Kevin Brooks talks to Nikki Gamble about his latest novel, Being, and explains why violence is often a necesary element in his stories.

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To begin, perhaps you could tell us a little about how Being came into being.

I don’t usually put stuff from my life directly into my books but in this case I did go into hospital for an endoscopy about 20 years ago. I wondered what it might be like to wake up in a strange room surrounded by strange people and I have been fascinated by how we put our trust in medics who knock us out with anaesthetic so that we become lumps of meat lying there with no control over what happens to us. It was just one of those ideas that I’d had for a long time. And I’ve written a couple of similar books that for one reason or another haven’t been published.

You have said that this was a difficult book to write and that you found the ending especially hard, why was that?

I knew what I wanted to do, but it was just quite hard to get it right. With the first draft it was a matter of simply writing it, but when it was finished I had to write it again, write it again, and write it again, until I was happy with it. The final manuscript was basically the same story, but it was told in a slightly different way. In the earlier drafts I took Robert further and some other things happened at the end which weren’t really necessary. I kept paring the story back and back and back until it reached the final version, and that seemed okay.

You leave the story at a point of real emotional intensity, and that’s one of its strengths.

I knew that people would imagine that it had been written with a view to a sequel, but it wasn’t. That’s not to say, there won’t ever be one. I could do sequels for a number of my books because that’s the way they are written. I’ve even worked out what I could do with some of them, but I don’t really like sequels, so I don’t bother.

Well stories don’t really have endings? At least the stories in life as opposed to the stories in books.

Yeah. I do give small hints about where Robert might be going. All books are like journeys. And in this one Roberts starts off with no family, no friends, just himself, and he’s okay with that. But his self-image is taken away from him, so he drops down really low. Then gradually builds up before finally going down again. I prefer not knowing exactly what happens, because the book’s about not knowing.

You changed the way in which you wrote the final version. How did it differ from your first draft?

At first I tried to write it as a diary, which I quite liked because it was immediate and gave a good sense of what it was like to be Robert. It emphasised his confusion and the sense of not knowing what was happening. But it didn’t flow very well and it was too constraining because I had to imagine him sitting down and writing it.

And with a diary you have the issue of having to write it in the present tense, which may, or may not, be right for the story…

Yeah, it’s hard if it’s in the present and you’re going back to the past. There are limits to what you can achieve with language. I realised that by telling it as a first person narration I could include more dialogue and interaction between people and achieve a better sense of character. Although in diary format I could emphasise his extreme loneness (not loneliness) it was hard to carry that through an entire book.

Yes, in the diary format you would have to report the dialogue and that wouldn’t sound very authentic. I think it would be quite hard to write this story in anything other than the first person though…

It could be done, but teenagers are very focussed on themselves and there’s so much in their heads that I think it works much better in first person rather than looking through someone else’s eyes. In third person you’d lose the self-questioning that is fundamental to this book.

And it’s important for the reader to experience the human qualities in Robert, that may not be as easy to convey in the third person.

Yeah, exactly. Robert needs to see and respond to other people and you need to feel how he responds to their perceptions. You need more than the surface view and with the third person it would be hard to get beyond that.

There’s a lot in the book about trust and trusting: who you can trust? Is it better to trust and be disappointed than not to trust people at all? ….

Yes, and also the idea of accepting that you can trust somebody, even though you might have doubts about them. You can decide to have a 100% trust in somebody, even though you might not be 100% sure that they are being true to you.

So that’s more like faith than trust…

That’s it exactly. If you could press a button and see God, it would be too easy. If you are religious, you’ve got to have faith. I’m interested in how that kind of faith, which we can learn to acquire, affects our relationships.

One of the things that struck me about Being is that is a deeply human story with a non-human protagonist: a non-human being.

It’s an idea I’ve had for a long time. I wasn’t directly influenced by things I’ve read but when I was 12 or 13, I used to read Science Fiction by Ray Bradbury and Philip K Dick, which is more about inner space than outer space. It’s hard stuff to think about and when you get older and adults often stop thinking about it because there aren’t any answers. But that’s why I like writing books. Humans are really fascinating.

And you seem to be interested in how humans respond to things they don’t understand..

Well that’s another theme which runs through my other books as well. I think it’s a theme that is particularly relevant in contemporary society; we have to find reasons for everything and attribute blame even when there may be no fault. I think searching for answers is interesting but we shouldn’t think we are always going to find them. Most big things don’t have answers and that’s why they are interesting. If they had answers, we would have found them centuries ago. Kissing the Rain is at one level about bullying. I’ve read books about bullying where it gets to the end and everything is resolved but if it was that easy there wouldn’t be a persistent bullying problem.

Some people might feel uncomfortable about the levels of violence in the book but I don’t think there’s any sense that you take pleasure in the violence. Do you think that violence can sometimes be a solution to violent problems?

Of course people are entitled to their views about the violence. There are people who take pleasure in violence: why, for example, do football hooligans beat each other up? So, there might be elements in the book that show a particular character taking pleasure in violence because that’s the way it is. But I hate violence and conflict; it’s something I’ve avoided all of my life. But I have experienced it and it’s the worst thing in the world. It’s a hugely important part of life and there’s no point in writing a book like Road of the Dead, which is about the power of violence, if you’re going to write something weak like ‘I punched him on the nose.’

Well you can’t really talk about violence as either a problem or a solution unless you are willing to be true in your description of it.

Yeah, otherwise it’s like a philosophical essay. I think it’s strange because, violence and its depiction are very acceptable in fantasy fiction. But violence isn’t like it is shown in the movies where it’s usually dull and cold, quick and stupid. If I’m writing about violence, I’ll try and show it how it is.

There are all sorts of contradiction about what we consider acceptable or unacceptable for young people. I found friends were surprised that I took my son to see Hotel Rwanda but they wouldn’t pass comment on him seeing the latest Bond film. Which is the most affecting in its portrayal of violence? Don’t we want children to empathise?

Yes, Bond films can deal with violence without any obligation to look at the consequences. It’s just bang, he’s dead, and somehow that’s fine. On the other hand the other extreme is the Reservoir Dogs, sort of, violence, which I wouldn’t use either. In the scenes in Road of the Dead there’s no explicit physical violence or torture' but I emphasise the fear and the coldness.

Being is a book of contrasts. Yes it has a hard edge but it’s also very soft both in the depiction of relationships and observations of the natural world. Do you feel more at home in the urban or rural environment?

You’re exactly right. I come from a small village outside Exeter. When I was a kid, I would mess around in, fields and lanes. I’ve always loved wildlife and animals. But I’ve lived in the city too. I used to live in London, and it’s the best place in the world for me. But then London’s full of grass and trees and there’s plenty of countryside around it, so it’s pretty much the same thing. I don’t always love cities but they’re never boring. Even in the worst city in the world fascinating things are happening.

I think because the book is so gritty the natural descriptions catch you unawares…

This is how I conceptualise it: There are different levels that we work on. Our normal lives are medium level, where we see everything short term; we don’t see ourselves in the bigger picture. The lower level is how kids live; they love streets with drains and tiny bits and pieces in a wall. That’s the level I experience when I walk across a field and look down and see the field as a vast world populated by insects and worms. And you can take it even lower where you find out about the sub-atomic world. I really enjoy reading about quantum physics; it’s stunning stuff. Then you can go above that medium level. The big picture is that humans have only been around as a species for a few thousand years and we’ll all be gone in 20,000 years. You can look at America as an empire and see that it works like all other empires before it, they’re powerful, they bully, and they invade or take over weaker things. In a few hundred years time there will be a different empire, that’s the way it is. And you can work on those levels in stories I quite like bringing in big things, but sometimes you can have a character just watching a beetle.

Stylistically, do you think your writing has developed?

Martyn Pig was by no means my first novel. I already knew words because I’d spent a long time writing music and lyrics and I knew about how to use rhythm. But since Martyn Pig I’ve learnt a lot more about writing novels, which is good, but it brings its own problems. When I was writing Martyn Pig I’d just write spontaneously whereas now I’m more aware of the choices that’s certainly the case with the rhythm of the text. Tone is different for me that’s intuitive, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, I’d prefer not to have the choice but, yeah, I’m, sort of, just learning all the time.

 No matter how good you are there are still things that can be learnt about the craft…

Yeah, it’s enjoyable to stretch yourself to try slightly different things. The best novelists are quite old because they’ve been doing it for a long time. I think you can write when you’re old but you can’t really do the music thing, that’s part of the reason that I’m writing now. Older musicians might be good technically but what makes them special has gone by the time they’re 30.

Well I don’t think you could be accused of being stuck in a rut; all of your books are so different. Though perhaps they have strong connections thematically…

Mmm… although I like reading a particular type of crime fiction, I don’t think I could write the same characters over and over again (unless they’re going to earn me 12 million pounds).

The pragmatist in you would win out then…

Yeah, yeah.

Thank you Kevin Brooks for talking to Write Away