Harry Thompson: This Thing of Darkness

For any first-time novelist, the recognition of Booker Prize judges is a colossal achievement. For Harry Thompson, one of Britain's most successful TV producers who unexpectedly found himself on the longlist, the recognition is thrown into sharp relief by the life-and-death battle he is fighting.

On a daily basis he faces some form of painful, unpleasant treatment for the inoperable lung cancer which leaves him weak and struggling for breath at the simplest task. Even eating is agony — the disease has spread to his oesophagus.

But his brief chance of glory in the Man Booker Prize —he didn't make the shortlist of six, which has just been announced — was a pleasing distraction from Thompson's struggle.

"I was absolutely gobsmacked to be on the list," he says. "I hadn't even bothered looking and I didn't even know the publisher had entered me. Somebody told me I was on there and I thought they had made a mistake," added the 45-year-old who has been behind shows such as Have I Got News For You, Da Ali G Show and Harry Enfield and Chums.

"Then my girlfriend looked on the internet to double-check but somehow she managed to get last year's list with Doris Lessing. Actually in my current state of health, I look rather like Doris Lessing ... "

Thompson's book, This Thing of Darkness (Review, $36.99), has taken 10 years from the first germ of the idea to publication, with three years of actual writing and research. A work of historical fiction, it examines the 19th-century voyage of the Beagle and the relationship between its captain, Robert FitzRoy — a devout Christian — and his passenger Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution ran counter to FitzRoy's faith in the Bible.

The appearance of his illness was concurrent with the book's publication.

"I had to go to a marketing dinner to meet the book trade. That night I was fast asleep, then I suddenly woke up and felt as though I had been shot. It just came out of nowhere and I was in absolute agony. I was a foot and a half away from a table by the bed where there was some Nurofen and I couldn't even reach them. I was just in a ball of pain. I had no idea what was going on.

"Strangely, I felt fine the next day and I nearly didn't do anything about it — I felt a bit of a fraud — but I went to the doctor and had a month of tests, each of them increasingly unpleasant. At first they thought it was pleurisy. And then they thought it was TB. I'd just written this Victorian book and then I seemed to have got this Victorian disease — people were taking the piss, saying you're taking your research too far. Now, I think I'd walk a hundred miles to just have pleurisy."

Thompson was diagnosed with lung cancer four months ago, after doctors found "two orange-sized tumours". Medics are trying to control the spread with weekly chemo and daily radiotherapy, but he has no idea how long he has left.

"How long is a piece of string? But there's no point in worrying about it."

His diagnosis was even more shocking because he had never smoked in his life, ate healthily and was a slim, keen sportsman. Thompson was probably susceptible to passive smoking. A cruel irony is that if he had been less fit, the impact of the disease would have been noticeable sooner.

"When I found out it was cancer, I was utterly stunned. It is just so surprising, so kind of irrelevant. You think this is somebody else's, there's been a mistake. This belongs to some guy who smokes 60 cigarettes a day.

"I've been in my fair share of smoky rooms — and I've had my fair share of smoky girlfriends, but they haven't got this. Nobody really knows how it happens, but maybe the fact is I am just genetically susceptible."

Thompson had written a number of biographies since his mid-20s but wanted to get to his 40s before trying a novel.

"At one point I was in hospital flat on my back and close to death [caused by an abscess related to the cancer]. Now I'm at home and moving around, getting on with work as much as possible," he said.

"I've written a small, frivolous book about cricket. It's not really the ideal follow-up to a novel, and I'd probably not have written it if I'd known I was going to be on the Booker longlist.

"It is actually so much more mental effort to do a proper novel with grown-up ideas than the books I have done in the past. The novel was highly researched. I wanted it to be as close as possible to history, and I went through thousands of pages of FitzRoy and Darwin's diaries and journals to get it as close to the truth as I could. I was so immersed in 19th-century speech I began to speak the same way."

Thompson said his children who are aged 9 and 11, and live with their mother in Edinburgh, are "something to fight for". Nevertheless it is a painful existence.

— INDEPENDENT