British Writer David Szalay: The Subject I Care About Most Is Mortality and Aging

The 2016 Man Booker Prize finalist talks to us about the Europe he carries in his head, his nomadic life, and the human weaknesses he can't escape and works hard to put on the page.

David Szalay, the 45-year-old British writer, is no stranger to travel. The only one of his novels published in China, All That Man Is, tells the stories of nine sets of people who set out on journeys for all kinds of reasons; it was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. His most recent book, Turbulence — in fact a series of radio plays written for the BBC — is also about travel, over an even wider stretch of ground.

Szalay calls travel his way of life. Not the "lifestyle" travel magazines sell: what Szalay is used to is being moved around with little say in it. He was born in Montreal, Canada; as a small child he moved with his family to Beirut, Lebanon; when the Lebanese civil war broke out, the family moved again, to London. For the past few years he has lived in Hungary, his father's country.

He calls his life nomadic, though he also longs, now and then, for a life spent in one place. This nomadic existence, as he tells it, is really a shared European experience. That is part of why it occurred to him to write a novel set across the cities of Europe. He wanted to catch the freedom of movement contemporary Europeans have never had before, and to find, inside that freedom and that churn, some common predicament underneath.

All nine stories in All That Man Is are led by men. They stand at different points in life, from 17 to 73, and face different crises: desire, status, money, aging and death. Asked whether an all-male cast is out of step with the times, Szalay insists the choice was mainly structural — he wanted the nine stories to trace, smoothly and without a break, the way a contemporary man might grow up and grow old, and how he answers that.

"I find some of humanity's weaknesses funny," Szalay told The Guardian last year. "Fame, money, arrogance… I mean, I'm badly afflicted by these weaknesses myself. That's probably part of why I find them funny. It's a comedy of release. In a way, when I write about the vanity and self-absorption of the characters in the book, I feel as if I've been laughing at myself the whole time."

Szalay was 42 when the Booker nomination came. He was still being called a young writer, though in an age of fast consumption and fast fame that is not young. His standing in British literary circles rests largely on All That Man Is, published the same year. The Booker puts on a dinner for its six shortlisted authors, which Szalay describes as "a terrible experience": "I remember it especially clearly — only psychological trauma leaves a mark that sharp."

At Oxford, Szalay read English literature and wrote a few plays. After he left, his life had nothing to do with literature for a while. He sold things for a time in the busy heart of London, then sold ad space for a magazine. As he described it in an interview, the job consisted mostly of phoning someone at Goldman Sachs, pretending to be a peer, chatting idly about the markets, then letting slip that he worked at a wealth magazine. If the man suggested lunch, he had to decline politely, because lunch would blow the whole disguise.

In the end Szalay got tired of the job. He took up an invitation from a good friend from Oxford and started writing scripts for the BBC. He was nearly 30.

On camera Szalay never smiles, not even at prize ceremonies and award dinners. Talking with him, you can feel him weighing each word and adding qualifiers. When he recalls the past he keeps stressing how accidental it was, as if a life turns on chance. So do the people he writes.

In the summer of 2017, Szalay was invited to a forum in Norwich, England, where he met writers, editors and publishers from around the world, among them Wu Qi, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Dandu《单读》. Wu Qi later ran two of his short stories in Dandu and invited him to Hangzhou for the opening of a new One-Way Street bookstore. It was his first time in China. Even on his first day settled in Hangzhou, he "had absolutely no idea what would happen."

With the writer Chen Danyan, he presented the Travel Writing of the Year award at the fourth One-Way Street Bookstore Literary Award. Through the three-hour ceremony, Szalay could not understand a word the winners were saying on stage, or why the audience kept applauding.

"The winner of the fourth One-Way Street Bookstore Literary Award for Travel Writing of the Year is: 《孤独星球》," Chen Danyan read out, then repeated it in English for Szalay.

He seemed to catch on all at once, turned to the audience and announced the winner a second time himself: "The Lonely Planet."

Q: QDaily

S: David Szalay

Q: One thing I felt reading All That Man Is is how far the characters range — Berlin, Prague, London, Cyprus, Denmark, Russia, Italy, as if every part of Europe were covered. Could you say the book represents your understanding of European culture and history? What role does "Europe" play in your life?

S: I had a very strong interest in writing a book that reflects the essential nature of contemporary Europe. People today move around Europe more often than in any period in history, maybe because it is so easy to do. Roaming Europe is cheap; plenty of airlines offer cheap tickets. Most of Europe has clearly achieved free movement of people, so travelling there is as convenient as travelling inside one country. On top of that, EU citizens have the right to work and live in other member states — the bureaucratic and administrative barriers that used to stop people from moving are gone.

From my own experience: I live in Hungary, but I spent most of my life in England, exactly the reverse of a Hungarian cousin of mine. My sister lived in Italy for some years, my grandfather lives in France. So a lot of my family is on the move too, and I know that only reflects a more general phenomenon. You know, in a place like London, huge numbers of people come from other countries; and in a place like Hungary, plenty of young people choose to go elsewhere — some come back, some may not. What I felt was this large-scale movement of people going on across Europe, and I hadn't seen anyone writing around that subject. So one purpose of the book was to sketch the phenomenon. Not to judge whether it is good or bad, just to describe it — something I think is very important that nobody had described. Obviously I deliberately sent the characters travelling around Europe; in every chapter the protagonist goes from one country to another for one reason or another.

Q: But since the book came out in 2016 this picture has clearly changed — Brexit, for one. If you were writing the book now, would it be very different?

S: Clearly the political picture in Europe has changed a great deal since the book was published. I finished it around 2015 and delivered it for publication in early 2016, and I certainly did not foresee what came afterwards. Brexit was a complete surprise. If I were writing the book now, the change would probably be that its subjects would become more political, I'd guess. What I had was an apolitical stance — I only wanted to describe a phenomenon, and that can't be done now. These subjects have become so political that you cannot simply describe them without expressing some political view; at the very least you'd have to express one obliquely. So yes, it would be different.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how much has changed in essence. For Britain the change is of course large; but for the rest of Europe I don't see signs of any fundamental change. I don't know how much you know about European politics, but what I want to say is that even after populists took power in countries like Hungary, Italy and Poland, they have not been as anti-EU as their talk. I don't think anyone wants to abolish the basic freedom of movement between EU countries. Even Hungary's Orbán government wouldn't propose that, because Hungarians still welcome freedom of movement; they still want to be able to work in Germany or Britain. A politician who proposed abolishing it would become very unpopular. So I think freedom of movement remains a popular idea in Europe, and Brexit has even strengthened it. Britain's example proves how hard it is to leave the EU, with no visible benefit, and people generally feel Brexit was pointless. I don't think Europe will fall apart at the root.

Q: Tell me about moving to Hungary. When did you decide to go? Was there a reason?

S: Oh, this is interesting — there was no particular moment of decision. I used to live in London, almost the whole time. One summer a few years ago I planned to go to Hungary. I knew the place; my father is from there. I have family there, and I went often as a child. I meant to stay a few months, one summer, with no intention of staying for good — the plan was still to go back to London. But I was happy living there, I liked the life, so I stayed a few months, then six months, then a year… so it was a matter of staying longer and longer, until one day it naturally became "I live in Hungary." When I left London I had no idea of running off to Hungary. It was a subtler, more gradual process, not a decision.

Why did I stay? Because… at first I lived in my father's home town, a small town. After living in London so long, moving to a small place makes you very happy: you run into friends in the street, you can walk everywhere, and it's quiet. Obviously the quality of life is completely different, and in some ways much better than London. But eventually I got a bit tired of the place, so I moved to Budapest, a much bigger city, where the quality of life is still better than London's. In London, unless you are rich, life is hard. Money is one part of it — the cost of living in London is very high, and once you're used to somewhere else it actually gets harder and harder to move back. There are many reasons, of course, but mainly, as I said, once you are used to living elsewhere, all the ills bound up with London stand out clearly. To be honest I would still like to go back to London; I still picture returning at some stage of life, but that is only a vague idea about the future.

Q: In one interview you quoted a line I found interesting: "We all think we're special, when in fact we're all the same fucking species." Is that true of cities too? Do cities have more in common, or more that divides them?

S: That's an interesting question, I've never thought about it. I think that, since people are alike, cities are probably alike too, I'd guess. That is, cities look wildly different on the surface but are the same underneath. They all work the same way; they share a deep structure.

Q: Do you feel you belong, in spirit, to any one city?

S: I have to say the only city I've formed a deep bond with is London. I grew up there and spent most of my life there. I lived in Budapest for some years and of course I have a strong bond with it too, but it will never be the same thing as London. I think if you grow up in a city and spend your youth there, your bond with it beats every other place.

Q: I may not be the right person to judge, but I really do feel you caught the atmosphere and texture of certain cities. I can picture myself in a shabby hotel in Cyprus eating terrible food, or visiting a heavily hyped housing development in the Alps. Did you write those scenes out of your own experience?

S: Most of the places in the book really are places I know, but the funny thing is the only two I've never been to are Cyprus and Copenhagen. I wanted to cover the different parts of Europe and at the same time write about places I know, so I made some choices. Part of the book is set in Croatia, for instance, which is very like southern Hungary, which I know well; the Alpine village the salesman James visits is actually where my grandfather used to live, and I've been there many times. It's true, I tried to write the cities I know, but I couldn't know them all, so one or two had to be imagined. Still, I'd guess seaside resorts are all much the same, so I didn't need to go to Cyprus; somewhere similar was enough.

Q: There's obviously a big difference between having been to a place and knowing it. Do you feel that difference?

S: Definitely. To really know a city I think you have to live there, which means more than a few weeks. I don't know exactly how long, where the line is, but you have to spend the time before you can truly know a place.

On the other hand, knowing and not knowing aren't opposites either. It's more of a spectrum than one or the other. You know, I've just spent 24 hours in Hangzhou — I certainly know Hangzhou better than Shanghai, which I've never been to.

Q: The characters in this book travel for all sorts of reasons — to escape, to learn, to do business. What do you mostly travel for?

S: For me, I travel because life has basically become an activity split between two places. London is still the centre of my work: my publisher is there, my books are published there, so I have to go back and forth between Budapest and London regularly. Other times I do travel for all sorts of other reasons.

I think I may be deeply claustrophobic, and to a large extent I live a nomadic life. I can imagine people who stay in one place all their lives, and I know many people live that way, but I personally have grown so used to moving around that I've become a bit claustrophobic.

On the other hand, I also regret having no roots. That's beyond what my circumstances allow. Neither of my parents is British — my father is Hungarian, my mother Canadian — and I wasn't even born in Britain, I just moved there very young. So I grew up in Britain with no British blood, carrying a name that is obviously not British (laughs) (Note: "Szalay" is an Eastern European surname; Wikipedia has gone so far as to add a pronunciation guide.), which causes a lot of confusion every day. I have a slight sense that I'm not a hundred percent British, though set against any other identity I still feel more British than anything else. So there's this rootlessness. My parents travel a lot too; they don't live in Britain now either, they've moved to the Middle East. So my family is nomadic as well — travel is simply a way of life for us. But I really do regret not having that sense of roots. I rather envy people who have never left their village, even though I wouldn't want to do it myself (laughs); I can see the value of that life, I can see they have something I will never have. I long for it from time to time.

Partly for that reason I have the feeling that I must go back to London, because it's the only place that gives me even a little sense of roots. But having been away so long, when I go back it will certainly have become a different place. And I'm not the same either. You can never pick it up again as it was.

Q: You write a wide range of people, some of them figures the public is curious about — a senior official, a veteran tabloid reporter, a billionaire. How did you get hold of these lives?

S: The billionaire section is obviously based on the Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who later moved to Britain and has died, which is why I could write about him (laughs). His life is closely bound up with that part of the book. As usual, I did a lot of research on this one man. The other stories are more general; they aren't only about one individual. I wanted my characters to carry some kind of public profile, because that's part of life too. With the journalist story I considered turning it into a novel, then realised that what I know about the profession wasn't enough for a novel, though it was enough for a shorter story.

Q: Can you tell me more about how you research a character?

S: In fact most of the stories in the book weren't researched at all, except the Russian tycoon one, and the journalist one, where I did some. I don't set out to read a book or search online to help the writing. Honestly, writing doesn't necessarily take much research, and I don't like that way of working. How to put it — turning research into invented plot feels strange to me, it's a bit like guessing. Why do it? Why not write the stories that need no research? You understand those far more directly, you feel them far more strongly. The Russian tycoon story was in fact the worst writing experience I've had, exactly for this reason: in that kind of writing you're guessing, using research to guess at what things were really like. I hope the story came out all right, but from the author's point of view the process left me unsatisfied. I generally avoid that kind of writing.

Q: What did you make these characters share? And what differences did you want to show?

S: You know they're all European men — that's one thing they have in common (laughs). Beyond that, I tried to give each of them his own character. They obviously come from different social backgrounds. They do different jobs, and their education and their views of the world differ too. I wanted to tell them apart, and at the same time, in a sense, those differences only underline how alike they are. What I mean is, making them more varied on the surface is really a way of bringing out how alike they are underneath.

Q: Is that what some criticism has called "masculinity"?

S: There is that side to it. Well, in the end these men's lives share very similar features. What they finally want out of life is simple and similar, and the way they respond inwardly to what life deals them is similar too.

I never set out to write a book about masculinity. The subject I care about most is human mortality and aging, and the whole structure of the book was built to press those subjects. But once you have written nine stories about male characters, it inevitably becomes, to some degree, a book about masculinity. I don't deny that. But it wasn't my intention when I wrote it. What I was trying to explore was still aging, time, mortality. And Europe, but that's second-order.

Q: These crises of aging and death seem to apply to women too?

S: Of course, obviously they do. I'm not contradicting myself. But — though I may not know the exact mechanism — these crises may work slightly differently on men and on women. People have asked me why all the characters in the book are men. I think it's because I wanted, in the end, to convey a sense that all these characters are the same character. Not literally the same character, but that they are finally alike, and the whole book reads as though it were telling the life of one person (at different stages). If I'd mixed male and female characters, I probably couldn't have made that effect. It would have watered down the original intention.

Q: You mentioned that the book's structure runs in order through the stages of life. Personally I felt the stories in the second half are better written than the first two (about adolescence), with more insight into life. Was there a story that came more easily? Or a stage of life you found easier to draw?

S: On the whole, no. I enjoyed writing all of them, except the Russian tycoon story I mentioned. I don't find it hard to write characters older than myself. For each story my main aim was to reveal what this particular age actually feels like, to render the subjective experience of an age. At the same time I cared a great deal about linking the stories along a very smooth thread. No story skips a whole age bracket. In fact I later inserted two stories specifically to fill the breaks between stories (and age brackets), to smooth things out. The reason there's a second story about a Frenchman in Cyprus, for instance, is that the gap between the first and third was too big. What I wanted to make was the sense that change can't be felt. I think that's our real experience of time. While aging happens we can't perceive it. Time just passes. But when you look back you suddenly realise five years, ten years, twenty years have gone. You're shocked — genuinely shocked.

Q: The characters you write all seem to carry something repressed and defeated deep down, even despairing. The salesman James brings up fate in conversation — does that stand for how you feel about fate?

S: It does. As he says, fate is the sort of thing that, by the time you realise it exists, it's already too late to do anything. You can no longer live a different life. Of course you can always make the road ahead somewhat different, but only so far, because obviously the older you get, the less such a change means within the whole context of your life, and the more of your life is already fixed. That feeling of a life being fixed is, I suppose, what fate is. You get it looking back, and it throws itself forward as well: your future seems to grow out of your past.

But on the point about the characters being repressed, I see it a little differently. The protagonist of the second story isn't especially repressed. The protagonist of the journalist story may not be a very good man, but he isn't repressed either. Saying all the characters are repressed may be going too far. But I agree with what you're saying, that most of them feel defeated by life, feel life is working against them, feel this is not the life they wanted. Even when they've got what they wanted, they no longer want it and realise instead that they want something else. We seem to be born never to be satisfied. That continual dissatisfaction is like a Darwinian trait, something we unluckily have to live with for life, but it is part of what it is to be human.

Q: That sounds fairly pessimistic. It seems hard for people to control their own lives.

S: It isn't really about control —

Q: Making changes?

S: That isn't quite what I mean either. You can make changes; the question is whether the changes will make you happier. That doesn't seem guaranteed. My point isn't that changing your life is impossible, though as the years go by it does get harder and harder to change it meaningfully. In fact I'm not a pessimist. I'd rather put it this way — all right, you may call this pessimism too — the secret of happiness, if there is one, is keeping your expectations low (laughs). One of the problems with this society, I think, is that it keeps raising people's expectations; the way people live is being shaped by higher and higher expectations. You know, consumerism and advertising keep raising what we expect of goods. Politics does it too: politicians keep trying to tell us how wonderful the world would be if we handed them power, which is also a way of raising expectations.

So we live in an age of ever-rising expectations, which is also an age of constant disappointment. And that disappointment may be what the novel conveys — you can never be fully satisfied with life, you always feel life hasn't delivered the fine thing it promised. In a way, if you don't expect to be happy you may end up happy; you'll feel life isn't so bad.

Q: These days the media talks more about queerness, about the fluidity of identity, and you've written a book fixed on a single gender. Aren't you worried that "masculinity" has become an outdated word?

S: No, not at all! Part of why this book has got some attention, I think, is precisely that it dwells on a subject that might otherwise be overlooked. I'd guess that the culture now is focused on gender fluidity, gender ambiguity, that kind of ground, and perhaps overlooks masculinity — although of course the two aren't mutually exclusive, they don't contradict each other. But masculinity exists as a fact, and for that very reason it's worth writing about.

Q: More than two years ago you were shortlisted for the Booker. Has the nomination changed your life at all?

S: The change is probably that it made the book more popular, and the book's success in turn changed my working life. You write a book, it does well, and your future writing is likely to be shaped by that, unconsciously. You think about why that book succeeded, and your next book takes in whatever made the first one work, so that it has the same qualities. It pushes you in a particular direction. If the book had failed outright, left no trace at all, you might write the next one differently.

In fact the BBC recently commissioned me to write a 12-part radio drama. The 12 stories are all very short, broadcast on the radio, and each had to stand on its own — after all, some people will only hear one episode — while also connecting to the others. I'd guess part of why they came to me is that this structure is very like All That Man Is. So I wrote the 12 stories, and they were published together last month. The two books, one after the other, share the same qualities. So yes, that nomination did change me, only in a fairly subtle way.

Q: How does writing scripts for the BBC feel different from writing a set of stories on your own?

S: What matters writing for the BBC is that they have to be written like scripts, stories that suit being read aloud on the radio, even if only one person reads them. One big difference is that they have to be very short — 15 minutes an episode, about 2,000 words written down, only the length of one section of All That Man Is. Also, I had to write fast. I had to finish all 12 in six months, which is a different way of working from writing a book, but I liked it. When the new book was published it was called Turbulence. Yes, it's structurally very like All That Man Is, but in other ways very different.

Q: How did you start writing in the first place?

S: Simply put, it went like this: as a teenager and at university I wrote a bit, and I liked writing, I got some fun out of it. I wrote a few plays at university, for instance, and they were staged, and I liked that kind of work very much. But for the years after I left university I stopped writing, not a word, and did a few different jobs. It was around the time I was nearly 30 that I happened to run into an old friend from Oxford, who was then working in the BBC's radio drama department. He suggested it to me: "I remember you wrote plays at Oxford — why not try writing radio drama for the BBC?" So I did. That was the first time I was paid for writing. It wasn't really a "play," more of a "drama" — not a story, just dialogue. I wrote a few, and after that I started writing novels.

Q: You're in your forties now. If we took you as a protagonist in your own book, where would his anxiety come from? What would he expect of life?

S: Oh, when I was writing the novel I was quite clear that the character who matches me is more or less James, the property salesman in the Alps. That's the character in the book that belongs to me (laughs). I haven't changed much since. I'm still getting older, except — in a sense the book's success has shifted my position. James wants success, and I wanted success when I was writing the book, and the modest success it had has moved me somewhere slightly different, but not fundamentally different. Basically I'm the same.

Q: So your own life has the same continuity the book has?

S: Continuity in what sense?

Q: That you pass smoothly from one stage to the next.

S: Yes, most of the time — but sometimes not. I have two children, and I separated from their mother a few years ago, and that period was not smooth at all; it changed very sharply. Not everything happens smoothly and imperceptibly. But most of life is still gradual, accumulating.

The cover image and banner are from the film Youth, via Douban.

Long-form cover image from: Daniel Olah on Unsplash