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NR: Yes, it’s fair comment. Although there’s plot and structure and narrative drive — at least I hope there is — the material is, to some extent, organised around echoes of certain images and obsessions. Layers of meaning is right as well. Not only do I not mind if some readers don’t pick up on everything, but there’s often stuff I don’t expect anyone but the sharpest reader to get. It keeps it more interesting for me that way, and, I like to think, for the reader. This is not to say that my books are intended to be difficult to read. I want them to be read and understood without difficulty. At the same time, I accept they’ll never sell like Jeffrey Archer’s.

I can’t write unambiguous novels. I couldn’t in the 20th century and I can’t in this. A certain level of ambiguity is fundamental to all my writing, just as it is to life. Take the ambiguity away and I’d have very little interest in carrying on writing.

You are very concerned with place in your novels, particularly decaying Europe in Saxophone Dreams and West London in The Director’s Cut. How do you feel about the kind of detail you use to conjure up these places? Do you run a risk of alienating those readers who don’t know the place? I mean I loved all the Shepherd’s Bush and White City detail, as I grew up in the area, but others will not have the map in their head that I do, and will not be able to trace the novel’s landscape in quite the same way.

I’ve always liked fiction that deals with place quite specifically. I enjoy writing it, too. At the same time, I like stuff that’s set in entirely invented places, such as Rupert Thomson’s The Insult, to name just one recent example. I can’t afford to worry about those readers who will switch off if I name too many actual streets or describe existing buildings. If they don’t get it, they don’t get. Too bad. For them and for me.

In The Matter of the Heart you concern yourself with place in a different way, where a single powerful action occurring in a room resonates throughout history, affecting everything else that happens in that location — even when the room’s use is changed, or the building that contains it is redeveloped. The power of the site and the action remains. Writers like Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd have also played with this theme — do you share their belief in the occult power of place, or is it just a literary device?

I am so strongly drawn to the idea I think I must believe it. If I weren’t a writer, I would still have this same fascination with buildings. It’s a part of my character, perhaps my nature. I do think that certain buildings have presence, or presences. And not just buildings either: knock a building down and it’s hard not to believe that some sense of it persists. Perhaps in the way that we maintain that the dead remain alive as long as they rest in our hearts.

I’ve always been interested in questions of identity, and I’ve always been interested in film. This novel is the first time I’ve really fused those two interests.

You have championed the books of Steve Erickson in this country, a writer who writes strange surrealistic novels, where time slips and fragments slowly drift together into some semblance of a story; which changes again when one reads another book of his, as his whole output seems to be one long novel. Can you say what fascinates you about his work so much? And any other authors who have been important to you — either as influence or just as a good read.

Erickson is a genius. His imagination constantly amazes and thrills me. It also amazes me that he’s so little known when other writers doing not dissimilar stuff are feted to high heaven. The problem, in the UK at least, has been that he’s been shunted from one publisher to another. None of them has put any real money into pushing his work. His first book, Days Between Stations, was a B-format paperback original — it hardly said prestige. It’s a fact of the business that you need to dress something up in all the finery — hardback, big marketing spend, blah blah blah, if you want it to stand a chance of succeeding on any level. As you say, there’s a story arc in his work that continues from on book to the next. He’s creating a whole world and he does so with such flair and brilliance that you go with him. Other writers who’ve influenced me include M. John Harrison, Iain Sinclair, J. G. Ballard, Derek Marlowe, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Roland Topor, Kafka, Christopher Burns. I could go on. There are so many.

Talent is discovered and nurtured in the small press, but an awful lot of crap is published as well. But that’s the same as the mainstream publishers. Most of what comes out is instantly recyclable. Magazines such as The Third Alternative, Ambit, Crimewave and others continue to publish good stuff by new writers. I try to publish new writers myself in the anthologies I do for Time Out, although there’s not so much enthusiasm at the moment for doing those anthologies. Short stories don’t sell, they’re always telling us. It may be true that they sell less well than novels, but that’s not the point. The point is short stories are a valid form and there will always be an audience for them, whatever its size.

R. L.