Your new novel, The Seventh Son, begins with an experiment at an IVF clinic that stretches the bounds of scientific knowledge and ethics. What inspired you to address this subject?
It’s something that’s been kicking around in my mind since I wrote Human Traces, when I did a lot of research into genetics and evolution and the roots of mental illness. Then it was discovered in about 2010 that most people in the world have a degree of Neanderthal in our genome. I found it rather thrilling. And then about three years ago, I read a tweet by Richard Dawkins, imagining some kind of genetic engineering experiment. And I thought, maybe that could be the basis of a story.
The Seventh Son explores what it means to be human, and what we are capable of as a species. Do you think we are now at a crucial point in history?
The older you get, the more you read that we’re at “a time of unprecedented this or that”. Of course, there was always a precedent. But clearly there are very big scientific developments, including the discovery of new species of human ancestor. I’d hope that it makes people have a better understanding of the relatively insignificant part that modern humans have to play in the world, and the fact that we are just a very random endpoint of the human genus. It could so easily have been otherwise. The last remaining human species needn’t have been so extreme and so violent, and indeed so clever as we are. And I think it would be a good idea if we had a little more understanding of what a particularly freakish species we are and the responsibilities that come with that. The Neanderthals lasted about 300,000 years and I don’t think we’ll make that. We’ll destroy the world before then.
The book is set between 2030 and 2056, which is a bit of a departure for you …
I had some fun thinking of some of the changes that will happen by 2056, particularly to do with transport. I’ve tried to do the future world with a very light touch; I don’t want the reader to think we’re in Blade Runner country. I’m due to complete the so-called Austrian trilogy [Human Traces and Snow Country] next. I have another vague idea, but it’s a little bit elegiac, a bit end-of-life-ish, so I’m not sure I really want to write it. But I’m also quite beguiled by the future. It is really liberating. I’ve never thought of myself as a historical novelist, and I don’t think of The Seventh Son as being pure sci-fi, either. I just see stories set in different decades.
In the novel, characters carry “personal identity cards”, which record their “intersectional points”. How does identity politics affect your work?
One of the advantages of setting the book in the future is that it’s a world where people are no longer particularly obsessed by these things – which may be a rather optimistic or utopian hope. I very much wanted people not to be seeing what is a big, high-level question of identity in the novel with the rather tight focus that we have on identity at the moment.
What sort of research did you do?
I had three technical advisers – a geneticist, an embryologist and an anthropologist. I also went around a fertility clinic, which was great; I actually operated the machine that fires the little sperm down the pipe. There wasn’t anything in it; I didn’t cause a conception to take place!
How did you decide how to pitch the science?
That’s always incredibly difficult. I remember discussing my last book, Snow Country, at a festival and I said, “Well, it was very difficult [researching it]: I couldn’t go to Vienna at all because of lockdown …” And a guy in the audience said, “Why would you bother? Does it matter to your reader which way around the Ringstrasse the buses went in 1910? Just make it up, we believe you!” So there is that get-out. But there’s a professional pride and also there’s the “wow” about the whole thing. I just wanted to share the things that people would find thrilling.
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There are three very different sex scenes in this novel. Did winning the Bad Sex award in 1998 for a scene in Charlotte Gray make you approach writing them any differently?
No. That was just a nonsense. My view on sex scenes has always been that there’s absolutely no point in describing two human beings copulating because everyone knows what happens. It has to tell you something that you could only discover in that way. One sex scene in The Seventh Son, set on a Scottish island, was tricky. But I took a lot of advice from my [female] editor, which helped.
Some readers know you for your James Bond and Jeeves and Wooster books, and for your Pistache parodies [from the Radio 4 series The Write Stuff]. How does writing parody and pastiche improve your regular writing?
I think the parodies make you focus very hard on how sentences work. On The Write Stuff, we’d do someone like Jackie Collins, [in whose writing] everything is completely superlative. “He is the buffest pool boy ever in Bel Air … She has the largest breasts this side of the Rocky mountains”. With a parody, you figure out the writer’s style and you write 150%. With the Bond novel, I wrote to about 75 or 80% Fleming. Otherwise you’re getting into pastiche, and a thriller has to be serious. People have to be thrilled.
You have occasionally been called a state-of-the-nation novelist, but you’re more a state-of-the-species novelist, aren’t you?
I like that. Looking back, I think my earlier books are those of a young writer, getting to grips with the world and saying, “Why is the world at war? Why is it divided so violently into different ideologies?” They’re an attempt to understand who we are. And then I started thinking about why we are such an odd creature. The Seventh Son fits into that theme. If there is a moral in it, it’s that we have to be aware of our hostility to otherness. But for all the very big scientific and philosophical concerns, it’s got some thriller elements – at least, it ends with a kind of chase – and it’s much more strongly plot driven than most of my books. Bits of comedy just kept coming – and I let them in.