It is an awkward fumbling business this business of finding your character, of building a whole new world. A bit like those first moments on the beach in early summer when you face your pale un-sunned flesh and take her to meet the rough waves. You want it to happen but the first moments find you holding your breath tight; your head turned rigid up to the sky afraid you may lose your breath. The salt water stings your eyes and you wonder for a moment whether you can still swim; or whether that large wave coming for you, the one now curling her large lip over you, will crush you and leave you for a sinking corpse.

But there are antecedents to everything: to every lived moment there has been a similar moment before; and so I write with a sense of genealogy knowing that the character I am building a world for has come from somewhere before — he has a provenance; he already has a home and so, he is already in some sense known; his life has begun elsewhere. I find evidence of this in artefacts and in other accounts of lives.

My character, Pond Man, has his foundation myth in Pond Life which will be published next autumn. And so as I begin the next book now — you must always be at least one book ahead, one world further on, I am having to pull Pond Man from the waves of his own myth as I was pulled from the waves as a child, (an event I fictionalise in The Green Lady) and turn him into something more historical.

He is covered in salt and brine because he is still part of this seaside town I grew up in: but it is a different town and a different place and time. In some sense he is the historic past and everything I am attaching him to is part of a cultural material past. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. (L.P. Hartley) What I want to get at particularly through Pond Man is our relationship to tools and implements, to physical life, to material objects: the way we build relationships with objects which shapes our understanding of the world and our relationship to ourselves and others. How we covet and appropriate and move things about; and to what end.

The things we handle everyday have changed radically over time; but there are still several continuous daily objects as there must be a continuous self to which I add and subtract aspects of my behaviour, make some modifications, I hope for the better; but this continuous self through time can only be added to or removed from; the same goes for my character. I can bring artefacts to him: snatches of conversation taken from the book I am reading (J.G. Farrell’s A Girl in the Head, 1967) .

Where I find myself in a strange but alluring form of English absurdism set in a seaside town. It reads like a lyrical version of a Pinter play or a Beckett novel and is organised around a photograph album belonging to the protagonist, Count Boris Slattery, an aging Polish artefact. Boris finds himself washed up in this seaside place and at the point in his life where we join him (the novel offers us a strangely disrupted tour of Boris’s life) he is touring through memories of himself as a virile young man in love with a girl called Ylva and wondering whether he can still seduce young girls even at his current age.

The novel is structured around Boris’s relationship to his family photograph album which we keep descending upon at arbitrary moments as though left out on the formica kitchen table for us to discover whenever we wish to visit with Boris’s younger self. The photograph album is, in some ways, the only steer we have on the plot which is a bizarre form of biography set across the span of a life time but not given with any clear chronology except a rather interrupted present; so I become grateful for that album and our visits to it. Also, because the object-material life of the novel is gratifyingly heightened as it might be in a play filled with essential props; and I am grateful for these three-dimensional props too because through these I can visualise the experience of the novel as a real place and myself in it as someone touring Boris’s mind and Boris’s history; and then his daily life in a seaside town (comically called Maidenhair Bay) where he lives in what appears to be a bizarre boarding house (I am reminded of Pinter’s The Birthday Party).

In fact, the house turns out to be Boris’s marital home. But Farrell turns it into a strangely alien and dispossessed space; a space which pushes Boris out more and more as relatives and visitors pass through and claim rooms —including two young lodgers who come to stay for the summer. Their arrival arouses his sexual appetite and we see the ghost of his younger virile self come crashing into rather pathetic contact with aging Boris who still lusts after teenage girls. What is brilliant about Farrell’s depiction of Boris’s sexual encounters is that it is not at all clear at first who exactly everyone is in relation to one another. As though a series of character-counters had been thrown out randomly on a games board and the job of the reader is to work out who is related to who; who feels affection for who and then who is in having sex with who because that fact is not always clear. The comedy arrives when Boris meets with several obstructions to his sexual desire.

The house itself often becomes a block for him. This happens when teenage Inez comes to stay and ends up sharing a bedroom with the other teenager visitor, Alessandro from Italy. In his desperation to wire himself into the hormonal life of the teens and their teen bedroom, Boris pulls up the carpet and makes a Peeking Tom hole through the floorboards. The house feels suddenly adapted as a radically new and imaginative space emerges — in the way you might open up a stage door in a theatre to allow another set of characters to emerge. In this theatrical mode people wander in and out as Boris himself roams through making eccentric routes across domestic and civic spaces — local cafes, the promenade, the local cinema —- and then into the more surreal territory of his dreams and personal history.

As a writer, I find the contingent and open ended nature of these spaces, the staginess of it all, rather freeing. When Flower, Boris’s long suffering wife, considers how she will accommodate her mounting list of visitors, she dramatically announces this: “Well there is nothing else for it. The children will have to sleep in the same room.” Such contingent arrangements grant me permission as a writer to both imagine a familiar space and then adapt it; to make my own routes through; to move parts of the house about. I find these moments both galvanising and freeing, as well as very funny, comedy perhaps being the deepest form of art in the end because it offers some resolution no matter how unsatisfactory. And it is the kind of passage below that somehow frees me to transplant my own version of Boris-in-his-familiar space into my own fictional world — the world I am trying in this early stage to make familiar to myself. Perhaps because Farrell’s domestic space functions so readily as a miniature theatre I can imagine mobilising such scenes and using them to my own ends. Imagine directing my own familial fictional sequences and adapting spaces already known to me.

After breakfast Boris opened the french windows and stepped out into the misty sunshine. The garden lay about him, calm and glorious. He lingered for a moment in front of the house and then headed diagonally across the tennis-court, avoiding the broken net that straggled over the dewy grass like a deflated black snake. On the far side of the lawn he ploughed through a bed of roses in order to avoid a detour by the garden path whose artificial crazy paving offended him. Turning furtively he noticed Old Dongeon, who had followed him to the french windows, had noticed this act of sacrilege. Boris bowed his head and moved on towards his destination, the sunflower.

(Note: Old Dongeon is the father of Flower, the woman Boris rather arbitarily married some years before; Old Dongeon and his wife live with Boris and Flower alongside a flurry of visitors, including Uncle Cecil, who at one point arrives for a season).

The theatrical nature of Boris’s garden- choreography (‘headed diagonally across the tennis-court) and then the fact he is being watched from behind by Old Dongeon who represents the older generation, a generation now being seized by dementia, encourages me to imagine the differences between younger and older generations; to create historical layers between characters across time. In other words, to bring different generations together in a tightly bound community and then allow one character to act bizarrely as Boris Slattery does. To interrupt his continuous self with strange regressive behaviours. This is surely all you need for a plot; and plot, as far as I understand it, is just a form of daily tension with wider historical significance.

(For Emilie and Nanu, Sabrina and Lina; for Violet and Katherine in particular: for all us writing students struggling to create vivid plot and setting).