Take a Faulks on the wide side

One could never accuse Sebastian Faulks of resting on his laurels. After the success of his French World War II trilogy, including the massive selling Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, Faulks moved onto the Cold War, the history of psychiatry and a satire based around Fleet Street. And in between all that he managed to knock out the fastest-selling hardback in Penguin’s history – Devil May Care, Faulks’ take on Ian Fleming’s beloved 007.

This September sees the release of his tenth novel, A Week in December, a multilayered tale written from seven different perspectives.
“It’s a novel set over the course of one week in December 2007. It concerns the activities of seven major characters, whose lives overlap during the week. I suppose what the book is really about is the way we live now; and if Anthony Trollope hadn’t already stolen that title I might have used it myself.”
A Week in December is a satirical novel, which examines, among other things, the dehumanising effects of modern life, or as Faulks puts it, “the way people seem to live their lives at one or two removes from reality.” All the characters are in some way plugged into the world, but at the same time disconnected from it.
“You see this in the activities of the hedge fund manager, who is building a gigantic, complicated financial deal in the course of the week, using very complicated financial instruments which have nothing to do with actually making things, or farming, or most people’s daily lives. This [disconnection] is the theme that runs through and unites all these different people.”
One area to which Faulks pays special attention is the way technology is used to connect us to others, but at the same time reduces humanity to a spectacle for entertainment, and where virtual experience is substituted for the real deal.
“The tube train driver spends a lot of time in an alternative reality game, which is not a million miles from ‘Second Life’. The son of the hedge fund manager spends his time watching a particularly disgusting reality show called ‘It’s Madness’ in which the competitors – if that’s the word – are all suffering from psychiatric illnesses.”
Not too far from Big Brother, in that case.
“Not as far enough as you and I would like it to be!”
A Week in December is Faulks’ first book written without an historical background or at least historical back-story. Writing from an historical perspective, he notes, makes it easier to see the big picture, but his themes evolve more from his interests than anything else.
“I suppose when I first started writing novels in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s I didn’t find that there was anything in contemporary life that was very inspiring. It’s taken a long time for me to see a way that I could write something that interested me, and that I hope will interest other people, obviously, about the contemporary world.
“It was also a question of finding a style, of finding a sentence structure that would work for me and that was modern and up-to-date. If you’re writing a book set in the here and now, you need sentences that are sufficiently flexible, so that when the story takes on more complicated ideas, the sentence structure is able to take those on as well. It isn’t something that the average reader will notice or care about, but it’s something that as a writer you spend a lot of time working upon.”
Like Faulks’ last work, Engleby, the great and not-so-good of London journalism have spent many column inches trying to identify whom the inspiration for December’s hack book reviewer may be.
“I try to find it amusing, but to be honest I find it annoying,” laughs Faulks. “Particularly since there is quite a long riff in the book about this and what a silly thing it is. It really is quite a childish misunderstanding of what fiction is. It’s very depressing that people can’t get it into their heads that what novelists do is invent. You know, as a child when you first read a storybook, I don’t think you think that the Gruffalo or Harry Potter is based on someone.”
Despite the success of Devil May Care, Faulks has vetoed the idea of another Bond novel. Having turned his hand to writing in other authors’ styles for Radio Four’s The Write Stuff (collected in Pastiche), Faulks has taken off many authors, including Fleming in a Bond story, where 007 uses his Secret Service training to buy groceries.
“Initially I was a bit sceptical because I didn’t think that the books would be any good, but I read the books and they were great – they were very good fun. They’re not literature, but they don’t pretend to be and they stood up very well as entertainment and I thought I could see a way that I could write something in the same style.
“One of the most difficult things was trying to pace the book, to give the reader a moment or two to slow down after a particularly action-packed chapter. Normally in the kind of book I write, that’s when you make the character have some sort of reflection and think about where they are and how they got there. I tried doing that with Bond a couple of times, but it simply didn’t work. Bond doesn’t have an inner life!”