.- The final twist in ''Conclave'' feels as if it was written in, and for, this moment. Were you ahead of your time?
I knew it was a risk. But I thought, '' This is what novels should do : jolt the reader, cause a commotion, make people think - even if they hate it.''
It slipped by without too much fuss nine years ago. The reception of the movie has been different, probably because the issue is so much more potent today.
.- Has your thinking [ and writing ] about politics changed over your years as a novelist?
I used to think of politics as essentially driven by rationality. Now I have realized that the processes of the human mind are much more emotional and complicated. It feels as though the era of the enlightenment has ended; we are back in a time of superstition and conspiracy theories.
.- You're regularly praised as a novelist strong on plot.
I think there can be an aesthetic beauty at the working out of a plot, just as much as in language or character.
For me the supreme example is Dickens's '' Great Expectations '' in which all three work together.
.- When did you learn about Venetia Stanley, whose [ epistolary ] romance is at the heart of ''Precipice''?
H.H. Asquith, the prime minister, wrote 500 letters to Venetia, most of them in 1914 and 1915 : She kept them all. I calculate she must have written him at least 300 in reply : He destroyed the lot.
What a novelist can do and a historian can't is invent. The moment I started to imagine what she might have written back to him, she started to come alive in my mind - clever, funny, unconventional.
.- What was the secret to inventing letters from her to answer to actual ones written by the prime minister?
Her granddaughter let me see the letters she had written to other people. That helped me to give her voice. And from the letters he wrote to her, I could deuce the kinds of things she had said.
I think she wrote quite passionately to him. It was a love affair completely unlike any other, between the leader of which was still, arguably, the most powerful country in the world, and a clever young woman less than half his age.
.- Do you still write letters yourself?
Hardly ever. Letters of condolence mostly. That's one of the things that haunt me about ' Precipice ' : It describes the end of an ordered, peaceful world, a world before the widespread use of the telephone, let alone WhatsApp.
.- You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
My three literary heroes : Graham Greene, George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.
The World Students Society thanks The New York Times.
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