Master of his own voice

Published on Friday 30 May 2008 17:46

NICK HARKAWAY IS SITTING IN THE living room of his house in Hampstead, remembering a childhood journey. It's one he made many times, sitting in the back of his father's car on the seven-hour trip from London to Cornwall, when the A303 was an even longer and more winding road. His father would tell him stories all the way, always the same but always different – about the family's old English sheepdog and its adventures as it set out to follow them. There'd be rabbit colonies, tunn

Why is he telling me this, and why am I asking? Because Harkaway has just written a debut novel of the kind that comes along only once every couple of years, overflowing with imagination yet powered by the kind of cleverly twisting plot that marks him out as a master storyteller. And because that's exactly what his father, John le Carr, the man behind the wheel spinning those still-remembered childhood stories, is too.

So there's an obvious string of questions hanging over this interview: what was it like, growing up with such a brilliant wordsmith as a father? Given the weight of expectation such parentage brings, if you wanted to be a writer yourself, was it even a mixed blessing?

First, though, to the book, for which his publishers have paid a small fortune – a "significant" six-figure sum, which was almost doubled by the sale of the US rights. The Gone-Away World imagines a future when civilisation is all but destroyed – apart from a small strip each side of a pipe that encircles the planet, pumping out a spray called FOX (InFOrmationally eXtra-saturated matter) that allows normal life to exist. Beyond is a land emptied of all form and substance, where matter takes the shape of its inhabitants' nightmares.

A small band of feisty freelance fire-fighters, led by Gonzo Lubitsch, is contracted to put out a fire on the Jorgmund pipe. This is a very dangerous business – as it will turn out, there's far more to the pipe, to the fire, and to Gonzo himself than meets the eye.

But there's far more to The Gone-Away World too, so much that it resists categorisation. It has the scattergun inventiveness and confident, extended comic riffs that you'd find in Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut, yet is more rooted in a recognisable world, even one savagely altered by a new kind of war. There's a dusting of satire on messy foreign wars and corporate culture, but it's mixed in with splendidly absurd adventures, political fables, philosophical musings and epic conflicts (where else are you going to see a band of ninjas do battle with a troupe of mime artists?). And as Gonzo leaves his country childhood behind to become a post-apocalyptic Red Adair, there's love and loss in the mix too. The only thing there isn't is boredom: this may be a long novel, but it's one that holds your attention, just like one of the stories John le Carr told his youngest son on the long road to Cornwall.

"The thing about being my father's son," says Harkaway (both write under a nom de plume, their real surname being Cornwell), "is that I grew up surrounded by story. Both my parents read me bedtime stories, but there was so much more to it than that. They both work in an incredibly interlocked way: he handwrites, she types, they discuss. So all the time I've seen the editing process at first hand. My mother was an editor before she met my father and her experience in the publishing trade is as long as his. So there are two experts on story in my parents' house – my father and my mother, who is brilliant in a completely different way to him.

"Imagine you're living with a master blacksmith: you'd expect that, after a year, you'd at least have an inkling about how he does what he does. I've had much longer than that with a master wordsmith. And even the stories he tells always have the same intensity of focus – before he opens his mouth he's already thought about how he's going to tell it, how he's going to pace the ending. I've always had that, even without having to think about it."

After leaving Cambridge, where he studied philosophy, politics and sociology, Harkaway worked as a film scriptwriter. Although he stuck with it for nine years, he grew disillusioned by the film industry. "It's such a caustic, abrasive place to be a writer. Basically, it's like living in those Orange film ads. I'd see those ads and they would almost make me cry because they're just so true."

A disillusioned Harkaway seems hard to imagine. At 35, there's a breezy self-confidence about him that you recognise immediately from his novel. This is a writer who can give you a whole page about, for example, the susceptibility of shrews to tachycardia caused by low-energy strip-lighting, and precisely how any such deceased shrews accidentally infiltrating a secret base would then be examined by trained hamzat teams for trained anti-statist activity. Call it geeky zest, call it fascination with ideas: either way, you'll be in the middle of one of The Gone-Away World's high-octane adventure passages, and Harkaway will quite often stop to stir another off-the-wall disquisition into the story and let it simmer away merrily.

When he was working in film, the ideas themselves were never a problem, he says. To prove it, he asks me to think of an industry, of an unlikely setting for it, of a role for a beautiful girl, and a dilemma they might face. Within seconds, we have the story about a mine on Shetland which is either failing, facing sabotage or endangering wildlife. "If it was just that they changed their minds about which of those directions to take, it would be annoying, but not too bad. But what happens instead is that they would completely change the central character, or they'd say the setting was a complete red herring and ditch that too so you'd having nothing remotely like what you started with.

"Every time I went into a job, at the end of the process, the producer would say 'This writer is getting between us and the story. And I wanted to say, 'Guys, I am the story! There isn't a way to get through it except through me because it's my story.'" He rattles through a whole list of other reasons why he became disheartened by the industry: low writers' pay rates, institutional unprofitability, slashing of tax breaks, producers with a self-importance unmatched in any other line of work, and a whole host more.

I ask if the reason he started working in films rather than writing novels in the first place was because he wanted to escape from his father's shadow. "No," he says carefully, "I believed it had nothing to do with that, but whether or not that's true is difficult for me to judge."

Why did he persist for so long? "My response to disappointment is to put more energy into something. So when someone turned down an idea I pitched, I'd turn round and put more energy into the next idea, the next pitch, the next script."

I'm starting to get the picture. Here's a quirkily original writer who knows that what he does is good. (He's had enough feedback on that score). He says he's not competitive with his father, but that he inherited his "try again, higher" attitude from both of his parents. Yet even when he does, for nine whole years, not a single project he's worked on ever comes to fruition; there's not one film he can point to, on big screen or small, and say that he helped to put it there. His parents have been, he says, tremendously supportive, and would have been, no matter what line of work he was in: "At uni, I'd thought of being an environmental lobbyist. I know they would have been delighted any time I wrote a press release."

But he wasn't writing press releases. He was in the writing game too, just like his father, world famous all the time his son had been alive. Except Harkaway wasn't getting anywhere.

One day in January 2006, he started writing a novel. "I eased myself into it. I didn't tell anyone, I didn't even tell myself, almost. But I had this idea of two guys in a truck. There was something dangerous about what they had in the back of it, that was all I knew. But after 24 hours, I told my wife, Clare, 'I might have something,' but I didn't tell my parents or anyone else.

"I didn't want to expand on any idea I'd had before for a film script. It was going to be a clean break. I didn't have a plan. I just went right to the top of the diving board, held my nose and jumped in."

All the things that the film industry stymied about his anarchic imagination, every plot twist and setting that would have broken budgets to film, every goofy tangential riff that a literalist director would have excised from the script, started to pour out. I exaggerate, but only slightly. Because if The Gone-Away World reads just like a damburst of dreams, then that might be because that is literally what it is.

&149 The Go-Away World, by Nick Harkaway, is published next week by Heinemann, price 17.99

Nick Harkaway on...

Creativity: "I don't need to know how it all works; if it's right and instinctive, I'm happy. It's like the end of the first Indiana Jones movie: they put the lost ark in a box in a warehouse full of boxes. And the thing is, you can just let your mind be the warehouse and let stuff come out of you and that's fine – but don't go and poke around because it won't help; you might just find that there's lots of tatty stuff in boxes. Yeats said: 'I must lie down where all the ladders start/In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart', and while I wouldn't say it's foul, I do think it's a rag-and-bone shop."

Being precocious: "I remember that focus you had as a little boy. When I was six, I had a blue T-shirt with a picture of a Dimetrodon grandis – you know, the prehistoric reptile with a great big sail on its back. It's not a dinosaur, but everyone thinks it is, though it predates them by 40 million years. I knew all that, and I told everyone too."

Science fiction: "What makes me crazy about the whole literary fiction/science-fiction split is that Iain Banks has to write under two names – Iain Banks and Iain M Banks – and usually people read one or the other and only very few cross over. I think his science fiction is much more exciting and he has more fun with it. I want to straddle genres, so there will never be a Nicholas P Harkaway."

How he'd pitch his novel as a film: "I've been pitching it as Thomas Pynchon does Crouching Tiger, but that's a bit obscure, so how about Indiana Jones meets The Matrix with a dash of, er, something else?"