Nick Harkaway is the author of The Gone-Away World, which we at Bookgeeks thought was rather marvellous and is now available in paperback (and which was recently nominated for the BSFA Best Novel Award).

Nick was born in Cornwall in 1972. He studied philosophy, sociology and politics at Clare College, Cambridge, and then worked in the film industry. He has trained in fencing, aikido, jujitsu, and kickboxing, and is notably bad at all of them. He lives in London with his wife, Clare, and he’s working for on his second novel. Nick’s father is John Le Carré, who we also think is rather marvellous!

We picked Nick’s brains about dreams, inspiration, whether or not he’s a book geek, and his recent nomination…

How do you feel about the nomination of The Gone-Away World for BSFA Best Novel award?

I feel great! And actually, incredibly alarmed. I looked at the short list and saw Ken MacLeod, Neal Stephenson, and Stephen Baxter, and then I went and had a little sit down and a cup of sweet tea to calm my nerves.

Are you KIDDING me? Those guys are all – and I say this in the nicest possible way – GROWN-UPS! I can’t be on a list with them!

But I am, and I am thrilled. I’m also delighted because, although I read SF a fair bit, The Gone-Away World doesn’t easily fit into any genre – I’ve had a lot of mail from people saying “I love this even though it isn’t really” and I never know what the next word will be – sometimes it’s “literary”, sometimes it’s “science fiction” or “fantasy”, sometimes it’s “usually my kind of book”… the consensus seems to be that TGAW isn’t quite a lot of things. And I’m good with that. I like being in the no-man’s-land. And yet at the same time, it’s great to be co-opted, to have someone say “hey! We like this. It’s ours now!”

But being on a list with those guys? That’s a top-of-the-world moment.

Are you a bookgeek?

Yes. Books are great. I love first editions, the yellowing, the way they smell. I love the notion of the reader’s handshake, the connections across decades and distances through a copy of your favourite novel: this book was read by someone who was contemporary with publication, who saw it in situ, as it were; this book was given as a gift of affection by the author to a friend; this book survived a shipwreck… I’m a sucker for objects which have stories, and books also contain stories, which makes them exponentially more interesting.

Do you consciously write about people you know? And do they notice?

I never write about anyone directly; I use fragments of people and make up the rest, then tie the whole thing together with narrative. I don’t know whether they notice. I suppose it depends on whether they know themselves well enough to recognise an isolated aspect of their own make-up. Since that requires either assured self-knowledge, blazing vanity, or crushing paranoia, I’m not sure how likely it is that they’d ever tell me.

When you read your own work, do you learn anything about yourself, your ideas, your obsessions, etc.?

Yes. I learn that I’m a lunatic. I think ‘where the hell does this stuff come from?’ If I’m lucky, I get a moment of cognitive dissonance where I go ‘oh, that’s really cool, I wish I’d come up with that… wait! I did come up with that! Yay, me!’

But I’m not a huge fan of writing as self-actualisation or therapy. I know it works for some people, but I don’t want to burden you with my angsts and I don’t really want to share my innermost secrets with you, either.

Is writing something that helps you to come to terms with the world?

No. Writing makes me look at the world and feel terrified. Writing is partly about nuance and the microscope, and about painting the broad picture with small touches. You can’t describe everything, so you have to describe significant things. And when you do that – or at least, when I do that – the results are pretty alarming and upsetting. We live in a very unbalanced, very unfair, very dangerous world, in a very perilous universe. Some of us are moderately insulated from the worse aspects of it, most of us are not, and none of us is in what you could call a strong position. We’re brief, powerless, and rash. Writing makes me all too aware of that, perhaps because in my worlds, I’m God. I sometimes feel incredibly guilty when I make things happen. I mean, in The Gone-Away World there’s a war which kills millions of people. I did that. Me.

How important are grammar and punctuation to you as a writer and a reader?

Very. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not important. Bad punctuation makes nonsense. Now, there are writers of exceptional skill who can get around that. Russell Hoban and Peter Ackroyd, for example, have both written books with non-standard English and made them play. That is not because they are ignorant of punctuation. It is because they are so good at rhythm and flow that they can discard standard punctuation and still make language which is beautiful and comprehensible. That’s blackbelt stuff.

When you are writing do you have an audience in mind? Is it a person, real or imagined, or a group?

My wife, Clare. She’s the perfect audience for me. She loves my sense of humour, enjoys my goofiness, but won’t tolerate things which make no sense. She likes satisfying endings and clear cut situations. She has little time for broad philosophical maunderings or studies in misery. She has an instinctive and powerful grasp of the difference between complexity and complicatedness. She’s my reader of first resort, and my tenuous connection with sanity.

I suppose I also write for a sort of nebulous group of ‘people who like stuff which is like what I am writing,’ and, of course, I write the stories which I want to read, which I want to tell.

Have you ever used your dreams as a source of inspiration or resolution?

My dreams are not generally useful to me in that way. They make little sense in the light of day, have annoying characters, and frustrating, fragmented plots. Every so often I wake in the night, write something down thinking I’ve got the best idea ever. Then I come to it the next morning and it says something like: “Australia eaten by giant pie! Curious reversal of ingestion. Beer also. Mountains like camels have enduring affection for semolina!”

You can see how much that makes the basis for great literature. (It’s always possible the problem is actually my handwriting, which is very bad.)

I do, however, wake up in the morning sometimes with answers to problems which I was working on the night before. I tend to think of that as just letting my subconscious do the work while I take a break.

Have you ever had an idea for your book, and enacted it out in the real world to see what the outcome would be?

My God. Can you imagine? Pick any single incident from The Gone-Away World and just picture it. I’d be writing this from an asylum, is the first thing. The second is that half the planet would be on fire. No, I never have.

Aside from the practical, part of the point of writing is that I create a world where I control the outcomes. I don’t need to know what would actually happen. A lot of the time, I’m starting with what happens and engineering the cause.

Have you got a first reader, and how much do you listen to them, and your Editor? Do their views on your work concur?

Well, I’ve mentioned Clare. I listen to what she says – as with my editors at Heinemann and Knopf. I don’t always do what they suggest – and in any case they often disagree on a given point. When, for example, Edward Kastenmeier says to me: “Nick, seriously, I have no idea what’s happening in this sequence,” that’s something I pay attention to, because Edward is smart and literate and if he doesn’t get it I have fundamentally screwed the pooch in some way and it needs addressing. Edward has pointed out that I (like a lot of his writers) do not respond to that kind of note by going and changing that specific sequence. I go and change something a hundred pages earlier and it’s all different suddenly. Apparently that’s normal.

What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given?

“Go and write something.”

But that’s a staggeringly unhelpful answer at first glance, so I’ll give you a couple more. The first is my father’s favourite:

“ ‘The cat sat on the mat’ is mundane. But ‘the cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is the beginning of something.”

And for whatever it’s worth, here’s my own contribution to the discussion:

There is no such thing as “writer’s block”. If you cannot write a passage, it is not because there is some mystical psychological constriction. It is either the very same skill which allows you to write in the first place telling you that you have screwed the pooch and need to fix what you have already written before you proceed, or it is that you have something so messed up in your real life that it needs working on before you go to your desk. Deal with it. Then go and write something.

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