Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country. |
I rather like getting away from fiction. |
You learn a lot, writing fiction. |
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation. |
I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement. |
I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past. |
All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself. |
The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction. |
I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence. |
I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction. |
There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history. |
I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not. |
Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm. |
I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are. |
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present. |
We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible. |
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency. |
I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements. |
Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story. |
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss. |