James Meek
 Photo: Sarah Lee
James Meek was born in London and grew up in Dundee. He worked as a reporter for twenty years, winning several awards for his work, including reports on Guantánamo Bay and from Iraq. He has published two books of short stories - Last Orders and The Museum of Doubt - and four novels: Drivetime, McFarlane Boils the Sea, The People's Act of Love, and most recently, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent.
This interview took place in March 2009, with questions submitted by EnCompass readers, and Reader in Residence Susan Tranter.
Susan Tranter: Welcome James, and many thanks for taking part in this interview. Can I start by asking if you've read anything lately which you'd like to
recommend to our readers around the world?
JM: I've recently read two short books or long stories about death which I recommend - Helen Garner's The Spare Room, about a woman who looks after a
friend who has come to her city to seek a quack cure for her incurable disease, and The Death of Ivan Illyich, Lev Tolstoy's famous story about a man who questions his life at the very end of it. It's bleak, but ultimately joyful. I'm reading Peter Clarke's excellent history of - well, the title tells the story: The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire. And I've been listening to an audio version of an early P. G. Wodehouse novel, Leave It To Psmith, a version of the narrative he returned to over and over again, yet somehow always made different: a country house, a plan to steal something for the sake of love, farcical episodes of mistaken identity, masters and servants.
Justyna: You've been writing and publishing for over twenty years, and wrote several difficult, flamboyant texts (Drivetime, The Museum of Doubt, etc) before your 'breakthrough' book - The People's Act of Love. What do you see as the continuities and discontinuities between your early work and most recent novels?
JM: The continuities are an obsession with the differences between men and women, and their efforts to overcome them; the conflict between the passionate and the rational; and the terrible fear we have of the consequences of understanding the Other too well - the fear of losing that protective shield of ignorance between cultures, peoples, generations, classes. What changed with The People's Act of Love - and not at the very beginning of writing it, either - was a sense that I hadn't paid enough attention to technique and craft; that I hadn't taken enough trouble to learn from my peers and forebears how they did what they did. To enjoy and to admire was not enough. That's not to denigrate my earlier work, which I still like. In fact the curious thing is that for a writer developing an analytic skill with respect to writing - without losing the ability to be a plain old reader - begins as a means to understand how other, admired writers do what they do; it then becomes a tool to penetrate the mystery of why there are some bits of your own writing you like so much more than others. What it led me to, more than anything else, was a sense that my work would benefit from more attention to character; and an awareness that I must be brutal with myself in distinguishing, in my earlier, magical dirty realism, between the devices I was justified in using, and the devices I used because it was easier than doing something difficult.
DG17: Adam Kellas in We Are Now Beginning our Descent is a controversial character - arrogant, vain, egotistical - but utterly engaging. Did you intend to write a modern morality tale about a man leaning on the self-destruct button?
JM: Yes!
Esky: Do you have a personal morality (and / or personal ethics) that is/are important to your writing?
JM: I don't have a system. I do have values, and a sense of right and wrong, and I am deeply concerned with the origins and vulnerability of those ethics. Recently in Britain, a group of atheists got together and raised money to put a supposedly pro-atheist slogan on the sides of buses. It read 'God Probably Doesn't Exist. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life.' As an atheist myself, I found the slogan peurile. God doesn't exist, but death does, and human cruelty, and selfishness. Hedonism and shopping are not enough. Still, I'm a writer, not a preacher. I try to be a bard, not a priest.
Julia: You're a prize-winning journalist. How do you view your war reporting in relation to your novels? Is it a very different kind of writing? How has your career as a journalist informed your career as a novelist?
JM: There are all sorts of obvious technical differences - constraints of space and time, mainly. But the fundamental point is that in fiction a made-up story may tell the truth about life, whereas in journalism it may not. If a reporter secretly invents a non-existent person, and puts that person in a newspaper story as if they were real, that’s a lie. If a novelist invents a non-existent person, and puts that person in a novel, the novelist isn’t pretending that it’s an actual person doing actual things, so it isn’t a lie in the same way. But the creation of that non-existent person can still be an untruthful act if the fictional character is a distortion of how the writer believes such a character would act if he did exist.
Justyna: In your opinion, is fiction or non-fiction better at capturing the immediacy and brutality of armed conflict?
JM: They both can. And of course some of the best fiction about war has been written by men and women who actually experienced it, so they are fictionalizing the real. I was struck by the crossovers between two books I read recently, both about the Indian Mutiny - J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur and William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal. The first was a novel, the second a superbly researched work of non-fiction.
Julia: Your novels have a great sense of place, but also of getting away. Do you feel the need for isolation when you write and also, would you ever write a novel set in the city where you live?
JM: I noticed something about We Are Now Beginning Our Descent after I'd written it, something I hadn't planned: it takes place in small towns - Dumfries, Jabal os Saraj, Chincoteague - and in big cities: London, New York. The small towns are places of love and self-discovery, whereas the big cities are places of failure and disappointment. I don't know if there's a conclusion to be drawn from that. But I can tell you that the book I am writing now is mainly set in present day London, where I live.
Trippy: I loved The People's Act of Love, but I'd be interested to know whether the story came first, or the political / historical setting?
JM: What came first was situations: a cannibal prison escapee and his prey, a castrate and his wife, a lost army and the country in which they are lost. Out of the situations came characters; out of the characters, conflicts; out of the conflicts, a story.
Susan: And might I ask what you're working on at the moment, and whether you plan to return to the short story at any point?
JM: My most recent published work was in a completely new medium - a photo story, in Prospect magazine. And I have a short story coming out in an Amnesty International anthology later this year. But my time is occupied mainly with a new novel, set, as I said, in London, now. It is a story about families, and betrayal, and right and wrong.
Susan: Many thanks James, and to everyone who submitted questions.
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