What inspired you to write The Origin of Species?

Most of my books go back a long way, and this one goes back, in part, to a book I read in the early 1980’s called The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. By looking at evolutionary mechanics from the perspective of genes rather than of whole organisms, Dawkins was able to put forward a convincing evolutionary explanation for altruism. He thus threw a monkey wrench into many people's usual notions of good and evil, including my own. I never quite saw the world in the same way after that book: it felt like a darker place but also, in some ways, more wondrous, working as it did according to laws whose nuances and interrelations had developed over billions of years. At that stage in my life the idea of becoming a writer was still a bit of a pipe dream, but I had already begun to wonder how I might one day find a way to explore the implications of evolutionary theory in fiction. Around this same period I met a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis with whom I became very close. She was a person of tremendous spirit and will, infuriating in some ways, stubborn, demanding, but also with a glow of goodness and hope to her that made her seem larger than life. At the time that I knew her I had the sense that her story had fallen to me in some way, that it had become my responsibility, though I doubted I would ever have the skill to do it justice or to bring out its larger implications. It was only some years after her death that it came to me that some of the basic questions she faced in her life were of the same sort as the ones posed by evolutionary theory. From there, The Origin of Species began to take shape.


How did you conduct the research for this book? Did you travel to some of the places you describe, Sweden and the Galapagos, for example?

I once heard the Saskatchewan writer Ven Begamudré describe his writing thus: “I write what I know, and what I don't know I research, and what I can't research I make up.” That is a pretty good summary of my own methods. In a novel like this one that requires a fair amount of research I usually do enough up front to feel I have some level of authority over the material and then dive into the writing, filling in whatever gaps need filling as I go along and then sometimes doing some post-research just to make sure I haven't fudged things too badly. The internet has greatly simplified research: in an instant I can find, say, the most popular song of a given year or even the newspaper headlines of a given day, research that might have taken half a day of tracking down obscure reference books in the past or scanning through microfiche in gloomy library basements.  Travel is trickier. The Origin of Species alludes to a trip Alex makes to Machu Picchu — covered in much more detail in earlier drafts — that I put together almost entirely from many weeks of taking virtual journeys along the Inca Trail on the internet. But there is no real substitute for breathing the actual air of a place. I have been to Sweden several times, both as a backpacker, under terms not so different from those of Alex in the novel, and as a published writer, and have always felt a special connection to that country, not just because it is socialist and cold in much the way Canada is but because there is some deeper spirit there — the elegiac spirit, say, of the Old English poets, who were essentially Norsemen — that feels very familiar. The Galapagos, on the other hand, I went to specifically for research purposes, and under circumstances not like Alex's at all, aboard a well-appointed yacht where five course meals were served daily and where the crew would greet us with canapés and cocktails when we returned from excursions. Unfortunately — or maybe not so unfortunately — that is how one must do the Galapagos these days, because travel there is so carefully controlled. However, I was able to talk to people there who had been around since the frontier days, and who remembered when Galapagos travel was a bit more as it turns out to be for Alex, a primal encounter with the bare bones of life.


Is there a particular character in this book that was the most fun to write?

The character by far who was the most fun to write was Desmond, in the Galapagos section, not only because he is so despicable and depraved but because he is so consistently so that he almost achieves a kind of nobility. Desmond says out loud things that most of us don't even quite allow ourselves to think. There is something liberating in that.


Are there any tips you would give a book club to better navigate their discussion of The Origin of Species?

While there is nothing in the novel, I think, that is casual — that is, that isn't somehow relevant to the greater whole — I was also attempting to capture the texture of life as it is really lived, with all its chaos of conflicting forces and demands. I guess what I am saying is that while the book may seem a bit of a dog's breakfast, some actual thought went into it. So don't be afraid to reach for obscure connections. If you have to, go out and reread Ulysses, or at least the first few hundred pages, which is about as far as I usually get.  


Do you have a favourite story to tell about being interviewed about any of your books?

One of my eeriest interviews was with the BBC in England. My publisher had given me an information sheet that listed a studio and a telephone number, but no contact person. At the BBC building a security guard directed me to the appropriate studio, which turned out to be a little airless booth that held only a telephone, a headset, and a 1950s-era microphone. A typed sheet instructed me to dial my number, which I did, and before I quite knew what was happening I found myself on the air somewhere with a disembodied voice that might have been coming from Glasgow or New Delhi, for all I knew. The interview lasted a matter of minutes; then there was a click, and that was the end. "Please see yourself out," the instruction sheet read. The whole experience struck me as very British and 1984-ish, though recently, I have discovered, the CBC had adopted this same style of self-service interview, where no actual contact with a live human being ever occurs. On the last of these I somehow ended up lost for some time in the deserted basement hallways of the Toronto CBC building, a little known part of the building apparently designed to shelter CBC upper management in the event of labour unrest or a nuclear blast.


Can you describe your writing process for us? Do you always know where you’re going in advance, or do you have surprises along the way? How do you know when the novel is complete?

I usually have a strong sense of the overall structure of a book before I begin writing it. If I am lucky, I also have a very clear idea of the ending, not necessarily in narrative terms but in terms of where I want to end up emotionally. Knowing the ending — sometimes it comes in the form of an image, or a scene, or simply a feeling — makes it much easier to write the rest of the book, since the ending then serves as a kind of lighthouse to aim for in the fog. That said, there are many things that come up while I am writing that I hadn't planned for, and that might shift me in one direction or another or even briefly take over the whole story. If the original idea was sound, however, these surprises usually end up being a way of helping me see the fullness of something I might not have seen the entire shape of at the outset rather than setting me off in some entirely new direction. You never really finish a novel, I think, you simply abandon it at some point, though I usually have a good idea when I have reached the right point to do that. Something feels right, or finished, or, more usually, as good as I will ever get it. It is partly a matter of feeling that any more work is likely to do as much harm as good, and partly of feeling that my energies would be better spent on something new rather than continuing to rework the old. 


Your best-selling trilogy Lives of the Saints was semi-autobiographical, and in this new novel Alex shares a number of biographical details with you, for example your birthplace of Leamington, your family’s Italian heritage and their greenhouse business, your involvement with human rights organizations… Why do you choose to infuse your work with autobiographical detail? What are the benefits? Are there costs?

Readers so commonly assume there is a biographical element to fiction that writers, I think, often throw in autobiographical details just to mess with their readers' minds. The American writer Tim O'Brien, for instance, has written stories which he claims are utterly fictional but in which the protagonist's name is Tim O'Brien. As a writer, I tend to regard my life in the same way I regard everything else, as suitable raw material to cannibalize for my fiction, though occasionally I also like to throw in details that are so obviously autobiographical that they should immediately put readers on their guard. In The Origin of Species I briefly revisit a childhood incident involving the shooting of a dog that was presented in a much different light in my novel In a Glass House — the contrast was partly my way of challenging that impulse many readers have to assume they are at some level reading about the author's life. Even when details are drawn from life, fiction often transforms them utterly to suit its own purposes. I find it a bit disconcerting, I note in passing, that no one has ever accused my novel Testament, about the life of Jesus, of being autobiographical.


The book is set in the mid-1980’s, primarily in Montreal. Why did you choose this particular period and location for this book?

The most literal explanation for the setting and time is that I happened to live in Montreal in the 80s, and it was there that I met the woman on whom the character Esther in my novel is based. But having just claimed that my work is not autobiographical, I'm obviously going to have finesse my response to this one. Setting is a crucial element in everything I write, and Montreal somehow lends itself well to fiction, perhaps because it is so rich in culture and history. It is also a microcosm of so many of our national contradictions, and hence a great place for exploring touchy issues like racism and nationalism and cultural identity. The 1980s were of particular appeal to me because on the one hand they seem in retrospect almost an age of innocence, when we had only the slenderest notion that the world was on its way to going to hell in a handbasket. At the same time they represented a particular type of turning toward the Dark Side: they were the end of the 60s, for better or worse, and the beginning, with people like Reagan and Thatcher abroad and Mulroney at home, of a neo-conservative ethos that we are still under the shadow of, and that has the suspicious look of repackaged social Darwinism.


Some writers are superstitious about being asked what they’re currently working on. Does this describe you? If not, care to share…?

I used to be superstitious; then I discovered that I could milk people for ideas if I told them what I was working on. In the present case, I am happy to say I have already finished a draft of my next book, a short biography of Pierre Trudeau that in a sense grew out of The Origin of Species and that will form part of the Penguin series Extraordinary Canadians, edited by John Ralston Saul. It will be out in March 2009. Beyond that I have a number of other projects kicking around in my head. I like to keep my idea bin full, so that when a book I am working on is going badly I can always imagine that my next book, when I can finally get to it, will be truly brilliant.


From the Hardcover edition.

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