Ned Beauman

Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident, a globetrotting, time-travelling comic romp that matches the riotous wit of his debut novel Boxer, Beetle, has been longlisted for the Booker Prize. Alex Peake-Tomkinson is caught in his web of curiosity, invention and self-parody.

I meet Ned Beauman at his parents’ house in Hampstead the day after his second novel, The Teleportation Accident, was announced on the longlist for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. “I'm really happy and excited,” he declares, “but also surprised, because this is such a personal and prickly and oddly-shaped book that I never would have expected it to find a wider audience than the first one.”

Boxer, Beetle was published in 2010 when he was 25 and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. It was described by the Sunday Telegraph as “probably the most politically incorrect novel of the decade – as well as the funniest.” He is now working on his third novel, a thriller set in South London. “I have sold it but it’s not finished. No one would want another book from me that soon. Why would anyone read that many hundreds of thousands of words of prose by one person? There are so many books out there. Most people haven’t even got to the end of Proust, why would they read three of my books in two years? That would be crazy!”

He nonetheless seems to produce books very quickly. I mention an author who took ten years to write their first book. “I find that a bit crazy,” he says, “the same with Franzen and Hollinghurst and Eugenides. I mean, obviously they’re very welcome to spend all that time but I just couldn’t tolerate working that long on one project, I’d get so bored of all the characters and themes. You want to maintain a certain momentum and excitement and surprise in the writing because I think that’s detectable in the book, and there’s no way I could maintain all those qualities for seven or ten years. It’s like a marriage. How can you possibly expect to stay interested in a book that you’re writing for longer than most marriages last? How can you possibly maintain interest in it for that long without wanting to stray? But they are all more mature writers than I am – maybe in another ten years, or maybe when I’m in my 40s, maybe then I will have an easier time keeping faithful.”

We both chuckle as the overextended metaphor shows the first signs of strain. “I don’t want to extend this analogy... but at the moment I just wouldn’t have the attention. Can you imagine ten years of your life writing one book? You only get five or six chunks of ten years as an adult, and one of those you spend on one story? I mean, it’s totally worth it but your brain having to be dedicated to this one thing all that time? At the moment it’s absolutely unthinkable.”

I had heard he will do almost anything to put writing off. “Well, just occasionally,” he smiles, “when I get up and I feel well rested, if I’m not hungover, I don’t feel tense for any reason, and I don’t have anything else to do, then I will sit down at 9 or 10 and do a day’s work. I’m not that good at throwing stuff out, I’m not that good at doing big revisions, so generally once I’ve written something it’s pretty much going in the book, which means that every time I write I really want to be at my peak intellectually.”

The voice both in Boxer Beetle and in The Teleportation Accident is remarkably confident and both books have been widely praised. I wonder, does he read his reviews? “I’m afraid that I do. I wish I didn’t. It’s very rare that reviews ever tell you anything useful. You sometimes get reviews that are great because they prove that that person has really understood the book and that tells me I’ve got it right in some respect, so I’m glad to read those because they’re very reassuring. Most reviews are not helpful for my writing, and if they’re not helpful for the work I feel one should cut out as much of that outside input as possible. Maybe soon I will stop reading them. The good ones tell you what you are good at and then you do more of that thing.”

Avoiding being influenced by the wrong sort of praise seems important to Beauman. “The idea that you write against as well as for is as old as the avant-garde as an idea. I’m not avant-garde but that’s what you do before you begin a book, you decide how you’re going to situate it in terms of the audience you want and the reception you want. Anyone who thinks authors only think in terms of maximising their reception instead of refining it, is really naive about how authors think and what they want. As a writer, what comes very naturally to me is cheap jokes, hollow sentiment, false profundity. It’s so easy to confect some Hollywood sentiment… In Boxer Beetle, the thing I’m least happy with is the bit about Sinner and his alcoholic dad because that’s totally like a painted facade, that had no emotional truth whatsoever. I put that in the book, knowing it was quite hollow but hoping people wouldn’t read it as hollow, and that is manipulative in a sense. You’re saying, ‘This is the emotion I want readers to feel, even though I know it doesn’t really warrant this emotion.’”

It seems quite a big ask to want readers to love your books for the right reasons. “On the one hand I want readers to like and enjoy my books, but on the other hand I would love it if my readership were all able to call me on my bullshit. I kind of want everyone to love it, but I don’t want the hollow in it to go unchecked. I think every author wants to be loved for the right reasons. It’s naive for people to think that authors think, ‘Just as long as people have a good time with it, I don’t care what their response is, it’s just nice to sell some books and make some people happy.’ A book is a mode of communication between an author and a readership, and you want that communication to be meaningful and fulfilling on both sides. You’re not just trying to give people a lift. All authors think like that but I think a lot of them, in interviews, pretend. I think it’s really disingenuous to pretend that all praise is as good as all other praise.”

In spite of his burgeoning reputation, Beauman is hesitant to believe in his ability to always hit the right notes. “Because it’s in my nature to do cheap jokes and glib characters and so on, my worry is never that I’m not going to be appealing enough. My worry is that I’m going to pander. Naturally I’m a panderer, and I have to block that in myself. If that involves thinking about the ways in which I don’t want to be praised, then that’s what I have to do. I know how to pander, I naturally lean towards pandering. Some jokes are fine but some jokes you put in and they’re not the right kind. They’re cheap, or they’re not honest or whatever. Every cheap joke that I put in poisons the intellectual coherence of the whole, so if possible I’d like to purge every cheap joke and every false emotion like vermin – which is hard for me because my instincts run in the opposite direction.”

The Teleportation Accident is written with the same verve as Boxer Beetle and equally reveals an author who is unafraid to risk offending readers. I mention, however, that I found this recent book more moving than his debut. “I tracked down the emotional core and it kind of coheres on a sentimental level by the end,” he observes. “For the first two-thirds of writing it, it looked like it was going to be a troublingly passionless book in spite of all its tricks. Even if you care about the characters a lot, a book can still lack like a tangible emotional pull. Sometimes I think you find that at the beginning of the writing and sometimes you never find it, and I was glad that I found it. I don’t start with the feelings at all. I have to hope the feelings will eventually emerge like dew from the ground. I would not want to publish a book where that hadn’t happened.”

It’s well known that he got the idea for Boxer, Beetle when he found the Wikipedia pages for a rare type of spider and for a famous boxer and decided to splice the two elements together. The Teleportation Accident was inspired by reading about two less disparate, but nonetheless intriguing, subjects. “I got the idea when I read the Mike Davis book The City of Quartz – he has this chapter about stuff that was going on in LA in the 30s and 40s and he has a bit about the Weimar émigrés and he has a bit about [American rocket scientist] Jack Parsons, who is the guy my character Bailey is based on, and he just happens to put them next to each other in a chapter. I’d been interested in the Weimar émigrés before. I read a review of a book in the TLS years ago, I think called Weimar on the Pacific, and it just seemed so crazy, all these people like Thomas Mann ending up in LA – and I’ve totally put this in the book – it’s so sunny, it’s so clean, it’s so optimistic. They have nothing to do all day except drive to the barber and then drive to play tennis and then smell the flowers and they just feel incredibly weird and misplaced and don’t know where they are. I’ve always thought that was fascinating.”

I ask about what sort of expectations readers might have about his books. His answer is surprising: “I have no idea why anyone reads any book.” But surely he must have an understanding of his own reading habits? “I have a very rigorous reading list,” he concedes. “I have a lot of books that I need to catch up on and I’m still working my way through that and I will for the rest of my twenties. I’m reading the canon so I’m reading the third volume of Proust, and when I’ve finished that I’m probably going to read David Markson. I also read a lot of non-fiction and contemporary fiction at the same time but it’s been literally years, possibly over a decade, since I’ve gone into a bookshop, browsed and then picked something up and then bought it, read it. So I have no insight anymore into the mind of a person who goes into a bookshop without knowing what they want to read. When I’m having meetings with my publisher about the blurb or the cover, I never quite know what to suggest because I don’t know what people are looking for because I never do that. But I’m glad that people do… It must be quite nice.”