John Love Interview

“A near-future thriller where those who protect humanity are not always completely human”. This is the setting for John Love’s new book, Evensong and we’ve had the pleasure to talk to him about his new release.

First of all can you tell us a bit about your new novel, Evensong?

The tag line is “A near future political thriller where those who protect humanity are not always completely human.” The style of writing is a bit different from Faith, my first novel. Evensong’s style is a bit plainer and sparser, and more suited to that of a thriller. There are one or two purple patches, but overall it’s less flamboyant than Faith; deliberately so.

Can you tell us a bit about your main protagonist, Anwar Abbas?

What made him interesting when I was writing him were his apparently contradictory qualities: he’s deadly but also vulnerable and obsessive. He has limited social skills and few friends, and perhaps to compensate he’s developed an interior life full of private routines and private jokes, and the (ultimately delusional) belief that he doesn’t need or want a close relationship in his life.

In other words, as some of the other characters in the book remark, he’s got his head up his ass.

What inspired you to write this story?

My wife and I went to an Evensong service in Rochester Cathedral in Kent. It was a beautiful summer evening and afterwards everybody went out into the Cathedral precincts where some tables had been set out for coffee. Halfway through my coffee I had this idea of a similar setting, where an unidentified woman comes to the Evensong service but doesn’t stop for coffee afterwards. She hurries away. She’s been to several previous Evensongs and has always hurried away afterwards. Who she is, and why she comes there, is her back story which begins nearly a year earlier.

What is so unusual is that I’d got the whole of her back story, and the whole construction of the book, in between two mouthfuls of coffee. There was no blinding flash or feeling of revelation, but the whole book had sprung out fully formed – main plot, sub-plots, main characters, minor characters, settings, everything. I could see it in three dimensions, could (metaphorically) walk round it and study it from every angle, and it worked. It all hung together.

When I came to write it there was almost nothing, major or minor, which was changed.

What is it with Science Fiction you find so fascinating?

I love this genre. Whenever I have an idea for a book, SF is the automatic default option for expressing it. The genre gives more freedom to make philosophical or political points – to project features of the present on to the future – and it makes for a good read. It’s not impossible to do this in other genres, but it’s more possible in SF.

In Evensong you have a diverse set of characters. How do you develop your plots and characters?

In Evensong, as I described the process above, I didn’t really develop the plots and characters: they seemed to spring fully-formed out of somewhere. With my first novel, Faith, the process was similar but different – see next question.

How did you start writing? Was there a particular book or moment in your life that spurned you on?

The premise for FAITH came fully-formed, and all at once – I could almost tell you the day it came, what I was doing and where I was. It came years before I sat down to write it, because of the demands of my work.

My work in the music industry involved running a £65million,190-person organisation and fighting major legal cases in an abstruse area (copyright) which had huge financial and precedental risks. I had ideas for FAITH and some other novels and stories while doing this, and I put them on the back burner but never entirely forgot them. The demands of my job meant that the ideas stayed in gestation, although over the years I scribbled things (sometimes only a phrase or sentence, sometimes a few paragraphs) for later use. Those bits of paper are yellow and dog-eared now, but I’ve kept some of them for sentimental reasons.

With Faith, unlike Evensong, the final version had a lot of differences from the original idea. Perhaps because it had been in gestation for so long, I worked and reworked it. The idea for Evensong, as I’ve said, came with similar suddenness but I didn’t rework it – almost every character and every plotline, major and minor, was unchanged.

Have you ever struggled between what you would like to happen to a character and what you considered more sensible to occur? Can you tell us when and what did you do at last?

Yes: Anwar. I wanted to give him another ending, but the one in the book was the only one that worked.

How do you feel you have evolved as an author since Faith was published?

That’s a difficult question. On balance, I think I probably haven’t evolved. My writing methods are more or less the same, and so are my writing goals: I’ve often said in other interviews that I want any book I write to have some literary qualities and to be a good page-turner. Whether I’ve succeeded or not is another matter, but those goals are unchanged.

But if I haven’t evolved, it doesn’t mean I don’t believe in evolution. I’m not a Creationist!

For your own reading, do you prefer ebooks or traditional paper/hard back books?

I don’t have an ideological or Luddite oppositon to electronic media. Whatever encourages people to read can’t possibly be bad. But personally I prefer books. It’s probably a generational thing.

Also, as an author, I have a particular reason for hoping conventional books won’t die out entirely: one day, I hope to see someone on a train reading one of my books.

What kind of books do you read, any favourite authors?

Apologies in advance: this will be quite a long answer. It’s a question I often get asked, so I’ve got a long list to which I’m constantly adding.

Hitchhiker’s Guide is one of my SF favourites, in all its early forms: the original BBC Radio 4 programme, the equally original BBC TV adaptation, and Douglas Adams’ marvellous “Trilogy of Five Novels.”

Some other SF favourites are:

Alfred Bester: his novels and stories from the fifties.
Ursula LeGuin: almost anything of hers.
Jack Vance: the Demon Princes novels especially (most of his others too, but sometimes he goes on autopilot).
Iain M Banks: almost anything of his.
Brian Aldiss: Hothouse and the Helliconia trilogy especially, but most of his other stuff.
William Gibson: especially Neuromancer, also The Difference Engine and the Bridge trilogy.
Fritz Leiber: most of his stuff.
Frederik Pohl: The Heechee trilogy, and (with Cyril Kornbluth) The Space Merchants.
R A Lafferty: especially Past Master.
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: almost anything of theirs.
Stanislav Lem: known mainly for Solaris, but his output covered a huge range, and I like almost all of it.

Non-SF favourites include:

Giant nineteenth-century novels, especially from England, Russia and France. Great literary works, and great page-turners.
Jane Austen: How did she do it? No sex or violence, mostly just people having tea, but totally unputdownable.
Metaphysical poets: neutron-star language: ultimate concentration of meaning.
World War 1 poets, especially Wilfred Owen.
James Joyce, especially Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses.
Doctor Johnson: he was a great bear of a man, a pompous High Tory and High Church figure with opinions on everything – always original and sometimes unexpected, like his opposition to slavery. And he liked cats.
Herman Melville: Moby Dick of course, but also Billy Budd and Bartleby The Scrivener.
Jack London.
Richmal Crompton’s William books: children’s books mostly set in the nineteen-thirties and forties. Great children’s books, because Richmal Crompton used unashamedly literary words whose meaning you could figure out by their context. A good way to learn and remember words. Her style was dry and ironic, with absolutely no talking down.
Shakespeare, for all the obvious reasons, and also some of his contemporaries: Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe.
Chaucer, for his characterisation.
Cormac McCarthy: everything of his that I’ve read so far.
Elizabeth Bowen: her stories exist on the tipping-point between the everyday and the mysterious. Her famous story The Demon Lover is only six pages long, but hints at immensities.

What do you do when you’re not writing, any hobbies?

I love London. I’m a fundamentalist Londoner. Since I retired I’ve had a Senior Citizen’s Freedom Pass which gives me free travel in the Greater London area. Often I’ll use it to go to parts of London I don’t know so well, just so I can mooch around the secondhand bookshops and markets.

I like books and book collecting, old movies and music, cars and driving, and Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.

And, of course, cats.

What’s next, what are you working on now?

I’m writing a fantasy novel. It doesn’t have any orcs, elves, dragons, sorcerers or dark malign gods, only people. But “fantasy” is probably the most convenient shorthand description because it’s set in a completely imaginary world at the same approximate level of development as ancient Greece or Rome. It even has a map.

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