Interview by Andrew Hedgecock (1998)

Andrew Hedgecock talks to Graham Joyce about hauntings, class, lifespan psychology, group dynamics, the pernicious influence of St Paul, the sexual turmoil of adolescence and the power of symbols. Beware, it has football in it, but only near the beginning, so don't worry about it.

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Graham Joyce has worked as a teacher, fitter's mate, fruit picker, bingo caller, Greencoat at the Derbyshire Miners' Holiday Camp in Skegness and European development officer for youth work. Somewhere in the midst of this activity he won the George Fraser Poetry Award (in 1981). Since the publication of his first novel, Dreamside (1991), he has produced work of increasing power and sophistication. Dark Sister (1992) was followed by The House of Lost Dreams (1993), Requiem (1995) and The Tooth Fairy (1996), and short fiction has appeared in various venues including Darklands 2, Eurotemps and In Dreams (Joyce's contribution was a marvellously unsettling tale of love and loss: 'Last Rising Sun') Joyce's most recent novel, The Stormwatcher (1998), a tale of dysfuntional relationships, psychological disturbance, sexual tension, dreams, hallucinations and angels - set in the magical landscape of the Dordogne - was reviewed in a previous issue. Since this interview Michael Joseph have published Indigo, another novel: 'The whole world believes there's this colour called Indigo until you ask them to point to it. I believed in it once.'

Joyce is very much The Edge's kind of writer. His stories are strange brews of disparate ingredients interacting in complex and unpredictable ways: elements of horror, psychodrama, gritty realism and the supernatural thriller are mixed with the occasional sliver of black comedy. These days he complements his writing with his work as a lecturer in creative writing at Nottingham Trent University, and it was in his office at the university's Clifton Campus, on the south bank of the River Trent, that I met Graham Joyce.

I felt a little trepidation. A biographical sketch in the acclaimed MacAuley/Newman SF/horror anthology In Dreams hints that he once attempted to poison literary collaborator Peter F Hamilton with liquor and curry: it went on to assert that '[he] may well be the most black-hearted and evil person in Leicester.' But, far from being Leicester's answer to Cesare Borgia, Joyce turns out to be an affable man whose energetic conversation is delivered in a faint West Midlands accent. He laughs a lot, and his enthusiasms - for books, football, places and the observation of the nuances of human behaviour - are utterly infectious.

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The answer to that must be yes. The earliest thing I remember writing, without being asked to write by a teacher, was when I was eleven years old and Kersley Newlands Primary School football team won the Coventry and Distict shield: I was goalkeeper and got some sort of kudos out of the fact that we used to win matches by genocidal margins of about 14-0, without me even touching the ball. Anyway, I was very interested in football and I recorded our progress to, and winning of, the final. This was back in the days when talking about football was infra dig - I could have predicted Nick Hornby when I was eleven. But that was the first inkling that I wanted to convert experiences into language. The teacher who took the football team had a very strong Yorkshire accent and I remember, even now, trying to imitate that in written dialogue. I don't know why I was doing it - I just kept this private journal. It was called My Story because I'd read various biographies of footballers and they were always called My Story. Not an inspired choice perhaps, but I believe Eric Cantona's is called My Story too. I had the drop on these guys all those years ago.

I think so. In a little story about a football team it always occurs to you to glorify your own contribution. Anyway the path from fact to fiction is very short.

I can remember reading football stories as a kid, stuff like Bill Naughton's The Goalkeeper's Revenge, but later a kind of football fiction winter set in . . .

In the sixties it enjoyed a sort of glamour because of figures like Georgie Best who crossed over from football to pop celebrity for the first time. Then, of course, there was the World Cup victory of 1966, so there was a swelling interest in the subject. Later, it became absolutely taboo for anyone with any pretence at being liberal or intellectual to admit that they liked football. I've been going to matches since I was eleven years old. I was absolutely dedicated, going down to Highfield Road [Coventry City's ground] just to get that spot behind the goal, just to be first through that turnstile. Sheer obsession. And afterwards I'd hang around for hours waiting for autographs.

I have similar memories of being that age: I used to make my dad take me to Elland Road [home of Leeds United] at the crack of dawn. But there's the Hornby factor, no-one believes it if you claim to have been interested before Fever Pitch.

For me it was just an absolute obsession, and it's never gone away: at quarter to five on a Saturday I get twitchy about getting those results. But now it's become fashionable to say you have those sort of obsessions. Louis de Bernières [the author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin] was here recently and he was giving a talk. Afterwards we went out to dinner, and I think it was he who brought football up. He said: 'Anyone who goes to see a football game must be a cretin.' I let him get away with it twice, and then he had a third stab. I think he was in the mood for an argument that night, so I took him up on this and we had a good row over dinner. I think we made friends afterwards. I asked him what he had in his own life that gave him that sort of passion, what could send a bolt of electricity through him so intense that he'd have to fling his arms up to discharge it. After thinking about it for about 10 minutes, he came up with flamenco: that made people round the table laugh, so he withdrew it.

I didn't get published until I was in my thirties, so everything I did up until then was supporting the habit of writing. The problem with that is these supporting things often steal your writing stamina away from you. So I've been sucked down various tracks, doing lots of travelling and various bits of jobs to keep body and soul together. And for a while I was having no success whatsoever: I didn't even get a short story published until after my first novel. So that's why I've got a long list of jobs.

Well I wasn't consciously going looking for material. I was saying: 'What can I do that doesn't actually suck me into a career path that makes me give up writing?' In most of my jobs, I always had the thought at the back of my mind that I couldn't really dedicate myself to the work because it wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. I did come dangerously close to a sense of fulfilment when I took a job involved in youth work. At first I took it on part-time, so I could write part-time too. This was in the 1980s. And then I was offered a very attractive full-time job around it, which I did for several years. It was very creative and involved a lot of national and international travel: I was training and development officer for a national youth organisation. I learned huge amounts from this and I was working with some great people. But I did it for seven years and thought: 'If I haven't made my contribution I'm not going to - I don't want to do this for the rest of my life.' I just felt I had to stop. So I quit my job and pissed off to a Greek Island, Lesbos, with the idea of spending a year dedicated to writing.

I'd submitted a few stories, usually mis-targeted at completely the wrong kind of publication.

I didn't understand the nature of genre at that time. I was just writing stories without any notion that there were different audiences for different types of writing. I was writing poetry as well, and just sending things off willy-nilly. On a mad day I might stuff three poems and two short stories about some wild subject into an envelope and send them off to Woman's Own. I was getting heavily into the joy of collecting rejection slips.

 

Were there strong elements of horror or the supernatural in these early stories?

I was always attracted to the weird edge - it figured in everything I was writing. I was turning out a lot of stuff about dreams, hallucinations and altered states of consciousness. That was, and remains, a presiding trope of my work. When I got my first book [Dreamside] accepted, a book about lucid dreaming, the editor who decided to buy it was already seeing it in genre terms. That wasn't because I'd thought of it as a good little number for the genre market, it was just that someone decided that was the place for it. That book was well received in science fiction, fantasy and horror circles. I didn't know there was this large, active community of people who went to conventions and published independent magazines. I knew nothing about this subculture until I got published and various different people began responding to my work. The response I was getting led me to investigate a bit more and then I found things like The Edge and Nick Royle's independent publishing. So this community was telling me this was the sort of stuff they liked, and I was saying: 'Well I can do more of that.' The fact that the major publishers were putting a genre category on my work didn't bother me. In fact, I saw it as a useful way of getting to readers. I've got stories in my drawer, finished but never published, and there's an element of the writing process that is never enacted until the stuff is published and a reader gets hold of it. If a story isn't published, then some of the energy that went into writing it just isn't discharged properly.

I've had some stinking cover treatment and, I suppose, that reflects on the way the stuff's been marketed. It's always been a bit tricky. I've never satisfied the science fiction community with my stuff, it just doesn't do it for them. In terms of horror: I seem to be well received by the aficionados of that genre who are looking for stuff on the edge of it, but straight down the line gorehounds aren't going to be happy with what I do because the body count isn't high enough - it's a bit difficult to be a horror writer when not many people die in your novels. And, as for fantasy, a lot of what is pitched at that market is high fantasy, whereas I'm a very low kind of guy; as far as my stuff is fantasy it's never hermetically sealed, it's always set in the contemporary with fantasy leaking into our world. The lover of the hermetically sealed fantasy tale is never particularly going to like it for that very reason. So, even though I'm writing in the same vein as I did in the first book, the publishers are now trying to pitch it to mainstream readers rather than genre readers.

I have this thing about magic realism being a fig-leaf title conjured up by academics who are slightly embarrassed about reading fantasy, horror or anything else with supernatural elements. I've never really accepted the label as a genre - it's just two words in collision and doesn't say anything useful about the work. The South American writing which I really enjoy, like the Gabriel Garcia Marquez stuff, doesn't have this self-consciousness about the fantasy that is enacted in it. But because of these genre categories here, it's just a no-no to use the word fantasy. Social surrealism - I can't get my head around it: like a lot of these labels, it's a funny hat I don't want to wear. But the other people you mention in that category: Iain Sinclair I really like, and I'm always telling people to read M John Harrison.

Books like Course of the Heart and Climbers deserved a much wider audience -

Both of them are superb. He's inspired a lot of people and offered them a way forward. He's an exemplary figure in terms of the way he writes on the edge of a genre, always expanding and exploring it.

I was very impressed by the Carlos Castenada series, years ago. At first I thought it was for real, then I began to suspect it was fiction. Now I know more about publishing and writing, I know it to be fiction, but that doesn't change the fact that those books made great sense as a model of how our minds work. I cracked the spines of a few Herman Hesse books when I was a student, and I wrote a dissertation on Pynchon for my MA. I'm a huge Pynchon fan, or maybe that should be was - not because his more recent books have been different, but because there are certain books that seem right for you at a precise time in your life. Certainly Pynchon blew me away in the late 1970s: I loved V and had a great time reading Gravity's Rainbow, at the same time feeling profoundly cheated by the thinning out and disappearance of the chief protagonist. Sure, intellectually I knew that Pynchon was saying something about narrative structure and playing games, deliberately flouting the rules, but it was seminal for me. I came to the conclusion after Gravity's Rainbow that it doesn't matter how clever you are, and Pynchon is so clever, you just can't do that! You get this frigid, intellectual authorial smile and it's such an emotional disappointment after you've invested so much fun and energy in this complex narrative.

Anyway, all these things go in the mix, I suppose. For films, David Lynch always impresses me. And I was knocked out by Jacob's Ladder, an Adrian Lyne film about reality and dreams with Tim Robbins. I often cite the painter Marc Chagall as an influence: I'm not a fan of Surrealism: I prefer people like Chagall who, having gone down into the dreamscape, make their way back up into the air again. For the same reason I like the poet Seferis, the Greek. This is beginning to sound a bit high culture, but I'm just as much influenced by comics. In my view Dr Strange left everyone behind.

It always sounds a bit pompous when you start talking about the canon of literature and point out how deeply embedded the fantastic and the supernatural are. But going back as far as the Odyssey, you can do a little jog through literary history and point to it everywhere until you got the book of social realism, naturalistic fiction. The supernatural did still pop up: Dickens and various other people did their ghost stories.

Yes, he was fascinated by phenomena like spontaneous combustion: he was totally attracted to the weird stuff, and sometimes his writing has a real gothic quality to it. I just feel it's a river that went underground for a hundred years or so, when we arrived at the tip of the post-renaissance rationality period. And now it's resurfacing because we've had to recognise that while science has advanced us, it has also pitched us into the cock-up ideology of history. We make what appears to be a step forward but in some other way it's a step back: every advance in technology or development in science brings a big new set of moral problems. There's not so much faith around in science at the moment - people recognise that it's a construct which will get us so far but one which begins to become a very inadequate tool as a way of understanding. I see science fiction as a rational mode, often pitched into a strange place, but fantasy and horror are far less rational. So writers are resorting back to other forms of consciousness, trying to express their dissatisfaction with rationality. So, as you rightly said, they plunder the genres of horror and fantasy. Certain motifs are quite popular at the moment - dreams, nightmares, drug landscapes and various altered states of consciousness. I think that's what's going on: a loss of faith in rationality.

Absolutely. As a lifelong socialist I have to deal with the fact that the greatest experiment in human history clearly failed and the walls came down. We're post-Auschwitz, post-nuclear age and there's a deep distrust of rationality at large. I think this is why writers resort to the motifs we were talking about as a way of explaining and exploring: a naturalist style of writing is the inevitable outward form of rationalist thinking. It's a rejection and moving back from that.

Well that kind of response would certainly make sense to me.

 

In your most recent book, The Stormwatcher, I felt there was one unequivocally supernatural incident and that the rest of it was open to interpretation. Is you work edging more towards the mainstream?

There's always a level of ambiguity. If you think of The Tooth Fairy, there's always the possibility that everything is going on in a disturbed boy's head. And if you go back to my very first novel, Dreamside, you're offered the possibility that the dreamers are telling lies, that they're committing disgraceful fantasies about themselves. So I've never been one hundred percent committed to the idea of the supernatural as a solution - or as a resolution - for a story. And I've become more and more interested in the idea of how people can be haunted, but not necessarily by the dead. This is a key theme in my next novel, which has the provisional title Indigo. If people are haunted by the dead, they're haunted in the way that you'd normally treat the haunting of a ghost but rendered in perfectly natural terms. So, somebody's life may be screwed up and corrupted by a person who is dead: in other words, by bad influence which goes right to the edge of becoming a supernatural quality. Someone's presence can be writ large in your life to the extent where it's almost like a ghost haunting - but not quite.

There are elements of this strange sort of influence in The Tooth Fairy aren't there? There's a force that's sometimes evil and on other occasions it's Goethe's 'power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good'.

The tooth fairy was meant to be a representation of creativity, malign and benign aspects of the creative unconscious. The fist scene in the book is at the pond when the pike appears, and when the tooth fairy arrives later, it appears in the same colours, green and gold, as the pike, and it has the same sharp teeth. I started the book with that image: the pike flashing out of the pond was this source of creative energy flashing from the unconscious pool and then disappearing back in again. It's potentially destructive, terrifying and beautiful at the same time. And that's what I was trying to do with the tooth fairy - it was this force in Sam the main character's life, representing the creative impulse.

When Sam starts getting attracted to girls there's a dark undertow to love and lust too. I don't want to flog the point too much, but the whole book is cut through with this ambivalent response towards this notion of creative energy.

There were loads. Probably more than I should admit. For example: the pipe bombs, the experiments with drugs and the little gangs. We managed to get up to all that.

That's been the most pleasing part of it. I hope it's not a boy's book but I suspect it might be. A lot of blokes have come up to me and told me little incidents from their own adolescence, so it clearly triggered things for blokes that it maybe didn't for female readers. I don't think I write things only for blokes but The Tooth Fairy may have been a stroll down that path.

Good - that's reassuring. I suppose I was focusing on the idea that after the onset of puberty boys are frantic wanking machines, and that's something we all have to deal with. There's all this sexual energy there but none of the experience, opportunity or sophistication to deal with it properly.

I've heard it cogently argued that The Tooth Fairy would have made an excellent literary rites of passage story, with the tooth fairy's role split between several realistic characters.

In several reviews it was criticised for being a slightly disguised (I prefer the term 're-worked') rites of passage novel, but the supernatural element supplies a clear trajectory to the story. I never thought of doing it in a naturalistic way, probably because, as I said, I've always been committed to a weird edge. If I was working with a familiar or traditional kind of story it would have to be overlaid with a supernatural, or approaching supernatural, character or motif.

 

It's a very touching story. Especially the end.

I was trying to say things that I wasn't really brave enough to set down - or perhaps didn't work hard enough to get across - about what happens when working class kids are taken out of their environment and shunted off to university. They have the rough edges knocked off them, they're buffed and polished up a bit and they come back speaking a little bit differently: they're educated out of the place they come from and they won't return to contribute to that environment and culture.

Yes, and I was trying to get across a sadness for that at the end of the book, but I don't think I was brave enough. I was a bit worried about it turning into a social commentary on that factor alone. Maybe it's because I'm projecting stuff I feel about myself - coming from a working class background, going off to college and coming back speaking some snooty long words to the people I grew up with.

Snap. The village in The Tooth Fairy, 'Redstone', is actually Kersley Village near Coventry, a mining village. I didn't dare call it Kersley, that would have been too obviously autobiographical.

Barry Hines was here giving a talk recently. Very interesting. He was saying no-one wanted to read about Sheffield council estates any more. And yes, in terms of entry to Higher Education the demographic figures are even more disheartening for the likes of you and me than they were in the 1960s.

In The Stormwatcher you have another crisis of maturation, it's pre-adolescent this time and the character concerned is female. Where these details significant to the development of the plot and symbolism?

Yes, I wanted to get someone who was old enough to have some sense of what was going on, but didn't know all the rules. And the character had to be at the stage when you start to get the sense that the people who control our society, people in authority who are rewarded with great wealth and power, are just fucking well making the rules up as they go along: we shouldn't trust them, but they carry it off because they're expert at managing the chaos and making it seem like they're actually controlling this mess - but it's all dangerously close to breaking up. That's what I was interested in, and that's why I made her that age. She had to be bright enough to be able to start seeing the cracks appear - which a younger child wouldn't.

The plot and symbols of The Stormwatcher are very densely interwoven. Was that something that was happening at a conscious level as you wrote the book?

Yes, I was trying to find ways of using the symbols to really advance the narrative rather than them just hanging there as decoration. Sometimes you read a book and it almost has a stamp on it saying, this is a symbol of x or y, and then you're expected to interpret it. Artistically, I was interested in finding something to actually move the story along at the same time - I don't know if I succeeded or not. Another problem I had was avoiding the use of clichéd symbolism. Take the weather as one example: when you're trying to talk about a storm you have this dreadful weight of everything that's ever been written about a storm, from Hammer horror to Dickens. That's why I resorted to scientific descriptions: I just wanted a way of talking about what was happening in weather terms which would indicate the build up of the storm without it all sounding too hackneyed.

Thank you. I'm glad you think so, but I felt it clunk now and again. When you're writing you get so close to the book that you don't always know if you're succeeding or not. I reworked all those descriptions quite a few times. I was interested in trying to make those symbols march the narrative along, and I was also very taken with idea that up in the stratosphere there's a nine mile high theatre of weather. We're six feet tall, living right on the bottom layer. We have this absurd sense of the significance of our own actions, and we're blown around like leaves in the wind in this nine mile high theatre.

Yes, I was trying to equate the movement of clouds with the arrival of angels in the mind of the character referred to as 'the instructor', who is getting more and more deranged as the storm approaches. And that's because that person has an impending personal crisis to meet.

I got fed up with the guy, he was a real pain in the arse. I tried to redeem him occasionally, which you may have noticed, but it's difficult when you're writing about characters who are so unsympathetic, because you're breaking rules: it's hard to get readers to travel with you if they don't like your characters. I think I might have done more for him: on reflection, I think I should have done more to redeem him. I wanted him to be a shit, but everybody's got something that redeems them.

But he's a guy with his life out of control. Isn't there a sense of him being a victim in spite of the morally dubious things he's done?

He hates his own life and himself as a consequence. And that's an idea I'm quite interested in. You do meet lots of people who get committed to a life of chasing the goodies. We all want the goodies, so it's not hard to be seduced into that world. And then you wonder if all that stuff is really what people want.

I think so. I had a friend who worked at Saatchi's until last year, and he took me down and introduced me to a lot of the people working there so I could make a close study of them. And he said: 'You should be able to spot the creative directors by the way they walk' - and he was absolutely right. One came down the corridor: barrel-chested, hip-swinging walk. I met him, didn't like him, and thought: 'Great, you're my template now.' It was a very interesting place, incredibly hierarchical and all these people were at odds with each other on the basis of where they were in the hierarchy. There was this executive car park and, depending on where you were in the pecking order, you got to park your car various distances from the building, under shelter, in a self-contained and lockable place, a car park with a lift - all that kind of shit.

So nothing has changed since Billy Wilder's The Apartment; all that stuff about 'the key to the executive washroom?'

No, it's all still there. And I don't see it making anyone very happy.

Yes - and secrets. I was also interested in the business of addiction - and the way in which people can manage a surface gloss. Like James, who manages to look in control of his life when it's all really horribly out of control. He's very unhappy with the way it's out of control too. And his friend Matt has this history of addiction that he's hiding - and most people don't know. I'd known a guy for seven years and then his wife told me he'd been a junky for the last five years. And I thought: 'My God! He's done a fucking good number socially.' I'd seen him in all sorts of situations and thought perhaps he was a bit louche, but nothing else. I'm amazed how people manage these things. Not just addiction, but other problems they cope with very well: they manage to do their jobs and when they go home they're into alcohol and drugs on a major basis. I'm not just talking about using this stuff on a recreational basis. Some people seem able to get on a very destructive trajectory, but keep their nine-to-fives together. And that's absolutely fascinating to me.

Throughout your novels, there's the recurring theme of life crises. Do these points of chaotic change fascinate you?

Yes they do - and I have to stop myself looking at people and saying: 'You're ready for your crisis point now.' By the time people get to their late twenties or early thirties they think: 'I haven't done it, I haven't set the world on fire and achieved my impossible dream'. So they give up their jobs and go into something else, or they fuck off to Greece. People do all these different numbers - or they just bury themselves in the old track and just slowly move into the distance. I think it's good for people to change and listen to these crisis voices they hear: 'You didn't want to do that job, did you? You can quit, the world won't fall apart - you can sell the house, you can go abroad.' I've got an idea - it goes back to that old Jesuit idea of: 'Give me the child from the age of seven and I'll give you the man.' And when you think in terms of sevens it does add up to a strange turning of the wheel. There are particular points: puberty around fourteen, at twenty-one the traditional key to the door. I tend to think people become adult much younger than that, but our society keeps them as children. They're old enough to be adult and do adult things at fourteen, but we stretch adolescence out hideously.

It keeps people in a state of immaturity. By the time people reach twenty-eight they're having these doubts about their lives and on and on it goes. I think thirty-five is a very interesting age, people are at a certain kind of peak - sadly I'm well on from that! But new things happen and, at certain stages, people start to ask more spiritual questions about the nature of their lives. People change all the time. I'm particularly interested in these nodal points of change. I worked some of that into The Stormwatcher.

I'm a qualified schoolteacher. I taught for a while and I did a lot of supply teaching when I came back from Greece. Just to test a theory of mine, how old are third years?

Bang on. They are the fucking worst! It's just like standing in front of a seething mass of hormones. They can't listen. Things are just popping for them all over the place and they are the hardest group to teach.

They are never an easy group. Especially in some of the tougher inner-city areas where I've worked.

Yes, and from my time in youth work. While I was doing that I did a lot of research and teaching on group dynamics, which played a big part in The Stormwatcher. I wanted to break the rule that you have to have a clear main protagonist. I got fed up of repeating the same kind of structure and I wanted to write an ensemble piece. Group dynamics have always fascinated me: again, it's all about what's happening underneath, what people are not saying and the way that groups apparently agree to act in a certain direction, then go an undo it two minutes later. Unpicking what they've just agreed. It's extraordinary and endlessly interesting.

I wasn't thinking of them when I wrote it. But I have always been interested in the unsaid: the menace, the hostility and the lust lurking under the surface. All the emotional possibilities that might be going on and making people behave in certain ways. These elements underlying behaviour aren't referred to and are never dealt with. I have the idea we go through most of our lives on that basis: maturity and good manners enable us to freeze some of these emotions and hostilities, and to manage them.

I am, but the particular psychologist who may have influenced my more recent writing is Bion. He was a psychologist who did a lot of stuff on group dynamics, working with soldiers with shell shock - what we now call post traumatic stress disorder - after the war. He did lots of work on this, instigating this terrible process of getting people together in a circle and just sitting there. He was ostensibly the group leader but he just wouldn't say anything.

Yes. He talked about leadership, fight and flight in terms of group dynamics, deference, anti-leadership. All the processes that have to surface when the ostensible leader of the group withdraws himself or herself. That vacuum has to be filled. I was doing lots of this stuff when I was involved in youth work training and I think it's filtered through into stories like The Stormwatcher.

 

Throughout your books, there's a focus on sex as a key drive behind behaviour. It's very evident in Requiem, which considers the links between sex and religion. What made you want to try to tackle these powerful and complex emotions?

In the case of Requiem, that whole book was about sexuality and all the biblical references were an attempt to deal with the way our sexual attitudes have been framed. St. Paul is the presiding genius of the Christian church in the west, and we have to carry his psychological burdens. His interpretation of the problems surrounding sexuality came out of the Old Testament. I did quite a bit of research on the OT and it's full of vile misogyny and some other terrible stuff. I was interested in finding out what has fixed our position in terms of our emotional reaction to sex.

Yes totally. And I also wanted to look at the ways in which it creates problems for the rest of us. I have a big beef with Paul: we are dealing - particularly women - with lots of St Paul's personal psychological problems. He was, as you suggest, a type A personality. When he got to Ephassus and Crete they had the sense to throw him in the sea, but when he got to Corinth he found an audience - unluckily for the rest of us.

Yes, and I'm interested in whether - and maybe how - you can induce these peak experiences, these events that seem to make life flare up in all its colours just for a moment or two. How can you make that happen? I always feel the miraculous is very close, and that a belief in it might be a central part of being human. It may be that we never actually manage to hatch out the miraculous, but we're constantly propelled by an idea that it's there, just under the surface, and it's waiting to explode, leak or find its way into this life.

Yes, totally: we sit up and beg these people to lead us to these wonderful places - that's the problem. We can't help it and people like him are dangerous as a consequence. However, knowing that doesn't stop us from being hungry for the miraculous moment.

 

Do you see these primal passions as being linked to the dark side of human nature?

Yes, I'm thinking back again to this idea of the pike snapping at the surface of the pond - that's how I see it. When the miraculous comes, it's like that [he snaps his fingers]. You have to be careful it doesn't bit your fingers off, but its still a beautiful thing to experience. In their reaction to St. Paul people were putting their heads straight into the mouth of the colourful fish and saying: 'Go on then, bite me!'

Yes - I lived there for a few weeks. It's an extraordinary place. That's another classic example of the dual nature of the marvellous. This place just exudes mysticism and you can see why these three great monolithic religions have sprung out of there - it's just pouring out of the place like mist. But there's this violence that comes with it and, at source, it's all part of the same strange energy.

Absolutely. I was walking around Jerusalem: I looked up and there was this Israeli soldier on the wall with his Uzi machine gun. The sun was going down behind him - I used this scene in the book - and, for a second, I hallucinated him as a roman soldier with his sword hanging down instead of his Uzi. I blinked and he was an Israeli conscript again. I thought: 'That's it! There's always been a soldier on this wall and there always will be - there's something about this place.' The violence and spirituality are just coming out of the ground like gas - and they are so mixed up they will never be separated.

For some reason, your Jerusalem reminded me of Nick Roeg's Venice in Don't Look Now. That's a wonderfully realised setting too, and it shares the same dreamlike sense of dread . . .

I love that film - that's a seminal work for me, but nobody's ever mentioned that connection until now. There are some great moments that really put the spooks up you. Do you remember the blind woman and her sister? There's a totally unexplained scene where they are laughing hysterically: you're not sure if they're laughing at the Julie Christie character because she's been taken in - that's the hidden implication - or are they laughing at something else? Extraordinary.

Talking of strange and resonant locations, you're based in the East Midlands. Do you share Mark Chadbourn's interest in the psychogeography and myths of Leicestershire?

The Dark Heart of Britain resides in the English Midlands, not London, not Cornwall, not the Celtic places. Mark and I have been mapping the Warwickshire-Derbyshire-Leicestershire interstitial zones, and the sheer density of the material is shocking. Mark took Dave Bell (editor of the now cancelled horror fiction publication, Peeping Tom) and myself to show us something extraordinary he'd unearthed in Swadlincote one night. I can't say any more because we'll be writing about it, but yes, we share this interest.

I can't seem to leave the place. I've been to Greece and Jerusalem and I've trucked round the Middle East, but I just keep getting pulled back here. It's not design. It's like the way this job at Nottingham came up for me - I'm coming round to the idea that I'm a Midlands bloke and I can't seem to get out of here. As for feeling cut off from the London literary set, yes I do. I often wonder if I might have improved my literary career by drinking a bit more footwash at book launch parties in London. I do try to get down there as often as I can.

Yes - one thing is that I get some really good manuscripts. The root of the problem for students here is narrative: we get some really good writers who can write beautifully about nothing at all. But to actually get them to write beautifully about a story - that's great, that's an achievement. It's wonderful when you can help them with that - and generally here they do want to listen. I've been writing for twenty years now - so I must have something to offer. I do get a bit impatient when students want to write something experimental if they haven't even mastered the basics of storytelling.

They want to be Thomas Pynchon, they want to be William Burroughs. They want to break all the rules without knowing what the rules are. But it's like playing the piano: if you know nothing about chords or scales you're just plonking. That's what it sounds like - just a cacophony. There's quite a lot of that about. Students say: 'I'm bored by narrative'. And I say: 'We're all bored by practising the difficult sides of writing'. Anything that's difficult is seen as boring. So I'm a bit of a stickler. I come across a bit crusty sometimes. I say: 'Go back and write something with a decent narrative for me then, after you've achieved that, break the rules as freely as you like. And if you're any good it'll be fine.' I'm amazed at how little some of the students have read - that's our big problem here: they want to write and they're not reading anybody. I ask them who they've enjoyed and they'll talk about films. Never books. And I say: 'How can you want to be a writer if you can't tell me any writers that you've enjoyed?' So then, they'll scratch their heads and tell you what you did for A Level. This is worrying.

I think some of them must be - but I can easily put them off that. I always say: 'Writers don't have a life - you sit in a room making up people's lives and it's bloody hard work. It's the craft and the graft of fiction. Don't have any illusions that it's about anything other than those two things - art will take care of herself quietly, if she wants to. Meanwhile you can think about the craft and the graft - because that's your business.' A good story takes seven or eight drafts, that's the reality, and students find that hard to accept. There's this widespread idea that the first thing that drips off the end of a pen - or clatters out of a word processor - is fine. When I suggest they throw a page away as it doesn't add anything, I get the feeling they'd rather cut off their fingers. They find it hard to re-work things and even harder to accept the notion that you can throw something away and make a story work better. But they are willing to be persuaded, that's the good thing. I have to say there are a lot of very keen people here.