I readily admit to borrowing from everyone, but particularly from a harrowing account of ditching in Geoffrey Jones’s Raider when, in January 1944, the (unnamed) crew of Halifax II JD165 (S-Sugar) from 102 (Ceylon) Squadron based at Pocklington spent three days adrift in the North Sea on their return from a raid on Berlin. I also learned a lot about what it was like to be caught in a thunderstorm from Keith Lowe’s Inferno. I fudged a few things, the date of the introduction of those darned Bristol engines for a start, and for the most part ignored the continual developments in technical and navigational aids so that the reader wasn’t continually tripping over heavy-handed references to, for example, HS2, Fishpond or Monica, all the time. Some things I haven’t explained—for the same reason, but also because I haven’t necessarily understood them myself (best to be honest here, I think).
The bottom line is that it’s fiction. Personally I think that all novels are not only fiction but they are about fiction too. (Not, I don’t think, as post-modernly self-referential as it sounds.) I get tired of hearing that a new novel is “experimental” or it “reinvents the form,” as if Laurence Sterne or Gertrude Stein or indeed James Joyce never wrote a word. Every time a writer throws themselves at the first line of a novel they are embarking on an experiment. An adventure. I believe in the rich textural (and textual) interplay of plot, character, narrative, theme and image and all the other ingredients that get thrown in the pot, but I don’t believe that necessarily makes me a traditionalist (as if we’re not all in a tradition, the tradition of novel writing).
Everyone always asks you what a novel is “about.” In the “Author’s Note” that accompanied Life After Life I griped that it’s about itself and I didn’t spend two years writing it in order to précis it in a couple of sentences. But, of course, it is about something. If you asked me that question about A God in Ruins I would say that it’s about fiction (and how we must imagine what we cannot know) and the Fall (of Man. From grace). There are, you will probably notice, a lot of references in the book to Utopia, to Eden, to an Arcadian past, to Paradise Lost and Pilgrim’s Progress. Even the book that Teddy’s daughter, Viola, throws at his head at one point is Enid Blyton’s The Land of Far-Beyond, which is itself based on Pilgrim’s Progress. So much of this is only semi-deliberate, as if there is a part of the writing brain that knows what it’s doing and another part that is woefully ignorant. I see only now how much rising and falling there is in the text. Everyone and everything ascending in flight or falling to earth. (And the birds! Flock upon flock!)
Imagery is for me of paramount importance in a text, not complex imagery that jumps up and down and demands to have its hand shaken but a more subtle web that weaves its way throughout, often enigmatically, and knits everything together. The “red thread” of blood that binds the Todds echoes the red ribbon of the long leg to Nuremberg that echoes the thin red cords of Teddy’s sheltered housing—a pattern that I hadn’t even noticed until the final read-through of the novel and yet makes perfect sense to me now. (Just don’t ask me why there are so many geese. I have absolutely no idea.)
And, of course, there is a great conceit hidden at the heart of the book to do with fiction and the imagination, which is revealed only at the end but which is in a way the whole raison d’être of the novel. I think that you can only be so mulishly fictive if you genuinely care about what you are writing, otherwise you are occupying a two-dimensional space where the text ceases to be an interface between the self and the wider world. If this is a refutation of modernism or post-modernism or whatever has superseded post-modernism, then so be it. Any category designed to constrain should be thrown out. (“Constraint” and “restraint” are words that appear continually throughout this novel—and their opposite, “freedom”—something else I only realized when I had finished. I thought about taking them out and decided against it. They’re there for a reason.)
War is Man’s greatest fall from grace, of course, especially perhaps when we feel a moral imperative to fight it and find ourselves twisted into ethical knots. We can never doubt (ever) the courage of those men in the Halifaxes and Stirlings and Lancasters but the bombing war was undoubtedly a brutish affair, a crude method employing a blunt weapon, continually hampered by the weather and lack of technology (despite massive advances that war always precipitates). The large gap between what was claimed for the results of the bombing campaign and what was actually achieved was never fully understood at the time, and certainly not, I suspect, by those men flying the bombers.