AL Kennedy: ‘I get very fed up with depictions of glamorous sociopaths’

The face on my screen is in silhouette against a window whose curtains haven’t been completely pulled back, yet when she moves nearer her computer I can see that it is indeed the writer AL Kennedy. On the internet, you’ll find some people saying she now lives in the Scottish Highlands and some that she lives in north Essex, so I ask her where she is. She won’t say.

“Not even which county?”

“No.”

“Or which country?”

“No. I’m keeping it variable. I get a lot of Brexiter hate mail. It’s expensive to have to put up CCTV and motion sensors and lights and things.”

“Is this all because of one person or more than one?”

“I don’t really know. If it’s handwritten then you do know, but if it’s a big bag of dog shit, it’s hard to identify. And the police are literally no help at all.”

AL Kennedy | Robin Niedojadlo

Wherever she actually lives, the dark, divided Britain beyond the multi award-winning Scottish novelist’s letterbox and curtains, the Britain about which she has been such a pithy and acerbic commentator on Radio 4’s now sadly defunct Points of View and as a columnist for Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, is what prompted her to write her latest book, Alive in the Merciful Country. At first she’d wanted to set it in the first 100 days of Boris Johnson’s premiership, but Covid put paid to that.

“I got Covid at the Tutankhamun exhibition [at London’s Saatchi Gallery] right at the end of 2019,” she says. “I remember standing in the packed crowds thinking ‘There’s this huge mystery pandemic across the whole of East Asia and half the people here have clearly come from there. Is this really the best idea I’ve ever had?’ And then, a week later...”

The virus left her with no sense of smell for six months, exhausted through chronic lack of sleep and with residual symptoms of Long Covid that lasted until 2023. Yet the spring of 2020, when Covid came for so many of the rest of us, is the setting for her novel: not just because time back then suddenly seemed both so spongily absorbent and absurdly finite but because that – the very first week of lockdown – was when her fictional protagonist, London primary school teacher Anna McCormick, finally heard again from the lost soul she has always known as Buster.

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Anna and Buster had known each other back in the Eighties, when both were part of a group of radical clowns, musicians and street theatre performers who called themselves the OrKestrA. They were the kind of people you might see floating around Edinburgh’s Hunter Square right now – more Merry Pranksters than any serious revolutionary threat to society, though that didn’t prevent them being infiltrated – and ultimately betrayed – by undercover cop Buster. Yet all that was a long time in the past: in 2020 Anna is happier than almost any AL Kennedy character I’ve ever read, fulfilled in her job, with a great, bantering relationship with her teenage son and at the start of a promising, loving relationship.

Herself the daughter of a primary school teacher, and the author of four children’s books (as well as the nine novels, short story collections, plays and radio dramas for which she is better known), Kennedy creates in Anna a character who is the antithesis of anyone pushing dog faeces through someone’s letterbox. At Oakwood Primary (motto: “There’s always a bright side – we just need to find it”) she is, says Kennedy, “trying to raise good people, to be kind and manifest love as a practical force – without which everything goes wrong.”

Back in the Eighties, the OrKestrA also tried to change the world – and again, there are some echoes of Kennedy’s own interests there too. “I was a drama student, and I did dramatic and activist-type things. I love magicians, and watching all that circus stuff.

“When I was a student, I remember reading the autobiography of Grok [the Swiss clown usually hailed as Europe’s greatest]. He was just so physically clever, in a way I just wish I could be. Still, I suppose you could argue I have spent 50-plus years trying to be good at making sentences, and trying to make some sentences that make people laugh and some that do something to people. So in a way, you know, Grok did that, but in another format.”

The contrast between Anna and Buster couldn’t be greater. Yes, he had charisma and was as good at his role in the OrKestrA as the silent film star they named him after, but when the whole country is in lockdown he sends her an unsigned letter in which he confesses not only to being a “spy cop” but a hired killer too.

As if she can sense raised eyebrows at this, Kennedy points out that the whole novel started with the Buster character, and not (as I had thought) Anna; that “like a number of policemen I know” he has grown disillusioned with the job and that many “spy cops” become deeply damaged by having to immerse themselves in undercover work.

“I get very fed up with depictions of glamorous sociopaths. So much of our culture is like that – drawn to the thrill of power, of what it would be like if there were no rules – you know, wouldn’t it be great to be [Breaking Bad’s] Walter White or Hannibal Lecter. I wanted to say no, if we had an inside view of a psychopath we’d see a person who can’t be fully human and it’s not glamorous at all.

“In a way, the book is Anna trying to change the world for the better in all the ways you can by not killing people, while also in a way being furious. And Buster is, as far as he can have an emotion, kind of furious, but he is trying to make the world a better place by killing people.”

There’s a hyper-articulate fury in most things Kennedy writes about contemporary Britain. It’s all here too, but – look again at the title, at Anna’s motivations and at her creator’s – so too is the idealism that underpins it.

Alive in the Merciful Country by AL Kennedy is published by Saraband, price £18.99. Kennedy will be at the Edinburgh International Book Festival at 11am on 13 August

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