8th February 1998

I write to discover

* You must have a fan club in England.

No , no I don't.

* The reason I asked, is that your writing seems to appeal more to the expatriate; the foreigner who has a certain idea of what Sri Lanka is. You seem to be a tremendous niche writer in that sense. Do you really target that kind of audience when you write?

To me the kind of writing I do has to do with a compulsion that I have. I can't say I'm going to write a book that's going to appeal to X Y and Z. I guess some people can. I suspect nobody can. Basically you have your limits, you write what you are able to write.So it has something to do with your interests, and your make-up.

* You seem to write the same kind of book. How different is this from your last, for instance.

Well, it's a little bit longer, its factual structure is more complicated and it has different voices in it. But, basically to me, its the kind of writer I am, and the kind of thing that I'm interested in.

Something where the story of the book has to gain its own balance. However much you want to write War & Peace, it doesn't mean that just because you want to, you will be able to.... Even if you fill the pages, it doesn't mean that anyone....

* I was certainly not talking about filling the pages. I was talking about the elements that go into the book. In yours, would you say they are basically the same?

Well, its all a matter of interpretation. Some see my last novel as an epic novel, even though it's actually very short, while others see it as very intimate. These are responses that the reader brings to the book. To me anyway, novels are where, what you feel is what you bring to it as a reader.

So if you see something else, its because there are things inside you. If you don't value it, it's because at that moment in time, you don't value those things.

* So are you saying that the responses are totally subjective.

It has to be. I can put my heart and soul into producing a book, but to me, if I produce it well, I'm invisible in it. The person who comes to it is going to see himself in it...for me, there is no me, other than what's there......

* But, despite whatever you say, isn't it correct that in the final analysis, there exists one large reference point — where the majority of people, for instance, agree that this is a novel about this and this, that its a novel about life, or alternately about horror or whatever. There is always some reference point.

That is the point at which you come to some view of it. But the process may be the other way around. It's a process of discovery. I write the book to discover the world.

People read a book to discover something.

* But don't you think people might read books for entertainment only , for instance

Well, yes, I don't have a lot of time for books that are turgid

* Would you say that ''Sandglass'' is a sequel to ''Reef''..

No, it's very different from Reef. There is a setting which is a mixture of UK and Sri Lanka I suppose.

It is a much more imaginary place, and it has the kind of alternative scenario if you like

* Alternative to what?

It's not a historical setting. It's on a larger canvass.

*I noticed the names are unusual

Well, that's a starting point. It's to show that it's a different scene. You find the names are different.. partly because they are unusual characters. You have to read it fairly openly, not in terms of "this is this sort of person and this is that sort of person.''

I think that blend of what is real, and what is not real, is much more of a blend than before

* There is this school of thought which says that everything that has to be done with the novel has been done, and that new books that are coming out necessarily have to be overwritten; and that they sometimes look abstracted almost like science fiction just in order to appeal to people

I think that's nonsense. It sounds to me like a misunderstanding of what the novel really is. Fundamentally novels are not really about plot. You have one plot that is universal.

* How do you define a novel?

Well people have been trying, but one cannot really define a novel.

Maybe you need to find out what kind of novel these people who adduce this theory are talking about. Maybe they are talking about a certain kind of novel.

* Well, for instance, the nineteenth century novel...

Well, if you take Tolstoy or the Russian novel, people have been reading the same....

* But not writing the same...

A good novel is something that people recognise, and I really do not see an end to that. There have been phases of course, surrealistic and all of that, but now I think people are interested in reading anything that has a storyline to it.

* Don't you think that writers are embellishing language more and more, that language somehow makes up for what's lacking in other areas

The point about the novel is that its very democratic. I think there were only six plots in the world , and people are writing them or variations to them. So there has to be something different such as language or something else. In that sense people could have been writing a thousand years ago, the same thing.

But people are writing much more novels, and there is much more interest in them, and there are some people who are much more interested in the language itself.

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