From Victorian asylums to the mud of the Somme, Sebastian Faulks has taken readers on a decades-long tour of the past.
But his new book is a big leap forward. Richard Nye meets the master.
Sebastian Faulks is facing an uncertain future. Not personally, of course. When you’ve spent more than 30 years crafting some of the finest novels of our time, your status is beyond secure.
No, it’s the future of humanity that has preoccupied him of late. Specifically, the question of what would happen if humans were to use the techniques of fertility science to create not Homosapiens but hybrids. How might it go if yesterday’s Neanderthals reappeared as tomorrow’s world?
In his latest stunning gem, The Seventh Son, Faulks imagines the possible effects of such a leap into the great unknown. Set between 2030 and 2056, it is superficially a departure for a man whose work has often drawn deeply on the past. On closer inspection, however, the familiar Faulksian footprints appear. For whether the prism is love or war, manipulation of the species the miseries of the mind, Sebastian Faulks has spent volumes worrying about one thing: the puzzle of what it means to be human.
“You don’t think about all that as you’re writing, though,” he admits when I meet him at his local pub in Notting Hill. “Each book is a separate entity. It’s only with hindsight that you see the thematic connections."
The Seventh Son is a vertiginous read. Quite apart from the chilling experiment at its heart, the oh-so-near future it conjures is so evidently rooted in existing trends as to seem almost a fait accompli. For while some of it is satire – the hilariously loathsome talk show host recognizable in a frozen heartbeat – it is also an AI-driven world of hyperloop and talking cars, where restaurants serving meat have retreated to the margins of the night. Yet the author himself is surprisingly sanguine as he tucks into a gleaming scotch egg.
What strikes me about recent history is actually how little our lives have changed.
"Go back to 1993, when my daughter was born. There has probably been one major change since then – this thing,” he says, tapping his smartphone. “Otherwise, our concerns are pretty much the same: family, health, holidays, football. I’ve lived in London since 1975, and apart from a few more cycle lanes, it is still the same place.“
"AI and climate change present big challenges, and I’m much more worried about Western democracy than 20 years ago. But a lot of this lounge bar chat: we just don’t know what will happen. Our parents and grandparents went through far worse than anything our generation has encountered, yet they survived. One must retain some optimism in life.”
In Lukas Parn, the pioneer in the novel who masterminds the creation of the hybrid Seth, optimism has degenerated into hubris. A self-styled “philanthropic disrupter”, Parn justifies his intemperatemeddling by appealing to the benefits that could flow to humanity due to his illegal research. It is the great-good argument revisited: the individual's dignity sacrificed upon the altar of collective advance.
“People like Parn have a sense of entitlement,” reflects Faulks. “You see it with techy types, but also in the financial world – you know, taxes are for little people, normal rules don’t apply. The sort who can get away with walking into veggie restaurants and demanding a steak. I wouldn’t want to spend much time in their company, but there is a certain exhilaration about them. They cut through a lot of silly rules.“
Now, in the experiment, Parn would ask: what’s the worst that can happen? Seth gets to live a pleasant life, in a nice family, but he’s just a bit different. How bad is that compared to the total disdain for human life we’ve witnessed for the past 100 years?”
As in previous Faulk novels, the mystery of consciousness broods over the surface of the deep. For if consciousness is what makes Homo sapiens unique– this curious, unfathomable ability to know and to know that we know – how could earlier analogues of the species, like the Neanderthals, be described as human at all? Faulks is robustly non-committal.
“The possibilities are so haphazard,” he insists. “But my working hypothesis is that Neanderthals had a form of consciousness that was simply different from ours. More or less intelligent? We have no idea. As Wittgenstein remarked: ‘If a lion could talk, we would not know whereof he spake.’”
In the past, Faulks has described the emergence of consciousness as a “glitch”,; a random tripping of the wires that made possible both the symphonies of Beethoven and the agonies of Auschwitz and the Somme. But if process all there is, and everything we hold – the freedom to choose, the power of love – is birthed in arid biological chance, are not our fondest imaginings merely a kind of grand illusion?
“Well, I’m not sure that matters as long as the illusion works. What is the difference between free will and the illusion of free will?” The absence with the latter, perhaps, of any truly genuine meaning.
Life doesn’t have a meaning – it has a value.
"Meaning implies something revealed; value resides partly in personal satisfaction but also in one’s benign influence over others – looking after children, parents and so on. There is such a thing as a life well lived.”
In which case, at least in literary terms, Faulks would appear to have cracked it. Charlotte Gray, A Week in December, Where My Heart Used to Beat: book by the book, the influence of his prolific pen has grown. But it was Birdsong, the 1993 saga that summoned the horrors of the Trenches from their slumbers, that dramatically changed his life.
“World War I had fallen out of public awareness back then. Things are different now, following the centenary 2014, but in the early 90s it was just something mucky and nasty. Then Pat Barker started publishing her Regeneration Trilogy. It was as though she and I both sensed, independently, that the time to revive the subject had come. I knew it would be difficult though: a high tariff dive, you might say.”
He pulled it off. Birdsong embedded itself within the public affection – slowly at first, then later with the force of an exploding shell.
However, it is Human Traces (2005), Exhibit A for the Faulksian fascination with the fragilities of the mind, that is surely his magnum opus. A broad, majestic river of complex philosophical thought, fed by tributaries of the author's other signature themes, it charts the filtering origins of modern psychiatry through the prism of two idealistic friends, each inspired by the vision of ministering to minds diseased. The five years of writing and research stretched Faulks to the limit. Yet the result was its own reward: one of the great novels, according to Sir Trevor Nunn, “of this or any other century”.
“Yes, that’s the book on which I would plant my flag,” says Faulks. “I was 47 when I started it, confident and right at my physical peak. But still I wondered whether I would get through it. The key was to establish an arc for the two leading characters. So, Thomas starts out with literary passions and ends up as a materialist, while Jacques goes the other way, veering towards Freud. That was the breakthrough, as it gave me washing lines on which to hang it all. I couldn’t do anything on that scale now though. But that’s fine – I’ve done it!”
And while Human Traces is not quite his proudest achievement– that honour belongs to the boundary he once scored off Sir Garfield Sobers, cricket’s greatest ever all-rounder – its legacy is fully assured. Towards the end, there is a scene of searing beauty in which Thomas, now entering the foothills of dementia, receives an outpouring of thanks from a woman whom his care and skill had long ago delivered from the asylum. It is perhaps my favourite Faulks passage –and apparently, I am not alone.
“I had a letter from a Canadian psychiatrist,” he says. “He told me that he reads that scene every night just to remind himself that his life has had value. So, to have written it is immensely rewarding. That is my own value.”
Absolutely. Whether it means anything or not.
