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

We'd better get the Oscars over with at once. Yes, Joanne Harris flew to LA for the ceremony 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. How was it for her? "A very long school speech day at Madame Tussaud's, with diamonds." So much for the waxworks of Hollywood. You can take the lady out of Barnsley...

Her verdict on Hallstrom's confection, which smothered the sharp edges 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 less subversive. But I don't think that's really all that relevant. I quite like the end result."

Joanne Harris has been getting out of Barnsley - where she grew up and, famously, still lives - quite a bit of late. The film of Chocolat has grossed 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 feted authors with every five-star luxury except the one they really want: time to write.

When, 18 months ago, she finally left her Leeds school 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 books on teaching and still not exhaust all the material from Leeds Grammar School." Of course, she fretted that the freelance life "wouldn't pan out and I would end up looking like a twit." But she also feared the "long, solitary periods of time".

Fat chance. An antipodean tour looms on the summer horizon, as well as briefer trips. These days, her urgent task becomes to carve out the odd PR-free month for real work. Her idea of a "holiday" has flip-flopped. She dreams of vegging out at home; while her husband, Kevin, and eight- year-old daughter, Anouchka, still hanker for a more conventional getaway.

This week Joanne Harris has come no further than London, to promote her new novel, Five Quarters of the Orange. The book contains, I think, her strongest writing yet: as tangy and sometimes bitter as Chocolat was smooth and emollient. Its unsparing, child's- eye depiction of small-town secrets and lies in occupied France strikes the author, who calls herself "not particularly cheery", as "closer to the roots 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: two published predecessors sank without trace. Three never got that far. That persistence tells you much about her grit: the Yorkshire variety on her father's side; the Breton on her mother's. It also indicates a deep 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 deft plot-machinery, powerful atmospherics and silky readability.

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

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

This is a class (as well as a classroom) act. Yet the cuttings file reveals a mind-numbing parade of Cinderella-hits-the-big-time gush. Maybe it's the thought of Barnsley that reduces the brains of Fleet Street's finest to the consistency of mushy peas. Still, as their object 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 ends of the trade, yet she loathes the commercial "apartheid" that sticks writers into marketing boxes. And her cross-Channel identity can close as well as open doors. French publishers have proved oddly 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 culture, 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 returns to concentrate on deepest France in its darkest hour. Set in the Loire valley, near Angers, a backwater of a defeated nation, it sets childhood trauma and treachery within the frame of tragic history. Yet the Occupation impinges only on the edges of three troubled siblings' world. It's almost as if Wehrmacht and SS patrols stand guard on the boundaries of a Famous Five holiday idyll, stirring sometimes to intervene, with thrilling and (ultimately) horrific results.