Interview
What inspired you to become an author?
I liked reading, and of course my Dad was always banging away at his typewriter at home. At school I found I could write short stories that pleased. And so I had always assumed it was something I could do. It was a shock to find, when it came to it, that writing novels was a lot harder than it looked.
Which authors do you most admire?
As a child and teenager I loved the CS Forrester novels and, of course, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. But I also liked TH White (The Once and Future King), Rudyard Kipling, Ingalls Wilder, Goodge (The Little White Horse), Buchan, MR James and Violet Needham. Oh, and Ursula Le Guin, especially her science fiction novel The Dispossessed.
Was English your favourite subject at school?
I liked History, English and German. You don't have to have been good at English to be a good author, but it helps.
What would you be if you weren't an author?
I spent seventeen years at the Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office and NATO. If I hadn't become an author I suppose I'd still be there. But my pipe dream is to be an aid convoy driver, and steer a great big machine through exotic places carrying lots of good things to people who need them.
Do you base your characters on real people?
No. Sometimes I will borrow a face, or some quality in someone I know, as a starting point. If you are going to say that a character "has steel in them" then it helps if you've seen someone who is pretty steely, and then you know what it means. But to play their role in the novel, say a traitor or a counsellor, or someone who is initially unfriendly but then helps you, the character has to be a certain kind of person. These are the things that determine what they need to be like.
You mean you build your characters according to the story, not the story around the characters?
Er... Good question!
The honest answer is 'it depends'. Most supporting characters, probably yes. And that can be dangerous. Most readers want to be interested in the characters before they get interested in the story. Characters need their own life, particularly if they are central to the story. They have to come well formed out of your head. So in a sense the answer to the original question is that a lot of any character is actually based on you. They come from different aspects of your brain. You have to be able to imagine yourself acting like that, even if in real life you would never do so.
You are a Christian. How has this influenced you?
It's more the other way around. The things that prompt me to write about moral confusion, duty and sacrifice also prompted me to become a Christian. The idea of corruption fascinates me. What tempts us? What is the fall like? Do you look back and realise that it happened right back there, before you even thought about it? Christianity, and its Jewish antecedents, provide a language for dealing with such issues. That's why some of the imagery in my books borrows from these religions. But I don't write to persuade. I have neither the gift nor the conviction. I'll just ask the questions that interest me.
What are you working on now?
A science fiction novel set, oh, about fifty years in the future. I'm using Triton, the moon of Neptune, as a setting. That's roughly four billion kilometres away and the surface temperature is about thirty degrees above absolute zero. Gravity is one-tenth of that of Earth. It's about as remote and hostile as we are conceivably going to get. And once you're there, you're there for life. So what would it be like?