When Adam Foulds was still at school, his English teacher took him aside and
suggested that he think seriously about keeping the rough drafts of his
poems. They could, the master insisted, prove useful for future literary
scholars.
At the time, the young Foulds thought the advice flattering, but rather
absurd. Who wouldn’t? He had, after all, started writing poetry only a few
months before, and was still just 16.
Seventeen years on, though, the teacher’s words look less like foolishness and
more like prescience. Now 33, Foulds - born and raised in northeast London,
and whose most recent job was driving a fork-lift truck - has just produced,
in quick succession, two remarkable books: a bittersweet debut novel, The
Truth About These Strange Times, and a dark, vivid, extraordinarily
accomplished narrative poem about Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising, The Broken Word.
The first, published last July, has just won the Sunday Times Young Writer
of the Year award; the second, out last week, has been hailed by Craig Raine
as “word perfect” and by our own Peter Kemp as “superlative”. Together, the
two books announce, in letters of fire 10ft tall, the arrival of a
significant literary talent.
Foulds - personable, intense, modest and just a little wary of being
interviewed - is still reeling from recent events when we meet at the
Horniman Museum, in south London, round the corner from where he lives. He
didn’t get much sleep the night before the Sunday Times award earlier this
month, and hasn’t had much since. “It’s a question of adjustment,” he says.
This, it turns out, is one of his first interviews. He smokes intently
during our discussion, fortifies himself with several cups of strong coffee,
shakes more than is strictly necessary in the chill spring wind and has to
make several visits to the lavatory. As well as being tired, he is, plainly,
slightly nervous.
Several things strike one forcibly as he talks about his work. One is the
sheer, boggling variety of his output. The Truth About These Strange Times
is a winning and often very funny odd-couple caper, in which an inept
Scottish loner, Howard, becomes protector to Saul, a 10-year-old maths
prodigy made miserable by his father’s ambitions for him. The Broken Word is
very different, a vivid and sometimes bloody poetic sequence that recreates
the Kenya emergency through the eyes of an increasingly troubled and violent
English public schoolboy called Tom. Foulds’s third, recently drafted book
is different again, a historical novel about the poet John Clare, set in an
1840s Epping madhouse. Behind that are a stack of other ideas – a novel
about postwar Sicily, another narrative poem, a second contemporary comedy -
queuing up in Foulds’s head like planes at an airport. “I suppose,” he says,
without apparent irony, “I don’t really know what kind of a writer I am yet.
I find things that interest me and try to serve them.”
Just as striking as Foulds’s eclecticism is the sheer intensity of his
ambition. He reads voraciously - a bewildering array of books are mentioned
in the two hours we’re together, from David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism to
Danilo Kis’s A Tomb for Boris Davidovich - and he seems to have sacrificed
his life to the single, central project of being an author.
The writing bug bit him at 15, when a teacher at Bancroft’s School, north
London (alma mater of fellow novelist Hari Kunzru), asked him to take part
in a poetry workshop. “I felt instantly this was what I was going to do,” he
recalls (he’d wanted to be a zoologist till then), and he quickly started
firing off three or four poems a week. He has been frenetically writing ever
since - at Oxford, where he studied English and fell under the wing of Craig
Raine; on the University of East Anglia’s MA writing programme, where he was
taught by Andrew Motion before switching from poetry to novels; and in a
succession of mundane jobs taken in a deliberate attempt to give himself
“mental space”. Hence the recent stint as a fork-lift driver.
Such intensity - and it shows in writing that is full of remarkable,
concentrated and pungent images - has its perils. He admits to having had
nightmares, lots of them, while writing The Broken Word. “They were mostly
related to the detention camps, nightmares about physical violence. As I had
these dreams, I had this uncomfortable feeling of being complicit and
somehow responsible.” He has, too, occasionally alarmed friends and
colleagues - as when, while testing some computer software, he sent his
agent a Kafka quote about buried axes and needing to write books that
“affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone
we loved more than ourselves... like a suicide”. “I do think that,” Foulds
says with a shamefaced smile, “but I also want to entertain people. What I’m
after is somewhere between trauma and a holiday.”
Is writing, I ask, that sensible a profession for him? “I’ve wondered about
that, particularly after writing the poem. I don’t know... EL Doctorow says
somewhere that when a novelist composes a novel, the composition of himself
is at stake. That’s true, but I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
In fact, rather than seeking to minimise the risks, Foulds always seems, in
his choice of subjects and approaches, to want to up the ante. “I know a lot
of actors, and they often talk about needing the stakes to be high in drama.
A piece of fiction isn’t exciting for me unless you sense an abyss beneath
the characters.” An abyss beneath yourself, too? “Yes, of course.”
For all this edgy talk, Foulds seems a remarkably self-contained character. He
is not boastful, merely confident of his calling. He can’t think of any
particular writers who influence him, merely particular books that excite
him. He has spent a lot of his writing career trying to paint himself out of
the picture; he gave up poetry at UEA because he was bored by the solipsism
of lyric verse, and abandoned an early novel because it was “too close to
home and the typical first novel that talks about your school experiences”.
He doesn’t see many of his UEA colleagues (such as Ben Rice, Panos Karnezis
and Clare Allan) because of the often “peculiar” atmosphere among competing
writers: “Someone would have a deal or an agent, and there would be a little
stir of panic among the rest of us.” Instead, he mixes with actor friends
(his girlfriend has just finished a stint at the RSC), plays the violin
(he’s modest, but admits to practising unaccompanied Bach) and writes.
Future researchers – the ones flagged by his teacher, perhaps – may have to
look hard to find Foulds in his first two books, but he is there, squashed
in among the research. Bizarre as it may seem, The Truth About These Strange
Times came out of a rereading of War and Peace, when he wondered what would
have happened to Pierre if such a socially disabled character had not come
into money early. Hence the stumbling but sympathetic figure of Howard.
Foulds’s own life is reflected in the book, instead, in the trauma suffered
by the put-upon Saul – a much exaggerated memory, he insists, of his own
anxieties during his senior entrance exams. Tom in The Broken Word,
transformed by events from an innocent teenager into the perpetrator of
terrible acts of violence, is, he concedes, a version of his young self.
Much of the rest is the result of research (extraordinary, considering he
has never been to Kenya) and a desire to explore a raw, rarely discussed
subject.
What, though, about the one thing that does unite the two books, the presence
behind the damaged central characters of unsatisfactory father figures?
Foulds’s own father is a chartered accountant who converted to Judaism to
marry his mother and has now, late in life, trained as a rabbi. Foulds
himself is not religious, but says his father’s influence on his books is
not something worth discussing. We let the matter drop. A full examination
of that, like much else, may have to wait for those future literary
scholars.
To buy The Truth About These Strange Times (Orion) for £7.59, inc p&p,
and The Broken Word (Vintage) for £8.45, inc p&p, call The Sunday
Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
