Faulked Tongue
It’s not quite how I’d envisaged opening an interview with Sebastian Faulks, but I am – apparently – telling him about my previous night’s dream. It’s less weird than it sounds; the dream, after all, involved a surreal reworking of a relationship between two characters – rival literary critics – in Sebastian’s latest novel, A Week in December. In the author’s account, there’s no love lost between the pair. In my hypnagogic, more fanciful version, they mutually decide that one cannot live without the other, culminating in an oddly resigned civil partnership. “I can see that,” laughs Sebastian. “After all, they do deserve each other, self-important little pricks!”
On a searingly hot day, we take refuge in Julie’s Restaurant. Sebastian , all tousled hair and casual T-shirt, looks like a man who’s just come from the Campden Hill tennis club which he’s devoted to (and which, he says, is the only arena where his otherwise latent sense of competition comes to the fore).
In truth, his outward appearance of a man unencumbered by the weight of the world belies his latest literary contribution: an unflinching snapshot of a handful of disparate Londoners whose lives are – despite divergent social strata – intricately interlaced. It’s a broad and ambitious sweep. There’s a well-read but socially shut-down tube driver who channels her emotions through a computer programme; an underworked and lonely barrister; a vindictive literary critic; a student grappling with the increasing sense that his only true path is towards Islamic fundamentalism; and an amoral hedge-fund manager billionaire trying to bring down a bank, and his son whose addiction to skunk ultimately leads to a psychotic episode. Framing all this is a dinner party, hosted by the local MP’s socially ambitious but shallow wife. The characters chug – and then race – towards individual climaxes over the course of the week before Christmas, as one by one they are awoken to the unreality of their worlds.
This world of the chatterati, of dinner parties and hedge funds, is quite a departure for Sebastian, who, until now, has been celebrated for writing books set against historical backdrops, most notably of war. He has, in the past, talked of how difficult he’s found it to follow that most standard advice to would-be novelists: to write what you know. So why now?
“I suppose there were two main hurdles,” says Sebastian. “One was my sense that the modern world wasn’t very interesting,” he elucidates, laughing at his dismissal. “Then about three years ago, I thought I saw something that was interesting, and that was the rate of change in the world – more specifically, the way people no longer really engage with reality.”
The second hurdle was more technical: sentence length. Resisting the vogue for spare, staccato narrative, Sebastian equally couldn’t use the first-person account (as in Engelby) or the long, “almost Victorian” constructions of Human Traces. “It took me quite a long time to get right, but I’m hoping most readers won’t notice.”
Thematically, one of the strongest elements of A Week in December considers how, in the age of the internet, we deal ever more in unreality; living life at a remove, whether through Second Life avatars, reality television or trading in derivatives. “I know lots of bankers and hedge-fund people and so on. One thing had been growing on me, which was that most of what these people did had really nothing to do with banking or productivity or factories or farms. It was all to do with taking bets on possible outcomes in the financial world. That interested me, but I couldn’t really see what to do with it.”
That was, until his football enthusiast son provided a eureka moment. “He was watching his team on telly, and at the same time playing Football Manager or something, an online game where you have a virtual team. He probably had another screen open as well, texting a friend, and it seemed it was more important to him that the virtual team should flourish than that his real team should win. Then I felt I might be onto something.”
Sebastian talks meditatively and in a refreshingly non-alarmist manner about the nature of society’s uncoupling from what is real. “I’m not altogether pessimistic. But it’s a massive change and I’m not sure that people have fully understood the nature of the change. If I go on holiday with my children, they don’t really experience the train, the plane, the travel or indeed much of the place when they’re there. They’re constantly on screen. And that may be fine, but put it this way: we’re entering territory no one has entered before. It may work out fine, or it may not.”
But already, as Sebastian points out, these galloping breaks with the past are manifest. “If everyone has instant access to knowledge, the premium on education may fall. We’ve reached a point where children leave school knowing less than they did 20 years ago. This isn’t necessarily a disaster, but it’s too early to tell how it’ll pan out. One of the interesting thoughts I got from a book about education and the Islamic condition is that for hundreds of years, there was no thought in the Middle East and Asia and Africa that the child would know more than the father. Merely to have no net loss was a great result. It’s a big thought, isn’t it? In this country too, I think the notion that there’d be a net increase in knowledge through generations was a hundred-year idea between about 1890 to 1980. And I think people have already given up on it.I mean, we clearly have!”
Writing a book set in contemporary London was in many ways liberating, Sebastian says. Not having to fact check whether, say, people would have had access to a telephone in a café in France in 1936 was a relief. As he says, “We have no choice but to live in the present,” and then sardonically: “I’ve lived my whole life in the present.” It also meant that he was able to collect material via first-hand experience. He spent some time in the front cabin with a Circle Line driver who supplied “an hour of absolute gold”, furnishing him with myriad tales of the underground: a long-held rivalry between Circle and District Line drivers, and the fact that TFL staff refer to the electronic tones of the station announcer as Sonia (because she gets-“onyer”-nerves).
But of the financial world, Faulks wants to make one thing very clear: the Dickensian and intensely dislikeable character of hedge-fund manager John Veals is not intended as a representation of all city workers. On the contrary, Sebastian says. Many of his friends in finance are cultured and generous with wide-ranging interests. It so happens that Veals is none of these things. And despite Sebastian’s portrayal of unscrupulous behaviour, neither is he entirely devoid of sympathy with our much-maligned bankers. “I think the heart of it is what happened when they created these complicated products and believed that they’d squared the circle; that you could get high return
on low risk and there was no downside,” he says. “To some extent, you have to have some sympathy: that’s what they’re meant to do, in the same way that a research chemist tries to find a cure for cancer.” However, Sebastian’s charity only extends so far: “Where you must feel less sympathetic is the massive amount of money that they gave themselves, which was completely uncoupled from reality. The other aspect is that you know you cannot square the circle; you cannot produce risk-free, high returns on a no-risk basis. There’s an insane arrogance, and also a desperate unwillingness to pay any tax, which is very distasteful. Capital W Wrong. There’s a lot of semi-autistic behaviour here – they have no concept of the other.”
Blinkered belief and tunnel vision is a recurring theme, it seems. Hassan Al Rashid is a student and son of a prosperous food magnate, battling with his British Muslim identity. He’s a complex character so enmeshed with British society that he feels he must deny himself even his sense of humour on the grounds that the biting wit he relishes in The Toad (a fictional equivalent of Private Eye) undermines his religious devotion. “I’ve always been interested in absolutists,” explains Sebastian. “Whether Freudians or Marxists or religious people. In my view, most of them have deficiency issues. They cannot live with complexity – they want a panacea; something that answers everything. To be able to live with uncertainty requires intellectual flexibility; a certain kind of pathology.” And so Sebastian, who knew little about Islam, read the Koran, which he found bare and discouraging. “Islam is demanding and it is fundamentalist – to be fundamental doesn’t mean you have to be aggressive, still less violent. In the literal sense of the word, fundamentally, God is in your every breath, your every thought. You have a very bare book, a demanding religion and, thirdly and tragically, you don’t have a society in the world that you can approve of. By definition, Muslims really disapprove of all civil societies. Put those three together and you have a very uneasy cocktail. If you are literal about it, as Hassan is, you’ve got a problem. There’s nowhere in the world your prophet or your God would really approve of you living. The next logical step is to, well, make it so.”
It’s heavy stuff, but Sebastian’s impressive panoramic view of these assorted London lives is never turgid. Instead, we are left at the end not with a dread of the modern world and its inexorable march into progress, but rather a sense of hope. Is the redeeming reality love, I ask? “I’m not sure that you have quite such a schematic thing. You can’t say: ‘This is unreality and the only reality is love for one another.’ I’m not saying love conquers everything or anything as facile as that, but people’s affection for each other is something that will survive.” And then, pausing to reflect: “Yes. It will actually.”
A Week in December, by Sebastian Faulks is published by Random House and priced £18.99