of Sacred Country said the novel highlighted that “sad slippage between desire and reality”. Were you conscious of exploring this theme in the novel?

My aim with this book was to take a very specific experience – Mary’s progression towards becoming Martin – and suggest that this journey had wider human relevance. I chose as one of the epigraphs TS Eliot’s line: “Between the idea/And the reality/Between the motion/And the act/falls the shadow”. This perfectly captures the terrible fact that in any human life, almost nothing will come to the state of perfection willed by the mind. Martin’s journey is only two-thirds complete when we leave him, but what he teaches us is acceptance of that incompleteness, which is likely to be a universal state.

Mary thinks that there has been a “mistake” in her gender assignation. Is her confusion amplified by the fact that she can think of no reason why she should feel like this, that this mistake has no logical basis?

In the 1950s, in rural Suffolk, where Mary lives, she would have had absolutely no template in the world around her for what she feels. Thus, she lives in an absolutely conflicted state; she feels something profoundly and incontrovertibly but has no way of knowing why she feels it or whether anybody else in the world feels the same. When she finally tells the kindly Mr Harker about her dilemma, he can only suggest that she has been reincarnated as female after a previous life as a male and that some residue of this previous life is still part of Mary. This is the nearest she gets to the explanation that she seeks.

As she is disowned by various people around her, does Mary start to internalize the intolerance of others? Does she start to self-loathe?

No, I think she miraculously escapes self-loathing. She is a terrific fighter from a very young age – defying her punishing father, obstinate in her love for Pearl, perfecting her insanely difficult magic tricks – and when she sees that the fight has to go on and on she just endures it with amazing stoicism. And the fight is all. She has no time or inclination to hate herself.

The novel is told from the view of more characters than just Mary/Martin. Did you want to have several perspectives on trans life?

That’s one of the book’s aims. But it’s important for readers to understand that I was trying to create a universal story from a specific one, without de-centralising that prime subject. The sub-stories broaden out the trans story to include non-trans journeys which have a similar shape, namely people struggling to become the thing they feel they are inside, but which society doesn’t allow them to be. Crucial to this is the journey of Walter Loomis from butcher boy to Country and Western singer.

How do you think the book has dated? There is a heightened awareness of trans life now, but do you think Mary/Martin would still like to see a greater level of acceptance towards the trans community?

The novel has been in print for 25 years. And thank goodness, slowly, slowly, attitudes to the transgendered have become far more accepting since that time. A negative corollary of this is that some children may be encouraged to make a gender change only to discover later that they feel quite comfortable with their original orientation, thus giving rise to anger and confusion.

But Mary Ward was not one of these. She never doubted the certainty of what she really was. But then she/he leaves England as Martin, to follow Walter to Nashville, Tennessee, and I somehow doubt whether there is a good "level of acceptance towards the trans community" in the Southern United States. So he would have wished that this acceptance were more universal than it is in 2018.

Have you received letters from trans people between the time the book was published and now?

Yes. Around publication I got a mix of letters – some trans people saying that the book had moved them and helped them emotionally and some saying that I had no moral right to have written it. Now, I mainly get letters of appreciation for being almost alone in addressing this subject in fiction 25 years ago.

You've said Brighton might be the kind of place where Mary/Martin could have found happiness. How familiar are you with the city?

I don’t know it well, although I’ve visited it several times. It strikes me as a vibrant place, with rich diversity at its core. Martin could certainly have had a life there.

City Reads starts on Monday. Visit collectedworks.co.uk/city-reads for more details. Rose Tremain is in conversation at Brighton and Hove High School on May 13. Visit brightonfestival.org