.

  Anita has interviewed a wide range of leading figures including Paddy Ashdown, Jonathan Dimbleby and Eartha Kitt for newspapers and magazines
including the Guardian (where she wrote the Guardian G2 "Pieces of Me" column interviewing people in the public eye about their favourite possessions),
the Observer, Independent, Independent on Sunday, New Statesman, and for the BBC.
She has also chaired events at the Guardian Hay Festival, Oxfam Bookfest, Folkestone Book Festival and Jonathan Cape Poetry Day.

A

Anita has interviewed a wide range of people in the public eye including writers, actors, musicians, film directors, politicians, and adventurers, for national and international newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters and at various events around the world.

Glasgow is bathed in a cold yet beautiful sunlight. Sunlight bounces off the impressive architecture and catches light on shop facades and peoples’ faces. On such a lovely day as this, it is hard to imagine the crimes that lurk around the corner. Yet even the thought of the maverick Detective Inspector Rebus (Ian Rankin’s infamous fictional protagonist who daily trawls the dark underbelly of society so vividly evoked in Rankin’s novels), sends a sudden chill down the spine - as it has down the spines of people the world over, garnering his creator an international reputation, his novels to found on the world’s furthest shores.

I know that Ian Rankin has safely arrived as his latest tweet announces that he is shopping for Vinyl and meeting an old friend (Rankin is a popular and prolific user of Twitter where he tweets under the name @beathhigh). I have followed his tweets for a while, and our tweets - and paths - are soon to meet.

It is a two-fold celebration. We are here to celebrate the phenomenal work of Oxfam and their relationship with books, at the Oxfam Bookfest. “Be moved by the state of the world / angry about what’s unfair / and excited about making a distance”, read the blue posters adorning the Oxfam Bookshop on Byres Road, Glasgow. It is fitting that Ian Rankin is here, for he is indeed a writer moved by the state of the world, and his writing grapples with many injustices. Indeed, as a crime writer, the theme of justice - and its subversion - is at the very heart of his gripping narratives.

It is also a landmark time for Ian Rankin, who has turned 50. Although looking much younger, his work is filled with wisdom even beyond these years as his hugely popular novels excavate the darkest recesses of the human mind. Ian Rankin skillfully slots in a sleek precis of 50 years into 50 minutes. With his usual sparkling wit and modesty, he traces the development of his life and literature, movingly evoking his early years growing up in a working class family in a bleak mining town where he discovered an early passion for both music and books. Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, he graduated from the University of Edinburgh, and published his first Rebus novel in 1987 - the Rebus novels are now translated into twenty-two languages and bestsellers the world over. No stranger to prizes, he is recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards and has received an OBE for services to literature.

It is hard to imagine with such a successful writer, and yet he too had years of struggle as a young writer before his breakthrough book “Black and Blue” (1997), which, he explains, captured some of the raw emotions he felt about his son’s special needs condition. Indeed it is his favourite Rebus novel as he finally felt confident that he knew what he was doing after all the years. “Knots and Crosses I don’t like”, he confesses, “as it’s obviously written by a literature student”.

Rankin has long expressed interest in those sections of society who do not read, the reasons that might be, and ways of encouraging them to read. He persuasively discusses the connection between poverty and illiteracy - how eradicating the former would likewise eradicate the latter.

His brilliant new graphic novel, Dark Entries, focusing on the paranormal investigator Constantine, reaches a market who might not previously have read many books before. He sees a particular problem in getting teenage boys to read. “There are all these different ways to get kids to read now. I was quite lucky. I had an uncle who ran the local newspaper and he said to my parents: ‘it doesn’t matter what Ian’s reading as long as he’s reading’”. So the young Ian devoured comic books, which were his early passion.

In the past 50 years, with such a wealth of experience, he speaks fascinatingly on the different ways of telling stories in competing forms, and discusses the relationship between paperbacks and ebooks, books and films. He has never watched the television adaptations of his own work: “I didn’t want actors’ voices to replace what was going on inside my own head”, he explains. He reveals that the dramatization of his novels, ‘The Complaints’ runs to over two hours if not three in length. “I’ve learnt my lesson so I’ve got executive producer privileges - so I get a say in it. This time I get to look at the script.”

What qualities does it actually take to be a writer? To be a novelist, says Rankin with the assuredness of wisdom, “you have to be a sympathetic, empathetic human being, a people watcher”, he says. With writing a crime novel, you start with a type then make them more three-dimensional, and you do that through trial and error, through “practice, practice, practice”, and learning from the great writers who know how to do it. “Then, you start to find your own voice and own themes that haven’t been tackled.”

“They say there are only seven plots in the world but stories keep coming at us”, he says. “It’s a bit like the twenty-six letters of the alphabet - out of those, anyone can write a sentence that’s never been written before. How amazing is that? You can write a sentence that’s never before been written in the history of mankind. I think that’s phenomenal. I love that. Stories are inexhaustible because human beings are inexhaustible. I’m interested in what makes us tick. Sadly I’m interested in the kind of darker side of what makes us tick. I would find it harder to write a Mills and Boon or comedy of manners set in a posh English boarding school. I’d much rather write about losers, and loners, and people who’ve done bad things along the way”.

As for the issue of how important his Scottish identity is in his work: “I started writing books about my hometown to make sense of my hometown. For a wee country it seems to be endlessly complex”. He realised that the crime novel could be a way of looking at the flip side of the city, not just writing about monuments, but a real breathing city, with real contemporary problems which need to be investigated and talked about.

On the subject of the “infinitely variable sentence”, I ask him about that space in cyberspace which is home to trying out such sentences - Twitter, for indeed with over 12, 000 followers and over 4000 tweets to his name (@beathhigh), Rankin is the King of Twitter among writers. He explains that, like a lot of folk, he read in the papers about how Stephen Fry was using Twitter when he was trapped in a lift, so Rankin thought he’d sign up for it to see what it was all about. Within a week he had hundreds of people following him and hadn’t tweeted a thing. “I thought I’d better write something, or they’re following me for no good reason”.

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It has turned out to be something he now enjoys. “I used to keep a page a day diary from the age of 12, till my 30s. My sister every Christmas would buy me a diary and I would fill the whole bloody page even if nothing had happened that day. I use Twitter almost like that. I can scroll back and remember, oh yeah I went to that concert and went to that city and I tweeted today that I was in Mono with my friend having a drink”. It’s also been a useful source of information for him, such as when Edinburgh airport was closed for ash cloud problems. As for Twitter as a novelistic tool, he describes how people are writing novels in 140 character chunks. He himself has written a Twitter-sized story for an Italian magazine, to tie in with an Italian literary festival.

Indeed, Rankin has been hugely successful in harnessing storytelling for the 21st century, and there is now even a Rebus Edinburgh iPhone app which offers a guided tour from Rankin of landmark locations in his books as well as his own favourite locations, and a host of other audio and video treats.

Having reflected on the prolific past 50 years, filled with books which ignite all walks of life with a love of literature, his readers will greatly look forward to the delights that the next 50 years hold.

Back out into the streets of Scotland, the sun is sinking now, and the air seems filled with the possibilities of infinite stories.

Anita Sethi talks to Michael Cunningham

* * *
I have his voice trapped forever in a tiny silver dictaphone, sound-tracked by the crackle of static, the clinking of cups, the hum of conversation in the hotel bar. "I love your machine, it's a lovely machine", he says, picking it up, his voice suddenly amplified. "Is it digital? Oh that's so much better, tapes always fuck up ... "Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham's impressive fourth novel, is an intimate history of a humanity trapped inside inadequate machines - bodies, society, language - forever struggling to break free. The novel is divided into three parts, all set in New York: a 19th-century ghost story in which a boy is devoured by a factory machine, a present-day thriller echoing with the threat of detonating bombs, and a science fiction story in which the commingling of the animate and inanimate reaches its peak. Three mutating characters - Luke, Simon and Catherine - roam through each story, leaping daringly over the boundaries of genre, geography and time to elucidate the paradox of our incalculable differences and essential sameness. Cunningham's conversation, too, glides effortlessly, energetically, from subject to subject. "I love a segue," he says.The strikingly handsome flesh-and-blood Cunningham lights up the first of many cigarettes, brightening the room with his electric blue shirt and ebullient conversation. "I'm a remarkably unremarkable person," muses the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a PEN/Faulkner Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Michner Fellowship from the University of Iowa. Remarkably modest, too. And his remarkable presence of mind and passionate speech is further displayed that evening in a powerful reading in Bloomsbury. "I go to movies. I've lived with the same man for 18 years. I do my job," he continues. His job in part involves filtering the mysterious hidden within the quotidian: The Hours focuses on the epic qualities of the ordinary, while Walt Whitman's poetry courses compellingly through Specimen Days, celebrating the remarkableness of everyone and everything.Cunningham explains Whitman's presence in his book with reference to the first section, "In the Machine", which is set during the industrial revolution, "the second major event in human history after Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden". Suddenly hurled from an agrarian into a mechanised world, people found themselves in factories "making a part of a part of something they couldn't ever afford". Sense of place was profoundly skewed, poverty became equated with shame and "a whole new way of living and thinking about ourselves suddenly burst upon us. And walking through all this, there's Walt Whitman saying 'I find it all remarkable and strange and beautiful'. I was so struck by his ecstatic moving through this terrible place, and I thought he should be the spirit and soul of the book."Unlike Whitman, many of Cunningham's characters remain painfully alienated from their environment and selves, struggling to inhabit the finite continuums of time, place and language. Whitman's phrase, "I celebrate myself", is a teasing goal for these individuals who are unsure who "I" is, consumed by inadequacy, squirming in their skins. Lucas is a deformed, autistic boy, longing to belong in his body yet yearning also to abandon uncomfortable consciousness, to "throw it off like clothes that never fit us right". "It's hard to live in the flesh", Cunningham explains. "Most of us, I think, feel the limits of our bodies and our minds and it's hard to celebrate ourselves. Whitman was unusual in that. I try to get my characters to a point where they hate themselves less and there are fewer limitations, though not all of them get there".The ones who don't "get there" seek out death. In the novel's second section, "The Children's Crusade", Lucas is reincarnated as Luke, a child suicide bomber, threatening to explode a fragile normality. "I think of terrorists as children," Cunningham explains. "Like children, they tend to believe in clearly identifiable good and evil. Adults have a more complicated picture of the world and are much less likely to murder someone in the name of some cause." America's 19th-century transcendentalist movement, with which Whitman identified himself, advocated challenging everything taught; does he believe that it's unlearning, I ask, which constitutes growing up? "Yes," he agrees, "the ability to challenge received wisdom, to appreciate ambiguity and complexity, to empathise, to comprehend the humanity of someone who doesn't look, speak or act the way you do. This would make the current president of the United States more childlike than adult in my view; it's that very simplified thinking: this is right, this is wrong. Part of what is so dangerous in the world right now is that the leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world is a 59-year-old child".Specimen Days wonderfully draws out the paradox that, despite his protestations of equality and scorn for mere dead words on paper, Whitman is elevated by his devotees within the novel to God-like status, his misunderstood poetry wallpapered onto the bedrooms of child terrorists. "I think an insistence on poetry as beauty and solace alone underestimates its potency, gives it a kind of parlour status," Cunningham says. "So there are these deranged people who are using Whitman as a justification. Hitler loved Wagner, the guy who shot John Lennon had a copy of Salinger in his pocket". And, indeed, the world's religions are embedded in often misinterpreted texts? "Absolutely, terrible things are happening everyday because 'it says right here that you are a sinner and should be persecuted'. Here is the word of God, whether God is Mohammed or the Christian God or JD Salinger or Walt Whitman".Cunningham's characters are haunted by the "sense of a missing part", which they seek to recover through divine or human love. "All three characters suffer from a deep inner emptiness," Cunningham nods. "Simon [the machine man of the novel's third and final section] is at last redeemed by a simple act of empathy; the choice to stay behind with an alien who is going to die anyway. It's sentimental but true. I've always been drawn to the line which separates true emotion from sentimentality and I think a lot of what makes us human is the simple ability to love, which is hard to write about in a way that doesn't seem mawkish. I try" he grimaces, "to be unafraid of the mawkish."In Specimen Days, the capacity to love struggles to survive against the mechanisation not only of the body but of the heart; motions of the heart stagnate until people are no longer capable of being moved. "As a novelist you can't be afraid of the dark, nor can you afraid of beauty; you've got to be aware of both", Cunningham insists. Is it not, though, a frightening and dangerous as well as desirable thing, the ability to empathise, the dissolution of the subject/object boundary? "Sure, because you lose a bit of yourself as you're projecting into another person". But you paradoxically gain, because you're part of something larger? "Yeah, you're with a larger world, and that, to me, is the central purpose of novels. Maybe one thing fiction can do which no other medium can is help us to know what it's like to be somebody else ... The more I write, the more I also feel that in this vast and dangerous world, one story just isn't enough the way it was for Austen or Eliot. So in my last two books I've told three stories; in the next there'll be even more". It keeps multiplying? "It does. I think I'll have to keep going until every sentence is a different story and then I'll have to stop," he laughs.The collision - and tantalising communion - of different worlds produces the great energy that washes through and invigorates Cunningham's fiction. "I think what you want to do is to strike unlike things together and see what spark it produces ... you have to be reckless. After the surprising success of The Hours", he admits, "I found myself in danger of losing my recklessness. I wanted to write a book that everybody would love but then I thought, no, that is the death of your art. I think every book should be an experiment".Far from being mere words on paper, Cunningham's work is alive with three-dimensionality. "I don't have any interest in the book as an object", he says, "the book is a vessel, a vehicle ... As much as I love books, I understand that they are liquid, pattern; the best you could do with those ideas in that moment of your life." Seeing his work translated onto screen and into foreign languages has heightened Cunningham's awareness of language's liquidity. Whom would he like to have play Whitman? "I asked Nicole Kidman if she'd do it and she said she'd love to," he laughs. "But I don't know if Nicole could be passed off as Whitman even with prosthetics and a beard. Julianne Moore called to tell me she'd just finished the book and said 'I would play the lizard in a red hot second'. She'd be great at the lizard".But despite his associations with cinema, music is the medium that he feels comes closest to transcending the need for translation; his work, indeed, pulses with an entrancing musicality. "If an extraterrestrial appeared before you and said, 'Can you tell me something about human beings?', you'd play a Bach cantata, you wouldn't give them a copy of War and Peace," he insists. "And the best I can do is to aspire to some kind of music in prose. I think of language as roughly equally made up of meaning and music". In a broader sense, Cunningham believes, we're all translators. "Writers start with an inchoate body of ideas and images and the book is an inadequate translation of those," he suggests, going on to proclaim his faith that he is translating "clearly profound designs, a pattern inside a pattern ... even randomness turns out to be a pattern". The anxiety permeating life, however, at times blinds his characters to such beauty. "It's getting harder to see the patterns don't you think?" asks police psychologist Cat in part two. "I hope there's something there to see. I hope it's not just... randomness. Chaos".When Cunningham's characters cease to believe in pattern and beauty, when music breaks down along with meaning, they spiral into destructive madness, exacerbated by their inability to express it. Many characters search in vain for the right language to correlate words with things. "In heaven," dreams Lucas in part one, "[he] would be beautiful. He'd speak a language everyone understood". On earth, however, as Cunningham explains, "life is just bigger than language. Language does its very best to imitate and honour and pay homage to life, but there are limits to what you can do. You're always struggling against the limits. Life always eludes you. Life is always larger and more complicated than what you're able to get down in a book". Which is what, of course, killed Virginia Woolf.But Michael Cunningham's fierce determination and energy impel him to keep striving after Borges's "flesh and bone tiger". Although he originally started out as a painter, "I could tell there was something missing. When I was 21 or so, I found immediately in writing what I hadn't found in painting. I've never for a second lost interest in the proposition of what writers do, and I suspect there may be an insubstantial line between talent and an inexhaustible interest in what you're trying to do. Marilyn Monroe once said 'I wasn't the prettiest, I wasn't the most talented, I just wanted it more than anybody else', and I think that's true of many artists. Without that I don't know where you would be. There's a kind of narrowing, an autism to it. I will sit in my chair and write something over and over and over again, which may be my main strength as a writer. I have a ferocious patience and I never give up. I never, ever give up".

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Anita Sethi talks to Alexander Masters

Cambridge is covered in soft drizzle, emptied of students, filled with tourists, bells chiming six o'clock. It's here that I meet Alexander Masters and it is here, in 1998, that Masters first met Stuart Shorter, crouched in a doorway near Sidney Sussex College, threatening to kill himself. Masters would spend the next four years wrestling with this homeless man's chaotic life-story, eventually shaping it into an extraordinarily powerful biography which chronicles not only a life but the inherent difficulties of trying to write a life. Told in reverse, Stuart: A Life Backwards traces the frenetic spiral of Stuart's existence, back through homelessness, prison and drug-addiction to a horrifyingly abusive childhood, in luminous prose. Stuart never saw the final product; he was killed by a train in 2002. Whether his death was suicide or an accident remains - like so much of this remarkable story - an open question.

In spite of its frequently harrowing nature, what distinguishes this biography and has delighted critics is its humour. "Writing is a form of entertainment" says Masters, sipping a glass of wine and contemplating his success so far. "You have to be grateful if you get any claps". He didn't expect the applause to be as long or loud as it has been, but unpredictability is forever rearing its head in this story. A twist of timing led to the book being published on the very same day as Masters' mother, the author Joan Brady, brought out her latest book, a publishing 'first' that meant a great deal of publicity for both of them. "It was completely accidental," Masters assures me. "I was visiting my mother at her house in Oxford when the news came out. It was amazing. We were very pleased that we could go to each other's launch parties."

We experiment in tracing Masters' existence backwards, from book to birth, but his ordered life somehow resists, so we bow to chronology and work forwards instead. Comparing his life and Stuart's, he says, impeccably well-spoken, "we're absolute polar opposites in terms of ease of upbringing". Born in New York into "a good, old, posh American family" (his father was the writer Dexter Masters and his great-uncle the poet Edgar Lee Masters), he grew up in Devon and read for a PhD in physics at Cambridge. This was followed by a sequence of odd jobs and writing attempts, including a play with 32 characters. "That," laughs Masters, his honesty as refreshing as the wine, "is how you waste a great number of years."

The play abandoned, he replied to an advert to work at Wintercomfort Day Centre for the Homeless. "I got involved in the first place because the job was good for writing, because I couldn't just sit there wallowing, which is what writers tend to do. I was off doing something that had nothing to do with writing. At least, I thought it didn't, but lo and behold ... " When Wintercomfort's managers, Ruth Wyner and John Brock, were arrested for allegedly facilitating drug dealing on the premises, Masters ran a successful campaign to free them, and it was while camping outside the Home Office with Stuart that the idea of the book was born. "I was always looking for an interesting subject and here was one sitting right next to me. And he was very keen from the beginning."

The troubled energy of Stuart's story crackles on every page, authentically captured through numerous interviews not only with Stuart but with his mother and sister, who were closely involved with the book. The idea of recording people came to Masters while he was working on a homelessness newsletter. "That way you're not telling someone's story, you're letting them tell it", he explains. "Like anything, you have to practice to get better at writing, so if you're homeless and someone says 'write something', as soon as you do, you destroy the story. And the stories are fantastic."

How did he reach the heart of Stuart's story? "If you ask someone to tell a good story, they just clam up," he says, "so the best way was just to sit down with Stuart and turn on the tape recorder. A lot of the most revealing information was contained in the smallest incidents, when he was describing something that happened on the bus rather than when he destroyed a police cell. Those big dramatic things he did were the things he was least part of." Indeed, the biography details Masters' infuriation at trying to capture those years of Stuart's life in which "Events replace character ... personality is gone". Masters explains: "He was a true Jekyll and Hyde in that he taught himself violence, created it, then lost control". Stuart himself identifies his "madness" as stemming from "the day I discovered violence", but he remains unclear as to whether it was taught or innate. "There was a profound, constant question with him about nature and nurture," Masters agrees, "and he never seemed to work it out."

Stuart belongs, says Masters, to the "chaotic homeless", the nadir of the underclass, united by "the confusion of their days". Cause and effect have little significance, so answers to the question of "when and how" Stuart became homeless swirl in a confused haze. "I wanted to get a sense of how convoluted a subject it was in a way that doesn't excuse or explain but helps you to understand a little bit more about it," Masters says. "Pat explanations might give a moment's solace but they're deeply annoying because what you felt with depth and compassion can be dismissed as this explicable thing."

The book opens with Stuart pronouncing the draft manuscript "bollocks boring" and advising Masters to write a thriller "like what Tom Clancy writes", telling his life-story backwards, as a murder mystery ("What murdered the boy I was"). "My initial thought," says Masters, "was, how the hell can you go against causality? You're inverting the whole natural order of things. But that was being too literal." Stuart's sense of existence was "broken into fragments", with pieces of the past missing. He had no memory of the first decade of his life: "I blew it out", he says, in a typically gut-punching one-liner. "My memory is atrocious, but Stuart's was deliberately atrocious," Masters explains. "I think he chose to forget things and then found he did forget them, just as he chose to be violent and finally became violent. Then there's the boredom. Often what keeps people on drugs is the intense boredom of life on the streets. Wandering around, you've got eight hours to think about taking heroin. I don't know what can be done about boredom on the streets; it's a boring way of life punctuated by overly intense moments."

What kept them together as friends was, says Masters, entertainment. "We had the same sort of sense of humour; we both enjoy being teased, so we exchanged rudenesses [on their class differences]." It is this ribbing that provides much of the book's comedy: "There's got to be humour there ... I think you can get too much of tragedy fairly quickly and you need the levity in between; in fact, it becomes a vehicle for the tragedy." Stuart wouldn't allow any photos to be taken; instead, Masters' cartoons punctuate the biography, adding poignant lightness to the text.

The book is a far cry from so-called 'misery memoirs'. "I deliberately didn't want to read them. I'm sure I would have ended up writing 'A Boy Called Stuart' or something," Masters says. Instead of portraying Stuart as simply a victim, his warmth towards him invigorates the book. "I've spoken to police officers who thought he was a wonderful person," he says. "He had this nightmare quality, but at the same time his gentleness and compassion and curiosity and intelligence were a great breath of fresh air. He had many more talents then he ever realised; he was immensely descriptive, could hold an audience on the edge of their seat." Masters sees the book as a collaboration, calling it "an act of generosity in Stuart that he was willing to be exposed". He has given half of his substantial five-figure advance to Stuart's family.

"Stuart is part of a tradition of people who have been to emotional extremes," he continues. "You could take anyone in this room and push them to the edge and they'd have interesting things to say about it. My life has been very comfortable, I haven't been pushed to the limits, but Stuart came back from these emotional war zones with reports about what it was like out there. I think there should be dozens of people out there with tape recorders saying 'right, speak, talk'. There are thousands of people with first-class stories and they don't get heard."

But Stuart's story is now etched inexorably into the landscape. As I walk through Cambridge next morning, the homeless people crouched in doorways, wandering outside the colleges, waving the Big Issue in front of me, are more conspicuous. I defy anyone to read this astonishing book and not see the world anew.

· Stuart: A Life Backwards is published by Fourth Estate for £12.99

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Anita Sethi interviews Michael Cunningham

I have his voice trapped forever in a tiny silver dictaphone, sound-tracked by the crackle of static, the clinking of cups, the hum of conversation in the hotel bar. "I love your machine, it's a lovely machine", he says, picking it up, his voice suddenly amplified. "Is it digital? Oh that's so much better, tapes always fuck up ... "

Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham's impressive fourth novel, is an intimate history of a humanity trapped inside inadequate machines - bodies, society, language - forever struggling to break free. The novel is divided into three parts, all set in New York: a 19th-century ghost story in which a boy is devoured by a factory machine, a present-day thriller echoing with the threat of detonating bombs, and a science fiction story in which the commingling of the animate and inanimate reaches its peak. Three mutating characters - Luke, Simon and Catherine - roam through each story, leaping daringly over the boundaries of genre, geography and time to elucidate the paradox of our incalculable differences and essential sameness. Cunningham's conversation, too, glides effortlessly, energetically, from subject to subject. "I love a segue," he says.

The strikingly handsome flesh-and-blood Cunningham lights up the first of many cigarettes, brightening the room with his electric blue shirt and ebullient conversation. "I'm a remarkably unremarkable person," muses the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a PEN/Faulkner Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Michner Fellowship from the University of Iowa. Remarkably modest, too. And his remarkable presence of mind and passionate speech is further displayed that evening in a powerful reading in Bloomsbury. "I go to movies. I've lived with the same man for 18 years. I do my job," he continues. His job in part involves filtering the mysterious hidden within the quotidian: The Hours focuses on the epic qualities of the ordinary, while Walt Whitman's poetry courses compellingly through Specimen Days, celebrating the remarkableness of everyone and everything.

Cunningham explains Whitman's presence in his book with reference to the first section, "In the Machine", which is set during the industrial revolution, "the second major event in human history after Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden". Suddenly hurled from an agrarian into a mechanised world, people found themselves in factories "making a part of a part of something they couldn't ever afford". Sense of place was profoundly skewed, poverty became equated with shame and "a whole new way of living and thinking about ourselves suddenly burst upon us. And walking through all this, there's Walt Whitman saying 'I find it all remarkable and strange and beautiful'. I was so struck by his ecstatic moving through this terrible place, and I thought he should be the spirit and soul of the book."

Unlike Whitman, many of Cunningham's characters remain painfully alienated from their environment and selves, struggling to inhabit the finite continuums of time, place and language. Whitman's phrase, "I celebrate myself", is a teasing goal for these individuals who are unsure who "I" is, consumed by inadequacy, squirming in their skins. Lucas is a deformed, autistic boy, longing to belong in his body yet yearning also to abandon uncomfortable consciousness, to "throw it off like clothes that never fit us right". "It's hard to live in the flesh", Cunningham explains. "Most of us, I think, feel the limits of our bodies and our minds and it's hard to celebrate ourselves. Whitman was unusual in that. I try to get my characters to a point where they hate themselves less and there are fewer limitations, though not all of them get there".

The ones who don't "get there" seek out death. In the novel's second section, "The Children's Crusade", Lucas is reincarnated as Luke, a child suicide bomber, threatening to explode a fragile normality. "I think of terrorists as children," Cunningham explains. "Like children, they tend to believe in clearly identifiable good and evil. Adults have a more complicated picture of the world and are much less likely to murder someone in the name of some cause." America's 19th-century transcendentalist movement, with which Whitman identified himself, advocated challenging everything taught; does he believe that it's unlearning, I ask, which constitutes growing up? "Yes," he agrees, "the ability to challenge received wisdom, to appreciate ambiguity and complexity, to empathise, to comprehend the humanity of someone who doesn't look, speak or act the way you do. This would make the current president of the United States more childlike than adult in my view; it's that very simplified thinking: this is right, this is wrong. Part of what is so dangerous in the world right now is that the leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world is a 59-year-old child".

Specimen Days wonderfully draws out the paradox that, despite his protestations of equality and scorn for mere dead words on paper, Whitman is elevated by his devotees within the novel to God-like status, his misunderstood poetry wallpapered onto the bedrooms of child terrorists. "I think an insistence on poetry as beauty and solace alone underestimates its potency, gives it a kind of parlour status," Cunningham says. "So there are these deranged people who are using Whitman as a justification. Hitler loved Wagner, the guy who shot John Lennon had a copy of Salinger in his pocket". And, indeed, the world's religions are embedded in often misinterpreted texts? "Absolutely, terrible things are happening everyday because 'it says right here that you are a sinner and should be persecuted'. Here is the word of God, whether God is Mohammed or the Christian God or JD Salinger or Walt Whitman".

Cunningham's characters are haunted by the "sense of a missing part", which they seek to recover through divine or human love. "All three characters suffer from a deep inner emptiness," Cunningham nods. "Simon [the machine man of the novel's third and final section] is at last redeemed by a simple act of empathy; the choice to stay behind with an alien who is going to die anyway. It's sentimental but true. I've always been drawn to the line which separates true emotion from sentimentality and I think a lot of what makes us human is the simple ability to love, which is hard to write about in a way that doesn't seem mawkish. I try" he grimaces, "to be unafraid of the mawkish."

In Specimen Days, the capacity to love struggles to survive against the mechanisation not only of the body but of the heart; motions of the heart stagnate until people are no longer capable of being moved. "As a novelist you can't be afraid of the dark, nor can you afraid of beauty; you've got to be aware of both", Cunningham insists. Is it not, though, a frightening and dangerous as well as desirable thing, the ability to empathise, the dissolution of the subject/object boundary? "Sure, because you lose a bit of yourself as you're projecting into another person". But you paradoxically gain, because you're part of something larger? "Yeah, you're with a larger world, and that, to me, is the central purpose of novels. Maybe one thing fiction can do which no other medium can is help us to know what it's like to be somebody else ... The more I write, the more I also feel that in this vast and dangerous world, one story just isn't enough the way it was for Austen or Eliot. So in my last two books I've told three stories; in the next there'll be even more". It keeps multiplying? "It does. I think I'll have to keep going until every sentence is a different story and then I'll have to stop," he laughs.

The collision - and tantalising communion - of different worlds produces the great energy that washes through and invigorates Cunningham's fiction. "I think what you want to do is to strike unlike things together and see what spark it produces ... you have to be reckless. After the surprising success of The Hours", he admits, "I found myself in danger of losing my recklessness. I wanted to write a book that everybody would love but then I thought, no, that is the death of your art. I think every book should be an experiment".

Far from being mere words on paper, Cunningham's work is alive with three-dimensionality. "I don't have any interest in the book as an object", he says, "the book is a vessel, a vehicle ... As much as I love books, I understand that they are liquid, pattern; the best you could do with those ideas in that moment of your life." Seeing his work translated onto screen and into foreign languages has heightened Cunningham's awareness of language's liquidity. Whom would he like to have play Whitman? "I asked Nicole Kidman if she'd do it and she said she'd love to," he laughs. "But I don't know if Nicole could be passed off as Whitman even with prosthetics and a beard. Julianne Moore called to tell me she'd just finished the book and said 'I would play the lizard in a red hot second'. She'd be great at the lizard".

But despite his associations with cinema, music is the medium that he feels comes closest to transcending the need for translation; his work, indeed, pulses with an entrancing musicality. "If an extraterrestrial appeared before you and said, 'Can you tell me something about human beings?', you'd play a Bach cantata, you wouldn't give them a copy of War and Peace," he insists. "And the best I can do is to aspire to some kind of music in prose. I think of language as roughly equally made up of meaning and music". In a broader sense, Cunningham believes, we're all translators. "Writers start with an inchoate body of ideas and images and the book is an inadequate translation of those," he suggests, going on to proclaim his faith that he is translating "clearly profound designs, a pattern inside a pattern ... even randomness turns out to be a pattern". The anxiety permeating life, however, at times blinds his characters to such beauty. "It's getting harder to see the patterns don't you think?" asks police psychologist Cat in part two. "I hope there's something there to see. I hope it's not just... randomness. Chaos".

When Cunningham's characters cease to believe in pattern and beauty, when music breaks down along with meaning, they spiral into destructive madness, exacerbated by their inability to express it. Many characters search in vain for the right language to correlate words with things. "In heaven," dreams Lucas in part one, "[he] would be beautiful. He'd speak a language everyone understood". On earth, however, as Cunningham explains, "life is just bigger than language. Language does its very best to imitate and honour and pay homage to life, but there are limits to what you can do. You're always struggling against the limits. Life always eludes you. Life is always larger and more complicated than what you're able to get down in a book". Which is what, of course, killed Virginia Woolf.

But Michael Cunningham's fierce determination and energy impel him to keep striving after Borges's "flesh and bone tiger". Although he originally started out as a painter, "I could tell there was something missing. When I was 21 or so, I found immediately in writing what I hadn't found in painting. I've never for a second lost interest in the proposition of what writers do, and I suspect there may be an insubstantial line between talent and an inexhaustible interest in what you're trying to do. Marilyn Monroe once said 'I wasn't the prettiest, I wasn't the most talented, I just wanted it more than anybody else', and I think that's true of many artists. Without that I don't know where you would be. There's a kind of narrowing, an autism to it. I will sit in my chair and write something over and over and over again, which may be my main strength as a writer. I have a ferocious patience and I never give up. I never, ever give up".

"I've always thought the flaws of my life have made me who I am and therefore I am not regretful"

- Eartha Kitt,
November 2008
The Guardian

Video Interview

Paulo Coelho talks to Anita Sethi
Guardian.co.uk
  

"Almost everything important that has happened to me has happened by accident."

- Paddy Ashdown, June 2007
The Guardian