Yahoo Movies Sebastian Faulks: ‘George Orwell showed me that authorities are usually wrong’
My earliest reading memory
Something called the Beacon Readers at a small village school, in the corner of a field. I can picture the jacket’s conical torch design on a brown cloth background.
My favourite book growing up
I liked books about witches, of which there seemed to be quite a lot lying around. A little later, aged about 11, I discovered Alistair MacLean whose formula – a group of desperadoes on a wartime mission but with a traitor in their number – I found almost intolerably exciting.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence opened my eyes to the fact that a novel doesn’t need action. The development of a character can be story enough. I was bowled over by the affection that Lawrence seemed to have for his characters. He actually loved them.
The writer who changed my mind
George Orwell. I remember, aged 14, reading his essay A Hanging, set in Burma. In simple prose, he describes a condemned man walking to the scaffold, at one point stepping aside to avoid a puddle. Orwell showed me that the authorities are usually wrong. This was appealing to me since I was at a school I didn’t much like. I read all his essays after this, and he set my mind at a liberal slant to the world.
The book that made me want to be a writer
At the same time, I read David Copperfield and Pride and Prejudice. I was amazed by Jane Austen. She was so rude about the figures of authority. Apparently you could be a national treasure and a rebel at the same time. With Charles Dickens, there’s this exuberance of invention. But there was something else that was inspiring: his ability, through focusing on the idiosyncrasies of his quirky characters, to reveal the entire structure of the society from which they came. Miraculous.
The author I came back to
I couldn’t stick Evelyn Waugh at first, but I got there eventually by reading the Sword of Honour trilogy in 1991, when we were living in a remote farmhouse in Italy with our first child, who was a year old. Afterwards, I found A Handful of Dust and my ear became attuned to his prose. I still wish he’d used that gift on more worthwhile subjects, but there you go.
The Catcher in the Rye seemed to me at age 15 to sum up all my adolescent discontents
The book I reread
The Catcher in the Rye seemed to me at age 15 to sum up all my adolescent discontents. At 31, when I was a journalist in London, I saw it as an almost clinical description of a mental breakdown. When I was 48, by which I time I was a full-time writer, it didn’t seem to be about Holden at all, but about a country undergoing mysterious change.
The book I discovered later in life
Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis. I had often heard of it, but didn’t read it till I was nearly 60 and at a literary festival in Bali. A wonderful book.
The book I am currently reading
How to Argue with a Racist by Adam Rutherford. Popular science (in this case, genetics) is hard to get right, but Rutherford is both scholarly and entertaining.
My comfort read
I read in order to be discomfited, or at least to learn something new, so I can’t answer this one; though I must say there is usually a welcome light on at 221b Baker Street.
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