Stuart Evers: 'We either look into the gutter or at the upper classes'
Stuart Evers’s acclaimed debut collection Ten Stories About Smoking won the London book award in 2011. His new novel The Blind Light is an ambitious fictional account of 60 years in the intertwined lives of two soldiers from very different backgrounds, who meet during national service in 1959 and raise families in the shadow of the nuclear threat.
You made your name as a writer of sharp, spare short stories; your novel is 536 pages long. When did you start working on it?
I can tell you exactly. Six years, 11 months and five days ago. The idea came when I went to visit a place called Hack Green Secret Nuclear Bunker with my mum and dad and my wife. It is what was known as a regional seat of government; in the event of a nuclear bomb dropping, the local dignitaries would be rushed to it. It’s now a visitor centre.
It’s not far from where you grew up, in Cheshire?
Yes, just around the corner. And my mum and I had a shared terror of nuclear war. We walked around this place in utter silence. A couple in their early 20s were down there too, though, and they were looking at it all as if it was ancient history. Laughing at some of the exhibits. And I came out and thought I had to write something about that, about how quickly we seem to have forgotten the fear of those cold war years.
The book begins at an army installation called Doom Town. Is that made up?
No. I was doing this research and an old Pathé newsreel popped up on my screen. I was knocked sideways by this report from a bombed-out town where soldiers were learning how they would cope in the aftermath of a nuclear war. There was one particular shot of a man in bandages being fed a cup of tea by another soldier. I looked at these two young men and thought: what would this kind of experience of the end of the world do to you? How would you react? It started from there.
I lost count of, and patience with, the number of novels published in which everyone was extraordinary in some way
Drum and Carter, the two soldiers, are divided by class, but united by a certain paranoia; their lives feel out of control in different ways.
Yes, I think there was something personal in wanting to find a control of my own. I had become a father when I started the book and that maybe brings a more complicated set of fears. As I write in the book, the first political system we all encounter is the family – whether it is a benevolent oligarchy or an absolute dictatorship. Fatherhood makes you ask questions of the kind of person you want to be. I was interested in that difference between the upper-middle-class approach of Carter and the more prosaic working-class lifestyle that Drum enjoys.
It feels a bit unusual, bizarrely, to read a serious English novel in which the male protagonist is not a publisher or a writer or something. You were conscious of that?
Yes. When I was growing up I didn’t see people like myself in any of the fiction I was reading. Even Orwell and Joyce were public school boys. Then the school librarian gave me a copy of Room at the Top by John Braine, and I just hoovered up all those “kitchen sink” novels, The L-Shaped Room, Billy Liar, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, just because I recognised the pubs and the people.
It sometimes seems that fictional voice disappeared along with mass employment in the 1970s.
My first job after university was as a bookseller. I lost count of, and patience with, the number of novels published in which everyone was extraordinary in some way; in Ian McEwan’s books for example. Whereas the American idea – in Raymond Carver or Jayne Anne Phillips or Toni Morrison – seemed the opposite. You would have ordinary people placed in an extraordinary situation.
Why do you think there was that difference?
I don’t know. You think maybe we don’t have the same cultural touchpoints – the Vietnam war and so on. But write down all the significant events in Britain from, say, 1970 to 1998. The history is teeming with fertile ideas. We have a habit of either looking into the gutter, or at the upper classes. Either Trainspotting or Enduring Love. I wanted to try to write for people who weren’t being written about.
The air of paranoia your characters live with also seems to speak to the current time.
Yes, there was this distant sense in the cold war that everything might fall apart – and what is your plan B? How do you keep your family safe? For the rich, those questions were always easier: we’ll head to our holiday home. It doesn’t feel a million miles away from what we are going through now. My editor called me up and asked me if I wanted to push the publication of the book back to next year. I said no. People who have read it said they found it curiously calming in some ways. That we get through things.
And history mostly happens without us?
Yes, there is a great James Salter story about a man having an affair in a hotel room and afterwards they turn on the TV to see that they have just missed man walking on the moon. I have always liked that idea.
Which book do you most often return to?
I am not a great rereader of books. But one I have gone back to recently is Berg, by Ann Quin.
Which books do you have by your bedside?
They are on my Kindle. I am reading this brilliant debut novel called Machine, by Susan Steinberg. I have a collection of essays on the go called Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions by Toni Cade Bambara, a contemporary of Toni Morrison who died young. That is wonderful. And also I am reading a book called I Hotel, by Karen Tei Yamashita, which feels like it is trying to do 14 interesting things at once.
• The Blind Light by Stuart Evers is published by Pan Macmillan (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
