Locked up inside the mind of a killer

A lecturer at the Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester, she spoke from her home in that English city.

Q: How did Patrick Oxtby arrive in your head?

A: I read Tony Parker’s book “Life After Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers’’ and I was struck by the case of a young man who lived in a lodging house and who killed a fellow lodger for no good reason. I wanted to write his story. Around that time, I had also reread [Albert] Camus’s “The Outsider,’’ Peter Handke’s novel “The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick,’’ which is a direct response to “The Outsider,’’ and Andre Gide’s “The Vatican Cellars.’’ The idea of an unprovoked, unpremeditated murder has always interested me, and there was great dramatic potential in the boarding house setting, the aimless young man, the fellow lodger who irritates him. I wanted to put those pieces together and write a hyper-realistic but dreamlike tragedy.

Q: What difficulties did Patrick create for you as a narrator?

A: Patrick’s solipsism, his profound selfishness borne out of unease and neediness, his sense of subdued terror and doubt all created huge limitations. I complicated things further for myself by having him be fairly uneducated, a long way from perspicacious or insightful. He can’t describe things eloquently or poetically (perhaps because I can’t). There’s so much weight put on the reader liking or disliking him. I think that partly explains the extreme reactions to this book; some of the bad reviews have been savage, and the good reviews better than any I’ve ever had. It depends on whether you become attached to Patrick.

Q: Your descriptions are forensic in their clarity. How did that develop?

A: I’m aiming for unadorned prose with all artifice stripped away so that the writer’s presence is invisible. In that sense, reading this novel should feel akin to reading a memoir. Francine Prose said that the writer must put every word on trial for its life, and that’s what happened here. Everything had to contribute to creating an atmosphere. By slow, careful accretion of detail an effect would be created.

Q: So this character altered your writing?

A: Completely. The changes that happened in the three years of writing this novel were wholesale and the final draft bears no resemblance to the first. The prose didn’t start to get a pulse until I was about two years in, so I spent two years knowing I had a failure on my hands. It wasn’t working in terms of pace, tension, traction, anything. Because I didn’t believe Patrick. Once he became more truthful, the novel changed in every way.

Q: Your previous novels have been called claustrophobic; this one locks us inside a prison. What is the attraction of the sealed world?

A: I love plays like “The Glass Menagerie’’ or Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker’’ where everything happens - intensely and vividly - within four walls. The fourth wall is removed, three walls remain and it’s just you and the people living and suffering in the room. I wanted to take that idea to an extreme, to have two people trapped in a room.

Q: How did you come up with such vivid prison details?

A: I made it all up. Not really, of course, because I had been informed over the years, by reading novels like John Cheever’s “Falconer,’’ for example. But I wrote the first draft without going to prisons or doing research. I didn’t want facts to get in the way. Then when I visited two prisons - one called Strangeways in Manchester - I found out that the stuff I made up suited the story better. So I left out the truth. The same goes for the criminal law and procedure. I also set the book pre-1970 so that the prison could be a more brutal place; I could have a bucket in the cell rather than a toilet. Part of my depiction would have been true for some prisons, not for others, but the total picture would fail as an accurate depiction. I was aiming for dramatic power. The word “chow,’’ for example, would never pass the lips of an English prisoner; it’s completely bogus, but it has a ring to it, a music, and awfulness.

Q: You’re passionate about this novel?

A: I am. There are things I wanted to say in this book, but I wanted them to be concealed. About freedom, the death penalty, the arbitrary nature and fickleness of the legal system, the quality of suffering, how rare it is to get close to the sufferer’s consciousness. I wanted to create the kind of character that most people would dismiss or condemn if they read about him in a newspaper. I wanted to get in close and make easy judgment, neat morality, more difficult. In my own perverse way I try to reveal those things and, of course, to tell a good story.

Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached at ama1668@hotmail.com.