That’s the notion I had, sitting in the French Pyrenees in late July. Could it happen?

A quick web search brought me to an AI Filmmaking workshop at the London Film School. I signed up.

On the Monday morning I was clueless. Over lunchtime I let my script idea assemble in my head. By Thursday I had my film ‘in the can’.

Unlike my regular posts, this is something of a ‘how-to’. If you’ve no interest in how to make a film using AI, simply enjoy the short one I made, Lone Wolf:

Here’s some of what I learned.

We were being trained on the editing software CapCut. It’s part of the Bytedance company. When you upload your TikTok video, you’re feeding Bytedance tons of data which has fed into my film, so thank you!

CapCut were sponsoring the course. Why? Because so much AI generated film on TikTok is crap. Continuity is the big issue – characters change, locations jump about. CapCut wanted evidence that their package could be used for real film-making.

One word of caution: don’t think you can get away with using AI agents to do the work for you. They have a habit of hallucinating. Keep the project human-led. It’s your vision, your film, and you can stay in control.

How?

First, don’t believe that AI will convert your TEXT into credible film. It needs more help than that. Give it references, which are images.

AI is rapidly morphing, companies overtake each other, but as of August 2026 Chat GPT2 is your best friend.

That’s how I created the characters in my movie (Joe, a fifteen-year-old boy, and a grey wolf). Chat GPT2 does work well from text descriptions. Be as clear as you can. Costume your character as well (remembering to provide different outfits if your film spans more than a single day). You can adjust your image till you have the one that meets your wishes.

Then create a character sheet of that character. It shows a full pose / hands / the head face-on, and in profile and three-quarter profile, and the back of the head. This way your character won’t suddenly change hairstyle, elongate their nose etc.

Do the same for your location (though, of course, no character sheet is needed for that).

Have these ready to post and you are set to write your PROMPT.

These prompts are your whole creative input.

First, alert your AI system to use your references (those uploaded images) for each mention of a character and a location. You’ll likely tag those references in the set-up.

Your prompt is your description of what each scene contains, including dialogue and movements. Here’s another trick – write your own version of this prompt, then ask Chat GPT to fashion it to meet CapCut’s requirements. That’s a good way to learn effective prompting – which includes instructions on what to avoid.

Ideally, using these reference images and careful prompts, you’ll only need one GENERATION – the process of turning your prompt into a film scene. This element is what will cost you money. Of course, things will go wrong at first. If it’s a disaster, take the issue back to Chat GPT and refine your prompt. If it’s passable, you can move on and work out how to input a fix in the editing stage.

CapCut, with its Desktop version (the one I used), lets you run sequences of up to 30 seconds. Your film can last that long or be a multi-shot – encompassing different scenes.

I did find myself clipping scenes, replacing them with new sequences. For continuity, upload a screenshot of the last scene of the previous sequence. That way AI knows from what point to continue – remember, it carries no memory at all between prompts. Each prompt is a fresh start.

And voila – my first film, Lone Wolf. I’m fond of it!

I used the cheaper, web-based version of CapCut to answer my initial questions. Can wolves appear through walls? Yes. Can they speak? Yes.

I needed workarounds on a couple of points. I wanted the wolf to disappear from the boy’s side for a while then reappear. AI would have none of it. The wolf stayed. So I had to put in a fresh prompt (remember, AI has no memory in these terms) that showed only the boy.

I also wanted him to react to the sight of the school sign and grow suddenly forlorn. The character’s responses was a comical slump, and I couldn’t nail having the sight of the school gate prompt the change of mood. So I went with the comedy and wrote a line for the wolf that served as the prompt. Working with the limitations, I reckon, made it better.

Continuity grew tougher on the final running scenes – characters would come from slightly different directions. I’m told, by someone with better eyes than mine, they handle a chain-link fence recklessly. Good for them!

Joe and the wolf are both totally real to me now. I care for them. I’m astonished by how well they are rendered – done by Seedance 2.5. The bond between the wolf and Joe astounds me in its detail.

I know there are issues about using AI, the energy costs of all that data usage. On the flip side, the energy costs of ferrying my cast / crew / lights and camera to LA and then run the lot through an editing suite would have been HUGE.

And taken more than two days. For me, AI democratizes filmmaking. It removes those vast barriers of cost, bureaucracy, and meeting a film company’s corporate demands. It lets creativity take flight.

The workshop was run by Virtual Story Lab: Where Storytelling, Technology, and Learning Converge. They have an online version comng up if you want to give it a go.

What other films came out of this workshop? Some amazing stuff. Catch it here: Showcase

Coming soon from me: how to use AI to film a book trailer.

And for those who might like to reference a step-by-step guide to my process, one is below.

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1 Build your characters in ChatGPT2. Describe them clearly in text, costume them (extra outfits if your film spans more than a day), and keep adjusting the image until it’s right. I had just two characters: Joe and a young male grey wolf.

2 Make a character sheet. Full pose, hands, and the head face-on, in profile, three-quarter, and from behind. This is what stops your character sprouting a new nose or hairstyle halfway through. I made a different character sheet for Day 1 and Day 2, showing the costume change.

3 Do the same for your locations — image references, though no character sheet needed. For Lone Wolf, I used two angles on a non-affluent Santa Monica urban street: a school entrance: a schoolyard with hurdles to one side; a close-up of a hurdle; a bedroom.

4 Write your prompt. Tag your reference images for every character and location, then describe each scene: action, movement, dialogue. Write your own version first, then ask ChatGPT to reshape it to CapCut’s requirements — you’ll learn fast what to include and what to tell it to avoid.

5 Generate. This is the step that costs money, so lean on your references and a careful prompt to get there in as few goes as possible. If it’s a disaster, refine the prompt; if it’s passable, fix the rest in the edit.

6 Edit in CapCut (sequences up to 30 seconds). Clipping and replacing scenes? Upload a screenshot of the previous sequence’s last frame so the AI knows where to pick up — it keeps no memory between prompts.

7 Music. I specified ‘no background music’ in my prompts. Sound effects were automatically supplied, as was the dialogue, using my voice instructions. Joe’s final run, through the credits, needed more drama so I fashioned a stretch of music using ElevenLabs.

7 Work with the limitations, not against them. When the wolf wouldn’t leave and the boy’s sad slump turned comic, I wrote to those quirks instead of fighting them. It made the film better.

January 2025, and we had just bought an apartment in Santa Monica. Along with a car, so we could take regular hikes in the local mountains. Then a fire swept through, taking out the homes of friends and charring the mountainsides. We thought we understood such wildfires but we knew nothing.

Once we had house-sat a Hollywood producer’s property in Malibu, its rear wall adjacent to the Pacific Coast Highway and the front overlooking the ocean. Surely the ocean winds would save it from such fires? Not so. Such fires create their own winds. That Malibu coastline, some of the most prized real estate in the world, was razed to the ground.

Our new apartment was coated in ash. We sold it – tied to Trumpland sealing its borders to the likes of me, the fire helped us surrender our American dream and return to Europe.

From April into May I took a retreat in our little home in the French Pyrenees. For a long time, as James and I straddled relative poverty and a trans-Atlantic relationship, this was our only home, passed on to us by a friend who could not handle its remoteness and dereliction. Now we had it looking dry and pretty, and this year’s Spring saw rains and the happiest profusion of wildflowers and nightingale song we have ever known.

Even so, I decided it was time to let the place go. 2003 saw the first heatwave strike, when we closed the shutters and went naked inside before fleeing north to Normandy. Such summer heat extremes are now standard, while winters are extra damp. We used to reach the village on the school bus, shop at the weekly food vans or cycle to stores and restaurants in nearby villages. That bus, the vans, the stores are all gone. Brexit means I have to count and limit my days on the European mainland. There were a tapestry of reasons for going.

Houses aren’t selling unless they are priced low – so we priced ours low. Within a week a couple of French writers had bought it.

A week or so later this remote region made international news. 10,000 people had been forced to evacuate from a wildfire – a fire named Trévillach. We knew Trévillach well: it is the next village to ours, which sits beneath the same mountain.

I tracked the fire’s spread. Winds kept our village safe, yet even so ashes fell upon it and the air smelt scorched. Neighbours reported their fear and sadness, and that friends had lost their homes.

My route down from France, driving down to pack up our little home, kept me away from the latest wildfire that was threatening Bordeaux. It took me through the town where we shop, Illes sur Têtes, whose evacuated population had just returned. At the edge of the town the old houses I knew were now burnt ruins. Firemen had worked to preserve hillside homes but the trees around them were skeletally black. As was the ground.

James is racing toward the deadline on a book so I had left him on retreat in our Suffolk apartment. We spoke on the phone. ‘Have you seen the news?’ he asked.

40-foot flames were sweeping through a favourite nearby patch of Suffolk, Dunwich Heath, moorland preserved for nightjars and nightingales. This eastern patch of Britain is tinderbox dry and prone to high winds.

It’s not many years since a friend was buying land for his children in Canada, so they would be relatively safe from the ravages of climate change. As I write, fires are flaring across British Columbia. Summer is now when Canada burns.

We can no longer think of wildfires as happening elsewhere. The fire next time may well be ours.

When we moved down to France, all my belongings had to fit in a car. Including a futon. That meant books and record players and my LP collection and indeed all my collections finding new homes.

Thirty-one years later brought that job in reverse – reducing a home to one carload for the return journey to England. All the books and three bookcases were walked up the village steps to grace a friend’s home. We agreed to sell the home with all its furniture included. So what about all these stacks of boxes?

Decades ago, when first leaving home, I filled sacks with all my journals and diaries and the letters I had been saving, the carbon copies of early books, and burned them to fuel the family boiler. I already had so much and didn’t want my future increasingly weighed down by my past.

Even so, when you join the literary world you dream of a day when scholars might be keen to know how your works evolved. James and I both worked on paper, so produced many reworked drafts of our books. They were packed in boxes. Are these what should fill the car?

I once took Julian Barnes on a tour of the Philip Larkin archive held in Hull. It’s immense, catalogued, temperature controlled, and while Larkin had had his diaries burned a life still yields a lot. All the books from his library are there. We tried on Larkin’s trilby and Julian, as a lover of text, bent to read the maker’s inscription on Larkin’s lawnmower. Julian Barnes, I believe, has not moved house for decades and since he has become famous his assiduous assembling of his own archive makes sense.

We have another world-famous friend who prides himself on a minimal life but has filled a vast barn with his archive. Once, visiting my then agent Deborah Rogers, she was mid-drama. Her agency has been flooded and its archives were on low shelves by the front door. ‘We have to save them,’ she said, ‘for my biographer.’

Deborah had many famous clients but I don’t believe she has yet had a biographer.

I carried armload after armload of papers down the steps, across the bridge, and dropped them into the village’s recycling bin.

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Pine martens are rare, threatened with extinction, and this is the only one I have ever seen. For me, still deep in the moment of my creative act, the visit was a communion. I had spent weeks at that window, staring out of it far more than I had looked at the page — which is, if you watched a writer at work, what you would mostly catch us doing. Staring out of windows. It looks like idleness. It looks, often, like loneliness.

It is neither. While gazing into the sky I was inside a character’s skin, inhabiting their thoughts, channelling their speech, recreating their world. That is the inchoate work that happens before we pick up a pen. And it comes from a particular way of being in the world: writers are witnesses. The successful ones are likely good at networking and parties, but most of us are more comfortable at the margins of life, watching to learn how people navigate things, then translating what we see.

That can look non-participatory — onlookers rather than doers. But in watching so keenly we provide meaning to what we witness. We transform a rash of random actions into an interconnected whole, a narrative, and offer it back. Our books invite readers to step out of their own intense personal drama — how well did I do, how much am I liked, how deeply am I offended — and into a world we have built for them. There they might gasp, or laugh, or pause as some understanding dawns. They gain perspective. If they identify with a character, they are seeing a pattern of behaviour set against other characters, the resonance of history, the presence of a place. They shift from the small picture to the big; from being alone to being a living element in a vast whole. We may look lonely. We are giving the gift of community.

Which is where crafting begins. At sentence level we are mediating between our imagined world and the reader — expressing it not just so they can understand it, but so they too can stare out of a window and feel a new world cohere inside them. A book finds its value when it ignites in a reader’s mind.

I am not free of ego in this. We writers would love success, renown, a best-seller. I am prone to myth, and some part of me wanted that raised black paw against the glass to be an augury — a blessing, a sure sign the book would find its readers and their money. It didn’t happen. Nor, of course, was that ever the purpose. The marten was not a promise of money. It was evidence that my writing had been sincere and true to my nature. The marten was nature, I in my writing was nature, and we were together in nature.

For over thirty years I have been heading to a goat house in the French Pyrenees. Walk among those mountains and the issues I have been struggling with on the page find their resolution. My writing window there looks out on a river valley. Finishing the draft of another book, I looked up, and outside the window, at my height, a purple heron flew two tight circles above the river — then straightened and was gone.

I smiled. Not because I had written a bestseller. Because the circles had closed, and so had the book, and the two felt like one motion. The heron was not coming to witness me, as the marten had. It was finishing something of its own while I finished mine, and neither of us needed an audience for it to be complete.

As I write this, a builder is removing scaffolding from the house next door. London is set to break another all-time record for heat in June. Hollyhocks bloom at the end of our garden, the view that is distant in winter is now screened by banks of trees in full leaf, and an occasional swift crosses a blue sky. This piece is a product of my staring through a London window, seeing what might emerge.

And then turning to my keyboard, so you and I can share all that I have found.

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Years ago I decided to write a thriller. James, being practical, asked how I could turn it into a best-seller.

I came up with some inane response, which didn’t appease him at all. He’s a lawyer so he needed evidence: facts about what turns a book into a bestseller, and evidence that I had tried to find out.

I gathered together a range of what were then recent bestsellers from different categories – and compiled a chart with many columns. The heading for each column was what a bestseller might contain: A wise character: a teenager; foreign settings; act of violence; graphic sex etc. (Sex came pretty high on the list, but more effective for best sellerdom that full details of the act is titillation, the ‘will-they-won’t-they’ question.)

I once spoke with James Patterson’s agent about how to write a successful thriller. One definite for him was short sentences and paragraphs. Some bestsellers on my list met this criterion and others didn’t.

Two of my speculative columns received ticks from every bestselling title in my assortment.

Here they are, those twin secrets to success:

Secret 1. Include great wealth. Contrast it with poor characters if you like, but some scenes must drip with wealth and the luxuries it can buy.

I guess people want to dream. If you’re investing your money and time in a book, why not surround yourself with the riches you would otherwise envy?

And here’s Secret number 2.

Include a chase scene. Every bestseller on my list had one.

As the Hollywood line goes: ‘Cut to the chase!’ It’s the essential drama of rivals at a pace to keep the reader’s adrenaline pumping.

So that’s how I made my first million …

OK, not exactly. Bestsellers need those two tricks but other things as well – like intense self-promotion, a super agent, perhaps D.B.C. Pierre’s trick of having opening chapters that are seven pages long.

I do include wealth and chases though – you’ll find them in my recent thriller The Boy on the Train.

My new novel out this week is a psychological thriller, with neither a chase nor wealth. If it becomes a bestseller it will prove me wrong.

Swimming for England is slim and mean. As with almost all my books it’s been humming away for decades, through draft after draft, with existence along the way as a short story and an award-winning play. Ahead of its time when I started out, geopolitics has now caught up. The seaside town of its setting would have voted Reform. The couple who run a boarding house specialize in showing young men their vocation in life. Their latest recruit, Faisal, a refugee from Afghanistan, is about to climb up onto the beach having become a cross-Channel swimmer. The couple sit on the pebbles and await him. Meanwhile Cameron, Scottish and black and in a state of shock, steps down from the promenade behind them.

What prompts such a tale? A trigger for this one was learning that a gay student in my hall of residence when I was an undergraduate went on to marry a woman. Drawn together by their shared appreciation of young men, they moved to the south coast where they hoped to find good specimens. My tale imagines their life to come.

For style, I shared a native city (Leicester) and dark sense of humour with the playwright Joe Orton, he of Entertaining Mr Sloane, and this book exercised that dark political side of myself.

Let it be your summer beach read – you could probably manage it in one afternoon, between ice creams!

I had cultural outings last week. Monday afternoon saw James and I at the Wigmore Hall, a lunchtime concert that brought two Quartets together – the well-established Modigliani from France, and up-and-thrusting Leonkoro from Berlin – to play the Mendelssohn Octet. Written when the composer was sixteen, it’s drivingly wonderful. The two Quartets spurred each other on and then returned to replay the Scherzo as an encore. It was utterly sweet, to hear the piece again, and also loveable, to encounter eight people who have given themselves to music so thoroughly. They are clearly GOOD people.

Friday night saw me at the new Marylebone Theatre to see Arthur Miller’s The Price. It’s a thrilling production. The set shows a millionaire’s furniture all stacked on the top floor of a decaying house. The millionaire lost his fortune in the Wall Street Crash. His sons are now meeting to let everything go, schmoozed by an antiques dealer they have surprised out of retirement. One man, perhaps the brightest brother, has given his life to being a police officer. The other brother is a rich and successful surgeon. I bother to tell you, because for me the play brought a moment of catharsis.

For me in the theatre for that’s not uncommon. Often a play manages to invert me, turn me inside out so what’s left touching the air is shaking and vulnerable. Some hidden core has been probed.

In this play, the moment for me came when the policeman brother learned a fact about his father that he had never known. Suddenly the sacrifices he had made, surrendering his future to take care of his ailing father, became senseless. He had been used.

His father’s armchair was centre stage, where nobody ever sat. The policeman blasted punches into the armchair’s cushions. My heart shook.

That’s the moment that turned me inside out. But for once I wasn’t left to simply quake. The catharsis brought some new understanding. The policeman had dedicated his life to serving his father – not because he was hoodwinked, not really, but because he had the capacity to do so. He now saw the truth about his father. But could not undo his own love for the man.

Having just finished writing a memoir about me and my parents, this resonated for me. The policeman learned a truth about his father – yet still was caught like an enwebbed insect in the love that he felt. You can absolutely know something to be true, while at the same time not being able to believe it.

This week included a launch event for The Future is Peace by Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah, an Israeli and a Palestinian - a Canongate event at Brian Eno’s studio. The two authors gave a heartfelt and instructive talk about peace making. In the time for questions one popped into my head so out it came. ‘Who do you both hate?’

The Palestinian’s brother was killed in the Intifada, the Israeli’s parents were killed by Hamaz on October 7^th, so they both have good reason to hate. I didn’t anticipate a list of hated people but was interested in how they handled the question. Aziz told how he hated behaviour rather than people – so he hated racism, for example. He got warm applause and then Maoz went deeper, and gave me an understanding that was new to me. He hates the actions not the doer. If someone who does hateful things changes his ways and now does good things, then he cannot hate him.

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Years ago I received some counsel that relates to this. Guadalupe Peak in Texas is my ultimate sacred mountain, and I had spent the night camped near its summit. This was an era when I felt in touch with the spirit of mountains. Waking in my tent a clear message was lodged inside of me. ‘Forget money and the social whirl,’ it said. ‘It’s through your and James’s books that you will change the world.’

I’m not declaring that our books are changing worlds in a ‘big’ sense, but a writing retreat surely helps that first part: forgetting money and the social whirl – along with the daily jabs of geopolitical drama. For thirty-one years now James and I have been coming to a former goathouse in the French Pyrenees, and I’m there now. The house overlooks a river valley. The morning chorus has been a trio of birds: blackbird, clack cap and nightingale, and this week a golden orioles joined in to form a quartet. Each day new wildflowers appear, and attract the related insects who feed around their stamen. With iNaturalist I’m scouting every inch of verge – and in two weeks am coming close to recording 150 species as my ‘new observations’.

Over the years we’ve written many books down here – one, I Was Carlos Castaneda, was in fact set here, while James’s poetry collection Notes from a Mountain Village captures poignant episodes of our time. When I’ve needed to wrestle a book to the ground I’ve come to walk through these mountains – sometimes with long train rides for just a weekend, but it’s paid off. As James and I tied together our transatlantic lives, this was the one home we had, the one solid point through the sometimes-vagrant decades.

Once, walking the hills, I reached up to nestle a horse chestnut in the palm of my hand. Something about its vibrant green, its spikes still soft, its freshness, translated in my mind into the character of Arnold – and the gay aspects of the boy that would be cherished by his parents and community. It became the sequence of stories, told in seven-year leaps, at the heart of my collection Lessons from Cruising: being in the midst of the natural world rescued my sense of gay sexuality as something wholly natural and turned that into story.

Along with me on this visit has come my memoir. Has it become a final draft? Maybe. It feels complete and wrapped up for now. I’ve let it be delicate rather than strident.

Might it change the world?

There are different ways of looking at that. I’ve written two books with the intent of their being world changing. One, co-written with James about his work as an eco-lawyer, Client Earth, has had an impact, especially in Europe, helping to convince environmental activists and funders that the law is a powerful tool in challenging environmental devastation. People have told me how it changed their lives. My book about the Bishnoi, My Head for a Tree, carries the Bishnoi’s urgent message to the world. While western readers have yet to discover the book it’s created a stir in India. Has that changed the world?

Here’s how it has and how every book can, no matter how many or how few copies it sells.

There’s no commercial clamour for my books. Each book is written because it demands to exist. The process can persist for years till a book is ready to be weaned and head out on its own. That books then finds life, is truly born, inside a reader’s mind. Multiple readers for it would be sweet but one reader is enough. A book with its own integrity will change that reader’s world. A reader emerges from a book and sees life more clearly.

As a publisher with Barbican Press, those are the books I have sought: ones that change readers’ worlds. Each of these books has demanded of its writer that it be written and each is counter to ‘money and the social whirl’.

You don’t need the French Pyrenees to manage a writing retreat. While I have been here James has been at home in London. The time became his own writing retreat – on Friday he sent out the first tranche of his new book to Canongate, his publisher. It’s an informed yet also personal guide on how China, by remodelling its whole way of being on sustainable principles, is becoming a superpower. This book might well, in fact, help change our world.

My book of the Spring, Nicholas Boggs’ monument biography of James Baldwin: Baldwin: A Love Story, offers another insight on writer’s retreats. Baldwin kept working to wrest time from a chaotic social life and the demands of being a spokesperson in the civil rights era, to find a place in the natural world that freed him from distraction. One such was in Switzerland, the family home of his lover Lucien. Another was on Fire Island, where his mother was his companion. For Baldwin, a retreat meant somewhere close to mountains or sea, but not solitude. He needed somebody close who could hold him inside their love.

Good news from my end is that James is on his way south to join me today. He can wake to our dawn chorus. And we’ll share walks – there are orchids in them there hills!

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In the tent where books were on sale he stood near the pile of his own title and popped it into the hands of browsing customers. It made for more selfies, happy readers clutching Paul’s book. It worked—perhaps too well. By the time of Paul’s main event and booksigning all copies of his book had already been sold. He took to signing the free tote bags he had brought along instead, emblazoned with the front cover of his book.

As a publisher, you hope for an author with that keen sense of Paul’smarketing. Substack’s lead exponent of Book PR, Kathleen Schmidt with her Publishing Confidential, regularly points out how little even a New York Times book review affects sales but there is one fact a writer must develop in order to sell their books: a platform.

It’s easier to do so with genre: Paul Waters is pitching a cosy crime series featuring a detective nun set in India. That comes with its own branding. I’m not averse to that, I’ve written genre titles which brought sequels to mind, but of course to bother with a sequel you have to have got out there and generated sales for your first book. In any case, my instinct when writing genre is to subvert the form. Why do it otherwise? And that of course is the opposite of having a marketing sense.

In Australia the writer Helen DeWitt has just refused a big award because it comes with the obligation of making six or more hours of promotional videos. She can’t bear the thought. (The linked story is written by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, who can’t bear the thought either, but has spotted this chance to begin a feature article by highlighting her own new novel. Well done Rhiannon!)

I picked this up recently from an interview with the novelist Gary Indiana: ‘I write about things to get rid of them, essentially. If I write about something, you can be pretty sure it’s all I have to say about it… So it’s always very odd when people want to discuss my work. Also I feel very uncomfortable as the subject of anything. That’s why my narrators are so de-centred.’

We novelists are a weird bunch, inventing worlds in our minds and peopling them with made-up characters. It doesn’t hang well with thrusting yourself into the centre of attention.

In fact I enjoy public performance. I’m simply shy about demanding it. In the past I’ve prepared press releases about my new work, then realized I’ve failed to give myself a mention at all.

With authors I publish for Barbican Press I nudge where I can but they write different books every time too; writing pays them so little they have to sell their time elsewhere; they wrote because they had powerful things to say and then they had said it. Dive into these books and they’ll shake you up. If they fit one genre they can be seen to fit several others too. We alert the worlds in what ways we can.

Here’s another piece that amused me from that Gary Indiana interview (in Richard Canning’s collection Hear Us Out): ‘My ultimate model is Patricia Highsmith,’ he writes, ‘though I’d probably never be able to write the way she does. One lobe of my brain thinks the best way to write is in these simple, declarative sentences that you just lay down. You get said whatever needs to be said. Highsmith has never been recognized as a great American writer, which is ridiculous…. Highsmith is the American Dostoyevsky, if anybody is. The fact people don’t recognize it is very funny, especially when so many people have tried to treat the subject of the sociopath; so many so-called “novelists.” Highsmith’s very accurate about urban people’s psycho-pathology. It’s not just the villains in her books—everybody’s obviously so sick!’

I’m glad to find another writer stuck on the same track that kept me going for years. My own version of Highsmith as the ‘ultimate model’ is The Boy on the Train (note the subtle marketing!). For years I have read and re-read Highsmith. Now I note I have stopped. Job done perhaps.

I’m not writing at the moment. A draft of my memoir awaits my return to it—but I KNOW you can’t just keep picking at a book. Let it rest and you become clear-eyed, you get some perspective, you can distinguish between what’s on paper and what’s in your head. Your view becomes somewhat objective.

I’ve another line from Gary Indiana to reflect on as I re-enter my memoir. What is literature about? For him, it’s about ‘an imaginative restaging of experience’.

Next week I head down to our old goathouse in the French Pyrenees for a few weeks and will take this project with me. I aim to read, edit, walk, or maybe simply let myself be washed by the song of nightingales.

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Since I last wrote? The train took me down the coast of Kerala (since renamed Keralam) to another week of festival. The hotel was by a beach, and the festival on a hillside surrounding a palace. In the capital city of Trivandrum, the Mathrubhumi Festival is named after its principle sponsor – one of 36 daily papers published in the State. Unlike the free Kerala Literature Festival this one charges a fee … but still brought in 5,000 readers each weekend day.

In the past my enthusiasm has flagged at festivals and I’ve taken timeouts. In Kerala I surprised myself with full engagement. I had fun! And the sessions were intimate – the size of this second one brought full audiences closer.

Keralans complained about the heat – it was 32C, around 90F. You didn’t get a murmur of complaint from me. I was always delighted to step from air-conditioning and into a blaze of sun or my favourite, warm nighttime air.

I suspect I need India in my winters. Even in Santa Monica last year I was sick throughout – one virus followed another. It took India a week to burn out the last of my UK flu. A week after being back in the UK I was down with a cold again.

It’s been wet in London, raining every day but not flooded. No drones have struck. No primary school filled with young girls has been wiped out by an errant bomb. At night we sleep in our beds. Birds sing by day and people walk their dogs. It’s a safe place.

My current writing project is my memoir. In this latest draft it’s growing more literary. One question for memoirists …. How do you trust memory of conversations? Obviously you can’t. If I tried to give an accurate account of a conversation I had this morning it would be a fictional recreation. What’s true though is that people did speak. Childhoods did not happen in silence. It’s much truer to reality to include dialogue than to present a scene without voices. Also, I suspect that the process of inventing dialogue aligns with recovering what was in fact said.

That writing process is quiet. More boisterous this week is the response to James’s proposal for his new book Riding the Dragon. At Davos this year the buzz was all about China—how come they are ahead in all aspects of technology and business? James’s book will provide the answers and show how everything in China is aligning to build what they term ‘an Ecological Civilization’. The concept of this civilization is enshrined in the Chinese constitution, James and his legal brain have helped forge it into being, and it sees a State committed to sustainable development. It’s the good news story, backed by evidence, that anybody with environmental concerns needs. And James’s book has just been bought by Canongate here in the UK and Crown in the US. At news of the deal we popped the champagne and danced around the house, singing marching songs.

James will be writing hard this summer - the book is due out in September 2027, to be delivered a year in advance.

More immediate good book news is completion of this Autumn’s book from Barbican Press. It’s Paul Russell’s gloriously titled The Angels Came to Sodom in the Evening. Paul was busy working on the final edits while I was away. He’s been a joy to work with. For years I’ve regarded him as one of our best writers. One virtue of the publishing world turning a bit pusillanimous is that such a writer lands on our list. It should win both the Book and the Pulitzer!

This year’s Booker, I’ve decided, should go to Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye. It’s masterful, a textured and layered book of vivid characters and an unfolding tale of reincarnation and climate change.

It’s out in April in the US and UK – mine was an early Indian edition. So to keep yourself amused while waiting, try Davis Grubb’s classic from 1953 The Night of the Hunter. I knew the terrific Charles Laughton film, but the narrative strength of the novel totally pulls you in, closed inside a young boy’s fight to keep hold of a secret, and he and his little sister’s life.

My new trick for playgoing will be to only go to ones that get lousy reviews. I’ve read three poor ones for Terrence Rattigan’s Man and Boy at the National Theatre. [To balance it here’s a good review.] In fact the play’s writing is taut, sharp, potent and brilliant. The direction was vivid, and the acting all round great. The lead role, the crooked financier using his son as a lure to win over the businessman who can bring him down, is played by Ben Daniels – how come I know Ian McKellen and Simon Russell Beale, other established gay British actors, and not him? He’s utterly compelling.

To end, a little news about MY HEAD FOR A TREE.

I’m really happy to say it’s been shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Award, given each year for outstanding nature writing.

And if you fancy a trip to the Kerala Literature Festival yourself, here’s a taster video: the film of my session discussing the book and the Bishnois, alongside the write Neha Sinha.

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It’s seductive – someone wants me! And they’ll fly me to an Indian beach, no less, for January sunshine.

In 2025 I cleared my diary for festival appearances in the US and UK, sure of fevered interest in My Head for a Tree. At least that left me time to write. After its January launch at the Jaipur Literature Festival the book briefly topped Amazon charts and was widely reviewed across India. The West has remained indifferent. Indigenous wisdom is a tough sell to those who don’t know what they need to learn.

So when Kerala Literature Festival invited me in, I said yes. Especially when a fellow Keralan festival in the capital, Trivandrum, invited me to be a speaker in the following week. And so I am in Kozhikode, a city also known as Calicut but unknown to me till I got here. My bad. It’s India’s first Unesco City of Literature – claiming over 545 libraries, 100 bookstores and 70 publishing houses. Kerala has the highest literacy rates in India – and hundreds of thousands turn up for the free four-day festival in event spaces strung along 1km of beach. They claim to be the largest literary festival in Asia – others might argue and the crowds in Jaipur felt dangerously dense in comparison, but there they couldn’t walk in the shade of trees along the paved promenade or spill out across sand toward the Arabian Sea.

I had two sessions, the first with questions from the books editor of the Hindustan Times, Manjula Narayan, and the second with the conservationist and writer Neha Sinha (who has a delightful new book out, Wild Capital, on discovering Delhi’s natural world). Essentially I’m spreading the message of the Bishnoi people, at their request, so the rest of the world can get up to their speed in living well on a warming planet. Ego-wise that makes for an easier pitch – I’m selling other people’s stories rather than my own.

That changes when it comes to audience questions – I’m asked for advice such as a fourteen-year old asking how to deal with the urgency of climate change and species loss. Or as a writer and publisher, how do I express the value of books and reading? I do in fact have informed opinions on such matters, which find shape and articulacy in such public discussions.

Several festival bookshops on site were crowded, but unlike at Jaipur there was no rush afterward to the signing tables – at least not for me, and starry writers appeared in the speakers’ lounge minutes after their talks. What was sweet was the people who asked me to dedicate the book to their young children, who had been with them at the talk – realizing this book was one for them to grow into, as it is about their future.

Freedom came with knowing book sales would be modest. I could simply talk, engage, entertain. The festival is about books and an exchange of ideas.

In that way I learned from others too. Passing one open tent I heard a writer being articulate about my own thoughts on writing. He was Jeet Thayil. ‘Your reader might very well be smarter than you,’ he said. ‘Don’t spoonfeed. Trust the reader.’

That’s handy. My current writing project involves leaving readers to work out a lot for themselves, and I’ve been wondering whether to be more explicit.

When he starts a novel, does Jeet Thayil know its ending? Not at all – he used the imagery of pushing a raft out to sea, not even knowing if it will ever land. And here he is on grief: ‘The dead return to us because they have nowhere to go…. Grief is love with nowhere to go.’

I don’t know his work, but will be reading his new one, The Elsewhereans. That’s one big bonus of festivals: new discoveries.

Festival friendships are a good part as well. Placed together in a hotel, writers become a tribe. I shared a taxi from the airport with Stuart Bartholomew, the plucky publisher of the Birmingham-based poetry press and festival Verve, who was shepherding his Queer Muslim Project to a striking afternoon of performance – the project blending emerging writers in the UK and India.

The whole festival is an excursion into five-star worlds, for both the accommodation and the cocktail dining given to visiting writers instead of fees. Kieran Desai was one of the star guests – sadly the two events of hers I showed up for were cancelled, but it was fun to breeze into conversation beneath a crescent moon. We shared both taking decades to write a novel, and her mother Anita Desai blurbing an earlier book of mine.

Of course, put me in company and I’m liable to wander off. Last year at Jaipur I skipped a day to walk around the edge of a leopard reserve. Here my hotel is near the city’s bio park, where I headed at dusk on my first day. And early mornings that’s where I start out, walking the forest path through a soundscape of birdsong.

Being set on a beach, the KLF makes such escapes easy. Walk beyond one end of the festival tents and you find a herd of camels strung together in the shade of a small orchard, then mangroves, before the low stone walls of a harbour where coloured wooden boats bob in the water.

At the festival’s other end comes its star attraction: the ‘Eagle Man’. At my first event I asked the audience to turn around and look out, look up. The sky was filled with large birds. They’re black kites, with a few Brahminy kites in the mix (a gorgeous chestnut colour with white heads and breasts).

The birds fill the sky in their thousands, wheeling around as two o’clock approaches. Feral dogs snack calmly as the kites zoom in. Then the eagle man turns up, a 40kg bag of meat scraps tied to his bike. He emits shrill whistles to alert the birds that food is coming, and then deals out his scraps.

On last year’s visit to India I took the chance to be close tigers, so close, a mother and her two sons, and stood inside an awe that hollowed me and smarted my eyes with tears. This surge of mighty birds, skimming my head hundreds at a time to snatch meat scraps from the shore, brought me toward that same state.

Every book festival needs an eagle man and a beach.

[The writer in the drawing behind me in the header photo is Vaikom Muhammed Basheer (1908-1994), one of the deans of Malayalam Literature, with an uncanny resemblance to Philip Larkin.]

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A belated Happy New Year to you.

In early December I read a doctor’s report on how to avoid the new strain of flu. Get the vaccine (tick). He wouldn’t bother with wearing a mask outdoors. But he would avoid mass gatherings, like concerts halls and theatres.

One concert and two theatre trips down I’m sitting in the third when suddenly I’m chilled, my nose starts running, and by the time I’m home I have every symptom going. New Year’s Eve was a lot quieter than planned (though I was woken by bangs and looked out of our top floor window at 360 degrees of firework displays).

Sometimes New Year’s Eve sees me go into ‘Little Miss Prophecy’ mode and predict the year ahead. That persona wasn’t available this year. I’m opting for some solid resolutions instead: improve my French and add strengthening exercises to flexibility ones.

We normally come up with a mantra for the year. My favourite of years past was ‘Fuck it – Chuck it!’. Feel free to adopt it. This year’s? Maybe something along the lines of ‘Steady as she goes’.

Years ago I recognized that you can source writing from somewhere other than good physical or mental health. Feel sick and you can still summon the energy to write. Perhaps it’s similar to accessing a dream state.

And so my memoir creeps steadily forward. It knows its genre now – literary memoir. I keep being surprised by the calendar, stating that it’s January 2026, since in my imagination I’ve been roaming around a 1960s summer day.

Adults in families smother themselves in subterfuge, it turns out. Perhaps for good reasons, like protecting their children’s innocence, and perhaps for bad. The act of memoir means unravelling those strands the adults sent in place, before weaving them into new coherence.

The Unhappiness Index used to look like a hump – the young start out happy, miseries pile on through middle age, and then ease away again.

No more. Unhappiness now peaks when young.

The pandemic boosted the process but this removal of a youngster’s happiness had been evident for a decade before that. The change coincides with the rise of smartphones. Spend five hours a day on social media and you become a bystander of life. You’ve no time left to hang with family and friends, to play sports or go to the mall or go for a cycle ride or walk the dog, all such activities that bring you out of yourself.

Twenty years ago I was teaching schoolkids on a winter’s morning. I suggested one boy look up from his work and out the window at a glorious sunrise. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘It’s just like a screensaver.’

For years China has limited the hours children can spend online. Australia has just brought in a social media ban for the under-sixteens. There’s talk of it here in the UK. There could be radical kindness in that.

Next week I head back to India. Two literary festivals in Kerala have invited me to speak … starting off with the Kerala Literature Festival, where 650,000 readers mill between tents and events strung along the beach. I’m down for two sessions It’s part of my pledge to take the Bishnoi message to any who might wish to hear it.

I asked about the young when I was travelling among the Bishnoi, preparing to write My Head for a Tree. Their lives are attuned to the natural world, and they see how it is increasingly threatened. Do they suffer from climate anxiety, the way youngsters in the west do? Adults and the young gave me the same answer, a puzzled ‘no’. They are smarter than their phones. Rather than get angry or upset, they ‘do something’. That can mean plant and water a tree, feed a feral dog, give first aid to a wounded gazelle … when you notice something going wrong, do something about it.

In an escape from digital media, I picked up an old Penguin edition of E.M.Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread. He wrote it in his twenties. It’s short and absolutely brilliant.

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It took decades - same Queen, same red pillar boxes - before I noticed BIG changes in my lifetime. Telephones changed so you couldn’t press A and B buttons and have big pennies fall into a slot, they got rid of those pennies, diesel trains replaced steam, television got coloured, we got an extra channel or two, but nothing was too startling. In 1972 my school got a computer. It filled a classroom. In 1982 I saw what looked like a speaker fixed to a pole in Saudi Arabia and was told It transmitted phone signals so that you didn’t need a line. Incredible!

In 1984 I rode through Beijing among thick crowds of people on bikes, cars were few, and we all waited at crossings for trains that ran on steam to pass. On a cross-China train journey I looked down on a stretch of fields whewre people were ploughing. To do so, a man stood on the plough, his weight digging its prongs inton the soil, and rope from the plough was pulled by a team of men. It was a medieval scene, not yet even in the ox-drawn plough era.

Here in London we’ve just signed up for solar panels made in China. And an air source heat pump made in Japan. It’s all been arranged through my smart phone and my laptop. The contracts for it are signed digitally, and to pay for it money I never see goes from my bank to a company I’ve never met with.

We see London from miles away now, a city of skyscrapers that were never there before and keep rising.

I’m seeing all this, of course, because of medical advances that mean I’m not dead.

I’m intrigued by the life that’s to come and fond of the life that is gone.

My first job in London was round the corner from the Royal Opera House. I could grab cheap tickets and peer down from the Amphitheatre. Almost fifty years on and I was up there again, for a performance of Janacek’s The Makropolos Case. The director catered for shrunken attention span. The stage was divided in two so we had parallel scenes to watch, and a projected phone screen above the action scrolled with texts from an added separate drama. In their compacted space singers stood so close together that from my distance I couldn’t see mouths moving so know who was singing. It’s a stupid opera without arias. The soprano lead is hundreds of years old and mean spirited.

I’d have been more interested once. Things were new! Now I want divas singing their hearts out. I always did. Shirley Verret soaring for that high C as Verdi’s Lady Macbeth at La Scala, the audience roaring appreciation, that’s opera. [Watch her in that performance here and be stirred and amazed - it’s one of those pieces I use when I need to be roused.}

On my previous visit to the Royal Opera, I wasn’t in the Gods because I wasn’t buying my own ticket. I was in the Royal Box for the house’s 563^rd performance of Tosca. Outside the Opera House protesters were chanting, opposed to the casting of a Russian opera singer with a history of association with Putin at a time when Russia was savaging Ukraine. I’m sympathetic. I might well have joined them. Instead I looked down from the box. Anna Netrebko is a magnificent singer - she enters the stage like a true diva, compelling even before she sings. The best opera roles see women of huge beauty and innocence and tenderness beaten to death by the callousness of the male world. Tosca is faced by Scarpia, the evil state official who will spare her artist fiancé’s life in exchange for sex with her. She sings Vissi D’Arte, (‘I lived for Art’) about her spiritual life and that she has only ever tried to do good and has lived for her art. She wins what she believes is the concession from the evil Scarpia, believes (oh dear) that he has primed her fiancé for his freedom, and then stabs him to death.

As Tosca, Anna Netrebko steps back from the killing, her back against a wall, and sings: ‘Now I forgive you!’

I had never understood fogrgiveness till then.

I was sobbing as she sang about her life of goodness and art, and was sobbing still as they brought dessert to the dining room behind the Royal Box during that second interval.

The world changes. Threats manifest. Artists are punished. Yet art endures!

Our Queen now, of course, is the wife of the King. Iniside the royal box his gilt-rimmed chair has a rope across it to keep it pure. The view from the box looks down on the orchestra but a slice of the stage is obscured. The sound is magnificent.

At the end of the performance we guests, with our security passes, were led through a warren of concrete staircases and emerged in the wings. We were there to greet the singers and conductors as they emerged through the curtains after their bows. The pianist Mitsuo Uchida, looking exultant, had got there there before us. The cast, greeting friends, rushed by. The conductor Jakub Hrůša, looking smaller than when on the podium but very friendly, paused to talk. From the front right of the Royal Box James had had a poorer view of the stage than most, and a magnificent view of the orchestra. He had enjoyed how attuned Hrůša is to the singers, holding the orchestral line for as long as a singer chooses to prolong a note, the orchestra and singers breathing as one. And he mentioned how the opera saw me in floods of tears.

‘It’s what we strive for,’ Hrůša responded.

A Happy End of Year to you, and you may you get the catharsis you need!

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Sooner than develop the neighbouring land into high-rent holiday cabins, however, it’s being turned into an organic garden. Around it, using different sites, this annual November gathering sees folk with expertise in conservation meet to share experiences.

I joined the event, keen to spread the story of the Bishnoi people and their extraordinary accord with the natural world. Appropriately (for my book is called My Head for a Tree), my panel settled beneath the branches of what has been called ‘The Story-telling Tree’, the audience surrounding us on a ring of straw bales.

By nature I am diffident and people lean close to try and catch what I’m saying. In my ambassadorial role for the Bishnoi something changes; I grow louder, clearer, as though infused with Bishnoi energy. It helps that theirs is such a powerful story to tell.

The audience was affected by it. Hopefully they spread the word. While the book has connected really well in India (I’m invited to take part in two literary festivals there in January), Britain and America are yet to surprise me with keen interest.

Which, of course, is true for almost all books. Review coverage is scarce, which leaves books having to wave their hands and dance for attention on entertainment channels (which include TikTok). And who makes time for serious stuff?

Here’s something that surprised me. The conference included an open-air showing of the David Attenborough documentary Ocean. Attendees bundled up in blankets and settled into deckchairs, facing both the screen and the Mediterranean. It’s a powerful film, urging the ending of bottom trawling and the restoration of our seas. But we were all conservationists, the film had surfed into public consciousness on a media blitz, had a wide cinema release and then was streamed on Netflix. Surely everybody had already seen it?

No. They watched it and were profoundly moved, almost all of them viewing it for the first time. How come? Why hadn’t they seen it before?

The film’s producer Colin Butfield was part of the gathering, so I posed that question to him. ‘It’s true. Yes, why?’ and he looked into the sky for an answer. ‘It broke box office records for a documentary in Australia and New Zealand,’ he tried.

And I asked him where we look after David Attenborough. He’s still going strong at 99, but who’s in the wings?

Attenborough’s unique, Colin answered. He’s without an ego, and has seventy years of film-making in this field behind him. ‘Whoever does emerge next, it won’t be a white man with an Oxbridge accent I can tell you that much.’

Who is there, though, looking more widely, with a moral voice? Where’s our Desmond Tutu?’

He thought some more, and shook his head.

[Alas, Jane Goodall has left our stage after hier 91 year run, RIP. Who’s left for YOU that speaks with some moral authority, particularly on the natural world? Comments - and links - welcome below!]

Recently live is a podcast on Terrence McNalley’s pioneering Free Forum podcast Defending Nature with their Lives . You’ll find me talking about the Bishnoi.

And also, because Terrence is acute with his questions, starting with talking about myself, stuff I’ve never much shared. On mysticism, the constraints of the UK as against the openness of the US, the tightness of academia. Please give it a listen.

The Hackney Citizen is a smart, gutsy, progressive local newspaper, and I love them even more because they’ve just reviewed my new novel The Boy on the Train. I love their pithy summary: ‘Greed is set against Cunning’, and of course an author always looks for a quote. ‘Deliciously twisty tale’ made me smile.

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‘I thought we’d fixed on this?’ he’d say. ‘I thought we’d made a decision. We had a plan. We’d worked out all the details.’

‘Maybe we have,’ I’d offer. ‘I’ve just got to work out the counter-argument first.’

That’s how you test something – you face it with its opposite. If the decision is really good, then it stays strong. If not, it collapses.

James is a lawyer. He encounters a problem and in his head he works through myriad detail to fathom a solution. The solution is backed by a clean line of argument. As he takes that solution into the real world he’ll meet with experts, study more, and refine his argument, but he won’t ditch it and start again. Where I am haphazard he is methodical. The main problem he encounters is global ecological collapse and he’s had more success at bringing in solutions than anyone else I know.

I’ve come up with two maxims that I return to as my own go-to wisdom.

One is: ‘Trust your intuition when it counters the advice of self-professed experts.’ When I forget to apply that, things go wrong.

The other is: ‘The opposite is also true.’ (I believed I had coined this myself, though this morning I learned (from Stephen Johnson’s How Shostakovich Changed my Mind) that Beethoven scribbled these words at the end of the manuscript of one of his songs: ‘Sometimes the opposite is also true.’)

‘Am I a good person, or am I bad?’ That I ask myself that question annoys James. For him, of course I’m good. For many who dwell on the right of the political spectrum and those with religious Orthodox beliefs, james and my existence as a gay, progressive environmentalist couple makes us very bad.

I recall a scene in the holy Indian city of Varanasi that exemplified this. Behind me was a shop selling plaster-cast statues of Indian Gods. The sidewalk was raised high above the street. Heavy rain fell, and suddenly the street became a fast-flowing river. To my left, drenched in rain, sat a dog. To my right sat a rat. All three of us stared in amazement at this sudden rush of river. Normally the dog would chase the rat, and I might run away from it. For a while the opposite was true – the three of us were together, absorbed in the moment.

The downpour paused and I looked to my right. A man, stout in white clothing with grey hair plastered back over his scalp, leaned on the railing of his balcony and stared at me. It felt like a look of naked hostility. Whoever I saw myself as being, he was seeing me as something bad.

In streets in the west dogs run up to me. It’s some automatic bond. They love ma and I love them back. That makes me good, right?

In backstreets of Varanasi, where archways made of human skulls formed the entrances to gardens, the sight of me span every dog into a frenzy of vicious barking. These dogs judged me as something bad.

Of course I am who I am and seek to be kind and do no harm.

And of course my even attempting to think my way into the mindsets of people opposed to me implies empathy, which Elon Musk and others on the far right claim to be a vice.

One strand of my fiction includes an avatar of myself as a young male character. This character doesn’t question himself – he is in ruthless opposition to the societal norm. (Here’s an audio version of one such on Spotify, Bender in Ectopia.)

Reviewers tend to dislike this character. So be it! I can take it! Really I can! My latest, Tom in The Boy on the Train, is smart, relentless and plucky. Beaten down he doesn’t stay low but takes on the whole world order. With a real chance of winning. One reviewer sums him up so: “computer hacker par excellence, and isolated neurotic loner, add teenage angst about the world and you have your anti-hero.”

James points out that my penchant for producing counter-narratives applies to my own novels, which I rewrite again and again. Often a new draft focuses on a character who was pencilled in lightly the first time around and now demands my attention; they want more substance. In this novel I had the structure and function of whole secret government departments to deepen as well. Feedback kept telling me the first half of the book was better than the second so I worked and worked on that. That same reviewer wrote of “a cataclysmic yet satisfying final chapter”, so good!

To round off the run of posts about the influence of Highsmith (on whose work I modelled The Boy on the Train) here she is on the need she felt to chuck out one draft of The Talented Mr Ripley and start again:

“On page seventy-five or so, I began to feel my prose was as relaxed as I was, very nearly flaccid, and that a relaxed mood was not the one for Mr. Ripley. I decided to scrap the pages and begin again, mentally as well as physically sitting on the edge of my chair, because that is the sort of man Ripley is… There is nothing spectacular about the plot of Ripley, I think, but it became a popular book because of its frenetic prose, and the insolence and audacity of Ripley himself. By thinking myself inside the skin of such a character, my own prose became more self-assured than it logically should have been. It became more entertaining.”

You don’t identify with Tom Ripley, find him likeable? Here’s Highsmith on that: “If there must be reader-identification, a term I am rather tired of, then provide the reader with a lesser character or two (preferably one who is not murdered by the hero-psychopath) with whom he can identify.”

I got inside the skin of my own Tom. I’ve fleshed out other characters. I reckon it’s entertaining, maybe even gripping. And now The Boy on the Train is out in the world. Please give it a try and let me know how it works for you!

The Boy on the Train is at a bookstore or library near you, avaiable from the usual online monolopies, and also at Bookshop.org - paperback and ebook.

The Boy on the Train’s UK link.

The Boy on the Train’s US link.

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In the moment when you are staring out to sea, all is well. Troubles lift. Since all your life has brought you to this point, and it’s become a good point, your life has a good outcome. Give yourself a tick. You’ve done well.

On you go!

That may be facile but it works for me. Whatever has happened, whatever has been done to you, you can emerge from it.

To emerge fresh rather than damaged, you outwit any harm that’s done to you. To do that, you separate from yourself (which spares getting stuck in a fruitless ‘poor me’ mode) and consider the perpetrator of the harm. What caused them to do that? What must it be like to live in their head?

Once you’ve seen someone in that light you don’t want to be near them. And you don’t want to be like them.

That’s two lessons learned: who to associate with, and what behaviours to avoid.

This chain of thought stems from my recently drafted memoir, which from early feedback needs a complete rewrite. The core of that book is abuse by my father which, despite the evidence, I can’t recall. How does such childhood experience play out in a life?

Staring out to sea, I wouldn’t swap my life for anyone else’s. Without that early abuse I doubt that I’d be with James, and the life we have shared is rich and unexchangeable. What has hurt me, and still quakes within me, partly shapes me. I can like who I have become even when others don’t.

One regret I’ve had is that one theme, that of a kid forging a life beyond abuse, has kept sneaking into my fiction. I’m now learning to accept it. For two reasons.

One is that the theme of a wayward character outwitting all adversity, distrusting authorities and determined to win through on his own terms, brings great narrative drive to my novels.

The other reason comes from insights from two authors.

The first is Ann Patchett, from her introduction to William Maxwell’s short novel So Long, See you Tomorrow. “Many years ago,” Patchett writes, “I got to know a woman who was struggling with the novel she was working on. Her last book had been wildly successful, making her rich, famous, and completely unsure of herself. She told me the book she was writing now was too much like the one she was writing before. ‘I think I only have onone story,’ she confided sadly. Even though I was working on my third book at the time, it was the moment I realized that I, too, had only one story. It seemed very clear to me then that the key to making art was not in surrendering your story, but in surrendering your desire to fight it.”

So Martin, this tells me, let go of your desire to abandon your theme. And if you need extra reassurance, here’s what Patricia Highsmith has to say (from her Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction):

“The theme I have used over and over again in my novels is the relationship between two men, usually quite different in make-up, sometimes an obvious contrast in good and evil. Sometimes merely ill-matched friends… Themes cannot be sought after or strained for; they appear. Unless one is in danger of repeating oneself, they should be used to the fullest, because a writer will write better making use of what is, for some strange reason, innate.”

Aaah, but what if the theme is some psychological warp, looping back into some personal trauma. Shouldn’t you just get over it, resolve those issues in psychotherapy or whatever and free the fiction?

Highsmith has a clear answer: “The book is always better if there are first-hand and really felt experiences in it.”

And the writer should be GLAD of any traumatic experiences they have: “Writers and painters have by nature little in the way of protective shells and try all their lives to remove what they have, since various buffetings and impressions are the material they need to work from.”

Really?

Absolutely, says Highsmith. “This receptivity, this awareness of life, is an artist’s ideal, and takes precedence over all his activities and attitudes: this is why creative people are called, sociologically, classless. Because they are alike and understand one another in this fundamental matter, they usually mix easily, whatever their backgrounds.”

Highsmith was so intense, I’m not sure ‘easy mixing’ was her forte. I enjoy how acutely she sees herself, and don’t need social encounters to be easy. It’s much more fun to meet someone who comes up with lines like this: “I do not understand people who like to make noise; consequently I fear them, and since I fear them, I hate them.”

The sentence has a deadly passage of logic, with three steps to understanding oneself … and therefore others. Think about it, and it casts light on the current gulf between what have become factions in society. “I don’t understand them – so I fear them – so I hate them.”

Inside a novel, a reader can come close to people and situations they would avoid in life. Their own protective shells can melt away. From a safe distance they can come to understand factors that might be at play in their own lives. And they are free to do whatever they like with that experience, for as Highsmith says: “Creative people do not pass moral judgments … art essentially has nothing to do with morality, convention or moralizing.”

Last week friends took us to see Samuel D. Hunter’s play Clarkston at London’s Trafalgar Theatre. It was my first time with the playwright’s work, and very moving. Of course it carries a theme with which I resonate: on top of all the other trials of life, there’s the extra burden of coming out as gay to oneself and others. How do you belong in a world that rejects you?

And the play brings me back to now, in Lowestoft and writing with a view of the sea. Lowestoft is the easternmost point of Britain and has two beaches, a wilder North and the managed ‘pleasure beach’ of the South. In my novel The Boy on the Train (modelled on Highsmith and so sparking these reflections), its punchy young lead Tom is whirled by action from a small Midlands town, through London, to North Lowestoft; his known world is on the brink of collapse while he faces the North Sea.

And ultimately, that’s what Charleston is about: two characters questing west like the old pioneers, with their goal of reaching the sea. Stand before the Pacific and what do you do – nod in appreciation and turn back to resume your old life? Nearly. That nearly happens. But stare longer, as those two characters did, and let the power of the sea take hold. Find that your old life has brought you here, where your new life begins.

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The first was that it’s compelling. You could guarantee that students actually did read the novel, all the way through.

The second, and all the other reasons, was that it’s compelling. It’s great for students to have a model of a book that knows how to grip its reader. How does she do it? Even in less successful works, like the last in the Ripley novels in which nothing much ever happens, she keeps you turning the pages.

How does she do it? Each time I went back to the book we found some new answers to that question, but there was always more to find out. When you teach what you know it soon grows stale. It’s much more exciting to teach what you’re finding out, and to bring students into the live quest.

My work habit when teaching was to get up at 5 o’clock and start writing. Academia is demanding but nobody can fairly reprimand you for not answering emails before 8. Giving my first three, fresh hours to creative work, I could then dig into the teaching and the marking and the admin. One day, by seven in the evening, I was too tired to read, to watch TV, to have a bath. Too tired to do anything … except, oddly, write.

I picked up a notebook and began the novel that has become The Boy on the Train. Those pages haven’t changed much. I knew a fair bit about the boy – but by the time my writing stopped a girl had taken the train seat opposite him. I knew nothing about her – the more she spoke, the more she intrigued me.

I took my own mentor for writing this novel: Patricia Highsmith. What could she teach me? How would SHE make the book compelling?

I left a virtual imprint of myself at Hull, where I set up an online MA in Creative Writing before settling into a quieter professor emeritus status. For the MA’s opening module I offered draft pages of THE BOY ON THE TRAIN, with a commentary on what I was trying to achieve with my Highsmith quest (students are asked to do the same with their own work and it’s good to have a model when you make yourself so vulnerable).

Looking back, what has Highsmith taught me? It involves lessons on writing, reading, and life, so hopefully it’s of interest for a substack or two.

In her Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction Highsmith left us some clues (I’ll be quoting from that). She starts with a little rap of my knuckles for even trying to work out how she did it. “It is impossible,” she writes, “to explain how a successful—that is readable—book is written.”

Ah yes, but she’s already giving some game away with that equation between ‘successful’ and ‘readable’. Readability means bringing your reader all the way through to the book’s closing sentence. If they’ve become intimate with characters they normally wouldn’t care to know, drawn from the writer’s untethered psyche, so that the readers are brought through layers of thought as well as incident, then ‘success’ will keep the book resonating in the reader’s imagination even after the book is complete. Highsmith teaches us much of that too, but for this post I’ll concentrate on her language, her style of prose.

Here's her statement on that, which really set me working:

“Most of my slow, even tedious beginnings are written in a rather nervous prose. It is possible to describe a dull, sleepy villa on a sunny foreign beach in a febrile manner, though nothing happens for eighty pages. The prose style prepares the reader for violent things to come.”

What makes ‘nervous prose’?

Here’s her opening to The Glass Cell: “It was 3.35 p.m., Tuesday afternoon, in the State Penitentiary, and the inmates were returning from the workshops.” Take out the words and hear the thumping rhythm: “The dreariness of the rhythm,” Highsmith writes of this opening, “is the dreariness of the prison atmosphere also.”

Lately writers tend to write in the present tense, but Highsmith didn’t. She also tended to pick words of Anglo-Saxon (rather than Greek or Latin) origin. That gave her short, stabbing words with lots of plosives, /p/ and especially /k/ and /t/. (‘trick I worked out’ has two /k/ sounds and three /t/.)

Look at the great words the past tense (rather than the present) of Anglo-Saxon rooted words gives you: leaves becomes left; dreams > dreamt; walks > walked; buys > bought; plucks > plucked. Lots of final stabbing /t/ sounds on every verb.

Take the stabbing explosive sounds and uild the into a rhythm. Here’s the start of the second para of Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley. “At the corner Tom leaned forward and trotted across Fifth Avenue.” Instead of ‘ran’ we have that ‘trotted across’ – two /t/ sounds, one /k/, and the quick rhythm of the language reflects the rhythms of Tom’s steps.

One other trick of Highsmith’s: she repeats a character’s name rather than using a pronoun. It can be awkward but it keeps the reader driving forward, not pausing to work out who the pronoun refers back to. For Ripley’s first name she chose Tom. It’s a good name for repeating: Tom tom.

I borrowed it for the kid in The Boy on the Train. Here’s an early paragraph, Tom called in for an interview with Glyph, a ‘security company’. “From his hotel room Tom hacked into Glyph’s system and found the test results. And then his counter showed a slight data charge. It took minutes to track it down and there it was: a new folder with that logo of a lightning bolt and a photo of Tom taken a minute before from his webcam. The results of his interview were posted into his machine. That was cool. Tom’s gut heaved at the shock of the intrusion. He nearly vomited, but it was cool.”

That’s my HIghsmith game at work, with plosives and staccato rhythms and past tenses and, hopefully, a style that drives you forward.

A final word on prose from Highsmith. For her example she picks this opening line of Graham Greene’s ‘The Basement Room’ – “When the front door had shut them out and the butler Baines had turned back into the dark heavy hall, Philip began to live.”

Here’s Highsmith’s comment: “What hostility and self-defense are contained in the phrase ‘shut them out’ instead of for instance, ‘closed behind them.’”

Poets pride themselves on taking care of every word, of harnessing rhythm. But see how prose writers do it too!

I’ve been staring out at the North Sea, willing my broken foot to heal, with the odd outing to the local park. (I do keep coming up with ambitious plans, and James gently counsels me back to common sense and what I can actually do.) It’s been a good time for reading.

I went looking for books that dealt with memory loss and AI sent me to Tana French’s Into the Woods, which was already sitting in my Kindle. She’s an Irish crime writer adopted by the New York literati, but in trying her before I found her prose style a little lush. This time I let it grab me. The book is long, the characters keep growing complete with puzzles and back stories, but this is rich layering rather than padding and not to be skipped. I see why writers tend to pre-order her upcoming books.

Then an interview with Rachel Kushner about her novel Creation Lake sent me to a writer who inspired her and who I didn’t know: Jean-Patrick Manchette. You like your books terse and noir? Go here. I read The Gunman (a man out to kill) and then Fatale (a woman out to kill). You don’t love these characters but you root for them. Fatale had an afterword by Jean Echenoz, itself clear and bright, so I moved on to his short fictional account of the composer Ravel. It’s clever, touching and brilliant – and its techniques made a related novel idea of mine (using a scientist rather than a composer) glimmer with possibility again.

With no TV or WiFi in the house and an incapable foot, the other option (when not cooking and drinking and eating) is writing, so I finished the draft of my memoir. It’s a wild yet contained and hopefully helpful beast, now out for initial feedback. It may be loved, despised or neglected, as might we all, but there’s comfort in having it done.

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As I write the page is becoming an artwork, with lines crossed out and phrases squeezed in. It all looks unfinished - which is handy. Writing direct into a Word document, no sooner is a word out than it is typeset and auto corrected, co-pilot taking it on in AI mode if you let it. Computing creates an urge for a piece to be finished, almost instantly. If it already looks published, surely it's publishable? Handwritten pieces aren't like that. They're personal and evolving.

Starting an academic year with a fresh crowd of creative writing students, one or two always stood out. They had natural flair, and the beginnings of a distinctive voice. It would seem like a good start. Oddly, those generally weren’t the writers who shone at the end of the course. Thinking they had it all, perhaps, a little cocky, they didn't put in the work. They didn't absorb the teachings or leave themselves open to feedback.

Writing is a slow, risky, tough business. It takes constant effort, every piece providing new challenges.

I recall a tea-company executive, bewailing the fact that people dunked tea bags. ‘Teabags are a convenience food, ‘ he said. ‘Not instant food.’

Add water, stir, let it steep.

Like teabags, writing needs time.

My books take years to complete. While I do now write directly into a screen, even so each book acquires an accompanying manuscript book or two, filled with early pen and ink versions. Writing drains you, but computer screens speed up the process and drain you too fast. Pen in hand, a window to stare through, technology switched off, words seep out at their own pace.

As a writer you don't have to chase after everything. Sit, and maybe things come to you.

Writing by hand in front of the Austrian view was deliberate. Unplanned is the fact that I’ve broken my foot. On arrival in the house I tumbled down its front steps. I suspect a message from the universe. ‘We told you to SLOW DOWN.’

Here’s a great slow-down tool – the iNaturalist app. How good are you at distinguishing one hoverfly from another? Do you even see them? Pause on a summer walk, stare toward some plant long enough, and one may appear. Snap a picture. Upload it. iNaturalist helps you identify it. Into the bargain, you’re adding to a global archive of sightings and becoming a citizen scientist.

I love how this app has slowed down my walks. No longer charging through a landscape on my exercise loops, I stop to see who is sharing it with me. Close-up photos introduce me to wondrous, colourful aliens. Linguistically it’s a wonder too, for these plants and insects come with great names. Here are a few from the last week: 22-spotted ladybird; birch catkin bug; nettle pouch gall midge; bristly oxtongue; dingy footman.

Wafting on to the paper as I write: a migrant hoverfly with its orange and black banded bum. It’s living up to the migrant name: I saw my first in Suffolk last week.

A virtue of not having a book contract is that you don’t have a deadline. Your book can stay a part of you for as long as you like. You can grow together.

For years now I’ve been writing a memoir. Pages accrued. The other day I realized that only procrastination was preventing completion, so I did set a deadline and wrapped it up in three weeks. Now it’s sitting there, steeping.

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[I’m back in London, tended by our wonderful NHS, and in our garden a hummingbird hawkmoth is visiting our verbena. On my handwritten page there’s a remaining paragraph of pretentious blather – never to be typed up and soon to be crumpled.]

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These past months James and I have been busy letting go. It has meant many trips to charity stores. For thirty years I had worked on moving to the United States – and pulled it off in December with the new Santa Monica apartment and new car. Then came California’s fires and Trump unleashed.

That apartment sale closed this week – when you clear out your wardrobes it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making room to bring others back. Another life has moved into that address. Happily friends found need for its furnishings. We packed our most precious things and shipped them back to England with FedEx. They arrived as broken shards, everything smashed.

Start letting go and there’s generally more of it to do than you planned.

Back in England we have a seaside home, an apartment in a former Victorian hotel with bay windows giving 180 degree views over the North Sea. On returning I sat and looked out, checking my emotional attachment to the place, and realized I could let this go too.

There’s a shift in the UK to double property taxes on second homes, which prompted the move. It has now sold to a lady who his downsizing from her bungalow in the town. And so in the next month we’ll find new homes for all the furnishings and let her move in.

That seaside place was our haven during Covid. It will be sad not to have access to it. But not being there means we’ll be elsewhere. Somewhere we wouldn’t otherwise have been. Letting go of what you know means letting in the new.

I have a trick for letting go of what you have. If you saw it in a charity store, would you pay a pound for it? Often the answer is no. You were glad of it once, but you’ve had your time together.

Similarly with books. They accrue. Do you need more bookshelves or fewer books? I know we don’t need more shelves.

Once I spent an evening sitting on my kitchen floor, grieving the end of a relationship. I had fantasies of future moments together that were clear in detail, like memories of the future. One by one I brought them to mind and then let them go. That shared fish dinner on a table overlooking the Mediterranean? Puff. It vanished into nothing. I let go of a future that didn’t want to happen.

I’ve since told this to James, as we supped on fresh fish and sipped chilled white wine with Mediterranean waves crashing onto rocks beneath us. Letting things go: leaving room for the new to come in.

The first time I arrived in Australia, picking my single bag off the luggage carousel at Sydney airport, my immediate thought was, ‘This will do! Let’s stay here, start afresh, and leave everything else in our lives behind.’

Of course, that was fanciful. We were on a three-week trip, and you can’t walk away from financial and bureaucratic encumbrances.

Unless you die. I often reflect on the fact that I could so easily have died, yet haven’t. In that light, still being alive is a great gift. Everything could have been over. Instead I’m still here. In which case, do I want to just resume my old life, or try something fresh?

The photo for this piece is of a lady I saw on Lowestoft’s beach. She stood with her two bags in hand, staring out to sea, so totally still that for minutes I wondered whether she was an art installation. Then she moved a little way and stood motionless again.

I wish her, and everyone, somewhere safe to be.

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Today sees Karen Stevens’ Brilliant Blue launch into the world, helped by a Substack review from Stephanie Norgate

This is Karen’s debut, the third in a trio of Barbican Firsts – debut fiction under 50,000 words. It comes from Barbican Press, my publishing house, and this debut series was spurred and supported into being by Maggie Hamand.

Maggie’s a novelist who ran the gutsy independent Maia Press for years. Doing such a thing is like adopting an orphaned baby rhino – it disrupts your life, chews up your resources, and neighbours fail to see its wonder. Why would writers behave so rashly?

Because we’ve been there. We know what it’s like for a writer to produce something precious that cannot find a home. When my first story was accepted, by Iron magazine, I took the acceptance letter and ran with it to the village phone box to tell my mother the news. Publication redeems a writer’s life.

The writer Jonathan Taylor recommended Karen’s book to me. At an event with literary agents the other day we all agreed that a book stands or falls by its opening lines. They needn’t be showy. Here’s the opening paragraph of Brilliant Blue, which worked for me: ‘It was knocking on four o’clock when Andy decided he’d had enough. There was no end to it: road after road of council houses with verges that he needed to strim. He’d taken his time again; just couldn’t be bothered. A full hour for lunch and several tea breaks, while Maciej – Mac, they’d nicknamed him at work – kept on going. The man was a machine. Intensely efficient.’

What pulled me in? The voice for a start – it’s not striving to be literary but speaks like a human, that ‘knocking off’ ‘had enough’ ‘couldn’t be bothered’. We get one character already mid-drama, weary of an endless job, and then a second character who’s different. We have a setting – and that this is a worker on a council estate already makes the book stand out from middle-class fiction.

Brilliant Blue is a startlingly fine collection, characters weaving between stories and homes on the estate. Checkov, Alice Munro, Tessa Hadley, Grace Paley, Mavis Gallant, (check those links!) there’s a host of big reputations out there whose first books of stories came quietly into print. Maggie and I read their work and it helped shape us as writers. In the tales of Brilliant Blue we recognized those qualities that mean a book enters your life and changes you. It’s great to share books that mean so much. Now Karen Stevens’ first book is in print. Others have the chance to share it too.

Reading is a solitary act, but a book ignites your imagination – reading in this way is co-creative, you take a writer’s work and your response is unique to you. The book lives inside a reader the way it doesn’t on the page or in any other reader’s life. Read and you are as much a part of a community as if you were sitting with an audience in a theatre. Books vibrate in their readers.

We’re running an online festival with our fiction writers just now. In our conversation Damion Spencer, whose The Devil’s Horsewhip is a feast of storytelling that leads you from Tokyo to Damion’s home country of Jamaica, claimed to have reached the stage where he is happy if just one person reads and appreciates his work. That’s right of course – engage in writing a short story and you are being willfully uncommercial. Still, as a publisher, it would be fun if thousands find their way into Damion’s world.

Similarly with the first of this debut trio, Sam Lee. Here’s the opening paragraph of her A Trail of Blood on the Snow:

‘I am unhappy with life. I am very, very bored with it. When I met my wife we were sixteen and her eyes were sparkly and on our first date, we went to a diner and shared a banana split. She had eyeliner on and dangly earrings and she smiled a lot. It was like she tricked me into thinking I’d be happy with her for the rest of my life, because now I’m 41 and she’s 41 and we’re only halfway through this whole shit show and happiness is nowhere to be found.’

Do you see how Maggie and I were pulled in?

It was interesting from our online conversation to learn how Sam just blasted out the first draft of her novel, encouraged by living in a cold and desolate landscape and watching a run of horror movies. It was a draft of two halves. She loved the first and threw away the second, grafting for years to construct the second half in the way we read it now. The novel leads you, twist by twist, into ever greater depths.

Sam’s and Damion’s interviews will be posted online. As will Karen’s – but you’ve the chance to be there live and ask her questions yourself. Event details here!

The New Fiction Festival concludes with Miranda Miller – whose novel When I Was is far from a debut. It is, though, the portrait of a writer as a young girl. 1950s London, and we come to know a family that has been compared to the Durrells in Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. Please join Miranda and myself in conversation.

Bishnoi updates

India keeps doing My Head for a Tree proud – with recent reviews from India Today and Mint. Those are behind paywalls – but one that isn’t is by Kate Horsley for Inkfish Magazine. It dives to the very heart of the book.

For a different perspective, please read this piece on the Bishnoi in World Atlas. I’d have cited it in my book had it been out in time. It quotes a head priest who refutes my claim (as I was told) that you can’t become a Bishnoi, only be born one. So we CAN become Bishnois. Let’s do it!

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Travel west through Rajasthan toward the Pakistani border and the Thar Desert becomes a rock-strewn plain before rising into classic sand dunes. Can wildlife exist out here?

Yes, with a little help from its friends. One such was Radheshyam Pemani Bishnoi – known to his friends as Radhe. On Friday 23rd May his phone buzzed with an incoming report of poachers in the district. Animals were under threat, particularly the chinkara, a delicate, knee-high gazelle. Radhe gathered three friends and raced off in his vehicle. It ran into an oncoming truck and Radhe and his friends, fellow Bishnois and a forest worker, were killed. Flames engulfed their vehicle.

I’ve been in that vehicle, a sand-coloured SUV. Radhe drove me across some of the miles of desert he protected. Radheshyam Bishnoi was one of the world’s most charismatic and committed conservationists, aged twenty-three when I first met him and twenty-eight when he died. He held no formal job – that would have constrained him. He served the wildlife of the desert. ‘It’s my passion in life,’ he told me.

This is true of many Bishnois. In the 15^th century the guru who founded their religion, Jambhoji, taught them how to live in a mutually supportive way with the natural world.

The iconic species in this patch of the Thar Desert is the Great Indian Bustard. One of our planet’s largest birds of flight, its wild population hovers around one hundred. I had come to catch sight of them and Radhe offered to be my guide. If he trusts you and your attitude to the desert, I was told, you will see them. If not, you might be driving around for five days without a glimpse.

I allowed five days. An hour into our time together Radhe stopped his car. Ahead was a spurt of dust, kicked up by the hoofs of a chinkara (a knee-high gazelle) startled by our appearance. Further off Radhe pointed to a line of birds, ostrich-like, over a meter tall, who raised their heads from grazing to follow the gazelle’s escape. The two species support each other in sensing danger.

And that’s what Radhe always did, on their behalf. He sensed and addressed dangers. Know the desert intimately and you know when something is out of alignment. Part of the Bishnoi way of life is to notice when something needs special care and promptly take action.

This work of animal rescue and recovery started for Radhe as a teenager when he found a chinkara that had been struck by a car. He picked it into his arms and took an overnight bus to Jodhpur, where forestry officials taught him how to tend to its injuries. Back in his desert home, he came to know the desert herds of chinkara so well that he grew alert when an animal went missing, and then learned to find the hiding places where sick creatures settle.

A visit to the Indian Birding Fair in Jaipur helped teach him him that a bird he almost took for granted, the Great Indian Bustard, was so special to his region that those he saw were the total global population. The species, the State Bird of Rajasthan, faced extinction

Far too often these bustards are found dead on the ground beneath electric wires that ferry the currents from wind turbines that churn above the desert. Strung across the bustards’ flight paths, these power lines were killing ten per cent of the bustard population every year. On our outing Radhe pulled up beside one of the pylons. Here’s where he found a bustard corpse, he told me. He had called in friends to stand guard by the body of the bird and phoned the forestry officials. When they arrived on the scene Radhe was clinging to the top of the pylon. Fix deflectors to these wires, he told them, make them more obvious to the bustards, or I will jump.

The Bishnoi have a noble history of martyrdom on behalf of wildlife and trees. When they say they will give their life to protect nature they are believed. Deflectors were fitted. Radhe got to live for a few more years, patrolling the bustards’ habitat. And he fought to have these power lines buried underground.

Radhe was an excellent wildlife photographer. His photo of a bustard and a chinkara grace the book I was writing. Another portfolio of his, featuring the attacks on wildlife by feral dogs, reveals how he used his photography to show us nature in danger.

Part of Bishnoi belief is that every animal must be allowed to live out its natural life. When a cow among the herd in Radhe’s home village dies it is carried to the village’s edge. Radhe took me to the vultures who line up there each morning, warming in the sun before feeding. He took me to waterholes where a mongoose mother led her pups down to drink. Last year’s action saw Radhe lead work to dig over a hundred waterholes in the desert so that wildlife could survive the summer’s heat.

A mobile phone was part of his toolkit. Camel herders, shepherds, farmers, they all had his number - local scientist working for the Wildlife Institute of India praised this as an innovative informer network. His phone held a picture those people out in the desert had sent of a bustard with its wings caught in barbed wire. Radhe raced to the scene and freed it. A dead cow lying on rail tracks? Radhe rushed to haul it away, so vultures that feed on it would not get hit by trains. Many of these vultures are of threatened species. In the two years before Radhe and his friends started monitoring the rail tracks, 150 vultures were killed by trains. Radhe’s monitoring brought that figure down to zero. In 2021 Sanctuary Wildlife Awards named Radhe their Young Naturalist of the Year.

And poachers out hunting his wildlife? Yes, Radhe rushed off to those incidents too. Unarmed, facing down armed hunters, is what the Bishnoi do. Radhe was a member of the Bishnoi Tiger Force, a band of young men always on the alert to respond to attacks on nature.

It is a tragedy that in responding to one such call, driving fast through the night to stop animals being killed, Radhe and his friends (Shyamlal Bishnoi, Kanvrajsinh Bhati, Surendra Chaudhary) were killed.

Radhe was buried in his village of Dholia. He left a wife and two children, a boy of five and girl of three. His community is working to build a fund to support his family and his conservation work, perhaps raising his statue in the centre of a memorial park, and seeking an environmental award from the government alongside his status as a martyr. He was much too young to be lost to us, but his life burned brightly. I reflect on a teaching of the founder of Bishnoism, Guru Jambhoji – don’t wait till you are old and tired to do good work. That’s too late. Act while you are young.

So well done and thank you, Radhe. You worked ceaselessly for the natural world around you, and you showed us how to live.

Radheshyam Pemani Bishnoi, born 15^th July 1996, died 23^rd May 2025.

For an fine article featuring his community’s responses to his death, Radheshyam Bishnoi’s Legacy

See the posting’s on Radhe’s Facebook page

Radhe features strongly in chapter 7, ‘In the Land of the Great Indian Bustard’, of my recent book on the Bishnoi, My Head for a Tree.

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And then, soon after my spout of envy, quite often those writers I was envying have died.

I am left, writing my furrow, reflecting on envy.

Others, I presume, envy me. While I feel my books are unjustifiably ignored, others will note that they are all published. While I feel the lack of acclaim, others might note my professorship of creative writing and my winning of prizes (but not the really big ones! say I).

As a teenager my favourite places were libraries, and in my twenties bookstores, where I read all the classics, sometimes five novels a week, and developed my pantheon of writers (André Gide, Paul Bowles, Janice Elliot, John Fowles, James Purdy, Patrick White, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, Jean Genet, William Blake, Jane Bowles) and when my tastes took on a contemporary edge I headed for the rare racks of Picador paperbacks and American imports (the old Books Etc. on London’s Charing Cross Road was great for such treasures).

And then, for periods, I didn’t like going into bookstores at all. Envy soured them for me. Why are all these books stacked on the tables and not mine? (While my books are indeed eventually published they can take years finding a home.)

I’ve known other writers feel the same, and apart from envy there’s a logic in disappointment with bookstores. Their front tables are largely stocked with books that have come out in the preceding weeks. When your literary tastes are formed by reading the cream of what has been published over the preceding centuries, the quality of this welter of the current crop doesn’t cut it. Will any of these books of the last few weeks be held in regard ten years from now? You open the pages, spot the flaws, and turn to the author bio and photo to discover how on earth they got into print.

I’ve grown more sanguine. Knowing how very hard it is to get published I can be pleased for any writer that manages it. They’ve clearly learned some tricks, deployed narrative skills and been professional. The economics of publishing, with the tightest of margins for any profit at all, mean a focus on celebrity and genre. Bookselling is a business and as such it is commercial, and as such it offers me few of the delights that formed my taste.

In my early twenties I took a bet that I would win the Nobel Prize. (Rina, if you’re reading this be in touch. I’ll pay up. The fiver is yours.) And yet that hankering for acclaim persists. I cleared my whole summer for appearances at literary festivals, happy to spread news of the Bishnoi with tales from my book My Head for a Tree. And yet nobody has invited me. Not even Lowestoft’s First Light Festival, which happens on the beach outside the window where I am now writing. (For my previous First Light gig I walked past the large writer’s tent, where a Scottish comic writer was being foul-mouthed for which he was getting a sizeable fee, and located the side-tent for my own free evening appearance to find the venue was being dismantled.)

What to do about my summer of festival non-appearances? Fret? Be envious?

Instead I’m cancelling other events – overseas trips, nights at the theatre, gallery outings. I’m glad of no need to travel. Being a writer isn’t enviable. It’s a condition.

Give me a table to sit at and a window to look out through and I need no other distractions. Neither famous nor dead, I can still write.

For those who miss the chance of meeting me at a festival this summer, there’s always this recording of February’s event in Jaipur. Really, it can’t be bettered.

These last two weeks have brought a little more attention for My Head for a Tree. Scroll had an intriguingly philosophical review from a Bishnoi reviewer – read to the end for his personal take on caring for dogs.

Hie review appreciates the care the book takes in including but not majoring on the story of the gangster Lawrence Bishnoi – choosing to focus on the good rather than the bad people. I’ve been waiting for the feature-length story of the Bishnoi in the Financial Times. Its author Chris Kay learned about the Bishnoi from my book, interviewed me and then went off to meet my contacts. He’s honoured my request to at least mention the book, I get a quote, and he does background the story of the Bishnoi as eco warriors, but of course the full weight of the story is given to the gangster and the film star elements. As one sage friend counselled me, ‘the press is always so’.

It helps me recognize why the press in the west (unlike in India) has paid scant regard to my book. The book is about what I find of value (good people saving the planet) and not what is commercial. Years ago a literary agent offered me lots of money to write a true crime book about a family of German cannibals. I declined.

Publisher’s Weekly, the magazine for the book trade in America, has just given My Head for a Tree a fine review. And I thank them. Here’s the highlight: ‘Goodman profiles his subjects and relates his historical anecdotes with the verve and amiability of a travel writer. It’s an infectiously buoyant and upbeat account of committed environmental activism.’

What charms me is their sense of my ‘amiability’. I’ve had reviews in the past that have been venomous about my character. This new adjective serves as balm.

At an Earth Day event in Santa Barbara last month, when my husband James Thornton and I made a joint appearance, I spoke of a difference between us. I use narrative in order to understand things. James uses narrative to communicate what he’s understood.

This Substack has taken a few forms before settling on this ‘Letters Home’ version of itself. I sat down today not knowing what would emerge. After writing, I have a clearer sense of a writer’s life and of dilemmas facing book lovers in bookstores.

Hopefully you have too.

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It’s been a sharp turnaround. We bought our apartment here in Santa Monica last December, have had it remodelled, and were fully expecting to lock in the California dream.

The first red flag was the Palisades fire, which fringed our neighborhood and blasted through much of what we love.

And then the new Administration unleashed itself. Even under previous Presidents my entry into the US was never easy – I’m regularly placed in ‘secondary inspection’, locked into a hall with others, phone usage banned, held for many hours pending an interview. Plans this time were to go for a Green card. Many of those in government who process Green card applications have lost their jobs. And since I was always detained at the border before, I’m doubtful I would even get through next time.

In the UK I have health coverage. In the US I have none. Eventually I should have become entitled to Medicare coverage, with hefty premiums, but who knows if that program will be available in future. Property taxes are high and iniquitous – an annual percentage point of the purchase price. Which means a young couple taking out a mortgage to buy a small condo will be paying higher taxes than those with multi-million dollar mansions who bought long ago. We reckoned we would need $50,000 to cover the cost of my insurance and property taxes.

And so we are letting the dream of California living go.

The grieving? This is a beautiful country with open-hearted people and we have made great friends. Rather than judging me and finding me wanting, people are ready to celebrate me for being myself. Santa Monica is one of the sweetest cities on Earth, with walkable tree-lined streets and a golden stretch of the Pacific coastline. Palm trees soar into blue skies.

I will sorely miss all of that.

A topic of conversation among American friends is how to acquire another passport. I am sad for the shame they feel for their country, and their worry that if they travel abroad they will be hated. Artists have lost public commissions and retirees have seen their investments plunge. Some find hope and community in mass protest. I fear that such protests will spark the imposition of martial law. Those who keep the country running, working the fields and the construction sites and maintaining people’s homes, face deportation. Agencies that monitor and mitigate the effects of climate change are being eviscerated. I fear the country will be ever more ravaged by fires, floods, hurricanes and droughts. The rule of law is being attacked at every level. I grieve for the harm that will be caused and the good that could have been done and those who are already afraid of speaking what they know to be true.

I had a happy book tour of California around Easter, from La Jolla and up to Danville and Corte Madera in the Bay Area, and then to Santa Barbara, alerting people to My Head for a Tree. The Bishnois have the message America needs just now (and forever). The image for this post is of a second growth Redwood forest near Oakland that I took in on my trip, from Skygate; a marvellous walk garlanded with birdsong. James and I walked the shores of Santa Barbara (where the name ClientEarth was coined) and Carpinteria, a town we’ve known well for thirty years and still the perfect beach town. “Tell me again, James,” I’ve always said while walking its beach, “why aren’t we living here?”

A purpose of coming to the US back in 2021 was to set up the Americas office of ClientEarth. That has been gloriously achieved. If you want to find hope and strategy for navigating the planet’s way out of crisis, look into the work of these astounding young lawyers.

London will be our base for looking out on the new world order. As the US empire collapses and the country fractures its power will seep away. The rest of the world will realign and hopefully strengthen its own set of values. President Trump’s aspirations for owning Canada have already changed the political make-up in that country and look like doing the same in Australia. James has a new position as an Oxford Professor and keeps finding inspiration from how China is forging sustainable models of planetary living. Watch his recent Mack lecture at the Walker Gallery in Minneapolis for his own guidance on how to find hope now.

So it’s so long to the hummingbirds at our feeder, and the palm trtees we see from our bed. And a returning hello to our London garden with its foxes and bluetits.

I’ll be in touch from there!

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