Faulks’ love of writing remains as strong as ever
I flew in very early this morning, and it’s been non-stop ever since,” says novelist Sebastian Faulks. The CBE is relaxed, dressed in a suit jacket.
Faulks is promoting his latest novel, A Possible Life. He has written 13, including a James Bond, so Faulks is not shy of challenges. The new book is structured to tell the stories of five characters at different points in history, and Faulks experimented with form.
“I like doing different things, and I’ve written quite a few different structures in the past. The best structure is the one that best serves the book’s theme and this book is about — a lot of things, I hope — but mainly identity, and whether individuals are ever really, satisfactorily distinguished from one another.
“It examines whether people change so much during their lives that they become other people, and I thought a broken structure would articulate that theme,” he says.
Geoffrey Talbot opens the book, in 1939, as a volunteer in occupied France who witnesses the horrors of German concentration camps.
The book moves to Billy, a self-made man who started life in the workhouse. The final two stories, respectively, deal with a maid in 1822, and two musicians in the 1970s.
The hinge of the book, where Faulks asks most of his existential questions, is the centre story. It follows Elena, a scientist in Italy in 2029, who may or may not have discovered the part of the brain that deals with human consciousness.
“When writing this book, I wondered if we were right to think of ourselves as individuals with our own specific soul or spirit, or whether we’re all part of something larger that we don’t know about,” he says.
It sounds as if Faulks, and not just his characters, is struggling with age-old questions we all ask. He says that he has thought about his own mortality. “When I die, I dread that I won’t be completely extinguished, and I’ll have to go through all this again,” he says.
Not only is Elena’s story the fulcrum for the book’s ideas about identity and who we are, but asks, crucially — does the soul exist? Faulks has researched the topic, but also has personal views.
“There are a lot of materialist explanations around. Many people say that there is no such thing as the soul, but that, in itself, is what we call a ‘necessary fiction’ — that is, if you believe you have a soul, it means you function better in the world. I haven’t come across any explanations that I find utterly convincing, but a lot of people who have spent their whole life in neurology, from brain surgeons to psychologists, say they think there is something that might amount to a soul,” Faulks says.
A novel is meant to ask questions, but not all writers would want to traipse into such philosophical territory.
Faulks grew up in Berkshire, and says he had “moments” of being religious in his teens, having been raised Church of England. There were hymns and bible studies, but he was never immersed in the spiritual (“which I regret, actually”). “There are a lot of imponderable questions in life, and I imagine that those questions are not as agonising or perplexing to those who have religious faith. To that end, I envy people who have faith,” he says.
At 14, Faulks was lonely at rural boarding school and, like many teenagers, discovered that books offered redemption from boredom. “I felt miserable and a teacher loaned me DH Lawrence’s Sons & Lovers. I thought it was extraordinary. I started reading grown-up books and what I loved was that I realised every character has an inner life, which was just as exciting as real life. All of these books seemed so subversive, which is very appealing to a teenager,” he says.
Science, as his character Elena discovers, can give us answers, but we must also use art to find out about the world, Faulks says.
“In my life, I’ve learned more from reading novels and looking at paintings. Reading novels gave me a much clearer understanding of how other people function. I don’t understand how people who don’t read books get by in life — how do they know what anyone is thinking?”
Next year is the 20th anniversary of the publication of Faulks’ most famous book, Birdsong. At the time, he was a journalist, when a friend — Blake Morrison, then books editor of The Independent newspaper — asked him to write an article about war poet Wilfred Owen on the centenary of his death. Faulk’s visited Craiglockhart, the Scottish hospital where many injured soldiers were treated. The book became a huge success and made Faulks’ name.
“I feel grateful that Birdsong enabled me to do what I wanted to do full-time. I haven’t read it since 1995, when I read it for American edition,” he says.
Faulks never rereads his books. “Any time I did, I either felt there was word repetition, or that I picked the wrong word. Or you think, ‘Hey that’s good, I can’t do that anymore’,” he says.
Recently, Birdsong was adapted by the BBC, but Faulks has further adaptation plans for the book — and for other novels. Three other possible projects are at various stages: he’s co-writing all of them, including an early stage draft of The Girl at the Lion D’or and several drafts of screenplay of On Green Dolphin Street. “That [BBC] Birdsong adaptation was the last experience of me signing everything away where someone else wrote it. There is talk of a feature film of Birdsong, and the BBC deal was that if they were allowed to licence the TV version, they would give me back the film rights,” he says.
After so many years of writing, with sales and profile to match, does Faulks still enjoy it, and does it get easier?
“I think of writing in embarrassingly high-minded terms, that I probably shouldn’t go into,” he says.
I urge him on. “An author should make it as perfect as they can. I am honoured by the idea that someone would get something from my books that I got from the books that I read in my youth.
“Every time I sit down and write the start of something, like ‘the door opened and she came in’, I think to myself ‘Come on. What door? Who’s going to believe that?’ I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I don’t think I’m near the end. I still feel I can do new things. Getting older, my awareness is better; it’s more inclusive, broader. I take in more than I used to. Mostly, I really enjoy writing — and some writers don’t,” he says.
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