People Know Nothing: Your Questions Answered

Where did the original idea for People Know Nothing come from, and how much did the finished novel resemble the book you initially imagined?

I have lived in the Edgware Road area all my adult life and used the swimming pool where much of the action occurs for many years prior to its closure. I would see the same people in the changing room and around the streets with some regularity, I would ‘observe’ and ‘judge’ them, but ‘knew’ absolutely nothing about them. It was then a simple conceptual leap to imagine what might happen were they all forced into some form of conflict. The most interesting part of the novel for me was creating the initial profiles for the six main protagonists and then seeing what might happen when they were let loose on each other in the second part of the novel.

Why did you choose the Edgware Road as the setting, and how important was it to you that the neighbourhood should become almost a character in its own right?

The mile of street between Marble Arch and the canals of Little Venice is one of the most interesting and diverse in London. It is full of very different histories and lives - “a place of beauty”, as Ishmina describes it. I wanted to capture some of its essence. Like people, places do not stay the same. Nearly all the locations referenced in the novel, such as the Richmond Arms and the Casanova Night Club, did once exist. Others, like Perfect Pizza and the Sport Central leisure centre were based on real places, now shut. I wanted to preserve fragments of these for future generations.

The novel moves between a number of very different characters rather than having a single protagonist. Why did you choose that structure, and what were the particular challenges of writing it?

It was a quite deliberate choice on my part to write the novel in this format. One way to think of People Know Nothing – or at least its first part – is as six separate short stories, or portraits of different people, albeit with common linkages. A novel such as David Szalay’s All That Man Is was, for example, an influence. Your question also relates to an earlier one and to a topic we may touch on later: if there is a ‘central character’ to the story, then it would be the Edgware Road, with Ishmina perhaps acting as its interface.

Samuel’s murder connects the characters, but People Know Nothing isn’t really a murder mystery. Why did you decide to place a violent death at the centre of the novel?

One of the challenges for many novelists is creating an appropriate framing device through which the remainder of the novel naturally flows. Describing it in the Prologue captures attention, providing a compulsion hopefully to read on. There is ultimately no mystery to Samuel’s murder. Rather, it is described in the novel as “a stupid, senseless accident” but it does “flip the world upside down and tears apart the natural order of things.” – for all the protagonists, and often in unexpected ways.

Which of the characters came most naturally to you, and which was the hardest to write convincingly? Was there a character who changed significantly as you wrote the book?

One of the most enjoyable aspects of writing the novel was trying to ‘inhabit’ both the inner and outer life of each character. Clearly some aspects were informed by personal experience (I was at university in Oxford, I volunteered at the Alzheimer’s Society, I have had a long career in finance), but others required substantial research. I was fortunate enough to travel, for example, up and down the Bakerloo Line at the front of the train with a driver acquaintance of mine and quiz him on the journey about his experiences. Visiting Alfie’s Antiques or the streets where Mariusz lives was also part of the work I undertook. Perhaps hardest – and something I learned via the various re-writes through which the novel went – was how to best write each character in voice most appropriately, choosing the words they might use rather than the one I, as an author, might instinctively select.

The reader often knows things about the characters that the characters themselves cannot possibly know about one another. How important is that gap between outward appearance and private experience to what the novel is trying to do?

It is absolutely central to the novel, as the novel’s title suggests. I was also heavily influenced by the thinking of J. G. Ballard (about whom I wrote my English Literature Masters dissertation) in this respect. One interpretation of his 1962 essay “Which Way To Inner Space?” can be that the most interesting territory for any fiction is the landscape where external physical reality and internal psychological states mirror, meld and swap places. I was trying to capture an element of this in the novel – especially when characters are forced together in unforeseen circumstances.

The novel deals with grief, loneliness, ageing, guilt, migration, marriage and social anxiety, but often through very ordinary moments. How did you balance these serious subjects against your desire to portray everyday life?

Without wishing to sound flippant, all the major topics raised in the question do naturally occur in life and form part of its rich tapestry. The difficult naturally occurs alongside the mundane and to attempt to suggest anything else would be simply incorrect. Think of soap operas as being classic examples. Equally, while Haruki Murakami’s novels often embrace the surreal as a device for handling complex subject matter, his characters may equally find themselves making pasta at home.

There are some striking differences between the novel’s male characters, but many of them struggle to express vulnerability or communicate what they are feeling. Were you consciously exploring masculinity when you created Leon, Archie, Mariusz, Bert, John, and Tony?

This was not a conscious or explicit decision, but as noted above, David Szalay’s novel All That Man Is represented a clear influence. Each male character has their own individual struggles, but it would be fair to say that they are all shaped in their own ways by women too (Iris for Bert, John’s Grandmother, and so on). Equally, it was important for me to include Ishmina in the novel partly as a counter-balance, to get a different perspective and expose a different set of struggles.

Chance and coincidence play an important role in bringing these otherwise separate lives together. How did you decide how far you could push those connections while still making them feel believable?

Many novelists deploy these tools and they are vital narrative tools that can help launch plots, explore profound themes and mirror the chaotic unpredictability of life. Most interesting for me is how unpredictable events can test characters – potentially revealing their inner natures – and also build personalities, forcing them to adapt, change or make hard choices. Throughout, the biggest challenge is to make instances of fate feel natural rather than contrived.

Why did you choose Ishmina to bring the novel to a close? What does her position as someone who observes all these people while knowing very little about their inner lives allow you to do?

Ishmina is vitally important to the story. Her position is structurally different from everybody else’s. The others are participants in the interconnected story. Ishmina is more than that – not just a participant, but also an observer and an inadvertent interpreter. Without wishing to spoil any part of the novel, she also performs two other important functions: returning the characters to ordinary life and preventing the ending from becoming too neat. Think of Ishmina as a novelist in miniature, taking fragments of information and imagining lives behind them.

Where did the title People Know Nothing come from? Did you have it from the beginning, and has its meaning changed for you during the writing of the novel?

The epigraph to the novel comes from a Joseph Conrad short story, An Outpost Of Progress, and reads as follows: “But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words.” Although Conrad was clearly writing in a different time and about a different subject matter – the physical, mental and moral degradation of two European traders stationed at a remote trading post in African Congo – it absolutely captures the dynamics of my novel. I have been a long-standing Conrad fan and have read Heart of Darkness multiple times, finding new meanings on each occasion. I think the importance of this quote – both for him and for me – is perhaps that the true ‘outpost’ is the human mind, namely, that we are deeply ignorant of our own psychological depths.

What would you most like a reader to be thinking – or perhaps noticing differently about the people around them – after finishing People Know Nothing?

Be careful not to judge too quickly. We can never know what is going on in someone else’s head. Tony perhaps captures it best in the novel when he notes that “you might observe a man like Archie from the poolside – his habits, his sharp edges – but the life he carries inside remains sealed… beneath ordinary surfaces, entire histories drift out of sight, entire worlds remain unseen.” Read People Know Nothing as a call for more tolerance and empathy, a recognition that we are all deeply complex individuals. It is, of course, also a celebration of the wonderful diversity of life.