Writing

Towards the end of April, my mum sent me a letter. She doesn’t write as a rule — we speak on the phone — but this time she sent something. It’s hard to explain the effect her handwriting had on me after so many months of being apart. It was as if she was there, in envelope form, on the doormat. And because her handwriting’s been so familiar for so long, it wasn’t simply my mum as she is now, but Mum through three decades. I stood there in the gloom of the hall, vertiginous with memory, and I realised how unlikely it is that any future generation will have this same experience. I’m Generation X, the last of the analogue gang, brought up on handwriting. Our things weren’t encoded, they were imprinted: records and tapes.

Spring is coming. There was snow in the garden till last week, here in Canada, where I have been spending this strange winter. But today the sky is shining blue and the sunshine is soft and warm. I guess this is what Easter is really about. Rebirth. I have spent months without going farther than the corner food shop. Zoom winter. I have never been in the same few rooms for so long. And yet I have never been so much in touch with colleagues and friends from everywhere. I feel I have partially migrated into a semi-virtual reality. It is not too bad. It is relaxing. This week is crazy. My new book, Helgoland — about understanding quantum reality — has just been published and, because I have the best promotion person in the galaxy, I am submerged by journalists.

Like 98.3 per cent of humanity, I’ve spent the past 12 months reading dubiously precise statistics, staring listlessly into space for hours on end, and, most poignantly, wondering if I am an extra in a movie about a pandemic. This last intuition only worsened when I watched Contagion — the 2011 Kate Winslet/Gwyneth Paltrow pandemic movie — and it felt like I was simply watching the TV news (again), right down to the scenes of giant stadiums ominously filled with empty hospital beds. The sensation that I am living through a real-life thriller is particularly acute for me, because that’s what I do: write thrillers.

In the middle of December, for reasons I’m coming to, I woke early in a posh hotel. I lay semi-dozing while my partner, Jo, was in the shower, and eventually worked out how to tune the bedside radio, an internet device, to Radio 4. The six o’clock pips sounded as a bathrobed Jo emerged, earbuds in place: on her digital radio she heard the headlines some seconds ahead of me, and as she sat on the bed, her smile faltered. What’s the matter, I asked. John le Carré’s died, she said. A heartbeat or two later, while the internet transmission caught up with the digital, the radio confirmed this. John le Carré had died. And then, after a similar timelag, the news landed somewhere inside me. John le Carré had died.

In the early 1990s, the American novelist Mary Gaitskill suffered an abrupt awakening. ‘I lived in New York, I didn’t have a television, I didn’t listen to the radio. I didn’t even read magazines or newspapers very often. I was really too preoccupied with my own existence, which was hand to mouth a lot of the time,’ she says. ‘But when I was a little better off, I began to pay attention. I did get a TV. I did listen to the news a lot. And I was just like, holy shit. What a weird fucking world.’ What particularly astonished her, she says, is how central the fashion industry had become: ‘Models had always been glamorous figures, but it was suddenly they were the most important thing any woman could possibly aspire to be.

I’m often asked when I’ll write a pandemic novel. I’m not sure I’d ever be tempted, though the backdrop of Edinburgh’s deserted streets at the height of the (first) lockdown certainly provided food for the imagination. I dare say novels will arrive — some may even be good. But I find that fiction concerning momentous events usually benefits from the dust having settled. Only then can we begin to comprehend the human costs, stresses and implications, by which time there may also be an audience ready to relive the experience. In the near future, however, I foresee a hunger for escape to a gentler and more reasonable world.

Three years ago I sat down to write a novel set in my adopted home city. Placing its claustrophobic action in the near future, I had no trouble imagining my mostly foreign characters haplessly trapped inside a decaying high-rise apartment complex and surrounded by political upheaval. Thailand has endured more military coups since 1945 than any nation on Earth, and I myself have lived through two, in 2006 and 2014, while the violent uprising of 2010 occurred while I was far away in New York. They are peculiar coups by world standards. Two Turkish friends who visited in 2014 were disgusted by the lack of tear gas and fatalities inflicted by air power. ‘You call this a coup?’ they asked.

The only female writers of importance I have personally met are Margaret Atwood and Joan Didion, both of whom are rather short. That, I realise, is an advantage of sorts. You have less height to lose. Didion is 5ft 1in according to her Wiki entry, and Atwood, a tiny powerhouse, is listed optimistically as 5ft 4in, but that I think is like the Hollywood actors who I know are several inches shorter than listed heights, having stood breathlessly when Robert Redford walked passed me outside Bloomingdale’s in New York City. I mention this because after completing my third book, the first two written over 40 years ago when I was almost 5ft 8in, I am now 5ft 6in. I have lost an inch and a half since going into a three-year lockdown hunched at my desk.

Empathy and kindness in these difficult times come more easily to some than others, but I’m trying. I had heart surgery in November to repair a faulty mitral valve. Recovery has been terribly scientific. On my daily walk, a heart monitor is synched with an app on my phone so through earphones I can hear my heart rate as well as encouraging messages in a voice I find indistinguishable from the American cultural critic Bonnie Greer. Mainly, my walk is spent suppressing the inner Nazi who can’t believe the human race still refuses to be more like me. Particularly at a time when good manners and common sense are now a public health issue.

Writers like me are used to long hours alone. I’ve never enjoyed that side of it. I don’t like the bleakness of silence. As I try to settle and gather thoughts on my bed, pillows piled up behind me — Robert Louis Stevenson did the same, and it worked for him — I must have birdsong, music, the murmur of voices, and I must be able to see the living world from my window. I need the reassurance that I am not alone. I get up from the breakfast table always reluctantly, knowing the hours of solitary work that lie ahead, often dreading to have to go to it. I make myself do it, because I do have a story in my head I want to tell, because I need to prove to myself every day that I can still do it, and because it’s how I earn my living.

There is nothing writers love to write about more than writers. We are an extraordinarily self-important breed. Find a group of plumbers, office workers or electricians and they will talk about anything except their line of work. When writers come together, though, the subject of conversation is invariably their peers and themselves. But I can hardly talk. Here I am, coming to you today not just to write about writers and writing but to write about a writer writing about writers and writing. (Did you make it through that sentence OK? I'm sorry for inflicting it on you. Have a drink or something. You deserve one.) What have we done to deserve this kind of self-absorption? Writing, at its best, adds a little truth and a little beauty to the world.