I’ve written the first thousand words of the new novel. It’s a near-future dystopia, set in a decayed and divided London. It centres on the networks of tunnels under the city: disused underground railway, sewers, utilities, old command headquarters, maybe even the long-buried rivers that flow into the Thames. It’s about fleeing from terror through the darkness, and all the strange things walking there.
All right. So where did THIS one come from?
I’ve said elsewhere that the idea that prompts a novel is like the seed of a pearl: it’s just a tiny piece of grit from outside that has got lodged within, niggling and itching in the brain until the mental processes begin to work on it and make it shiny.
In this case I can, (I think) pinpoint exactly the moment that gritty molecule arrived. It was decades ago, when I was a young duty officer in a department of state, and the phone went in the middle of the night. It was the police. They had been chasing some suspects, who had gone to ground in a tunnel system somewhere under central London. The cops thought that the tunnels might be our property. I can’t remember what they wanted from me: keys, maps, alarm codes or whatever: I didn’t know anything, apologised and hit the pillow again. But the seed lodged. Footsteps were running down dark galleries under the streets. Puddles. Rats. Fear. Then, or later, I learned how extensive the tunnels were. Surely I could use that somehow?
Going even further back, I had visited East Berlin as a student, in the last decade before the wall came down. I had crossed at Checkpoint Charlie and seen the borderguards, for whom the stony face and grumpy attitude were part of the uniform. I had visited the museum where the epic escape stories – yes, including tunnels – were told.
After the wall fell I watched (as we all did) while societies we had thought ordered and stable disintegrated into chaos and war. Then at home there was the political fever of the Brexit years, attacks on judiciary and the press and the shivery thought that things we took for granted could be very easily lost and very hard to rebuild. All that went into the melting-pot. So too, went the Book of Revelation, which is always good for something if you don’t overuse it.
And the plot? The story on which all this is going to hang? Well, that came after. There was some delay, but it came, oh several years ago now. It’s all been waiting together, down in the tunnels at the back of the brain.
Now it’s time to dig it out.
Last Updated on May 20, 2026 by John