Sebastian Faulks at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival
In the first of The Times exclusive reports from the festival, we hear from the celebrated author about his forthcoming James Bond novel
The 12th Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival began on Monday, March 31, with great style, a packed marquee and a tremendous air of excitement. Oxford has never looked more beautiful and – appropriately, perhaps – the loudest background noise to be heard as Sebastian Faulks started to speak was birdsong.
Faulks, who was talking to the Sunday Times fiction editor Peter Kemp, was engagingly self-deprecating in an interview which took him from his earliest fictional efforts – as a DH Lawrence smitten schoolboy – to his current work-in-progress, which he describes an English Bonfire of the Vanities.
It’s taken him more than 20 years, he said, to find a way of writing about present-day England: the great American writers, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike and co, have never had a problem in writing seriously and significantly about contemporary life, but the English tend to lapse into satire or comedy. “There is something about contemporary English culture,” he said, “that is just intrinsically self-parodying.”
Faulks’ best-known novels deal with France - Birdsong, Charlotte Gray - and he was fascinating about the research done for both books. For Birdsong, he followed the advice of the poet James Fenton, who told him that all poetry, and, by extension, all novels, should contain a new piece of information.
Faulks, who was talking to the Sunday Times fiction editor Peter Kemp, was engagingly self-deprecating in an interview which took him from his earliest fictional efforts – as a DH Lawrence smitten schoolboy – to his current work-in-progress, which he describes an English Bonfire of the Vanities.
It’s taken him more than 20 years, he said, to find a way of writing about present-day England: the great American writers, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike and co, have never had a problem in writing seriously and significantly about contemporary life, but the English tend to lapse into satire or comedy. “There is something about contemporary English culture,” he said, “that is just intrinsically self-parodying.”
Faulks’ best-known novels deal with France - Birdsong, Charlotte Gray - and he was fascinating about the research done for both books. For Birdsong, he followed the advice of the poet James Fenton, who told him that all poetry, and, by extension, all novels, should contain a new piece of information.
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