Over the years, whenever I was in some suitable situation and this subject would come up, and I’d mention this friend, people would be fascinated, but they would always be judgemental. And it wasn’t the traditional morality of church and family, it was the contemporary morality: how could she allow herself to be treated in that way? The woman was a dear friend and I knew enough about her to understand the complexity of what happened, but the reactions were fascinating. I’m not running people down for their reactions, because it’s natural, but the element of horror was often there. Immediately when I thought about the story, I thought about the reaction, and that made me want to write a story with a contemporary reaction to it. The form took off from there.

Bea isn’t spineless by any means, but she seems to give over all to her passion.

This is particularly true of omen of her era. They have a resilience and a strength and a vigour, but Bea, to use the fictional example, is willing to give herself to the situation and even though at times she doesn’t cope with it well, and she’s a limited person like all of us, she refuses to blame anyone. She takes responsibility for her own actions. She’s self-pitying at times and resents what happens to her and is angry with what she’s chosen and what’s been done to her, but in the end she refuses to accept that she hasn’t chosen.

This interests me a lot. I met a young woman, to give you one little example, just a couple of weeks ago – and it’s funny how, when you are working with a project, things happen that coincide with it, maybe it’s just that you listen more – and she asserted to me, without knowing anything about this book, that there is no excuse for a woman to allow herself to be mistreated in our time. And that sat so perfectly with Jennifer’s reaction to her great-aunt.

That’s the judgemental side, but what about when someone wants to say, but you can do better.

That’s exactly why I didn’t make Jennifer a cardboard cut-out of a character. There is some complexity there. She’s not just a stereotype of a feminist or something like that. She’s confused too about her reaction to her great-aunt, and she loves her and wants something more for her. The complexity interests me. And I think this goes back to something to do with our time, the nature of our society, its essential middle-classness. We tend to be obsessed by issues.

This book, a ta superficial level at least, belongs to its time. You can read it through as something that discusses certain issues about being a woman and a man in our time, and that’s the way we think. Pick up any newspaper and you see that we are obsessed by this. Who cares if the poor are starving and people can’t get jobs – we’re obsessed by personal issues.

When you say complex, is that another way of saying not able to be solved?

If I were to spend two or three years writing a book that I could write a precis of in fifteen minutes, I’d be a lunatic. It would be tragi-comic. I think reality is complex, and issues are difficult to solve, but I’m not using that as an excuse in any way. But there is something very interesting in opacity, and the truth is opaque. That doesn’t deny that it’s interesting to make the effort to understand it. That’s one of the lovely things fiction does, you have the time and the space to address the superficial and the complex underlying it together.

Bea is where your sympathy lies, rather than Jennifer or Steven.

I have more sympathy with her because I think her sort of person is more misunderstood, or misjudged, or dismissed too easily. And that’s a poignant thing. I could have written a book that was about a love affair beginning sixty years ago, right through to the present, and had it work in the traditional literary fashion with lots of poetic imagery (which is not to be dismissive about that – it’s the centre of most literary endeavour and it can be wonderful). But something about me doesn’t want to do that. I want to try to deal with contemporary voices too. Even though there’s an essential sympathy with Bea, it’s not as simple as that in my mind and I wanted to cast another light on her through a contemporary view.

What about Mark, the man Bea loves; he remains the enigmatic lover, and we don’t learn anything about his motivations.

I toyed quite a lot with making him a little more transparent, but in the end I thought just leaving him this charming shit was necessary to sustain Jennifer’s reaction. If I made him too real and too sympathetic, it would undermine the book. He was not the central man – Steven Hernery and his father are central.

Steven and his father seem to have been transplanted from Revival House, your first novel – fathers and sons again.

One thing that interested me about Moishe Feinbaum in Revival House was that people were really attracted to him. Readers told me that they liked him. He’s a witty man, a vigorous man, and we love that. We love to be entertained. But the central role of Moishe, apart from being entertaining, was that he managed his own life to bring himself out in the best light, and he didn’t admit his manipulation of everyone around him. He was incapable of that. And that’s another human type common in our century. Steven’s father is a bit like that. His wife complains about her health and he says, shutup, I’m not your doctor.

Steven is the sort of person who either irritates you, or you sympathise, or a bit of both. Bea at one stage warns Steven that no one likes someone who is really nice. I know several people who are really rather like Steven, but we’ re rarely privileged, as we are in the book, to hear someone else’s thoughts. We see Steven’s passiveness and weakness in sort of stereophonic glory. We like people like this because they are charming, they don’t threaten, they will listen to us as we prattle on, but we will get irritated with them after a while because they are not interesting enough. This really interests me about human relationships. I know lots of people who involve themselves with people they can dominate and then once they’ve chewed them they spit them out, because they become boring.

In a way Steven’s reactions are a little adolescent, some people would say intolerably adolescent, but I wouldn’t be that cruel. He’s someone who is genuinely wrestling with those things. He’s in some ways handicapped by a sensitivity to things, an inability to just do it, and get on with things.

He relies for much of his morality on books, and that brings him to Bea – and to writing.

Jennifer is intrigued by who Bea is, and because a record is being made of Bea’s life that Jennifer is being denied – Steven is making it, and we see it through Bea’s conversations with Steven who is also trying to write about her – this enabled me to look at the way records are made, to look from outside at the way this record I am making is done, although I have none of the niceties and preciosities and guilts that Stephen has about doing it. I wanted to look at the notion of what a novel is today. This is not in any way an outlandishly different book, but because it is self-reflexive it deals with lots of little issues about trying to write a novel now, and it has a number of voices doing that. I hesitated about it, because people who write about writing in novels can be extremely tedious and it’s a dangerous thing to do, but I had such fun with it. And there’s something very pertinent about it for our times, once again, where creativity is such a middle-class thing.

Just a generation ago it was different. Steven has been beaten about the head by his father because his father disapproves of any self-indulgent creative activity – you get on with life. He belongs to an era that still existed when I was young where being arty was suspect. But the world has changed and now it’s fashionable to have arty aspirations in the middle class. Shane, Jennifer’s fifteen-year-old brother, has this wonderful brainless will to be creative and an artist. It doesn’t matter what it means. You just do it because you want to be famous.

It shows how Australia is changing. I’m not an old person, and in my brief lifetime our attitudes to creativity have changed enormously and our double-standards about it have shifted. It’s probably, in some ways, a good thing, in that we’re not as self-consciously bound up about it and maybe there will be more people who can just wing it, and do it, one day. It’s very hard to have a perspective on it while we’re still in it, but I think we’re in a period when the creative impetus is lost, and we’re meandering in backwaters now. It’s a phase we have to live with until a young vigorous generation gets on with it.

That’s perhaps true for all art, except the novel.

Yes, and that’s why I like doing it. There’s a sense that the novel has escaped to some degree the self-consciousness that has crept into most art. Even though it’s been open to all the debate and pulling apart this century, something about people wanting to read stories and wanting to have reality elucidated which language can somehow do has made it survive. Even though there aren’t many people in Australia who read the sort of books that even I write.

Perhaps the pulling apart has been responsible for that survival.

Yes, but it has also hamstrung a lot of art. And that’s perhaps something I regret about living in this era. When I write a book I’m conscious of everything I’m doing, whereas it might have been nice just to do it. I sometimes envy the Renaissance painter who was apprenticed to a workshop, and mixed the colours and had no doubt what he or she – usually hes then – was going to do, and just did it, loved it, and if they were good enough at it they developed a personal style. It was a nice situation to be in. The intent to just do it.