Andrew O'Hagan
Andrew O'Hagan
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When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire.
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In Britain, the great hidden secret of talking animals and children's literature is how political it was in its bones, beneath the obvious cuteness.
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Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.
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We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time - sometimes time out from their realist fixations - to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.
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I don't believe in the meteoric culture of anxiety, generally. Obviously, some people have it, some people are crippled by it, but most of the novelists I've ever known are in love with influence. They thrive on it.
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Everybody has an idea of the kind of society they'd like to live in, and I would like to live in one where our senior politicians were spirited and original and possibly even good at what they do.
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Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.
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When I was growing up, there was a feeling in one's living room as much as in one's local gallery that a little elitism was good for the soul.
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You'll find that no pride is greater than the pride that comes with being thick. Britain is filled with people who are really proud of their stupidity.
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There's a horrible fallacy that exists in the popular discussion of fiction these days: the idea that a successful central character need be 'likeable' or 'sympathetic'. It is surely more important that they be human, no? More crucial that they breathe?
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Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.
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I probably owe my political dismay to New Labour, but also my growing sense that the satirical shape of human affairs is international and historical, not glued to the tawdry ambitions of a team of politicians who represent nothing but themselves.
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Long before the arrival of reality TV - before speed cameras, before recording angels on buses and lampposts - I felt I was living in a country that already knew how to watch itself. It was journalism that held the responsibility for seeing who we were and noticing what we did.
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A theatre is not a blank page for editorial, it is not a soapbox or a Tannoy system: it is a conscience that wakes with what is happening in the space, and wakes further still in response to what people are making of it.