How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S1, Ep2 How to Fail: Sebastian Faulks

Episode Date: July 18, 2018

Sebastian Faulks, bestselling novelist and author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, joins How To Fail to talk about his failure to win the Booker Prize (“the whole thing is absolutely ridiculous”), his sense of social isolation at boarding school and a period of depression at university he feels he has never fully recovered from. Along the way, he talks about what it really means to be a “successful” writer and whether it matters what other people think, as well as the time he failed his driving test and got bowled out having scored 98 at cricket (two separate occasions, thankfully). Then there was the painful occasion he baked a soufflé and it failed to rise, a cooking faux pas that haunts him still. And if that’s not enough to whet your appetite, feel free to download and subscribe in order to hear Elizabeth being sternly reprimanded by Sebastian for her misuse of the word “saga”. How To Fail is hosted by Elizabeth Day and produced by Chris Sharp  How To Fail is sponsored by Moorish  Social Media: Elizabeth Day @elizabdayMoorish @moorishhumousSebastian Faulks @sebastianfaulks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. Hosted by author and journalist Elizabeth Day, that's me. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. My guest this week is Sebastian Foulkes, who is that rare thing,

a best-selling novelist who makes a successful living from his books without losing his reputation for being one of the nicest men in publishing. He's probably best known for Birdsong, the epic World War I saga, which was published in 1993 and has sold over three million copies. But Birdsong is only one of his 16 books, which span both fiction and non-fiction and cover a dazzling variety of themes and topics, from wartime espionage to 1950s jazz to the history of psychiatry. His latest novel, Paris Echo, is published in September. This, then, is undoubtedly a man who has experienced great achievement. But of course, I'm more interested in the failures that might have led him there. So, Sebastian, how does it feel hearing that about yourself?

Well, a bird's-eye is not a saga, I would say. Well, it's part of a saga. No, a saga's either a Norse or Icelandic poem, or else it's a kind of Judith Krantz thing with a sort of risen red cover in which some poor woman is horribly raped in the first chapter, and then 700 pages later, her granddaughter opens a shop on Park Avenue.

So do you want to start again without the saga? No, I'll keep that in because I've always thought of you as a kind of male Judith Krantz. Oh, thank you. When we first emailed about the idea of this podcast, you rather plaintively replied that you found it difficult to relate to the concept of failure. Why do you think that is? I mean, one of the examples you chose of having failed was when you cooked a souffle and it didn't quite rise. Do you think you're resistant to the idea of failure? I'm not sure I really understand what it means. I mean, there are very clear instances, I suppose you could say, of somebody in a high

jump competition who has three attempts to clear the bar at two meters and fails to clear it at any of the three attempts. So I suppose that is a failure, but it's a kind of qualified failure. The fact that they can jump nearly two meters and pretty good. They're in the finals of the Olympic event. They'll have another go next week when they might make it. I don't really quite know what it is. Things often don't go as well as you hope, but it doesn't mean to say they're a complete fail. Well, I was going to ask you about that, actually, because you've said before that one of your novels, A Week in December, turned out slightly differently from how you'd

wanted it to be. You wanted it to be quite a serious, up-dyke-ian novel. And it turned out to be more satirical. Yeah. I wouldn't say that was a failure. It turned out differently. It certainly wasn't a failure in the bookshop. It's the only book I've ever written that got to number one in the best seller list. So in that sense, it wasn't a failure. It became different as it went along. And I didn't end up writing the book that I wanted to write. But to some extent, I think that happens with every book. As you go along, the book does take on a life of its own and a character of its own, and the extent to which your finished article ever represents what you first envisaged is limited, generally. Basically, it's never as good, for one thing.

You envisage this perfect, glittering, flawless diamond that is going to square the circle and be the best piece of literature ever. And you end up with something that most people enjoy, but that's about it really. How does it feel when you've written a novel that has done incredibly well, and then you have to sit down and write the next novel? Does it make a difference to how you think of your own writing? No, I didn't really have that problem. I do take the writing of a book pretty seriously. So the central idea has to be, to me, extraordinarily interesting and robust and many faceted, something that I can work with and on and over for two or more years, and which I believe is

going to be interesting enough for thousands of people to read and get something from. And that sort of idea or combination or constellation of ideas doesn't come around very often. I mean, maybe every two or three years, you finally think, yeah, I can do something with this. So how the last one had gone well, or not so well, So how the last one had gone, well or not so well, has really very little to do with the process of finding that elusive thing that you can work with. So I wasn't really affected by the fact that Birdsong sold a lot of copies any more than I was affected by the fact that the book before

Fool's Alphabet didn't sell a lot of copies. I mean, it didn't bother me one way or the other, really. And I know this happens very rarely, but when you do get a review that isn't glowingly positive, how do you cope with that? Do you read your reviews and does it bother you? I've had tons of bad reviews and tons of good ones. And if you publish as many books as I have, which is what, 15, I think, which have been reviewed in lots of places, you're going to cover the whole spectrum sooner or later. I quite like getting bad reviews in a way, as long as there's not a sort of personal thing in it. If there's a real vigorous disagreement, I find that quite sort of bracing, actually. And quite often, the person who doesn't like your book has engaged with it in

quite a lively way, much more so than sometimes you get a very nice review, but you don't really feel the person has actually got a hell of a lot out of the book. So I don't read them all religiously as they come out, but I do catch up with them eventually. Have you ever sat next to anyone at a dinner who's really hated one of your books or met someone in person who said, I just despise this? I've met people who've tried to be patronising. Oh, a smashing read, things like that. Because obviously, it's made them feel threatened. And that's their way of defending themselves,

trying to mumsify it. But no, I mean, I suppose I just meet very polite people. It sounds to me as if you relish the challenge of someone engaging with your work and discussing it. And I wonder if that's accurate. Yes, I want people to engage in it. And people write to me a lot about it. And it has had an effect on people's lives. I mean, human traces, for instance. I know quite a few young people who said their lives were changed by it and now work as psychiatrists after having read the book. A guy wrote to me from Canada who's a retired doctor saying that he reads one scene before he goes to bed every night

to remind himself of what he tried to do in his career. And so that sort of engagement is tremendous. I've had lots of communications like that over the years. Do you like being challenged though? Because you went to Cambridge and obviously there there is this sort of tutorial system where you are required to write an essay and then be challenged on it. Yeah. Did you like that? When I was there yes and go to all that many tutorials but yeah being asked to defend something that you've written was good. And it sharpened you up, I think, at that age, 19 or something. Particularly if you

cared a lot about it. Keats, for instance, I was very keen on. And I remember being very disappointed that there were two of us in the tutorial and the other guy got to read his essay and not me, because I really wanted to read mine. Not because I wanted to be challenged, because I wanted to show off, I think. But it's good to be put on the spot and asked questions. And I mean, you get this to some extent in the editorial process. And some of the editorial questions you get are not particularly interesting. But some of them, I don't feel that we've disposed of this character properly, or I feel this bit needs to go later on,

and you need to think about why that works and why it might work better and so on. And when I got a new publisher, when Penguin and Random House merged, I was asked what I would like in the way of publishing, and I said, you know, much more editorial involvement. But it's slightly a question of be careful what you wish for, but I like that.

Because I think some people struggle not to take that sort of editorial intervention or criticism personally but have you never had that problem? You've got to pick your editor I mean you've got to be someone who is a good reader and also someone who's tactful. I've occasionally read books by friends as a favour and made some suggestions but you have to put them in very very tactful. I've occasionally read books by friends as a favour and made some suggestions, but you have to put them in very, very tactful ways. You know, might you consider or something like that, even if you're pretty certain that they really ought to consider it, because it would certainly be better if they did X, Y or Z. So it's like, depends how it's phrased. For instance, in this

new book, a note was passed to me, and I'm not going to say where it came from. It was about third hand, but somewhere along an editorial chain somewhere, the phrase racist stereotype was used. And I did write a very long explanation of why the character referred to in the book was completely anti-stereotypical and completely not racist, of course. But, you know, those are phrases that you shouldn't be, one, to say racist means a very evil person, and the other stereotype means you can't write. So these are not things that you should be saying to, you're evil and talentless, you know, one or other, but probably not both. But that probably won't slip through again. In the spirit of full disclosure, you did actually read my manuscript for my latest novel, The Party, and gave me amazing editorial suggestions that were,

as you say, incredibly respectfully phrased. Or humorously, you know, why not? I mean, not humorously. I wouldn't go that far. I'm joking. They were also very funny. I mean, I think, you know, however serious your books are, I mean, you can always at some point be slightly humorous about them, particularly when you're getting to the exhausted end of the entire process and the hyphens and the commas. And the copy editor, which is the very last gasp with me, said something about somebody wearing, yeah, Tarek is wearing Billy's tennis clothes here. But you know, on page 26, Billy is after all the younger brother, and I'm wondering whether they could really fit. So I just replied, I think Billy's had a growth spurt.

And you can be humorous about these things to some extent. You encouraged me to put a sex scene in my book. Did I? Yes. And did you? I did, yes. And it's one that many people comment on. And do they like it?

Yes. Do you find it easy writing sex scenes? Not really. And in fact, I think the ideal sex scene should tell you something about the characters that you didn't know before. So for instance, in Charlotte Grey, we discover when there is a sex scene in that quite early on,

it's a bit of a non-sex scene actually, we discover that she's never had sex before, which is not something you knew. And I slightly sort of borrowed that from the French Lieutenant's Woman, which has a very good sex scene in it, which is not something you knew. And I slightly sort of borrowed that from the French Lieutenant's Woman, which has a very good sex scene in it, which is both rather erotic in itself, but also you discover that the eponymous woman

has never had sex before. And so therefore her reputation for being a loose woman is tremendously unfounded. So that's my sort of ideal. Or actually, I suppose in Lady Chatterley, which I think is a very underrated book, where the sex scenes tell you a lot about how these two people are trying to find connection in a world which has been destroyed by the First World War. It's a sort of post-traumatic landscape they inhabit. In the book I've just finished, Paris Echo, towards the

end, both of the main characters have sex, not with one another. And one of them is not described because what would have transpired between her and the man with whom she goes to bed would have been just what people do. They would have just copulated or mated or whatever you want to call it. There was nothing in it for me to describe what they did. But the other one I did describe because the boy had spent basically all the book imagining what it might be like. So it seemed only reasonable to share with him his discovery of what it was like. But then in the end, I didn't think what he discovered was really different enough from what he'd imagined to really justify keeping it in.

So I pretty much took it all out again. The sex scene? Yeah. Have you ever been shortlisted for the Bad Sex Award? I believe I won it. Did you? I believe so, yeah. Oh, for which book?

Charlotte Grey, which, as I said, didn't have a sex scene that I was really aware of, apart from this non-event. Auburn War, who I knew because he used to review for The Independent, rang me up and said, are you coming to our party? I said, well, I hope to, Bron. I don't really like the party. It's rather like UKIP's idea of a literary event, I always think. I said, I'll probably try and cut along.

He said, you must come. I said, why? He said, because I think you've won it. I said, but why? Which book? And he told me. I said, but which bit? He said, I don't know. I haven't read it. And I said, well, you can't give me some prize for something you haven't read. And he said, no, but so-and-so tells me there's a bit

in it. And basically it was because Birdsong had sold a lot of copies. It was Bron's idea was it's time to de-bag this chap in the dorm. And you know, what's the expression? Cut him down to size or something. Talking of prizes, one of your three incidences of failure, which you kindly gave me over email, was when you failed to win the Bancarella, which I'd never heard of. It's a big prize in Italy, you said, for which you were shortlisted, but you didn't win it. Yes, that's right. It's the prize that, do you remember that film called La Grande Bellezza, the great beauty, a vast Italian film. And the main character has won this prize as a young man and feels subsequently he need do nothing else. He never needs publish another book. judges in a very Italian way. Is that a failure? I mean, I wouldn't have thought so. I mean, I've thought it was rather a success to be flown to Milan to be celebrated in a country not your

own for a book with no Italian connection. But who knows? I think I was offering that to you in a slightly playful way, perhaps. I know. Are prizes important to you? And is outside approbation of your work important to you? Yes it is important that people think that you're doing a good job yeah it certainly is. Prizes have not really come my way so I couldn't really tell you what that might feel like but I've had the approbation of you know written and spoken and through sales and to an extraordinary extent that to want to win the you know the pizza palace or the Cadbury's chocolate egg prize as well would be kind of de tro really having said which I wouldn't you know someone said here's one I'd turn up yeah what do you think of the Booker

prize I think it became terribly irritating when it was taken over by the man group the man group is not sort of people who should be The Mann Group is not the sort of people who should be sponsoring literary prizes. They're the kind of people that literary figures ought to be criticizing, as I did in a week in December. They're kind of the enemy. I wouldn't feel happy about accepting money from them, not that it appears possible that that will ever happen. And I hate the whole sort of idiolect that it developed you know the man booker the asian booker long listing and barrels booker of barrels and oh god the whole thing is absolutely ridiculous it'd be interesting if they did want to give me 50 big ones would i go along i don't

think i could from the man group but if it was instead sponsored by somebody friendly or the hummus a moorish hummus company a hummusmus group, 50 grand, I could take that, yeah. Okay, 50 grand in pots of hummus. Probably that would be, I don't think my digestion could take 50 grand worth of hummus. You're the youngest of two boys. Or younger of two, as we sometimes say. Oh, my gosh.

So, of course, Jane Austen says that very thing in the first page of, I think it's Emma. Emma was the youngest of two girls. There we go. I'm just following in Jane Austen's footsteps. Yeah, good course, Jane Austen says that very thing in the first page of, I think it's Emma. Emma was the youngest of two girls. There we go. I'm just following in Jane Austen's footsteps. Yeah, good footsteps, yeah. Your brother's two years older than you, is that right? Two years and eight months, to be precise. And did you look up to him or was there a part of you that wanted to be as advanced as he was?

I remember that as a child, always wanting to do the things that my older sister did. I think our dynamic was very typical, really. Probably the gap was slightly bigger than it ought to have been. I think it was slightly bigger than it was planned. I think there was one that, you know, went missing between the two of us. I think Edward had to make a choice either. He had to sort of wait for this kid to catch up or else he'd have to go and play with older children, which he did quite a lot because, you know, it's a long way. And I'm two and he's five, and five and eight. You know, these are substantial differences when mostly what you're playing is physical games anyway,

you know, cricket and football. It wasn't much fun for him. But equally, for me, it was a question of running hard to try to catch up, to try to have a playmate. So I think he sort of dawdled a bit, waited a bit, and I panted on and pushed on to try to catch up, which I suppose is fairly exactly what you'd expect, really. Do you think that dynamic is still in place?

No, I think that sort of ended about the time that the physical difference became irrelevant, which would be actually probably not till about late teens. even 18 and 15. An 18-year-old will generally beat a 15-year-old at tennis, generally, but it's starting to close up by then. So who beats who at tennis when you play now? Well, it's been through phases. I would have said that I used to win, but I think that now he would win because he's fitter than I am, basically. You were pretty precocious at school. You won a scholarship to Wellington and you were two years ahead of yourself. Did you enjoy school? Were you good at it, at the social side of it? No, I loathed it. I hated it.

I was an extremely shy, antisocial child. And I had no friends, really, at home. And then I went to boarding school when I was just eight. And I got on fine with the other boys there. But I wouldn't say any of them were really close friends until a very nice boy arrived from India when I was about 11. A boy called Farley Vakil arrived from Bombay. And Farley was a bit more sophisticated than the other boys. And he'd read a few more books. I was fond of him.

And I mean, I got on really well with all the boys there. But we just weren't sort of close. It was just a sort of pack, really. No one really disliked anyone. We all got on well together, but there weren't sort of close friendships or anything. And then at Wellington, it was a thoroughly second-rate school. And because I disliked it intensely,

and I was two years out of my stream or whatever, however you put it, so none of the boys in my lessons would ever speak to me because, you know, why would you? Who's this jumped up little tit, you know? So I didn't know the boys of my own age because they were in different lessons and the boys in the lessons I was with never spoke to me. So I was sort of, I wouldn't say I was sort of miserable, but it was just a very bad school and it was just sort of dismal really but the good thing was that there was nothing to do in the evenings other than you went into your little cubicle on f wing or d wing it was like not the nonsense wing but you know the sort of hardcore place and you were banged up from about

seven i think you were allowed to slop out at nine i suppose apart from that there were no televisions you weren't allowed to listen to the radio. There was no internet. So all you could do was read. That was all you could do. That was read or stare at the ceiling or masturbate, I suppose. But, you know, I preferred reading, I suppose. So I did read a hell of a lot. So although it was a really second rate school, I read a lot of books there. Were you bullied? No. Unless you call not speaking to someone for a long time bullying. Very passively. I say I was rather on their side.

I wouldn't have spoken to some little tit if I'd been there. My best friend is a psychotherapist, and she says most of the men who come to her have an issue because they were sent to boarding school at a very young age. Did it... Being sent at the age of eight? Well, it was traumatic, undoubtedly, because the world that you found yourself in was... Did it, being sent at the age of eight? Well, it was traumatic, undoubtedly, because the world that you found yourself in was, it just bore no relation to any world I'd ever known.

Iron bedsteads, weird clothes, weird food, Latin, Greek, hymns, and there was no experience for the first sort of month that I'd ever had before. But eventually, you sort of got used to it. And I remember one term, I didn't go home at all, because I was some sort of mumps outbreak. And in some ways, it was easier not to go home at all, actually. And, you know, I learned to fit in and to adapt. And in the end, it's weird, but I rather enjoyed it. I mean, I sort of rather prospered at that school. Because essentially, it was a good school, It had high standards. And if you did well at stuff, you know, you were rewarded and applauded and so on. Whereas at Wellington, if you did well at something, people told you you were a wanker and that was not good. Neil Wellingtonian was the sort of lower to middle ranking guy who didn't make a fuss, who could go on a sort of 14 mile yomp through the rain and finish in the top half without making a

fuss. If you came in first, that was a bit showy. Did you ever question internally why your parents had sent you to boarding school? Or was it simply something that happened? I questioned externally a great deal and demanded to be taken away. I was persuaded to stay. I said, look, you know, I hate this terrible school. It's very second rate. I don't like it. And I'm not going to become a sort of prefect or anything. I'm not interested in any of that crap. I don't play games anymore because I'm so disaffected from the whole school. Please, can I go to the local grammar school? And apart from anything else, you know, having a private education, I realised straight away were then going to sort of disqualify me

from ever having anything to say on education, because people would just say, yeah, yeah, you can't talk, you were privately educated. I knew that would happen. And you know, the ideal, of course, is to be like Alan Bennett, you go to a fantastic state grammar school, and then a fantastic University, Oxford, and you're free to pontificate for the rest of your life. I could see that coming. Anyway, I demanded to be sent to the local grammar school, and they rang up, and I can't remember if I went for an interview. Anyway, they said they'd have me.

But my mother told me my father was very upset about all this, and if I went back to Wellington, they'd let me live outside the school in the village with a retired master, and I only had to go in once a day for a lesson and so on. And I didn't want to upset my parents any more than I already had, so I reluctantly agreed. So that's what I did. And ended up living outside the school. Yeah.

It was actually quite a nice life. And to be fair, if anyone should ever listen to this, the teaching in my last year was good, actually. There were three very good English teachers who'd been hoping one day to find an English student who was as interested in Jane Austen as they were, or Milton or anyone. And finally, they'd found one. And they were very, very enthusiastic and very encouraging. And so, in a way, it sort of worked out at the end. So in a way, it sort of worked out at the end.

Peyton, it's happening. We're finally being recognized for being very online. It's about damn time. I mean, it's hard work being this opinionated. And correct. You're such a Leo. All the time. So if you're looking for a home for your worst opinions. If you're a hater first and a lover of pop culture second,

then join me, Hunter Harris, and me, Peyton Dix, the host of Wondery's newest podcast, Let Me Say This. As beacons of truth and connoisseurs of mess, we are scouring the depths of the internet so you don't have to. We're obviously talking about the biggest gossip and celebrity news. Like, it's not a question of if Drake got his body done, but when. You are so messy for that, but

we will be giving you the B-sides, don't you worry. The deep cuts, the niche, the obscure. Like that one photo of Nicole Kidman after she finalized her divorce from Tom Cruise. Mother. A mother to many. Follow Let Me Say This on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new episodes on YouTube or listen to

Let Me Say This ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, historian and host of a new chapter of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. and world-leading experts every week as we explore the incredible real-life history that inspires the locations, the characters and the storylines of Assassin's Creed. Listen and follow Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. your father was a decorated soldier he won the military cross didn't he and your maternal grandfather um served in a trench unit at the Somme and I know that you have returned to war several times as a theme in your novels and I wanted to ask you whether you felt that men of your generation

felt the lack of having fought in a world war themselves? Well, growing up in the 50s and 60s, I assumed that there would be a war in an admittedly very uninformed, infantile way. But actually, it wasn't a ridiculous assumption. You know, if you think of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was nine then. And in the early 60s, it was thought that the Russians were ahead in the arms race, the space race, and so on. And it was a very tense time. And so one did reasonably expect that there would be further another war. I'm very glad there wasn't. And of course, now we're looking at where we are, our generation, the people born in the so-called baby boom, are now reviled because we didn't do what our grandparents and parents did.

And we've stolen all the money from our children and grandchildren and all the houses, which to some extent is true. And though it's not all of us who've stolen it, it's only a few thousand financial criminals who've stolen it. It's not me. So I do feel a mixture of incredibly fortunate, extraordinarily lucky to have been born at this time. I also feel that I've never had to do anything really other than sort of pounce around. And, you know, it makes you feel

as well as because I don't want to spend my life feeling guilty, I try to spend my life feeling grateful. I think that's a more positive way of looking at it. And maybe actually that's really what is partly my unconscious drive in writing Birdsong, Charlotte Grey and other books, is to say thank you, actually, and to say I understand and I appreciate what was done for us. Do you think you've taught yourself to be optimistic? I was optimistic as a child. Although very shy, I was essentially a

jolly little chap, you know, looked on the bright side. But I think I became essentially pessimistic in my 20s, really. And, you know, I've had to fight pretty hard to try and look on the upside. But I think I'm not sure it's really a terribly intellectual thing. I think it's more of a temperamental thing. My physiology or temperament or whatever word you want to use, I mean, and there's a place where they meet perhaps, is naturally a touch on the gloomy side. So I do have to try pretty hard to be optimistic. What was happening in your 20s that you? Well, at Cambridge, which I didn't like, as well as not liking school, I just sort of struggled to adapt, really.

I sort of finished academically. I didn't want to be a sort of show pony. I didn't want to win any more prizes and stuff. And I was still quite competitive in some strange way, and I thought perhaps I ought to get a first, and perhaps I ought to do this or that. And I was just confused, and I drank too much and smoked too much and became very confused and unhappy.

And I dropped out, really, I suppose you'd say. And I was age 22 or 23. I was extremely confused and very fragile. And it took quite a lot of time to get over that. I wouldn't say I have got over it, really. Talk to me more about that, because writing, for all its benefits, is also a very solitary activity. And I imagine if one does have that temperament, as I do,

then you have to be careful. Yeah, I mean, life is a continuous negotiation, really, with yourself and other people and company and the kind of company you want, how much company you want, how much you want to give, how much you want to take, what form and shape that takes, especially if you've had this tremendous shyness as a child, still have to some extent. You know, you do change. That's another thing you're negotiating, the actual changes that take place in you and different ways that you react as you get older to people, families, situations, friendships, and so on. But being a writer,

it was so important to me from the age of about 14 that I found everything else was really getting in the way. But then when I became a journalist in my sort of later 20s, I enjoyed being a journalist a lot. And I quite liked the company of other journalists as well. I had a sort of perfect job really on the Sunday Telegraph where I was a feature writer and I had half a dozen good colleagues, friendly colleagues, but I spent most of the week off on the story on my own. But there was this sort of support system back at the paper and the editors were extremely avuncular and, you know, looked after me and rather sort of gave me the, not the best, but some nice things to do. But at the same time, it wasn't particularly demanding, frankly, one story a week. And I had three day weekends. And

so I was able to write my books at the same time. And that was at that age when I was then in 30 ish, that was kind of really perfect balance. And then since I left journalism in 1991, I had by that time become an editor and was spending all day in meetings and I never had any time off. And I didn't like that at all. Finally, I got this freedom to sit in my cork-lined room and write the books, which was for the first 10 years, pure heaven. And then the next 10 years, pretty good. And then I suddenly thought, you know, I've done this. I've had the time, I've had the silence,

I've had the ability and I've put a lot of books on the shelf, I've done a lot. And I would quite like now to have meetings and friends and colleagues, actually, is what I wanted. A bit of flirtation around the coffee machine. And I actually wrote this in a spectator diary, much to the amusement of the Londoner' diary in the Evening Standard. I said, I mean, I really would like a job now, a part-time job, something that could do something like this.

Help me to meet people. And I was offered a job by solicitors in North London who asked if I'd like to rewrite the content of their website. And a crime writer called Sophie Hanna asked if I'd like to do some dog sitting for her but I mean dog sitting Sophie's dog wasn't quite my idea of colleagues it's all about adjustment and change did you rewrite the North London Solicitor's website no okay because a couple of years ago you did give an interview to the Sunday Times where you talked about how you didn't like the term writer's block, but you had struggled. How have you overcome that? I did struggle a bit at one point. I overcame it by writing another book. I wrote a Jeeves book, which I initially turned down. I'd done this Ian Fleming, James Bond continuation book for the

centenary of Ian Fleming's birth. And when I was asked if I'd do the Gs one, I said, no, I can't do that. It's far too difficult because Woodhouse's style is so beautiful and very, it's like sort of spun sugar. It'd be really difficult to do. Plus I couldn't think of a plot and I thought it'd just be presumptuous, frankly. Anyway, when I had got stuck with what I was doing, I rang up and said, you know, is the offer still on? And they said, sure. So I did it. And that actually was very helpful. It sort of freed something up. Because you're assuming someone else's voice in a way.

Yeah, it was just an exercise. It was sort of five finger exercise. But it also involved typing. It was writing and just putting sentences together, even though they weren't really my sentences. It sort of, it freed something. Two of your incidents of failure, which I know you've written humorously, but two of them are sporting. And I'm just going to quote from the email here, because it is very funny. There was a time my friend Simon and I lost the final of the over 40s doubles and had to be content with the runner-up glassware. And at cricket, I remember once getting out when I had made 98

and chipped a return catch to the bowler. How important is sport to you? As someone who spends so much time in your head, is it crucial to get in your body? Sport has been very important, both for the physical well-being. Vigorous exercise, as everybody knows, releases certain chemicals in your brain which make you feel good. So you just play tennis for an hour and a half and you come off the court and you feel as though you have just taken a whole lot of crack cocaine, but without any unhealthy side effects.

So that's good. It's good for you physically. It's good for you mentally. It's a free high high which has no side effects no downside at all but also the imaginative life of sport is something that I found extremely sustaining particularly when I've been in periods of unhappiness I think about sport a lot in bed I think I imagine I'm playing rugby or I imagine I'm playing particularly difficult golf course and you can kind of lose yourself in that

rather than confront the sort of terrible failings of your own personality that have led you to be in an unhappy situation. And it's a sort of displacement, but it's a very, very effective one. And it's a whole fantasy world too of hypothesis and who would you select if, who would be your all-time favourite cricket first XI? Well, why are you picking Ken Barrington rather than over Kevin Peterson?

And then there's a massive psychological aspect to why you might do that and what kind of players they are. And cricket in particular, it's quite like chess, except played by sweaty guys in white clothes. But the psychological and tactical aspects of it are very, very interesting. Do you suffer from insomnia? I have done periodically but just at the moment I'm doing very well thanks. Oh good. What are you like when you lose at tennis? Are you a good loser?

Yeah fine by the time we're off the court back in the bar I've sort of forgotten already. I don't particularly enjoy winning. I don't particularly like losing. But neither of them is all that important, really. I try like hell when I'm there. But if I win, I feel faintly embarrassed. If I lose, I feel faintly ashamed. So neither is really a good feeling. It's the game that's the thing.

It's the most British thing I've ever heard. I remember I took tennis lessons in my 20s because it's a sport that I've always wanted to be good at. And I remember the coach, Brad, saying to me... Brad Gilbert. Is he a tennis player? Yeah, a very famous coach. Author of a book called Win Ugly.

Well, maybe it was Brad Gilbert, but he said to me, your problem is that every time you miss a shot, you dig yourself into a pit of self-loathing from which it is impossible to clamber out. And it was so true. And I was like, that's actually just my entire personality. So to not have that, to be on an equilibrium is a very sane place to be. I do get frustrated with my failings at tennis,

particularly when I don't understand what they are. And as my knees went, this has very subtle implications for the way you play. It means you're not willing to put quite enough weight on something, which means you're not quite over the ball and things like that. And then I started, I started in my left eye, went, I hadn't realized that. And sometimes you miss things because for reasons you know, you just lose concentration or you, as you're about to hit the board, you look up to where you're going to hit it to.

This is the most common mistake, even among professionals, but actually not so much in professionals. But in amateurs, 90% of shots, they've just taken their eye off the ball at the last minute, however much you tell yourself. And in a way, that's annoying, but you know what you've done. But it's when you've made a mistake and you don't understand why. That's pretty frustrating.

And it's, in my case, to do with various ailments, which I hadn't quite understood the effect they're having on the positioning and so on. Do you think you've been in a state of denial about your ailments? No but I just didn't know what they were until I went to the optician once having completely missed a ball of tennis and I went to the optician the next day saying I haven't had my eyesight checked for a bit. It turned out I developed glaucoma in the meantime, and I had lost about 15% vision in my left eye. God. So in a way, it was a good way to find out.

Do you worry about ageing? No, I feel pretty good about ageing, actually, because I think I've sort of had the things. Everyone's genetic inheritance is good and bad. My muscles are incredibly good. My joints are pretty shit. But I've had two partial knee replacements. And my other joints were a case of my back, which is just painful. But I don't think it's going to get much worse. It's just you live with a degree of pain. And my eyesight is I've lost what I'm

going to lose, and I shouldn't lose any more. And for the rest, I think the genes are pretty good, actually. Some writers and indeed many creative types struggle to get out of that headspace and be present in their actual lives. And I wanted to ask you what you were like as a family person. Are you a present and good father? Do you feel that's been a success? You should really ask my children, but I do, yes. I have found being a father has been a wonderful experience. I've been very present in the sense that some parents can't because of work, but I've never, since my children were born, I haven't had a job. So I've been around a lot and been very involved in taking them to school, picking them up and in all their activities. And I think that I have been very

present. I haven't found it difficult to concentrate on their lives. I used to work just down the road in a flat. And when I was writing Human Traces, which was certainly the biggest and most all-involving thing for about five years, trying to sort of figure out what human beings are and why they don't work, quite scientific, which I have no background in as well, as well as literary. I was completely out of this world for periods of eight or 10 hours. By the end of that, I was very, very exhausted. But the 10 or 15 minute slow walk back was enough to reconnect me to the world. And by the time I came through the front door, I was, you know, really pleased to see them and find out about what they've been doing at school and so on. I think they would say the same, probably in a slightly less self-congratulatory way than I've put it. Going back to the overarching theme of this, of all of your books, which one do you feel has been, by your own terms, the most successful?

And which one do you think has been the least, according to what you wanted to produce? Which finished thing came closest to the idea that I've had in the first place? Yes. I think they are all reasonably close to what I had conceived, apart from the fact that one's own limitations, as soon as you pick up the pen, you're fucking it up to some extent because of the limitations of your ability one isn't Michelangelo it's flawed by your own limitations by definition I think that human traces I never

really quite thought I could maneuver that juggernaut into the very narrow dock or landing space where it had to be that was a huge expedition with so many logistical elements to get that great big tanker to mix them up as tanker docked and berthed. I suppose the book that I like more than other people did is A Possible Life, which has a slightly unusual form insofar as it's five separate parts. And they are linked together, but they're linked quite lightly. But they are, in my view, massively linked because they're all about the same thing. So in my view, it's like a symphony. I know symphonies normally have four movements, not five. But if you write something a bit unusual, the response you get is from people

who are not very good readers or sophisticated readers is, I don't understand, this looks like five short stories. And you don't want to embarrass themselves or you by explaining that actually, it's not like that. Or if it's a reader who thinks that he or she is very clever, they say, oh, dear, dear, really, does he honestly think this is new or avant-garde, the Bolivian neorealists were doing this in 1823. So you kind of irritate dear, really, does he honestly think this is new or avant-garde? The Bolivian realists were doing this in 1823. So you kind of irritate everyone, really. I still think it was the only way to write that book. It was the only way that it could work for the themes to come out.

But it's kind of disappointing. Not everyone responded like that. Lots of people just said, yes, and I enjoyed it. But I would like people to look at that again, maybe. I just want to mention Engleby for no other reason than that I love it and I hadn't read Birdsong to my shame until a few years ago and I remember emailing you in a sort of state of ecstasy because I just read it and thought it was incredible but Engleby I'd read prior to that and I do think it's a wonderful novel of yours and it's completely different from anything else you've

ever written. Yeah it is and I didn't really write it. It sounds fae, but he wrote it. I just took dictation and it wrote itself. And I suppose in that way, it is probably the most successful book I've written because my clumsiness and my limitations as a writer are not imposed on it because I had so little to do with it. I just channeled this voice. Which you woke up with. So he's a very sinister narrator and untrustworthy, but you woke up with his voice one morning. Yes. Those moments between waking and being fully awake are rather like those moments when you're falling asleep. There are long pompous words to describe both these states in psychology. And I quite often hear voices, not in the sort of schizophrenic sense, but I'm aware of words forming or sometimes music or what seems to me

wonderful poetry forming. But I used to try and grab a pencil by the bed and try and write it down. But by then you're too awake. And so you've lost that receptive sense, receptive level of consciousness. So when this happened, I was half awake and this voice started up in my head saying, my name is Mike Engleby and I'm in my second year at an ancient university. I could even hear the accent, which was slightly sort of off key and flat. Rather than try and write it down, I tried to keep my level of consciousness exactly where it was so the voice would keep on coming. And eventually I stirred too much or the cat came in or something. But I'd got about a page of it by then.

And when I went to work later on, I wrote it down. And as I wrote it down, the voice sort of, it didn't start up in quite the same way, but I found I was able to continue, put it that way. So I carried on writing. I just thought, I'll see where this takes me. It's completely the opposite way from what I normally do. I found that day after day I'd go into work and I could just start him up again, old Mike.

And I found I was beginning to enjoy his company quite a lot. And he was a bit like my sort of evil twin, I suppose. To the extent that I took risks with him, he was so not me. That was what was weird. He was so not me that I could take risks with him that I would never take with another character. So I made him the same age as me. I sent him to the same university as me. I never do this in normal books, because I think if you put in things from your own life, they stick out badly. But with Engleby, I felt that he was so watertight in himself, and he was so not me, that I could do anything with him, really. I sent him to the same plays I'd seen, I made him do similar jobs, and he

just did everything so differently from me. It was a great gift. It was a very easy book to write, in a way, very easy. Then about two-thirds the way through, I realised, well, I think I'd suspected all along, which is that he had done a very bad thing. And I thought, well, at this stage, you know, I can't just say I'm taking dictation from this invisible person. I better make sure if I'm going to publish this, that the reader, I've been fair with the reader and I've given the reader enough clues early on. But I looked back and it was all in there. It was all perfectly available to the reader to see that this guy was not a good person. I remember giving it to my brother to read

and he said, God, I read the first three pages and I thought, this is so embarrassing. Sebastian can't write anymore. It's all just sort of off key. And then I realised that that was the point of it. And it's like a wireless station radio station which is just slightly off tune it was brilliantly read actually on the radio by Douglas Hodge who's a very good actor I think how long did it take you to write was it quick yeah

took about four months I just dream of that I dream of waking up having dreamt of the entire well I started writing in September I remember and and I really thought I should be doing a proper book. But then after about 30, 40, 50 pages, I said to myself, well, look, I haven't got another idea at the moment, so I'll do this and I'll give it till Christmas and then I'll start a proper book. But by Christmas I had finished, so it can't have been more than four months. So you see, in failing to write a proper book,

you succeeded to write Engleby, which for my money is one of my favourite of yours. Thank you so much talking to me. I know you don't think you failed and you really haven't, but it's been very patient of you to talk to me with such eloquence and openness. Thank you, but just take out the saga. Oh my God.

Did you fail your driving test, by the way? Oh yeah, I failed my driving test twice. Oh, my God. Did you fail your driving test, by the way? Oh, yeah. I failed my driving test twice. Well, there we go. Yeah, but I was still only 17 and a half when I passed it. So, you know, that's what I mean. Is that a fail? I don't know.

My children are 27, 25 and 21 and none of them has a licence. I failed my test twice, but I still had a licence by the time I was 17 and a half. Do you remember what you failed on? Being too young and cocky. There wasn't a box box they could tick but you could tell that's what it was but the third time I went back the bloke said oh god you again and he knew that if he failed me again I'd be back again I think you had to spend four weeks before you could come back he knew I just keep coming back so he eventually said all right. Okay well thank you you turned those failures into a success as

well yeah it's how you look at it