Sebastian Faulks. Photo / Getty Images
Sebastian Faulks on writing James Bond, his obsession with psychosis and why no one reads any more. By Bryan Appleyard.
Sebastian Faulks is worried about his future. He writes books, literary books in the tradition of the great writers of the past. But nobody seems to bother to read any more. "I know recent graduates in English who've read one or two books. And wonder what they did for their three years."
As a student at Cambridge University, he read everything. "I thought I needed to read representative samples of George Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens, Conrad, Henry James, you know — at least three or four books by every single one of them. You just did, otherwise I would have felt completely fraudulent."
He accepts that, thanks to the internet, these bookless kids do know a lot of stuff. "Films, TV, countries, flags, currencies. But it isn't the same as what you get from reading books. I think their life is really impoverished by not having read books. And I think that their ability to appreciate books being written now is also impoverished by not reading."
He is 68 and he does occasionally acknowledge that he might be an "old fart" but neither he nor I think that is the point. He is what he is and we are who we are because of, among other things, great books. Faulks is now a grandee of the literary establishment. His books are critically acclaimed and many, notably Birdsong, sell very well indeed. He is garlanded with prizes and honours, he broadcasts and he speaks. He is married with three children; one son shows promise as a writer — he writes about football for a Chelsea website. Faulks supports West Ham. "He's never listened to anything I've ever told him."
We are murmuring in the dark red "honesty bar" of a little hotel near his home in Notting Hill, West London. He has been in France, eating cheese, a lot of it. He apologetically notes that he has put on 6kg. But, in holiday mood, we still have a glass of wine each for which he, in all honesty, pays.
We are discussing his latest book, Snow Country. It's the second in his Austrian trilogy. It's a glacially slow project. The first one, Human Traces, came out in 2005 and he doesn't know about the third. He can't plan, his books just happen to him. "My books are just like cabs coming off the rank. I don't know whether it's going to be a white one, a black one or a yellow one. They come quite rarely and, when they come, you just have to go with it."
Psychiatry, mental disorder and the nature of the self loom over the trilogy and over much of his work. Psychosis is an obsession; he has known quite a few psychotics. "One in 100 people has a psychosis of some kind. But I probably did know a few more than most. There was a little boy who was at school with me who developed schizophrenia very young. Then there was my godmother's son who developed it at the classical age of 21.
"There was my brother's best friend in the next village, he developed it and committed suicide. I think I was aware when I came across these people and their lives. If you ever meet someone with schizophrenia and talk to them, you get this sense of them being there and not there."
For Human Traces he visited the high-security psychiatric hospital at Broadmoor. "I did a little reading group — sort of a creative writing class, as a payback for being shown around. You could have very good conversations with the inmates. The questions some of these people were asking were as good as you get in Waterstones [bookstore] in Kensington."
But neither he nor his family seem to have been afflicted. "I've been stressed and unhappy, but not in any sort of serious way."
Snow Country is a love story, but one made complex and uncertain to the last page by politics and the intellectual ferment of Vienna in the early 20th century, a ferment that was unusually sexual, thanks primarily to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.
"Vienna was quite obsessed with sex before the First World War. Women were depicted as sort of basically insatiable and it was thought that that was how they should be — polyamorous, polygamous. There was also a massive prostitution thing going on."
The hero, Anton, uses prostitutes in his attempt to recreate what he felt on his first night with his lost lover. This is love as a kind of puzzle to be solved, not love as an old sentimental tale. "I think the whole idea that I sort of grew up with, we all grew up with, was that you kiss a few local girls at the dance, you sow your wild oats and you settle down, aged 35. It's so much more interesting than that. So much more complicated."
There is one final oddity about Faulks that needs to be mentioned. He has written a James Bond thriller — Devil May Care — and a Jeeves and Wooster comedy — Jeeves and the Wedding Bells. Is he indulging in versions of literary Englishness?
"I honestly hadn't thought of that. What attracted me to Bond was that it was such a ridiculous idea. My agent rang me up and said, 'They want you to write a centenary novel and they definitely want you.' I said, 'But I don't write thrillers, I don't really read thrillers.' But Ian Fleming's family were just terribly nice about it and very persuasive. And then my agent persuaded me that it would make a lot of money and said, 'You haven't got a pension fund, so what about it?'"
And so Bond was reborn as a pension contribution. He at first resisted Jeeves because it seemed too difficult but, in the end, he succeeded. Now he has been asked to resurrect Raymond Chandler's private eye Philip Marlowe. He has declined. "I don't have any feeling for Chandler and anyway, the pension is done."
And with that we finished our holiday tipple and he paid his honour debt and went back to his next book. It's inspired by something Richard Dawkins said about the variety of the human species. But he won't say more than that; it's bad luck.
Snow Country, by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson, $37) is out now.
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