Being a top reporter got in the way for a while, but James Meek is focused on fiction now, he tells Nadine O'Regan
James Meek was just 18 years old when he finished writing his first novel. Meek sent the 70,000-word book, whose name he'd prefer not to mention, to several publishing houses. But to his chagrin, the work won not praise but rejection.
"Thank God," Meek laughs now, in the dining room of the Bonham Hotel, Edinburgh. "I'd hardly ever been outside Britain and yet it was set in Afghanistan!"
Such vaulting ambition would seem remarkable from any writer, of any age, but Meek makes it appear almost normal. For two decades, the London-born, Dundee-raised writer has forged a twin-track career, working as both novelist and journalist. Both paths have proven difficult at times. But Meek has persevered - and his determintion has begun to pay high dividends.
Two years ago, Meek was named foreign reporter of the year at the British Press Awards. In July, he received a Booker longlist nomination for his third novel, The People's Act of Love, in the process joining a coterie of such venerable talents as JM Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Zadie Smith and John Banville.
At 43, with five published books to his name, Meek's moment in the spotlight finally seems to have come. The People's Act of Love is a powerful, original and frequently awe-inspiring work. Reading it, you regularly feel like a veil has been lifted from your eyes - that while all the other novelists were fiddling around with drawing-room dramas and mind-manacled set pieces, Meek was doing hard labour at the coalface of humanity, hefting around huge slabs and figuring out where our limitations as human beings lie.
Theme-wise, the book is a blast. Cannibalism, castration and spiritualism are all present in the novel, whose main narrative drive is set in and around the Siberian town of Yazyk.
The year is 1919, and three discrete forces are poised against one another. There is the Czech Legion, a battalion of fighters who fought on the side of the White Army and now, with the Reds in the ascendant, find themselves stranded in Yazyk under the command of sadistic Captain Matula.
Then there are the townspeople, who are trying to conceal the fact that they are Skoptsky sect castrates, who describe the male sex organ as the "Keys to Hell". Finally there is Samarin - a terrorist "here on earth to destroy everything which doesn't resemble Paradise" - who arrives in Yazyk, claiming to have been trailed by a cannibal, and who becomes the catalyst for the town to be torn asunder.
Although there are weaknesses - owing to the novel's web-like structure, much of its impact is felt only in retrospect - Meek's shimmering, cinematic prose style, which one reviewer deemed "so vivid that you try to turn away while reading", is nothing short of astonishing.
"I think there is a problem with fiction, in England particularly, that writers do not take enough care over each individual word," Meek says. "I admire James Kelman immensely. What I've learned from him is never to be complacent about words, always to be aware of clichés and received wisdom, and to ask of every word, 'do I really need that word, that adverb?'."
MEEK BEGAN WORK on the novel in 1995 and "there are still sentences, paragraphs and pages in it that are unaltered from the mid-1990s - but not many". He investigated the real-life stories of the castrates, but the hardest research he did, he says, was the kind of "research you do within yourself".
"The most difficult thing for a novelist to do is to look in a clear-eyed way at your own faults, and what you really think about other human beings, and then try to report back from that."
The most valuable periods of writing came when he retreated to friends' houses in isolated locations in Scotland and north Bohemia.
"What was important was not so much the writing as the thinking about writing," he says. "In the space of 24 hours, you can wake up and do all your displacement activity, and all the time, while you're thinking about other things, you're also thinking about the book, and then finally, before midnight, you can finally start to do some writing - and it just seems to work better."
Meek needed hours away from the internet, television and telephone more than most. Throughout his adult life he has conducted his career in fiction in tandem with time spent in a series of highly challenging journalistic posts. A reporter in Grozny during the war in Chechnya, Meek more recently spent a total of three months, over the course of four visits, in Iraq.
"With Iraq, you had the compensation that people were interested in it," he says. "It's much worse to be in a war that nobody cares about. Iraq, for me personally, was a much less harrowing and unpleasant experience than covering the first war in Chechnya, because with Chechnya you were seeing all these terrible things and nobody cared."
Meek started out writing fiction but entered the world of journalism after college "because I didn't want to be poor", serving stints at a newspaper in Northampton, then at the Scotsman, before moving on to the Guardian. While he thinks that had he stuck primarily with fiction, he might be more successful now as a novelist, he feels the benefits of his journalistic experience.
"This 20 years of journalism at all levels, from sitting in magistrates' courts in little English country towns to reporting on wars and international politics, has given me a perspective on the world which is maybe richer," he says. "One of the things I'm glad about in the reviews I've had is that very few people have done this sort of 'journalist writes novel' thing. That would be a bit unfair anyway, seeing as this is my fifth book."
Meek pauses. A rare uncertainty flits across his face. Though neither of us says it, the truth is that up until recently, there was a possibility that a critic reviewing his work might not have been aware that Meek was the author of four other books.
"I think in the past I was avoiding difficult tasks by making my work funny, surreal," he says. "It might have been funny, it might have been entertaining, but sometimes I felt I was not looking my reader in the eye."
THESE DAYS, MEEK has jettisoned the humour and, perhaps because of doing so, has located a seam in his fiction that regularly approaches the profound. Virtually every reviewer has compared Meek to the great Russian authors - Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky - but Meek says that although he is influenced by them, he has learned just as much from writers of other nationalities. Although he lives in London with his Russian wife, Yulia, he is glad to consider himself a Scottish writer, not least because coming from a small country has made him appreciate the vastness of the world.
"Scotland has got a good balance," he says. "It nurtures writers. It gives them extra protection when they're not very successful. But because it's small, it allows them to be aware of the wider world. I think that when you're a British writer rather than a Scottish one you have to work a bit harder to remember that there's a big world out there, and that if you're serious about what you're doing, you're competing with the world of the present and the past, not just the usual suspects in London."
The People's Act of Love, by James Meek, is published by Canongate, £12.99