A Very Persistent Illusion stands alone from your ‘Elsie and Ethelred’ comic crime series, and, though there is plenty of humour in it, the subject matter is often dark and disturbing. To what extent do you see this novel as a departure from those other books?
When I wrote The Herring Seller's Apprentice, I had seen it as a one-off crime novel. I wasn't planning to allow detective fiction to become a habit. It seemed perfectly logical therefore to write some general humour next. Only now am I beginning to wonder what people will make of it all, and whether I'm going to have to go round bookshops pulling Persistent Illusion off the crime shelves and putting it into the general fiction section. I'd like to reassure people that there is a mystery to solve in Persistent Illusion - there just aren't that many dead bodies.
In other ways I'd say the books are not that dissimilar. Both are humorous stories told by unreliable narrators. You are right however that the tone of second book is much darker - we are definitely in tragi-comic territory. But I'd like to think that those who enjoyed Herring Seller will probably enjoy Persistent Illusion too.
Tell us about your main character, Chris Sorensen – ‘everyman’ or ‘anti-hero’?
Somebody said to me recently that they wouldn't want to be Chris Sorensen and they wouldn't want to be his friend. I took their point. Initially we see Chris mainly through his own eyes. Later we begin to see him as others do. I guess I wanted to create a character like Camus's Meursault (in The Outsider) or Satre's Antoine Roquetin (in Nausea) - somebody detached from society and up to a point from reality itself, yet able to let the reader into their world. I wanted to explore the idea of what would happen if somebody ceased to believe in reality.
Of course, the idea that what we perceive as reality might be a figment of our imagination or a dream is not as uncommon as all that. It must have occurred to many people who will read the book - possibly to most. Chris just takes it (as he takes so many things) one stage further than is absolutely necessary. And a number of people - I'm not naming names - have also told me that they do Chris's traffic light thing. So there's a bit of everyman in there too.
‘Chris’ writes some wonderful pastiches of well-known poems to alleviate the boredom of his job: to what extent does poetry inform your own writing?
I think writers of prose are a bit in awe of poets. They seem to know stuff the rest of us don't. Poems are prose distilled into the headiest form of literature you can legally get your hands on. All good prose (and I do try to write good prose) should aspire deep down to being poetry. When a poet, like Owen Sheers or Helen Dunmore, writes prose, you can feel the way every word is made to count - you can feel the underlying rhythm of what they write. I don't pretend to write good poetry myself, but I can sneak bad poetry into my novels by claiming they are pastiches written by the narrator.
Tell us about the novel’s title and its significance.
For a long time the novel was called Reality Check. I still like that title, but it had been used before, so I came up with A Very Persistent Illusion, which is something said by Einstein: "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one". It seemed to sum up Chris's view of the world.
The novel contains scenes from the life of the philosopher Rene Descartes. To what extent does philosophy influence your writing?
I first read Descartes when I was in my teens and found him a revelation - that you could question everything, that there were no givens in philosophy, came like a sudden shower of cold water (but in a good way). That you might be able to prove the existence of God was an added bonus. A Very Persistent Illusion clearly has a philosophical core. It is, if you like, an investigation into solipsism. I don't claim to be a philosopher any more than I would claim to be a poet - but the philosophy part was fun.
What started you writing?
All writers begin as readers. After a bit, you think: "yeah, I could do that too". I can, strangely, remember the precise moment when this thought occurred to me, listening to a French surrealist short story on the radio. Unfortunately I can no longer remember the title of the story or the author, which is a shame. I still hope one day I'll stumble across it again.
Which writers do you feel have influenced you most?
I've probably been influenced more by writers of humour than writers of crime. My earliest influence was probably Jerome K Jerome, who taught me how you can be consciously unconsciously funny. Later I read people like Mark Twain, PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Ernest Hemingway, Anthony Powell, Hunter S Thompson, Joseph Heller, Terry Pratchett, and found them all good in different ways. If Hemingway looks an odd member of that gang, then you should read The Torrents of Spring. On the crime front, writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers formed my early reading in the genre - hence I guess my narrator's harking back to the Golden Age in the Elsie and Ethelred series.
If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would it be?
I've spent a lot of my working life overseas - Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Khartoum, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki. Right now, I'm perfectly happy where I am.
A Very Persistent Illusion is available to buy now.
