THE FIRST FIVE PAGES

Edward Carey describes how the beginning of his latest novel evolved with the idea of going to the theatre in a pandemic

photo credit Elizabeth

I had never really meant to write this book. I’d been working on another novel for some time and I had yet to admit to myself that it wasn’t really coming together.

Sometimes books behave (one I wrote in six months), mostly they don’t (one took me 15 years). This was the beginning of the pandemic, I was stuck at home like everyone else and home now, and for the next many months – though we didn’t know it to begin with – was all there was. I wondered what on earth I was going to do with this time.

I kept thinking of Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room, which was written under house arrest in 1790 in which, to keep the author’s mind active, he wrote a guidebook to the room he was detained in. What might I do sitting in a bungalow in central Texas with my beloved wife and children and with a new and very outspoken cat who had just come to live with us – that was the cast for the next year plus. How to make an odyssey out of going to the bathroom.

Just before the world shut down, I had been in London and had met the brilliant illustrator Clive Hicks-Jenkins. My last piece of social interaction before the walls came down was sitting in a café just around the corner of the British Museum with Clive, we talked among other things about Victorian toy theatres, those card theatres that children use to construct and play out dramas with card characters. By the time we left each other it was clear from phone texts that I should retreat back home to my family and as soon as possible. I wandered up Ludgate Hill to say goodbye to Saint Paul’s, across the river to my hotel and took the next plane home.