Marcel Theroux is a British novelist and broadcaster, who has written The Stranger in The Earth and The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes: a paper chase for which he won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2002. His third novel, A Blow to the Heart, was published by Faber in 2006, and  his fourth, Far North in March 2009 (read Simon A’s review). He is the older son of the American travel writer and novelist, Paul Theroux, and his younger brother, Louis Theroux, is a journalist and television presenter.

We caught up with Marcel to talk to him about his writing and the ideas and inspiration behind Far North.

We always like to ask – are you a bookgeek?

Indubitably.

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

It’s my wife, in fact, and I feel I’ve succeeded if I can get her to cry at the end.

What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given? And what’s the most important thing you learned about writing from your father?

The best piece of advice, — and I can’t remember where it came from — is not to talk about the book until you’ve written it. Talking too much about a book in progress can just drain the life out of it for you.

From my dad, I really learned the importance of tenacity, rewriting, and just keeping your bum on the chair doing what my dad calls “woolgathering”. My dad’s also good with practical stuff. He pointed out to me once that when you get stuck with a book, it’s often the case that there’s a problem that needs addressing much earlier in the book. I found that very helpful.

Where do you do most of your writing?

I’ve got a desk in our spare room where I work.

Do you read reviews/critiques of your books?

I really don’t. Even with the best review, I’m afraid there’ll be a line that will stick in my head and buzz around in there forever. And as for a bad review, why would you put yourself through that?

Far North is set in a grim near-future – although we (and Makepeace) don’t get to know a lot of the details of ‘the fall’, how far did you work them out for your own purposes to enable you to write the book?

I read around the subject a lot — and was lucky enough to make a documentary about global warming during which I met James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis, and read his books and a book by Martin Rees called Our Final Century. I had a pretty clear idea of what had happened in Makepeace’s world, but I didn’t want Far North to be a book about global warming. I wanted it to be about what happens to human nature in extremis

Do you see Far North as following in the tradition of literary dystopia (1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, etc.), and would you say you were influenced by those kinds of books?

Well, that’s very exalted company and I would be proud to be following that tradition. I was influenced by a number of books. I’d single out Riddley Walker, Under the Skin, Waiting for the Barbarians, Roadside Picnic, but also Huckleberry Finn, which takes place in a dystopic, slave-owning civilization of the recent past.

The idea of American exiles settling in Russia is a pretty striking premise for Far North? What inspired you to make that leap?

At its simplest, I think it was because I’d been to Siberia, thought it was beautiful and fantasized about living there. Also, when I was writing the book, I was thinking a lot about Westerns and how they deal with the bringing of civilization to an empty (of course, actually occupied by Native Americans, but that’s another kettle of fish) land. I wanted Far North to be a kind of reverse Western, an Eastern, where complex institutions are unravelling. I’ve always been interested in that pioneer streak in people which makes them believe that, with another fresh start, they’ll escape what’s bad in human nature. The other thing is that I had studied the demography of Russia and was amazed to find that the country’s population is shrinking by 700,000 people a year. The needs of the pioneers for a fresh start and the government’s need for new people is part of the backstory of the book.

Does Far North reflect your thinking about the brittleness of our modern society, with social order unable to survive a major catastrophe?

It reflects my perception of this odd paradox: that while we’re beneficiaries of the most advanced technology the world has ever seen, most of have no clue how it works and can’t fix it if it breaks. And furthermore, as a result of our specialization in particular skills, we’ve mostly lost the general skills that even our recent ancestors had. I think we all – myself included – tend to think there’s something antiquated about traditional societies. But in a reduced world, subsistence agriculture and reindeer husbandry will look like very forward thinking options, while hedge fund managers and advertising creatives will last about as long as their tinned food holds out.

And book reviewers too, we suspect! Marcel Theroux, thank you very much.

Bookmark to