Interview by David Kendall (1998)

Photos by David Kendall

The Extremes, Christopher Priest's new novel, is published in hardback by Simon & Schuster. Some of his earlier novels are available in paperback.

THE EDGE: Did you make a decision to write The Extremes differently from your previous novels?

PRIEST: I wrote it in the third person, and I often write in first person. With this book I felt it was about time I did third again. I always try to vary things. I don't want to do the same book again and again, so the voice comes into it. I wanted to do one with multiple view points, and in this novel there are three or four stories woven in there.

Do you think that alters the audience that you're aiming at? So The Prestige will have been read by a different audience than The Extremes?

Yes. You see I've always chopped around a bit. I try to keep myself interested by doing something different, and it's usually fairly trivial things like writing in third rather than first person.

I wanted to have an American view of England. Although there's a foot on the floor of the swimming pool in that she was born in England. This was just in case any unconscious Angloisms slipped in.

It does work up to that. At that point it becomes one of my books.

What was the book you wanted to write with The Extremes?

I wanted to write a different book from what it actually came out to be. I was in Hungerford on the day of the Michael Ryan massacre. I wasn't in any danger but to be there on that day. . .

It was a kind of memorable day. The whole thing was shocking. We lived at the time in the next village to Hungerford, and so we were there months and years later. Long after TV lost interest, and it had all dropped out of the news, we would go into Hungerford and that feeling was very tangible. This kind of grief that you can't express anymore. There's no one to tell it to, and all the people you would tell it to they're sharing it too.

I was interested in that. It was a sort of challenge. A kind of thing I'd never written before.

The other thing it was supposed to be about was the knowledge that the American FBI and the American big cities have been using a form of virtual reality to train their cops to shoot. The crudest form was big cinema screens which had electronic sensors in, and they would shoot at the screen. With live bullets, that's the weird thing, and depending on where the bullet hit, the computer would cut in another piece of film footage of the perpetrator falling down, or shooting back, or whatever.

Rather different from what we are led to believe in films like The Silence of The Lambs where people shoot live actors or pop-up cut-outs.

Yes. This sort of reactive thing they've been doing at least a quarter of a century. Now it's been refined and they use videos, and in fact a lot of the technology that they developed is now used in computer games. It struck me that the next logical step for them would be virtual reality. That's when the two ideas started to come together; virtual reality gun training, and massacres, and that was The Extremes. The virtual reality element made it into one of my novels much more. The first half of the novel is coping with that grief and aftermath, and then the second half is the virtual reality stuff.

The FBI do this all the time. They have a Behavioural Research Unit, which I have a version of in the novel. The BRU are trying to profile serial killers and spree murderers, and identify them before they break out. I don't know. I think a lot of that is pie in the sky. Since I finished the book there's been children perpetrating this kind of gun crime at school, and that's the sort of thing you can't predict. Driveby shootings: these are things you can't anticipate.

In Dunblane, that man was very well known. He was a geek with a grievance who wrote letters to MPs and such. You couldn't say, therefore he's going to kill a load of children. Lots of people do 'geeky' things but they don't have that extra ingredient.

I don't know. If you're in America the take is very different on that. They're much more accustomed to guns. I was in Euston once when a news story broke. What was happening was a bunch of cops were sitting in a parking lot having their lunch outside the police station. A guy who had been in for something came out and started screaming at them. He was running up and down screaming at these police, and in the end one of them just shot him dead. This was on the local news that night. The next day his brother goes into the police station and shoots himself as a protest. And then the next day the mother goes into the police station and starts screaming, and they shoot her.

This wasn't a world story like Dunblane was. This was the fourth story on the local Euston news. They're so much more accustomed to guns and their effects over there.

Yes, because it is so much more abnormal. I did a lot of research into this. I got things from the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association, all of whom use the same statistics but turn them around to support their own view. The common factor is there are a lot of guns in America.

Back in the early eighties I was again in Euston over New Year, and on New Year's Eve there was a cartoon in the paper which said 'Gun Deaths in 1983'. It had all the countries where people had been killed by guns: Northern Ireland 43, Israel 27, Belgium 16 and went all the way down to places like Zambia 43 and Australia 17. Then at the bottom it had USA 15000. Incredible. Out of all proportion to the population density.

It must be the presence of guns. Most of the shootings take place in families, or between lovers. American Liberals are very touchy about the whole thing and think they have a real problem on their hands. The Europeans are quite smug about it though we have things like Dunblane, and the paedophile ring in Belgium, which is not quite the same.

So how is The Extremes different from the book you set out to write?

The thing is, I have to write a book to discover the book I'm meant to write. That sounds pretentious but it was just the same with The Prestige. Halfway through I found it was wrong. It wasn't working and I had to work my way back, unpick it and do it again.

The Extremes took off for me when Teresa Gravatt started using the extreme experience scenarios. In the book it says she comes across a scenario which really intrigued her: The Elsa Jane Durdle scene, which is, in a sense, an autobiographical thumbprint of mine.

It was at that point that I started to see what the book was about: this idea of a virtual reality scenario where you can drive away, drive off into the countryside. Okay, it will start flattening out and become boring, the programme doesn't allow you to go anywhere. . .

I've got a car race computer game in which you race through San Francisco. You can do sharp turns and go over the Golden Gate Bridge and such but it was the sideroads that I was racing past that were tempting. I really wanted to see where they would lead but the programme won't let you. There's a game called Carmegeddon which is a race through a futuristic city but you can actually turn off down the side roads which are full of wonderful things.

Of course, eventually you run out of memory, and then you reach 'the extremes'. You come against mountains you can't get through, a dead end street you can't get out of. In one there's a pit, and if you get it wrong you fall down this pit, down, down, and down. You hit the walls, crash, crash. It goes on for miles. That fall is there prepared in the code, even though you only come across it by accident.

I certainly think virtual reality is a big problem. That was one of the reasons I wrote the book. If you think about the effect TV has on people now. When TV was first invented near here in the 1930's, it was a kind of creaky radio with a fuzzy screen and people wearing dinner jackets. TV then was very much a novelty. Fast forward sixty years to now, and it's world-wide, it dominates life. You have phenomena like Lady Di's funeral, and the World Cup, where you literally have the undivided attention of a substantial chunk of the world.

Virtual reality at the moment is this clunky thing you put on your head. Five years on we'll have head sets which click into your ear, or straight into one of the optic nerves. This is technology and it will happen. Five years beyond that, everyone's got one. Eight year olds are playing with them.

What's that going to do to their perception of the world? It may be totally harmless. You can argue that TV is harmless but I don't think it would be a very convincingly argument.

Virtual reality won't be any good unless it's indistinguishable from reality. We then have to think, what's it going to be used for? Are you going to go on travelogues to the South Sea Islands? No, you're not. Are you going to go to work and do a job in virtual reality? No, you're not. What you're going to do, is get Lara Croft and fuck her. Or kill somebody. Do something which you perceive as more exciting than your own reality. That's when it becomes dangerous. It's safe in theory but it's the whackos that make it dangerous.

No. It's exactly the same. A new risk. I'm a parent, and when you've got kids you're constantly looking at them. What you know is that being a single parent isn't the cause of the trouble; eating junk food isn't the trouble; watching video nasties, poverty, and being beaten up at home isn't the cause of the trouble but somewhere all those things combine to cause kids to go 'wrong.'

I think virtual reality will be just one more ingredient, and an extremely potent one. For a long time it will be too expensive but like all other technology it will become affordable in time. It's not all negative. In an ideal world virtual technology would give us an insight into reality. That's what the book is about. Now we've all been to see good movies, and that movie is life-enhancing, a good book is the same but these things get perverted.

Take one novel at random, Dubliners, by James Joyce, an arguably great book. Is that book in any way invalidated by a pornographic novel about child sex?

The medium is the same but is being used for different purposes. I would have thought virtual reality would have a lot of genuine scientific uses. Think of archaeology, the way they could reconstruct things and let people experience what otherwise they couldn't. Yet we know from the internet what people want to see is mud-wrestling and paedophilia.

No, it's not. They've done the figures for search engines, the words people go for, and sex was number one.

Which is the up side to the whole thing. I'm not going to say we should ban virtual reality. All I'm going to say is that it's going to come. It's real. It's not a myth. It's like mobile telephones, we may not like them but they're here and they're not going to go away.

Yes. One example is that emergency services get to crashes much quicker than they used to. If there's a crash on the M1, within ten seconds about thirty people have phoned the emergency services. That has improved life. Mobile phones are still in that embarrassing category. If it goes off on the train you immediately apologise but it will shake down and that is how people will communicate, by mobile phone. I can't see them going away anymore than I can see TV or cars going away. One of their main values is reassurance. You can phone and tell someone you're on your way, or you're going to be late, whatever. That's a very human thing to do.

Digital technology is going to change a lot of things. In the Grand Prix you'll be able to choose you're own camera angles. With digital TV you can 'sit' in with whichever driver you want to. See the race as they see it, and flick in and out via the remote. This democratises TV. Is that a good thing or bad thing? You might flick from the race to the crowd, and then there are all kinds of civil liberties issues. As I was walking to meet you today there was CCTV which picked upon me. And I thought what's it want with me?

It will be interesting to see how VR is marketed. Will we have centres for it like in The Extremes?

Yes. In the book you find out you can get franchises in shopping malls in the US. They're going to turn the pub into a multimedia centre and have virtual reality there. And you realise that it wouldn't be long before every town had one. There's a story by Arthur C Clarke about an American politician, a mayor, in some town like Kansas City, or somewhere. Now, he wants to show what a hip, up to the moment guy he was, so he had this telephone which he'd just had installed in his office.

Later he made a speech, and in the speech mentioned that he had this telephone, and said 'I can see a time when there will be a telephone in every American city!' That's how I feel. Am I actually gripping what virtual reality or digital TV is going to be like? You can catche glimpses, but I remember when lasers were the big thing. They were going to be death rays and everything. Who would have thought of CDs or different types of eye surgery. You can't predict. There's also the Betamax factor. You get the right idea but the wrong technology.

Novels are metaphors, and virtual reality would be a metaphor of reality but it wouldn't seem like that - it would seem better than reality, although it would never be as good. The Internet was something I was thinking a lot about when I was writing the novel, and I amused myself with this idea of 'shareware' virtual reality. I'm sure this will happen.

One of the things that worries me is the way the Internet is justified by the information it contains but that information is completely unprovenanced. A couple of years ago I was looking for a literary agent, and I thought I'd try the Net. Sure enough I get a screen called British Literary Agents. It was an absolutely quintessential Net experience; it said 'up-to-date listings.'

Great. I started scrolling down it, and on the first page I noticed three mistakes; one wrong phone number, a company that didn't exist anymore etc. I got to the Os and it said; 'haven't been able to finish this maybe somebody can take over'. Completely useless.

In The Extremes there's a sequence about the Austin tower gunman, Charles Whitman. There's a description of what he had with him at the time. That section was downloaded verbatim from the internet. Actually I corrected the spelling mistakes. It's not a quote, I use it as my text.

I don't know if anyone's done it before, or whether it's worth doing because every time I see that unpronevanced passage I worry.

Where did it come from?

Who wrote it?

Where did their information come from?

Everybody worries that the Net has too much information about the wrong subjects, I'm worried that it has too much information that is wrong. You can hope that it will be cross referenced to books which you can then track down, but why not do that in the first place?

That's the way they justify it. The Constitutional Amendment says the right to bear arms for the formation of a militia. Not simply the right to bear arms. I think there's freedom from and the freedom to. They have the freedom to carry guns but it doesn't give the freedom from fear. For me the argument against guns has always been about the use of them.

Suppose you or I have a gun. We keep it in our bedside table. Three years down the line the scenario happens: a noise downstairs, there's a guy with a mask and a jemmy in his hand. What do you do? I wouldn't have the nerve to shoot someone but if I pulled out a gun would they do the same?

Chekov said if you had a gun on the wall in the first act it had to be fired by the end of the third. That still applies: I have one, let's use it. One of the things I downloaded from the American Civil Liberties Union, and I'm only quoting very loosely here, said the main justification that people had for having guns was self defence. And then they had done statistical analysis on what guns had been used for, and they found that only about one per cent of guns being discharged where used in the course of self defence. Guns are almost never used in self defence.

I was in WH Smiths. I picked one of these magazines up for the first time. It was American, and it was pornography. No other word for it. It was inciting readers to use guns. The first article was actually a review of a knife. Now I come from a culture where you review films and books. This was a review of a hunting knife although it was quite clear it wasn't going to be used for hunting. The reviewer had a pig carcass which he stuck the knife into several times. He said he used a pig because it was closest to a human being. Basically it was an article on how to knife someone.

The next article was how to be a sniper, where to conceal yourself, what sights to use. I thought bloody hell, this is WH Smiths! I took a few more out, some were even worse. It was a real eye-opener.

Back in those days I was in touch with Smiths. They were based in Swindon and I wrote to somebody I knew there. I said, 'I'm all for freedom of information but do you know what's in these magazines?'

They said, 'Oh yes, they're all vetted at head office, we're happy with them.' So I thought right, I'll get you then. I went back to that branch and a load of these magazines and spent a couple of days reading through them, photocopying them, and doing an analysis of them, and then I sent then round to everybody, including the chairman of Smiths. Just so they could see what they were selling. It caused a lot of trouble. It wasn't publicised at all. I got a letter from Smiths saying they would be much more careful in future. However they said the Marlborough branch where I'd got them from was an exception as there was a local gun club, and the army base, nearby.

I wasn't happy with that. I used to go in the Marlborough branch every couple of weeks, and they'd cut them down from ten to eight or something. And then about three months later Michael Ryan went berserk in Hungerford. At first I didn't connect the two until it came out that he belonged to that local gun club that Smiths used as justification for carrying those gun mags. I was still annoyed by all this, and I shouldn't have done it, but I rang up The Observer. They printed the story, and Smiths got pretty annoyed about it.

The Extremes has several strands: the psychology of berserk killers, the effect on their target community, virtual reality, and fiction within fiction. Which is the predominant idea for you?

The one that comes out at the end. The idea that, in a sense, the virtual reality causes it. In a sense it's a meta novel: it's not about any of the things it seems to be about. It's very difficult to describe.

It's not really about mad killers, it shies away from that, there's not even that much about the effects on the community, one chapter really. It's not even really about virtual reality. Virtual reality is the central metaphor for memory, the novel you're reading, video games and the Internet.

The Extremes is where memory ends and life begins anew. Although that's a bit of cod lyricism, you imagine as far as you can. At that point you either die, or you start again.