Interview with Adam Roberts

about LAKE OF DARKNESS, folds, black holes, the baroque, Deleuze, Satan, the Teletubbies, etc.

Longtime readers of this newsletter know that it alternates between being a Barbara McClay appreciation blog and an Adam Roberts appreciation blog. (Increasingly it is also an S. Shaw Richner appreciation blog.) Adam is an accomplished scholar of the Romantic movement, particularly Coleridge, and has edited the standard edition of Coleridge’s 1811-19 lectures on Shakespeare. He has also written stunningly well in a bewildering variety of fields — science fiction novels, a history of SF, a forthcoming history of fantasy, a study of the apocalyptic mode, volumes of criticism and parody, a biography of H.G. Wells, a million articles, blog posts more informative than some peer-reviewed works of literary scholarship, puns so bad they could rip a hole in the universe, a Latin translation of Finnegans Wake and an English translation of the Christiad, etc. Among these many works are two of my favorite novels published in this century: 2015’s The Thing Itself, a brilliant and haunting thriller inspired equally by Carpenter’s The Thing and Kant’s epistemology, and this year’s Lake of Darkness, a novel in which space explorers from a future utopia find Satan in a black hole. (Adam is an atheist, which must have something to do — though I’m not sure what — with the fact that he keeps writing the best Christian novels this side of Marilynne Robinson.) Last time I interviewed him, I pronounced him “the coolest fucking guy,” to his furious dissent. To his dissent, I can only respond, in the words of the great Hannibal Burress, Why are you booing me? I’m right.

This interview gives many spoilers for Lake of Darkness. I think the novel, like any excellent novel, survives spoliation, but if you want to maintain your surprise, purchase and read the audiobook or ebook on any major ebook platform (the print book is not yet available in the US) and then come back and read this. And Happy Halloween — this book is the scariest thing I’ve read from Adam yet, and thus appropriate to the season.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS:

To make sense of the below, you need to know: the universe is a Klein bottle; the future utopia in this book is so riddled with “strong AI” that people don’t need to read or work; Joyns is a Christian when we meet her; the Gentleman = Satan; Raine = the guy who first encounters Satan in the black hole; there’s also a character named Saccade.

I don't know whether a Christian frame is the right frame to interpret this novel through, but I'm a Christian and ya dance with the one what brung you. So I read the last third of the novel as a properly tragic story about Joyns, whose faith enables her to grasp some of what's happening around her. But she abandons that faith — either by killing the man she's in love with, which she doesn't seem to know she's doing (she hallucinates that she's defending him against a knife attack by the Gentleman), or at some point afterward. On my reading, it's when she's being held prisoner after the attack: she despairs of ever again being understood by anyone except the Gentleman, and so she turns her back on everything else, especially love (which she used to think constitutive of the universe). When we next see her, she has turned into a kind of Manson girl, cut off from everything, soaked with both real and fake blood, and ready to do anything as long as it keeps her in touch with her one friend, the Devil. Does this seem right? What am I missing? Why does she make this choice? 

I think a Christian frame is exactly the right one for this novel. One way through this novel is to take it as a story about a girl who is tempted and falls: tempted, like Eve, by the prime temper, and tempted out of a position of a sense of secondarity, or belatedness, of, as you say, misfit-ness. The specific trajectory Joyns goes on, including the moment when she stabs Razak, is in dialogue with (if that’s not too evasive a way of putting it) with Hogg’s Justified Sinner. And the conclusion is a kind of Edenic midrash, as Utopia can be thought of as an attempt to return to Eden. But you’re asking a question about choice, about why we make the choices we make, about our path through the moral manifold, and how that tangles with self-sense and self-esteem, with desire and despair, with flatness and intensity. 

If the Gentleman is already out (because the universe is a Klein bottle), why does he want ... out?

I mean, that’s a good question. What does the Devil want? Why does he want what he wants? We can assume he’s not an idiot: he must know that he will never achieve the overthrow of the Almighty Power that created him, that defines the parameters by which he, as all of us, live and move, determines what is and is not possible. It’s the Bible, and Christian tradition, that tells us that Satan is simultaneously locked in the deepest pit of Hell and (in the passage I quote as epigraph to chapter 7) walking up and down the earth. You might think, how can he be both? Why does he want out? Or to put it another way: out of what? Perhaps it’s what Marlowe’s Mephistophilis tells Dr Faustus, as he is out and about, walking up and down the earth:

FAUSTUS. How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?

MEPHISTOPHILIS. Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it.

One theory about the devil is that he builds big lies out of small truths. This is the frame through which I read everything the Gentleman says, especially his long argument with Joyns. Since the Gentleman, at this point, makes most of the critiques that a person living in 2024 would make of this novel's utopia, and indeed repeats a lot of the reader's own internal monologue -- These people don't really work, they've trivialized themselves, I don't want to be cruel but maybe something bad needs to happen to shock them back to life again -- that critique is further ironized. We notice the sadism that hides in it, and start to feel defensive of the novel's future society, even though it's a little ridiculous (as though ours isn't!). Does it matter for this novel, and particularly for readings of it that treat it as a satire of utopian ideas, that the devil is a liar? What kind of liar is the Gentleman, if he is a liar at all? (He says he isn't but he would say that, wouldn't he?)

The novel is an exercise in topographical fiction. That’s how I’d characterise it. So: black holes—if they are merely objects, with dimension, spheres of immense mass and immense gravitational pull (so immense that even light lacks the escape velocity to get out from them) but spheres, then they are objects in cosmic space. But if the black hole is more than this, if all this mass inside is compressed down into a singularity, a dimensionless point of in effect infinite mass, then the kind of geometries with which we are familiar no longer obtain. My novel speculates that a dimensionless point of infinite mass would at the same time be a manifold of infinite diffusion; that the view from ‘inside’ the black hole—a point of huge gravity drawing material ever inward—would also be the view of an infinitely diffuse space in which material is ever expanding outward, which is what we see when we look at our universe. That these are in a real sense the same place. Infinitude is weird, and does weird things to common-sense. The idea of black holes as a type of oubliette, an inescapably deep prison into which to cast prisoners and forget about them, draws on the first idea of the black hole; but the idea that space and time are complexly folded on itself, which is the shape the novel explores, or tries to, depends on the second: that nearby and faraway are the same place, than inward and outward are the same direction, that the past and the future knot together. I was writing a novel, or trying to, that was about that, that iterated that. And this is not just a question of material. It is moral. Writing according to this topography, I am saying that ‘truth’ and ‘lies’ are not a distinctly separated dyad, not mirror images of one another—nor am I saying that there’s no distinction between telling the truth and lying. I believe there is such a distinction, and that it’s good to tell the truth and bad to lie. But I am saying that truth and lies fold each into the other, that they are this infinite geometry. It is perfectly possible to construct lies, even lies of great magnitude, by constructive truth-telling; a truth-construed lie will be more effective than a bald lie. Think of Orson Welles’ Harry Lime and his ‘cuckoo clock’ speech in The Third Man: it’s not composed of untruths, but it articulates a wicked, deplorable, mendacious thing. And my Satan is, as per Edgar’s claim in Lear—there’s quite a bit of Lear in this novel—a gentleman: ‘the prince of darkness is a gentleman.’ A gentleman would not lie. He would not be so unmannerly, or vulgar, or discourteous. But that doesn’t mean he is truthful, or good, a commendable. A gentleman might very well be thoroughly bad. 

‘We notice the sadism that hides in it, and start to feel defensive of the novel's future society, even though it's a little ridiculous’ … the defensiveness, I think, is because the human characters in my story are, essentially, children. They are chronologically adult, and do adult things, like having sex and sitting on committees, and going on voyages. But they are infantilised. So when these terrible, violent things start happening to them it feels worse than it might, because it feels like it’s happening to younglings. That’s the idea, anyway. And there’s something charming, isn’t there, in the way little kids lie—it’s so patent, they’re so obvious about it. My mother tells a story about me, aged 3, when my sister was not yet 1: her, asleep in her stroller, me sitting with crayons and paper. I drew an elaborate pattern on the wall, and when my mum came through and rebuked me I pointed at my sister and said: ‘she did it!’ 

And to follow through, there is a self-reflexive element to this, isn’t there. One can tell truths in order to lie; but it’s also possible to lie to tell the truth—this, we could say, is what art does, what fiction is. John Le Carré describing himself: ‘I’m a liar. Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as a novelist.’ He lied in his fiction, as all writers of fiction do; but he lied in his life—all those extra-marital affairs. Lying to people is bad. I’m a writer, so in a sense I lie for a living, but I try not to lie in life, and I don’t cheat on my wife. Still, how can we justify lying as fiction-writing? Thomas Carlyle thought the novel as a form dubious, immoral, because it isn’t true. He thought we should read histories. 

In Genesis, Eve and then Adam disobey God, but they don’t lie about it. When they are confronted with what they have done, they own up. So what’s the first lie in the Bible? We could say: the serpent lies to Eve: ‘The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”’ But they do die—that is, become mortal. Were they immortal before, though? And did they not understand the difference between good and evil until they practised evil? Hang on, though. Maybe the serpent is telling the truth: that’s the felix culpa doctrine, that only through this sin is Christ brought to the world to redeem humanity, and that is a positive that outweighs the negative. Through Christ we need not die, which is, after all, what the serpent promises. And without actual evil, in the world, we could not comprehend good and evil, just as an all-white picture is a mere blankness without the darkness and shadow. Maybe the serpent isn’t lying.

If the serpent is telling the truth—telling the truth in order to do wickedness, truthing towards the bigger lie—then I wonder what is the first lie in the Bible? When Cain kills Abel I suppose, and is accused by God: “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” That’s a lie-by-evasion, which is also a lie. Mendacity as absence, the lie as gap. Do we think of lying as a lack, or as a positive bodying-forth?

A political question this book asks is: Would it be worth trading reading, depth, a certain plane of interiority for the relatively peaceful and harmless lives that these trillions of people lead? The longer I read, the more I felt like maybe my answer — to my surprise — was "Yes," though I don't trust anyone who answers this question with no ambivalence either way. What do you think?

The same day your interview questions arrived, via the magic technology of email, I was reading this Scott Alexander review of the new Nick Bostrom book:

Book Review: Deep Utopia

Let me put it this way, since the frame of our discussion is religious—you, because you are a man of faith, me because however complicated and involuted my infidelity, faith remains the larger context of art, culture, thought and my life. So, let’s say: God could have created a world in which all his creations were blissfully joyous and fulfilled at all times forever. He did not. Why not? One answer is: he did, but some niggle, some wrongness, in his creation asserted itself, Satanic-pridefully, Adamic-disobediently, to fuck the bliss up and bring disharmony, misery and sin into the flawless symphony. I mean: maybe? But it’s at least worth considering the possibility that this niggle was always part of God’s plan. The idea that ‘God is an artist’ is a Romantic and post-Romantic one, and as (I clear my throat resonantly, considering the pretentiousness of what I’m about to say) an artist myself, there’s a part of that conception of the divine that strikes me as fucked up. I write, create, but am very far from doing so divinely. Coleridge thought Shakespeare was a great artist because he was a great man, but Coleridge—no more than us—knew precisely nothing about the moral and day-to-day virtue and niceness of Shakespeare the person. Maybe he was simply lovely. Maybe he wasn’t. Pope was a marvellous poet and a deeply unpleasant human being. Schopenhauer a great philosopher but a shit. Thomas Malory, author of the Morte D'Arthur, was a convicted rapist. Eric Gill was an extraordinary artist and a child molester. Pound and Wyndham Lewis were fascists and Heidegger a Nazi. Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper (I mean, he probably wasn't, but he was certainly violent towards women and generally not very nice). I don’t mean to labour the point: but you see what I mean.

But for a moment let’s consider the ‘God is an artist, and the universe is the greatest and most beautiful work of art’ notion. Since I’m a writer, I’m going to limit this to verbiage, storytelling—an abbreviation of possibility of course, but with a particular point. I often think of C S Lewis’s beautiful, would-it-were-true conception of heaven, at the end of the last Narnia book, Last Battle, when the Pevensies finally enter the heaven of heavens, and Lewis says:

But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

I mean, wow. That strikes me as a brilliant piece of conceptualising-the-unconceptualisable. But here’s the thing, what I tell my creative students when they come to me with their cool ideas for stories, their brilliant SF conceits and worlds and so on. I ask them: in this idea, where is the conflict? Because: no conflict, no drama; no drama no story. Writing the perfect utopia is hard because there can be, by definition, no conflict in the perfect realm. But what if our greatest happiness is not wire-head sensual satisfactions, absence of pain and deleteria, harmonious society? What if our greatest happiness is story? Ourselves in story? Well then happiness depends, in a radical way, upon the conflicts that dissolve the structuring of utopia, as salt dissolves a slug. Iain M Banks wrote about a utopian society, The Culture, but actually he rarely actually did that, because the radical happiness of Culture life is not conducive to Story; so Banks’s novels are set about the Culture’s dangerous secret-service organisation, Special Circumstances, who go into all manner of non-utopian worlds and alien species and have adventures.

Some years ago, I was invited to give the keynote at the biannual Utopiales conference: an event that takes place at various locations around Europe every two years. The year I went it was in Tarragona, a beautiful place. Anyway: I gave my keynote, the nub of which was—utopia as a mode cannot evade the crunch-point of human nature. Some utopias are authoritarian (Thomas More’s original utopia is this, for instance) where structures of authority and force compel the utopian citizens to live in harmony. Others are bottom-up, predicated on the notion that if this or that material or psychological impediment were removed, human beings would just naturally live together in bliss. I don’t think either of these are viable, practically speaking, I must say. As John Carey puts it, what all utopias share is the desire ‘to a greater or lesser extent, to eliminate real people’.

In my Utopiales keynote I argued that the most convincing utopia in culture is the TV show Teletubbies. These … beings (I’m not sure what they are: posthuman genetically altered cyborgs perhaps) … these ’tubbies do live according to utopian principles, but only because they are little children. Their needs are easily catered for, they are easily distracted and entertained, they are happy in their world. Adults would of course find Teletubbyland a frustrating and terrible place to live: monotonous, understimulating, restrictive. My argument, in other words, was that there is something radically infantilizing about utopia as a concept, something puerile in the strict sense of the word. After the lecture there was a reception, and I wandered around the venue with a glass of wine in my hand chatting to people. Some Utopiales attendees chatted with me about my talk, but there were a number of people there who ‘cut’ me, literally turned their back to me as I approached. I was puzzled by this, until the conference organiser explained: Utopiales attracts scholars and academics interesting in literary and cultural representations of utopia, but it also attracts actual utopians, people who plan to make utopia a reality: as it might be, wealthy American businessmen who, having made their fortune, have retired and plan to buy land and construct a utopian community. These people thought I was mocking them, with my keynote. They were angry with me.

One of the things utopian scholars talk about is the desuetude of the form. So: More’s first utopian novel, Utopia, is 1516. It produced lots of imitators. Through the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries a great many utopian books, novels, tracts and treatises were written.  It was a major genre in the 19^th-century and into the 20^th: Erewhon (1872) by Samuel Butler; Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy—one of the most impactful novels America saw, only Uncle Tom’s Cabin outsold it, led to the creation of hundreds of ‘Bellamy Clubs’ across the USA, the founding of a Nationalist Party to run for President, just a huge deal— William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1892), H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905), B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948)—[*yells* SkinNER!]—and Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962). But the mode has died away, in modern times. People don’t really write utopian novels any more. What they write is dystopia: the first couple of decades of the 21^st-century have been absolutely awash with dystopias, Hunger Games, The Road, Divergent, Maze Runners, Cyberpunk hellscapes, Battle Royale, Oryx and Crake, a great dismal river of books and films and video games. It’s an interesting question as to why utopia has gone out of fashion, and why dystopia is so popular. Fredric Jameson argues (in Archaeologies of the Future) that dystopia nowadays actually channels our utopian impulse, that dystopia is actually a way of doing utopia, an as-it-were photographic negative. I’m not sure. But I was interested in the idea of writing a utopia, since it seems not to be en vogue any more. And it seems I’ve written a utopia as a way of doing dystopia. 

Your question is, in a sense, the Brave New World dilemma. Is Huxley’s novel a dystopia? It’s often described as such. Still: I’ve taught it to undergraduates who, if offered a world of feelies, parties, happy-drugs, endless sex and technological facility would leap at the chance. And I think Huxley stages a more complex drama in his novel than simply ‘this is a vapid shallow and soul-destroying dystopia, entirely purged of the beautiful and the numinous’ and ‘this is a happy place structurally and specifically designed to make everyone happy: it’s a utopia’. We could say that the book’s dystopia is folded into its utopia and vice versa. Which brings me to—

This book is an exploration of Deleuze's ontology of The Fold. Deleuze's philosophy, insofar as I understand it (and I don't), is based on Spinoza, and both Deleuze and Spinoza are arguably atheists — there's no God, just substance and difference — which is one reason that I wonder whether it's right for me to bring Christian theological assumptions to my interpretation of the book's plot at all. How did you find yourself reading The Fold? What about it excited you and provoked you into writing a novel-length exploration of its ideas?  

Was Spinoza an atheist? I don’t know that he was, though (I mean: he wasn’t a conventional or orthodox Jew either). And I certainly don’t think it’s wrong to bring Christian theological assumptions into the book. I consider it a Christian novel, in some respects: the characters, biologically adult, are children, and human society has become again as a little child. And core characters are actual Christians, because, most people in the world are Christians—or people of faith, more broadly: people of the Book. I’m well aware that atheism is eccentric, in the strict sense of the world. 

As for me reading Deleuze: well I’ve read quite a lot of Deleuze, as it goes. When Foucault said that the future would look back on our time and call it ‘the Age of Deleuze’ he was only half joking. We used to run an MA in Postmodernism at my university, upon which I taught, and my sense of Pomo is Jamesonian and Deleuzian, or Deleuzeguattarian. Nowadays I find myself less in accord with what he, or they, argue(s), but he’s always interesting. In the Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari attempt to overturn Freud’s theory that desire is rooted in lack, and instead propose an understanding of human desire as a positive outpouring, a reaching outward and mutual netting. I like that, though I’m not sure it’s right. And the whole rootsy celebration of A Thousand Plateaux, the valorisation of rhizomes growing horizontally and connecting and reconnecting, opposed to the ‘arborial’ logic of up-down hierarchies, appeals to many. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze defines philosophy not as the search for truth, but as, in essence, inventing cool concepts, and I like that very much. But I don’t find myself returning to much of what he wrote, one book excepted. It’s not unlike Derrida:—back at the end of the last century, when Derrida and deconstruction were everywhere in the academic and literary criticism, I read a whole bunch of Derrida. Most of it I don’t go back to, but one book of his, the slim On Spirit, still seems to me really interesting and productive (maybe Specters of Marx too). With Deleuze, for me, the one book I go back to is The Fold.

There are particular reasons why this Deleuzian novelising, which is to say why these concepts, were in my head as I wrote Lake of Darkness. Alongside writing it I was working on a quite-big (well: 140,000 words, not nearly as big as I would have liked, rather bigger than my publisher would have preferred) History of Fantasy. The argument of that study is that the appeal of Fantasy is about combatting the Weberian disenchantments of modernity, about a more-or-less safe re-enchantment of the world, stories and worlds in which the past is recuperated into the present, magic and wonder are folded back into materiality. Rereading John Crowley’s Little, Big—a masterpiece of contemporary Fantasy, I’m sure you agree—I was struck by the extent to which it is a baroque work of art, not in the sense that it imitates the artistic, design and architectural particularities which we call baroque, but in a Deleuzian sense. I blogged about my thoughts on Little, Big—and on Gene Wolfe’s New Sun series, also major late 20^th-C Fantasy, also baroque in this sense, I think. 

By baroque I mean: Wolfe folds future and past into his present, folds narrative into elaborate pleats, folds reference and intertextuality and pattern into his whole. This is also true of Crowley’s Little, Big (1981) — for though in many ways Crowley is a very different writer to Wolfe, they share, I think, this complex, crenulated approach to Fantasy. And my way of framing this is via Deleuze. In The Fold to quote Tom Conley’s summary): 

the Baroque does not comprise what we associate with Bernini, Borromini, or Le Brun. Deleuze says: “the Baroque state reveals identical traits existing as constants within the most diverse environments and periods of time. Baroque was not reserved exclusively for the Europe of the last three centuries any more than classicism was the unique privilege of Mediterranean culture.” ‘Baroque’, then, designates a trope that comes from the renewed origins of art and has stylistic evidence that prevails in culture in general. Under its rubric are placed the proliferation of mystical experience, the birth of the novel, intense taste for life that grows and pullulates, and a fragility of infinitely varied patterns of movement. It could be located in the protracted fascination we experience in watching waves heave, tumble, and atomize when they crack along an unfolding line being traced along the expanse of a shoreline; in following the curls and wisps of color that move on the surface and in the infinite depths of a tile of marble; or, as Proust described, when we follow the ramifying and dilating branches of leaves piled in the concavity of the amber depths of a cup of tea. [Tom Conley, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, Gilles Deleuze The Fold [1988] (University of Minnesota Press 1993) x-xi]

Everything is folded, infolded, and the art of the Baroque — the pleats and flexes of the painting, the curlicues and grace-notes of the music — captures this. More, according to Deleuze, ‘knowledge is known only where it is folded’ [Deleuze, The Fold, 49]. What does Wolfe know? Or we could ask: what does his fiction know? Something about the labyrinth of life; something about complexity; something about God. There are always multiple layers, or floors, to what Wolfe is doing. Likewise in Crowley’s masterpiece: a central premise of Little, Big is that ‘space’, in which he live, is actually a vast, possibly infinite series of concentric spheres, with the corollary that each sphere, as we go inwards towards the centre, is actually and counter-intuitively larger than the one before. In the centre of this nested geometry live the fairies, a kind of parallel evolutionary life-form, unnoticed by science because they have left no material artefacts in the fossil record. So our world is folded into fairyland, and fairyland folded into our world, in a complex interrelation. Crowley’s universe folds fairyland into mundane reality and vice versa, just as his novel folds a wide range of story-elements and allusions — Grimms’ tales, Carroll’s Alice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Barrie, Wind in the Willows, the Cottingley Fairies — into its cinched textual surface. The two sizes specified in the novel’s title are not opposed, but complimentary. ‘The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity,’ says Deleuze.

First, the Baroque differentiates its folds in two ways, by moving along two infinities, as if infinity were composed of two stages or floors: the pleats of matter, and the folds in the soul. Below, matter is amassed according to a first type of fold, and then organized according to a second type, to the extent its part constitutes organs that are differently folded and more or less developed. Above, the soul sings of the glory of God inasmuch as it follows its own folds, but without succeeding in entirely developing them. A labyrinth is said, etymologically, to be multiple because it contains many folds. The multiple is not only what has many parts but also what is folded in many ways. A labyrinth corresponds exactly to each level: the continuous labyrinth in matter and its parts, the labyrinth of freedom in the soul and its predicates. If Descartes did not know how to get through the labyrinth, it was because he sought its secret of continuity in rectilinear tracks, and the secret of liberty in a rectitude of the soul. He knew the inclension of the soul as little as he did the curvature of matter. A “cryptographer” is needed, someone who can at once account for nature and decipher the soul, who can peer into the crannies of matter and read into the folds of the soul. [Deleuze, 3]

Interested in this, I set about writing it out as fiction. Not all my folds, in the novel, are as neatly or well pleated as I might like, but some of them work, more or less. Childhood is folded into adulthood, and vice-versa. At my son’s bar mitzvah, a few years ago, I did a reading of Wordsworth’s short lyric ‘My Heart Leaps Up’, and its gorgeous line: ‘the child is father of the man. The past is folded into the now—the past is never dead, as Faulkner said; it is not even past. And this is the core of Christianity. In Judaism, or Islam, there is God, and there are human beings. These relate to one another, but they are distinct things. Uniquely of Christianity, God is literally folded into humanity in the personhood of Christ, and, through Christ, humanity is folded into God. 

Lake of Darkness is quite a, well, dark novel: horror folded into innocence—I’d never written a horror story before, and wanted to try that. It doesn’t seem to me contradictory that I’ve mashed up horror and childish utopia. What I’ve written is, amongst other things, a murder story, and as Samuel Johnson put it, murder is something equally in the power of him that is hardened by villainy and inspirited by innocence. Anthony Burgess was fascinated by that: the dangerous potentiality of innocence for violence and murder. A Clockwork Orange, or, an even better novel, One Hand Clapping. 

Why is "Ice" the scariest thing Mr. Modo says to Raine? 

Dante’s Inferno, Canto 34.

I would never have thought much about the name Saccade, except that I happened to be reading another book (Adrian Johns's The Science of Reading), and in that book I learned that a "saccade" is the small synchronized jump your eyes make when you read. Saccade, of course, is one of the three characters in this novel who are directly tempted by the Gentleman and who give in to him (although two of those characters may be imaginary projections of one of the characters). How linked are reading and sin in the cosmos of this novel? In your cosmos? 

It’s all reading. So, yes, intertextuality, because it’s all intertextuality—I’m a bibliophile, and love reading (and writing) very deeply, which is why the C S Lewis version of what heaven will be like speaks so resonantly and beautifully to me, but my own predilections aside, ‘reading’ in the broadest sense, interpreting and finding meaning and beauty, are the fundamentals. Raine is called raine because, in a different kind of text, when the Raine comes they run and hide their heads—they might as well be dead. When the Raine comes. How do we read the world? Robert Browning, a Christian like you, Mr Christ-man, puts these words into the mouth of his artist-figure, Fra Lippo Lippi, but really he’s talking for himself, as a poet: ‘This world's no blot for us, Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: To find its meaning is my meat and drink.’ I wonder if the world does mean good, though. Do you think it is?