Books / Fiction
Interview: Guy Gunaratne
Guy Gunaratne’s brilliant debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City, an all-consuming portrayal of life on a London housing estate, was longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Ahead of his appearance at Spike Island he tells Joe Melia more about one of 2018’s most acclaimed first novels.
What did being longlisted for the Man Booker prize mean to you?
This may sound downbeat, but anyone who writes for a living knows how precious just having the time in the day to think and work can be. The Man Booker longlisting, how this book has been generally received, means that I’ve been given more time, more space to explore. It’s like a great headwind that I can then use to conserve more time for working.
is needed now More than ever
The novel has had a brilliant reception. What impact has that had on your writing?
Distance is important. I try – more than try, I’m a little militant about the whole thing – to maintain a healthy distance from all that. Having people around me who are not as interested in any of it, who care more for my own well-being rather than any acclaim my book has managed to gather – that’s always been important to me. There are greater stresses, like the notion of becoming a new father, my friendships, love, political turmoil – these things tend to wile themselves into the work. I don’t feel a deeper burden of expectation or anything like that. It probably comes down to being attentive to what I spend my time thinking about.
Guy Gunaratne’s brilliant debut novel was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize
A review in the Irish Times said that the novel is full of “prose that benefits from being read aloud”. Did you ‘hear’ what you were writing as you were putting it on the page?
Yes, more so at the very beginning when I was just exploring and allowing each voice to sound off. This has always been one of the most difficult things to try and articulate. It’s something that feels deeply mysterious to me. I found that the better I became at listening, the better the writing appeared on the page. I think that has a lot to do with trust. I learned to let go of inhibition, trust that the voices would offer up a level of coherence by the end, accept that it may lead me down dead ends, and see what I had once it was all over. Sounds terrifying – it was and wasn’t – but it was certainly worth it.
The novel shows both a divided city and also united communities. How difficult was it to represent London’s contradictions?
The difficulty was the most creatively interesting aspect for me. I wanted to find a way to render those contradictions. It’s the kind of dissonance that feels true to London. It became embedded in the structure of the book, the use of language, how voices jump around, how words are borrowed and inherited from one generation to another. I would have thought it be more difficult to write about London without a sense of multiplicity being as inherent.
What challenges did depicting several main characters present?
Many challenges. I needed to be attentive to the consistency of each voice, maintain the steady rhythm of each story, make sure all the thematic arcs remained clear throughout. But then again, if it wasn’t challenging it wouldn’t have been as fun. I don’t know, each book seems to demand very different things. This novel demanded multiple voices and so I had to deal with those demands.
What are you working on now?
After a few errant, garbled attempts at answering this question in the past, my wife has banned me from saying a word about it until it’s done.
Guy Gunaratne will be discussing his debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City, with Madhu Krishnan at Spike Island on December 6 at 6.30pm. For more information, visit http://www.spikeisland.org.uk/events/talks/novel-writers-guy-gunarante/
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