RUDD: You were brave to bind the plot of The Brief History of the Dead so closely around Coca-Cola’s marketing ambitions. Why did you opt for a real company?

BROCKMEIER: I considered inventing a company, but nothing sounded anything other than needlessly artificial and, frankly, silly. I needed a device such as Coca-Cola to set the plot in motion, but my worry was aesthetic: I had to find a product name that wouldn’t ruin the atmosphere of the prose. Coke is so widely known that the word almost reads as a generic noun. Simply enough, it seemed to cause fewer aesthetic problems than anything else.

Has there been feedback from Coca-Cola?

As far as I know, there has been none at all from Coca-Cola. The feedback from readers, has been pretty consistent. Everywhere I go, people ask me this, and I tell them that there have been some pretty elaborate disclaimers on the copyright page, and I can only presume that my publishers know what they are doing.

My children are intrigued by the idea of what it would be like to be the last person alive. Does your book appeal to a younger audience?

I would ask how old your children are. There is nothing about the storyline or the shape of its characters to prevent younger readers enjoying it, but my guess is that the vocabulary and complexity of the sentences might be a bit intimidating for certain children. That said, it is no more elaborate than, say, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.

What is the significance of the blind man?

First and foremost, he is a human being, and signifies his own individual humanity. In many ways the novel is about the people who inhabit our memory, whom we carry around with us, unavoidably, simply because we have encountered them, and of all the characters the blind man is the one least able to let go of his own past. I was also interested in the technical challenge of writing a chapter from the perspective of a character who has to rely entirely on non-visual senses to understand what he experiences.

Which chapters were more demanding to write; those about the polar expedition or those about the next world?

Definitely the polar expedition, first because they demanded that I sustain a single narrative voice, from a single point of view, over a great number of pages, but also because Laura’s story is in many ways a classic survival narrative, and I felt the need to remain true to the traditions of that kind of narrative. The invented world allowed me a freer hand.

Are you making a political point about global terrorism?

If I am, it’s a sort of sideways point, and mostly unconscious. I think of the topical aspects of the book as part of its background, atmosphere, rather than one of its distinguishing features. To me, the imaginative centre lies inside Laura and the inhabitants of the city, their souls and the ties that bind them.

Are you worried about how it will translate to the big screen?

It’s not yet clear that the story will make it to the screen, but I’m more enthused than nervous about the idea. Certainly, plenty of novels have been ruined by the studios, but there are also good novels that have become good movies (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Ice Storm, Children of Men) and even novels that have been bettered in the translation (I would say that James Whale’s Frankenstein, for instance, is a deeper-reaching, more powerful work of the imagination than the Mary Shelley book). In any case, I’ll be satisfied if it comes together with a certain amount of artistry and inspires more people to read the book.

You preface the book with an explanation of how some African societies believe in a third state other than being alive or dead. Did this prompt the book?

I read about that African notion of the three terrains of existence — the living, the dead but not yet forgotten, and the dead who have slipped out of living memory — several years before I began the novel, and even before that I felt that memories, both pleasant and painful, lay close to the centre of daily life. But yes, it was in thinking about this idea that my notion of the city came about, and along with it most of the characters.

Did you initially plan to write only the first chapter, as a short story?

I had it in mind that the book would be a novel from the very beginning. With every novel so far, I’ve tried to approach the opening as though it were a self-contained story. In part, this makes for a less intimidating first leg of what can be a very long journey, and in part I think of it as akin to placing a certain amount of money in the bank: if the novel falls apart unexpectedly, at least I’ll have a good short story to show for my work.

The key questions

- Is it fair to call the book a fantasy that contains an uncomfortable amount of potential reality?

- Did the novel prompt you to try to remember the faces and names of people you had met only briefly?

- How do Laura’s exploits compare with other, nonfictional, depictions of polar exploration?

- Is Brockmeier’s (below) afterlife comforting? What is the impact of the constant heartbeat?

- Is the spread of the virus too surreal to be distressing?

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