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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
But it took you a while to bring the attacks into your fiction?
I had been planning a little novella about a tabloid journalist. I'd mapped that out and written notes and was pondering. That just seemed irrelevant. Then I did what a lot of people did and became a news junkie and read books about Islam. Talked about it, listened about it and was completely fixated on what we were doing and what we were about to do and what it meant and whose fault it was. I couldn't get my hands on enough to read about that stuff. I did no writing for about a year, just read.
Slowly I began to think, if I'm writing this London novel and it's in the present and about the present, then it needs to be about what was going on. And what was going on was the post-invasion of Afghanistan and the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. And a colossal nervousness after the Bali bombing and even before Madrid. A general sense in European cities, and I guess in the U.S. too, about when the next shoe would drop. We were assured that it was inevitable and I know they were covering their backsides by saying it, but still, it got into the small print of private life.
I began to think, well, we're now living in horribly interesting times. There are great, grinding sounds of shifting axes of power and interest and alignment and politics and alliances and differences between nations. But also, more interestingly, at the private level, the kind of Edwardian summer of the '90s seemed like a long party, the post-Cold War, that was over.
I take some interest in environmental affairs and it just seemed we were dancing while the ship was sinking. We had so much opportunity, without major wars to fight, with some money saved that would otherwise go to an arms race, and with economies growing ... Anyway, that hadn't happened. The West just enriched itself. Anti-globalization had yet to concentrate minds on the unfairness of world trade groups, at least in the mainstream. So that was over, that party. There was a hangover feeling as well as the fear factor. All of that fed in to this novel.
And Perowne's house and neighborhood are also yours.
Most of the novel is fiction, an entire invention, but I decided to use whatever was to hand. I used my own house and circumstances. I turned my son into a guitarist, but that character, Theo, is very much like my son, very gentle. The dying mother is my mother.
That's unusual for you, isn't it?
Yes, entirely. For some writers it's quite standard.
How did if feel to be writing something with that level of autobiography in it?
I don't know if I'd do it again, but it helped with this material. I decided that if it was going to be of the times and in the present, I'd not invent everything. But, of course, in describing it you shave it away and invent and change reality to suit the rest of the novel anyway.
Perowne has an empirical, material view of life. He's a man of science in a very comprehensive sense of the term. And he doesn't get much out of art.
Well, not out of literature.
That's true. He is moved by music. Was making him that sort of person a choice you made late in writing the novel?
Oh no, he was that from the very beginning. I thought I'd have a go at challenging the notion that happiness "writes white." That we're drawn to forms of misery and conflict because they're easier to describe, while happiness is bland. There's supposed to be a universality to happiness while there's a distinctly individual quality about misery. I thought, if I'm going to write about an anxious world, it would be more interesting to put a very happy man into it. Instead of a guy who's riven by domestic anxieties and teenage kids who are taking far too many drugs and can't speak properly and a vicious wife, with loathsome ...
Let the record show that you're saying all that with great relish.
Yes, hey, I'm getting a good idea here! But it seemed more interesting if you're going to have a background of anxiety and bafflement, why not braid it with a degree of domestic contentment? So I decided to give him pleasures and those pleasures were going to be superficial ones like wine and sport, and profound ones like love and sex. To make him free, as it were, to worry about the world. He doesn't have to worry about his wife and children. Of course, he has a dying mother, but everyone has a dying mother unless they predecease their parents. It was a desire to braid together private happiness and public anxiety.
Also, I found, and this is somewhat paradoxical, I hadn't meant to write a commercially successful novel with "Atonement." I was astonished it sold as many copies as it did. So I made sure I was going to write a meditative, digressive novel. I'm free not to write another book that loads of people want to read.
