Alex Ross has won this year’s Guardian First Book Award for The Rest is Noise, a history of twentieth-century classical music. Announcing Ross’s victory at a ceremony in London last night, the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, himself an accomplished music critic, said that having read the book ‘you won’t be able to hear any twentieth-century music, from Strauss through to Radiohead and Bjork, the same way’.

With The Rest is Noise, Ross sought to bring the composers of the twentieth century back in from the cultural cold. He has said that ‘While paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, and lines from T. S. Eliot are quoted on the yearbook pages of alienated teenagers across the land, twentieth-century classical music still sends ripples of unease through audiences.’ The book explores and explains why and how composers such as Schoenberg, Berg and John Cage, so often maligned for their difficulty, broke from the music of the past, reinvented musical forms, and interpreted the political, social and artistic travails of their present. Critics have praised the book for its mix of minute musical analysis, grand historical narrative and metaphorical flare.

The award is the latest addition to a long list of successes for The Rest is Noise. Last year it won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and was a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction. It also attracted ‘Best Book’ nominations from the New York Times, the Washington Post and the LA Times, among others. In the UK it was shortlisted for the 2008 Samuel Johnson Prize, where it lost out to Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

Claire Armistead, the chair of the judges for last night’s award who also sat on the panel for the Samuel Johnson, said today that the success of The Rest is Noise proves that ‘there is a huge appetite among readers for clear, serious but accessible books’.

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the French novelist and poet Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. The Nobel Committee praised him as an ‘author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization’.

Le Clézio published his first novel, Le procès-verbal (The Interrogation) in 1963, when he was twenty-three years old. He was the first recipient of the French Academy’s Grand Prix Paul Morand in 1980 for his novel Désert, which ‘contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert, contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants’.

His most recent books include Ritournelle de la faim, published by Gallimard this year, and Ballaciner which was described by the Swedish Academy as ‘a deeply personal essay about the history of the art of film and the importance of film in the author’s life, from the hand-turned projectors of his childhood, the cult of cinéaste trends in his teens, to his adult forays into the art of film as developed in unfamiliar parts of the world’.

Last week the Permanent Secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, Horace Engdahl, caused consternation when he criticized American writers for their insularity and ignorance. ‘They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,’ he said. No doubt many in the English-speaking world, where Le Clézio is not much read, are now trying to catch up with the conversation.

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Martin Rynja, the publisher of Gibson Square Books, is considering whether to proceed with publication of The Jewel of Medina, the controversial historical novel by American author Sherry Jones, following the firebomb attack on the company’s premises in Islington, London last Saturday. The author’s agent, Natasha Kern, confirmed by phone that publication will proceed in America, Germany, Italy and Spain, some of the fifteen countries where book deals have been signed. It has already been published in Serbia where, after an initial withdrawal from bookshops for fear of reprisals by radicals, more than 10,000 copies have now been printed.

The book tells the story of Aisha, the child bride of the Prophet Muhammad. According to the novel’s marketing blurb Aisha ‘uses her wits, her courage, and her sword to defend her first-wife status even as Muhammad marries again and again, taking 12 wives and concubines in all’.

Jones’s novel had been scheduled for publication by the Random House US imprint Ballantine Books until they withdrew from the two-book agreement in August following comments made by the academic Denise Spellberg, who called it a ‘very ugly, stupid piece of work’ and ‘soft core pornography’. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, she said that ‘as an expert on Aisha’s life, I felt that it was my professional responsibility to counter this novel’s fallacious representation of a very real woman’s life… The combination of sex and violence sells novels. When combined with falsification of the Islamic past, it exploits Americans who know nothing about Aisha or her seventh-century world and counts on stirring up controversy to increase sales’.

What a lot of weight The Jewel of Medina has had to bear since. Salman Rushdie has denounced Random House for ‘censorship by fear’; Kenan Malik has cried ‘Self-censor and be damned!’; and Stanley Fish has weighed in with a piece on the semantics of censorship for the New York Times. In support of Gibson Square’s decision to publish the book at all, a view presumably redoubled now, Alvaro Vargas Llosa writes in The New Republic that ‘the fact that someone, somewhere, is willing to run the risk of not letting the threat of violence inhibit free expression is tremendously comforting’.

Speaking yesterday on Radio 4’s Today Programme, Sherry Jones called upon moderate Muslims to ‘stand up and be counted and have their voices heard, otherwise we have a small group of radicals who are controlling the agenda’. Martin Rynja, now under police protection following Saturday’s attack, regards the novel as ‘an important barometer of our time’.

We shall have to wait for publication to gauge whether the novel warrants the pressure it has been subjected to. As the author pointed out in the Washington Post, ‘So far, discussion has centered around my not-published book, which almost no one has read. Soon, I hope, we will address the text itself, in published form, and my ideas, derived from research and experience, of moderate Islam as a religion of egalitaranism and, yes, peace.’ Judging from a review published on IslamOnline.net by Marwa Elnaggar, to whom Sherry Jones sent the manuscript, the text itself ought to diffuse controversy (without thereby inviting praise). ‘I hope that readers will take it for what it is: an attempt by a Western writer with little knowledge of Arabic, Arabia, Islam, and Muslims using her own Western, 21st-century values, ideals and emotions to portray an unrecognizable version of the well-known and well-documented story of A’ishah… Yet given all its inaccuracies, its faults, and its biases, should publication of The Jewel of Medina be stopped? By all means, it should not.’

According to Zhang Yimou, director of House of Flying Daggers and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, ‘orderly movements create beauty’. The West, he says, can’t do order. ‘They have all sorts of organizations, trade unions.’ It took a lot of control to make the Games appear as polished as they did. China’s successes are tied to its suppressions.

This, says Philip Pan in Out of Mao’s Shadow, is reason to be sceptical about predictions of economic openness presaging social and political freedoms in China. Take the case of Chen Lihua. Chen, who is known as ‘The Rich Lady’ – China’s richest, in fact – is worth approximately $500 million. She made her money first from antique furniture, picked up at bargain prices from government warehouses used to store what the Red Guards stole, and then from property deals. The largest of these involved demolishing the homes of 2,100 families in the old hutong districts of central Beijing. The rights to the houses were secured, cheaply, from the government. The demolition was achieved in just twenty-eight days. Pan asked Wang Shouyuan, a former Beijing politico who became one of Chen’s aides, to explain the ease with which her company had cleared the fifty-five acres of land necessary to undertake the project. ‘For demolition to proceed quickly,’ Wang said, ‘it relies on a combination of strength and force…Strength means giving enough money. Force means the backing of the government’. Chen’s route to riches, and China’s route to economic growth so far, has been ‘authoritarian capitalism’, the oligarchic grab.

Pan’s book paints a pointillist picture of the country, collecting individual stories gathered during his seven years as the Washington Post’s correspondent in Beijing. He gradually builds an image of a rigid, creaking complex of big business, political control and nationalist myth-making that is occasionally, movingly, but all too rarely cracked by the individual struggles of lawyers, doctors, academics, bloggers, film-makers and aspirant unionists and democrats.

To a book with a similarly penumbral title – Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark. Auster’s last novel, Travels in the Scriptorium, began with a man, Mr. Blank, alone in a room trying to remember how he got there. In Man in the Dark, Auster’s narrator, August Brill, lies awake in Vermont through ‘another white night in the great American wilderness’ trying not to remember a host of recent traumas. To that end he tells himself the story of Owen Brick, who finds himself in a parallel America, at war with itself following the 2000 presidential election. Brick’s America is one in which the Twin Towers still stand and Iraq was never invaded. Dragged from his hole by Sergeant Serge Tobak, Brick is sent on a mission to kill the war’s author and instigator – the retired and widowed writer August Brill, who is inventing the war in a room in Vermont.

Auster’s fame is founded on literary trickery, and this book is no exception. The story of Owen Brick – a thriller interspersed with anguished returns to Brill, alone in his room – is excitingly and vividly written but it ends rather too abruptly; a symptom, it seems, of two narratives that are never successfully run together.

The third part of Javier Marías’s novel in three parts, Your Face Tomorrow, is scheduled for publication in 2010. Weighing in at over 700 pages in Spanish Poison, Shadow and Farewell is currently being translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa and I am lucky to have been sent a manuscript of the first half of the translation. The novel continues the story of Jacques Deza, a Spaniard in London, and his work for the intelligence organization run by Bertram Tupra. The first two novels, Fever and Spear and Dance and Dream, were written in a fiercely analytical and winding prose. They are thrillers as much as they are philosophical investigations into selfhood and memory and Dance and Dream in particular contained some of the funniest writing I’ve read. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of Poison, Shadow and Farewell when it is published.

Cartoonist David Heatley’s work has included a self-published graphic pamphlet, Deadpan, cover art for the New Yorker and drawings for the New York Times and McSweeney’s. His graphic memoir, My Brain is Hanging Upside Down, will be published in October. For Granta 102, Heatley created a cartoon strip, ‘Classic Combo’, confronting the complex industrial processes that produce fast food. Here Granta’s Simon Willis talks to him about his intolerance for wheat, dairy and political art and the current popularity of confessional cartooning.

SW: For Granta 102 you drew a strip documenting the production of a hamburger from crop to kitchen. How did the strip come about?

DH: I’ve had stomach trouble all my life. A few years ago I started getting a serious intolerance to soy, wheat and sugar. In the last few months I’ve added dairy to that list. So food is a subject that’s on my mind a lot. The idea for the story came to me during my morning meditation. I imagined what it would look like to draw all the steps involved in engineering (there’s no better term for it) a classic burger and fries combo at a diner or fast-food restaurant. I read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation years ago and have seen Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me. I’ve also read articles on food by Michael Pollan and others. There’s really no new information I’m imparting. I was just interested in visualizing all the steps that have become invisible [in the production of fast food].

While drawing the pages, I could see even more clearly how convoluted and absurd our process for getting food on our table has become. It’s almost like a Dr. Seuss or Rube Goldberg machine. After I’d thought of the strip and made some notes on it, my agent told me that Granta was looking to feature more cartoonists and they were wondering if I had any ideas that related to people feeling disconnected from nature. Perfect! Before I had even drawn the strip, my idea had a home. It was a really nice synchronistic experience – the kind of experience that seems to be happening more and more in my life.

You’ve said that you don’t like overtly political art, so why did you decide to deviate from that principle for Granta?

I don’t think of this strip as overtly political. I’ve tried to make it quiet and as neutral-seeming as possible. There’s a clear embedded viewpoint that I find our food industry absurd, but I’ve added no narration, dialogue or commentary. I’m just presenting the facts of how this particular meal was made. I’ve even shrunk the panel size of the images of the cow being killed so as not to completely alienate the reader. I have a lot of respect for Sue Coe [author of Dead Meat] as an artist, but her book about the meat industry is the opposite of what I’ve done – visceral, angry drawings of slaughter. Unfortunately, I think that tactic almost always backfires because it winds up completely repulsing the viewer. Charles Taylor put it really well in a recent New York Times book review: ‘...humanist empathy devoid of the distinctly human is finally not art but merely grim reportage’.

Your dislike of overtly political art is interesting in another respect. Contemporary cartoonists and graphic novelists often trace a lineage to political satire, as far back as Hogarth and Gillray. Modern cartoonists like Robert Crumb and, more recently, Joe Sacco are also overtly political.

I’m not a fan of political cartoons from any era, really. I think sharp political cartooning requires flattening people into groups and factions to render them right or wrong. I’m much more interested in complexity and contradictions within people. Anything I would be angrily decrying as wrong with the world exists inside of me, too. My time is much better spent examining myself and trying to root out what I find repugnant. The opposite tack always seems a little hypocritical to me. Joe Sacco is possibly the one exception to what I’m saying. He finds a way to make his stories personal and include himself as a character in the narrative, which I think makes all the difference. My favorite works by Crumb are his early issues of Zap and his collaborations with Harvey Pekar and Crumb’s wife, Aline Kominsky. I’m not so into Crumb’s rants.

Who has influenced your cartooning?

Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Art Spiegelman and Gary Panter are probably the biggest influences. There’s John Porcellino, whose books Perfect Example and The Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man are brilliant. Crumb, Charles Burns, Kim Deitch, David Mazzucchelli, Debbie Dreschler, Joe Matt, Chester Brown and Seth [the pen name of cartoonist Gregory Gallant] are all really important to me. Seth’s art in particular has a deeply soothing effect on me whenever I look at it. Ron Rege, Adrian Tomine, Dave Kiersh, Gabrielle Bell, Kevin Huizenga, Sammy Harkham, C.F., Dan Zettwoch, Mat Brinkman and Leif Goldberg are all amazing contemporaries of mine. Painters like Philip Guston, David Park, Basquiat, Saul Steinberg, Jim Nutt, H.C. Westerman and Alice Neel had a big effect. I’m also inspired by the video game design of the 1980s, especially Nintendo arcade games like Donkey Kong Jr., Dig Dug, and Q-bert. I consider all of them works of art. Children’s book authors that really impacted me at a young age were Maurice Sendak, Dr. Seuss, Richard Scarry and Clement Hurd. I’m also deeply inspired by too many musicians and filmmakers to name, but an experimental filmmaker named Scott Stark was probably my favourite when I was in film school.

The title of your forthcoming book, My Brain is Hanging Upside Down, a graphic memoir, is taken from a Ramones song. Tell me about the book and how it came about?

The book evolved really naturally. None of it was planned in advance. My first comics strips to get noticed were illustrated versions of my dreams. I started getting known as someone who only did dreams, but I thought of them as only one facet of my story that I wanted to tell. I got the idea of doing comics about my sex life and doing portrait comics about my father. All these strips made it into my self-published comic book Deadpan. If I was planning anything it was probably that I’d keep publishing these comic books until I had enough material for a collection. But I met my first editor, Michael Homler, at a party and he asked if I had any book-length projects to propose. I gathered what I had so far and wrote a book proposal describing possible additional strips like ‘Black History’, ‘Family History’ and ‘Portrait of My Mom’. And I got a book deal.

I spent the next four years drawing those strips and learning how to organize the material into a book. So basically I had to learn how to go from being a comic book artist to an author in that span of time. It was tough, but I’m much happier where I am now. It makes sense for cartoonists to be treated like authors, to have literary agents, to get real book advances. Without a doubt, I’ll be approaching my next book a little differently.

What draws you to memoir rather than to fiction?

I was traumatized into preferring memoir. I think having a father who was so caught up in fantasy my whole life (my dad is a lifelong fan of science fiction and Tolkien novels) has made me run screaming to things that feel authentic and reality-based. I read a lot of novels in school, but I often find I can’t even get through them anymore, with the exception of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, who are my favourites. I can devour a non-fiction book if it’s on a subject I like and I read newspaper and magazine articles more than anything. I have a special fondness for memoirs, graphic or otherwise, though I hold them to the same high standard of everything else. I recently saw a movie called A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints. It blew me away. There’s something so powerful in someone surviving a situation and peeling back all the messages they got from life or their family and just screaming it out into the world: ‘This is the way it happened! I know! I was there!’

Many current superstars of cartooning have made their names with graphic memoirs: Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) are two famous examples. Robert Crumb’s work has a strong autobiographical element, as does Chris Ware’s. Why is memoir so popular among cartoonists at the moment?

I think there’s something in the zeitgeist in general for whatever reason. Reality TV, blogs and documentaries are all being produced in huge numbers. In terms of comics, I know both Spiegelman and Crumb were inspired by Justin Green and Aline Kominsky in the 1960s. The form didn’t really exist before them and few people have actually read either of their work. It’s such a tiny slice of the pie in terms of comic books, but it just takes one person like Spiegelman or Satrapi to be inspired and then they take it to this completely other level. I picked up the thread after reading Spiegelman’s Maus, and also the work of Julie Doucet, Joe Matt, Chester Brown, Debbie Dreschler and Seth. There was this great autobio renaissance in the ‘90s that kind of faded away. I think a lot of young cartoonists are looking to people that Dan Nadel is publishing with PictureBox – fine art crossed with lowbrow fantasy comics. I’m inspired by a lot of that stuff too, but I’m planting my flag solidly in the personal storytelling camp. I hope my book furthers this thread in comics and inspires others.

In a review of the cartoon issue of McSweeney’s, the British satirist Martin Rowson wrote that ‘comics aren’t and shouldn’t be respectable. The closest they should come to the adult world is as a kind of foul-mouthed, filthy-minded and grubby adolescence’. Do you agree with that?

That’s a little extreme, but I agree with his overall point. I’m not crazy about cartoonists who use expressive, painterly brushstrokes that are supposed to show their connection to Cezanne. It kind of deadens the reading experience for me. There’s something magical about a pictographic doodle that’s simple enough to scan and then move on. The whole page comes to life. Within that range of simple doodling, it’s possible to express the gamut of human emotion, including things that only adults deal with. So I’d part ways with Rowson’s comment there. Anyone who has read Maus or Jimmy Corrigan or Persepolis or Carol Tyler’s The Hannah Story knows just how powerful comics can be. There’s nothing adolescent about any of those works.

How important is good writing to good cartooning?

In terms of the importance of writing in comics, I’d say it’s absolutely essential. Writing is the foundation of comics, or maybe the armature. A comic is only worth reading if the story is well-planned and powerful. Otherwise it’s a series of loosely connected pictures, regardless of how well they’re inked or colored. Writing is easily seventy-five percent of my process and it takes the longest. I prefer artwork that isn’t too laboured over, that shows some spontaneity and improvisation. But the story has to be really well-constructed if it’s going to reach me.

We are seeing more and more graphic adaptations of literary works. Andrzej Klimowski has just made a graphic version of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. We’ve had adaptations of Shakespeare. Martin Rowson has done Tristram Shandy. What do you think graphic treatments of literary works add? Isn’t it just publishing opportunism?

I think the idea has merit. One of the greatest graphic novels is David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik’s adaptation of Paul Auster’s novella, City of Glass. It’s brilliantly inventive, while staying very true to the original. And it’s not just a Classics Illustrated approach to literature. It expands upon, highlights and collapses parts of Auster’s book. In other words, it’s a book that has a real reason for existing. Kevin Huizenga has also done some very interesting work adapting from other works of literature. I don’t think any use of comics is bad per se, it all depends on the execution.

J.M. Coetzee cuts a surprisingly dashing figure in person. Speaking last week at the University of East Anglia, as part of UEA’s New Writing Worlds season, Coetzee took to the stage with a loose walk, even a subtle swagger, in a perfectly pressed suit. He spoke on censorship, and then gave readings from two of his early novels, In the Heart of the Country (1977) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). His delivery was nuanced and witty, albeit with a sense of private restraint. At one point in the evening, I even saw him laugh.

Writing under the threat of censorship, Coetzee has said, is ‘like being intimate with someone who does not love you’, someone waiting for you to slip up, someone who measures your mistakes and then runs to tell their friends. Censorship has long been an obsession of his, but his attitudes have always been marked by subtlety. His essays on the subject, collected in Giving Offense (1996), ‘do not,’ he wrote, ‘constitute an attack on censorship’. Coetzee’s tone is always investigative and probing. With humility he wrote that ‘I cannot find it in myself to align myself with the censor… the dark-suited, bald-headed figure, with his pursed lips and his red pen’.

But as Coetzee explained last week – and as Peter D. McDonald reported in the TLS in 2000 (it’s surprising that Coetzee claims to have heard of the public existence of the censors’ internal reports only last year) – the reality of the author’s run-ins with the censors belies the popular image. Not only were the censors complimentary of the books – for example, one censor called In the Heart of the Country ‘outstandingly well-written’ – but they were themselves sophisticated readers known to Coetzee. Among them was H. van der Merwe Scholz, a professor at the University of Cape Town, where Coetzee also taught. Another was Anna M. Louw, herself a novelist based in the city. These censors were part of Coetzee’s intellectual and social world, drawn from the small South African intelligentsia who, Coetzee suggested, considered themselves to be ‘guardians of the Republic of Letters… book reviewers to the power of n’ protecting a space for literature from a philistine state.

But you’ll find no gratitude in Coetzee, no dedications in his books to some censor’s bureaucratic serial number. Here are some choice fragments of the censors’ reports on In the Heart of the Country, a novel in which there is sex – both consensual and forced – between white and black characters: there are ‘traces of protest literature’; the sexual intercourse ‘across the colour bar’ is ‘so firmly interwoven, even overwoven, by the sometimes almost hermetic style, that it won’t give any offence’; the novel will be ‘read and enjoyed only by intellectuals’; ‘it is difficult to abstract reality out of the spinster’s flights of imagination’. Despite In the Heart of the Country’s troubling and transgressive content, in the censors’ view the novel was rendered innocuous by a literary quality which curtailed the book’s likely readership. A classic defence.

So how did it feel for a writer who once said that he considered it ‘a badge of honour to have a book banned in South Africa’ to find out that the state’s literary representatives – his unloving readers – were actually on his side? How are we to interpret the disdain and sarcasm that spiked Coetzee’s voice as he quoted these lines?

The extract he read from In the Heart of the Country – the rich, speculative, Beckettian monologue of Magda, a lonely, disused and mistreated daughter on a farm in the middle of the Karoo – is telling. ‘I am a black widow, in mourning for the uses I was never put to’, the extract began. ‘But I have another sense of myself, glimmering tentatively somewhere in my inner darkness: myself as a sheath, as a matrix, as protectrix of a vacant inner space.’

But Magda’s protective retreat – her ‘sense of election’ – is weighed down in darker moments. She wonders ‘that if only I had a good man to sleep at my side, and give me babies all would be well… a man whom I would vow to bend down to a little lower, slave for a little harder than another woman would, whom I would have to disrobe for on Saturday nights, in the dark, so as not to alarm him, and arouse, if the arts of arousal can be learned, and guide to the right hole, rendered penetrable with a gob of chickenfat from a pot at the bedside’.

Here are sceptical attitudes to marriage and stark references to sex framed by a sophisticated speculative device: the ‘spinster’s flights of imagination’ that the censors thought exonerated the book from obscenity. But as a ‘protectrix of vacant inner space’ the speculation is part of the protest, an assertion of a controlling intelligence able to resist what Magda describes as ‘the bucolic comedy… not to be explained away by poverty, degeneracy, torpor or sloth’. The censors had excused the novel by privileging its literariness. But in so doing they had missed its power.

‘As a child I knew almost nothing,’ said V.S. Naipaul in his 2001 Nobel lecture, ‘nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house.’ This was the Lion House in Chaguanas, Trinidad. The atmosphere, Patrick French tells us in The World Is What It Is, his brilliant new biography of Naipaul, was one of mythologized family history. His grandmother embellished her late husband’s Brahmin inheritance (in fact, he had deserted his family for another woman shortly before his death). It was a house of ‘propaganda, alliances, betrayals’, in which the young ‘Vido’ witnessed the emasculation of his father Seepersad, an aspiring writer and rationalist smothered by Hindu traditionalism. What Naipaul learned was a vulnerable pride, a fierce and often cruel independence and overweening ambition. French traces the consequences of this complex background with compulsive honesty, debunking Naipaul’s unjust reworkings of his past but remaining sympathetic to the writer if not to the man.

A few weeks ago I heard Daniel Pennac in conversation with Alberto Manguel at Southbank Centre. Pennac read from his 1992 book The Rights of the Reader, a literary phenomenon that has sold over a million copies in France. It is a lovable polemic against the dogmatic hypocrisies that surround reading and its teaching. With raised fingers, waving arms, crescendos and quietness, Pennac read to his audience of the importance of reading aloud, of reading as a performance. ‘When someone reads aloud, they raise you to the level of the book. They give you reading,’ he said. Like an excitable child, I rushed to the foyer to buy my copy.

Amid discussions of a two-state solution to the conflict in the Middle East, Israel’s own Arab population occupies an uneasy position. Set in the tense aftermath of the Al Aqsa Intifada of 2000, Sayed Kashua’s second novel, Let It Be Morning, shortlisted for this year’s IMPAC Dublin Award, is a sharp dissection of the traumas of the region’s complex political geometry. But the narrative voice, of an Israeli-Arab journalist (like Kashua himself), is too flat to sustain the story and it sags as a result.

To find out what Jason Cowley, Granta’s editor, is reading, click here

Gordon Burn is the author of acclaimed works of both fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Alma Cogan and Fullalove, and a study of Fred and Rosemary West, Happy Like Murderers. But in his new book, Born Yesterday: The News as A Novel, he made the ambitious decision to fashion a work of fiction from the news stories that were current at the time of writing and that continue to top the news agenda: stories that include the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and the end of Tony Blair’s government. Here, Granta’s Simon Willis asks Gordon Burn about the challenges he faced when writing the book.

SW: Writing a book set in the very recent past and the rolling present must throw up difficult technical and imaginative challenges for a novelist?

GB: From the outset, I approached the book as being a ‘found object’, in the sense of a Duchamp ready-made: the narrative was largely given, as were all of the main ‘characters’ – Blair, Brown, the McCanns, Kate Middleton, John Smeaton – other than the narrator. The imaginative challenge – and therefore what in my view makes Born Yesterday a novel – came in making connections that hadn’t previously been apparent. John Berger once said something that struck me very forcibly, and that I recalled continually in the writing of this book: ‘Imagination is not, as is sometimes thought, the ability to invent; it is the ability to disclose that which exists.’ So it was about looking; about sifting, and sitting still and thinking.

But large portions of the book are essayistic.

Well, it’s full of narrative – narrative, that is, as opposed to plot, which is something I have next to no interest in. Plot is something people want for television plays, as V.S. Naipaul once said. Narrative, on the other hand, is something large going on around you all the time. Plot assumes that the world has been explored and now this thing, plot, has to be added on.

It’s also a novel if you happen to agree, as I do, with the Berger quote above. It sets out to restore some ambiguity and complexity to stories that have been stripped of those things in their broad-brush retelling on TV, online and in the press. My intention was to re-complicate reality and, in doing that, to show that it can have the poetry and some of the mysterious resonance of fiction.

You’ve written books about Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West, but Born Yesterday represents an entirely different engagement with news events. Why did you feel compelled to write this book?

Reality is always changing. It changes constantly, and as a writer you have to find new ways of capturing the reality. The police leading the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper stored their data on thousands of cards in hundreds of shoe boxes in the incident room in Bradford. There was no computer. The journalists at the West trial had access to neither texting nor email. Blogging, rolling news, online interactivity – so ingrained have these things become that it is hard to remember that they are all recent developments and all contribute to our sense of being inundated by information, much of which calls itself ‘news’, when it is in fact – and increasingly – no more than rumour, gossip, spin, speculation. The instant a newsworthy event occurs, it is misrepresented in its reporting – fictionalized, really. The line between reality and its representation has become rivetingly porous. So the news as a novel made sense.

Born Yesterday is an audacious experiment. Are you pessimistic about the novel form?

Not so much pessimistic as uninterested in most contemporary fiction. It’s the ‘plot’ thing again. Imposing a plot inevitably distorts. I recently read an interview with the American writer Lydia Davis in which she said she was simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters because of the artificiality. It’s a point of view I share; it’s a reiteration of what Naipaul (again) has been saying now for many years: that we are here to see things as they are; to take in the is-ness of what is. That consciousness is our only salvation.

You return, in Born Yesterday, to your novel Fullalove, which, with its story of the stolen child and the resilient father, has obvious parallels with the McCann kidnapping. How transgressive did writing about the McCanns’ unfinished story feel?

Hardly transgressive at all, apart from the section in which I describe Gerry McCann’s working life as a surgeon, ‘his hand in their chest, working under the rib-cage’, and the passages pointing up the curious parallel between the two groups of doctors and health professionals – the McCanns and their friends, ‘the Tapas Nine’, and the people arrested in connection with the failed car-bomb attacks in Glasgow and London – whose stories ran throughout that summer.

It was the McCanns’ media literacy, which some people believed sat awkwardly with their assigned public role of grieving parents, as well as their access to wealthy and powerful people, that was interpreted in some quarters as being transgressive – or, at least, worthy of comment – in itself. It was something unexpected and new in the world. Their appointment of an official press spokesman – a ‘spin doctor’ – was another intriguing development.

You wrote a piece in Granta 53 about the trial of Rosemary West in which you say that ‘there was nothing much to see and it was always much the same, but the heavy media presence was in itself justification for having the story high in the running order’. You wrote this in 1996. What sort of watershed do you think that McCann story marked?

The McCanns’ apparently instant decision to use the press rather than be used by it, which included their refusal to appear before the cameras as stereotypical ‘victims’, was riveting to observe. It made Gordon Brown and his cohorts’ naively ill-judged and frequently embarrassing performances in public at around the same time appear even more bizarre.

There are lots of fairly conventional ‘state of the nation’ novels being written at the moment that try to come to terms with the recent past. Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency is one example. How do you think Born Yesterday fits in?

Of course I would like to hope that, read in thirty or fifty years time, this book would give an accurate picture of the grain of the reality of this time. But it wasn’t written with posterity in mind.

You’ve written journalism, fiction, non-fiction and now a book that collapses all those categories. Which of your books means the most to you?

This one. I suppose every writer would say that. But I think it’s maybe opening up a little bit of new ground. It was exhilarating to write.

Martin Amis has been criticized for his engagement with current affairs since 9/11. The right of the novelist to be heard has been questioned. What role do you envision for the novelist in public life?

Novelists – the lucky ones – have the time and are, or should be, unaligned. They are able to make connections between the visible and the invisible world that maybe aren’t immediately apparent: how the sight of a prime minister so clearly uncomfortable in his own skin, or the rolling story of two middle-class parents who have been named official suspects in the disappearance of their daughter, can breed a wider, underlying unease which finds its way into the dream-life of those of us on the ground.

You write in Born Yesterday about being attracted to writers, like Naipaul, who have written on the road, and who have written about rootlessness. The erasure of community is a recurring theme in your work. Do you feel homeless, nostalgic?

Dislocated, perhaps, in the same way that I describe Gerry and Kate McCann as being between classes – born working-class, both now doctors – but really having roots nowhere. I feel it was another element in the widespread public antipathy towards them.

The novel ends with the line ‘Bye bye, everybody. Bye bye.’ What are we saying goodbye to?

Maybe an unmediated reality. Maybe a world where not everybody has an opinion and not everybody wants that opinion to be heard. It’s a phrase from childrens’ television – ‘The Sooty Show’. Maybe a goodbye to the kind of innocence that a 1950s tea-time TV show in grainy black and white represents.