A year after Nadya and I married, our first son was born.
I was besotted. I also fixated on his fragility — and on what the world would do to him, if the world were given half a chance. The ferocity of the joy I took in his birth, in the awesome fact of his existence, was attended by a kind of terror. It wasn’t a dignifying feeling.
I wanted to protect him beyond my ability to do so. I wanted to kill anyone who hurt him. I wanted someone to try hurting him in order that I could kill them.
I woke in the night choking on thoughts of sudden death; not because I feared it for myself, but because I couldn’t bear to think of leaving my wife and my son alone and unprotected. I secreted weapons throughout the house, began carrying them in street.
A few weeks after his first birthday we visited New Zealand, staying with Nadya’s family in Wellington. We spent a week in the Marlborough Sounds, then New Year’s Eve with friends in Auckland. When I opened my eyes on New Year’s day, a story flooded in like daylight.
Normally, my ideas are tenuous and hazy things; bits of this, bits of that. But this idea came whole, with the clarity of a well-remembered song. I knew the first sentence and I knew the last.
It was an idea about a good and gentle man who learns that his precious, damaged child is being bullied – and the steps he takes to put an end to it. Domestic drama to psychological horror; a tender book, and a frightening one. I began writing as soon as we got back to London. It came in a white heat, like an act of possession.
Most of the reviews were very good — a minority were savage; the first really bad reviews I ever got. This was especially true in New Zealand, where I’d conceived the story and which I’d since made my home…and where the novel being longlisted for the Man Booker prize was a news story.
