I'm slightly pessimistic about human nature, about how close it's possible to bond with those around you. Dying alone is a deep fear for most people. I'm not scared of death but I'm scared of dying scared. Maybe everything else in life comes from those two points: the separation anxiety of childhood and the ultimate fear of dying alone.
Holman's world is a worst case scenario but it's healthy to examine extreme possibilities. If the technology that is used for genetic enrichment in Genus had been distributed equitably, across society, it could have been nirvana, a great world where people don't fear the diseases that we die from. The problems that arrive are more to do with resource hording than technology itself.
At the moment we seem to be heading in the opposite direction. However you dress it up, it's pretty obvious who is being affected by the government's cuts.
I come from a privileged background but I worked a lot of winter seasons in the Alps and I've done lots of mundane summer jobs back in Britain where I mixed with less well off people. Maybe it comes from there but I've always felt that it's our duty to make society fairer.
We have this sense that there's something bigger than us, above and beyond. If you take away the idea of God, you need to replace it with a shared moral code. Otherwise, everybody becomes very self-centred and materialistic.
I do always know where I'm going in my books. I know the endpoint. I've written only two thousand words of my next novel but I know what the ending will be already.
When I start writing for the day, I usually read aloud the chapter I'm working on. It gets me into it and illuminates mistakes. I'm very rhythm conscious and I do enjoy repetition.
Living in France means I see the UK in snapshots. There is something quite nice about being in exile and the things you remember about places tend to be the most vivid details. You don't get that when you see somewhere every day.
Social mobility decreased under Labour and under the current government it is reversing. The differences between the poorest and richest are returning to Victorian levels. We don't have open sewers and infant mortality rates at fifty percent but in economic terms we're getting to a level of disparity we haven't seen for a couple of hundred years. And we're getting there very quickly.
You are supposed to look at the unimproved and think about the way that we dismiss so-called 'chavs' and certain immigrant classes that are considered unworthy, the "undeserving poor". Those kind of prejudices are getting worse.
There are very good evolutionary reasons for having religion. From early human history we have evolved a need to see God. We have a perception of ourselves and in order for that to be a true perception we have to believe in a soul within us.
I'm a hardened atheist but I feel that we have an inbuilt need for God. If you eradicate religion, you end up with something terrible in its place, like the communist state, as in Russia or China, where the dictator becomes the messiah figure.
New technologies are a good thing but we must consider how they will impact on us so that, when they become achievable, they aren't allowed to run amok.
What I imagined doesn't require anti-gravity beams or anything too spectacular, just advances in analysing different genes, finding out what they can do and recombining them.
I debated whether or not to pin the setting down to a particular date but in the end I decided to leave things vague. It depends how fast technology improves.
I wanted to write a book that imagined where advances in the study of genetics might lead us. Holman was the first character who came to me: I envisaged the misshapen offspring of beautiful, wealthy parents. Then I realised that he bore a striking resemblance to Toulouse-Lautrec. I developed that, made Holman an alcoholic who lives among hookers, an artist tortured by his disability.
