Readers Place

Sebastian Faulks interview/review

Extract from an interview in Daily Telegraph – May 2007.

Faulks admits to being surprised by the book himself, particularly by the way in which the idea first came to him. ‘In September 2005, I finished my last novel, Human Traces , which had taken me the best part of five years to write. ‘When it was done, I put away all my research and my drafts in boxes and thought: “What the hell am I going to do with the rest of my life?”

‘Then, about three weeks later, I was lying in bed one morning, in that state between sleeping and waking, and I heard this voice in my head. There was nothing psychotic about it, yet I could hear it quite clearly, talking away. ‘Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. I tried to keep myself in this state for as long as possible, and when I came into work I was able to write down about half a page of what this voice had said. Then I tried to see if I could get it back online, as it were. And every morning the voice would start up again.’

Unlike his other books, which have been planned like military campaigns – complete with wall-charts and drawings – Faulks set off with no idea of where he was heading. ‘To begin with I thought, “Well, I’ve got nothing else to do. Why don’t I give it three months? If by Christmas I think it’s a waste of time then it doesn’t really matter.” But by the time Christmas came, I’d virtually finished it.’ What he had produced was a book that was dark and funny in roughly equal measure. In part, it’s an exploration of what it’s like to have several screws loose, and in part it’s what looks – on the surface anyway – like an autobiographical novel.

Certainly Engleby has a number of things in common with his creator: they both went to boarding schools in towns that happened to have large psychiatric hospitals; they both went on to Cambridge and then drifted into journalism – Faulks eventually became the deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday . The book contains encounters with Jeffrey Archer and Ken Livingstone (‘his round Chinese laundryman’s face at last became animated’); for legal reasons, they’re carefully based on interviews that Faulks conducted with them while working as a journalist.

This raises the obvious question: how much of Engleby is there in Faulks? Or, to put it another way, what demons lurk beneath his affably bearded exterior? ‘Although Mike is my age and plenty of the cultural references are shared, at no time did I feel that he was leaking into me – thank God. But then I’m good at shutting things out. With Human Traces , I spent five years writing about madness and that I did, occasionally, find troubling. With this, though, it was different. ‘In one sense, of course, everything Mike thinks has been thought by me because it’s flowed out through my fingers. But it always surprises me how most readers, even quite sophisticated readers, have this big problem with the idea that novels are invented. ‘When Birdsong first became widely read and I went to literary festivals, people would be puzzled by the fact that I wasn’t French, that I wasn’t 95 years old and that I wasn’t a woman. ‘They just couldn’t get the basic premise of fiction, which is that you make up a story. I’ve actually given up trying to explain to people that I’m not Charlotte Gray, or Stephen in Birdsong etc, etc…’

All right then, but what did your wife think of Engleby? ‘Ah,’ Faulks says. ‘Um… well, she didn’t really talk to me about it. I think she knows me well enough not to be disturbed. Although I think she did say to me in a very jokey way, “You didn’t do anything like that yourself, did you?”’