Well, I saw a really alarming newspaper article
just a week or so ago in which it was—some
survey had shown that more than 50 percent
of self-identifying Republicans believed that
universities were bad for America, really
that universities were actually a negative,
harmful force in American life.
I mean I had never seen any group of people
saying that before, so that was shocking.
And I do think this is not unique to America,
because also in England there is a similar
kind of distrust of expertise.
In the Brexit vote there—one of the things
that came up over and over again was a dislike
of experts “telling you what to think”.
And so somehow this mistrust of “people
who know things” has become internationalized,
it’s not just something about the American
Right.
Obviously to somebody who has seen knowledge
as being a great virtue and who has spent
his life trying to accumulate little bits
of it and somebody who thinks of knowledge
as a kind of beauty, it’s very discomforting
to say the least to have people who think
of it as being suspicious.
You know, um...
Because what’s happening it seems to me
is a strange distortion of the idea of the
elite.
If you ask me “What’s an elite?”
I would think more about the many, many billionaires
sitting in the Trump administration.
Here’s a government with more super-rich
people in it than has ever been in any American
government, and that government calls college
professors and journalists elites.
We’re not the ones with private planes and
golf courses in the Bahamas—relatively few
novelists have these things.
And the idea that we’re the elites, whereas
that group, that kind of 0.1 of the 1 percent
that considers itself to be in some way possessing
the common touch, that just seems like an
absurd comic inversion of reality.
I think one of the things we see at the moment,
and I tried to in a way capture in the novel,
is this idea of a world turned upside down,
in which things that one thought of as being
normal—solid, believable descriptions of
reality—are being stood on their head everyday.
The idea of reality itself, the idea of truth
is something verifiable and objective, all
these things are being inverted and knocked
off their pedestals.
Well, I mean there is a terrible thing which
writers sometimes say to each other, which
is, “The worse it is the better it is,”
because when the world is in a terrible condition
there’s a lot to write about.
I mean one demonstration of this is the literature,
very often underground literature—the Samizdat
literature of the Soviet Union was of an extraordinary
quality when there was this colossal adversary
of Soviet authoritarianism.
Many writers, both in a fiction and nonfiction,
rose to that challenge and created extraordinary
work.
And I think it’s not unfair to say that
the literature of the post Soviet Union, the
literature of Russia since 1989, that there
is a somewhat of a falling off, that it’s
not quite as intense and extraordinary as
that earlier work because of the lack of the
adversity.
To put it in another way it seems to me that
spy fiction was enormously damaged by the
loss of the Soviet Union because suddenly,
who were the enemy?
So I do think that in times this, which are
very adversarial and in which the question
of the truth has become so central, there’s
a big place for art, there’s a really big
role for art to speak up in such a time.
And I think more or less every writer I know
in America is considering how best to respond
to the place we find ourselves, including
me.
Most of this book was written before November
the 8th, I mean the vast bulk of it was finished
before the election.
And I’m sorry to say that I guessed right,
that’s to say that I always knew that if
things had gone another way that there would’ve
had to be some reshaping of a part of the
book.
(But actually anyway I needed to do a bit
of reshaping because things don’t always
turn out exactly as you foresee.)
But I wanted to try and capture this strange
moment and to tell the truth that part of
the novel is very much background rather than
foreground, so the actual storyline of the
book, what happens to the characters and how
they resolve their particular dilemmas, that
would not have been altered in any way if
the election had gone in another way.
I mean the story is the story, but the context
of the story, the way in which America developed
from the beginning of the Obama administration
to the present moment, what happened in that
arc of time, that’s the context against
which the story takes place.
And there I had to guess and gamble a little
bit and then try and fix things right up till
the moment the book went to the presses, so
that’s more or less—there’s a moment
when they take your fingers off the keyboard
and say “we’re printing the book today,
so you can’t do anymore!”
But until that moment I was trying to fix
things.
