Your inquiry into the subject of killing obviously began as a personal curiosity, spawned by the grisly discovery of a souvenired soldier’s head from Gallipoli and the questions that sparked about the nature of violence. When did you realise it would become a book?

Originally, I wanted to do a whole project about the mummified skull from Gallipoli. It was such a shocking artefact – not simply because it was a bullet-ridden body part, taken from the trenches, but because it had been stored in a velvet lined display cabinet, like a precious collectable.

I thought I could try to find out what had happened and use that story to discuss the Great War, a topic that’s long fascinated me. That particular idea collapsed because there simply weren’t enough clues – at least not that I could find – as to how the Turkish soldier’s head arrived in Australia. So for a while, I abandoned the whole thing. I only took it up again after reading a news article about how US soldiers in Iraq were collecting photos of corpses. It struck me that this was probably the same phenomenon that led to the souveniring of a head from the battlefield of Gallipoli, all those years ago. So I started wondering what war in general – and killing in particular – did to soldiers and to society. And then I spent a long time thinking about the different ways you might investigate such a topic.

The book is written in such a way that the reader accompanies you on your search for answers, rather than being presented with your findings. I thought this made the book particularly engaging, and encouraged the reader to draw their own conclusions and interrogate their own beliefs. Why did you decide to write it in this way? Was it a conscious choice?

It was partly forced upon me, in that very early it became apparent that getting access to people and material would be difficult. So I wanted to foreground the process I took and the difficulties that I faced, to talk about the information I couldn’t get as much as that which I found. But it also seemed appropriate in that most of the time I was genuinely conflicted about the material. In the (slim) literature about killing, you can find people describing combat as the worst moment of their lives – then a minute later, discussing how nothing they’ve done since has been as exhilarating as the few minutes they were in battle. I kept meeting different people who argued different things, and I wanted the reader to share that experience of the perspective shifting. Moreover, it’s an area in which it’s difficult not to become emotional. I spent some time with a former executioner in Virginia, a guy called Jerry, and he was one of the loveliest people I met when I was in the USA. That was quite a confusing experience that took me well out of my comfort zone, and hopefully the book conveys that.

The industrialisation of killing (‘McDonaldised killing’) is a running theme in the book – a separation of the act of killing into a series of tasks, or a collective act, whether in the abattoir, on death row or in the army. This enables those involved in killing to concentrate on the task, rather than on the bigger picture of what they’re doing. What effect does this have on the people involved?

In the short term, it makes a distasteful or horrible task easier. On death row, the tie-down teams rehearse again and again the particular role they will play in an execution. One guard might simply be responsible for strapping the prisoner’s leg onto the electric chair. If he concentrates on doing that, he can lose all context for what’s really happening – he’s not killing someone, he can tell himself, he’s just strapping a leg. In the longer term, however, there seems some evidence that it can have the opposite effect. Because the killing takes place without any emotional affect, it’s difficult for the perpetrator to come to terms with what’s happened. Some executioners then feel devastated precisely because they don’t feel anything.

There’s some analogies with what takes place in a modern abattoir (basically, a factory for killing animals) and, perhaps more controversially, in the way soldiers are trained for combat.

One of the things I really like about this book is the way that you interrogate your own beliefs on the subject and the fact that you share your doubts and changes of position with the reader. What were the most confronting moments for you in researching this book, in terms of challenging your beliefs?

When I was young I was a vegetarian, but I haven’t been for years. I really don’t know any more what I think about the industrial killing of animals. Certainly, it’s hard to visit an abattoir and not think you’re watching something very wrong taking place.

I also found it confronting how nice and now normal most of the people I interviewed were. That sounds fatuous (of course they were normal!) but it’s much easier to think about killers as monsters than to realise that they’re ordinary human beings. So, it was a challenging experience hearing a former US sniper talk about the men he’d shot, even as you’re thinking that he seemed just like any kid you’d meet in Carlton.

One of your findings was that once the process of killing becomes familiar, ‘the participants worried more about efficiency than anything else’. That was also your own experience while helping out the Queensland roo shooter you interviewed. Did that finding surprise you? What do you think it says about human nature and violence?

Humans are social animals and so I suppose it shouldn’t seem strange that social approval matters so much. But, yes, it did surprise me how much I wanted the approval of the guy who took me roo shooting, even though it’s not something I’ve ever done before and I can’t imagine ever doing it again. In the book, I quote Siegfried Sassoon, discussing some particularly awful event in World War I and mentioning that, more than anything else, he was worried about making a fool of himself. It does seem to be a common experience.

Execution expert Fred Leuchter observed of the workers who administer the death penalty: ‘Society has dirty jobs that have to be done.’ What do you think of this comment? Does it also pertain to the abattoir workers and military? Do you think we need to be more assiduous about measuring the cost of these ‘dirty jobs’ against their gain?

Ultimately, in all the different forms of violence, the responsibility lies much more with those who make the dirty jobs necessary rather than those who carry them out. The book is not supposed to be an attack on soldiers, abattoir workers or prison guards. As I said, most of the people I interviewed were actually very pleasant.

But somebody sends the kids to war; somebody sentences an inmate to death; somebody wants a cattle truck processed – and it’s that somebody we need to think about. The breakdown of killing into isolated acts affects those personally involved in the act, but it also helps further separate those end of the chain of command from the process they set running. At the most obvious level, you can, for example, launch an invasion of Iraq and never see the human consequences of that decision. The soldiers don’t have the same luxury.

Were there any particular books or authors who influenced you in writing this book? If so, what (or who) were they?

I found Paul Fussell’s book The Great War and Modern Memory a fantastic resource. It’s one of those books that completely changes the way you think about a subject. Basically, he shows how the war structured a whole range of things that we now just take for granted. I also became completely obsessed with Sassoon: less as a war writer, actually, than as a chronicler of the world destroyed by 1914. Books like Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man and The Old Century have a tremendous power because, even though they’re set in the pre-war era, they’re so obviously haunted by what comes next.

Not many first-time novelists can boast a Nobel Prize winner as a mentor. But then again, Patrick Allington – who was mentored by J.M. Coetzee in the early stages of writing Figurehead – has not written your average debut novel. Instead of the fairly routine practice of drawing on life experience for his first outing, this writer has drawn on history, creating what he calls ‘an absurdist version’.

Figurehead is a tightly crafted, sharply satirical novel about questions of culpability, responsibility and idealism as played out in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the decades that followed. Australian journalist Ted Whittlemore is famous for reporting on the war in Vietnam from the side of the North Vietnamese. In the late 1960s, he lives in Phnom Penh, where he is friendly with both the Communist insurgents (who will become the Khmer Rouge) and Cambodian leader Prince Sihanouk. In 1967, he saves the life of future Khmer Rouge leader Nhem Kiry, later to become Pol Pot’s right-hand man. The novel follows the machinations and trajectories of both Whittlemore and Khiry, two flawed idealists who both influence and are influenced by history.

‘I was interested in the passage of time and the way that moments in history and particular decisions and particular events have reverberating effects in the years and decades that follow,’ says Allington.

The two main characters borrow liberally from real-life historical counterparts who Allington used as ‘starting templates’. Nhem Kiry was inspired by Pol Pot’s right-hand man, Khieu Samphan; Ted Whittlemore by controversial Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, often accused of being a Communist ‘agent of influence’. Other historical characters, like Sihanouk, Henry Kissinger, Pol Pot and Fidel Castro are similarly drawn from the historical record, but fleshed out with positively gleeful fictional licence.

Allington is careful to point out that he uses these historical events and people (‘fictional creations’) as a starting point to tell a story and explore his central ideas, rather than the other way round. Readers curious about Pol Pot’s Cambodia, its aftermath and the Cold War politics of the 1960s and 1970s will still find plenty of historical detail to enlighten and entertain. Allington may wear his knowledge about the period and its main players lightly, and have a great deal of fun with the facts, but the book – which took approximately four years to write – is steeped in evocative detail and sharply telling observations that obviously stem from a rigorous grounding in the subject. His unconventional, yet successful, approach calls to mind the adage about knowing the rules in order to break them.

Figurehead is mostly set in the years leading up to the Pol Pot regime (1975-79) and the years that follow, with very sparse reflections on the four years that represent ‘one of the most truly horrific regimes of the century’. The absence of those years is especially chilling – what the reader imagines took place is more effective than any necessarily brief telling could be. ‘It’s a representation, I guess, of what happened in the West in terms of what people imagined was happening in Cambodia. There was a great silence and almost a blanket over Cambodia during that time ... It wasn’t really until early 1979, when the Vietnamese invaded, that the full extent of the horrors became known to the general public. I wanted to convey something of that – of not knowing, but also of us being more collectively at ease with not knowing.’

That kind of self-delusion is a strong theme throughout. The main characters have idealised versions of themselves that uneasily contrast with reality. Khiry and Whittlemore have inflated ideas of their own importance on the world stage, married with heightened ideas about their responsibilities to world affairs – and the necessary compromises they feel licensed to make in order to influence world events in ways they see as positive. Allington was keen to explore ‘that sense of the disconnect between an individual’s ideals and how they imagine the world might work – and what their impact on the world might be’.

Does Allington think that all ideals are dangerous when they’re followed too literally, without being balanced with other considerations and looking at how the world really is? ‘Idealism is a double-edged sword. Momentum and the possibilities for positive change come out of people pursuing new ideas and engaging in acts of dissent that are designed to rupture the status quo. But these things can develop their own momentum – and nothing works in practice as well as it might appear to work in theory. Self-perception can take on a more insidious perspective, where there isn’t the ability to take a step back, to look at the big picture critically, as well as idealistically.’

Nhem Kiry, who becomes ‘the acceptable face of the Khmer Rouge’ after the collapse of the regime, is ‘ideology in its purest form gone horribly wrong’, says Allington. In our earliest encounter with Khiry, his ‘mouth turn[s] dry’ at the thought of the Cambodian military beating the peasants. Post-1975, he coolly reflects on the importance of grooming and manners on the world stage: ‘You can’t leave anything to chance ... when you’re selling a million and a half dead people.’

Allington made ‘extensive use’ of Wilfred Burchett’s life and writings in creating Ted Whittlemore. He was particularly interested in the ongoing ‘passionate’ debate about whether Burchett (who, like Whittlemore, was a committed socialist and reported from the North Vietnamese side of the war) was a journalist, an agent of influence or both. This question is teased out in the character of Whittlemore, who we see actively participating in world events – like saving Khiry, an act he bitterly regrets later, and playing matchmaker between Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge – and doctoring his columns to serve his view of those events. ‘He’s partly of the view that the whole world is peddling their own perspective and having it masquerade as truth and that it’s important to do that for all sides. He’s got a view of history and of day-to-day current affairs that gives him justification in his own mind for this approach and allows him to see himself as a legitimate journalist. As far as he sees it, he’s not doing anything different to anyone else, he’s just coming at it from a different angle.’

Allington himself has some sympathy with the kind of advocacy journalism epitomised by Whittlemore (and Burchett) at his best – though he draws the line at deliberate deception. ‘There is a lot of journalism that has this facade of objectivity and you don’t have to search very hard beneath the surface to see that objectivity is feigned or loose or at the very least, limited ... It’s something that I think we as readers push upon them and expect of them. But the reality is that everyone who writes must have their own views.’

He believes that journalists who are granted the freedom to push an argument are in some ways both more truthful – and able to delve deeper into the issues they explore. ‘It doesn’t become a matter of taking the fixed facts in a story and considering them to be facts that we’ve all learned, but rather, engaging directly with the journalist and forming our own views about whether we agree with what they’re saying. Ultimately, that’s a much more productive way of collectively getting our heads around issues. And a lot more realistic. Because we know that we don’t all agree on things. And the idea that we need to is itself a little bit ludicrous.’

Your novel has drawn comparisons to Lolita and On the Road, among other works. Were either of these novels – particularly Lolita – direct influences on The Ice Age?

Not directly, though I have read On the Road and Lolita (when I was around Lolita’s age). It didn’t occur to me until I finished writing and starting pitching The Ice Age to publishers that I’d written a sort of reverse Lolita.

The narrator, an adolescent precariously treading the line between childhood and adulthood, offers a unique perspective on the adult world she observes, her distance alternately gifting her with knowing and handicapping her with naivety. Were you particularly drawn to this stage of life, and the perspective it offers?

Yes, I chose an adolescent viewpoint specifically for its clarity and limitations. I wanted the reader to be able to peer through her naive take and see more than she does at times, but also benefit from her blunt observations, that are free of the compromises and existential clutter that we accumulate as we grow older.

The character of Gunther, the narrator’s much older travelling companion, is a wonderful enigma: a charismatic, drug-taking reformed hedonist and loner, who is passionate about literature and art. Was it fun to create him? What inspired him as a character?

I loved writing the character of Gunther. He is so secretive and dignified that even as the person creating his character, I felt I should keep a respectful distance. He was initially inspired by my boyfriend, specifically the part of him that is an old soul, and by my unhealthy vampire fixation and sense of nostalgia. From there I let my imagination wander. This book was written in such a stream-of-consciousness manner that it is hard for me to pinpoint where much of it originated. There is even some of me in Gunther. His arthouse leanings, picky eating habits, and tendency to waste his talents, although exaggerated, are all mine.

The Ice Age offers a sinister view of insular, isolated middle America. The narrator says the country is ‘less scary-weird when you get close to the edges. People are just more normal.’ Do you share her viewpoint?

The luxury of writing from her perspective is that she can make unapologetic pronouncements with impunity, whereas I tend to see things from several different angles, and talk myself out of generalisations. I could never write off an entire region of people. Having said that, when it comes to the USA, I generally feel more comfortable on the coast(s). My personal biases, past and current, certainly inform some of her opinions.

The background of the teenage narrator seems deliberately vague – she’s from small-town America and hungry for adventure, she doesn’t make friends her own age easily, but that’s all we’re really told about her. There are plenty of gaps for the reader to fill in. What was the thinking behind that? And do you know more about her than you’re telling?

I aimed to create the kind of characters that would be encountered travelling. We don’t know everything about people we meet. We don’t even know everything about ourselves. Leaving a sense of mystery intact made the characters feel more real to me as I wrote them. I wanted the reader to feel the same sense of wonder they’d feel toward another person. Also, I didn’t want her to reveal more than I felt she realistically would. When I was her age, I didn’t share anything I didn’t want to, and her character is loosely based on a younger me.

Like all road novels, The Ice Age is about a metaphorical journey – a journey of transformation – as much as a physical one. It seems to be very much about loss of innocence and the passage from naivety to knowing; both celebrating and mourning that journey. How do you see the narrator’s journey? Is that what you had in mind, or was it something different?

I told this story with mixed feelings; celebrating and mourning that journey is a perfect way to put it. I was at time of questioning in my life, wondering whether I had lamely relinquished my dreams and aspirations, or whether I was naive to have entertained them in the first place. The book explores this quandary. The narrator is driven by intense longing; needing and wanting things from the world, and the people around her, and is hopelessly in love. I wanted to show this state for what it is: open to both good and bad experiences, full of passion and vulnerability.

You’re a visual artist as well as a writer, and there are some marvellous word pictures in the novel (like Gunther’s “iceberg eyes”). Do you think that your work in the visual medium influences your writing at all – the way you see the world?

I’m sure it does. I’m such a visual person. I saw the story unfolding before me like a movie as I wrote it.

M.J. Hyland was born in London, spent her early childhood in Dublin, and her adolescence and early adulthood in Australia. Hyland now lives in England, where she teaches in the Centre for New Writing at Manchester University. Her literary career began in Australia, with her promising 2003 debut, How The Light Gets In. It was followed by the astonishing, Booker-shortlisted Carry Me Down in 2006. Gregory Day, who admiringly reviewed Carry Me Down for The Age in 2006, spoke to M.J. Hyland about her latest book, This is How for Readings' New Australian Writing Feature series.

M.J. Hyland took a lot of people by surprise when she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006. The disturbing but ultimately redemptive Carry Me Down was the follow-up to her promising debut, How the Light Gets In. This second novel demonstrated Hyland’s fearless approach to the precarious psychological territory which inspires her, expressed largely through the unforgettable character of John Egan: a freakishly tall and dislocative 11-year-old, dangerously at odds with his peers and family. J.M. Coetzee went so far as to describe Carry Me Down as ‘writing of the highest order’ – and along with the Booker shortlisting came numerous other awards and plaudits. Most importantly perhaps, it became clear among that hardcore of writers and readers who take little notice of the literary prize circuit that a compelling new voice had emerged in our midst – a writer with a real-life urgency about her, possessing a rare combination of sympathy for the marginalised and an entirely unsentimental command of her craft.

Now comes Hyland’s third book, the disturbing and stoic This Is How. The time is the late 1960s; the place is a small English seaside village. Patrick Oxtoby, a self-conscious but efficient young mechanic from Manchester, starts a new job in a local garage after breaking up with his fiancé. He takes an upstairs room in a boarding house in the grip of an already tenuous clique, comprising two posh young university graduates and the attractive but recently widowed landlady. There, things start to go excruciatingly wrong.

The first half of This Is How carefully lays out a litany of disconnections and misplaced desires amidst a texture of insinuating everyday malevolence. As the reader becomes engrossed in Patrick Oxtoby’s perspective, one can’t help but be reminded of John Egan and Carry Me Down. The pathologies are close; both novels are characterised by Hyland’s first-person narration and the immediacy of her present tense. This time, however, through the tragic events that ensue, we are destined to go one step further – indeed one step deeper into the strata of Hyland’s world. ‘With this book, I couldn’t settle for two or maybe three layers. I thought no, let’s have more. I sent a depth charge down, and I really sent it down.’

The idea for This Is How came to Hyland while reading Life After Life: Interviews With Twelve Murderers, by the late English oral historian Tony Parker. ‘It was only a three- or four-page interview in Parker’s extraordinary book,’ she explains. ‘It was with a man who had served 14 years of a life sentence and was out on licence. He describes the murder he committed when he was in his early twenties and it happened in a lodging house. He went into an adjoining room and killed a man he hardly knew, for no particular reason. It floored me. This was in 2004 and I wrote in my notebook that I had to write a novel based on this story.’

Talking to Hyland, it’s clear that the composition of This is How took her way out of her comfort zone. She describes the book as ‘a monster, like a 100,000-piece jigsaw I had to put together without a picture on the box’. But she is adamant that the disturbing nature of the subject matter had nothing to do with the difficulties of the process. ‘Maybe I’m unusually dissociative or something, but the content is neither here nor there,’ she says. ‘I set out to write interesting drama, and for my money it’s always been the case that the best stuff – going right back to Aristotle, right to back to Greek tragedy, to the start of what it is that makes people enjoy reading fiction or enjoy drama – has got to be about the guttural, the big things, people at odds with the world. There are all sorts of gaps and breakages and faults, chasms between people, things go wrong all the time, so much goes wrong between people. That’s the lifeblood of my fiction: trying to, as best as possible, express those weaknesses in the fibre of relationships between people. If it can’t happen in a cave I’m not interested in it.’

Indeed, the second half of This Is How is set for the most part in a bare prison cell, where Hyland replaces opaque binaries of innocence and guilt with more complex investigations into Patrick Oxtoby’s largely somatic reactions to his crime. ‘In prison, his life has shrunk to a size that suits him better. And he doesn’t feel remorse for what he’s done, he feels embarrassed. It’s a heat travelling up his body, in the way that you suffer when you’re embarrassed, like he’s standing in front of a fire. He says it’s like when you leave something valuable on a bus. That’s how he compares his experience. The kind of: Oh fuck I wish I hadn’t done that. His body has acted, but his mind perhaps wasn’t fully engaged in the act. It happened in a split second and there was a dissonance between mind and body. I’d been reading the fantastic debates between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty where, amidst all Sartre’s crapology about ‘radical freedom’ and the like, Merleau-Ponty says something like, well, to put it crudely, “Yeah but what about our fucking bodies? How do we contend with that!”’

Hyland describes how many of her favourite books deal in the territory of what is sometimes called ‘the gratuitous act’. 'Books like Andre Gide’s Vatican Cellars, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke, Crime And Punishment, and of course the obvious, Camus’s The Outsider. This is the kind of stuff I feed on, these books are catnip to me. I’ve always wanted to write literary crime.”

Hyland’s signature effect is to cast shadows into places where nobody much wants to look, to explore in fastidious detail the inner lives of character types about whom most people have a whole suite of generic preconceptions. These preconceptions are important ingredients in what Kafka famously called the ‘frozen sea inside us’ and Hyland does see it as her job to take an axe to that ice. She is very clear when asked if there is a social justice agenda behind what she writes. ‘There’s a great deal I want to say, yes, but fiction can go very wrong if an author is on a moral campaign. It’s got to be about what happens to people when they rub up against each other, when they fuck each other up, and fuck themselves up. Life is intense right? No-one would argue with that. But first and foremost, it has to be drama, a good story, and entertainment. God forbid, a book should be fun.’ Such a comment may seem a bit rich from a writer who is fast becoming the laureate of everyday damage, but the slightly perverse fact remains that for the most part, This Is How, while not exactly fun, is peculiarly entertaining. Indeed, it is hard not to read the novel fast, such is the sawn-off intensity of its rhythms, its terse dialogue and compulsive narrative traction.

At the end of our interview, on a hunch, I asked Hyland whether she’d noticed the thematic similarities between This Is How and the first track of Eminem’s latest record, Relapse. I’d been listening to it as I read her book and was struck by the link. I suggested that both works render the random brutality of our species as an ordinary quotidian truth. She agreed and was very pleased I’d brought it up. She told me she often played Eminem as a reward after a good writing session. I had to laugh. Many writers would consider playing Eminem a punishment rather than a reward. But M.J. Hyland’s not just any writer.

Gregory Day is the author of The Patron Saint of Eels and Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds.

Many of the stories in this collection have been previously published (in journals like McSweeneys, The Paris Review and The New Yorker), yet they form a remarkably cohesive collection. Did you always intend for them to be published together?

I’d always hoped that I might persuade someone to publish the stories between a single set of covers, but I can’t say that I set out to write a cohesive book. Really, these were the first nine stories I wrote (over the course of eight years or so) that didn’t give me the horrors when I reread them after the final revision. That it seems to anyone like a cohesive book is very glad news to me.

Short stories seem to have experienced a resurgence in recent years, with single-author collections like Nam Le’s The Boat and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth achieving both critical and commercial success. What do you think is behind this resurgence? What draws you to the short story as a form?

If the short story is indeed in a resurgence, I suppose you’d do better to ask someone who hasn’t been reading them like mad all the while. I’ve been pretty keen on the short story since childhood or so. As a writer, what attracts me to the short story is the terrific challenge of assembling, in a very tight space, a simple machine that delivers a persuasive emotional wallop. A short story permits its writer few indulgences and digressions, and, if left to my own devices, I quickly become digressive and indulgent. The short story reins me in.

You inhabit a huge range of characters and voices in this book: floundering middle-aged divorced men; a former corporate high-achiever slumming it in the wilderness; an adolescent girl longing for affection and validation; a small boy evading his sinister stepfather; a Viking divided between career and family. Do you like the challenge of imagining such different characters, or are you drawn by curiosity? Or something else?

Most of the stories in the book went through several radical revisions. Lots of total demoltions and wholesale rebuilds, often with complete rotations in the casts of characters, tense or point of view. With each story, there was generally a core element, a setting, an incident, that constituted the story’s inspirational core, and it took a lot of trial and error to find the characters to suit the tale. With a couple of exceptions, I can’t really recall sitting down and coldly deciding to tackle one sort of character or another. In most cases, the stories insisted on their particular populations after much gruelling work.

The stories in this book explore the cracks in family relationships. They look at the process (or the aftermath) of relationships falling apart; or at family relationships that were always far from the ideal. What is it that interests you in exploring these familial faultlines?

I don’t know that it’s the family that preoccupies me as a going concern. It’s more that my fiction, like most fiction, wants to know about the things that people do to one another, and a good proportion of humanity’s emotional warfare gets waged among people who are related to each other.

The father in ‘Wild America’ is ‘a connoisseur of the chance encounter’. So are you as a writer, it seems: incidental relationships and chance encounters are important in these stories. Neighbours form unlikely friendships; strangers provide distraction or temporary comfort. Was this a deliberate thread running throughout the collection, or did it evolve as you wrote?

I suppose the prevalence of chance encounters in the book grows out of its preoccupation with people who have fetched up, alone, on life’s far shores. But no, the solitude, the run-ins with strangers weren’t a part of deliberate thematic strategy. Some of the chance-encounter business probably owes a debt to the years I spent writing features for magazines, usually doing stories where it was up to me to mooch around at horse tracks or public parks and find people to write about.

Each of these stories leaves the reader wondering about the characters. What will happen to them after the last line is uncertain, though you leave a trail of clues for the reader in the form of their actions and experiences so far. Is this something you aim for – to leave the reader wondering? Is it something you look for as a reader?

I think a compelling story should trace several pendulum swings in the moral momentum between the characters, and ought to compel a series of shifts in the reader’s sympathies. I have a fondness for endings in which the characters’ fortune or moral authority has undergone another wild swing but hasn’t yet come back to centre. A good ending should leave the reader in a pleasurably unbalanced place, rocked back on his heels.

One of the great pleasures of this book is your deft imagery. Innocuously designed clocks evade notice ‘like well-greased pills for your eye’. Rain threatens through ‘a large blue violence of storm clouds’. Is that one of the pleasures of writing for you – crafting careful word-pictures? Is it something you strive for?

Thanks very much, and sure, I do take pleasure in a well-turned description. I suppose I strive generally for careful language. I feel pretty strongly that if you’re going to ask somebody to do you the terrific favour of reading a sentence you’ve written, you’d better be damned sure that the sentence is up to something interesting, that every word is there for a reason.

Who are your influences? What books and writers do you read?

Let’s glance behind me at the shelf of books I hold dear: Orwell, Styron, Melville, Nabokov, Joyce, Cheever, Barry Hannah, Joan Didion, William Vollmann, John McFee, Ian Frazier, Walker Percy, Michael Chabon, Lorrie Moore, Grace Paley, Charles Portis, Allan Gurganus, Evan S. Connell, David Berman, Flannery O’Connor, David Foster Wallace.

Brian Castro is one of Australia’s most critically acclaimed novelists – our very own ‘writer’s writer’. He was joint winner of the Australian/Vogel Award in 1983 for his first novel, Birds of Passage. Ten years later, Shanghai Dancing (Giramondo) won a swag of literary awards, and his most recent novel, The Garden Book (Giramondo) was shortlisted for the 2006 Miles Franklin Literary Award and won the Queensland Premier's Prize for Fiction.

Giramondo publisher Ivor Indyk interviews his author about his latest novel, The Bath Fugues, for Readings, and talks about the importance of this major Australian writer from a publisher’s perspective.

Brian Castro was one of the reasons I started publishing books in 2002. I found it hard to believe, as a critic and a lecturer on Australian literature, that a novel like Shanghai Dancing couldn’t find a publisher in Australia. I don’t think there was any doubt about its quality. It’s just that the numbers didn’t stack up. There is an assumption, which seems quite widely held, that the art of a democratic country should be democratic too – in the sense that it should be open and accessible, and appeal to as large an audience as possible. Commercial success follows.

But the great quality of Shanghai Dancing is the richness of its texture. When a book has a lot to offer, you don’t expect it to show itself all at once. There are social and historical complexities too, in the author’s experience, which aren’t easily negotiated, and which require reticence, allusion or a certain wariness in the telling. Shanghai Dancing dealt with these complexities in quite a romantic way, since it presented them in the form of family history, through the focus of memory and recollection. The Garden Book was more direct, even brutal, in showing just how little openness or accessibility there could be, in a country which paraded its democratic virtues. It had its secrets too, as the scholars have discovered. It was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and I often wish it had won – a novel with a Chinese-Australian heroine; that would have opened things up, quite decisively.

Castro’s new novel, The Bath Fugues, resembles Shanghai Dancing in its use of a musical principle to orchestrate its materials – in the latter it was jazz improvisation; here it is the contrapuntal fugue. The novel is made up of three novellas, each told by a different narrator in 30 parts, each with its own answering narrative, each bound to the others by reiterated motifs, like bicycles and clocks and counterfeits. Like The Garden Book, two of the novellas have strong Australian settings, in the hills west of Sydney, and on the far north Queensland coast, where his characters, most of whom are migrants or of migrant stock, find their way through an intricate web of relationships and identities, some of which they are barely aware of.

I asked Castro why he had employed the fugue as a structural principle, and was pleased when he gave an answer that wasn’t purely formal. ‘I wanted to connect the musical form of the fugue with the psychological condition. Both are about flight – in my narrators’ cases, flights of the imagination. The musical fugue takes on the form of a contrapuntal dialogue set against a ground bass – in this novel the ground bass is the theme of inheritance. The psychological fugue is represented by the bicycle, an easy form of locomotion which allows escape and flight. In the late nineteenth century fugueurs were very common – the discovery of the bicycle led them to explore places beyond their own villages. Many never came back, took on false names and left their little lives behind. So there was flight and there was forgery – everything a novel should incorporate. A character is an alter-ego forged by the imagination.’

Inheritance is a dominant theme throughout Castro’s work: his characters are in flight because they have no inheritance; they are in flight from their inheritance; in vain, because ultimately the past possesses them in all sorts of fugitive ways. Another condition, closest to Castro’s own, is when out of a sense of impoverishment the character chooses his ancestors, either from the stories told to him, or those he reads himself.

‘One inherits the lives of others. Perhaps this inheritance was the only thing I was left with by my family. The stories they told were passed onto me. So they were legitimately given. If my family knew I was to become a writer they would have clammed up. But my innocent absorption of lives and stories made the process seem innocuous.’ Jason Redvers, the teller of the first novella, claims the essayist Montaigne as his ancestral figure; Camille de Conceição, the teller of the second, is obsessed with Baudelaire. Other progenitor figures make an appearance in the book: Bach (naturally), Walter Benjamin (who was also obsessed with Baudelaire), Frances Bacon, Nathalie Sarraute…

I was also keen to know why The Bath Fugues was so preoccupied with forgery, and the counterfeit. In this novel the absorption of lives and stories is neither innocent nor innocuous. Redvers is a forger, Conceição a counterfeiter. Redvers’ friend, Walter Gottlieb, who may have falsified his past, steals Redvers’ story and make it his own. Friendship and forgery seem to go hand in hand. As it turns out, the betrayal of friendship sits very close to Castro’s idea of the writer. ‘Because writing is such a secretive act, furtive almost, the fear of revelation is always present – before the work is completed. So friendships are put at risk if these revelations are premature and stated in good faith to a good friend. Writers tend to suck up moods like vacuum cleaners, and sometimes a novel can disappear in a momentary loss of a central idea, when another writer runs off with it or destroys the trance. The phrase “in the ether” is more accurate than one thinks. This is a novel about story-stealing, clepto-biography, the rubato of measured time; getting between and behind the lines. I call this my ‘saboteur style’… it relies a lot on irony.’

I would guess that there is an anxiety here, not only about the writer’s relationship to his contemporaries, but to those writers from the past he has read and admired, and made use of in his own work. In that respect, the anxiety is about the authenticity of writing itself; but in fact it goes much further, to a moral doubt about the nature of character and conduct. ‘Art is the rendering of a simulacrum; it is a forgery of life. In turn, as André Gide demonstrated in The Counterfeiters, a novel conceals other novels within it…I’ve embedded diaries, lives and legacies in the formation of the narrative, so that the original and the copy work in tandem to reverse the loss of the “aura”, not only of the work of art, but of these ancestral biographies. In terms of human relationships, good faith and bad faith operate in a similar fashion. For the most part, Gide’s characters are not ‘nice’ people … nor are Dostoyevsky’s. One’s behaviour is determined by cultural norms which elicit a kind of trust. But put simply, when asked about one’s “identity” one counterfeits as the moment sees fit, as identity is never stable.’

In her recent book, Brian Castro’s Fiction, Bernadette Brennan observes that Castro’s characters are often wounded or injured in some way. That is certainly the case in The Bath Fugues, which is why the third novella is told by a doctor, who is privy to the secrets of all the characters we have met before. Because they are wounded, these characters are often unpleasant: self-conscious, ashamed, suspicious, resentful. Middle-class readers like to identify with characters in a novel, to empathise. I put this to Castro: ‘What is it with your characters?’

‘Well, one aspect might be that the “Hollywood Project” of sugary romanticism has effectively erased voices that are bristly and barbed-wired. The latter used to be at the high end of literary art: viz. Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard, indeed, Dostoyevsky. The yearning to empathise is one of the diseases of modern reading. Literature as self-help? I cannot think of a more fitting example of an oxymoron.’

It’s interesting, because the predominant feeling imparted by a Castro novel –and this is true of The Bath Fugues – is one of exhiliration, when the associations suddenly gathered around a detail or a turn of action convey an experience of richness and assurance, or disclose relationships where none had existed before – effects which are the very opposite of the doubt and suspicion often displayed by his characters. Castro’s art of variation and return is surprising, funny, beguiling, consoling. It gives you a world forged by the imagination, and it contains all the ironies of which its author speaks.

Ivor Indyk is publisher of Giramondo Publishing and of Heat magazine.

ALP true believer, playwright, screenwriter, some-time political staffer and long-time author Bob Ellis is a much-loved figure on Australia’s literary landscape. Jo Case spoke to him about his latest book, And So It Went, for Readings.

In And So It Went, you call yourself “a nervous union hack, a political bit-player, an edgy pontificating witness of earlier times.” Your self-deprecating persona is a recurring – and, I have to say, thoroughly enjoyable – presence in the series-of-sorts that this book is part of (beginning with Goodbye Jerusalem). Is this something you cultivate for comic effect in the books, or is it an accurate reflection of the way you see yourself?

It’s accurate. Like most writers and many, many politicians I live in fear and dread of the day that I am ‘found out’.

You’ve been critiquing the Howard government in print for some years. At one stage in the book, you jest that ‘it seemed my purpose in life was ended with Howard’s fall’. Although as a human being you must be delighted with his demise, as a writer, does a part of you miss him?

He gave my seventh decade a focused purpose, but he shrivelled my talent, hobbled my career and gave me a weary depression (which Julian Burnside calls ‘Howard fatigue’) that shrank my artistic confidence and self-esteem. I don’t want him back, nor does anyone. Suggest to any Liberal he should be found a safe seat and a Shadow Cabinet position (his former job of Industrial Relations for instance) and see how quickly they kick you down the stairs.

One of the things I like most about your books is the way they humanise public figures (especially politicians) by showing them as they are behind the scenes. Your good friend Mike Rann, SA Premier, and sometime employer, former NSW Premier Bob Carr, are two characters who I especially enjoying reading your accounts of, for this reason. Does your candour ever get you into trouble with these figures – friends included? Do you think they learn to watch they say around you, knowing chance comments may work their way into posterity?

No, but they do say with emphasis, ‘Print this, Ellis, and you’re dead meat,’ an injunction I (mostly) heed. Many, many politicians are warm and decent beings, and the media view of them as chittering gremlins is tremendously unfair and unjust. None of them is as wicked as O’Reilly, Hannity, Akerman, Beck or Jones and I hope my books remain as evidence down the centuries of politicians’ contrasting decency.

You say that you “should be more grateful than I am” for Rudd’s leadership – at times you make some funny but devastating observations about the man who once called you ‘Uncle Bob’. (“The mountain has laboured ... and brought forth a clerk.”) It seems that you have mixed feeling about him. Is this accurate?

Very mixed. He is a superb, disarming television presence, a tyrannical office manager, a changeable policy wonk, and a dark miracle of sleeplessness and hectoring. History will be less kind to him than Robert Manne, but he towers over the crab-louse he displaced, and his Ministers and Secretaries are collossi compared with their fidgetty, midget predecessors.

You write that you didn’t want Turnbull to win the Liberal leadership because “he’d be too effective”. What do you think of him now?

I think he’s blown it. He tells daily too many contradictory lies and the voters are noticing.

Your record of the past couple of years in politics – the lead-ups to the Australian and US elections, the early days of the Rudd government – is tempered with reflections and observations on the other ingredients of life: family, friends, work, cultural life. What do you think your books achieve by blending the progress of politics with the march of everyday life? What first gave you the idea for this series of books?

In 1983 my wife miscarried on the day Hawke replaced Hayden and Fraser was not allowed, for five hours, to call an election. I was propelled by anguish and suspense into writing all this down, and in fifty days The Things We Did Last Summer was in the bookshops. Enough praise from it followed to prove the combination of public and private useful. Later reading Vidal’s Palimpsest and Alan Bennett’s yearly Diaries confirmed me in this view and I did Goodbye Jerusalem with the eye of a novelist. Oswald’s Tale by Mailer and In Cold Blood by Capote showed, too, that fact displayed as if it was fiction drew in the reader as no dry arm’s-length history could. All good books have a speaking voice and those that don’t soon founder.

Of the global financial crisis, you say: “It’s as big a shift in the way we think as the Berlin Wall. Like that huge event, it showed the rules we lived by till then were wrong, because so many people wanted to escape those rules.” What do you think the lasting effects of the crisis will be? Do you think there will be any positive effects? Do you think it will change the way politics is practiced at all?

The lasting effects will be the end of the notion of the greedy-wizard CEO and of jackal capitalism as we know it. What will follow is uncertain but my money is on Social Democracy, Scandinavian-style, with fifty percent taxes, an interfering bureaucracy and security, cradle-to-grave, for all.

It’s clear from reading the book that you are a voracious reader. What books have you read and enjoyed lately? Any that particularly surprised, delighted or outraged you?

Dreams From My Father, Confederacy of Dunces, The Plot Against America, The Human Stain, The Second Plane, The Castle in the Forest, Voltaire’s Bastards, The Last Cigarette, Occupational Hazards, all of Evelyn Waugh, many, many books about the Iraq fiasco and the television series Rome, The Wire, The Thick of It and Mad Men, and the films Hunger, In Bruges, Standard Operating Procedure and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. All of these test the intellect while delighting the language-sensitive ear. I try to read two books a week and a hundred book reviews and believe this delays Alzheimer’s.