An abstract issue that suddenly became seriously real
Sebastian Faulks's new novel with the contemporary theme of how we are shaped by a virtual world landed the author in trouble, says Julia Molony
MATERIAL: Faulks will be one of the star guests at Books 09. Photo: Getty Images
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Sunday August 30 2009
SEBASTIAN Faulks has good reason to feel wary of people wielding tape recorders. So far, the promotional round for his latest book, A Week In December, has proved to be rather trying.
Last Sunday, in an interview with a British broadsheet, he stumbled head on into the most incendiary ideological debate of our times.
As part of the research for his book, which features a would-be suicide bomber, he read the Koran, and then gave a critical appraisal of it, which included the description "the rantings of a schizophrenic".
Commentators from all backgrounds had a field day, accusing him of causing grievous offence to those of Muslim faith. Faulks doesn't seem to be the sort of man who would deliberately court controversy in the interests of creating noise and generating publicity.
On the contrary, he appears a little rattled by the row. He moved fast to pour water on it, penning a contrite sounding clarification of his point, published in the Telegraph on the day we meet. "That", he says quietly, "is to be my last word on it."
This is new territory for Faulks, whose previous novels, set safely in the past, have always been at a remove from the mud-slinging of current affairs. A Week in December was a considered and deliberate departure from the historical. "I'd been wanting to write a book set in the contemporary world for a long time, because it seemed so perverse, since I have no choice but to live in it, not to write about it." he explains.
After struggling for some time to find a unifying theme, several very modern conditions converged in his mind to form the substance of the novel. A Week in December grapples with the sense of disorientation caused by a wholesale move away from the material in modern life.
It deals with our retreat into a more virtual, abstracted way of living. Entire sections of the narrative take place in Parallax -- his fictionalised version of gaming worlds like Second Life.
He also takes on the increasingly remote market mechanisms that underpin global economies. Their disconnect from "anything that you or I would recognise as fundamental economic activity, such as factories or farming or the production of anything at all", in favour of derivatives, "basically bets placed on the outcome of other financial agreements or arrangements.
"I do think society has changed," he says, "largely because of digitisation of media, the electronic world, fantastically fast." His latest novel captures a profound sense of discomfort with that change.
"To me, the most important thing about the novels I write and the novels I enjoy best reading is that they have an animating theme, an idea running through them.
"They're not just a story about people. Though obviously character is important. There must be big ideas or at least one big idea that connects the whole thing."
Big ideas, however, as the media row in which he is embroiled has proved, can be troublesome. But as a literary heavyweight, who has plotted a steady, unswerving route to the top of his game, via such classics as Birdsong, Charlotte Gray and Enderby, he is now very well placed to weather the storm.
It is a measure of his significance as an author of literary fiction that he will feature as one of the star attractions of Books 09, by which time, he hopes, focus will have shifted away from his comments on the Koran and back to the merits of his new novel.
The early days of Faulk's career as a novelist were not particularly dazzling. He wrote three books that never saw the light of day before A Trick of The Light was accepted for publication in 1984, when he was nearly 30.
It took him some time as a young man with literary ambitions to become comfortable with terms on which to engage with the world. Troubled and confused young adulthood, a theme he explores in A Week In December, has been a feature of his own life experience, and preceded his eventual success.
"I had been incredibly shy as a child," he remembers. "I didn't enjoy the second boarding school I went to ... I wasn't bullied or anything, but it was just a very unsympathetic place. And then I just found it extremely difficult to make that gear change into the grown-up world to understand that it required things of me. I just wanted to be invisible really and I didn't understand that I had to engage with it.
"So I took refuge quite a lot in -- I don't really want my children to read this but -- in the usual things that slightly troubled young men do.
"Still, I made it in the end. But it's a bloody hard transition. It really is."
None of those particular trials were wasted experience, however. And perhaps the same will apply to the taste of adversity he is experiencing now -- albeit on a completely different scale.
"I think it's quite useful to have been through some bad times," he says. "It makes you more likely to be sympathetic to peoples' difficulties.
"Even if they are the difficulties that you give to your fictional characters, they are not the ones that you yourself have experienced, you know what it is to feel at the edge of your capacities."
Sebastian Faulks will be appearing in Trinity on September 11 at 7pm. See www.books2009.ie
- Julia Molony
