What was the first spark that ignited the writer in you?
Many people write without ever imagining themselves becoming a writer one day or thinking that they could ever make a career or a living at that. And in lots of ways, I've been writing my whole life, whether it was diaries or short stories or small pieces. But really, I suppose my writing career—I normally say that when I was about 30 or 32—and I was living in New York and had been working in fashion for some time, that's when I sat down in earnest to begin writing the first words of Shuggie Bain (which was awarded the Booker in 2020). Since I was working in fashion, I was writing sometimes just for 20 minutes in the morning, or maybe I had Sundays off and so I would write all day Sunday. But that's when I suppose my writing career as a career really began.
While reading John of John, another novel came to my mind—Minor Details by Adania Shibli—just like her book, your novel captures the texture of minor details of everything. Why do you think these ‘minor details’ are important for novel writing?
First of all, it's the aesthetic that I enjoy in a novel. I like to be transported somewhere and to feel that I can touch, smell and hear the place. It's such a wonderful way to travel. I believe in the dignity of detail and that I should build the world with as much care as a great classical novel would. If you're going to the Isle of Harris, you are going to feel all of it, and you're going to be inside a house. You're going to understand the rhythm, the pattern and the texture of the house, but understand what it means to be a sheep farmer and how hard it is to castrate sheep, to bring them down off the hillside and for such little pay. And so, I think life is in the details. That's where the celebration of it is.
What is the definition of a great classical novel for you?
Classical novels are always interested in pivotal moments in history when not only the character is going to go through a transformation, but the whole world. Within John of John, we are seeing the end of crofting. And so for me, big classical novels are always looking at moments of social upheaval. They're looking at people, characters who are working within a family, a context, a social structure, but are also facing their own fate in a way that feels like they're being drawn towards a fate, but are also fighting against that.
How did the idea of John of John come to you?
I began working on this book, in 2018 or 2019, before Shuggie Bain was published. And I'd finished Young Mungo. It seems like I've published three books very quickly, but really, they're an accumulation of 20 years of work. In 2018, I realised that I'd been writing about the working-class experience, but every time that I did that, it was set in an urban setting. In the UK, because of de-industrialisation and tourism, all of our national narrative is centered in the city because that was the dominant shake-up. And so, I went to the Outer Hebrides. I'd never been there before. They're one of our most far-flung places. I grew up very poor. I was the son of a single mother. My mother cleaned shopping centres and hospitals. She had no time and no money to show us the country, to take us on holiday.
I decided, well, I'm going to go to the Outer Hebrides and I'm going to go for 12 weeks because maybe there'll be a story there. But by the time I got to the Isle of Harris, which is about three-quarters of the way up the archipelago, I discovered this lunar landscape; a very barren, denuded, rocky island where the people are incredibly kind, but are living in quite a harsh way. It's a hard place. And this is where everything converged.
It's the first place where tweed weaving exists. It's the first place that the Gaelic language exists fully. Calvinism is now on the island, and also crofting, which is subsistence farming, a dying way of life. Suddenly, all these things met in the place and I thought, "Oh, the novel is here." And so, I set out with just a sense of adventure and exploration, and the novel came from that.
There is an interesting paradox in Cal's return home: he comes back to the place that seems most restrictive, but it is also the place where his deepest emotional attachments exist.
Cal’s returning to a home that has a lot of pain in it. But he's also returning to a home with a father who has a very strict set of rules of how men should be. I think part of the patriarchy, certainly in the West, is that men often want their sons to be in their image. And that means to be a good man, you have to be hardworking and tough and strong and brave and, you know, not very expressive with your emotions. And yet, he's sort of home at the same time, and he's the only place that makes sense. We all make sense most at home, right? Our families know us on a level that nobody else will ever quite understand us. He feels very at home, and yet he cannot flourish at home. I'm making a comment on rural populations because rural populations through the 20th century really became heavily depopulated.
What is the idea of home for you?
For me, the idea of home is the place where you can be most yourself and where you can feel very centered and free. For me, home has always been about not living under someone else's rules or someone else's wants, but that sort of corner of the earth, that cave where you can really just be your own man. It's a retreat for me. But home is a very complicated thing because I grew up as the son of a single mother. When my mother died, I lost her and also lost my home. I lost all my furniture. All my clothes. That was such a pivotal moment for me that it's left me searching for the question of what is home my whole life. I think that's why it keeps featuring in all of my fiction.
A question that springs from the setting of your novel is that of coastal erosion. Did you plan to talk about environmental concerns?
Yes. You have to write it in a way that cannot have the author bring everything that they know and give that to the characters, because the characters, at this moment in 1996, do not know. But they will lose their homes. I mean, sea-level rise is going to devastate Scottish island living because, of course, part of living on an island is living as close to the sea as you can because you depend on the sea for a livelihood. And so, coastal erosion is a very real thing for the Mcleod family. I would imagine by about 2050 that house that they've been fighting for to protect will no longer be there. Also, textiles is a very important part of what's happening with our climate. It's the second biggest polluter on the planet. It creates huge amounts of waste.
You said in an interview that “working class people cannot afford to write”. Do you believe that writing literature is an elitist job removed from the rugged realities of society?
No, I don't believe that writing is removed from reality. I think you need a certain amount of comfort in your life in order to be able to sit down every day and write. I think money helps with everything. It gives you free time. It gives you someone to take care of your children. It gives you someplace to go. It gives you a university to be adjunct to where you can have a quiet room. And if you are a working-class person, you don't have access to any of that. You're working every single day to survive. And so it remains incredibly difficult for working people to write.
