There will be a narrative germ at or near the start (as it might be, ‘Tell story of Thatcher boom years from the inside'), but the shaping of the story comes last in the planning, and it's only when I've got that clear that I'll actually start writing (though by that stage I will probably have hundreds of pages of notes, thousands of accumulated details to be worked in). I want to describe life as it is, or was, but to give it an order I might loosely call poetic – a matter of rhythm, echoes, form as an agent of irony, an attempt to create a pervasive harmony through the narrative voice. I seem always to begin with the apprehension of details, as if, among objects in a commonplace view, one or two had begun to glow or resonate with imaginative potential. There are many things I don't understand about where my novels ‘come from'. Or perhaps I should just say that the books that accumulated and began to cohere in my mind and my notebooks were not ‘Aids novels'.

This was partly resistance to a certain expectation that a gay writer would treat this urgent subject, but more because I couldn't see a way to do it that satisfied me artistically.

I went on to write two novels which, though touched by the AIDS crisis in different ways, didn't address it directly.

Should I adjust my depiction of the gay world to reflect what was happening? Should I add a dark update to its episodes from gay history? For various reasons, of both taste and technique, I decided to close the narrative in the late summer of 1983 but any reader in the late '80s and onwards would see that the young narrator's heedless present day had become historical in ways that he, and I, could never have predicted. In the summer of 1984, a close friend of mine developed a puzzling inability to heal or recover from minor ailments, and by early November he was dead.īy the time I was completing the book, in the summer of 1987, thousands of people were dead and dying of the same condition, and I, infinitely more trivially, was faced with an artistic problem. I began writing it on 1 January 1984, and it was intended to be strictly contemporary, though it also attempted to sketch in, through the diaries of an eighty-three-year-old man, a life that was as long as the century. My first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, came out in 1988 and was set in 1983 – a five-year gap that covered the time of its composition, and in which the world the novel described changed dramatically.

The line of beauty novel