Lunch

Only a few minutes after Sebastian Faulks arrives, it’s clear that each of us is here for a different reason. The author wants to talk about Engleby, his novel about a dysfunctional university student, just out in paperback. I’m intrigued by his newer venture: to mark the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth, Faulks was commissioned to write a James Bond thriller, which follows Fleming’s last novel before he died in 1964.

There’s another problem. Though I want to discuss the newer book, Devil May Care is under embargo – for his eyes only – until publication at the end of May. All I’ve seen so far is the cover.

“I’m not really allowed to talk about that,” says Faulks as soon as I mention Bond. He can’t tell me anything about the plot, where the book is set, who Bond’s enemy is, how many women he sleeps with, or if and how the villain dies. “If I told you anything, that would cause me to be tied to a cane chair and whipped with rope,” he laughs. “If you want to hold the order and send me away now ...” It would be a shame to turn away what promises to be very fine food. We are lunching at Chez Bruce, a Michelin-starred restaurant in south-west London that Faulks has been keen to try. After picking our first two courses we move on to the wine list: “White burgundy is pretty much my favourite thing,” Faulks raises his eyebrows at me. The waiter commends the author on his choice and brings the £86 bottle of Puligny-Montrachet.

Faulks is best known for his 1993 novel, Birdsong. The book so vividly depicted the emotional toll of fighting in the first world war that it won the praise of readers, critics and also veterans: “I felt, as I was writing it, that it kept going better than I thought it might,” Faulks remembers. “And then when it was successful I just thought, ‘what on earth am I going to write now?’.”

This worry doesn’t seem to have slowed him down too much. Birdsong was the fourth of Faulks’ 10 books to date, including Charlotte Gray, later made into a film, and Human Traces, a 700-page epic about mental illness in the 19th century.

Through all Faulks’ novels, his characters are thinkers, not killers; it’s the inner life that fascinates him. This makes him a surprising choice for the Fleming estate – the fictional British secret service agent has no interior life to speak of; Fleming’s books are all thrill, no conscience.

Our starters arrive and Faulks clearly hopes to distract me from Bond. He comments that our salt cod beignets look more like fish fingers than the doughnuts the name suggests. I agree, and press on.

Bond by the book: Wine, women and ... foreigners
Bond’s extravagant lifestyle and regular caviar consumption offered readers in postwar Britain a glimpse into a fantasy world. His views, however, were more in keeping with the time.

On smoking and drinking
In Casino Royale, Bond reveals his recipe for a perfect dry martini: “In a deep champagne goblet. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?” Alcohol never numbs Bond’s reactions, however – in From Russia With Love (1957) he downs a double martini just before a crucial meeting with a Russian spy. Bond also smokes all the time: every desk in MI6 has an ashtray on it; even “M”, chief of the secret service, smokes a pipe in For Your Eyes Only (1960).

On women
Initially a distraction (“They fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around.”), Bond gradually warms to the prospect of female company,

In Quantum of Solace (1960), he says: “If I don’t marry an air hostess, there’ll be nothing for it but marry a Japanese. They seem to have the right idea, too.” And In Goldfinger (1958), he encounters Pussy Galore: “Bond liked the look of her. He felt the sexual challenge all beautiful Lesbians have for men.”

Bond on foreigners
Bond patronises the French and the Americans, but is most patronising about anyone who isn’t white. In Goldfinger, for example, he meets a Korean – “the cruellest, most ruthless people in the world”.
Fleming created Bond in 1952 at his Jamaican estate, Goldeneye. Agent 007 is very much a creation of his times: he drinks copiously though this never impairs his ability to drive or shoot straight. And despite his prodigious smoking habit – in Casino Royale Bond smokes 70 cigarettes a day – he is as athletic as any secret agent could wish to be.

Fleming was also something of a jet-setting womaniser; he talked of writing as an interlude between snorkelling, entertaining and drinking cocktails. On a superficial level, then, it’s not a model that Faulks fits. The intent man sitting across from me has a greying beard and is dressed in a beige cord jacket and blue shirt. He is warm, calm and engaged – and politely bats off my provocations that he needs to behave like Fleming to write like Fleming. Instead, he lives comfortably in Notting Hill, west London; he plays tennis every Sunday with a friend who works in the City; he sends his three children to private school and has been married for 19 years – the only Bond touch is that his wife, Veronica, was originally his secretary.

Fleming’s guiding principle was to write without pausing to reflect or edit. By contrast, Human Traces took Faulks five years. But for Devil May Care he followed Fleming’s lead and gave himself six weeks: “You don’t have those long moments where you ponder for about an hour: ‘What is he thinking now?’. Bond doesn’t feel anything.”

Our main course arrives and Faulks tackles his stack of pork belly and chorizo: “I could have done with a little bit more crackling. That would be my only complaint.” My flaky halibut and olive mash are perfect.

Faulks takes up where Fleming left off, amid the secrecy and tension of cold war 1967. The films are now far better known than the books, however – Quantum of Solace, which premières in October, brings the number of Bond movies to 22; Fleming wrote 12 Bond novels and two story collections.

So is it really possible to write about Bond without resorting to the film persona? The 007 of Faulks’ imagination did occasionally morph into Sean Connery, he admits: “There’s just one or two lines, one or two bits of dialogue I heard in a sort of rasping Scottish accent. Very few.” Faulks says he tried to stay faithful to the original works: Q, the technical wizard of the films, is barely present in the novels, and even the famed secretary Miss Moneypenny features only fleetingly. The sex in the novels is unconvincing, he adds. (Though Faulks may not be the best judge: his novel Charlotte Gray won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 1998.)

He remarks that readers in the 1950s would have enjoyed the books differently; Bond hops on planes to travel the world, an experience both alien and exciting to his audience. And Fleming’s often misogynist and racist comments would have jarred less with the sensibilities of the time. So was he worried about 21st-century concerns when writing Devil May Care? “No. It’s escapism. You want to be free of all that.” Though he claims to be “very unembarrassed” about his income, Faulks refuses to say how much he was paid to write the book. He does admit he’d like to see a film version: “I’d make a lot more money, yeah. And I also think it’d be great fun.”

Just at this moment our dessert appears and I am gleeful as Faulks’ syllabub turns up in a martini glass. He refuses to be drawn on the glassware, but is enthusiastic about the contents: “This is like a really upmarket trifle, but the best you’ve ever had.”

These days Faulks is a fêted writer, accustomed to fine dining and drinking. But he has worked hard to get here. He started “scribbling” as soon as he left university, but abandoned several books before finding a publisher for A Trick of the Light in 1984. (“It wasn’t a very good book; it sank without trace.”) He became a feature writer for the Telegraph and was the first literary editor of the Independent, before moving to be deputy editor at the launch of the Sunday Independent. In 1991, midway through writing A Fool’s Alphabet, he quit journalism.

Faulks refutes the traditional maxim to “write what you know” and believes you should write what you don’t know: “That’s the only way you can stretch yourself and stretch your imagination.” Though his books range in time and place, all explore the price of human experience. Previous articles have suggested Faulks’ mother suffered a nervous breakdown, but the novelist denies this. “I guess I’m just interested in it [mental health] because it’s interesting.” For someone so easy to talk to, it’s hard to get beyond Faulks’ smiling façade. He has a clear sense of boundaries – his questions to me fit traditional categories: what school did I go to, what do my parents do? – and he often speaks in the third person when conversation gets too close. Faulks plans his books from the start – and an interview is far easier to control than a book. So perhaps, if I was looking for clues to the author’s inner life, I should have been talking about Engleby . This novel is the nearest he has come to himself and his time and it’s the one book, he says, which emerged from his pen unplanned, with only a character’s voice in his head.

The novel is set in the 1970s and its protagonist goes to boarding school, reads English at Cambridge, and then becomes a journalist, just like Faulks himself – though he claims the similarity ends there: “He’s not me at all. He’s a completely self-interested shit.” The novel was a surprise even to Faulks: it’s his only book in the first person, the tone is sinister and measured, and the plot unfolds according to the whims of the narrator, rather than in a linear manner. But Faulks continues to stress that his fiction isn’t autobiographical: “There are tiny bits, tiny bits. Places. That’s all.”

So keen is Faulks to avoid the autobiographical that it’s only now, aged 55, that for the first time he’s writing a book about present-day London: “I cannot think of any contemporary English novelist who writes about the contemporary world in a serious, ambitious way. There is something about English society which makes writers go all satirical, or surreal, or comic.”

He is four months into this next work, which he describes as “a Dickensian novel” for our times, with characters from all levels of society: a tube worker, a professional footballer and a hedge fund manager.

Amid all this research, doesn’t the idea of writing another six-week thriller appeal to Faulks? Not at all, he says. “I’m still wedded to this lifelong project of trying to write a good serious book. I’ve had a few shots and you’re still hoping ‘the next time I’m really going to nail this bastard’.”

...............................

Chez Bruce
2 Bellevue Road,
London SW17 7EG

2 x Deep fried salt cod beignets with mussel vinaigrette and aïoli
1 x Confi t belly of pork with chorizo, glazed apples, choucroute and crackling
1 x Grilled halibut with olive oil mash, roast tomato, grilled courgette and gremolata
1 x Syllabub with blood orange jelly and macaroons
1 x Hot chocolate pudding with praline parfait
2 x Bottles of still water
1 x Bottle of Puligny-Montrachet 2000, Domaine Lefl aive
1 x Double espresso
1 x White coff ee
Total £167.50