I SAW A MAN Q&A with Owen Sheers When we meet Michael in the first pages of the novel, there are many hints about his past and his future, but the novel keeps us in suspense about what exactly those events are. How much did you know about Michael and his life before you began the novel? This book had several beginnings. Four, to be exact, in that I wrote the first 10,000 words three times over, before finally starting again on what would become the finished novel. I mention this as these false starts meant that my knowledge of Michael and his life repeatedly shifted, deepened and shallowed over those different beginnings. What I can say is that I always knew what he had done and what he would do. I knew he’d been an immersion journalist in the US and I knew the broad brushstrokes of his emotional hinterland - his relationship with Caroline and his grief in the wake of her loss. I also knew how he’d react to what happens inside the Nelsons’ house. But none of that is the same as knowing him. In terms of the man himself, I had to come to know Michael in the writing. Which is how it should be, I hope. This seems to me to be the most natural, and perhaps the most true, way for a character to develop - under the shaping influence of event and interaction with the world and others rather than through extensive planning in the abstract. In the small details of their movements, the junctions of their thoughts. The hints about his past and future that you mention were a narrative intention from the outset, in that I wanted to try to create a two-way tension throughout the first half of the book. I didn’t just want a reader to be thinking about what would happen next, but also about what had happened before the opening page. I recognised this was something of a risk, in that a ‘push – me – pull – you’ approach to suspense in the story would require a complex temporal structure, but at the same time it was important to me that a reader feel absolutely centered on the action of Michael entering the Nelson’s house. His journey through that house forms the narrative spine for much of the novel, and for it to do so it needs to be sustained by a suggestive approach to his past, and a gradual release of information, rather than a reader have full knowledge of his psychological history from the start. In the other direction, looking beyond the events of ‘‘I Saw A Man’’, I wanted the narrative voice of the novel to have a strong sense of being rooted in the future - to be imbued not only with a retrospective knowledge of what happens in the book, but also of what happens long after its final page. Nearly all third person fiction carries this tone by association, but I did want to turn the volume up on this quality a little, with an eye towards the end of the book… Can you describe how you came to write the novel - did you begin with a character, a scene, an event, something else? ‘‘I Saw A Man’’ grew for me in a different way to anything else I’ve written before. And yet at the same time it grew from those pervious books too. My journey into fiction before this novel was primarily historical, and often interwoven with, or seeded in, an element of real event or experience. In the wake of those other books I knew I wanted to write something next that would take a deeper step towards a work of ‘purer’ imaginative fiction. Or to put it another way, I didn’t want an external trigger for the book; for it to be based upon, inspired or drawn from a true story. In this respect perhaps ‘I Saw A Man’ didn’t so much as grow from my previous books, as grow in reaction to them. The truth is, however, that while you can have all the intentions and plans in the world, you often have little control over which story will take hold of you sufficiently for you to spend seven years of your life working with it. This was certainly the case with ‘I Saw A Man’, which entered my life as a single image. That of a man entering his neighbours’ house by the back door, thinking there is no one inside, when there is. The rest of the story grew from that image and the questions it provoked. Who is this man? What is his relationship with his neighbours? Who are they, and what are their stories? There were two other elements that were there from very early on. The first of these was the anticipatory draw of a reader knowing that someone was inside the house but not knowing, from a cast of several possible characters, who that person was. The second was more a personal literary challenge than an aspect of plot or story, in that I knew I wanted to try to manipulate a reader into a position where they don’t want Michael to confess to what he’s done. Given the nature of the event that happens, I always knew this would be very difficult to achieve, and I still don’t know to what extent I was successful in this aim or not. The first line of the novel is immediately captivating - so much so that it was used on the book jacket! Was this always the first sentence of the novel? No, and yes. The first sentence always carried the same sense, the same information and meaning. But how it carried that sense changed and altered constantly for many months, if not years. This was often a question of listening to cadence, or searching for more economy of phrasing, or playing with the temporal weight of the line. The novel turns on several acts of violence, and depicts an intense love affair as well. Is it more difficult to write about love or violence? Both are difficult to write about well, mostly because both have been written about so much to the extent that many of their truths have become clichés. I’m also reminded of what Auden said about sex in literature in his essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets, and how the same applies to violence too. He writes about how the central tension in any writing about sex is between the unconscious nature of the sexual act, and the highly conscious nature of writing about it. Although I suppose one of the things that interested me about the central act of violence in ‘I Saw A Man’ was the extent to which it is very conscious, planned, mediated. If pushed to answer this question, though, I’d have to say love. Love is, you hope, experienced by more of your readers than extreme violence. As such there is a greater knowledge of its varieties, its shades and tones, and often a greater ownership too. Love (as opposed to sex) is also an emotion experienced over a span of time, in contrast to the sudden, and therefore naturally dramatic, nature of much violence. It’s harder to write authentically about the shifting patterns of a love over time, than it is to write about the ‘puncture point’ of a moment of violence. ‘I SAW A MAN’ explores the difference between how we tell the truth in fiction versus journalism. How do you feel about this, particularly as a writer who works across different spheres, from fiction to poetry to drama? I enjoy reading quality non-fiction, reportage and journalism, and often do, but the very reason I choose to write in imaginative forms, even if the material is documentary based, is because I’m interested in the truths you can tell when you have a license to invent, to let go of pure ‘fact’ and imagine from it instead. It’s part of the ongoing alchemy of literature isn’t it? The deception that reveals, the lying that tells the truth. Unfettered by the bounds or chronologies of real events, the writer of fiction, poetry or drama is able to shape, omit, pace and juxtapose at will, answering only to the internal credibility and coherence of the story, poem or play. As such, if done properly, they’re able to evoke truths beyond fact that don’t only live, but also live on, resonating with a reader or an audience. On one level it’s this question that drives Michael’s writing, and then Michael himself, in the novel. The concept that the facts alone, without their context or motivations, are incapable of telling a true story. Much of your writing is concerned with war and its impact on soldiers, civilians and those on the homefront. Has this subject always been important to you, and can you talk about how you've done your research? I’m often asked about why I write about conflict and its aftermath so much. The first thing to say is that I never set out to do this. Rather, the subject has grown organically across a number of different books, poems and plays. The main reason for this is, I think, that my adult writing life has progressed in parallel with the post-9/11 conflicts. Ever since I’ve been writing seriously, they have been there. I knew boys from my school in Abergavenny who joined the army when they were 16, and watched from a distance as they went on multiple tours of Iraq and Afghanistan.