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BOOK: The People's Act of Love

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AL:
One of the things that particularly impressed me with
The
People’s Act of Love
was the fact that you used two elements from history, the castration sect and cannibalism, that could easily have overwhelmed the story, and yet they remain almost peripheral. They are important to the story, but they in themselves are not the story. Would you agree?

JM:
It was a hope of mine that this would happen. They are important, but it is always difficult to confront horror full-on. You don’t want to be seen to be avoiding unpleasantness, yet nor do you want to be simply grossing your readers out, or scaring them, for the pure sake of making a stranger’s guts churn. The more extreme an action, the harder you have to work to contain it within a bigger narrative, the more you are
likely to gain by subtlety and indirectness. So I did want to describe the act of castration, but simply, without excessive gore, and without toiling through too much biological detail about what it actually does to a man’s body to have his balls cut off, in terms of loss of testosterone. I always admired the scene in
Crime and Punishment
where Raskolnikov murders the pawnbroker and her sister. The actual murders, which are bloody, horrible, terrifying, are described in matter-of-fact terms. Immediately afterwards, with the corpses lying there, Raskolnikov sees that the door to the apartment is open. It is the sight of the open door, not the corpses on the floor, which he describes as ‘a horror such as he had never, never experienced before’. Genius.

AL:
A number of critics have picked up on the language used in the book. George Walden, writing in the
New Statesman
, remarked, ‘Meek has a good ear for that peculiarly ethereal tone that can inflect ordinary Russian speech, so that grand notions can be expressed in unpretentious, sometimes earthy language’. Lesley Chamberlain wrote, in the
Independent
, ‘one has to admire a British writer who can write convincingly as a Russian. There were linguistically odd moments when I thought I was reading a less than perfect translation’. How important was setting the linguistic tone in the book?

JM:
It was important. There is a degree of presumptuousness involved when a writer whose mother tongue is English writes a book in English in which none of the characters are English speakers. But I do speak and read Russian; I lived in the Russian-language world for eight years, a third of my adult life. Sometimes when I was writing the book, I did hear the Russian words in my head, and I did translate them.

AL:
It seems a brave and unconventional choice, to stage the novel in a long-forgotten war, in a part of the world that has rarely figured in English-language literature. Most of the novels longlisted for the Man Booker prize, for example, are set either in completely fictional worlds, or in a setting that has a fairly direct connection with the author. As a writer, are you influenced by prevailing fashions, in the sense of avoiding them?

JM:
I don’t believe in the idea of completely fictional worlds. You can never separate made-up
milieux
from the words you use to describe them, words which will, unavoidably, resonate in the readers’ heads with the not-made up
milieux
they have experienced. I read a lot of science fiction in my early teens and I recognised all the worlds there, every one. No matter how much alien geography and exotica you put in, you have to be able to describe it in familiar words, otherwise it’s incomprehensible, and there have to be recognisable patterns of behaviour among the characters, otherwise it’s dull. Even
Finnegan’s
Wake
and symbolist poetry don’t create a completely fictional world.

As for fashions – the books on the longlist, on the shortlist for that matter, seem quite diverse to me. The world of English-language literature, encompassing as it does India and North America and Africa and Australasia as well as all the British Isles, is too large, and the generational, ethnic and gender spread of working writers too great, for prevailing fashions. Experimental modernist fiction is out of fashion though, I grant you that.

AL:
As a reader, what are the elements that draw you to a novel? To put it another way, what kind of novels do you enjoy the most?

JM:
I like a wise author. One who is neither cynical nor idealistic, but has an observation about the world which is true. I loathe authors who use clichés as if they were words, authors for whom the texture of the sentence, its rhythm and structure, doesn’t matter. The sentences can be terse or elaborate; I don’t mind so long as I know the writer wants to and can fashion them well. There is nothing sweeter than a description which flies to the thing it describes and fits it, like a key hurled from ten feet slotting into its lock. I love to be surprised not so much by a twist of plot as a twist of characterisation. As soon as I read, in the very early pages of Michel Houellebecq’s
Atomised
, the sentence ‘It was rumoured the director was homosexual, but in reality he was simply a drunk’, I knew I would read the book to the end. All that matters, all that great novelists have in common, is truth, and narrative. What it is that makes you believe, and what makes you keep turning the page. Finally, I don’t believe I’ve ever read a great book which didn’t make me laugh, or at least force a wry smile, at least once. And that includes such sombre works as
If This is a Man
.

AL:
Irish novelist Dermot Bolger, talking about his latest novel
The Family on Paradise Pier
, said ‘if you really want to understand the past, it means you do not have heroes and villains; you remember the complexities of a decade and try not to be wise after the event’. Is there a challenge for a novelist dealing with the weight of history, in dealing with his/her characters? Should literature be non-judgemental? Is
The People’s Act
of Love
non-judgemental? It’s interesting that while Mutz may be the most sympathetic character, he’s far from the most charismatic (Anna, after all, loves and hates both Balashov and Samarin, not the reasonable and heroic Mutz).

JM:
Yes. Sad, isn’t it? And true, I think. Not ‘I think’: I know. You don’t have to be in a war for it to happen, either. When writing about the past, you have to avoid the temptation to irony or the application of retrospective morals. In my book that means no ‘I bumped into a funny little man in the western trenches, corporal by the name of Hitler’ and no concealing the pervasive racism and anti-semitism of 1919, even among relatively sympathetic characters. What is important is that you, the writer, sympathise with each expression of each character at the moment they are making it. A novel free of any moral framework runs the risk of dullness. But there is a difference between making a sharp observation about your characters’ behaviour, or about the behaviour of people in general, and making a judgement about it. The observation is the writer’s; the judgement is the reader’s. Yet by making the observation, you are inviting the judgement.

This interview originally appeared in the excellent online
magazine
Three Monkeys
. For more articles like this see
www.threemonkeysonline.com.

Praise

THE PEOPLE’S ACT OF LOVE

“James Meek’s visceral murder mystery has been the recipient of extravagant critical praise, and deservedly so. Vivid, brutal and exhilarating, it renders the mass of historical fiction pallid by comparison.”
Daily Mail

“Great book. Rich and illuminating and impossibly imaginative.”
John Harris, BBC
Newsnight Review

“It is hard to think of anything more worthy of this year’s British Booker … It is a huge achievement … Excellent.”
New Statesman

“A quite extraordinary novel. The language is so fresh and crisp and sparkling – and yet never for the sake of showing off. And what a narrative! What a story! There’s a majestic disdain for littleness in this book – for littleness of ambition, for narrowness of sympathy, for pettiness of imaginative scope. I admire it enormously.”
Philip Pullman

“A powerfully realised novel … supremely well plotted.”
Observer

“Recalls …
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
. Combines the epic sweep of a Russian classic with the psychological precision of the keenest suspense thriller … Meek has written a novel of ideas that offers thrills and chills aplenty for the many, and more than enough brain food for the hungry few.”
Literary Review

“A treasure-house of stories. Meek shows a splendid confidence … and an equally remarkable skill as gradually he weaves his stories together until at last the figure in the carpet is revealed, clear and coherent … There is intellectual control here, as well as a tumultuous imagination.”
Allan Massie,
Scotsman

“A big, bold, thrillingly different story told with uncanny authority. Meek understands the horrific power of evil, but he never loses his sense of humour or his affection for those odd moments of grace that keep the human heart alive.”
Michel Faber

“Left me breathless with admiration and envy.”
Bookseller

“It’s by the quality of the writing, never less than convincing and often extraordinarily vivid, that he deserves to be judged.”
Independent on Sunday

“For its fine set pieces, its sense of history and its persuasive, passionate love of Russia, this is a book to read.”
Helen Dunmore,
The Times

“This novel is very, very good … the real excitement lies in Meek’s skill in creating people, not puppets, and in weaving them into a masterful narrative that starts out slowly and then swiftly picks up steam, driving on like a locomotive to a powerful finish.”
Globe and Mail

“One has to admire a British writer who can write convincingly as a Russian … An ambitious work, authentically Russian-flavoured, and unusual both by virtue of its subject and its author.”
Independent

“Combines scenes of heart-pounding action and jaw-dropping revelations with moments of quiet tension and sly humour. This original, literary page-turner succeeds both with its credible psychological details and its grandeur and sweep.”
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“Stimulates thought but not at the price of sacrificing a simple, satisfying enjoyment. It is also redolent of a wonderful atmosphere, where the Siberian cold mixes like highly combustible explosive with human passion.”
Herald