SEBASTIAN FAULKS: A literary ventriloquist

Disappointingly for early readers of Bird-song, the “Balzac of Holland Park” turned out to be neither 105 years old nor French. This was 1993, two years after Sebastian Faulks, a former teacher turned journalist, had been paid off by The Independent on Sundayafter a choppy time as the paper’s deputy editor. During his tenure he’d developed a stress-induced ulcer and spent “the first three months after I left . . . cackling wildly, hysterically. I was so relieved to be out of that place.” In between cackling, he wrote what was to become one of the bestselling literary novels of the 1990s. Set in the First World War, it convincingly conveyed the horror of life in the Flanders trenches. “One man asked me how I knew what it was like to fight at the Somme. I told him I’d read a lot of documents, visited the site, then made it up . . . But he didn’t believe me and neither did anyone else there. They thought I’d found a pile of old papers in the attic and passed them off as mine.”

Disappointingly again, but this time for the literary establishment, Faulks refused to accept his winner’s gong at the Bad Sex Awards in the 1998 for his fifth book, Charlotte Gray. The Literary Review diagnosed a sense of humour failure but uneasily sensed in Faulks an aversion to self-parody – the hallmark of any transcendentally ambitious person. Faulks was by then settled in West London with his wife Veronica and three children. “Something about the [British] culture is self-mocking”, he’d commented in an earlier interview. In his writing he’d planned his escape. He wrote about France because he’d felt an “intense yearning” for that country ever since he’d visited it as a student: “The only way . . . that an English novelist can write satisfactorily about the present is in a surreal way, as Martin Amis did with Money. If a British novelist writes realistically about the present the result is usually banal, uninteresting and reads like a style piece.”

But the pressure to write about home intensified. Faulks visited Broadmoor and wrote a well-received novel about madness. Eventually, it was rumoured, he even wrote about himself – his satire of the 1980s, Engleby, is about a man from Berkshire who attends a minor public school (Faulks had an unhappy time at Wellington College), has an unfulfilling time at Cambridge (as did Faulks), then joins the staff of a start-up broadsheet newspaper in the mid1980s. This week it was revealed that Faulks will bring James Bond back to life and take up where Ian Fleming left off, to write a Bond novel, Devil May Care. Inevitably it will be well-received, although some critics will again carp at Faulks’s ventriloquism. Deep down, the notoriously envious literary establishment will have to admit that here is yet more proof that this is a man who may be able to successfully turn his hand to anything.

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