Maggie panics. Andrew is devastated. But when he turns the tables on her, Maggie begins to see him rather differently.

Meanwhile Maggie’s Sussex neighbours are living through their own intense dilemmas. Henry’s midlife crisis is exacerbated by a plague of rabbits in his garden, but hiring petty criminal Terry to extend the fencing turns out rather badly. Henry’s wife Laura is secretly adored by her brother in law, Roddy. He hovers in the wings for the moment to declare himself; while screenwriter Alan’s efforts to convert a Grade II listed outbuilding to a workspace are thwarted by a maddening local planning officer – Maggie.

The stories of these and other characters entwine in a continuous dance over seven golden days of high summer. It is a human kaleidoscope that perfectly captures how familiar yet strange, passionate yet mundane, painful yet comic our everyday lives can be.

This ‘banker fury’ gave rise to an answering eruption of anger in me. How come they don’t get that they’re the muggers here, not the victims? And they still don’t get it, even today. Two weeks ago at a City gathering to restore ‘values and trust’ the Chairman of Barclays claimed that the City had become a ‘scapegoat’ for the public’s anger. A scapegoat is an innocent creature made to bear the blame or the sins of others. But the bankers are not innocent. Their behaviour caused this crisis. Their refusal to show contrition, let alone to make some kind of amends, so enraged me that I began to suspect my own response. What was I so worked up about? Was it just envy? It felt like something more righteous, as if some deep sense of justice had been affronted. After all, the crisis we call the credit crunch has caused our economy to contract and our national deficit to balloon. Next Wednesday, coincidentally on my play’s opening night, we’ll learn how we’re going to pay for it, in cuts to our services and increases in our taxes. At the same time, the City is preparing to hand out bonuses totalling £7 billion – back to the levels of 2004.

I remember 2004. I remember the golden years when house prices rose and rose, and the brightest and the best took their Oxbridge Firsts into the City, and a new superclass of financial overlords were rewarded with wealth beyond imagining. We wondered a little what could make them worth so much. We were assured that they were the engine of wealth for everyone. They were the geese that laid the golden eggs. Until one day they laid a very big, very bad egg. Imagine our surprise! It turned out the overlords had screwed up, and had made us all poor.

Only then did it dawn on me that I’d fallen for the old Scott Fitzgerald fantasy, that the rich are different from you and me. Without ever exploring my assumptions, I had come to believe that anyone who could make such stupendous sums of money must be brilliant in a way I couldn’t even conceive. Why didn’t I question this years ago? Why didn’t I remind myself of my university contemporaries who had gone into banking, and reflect that they hadn’t seemed unusually clever at the time? But I was too dazzled by the sheer scale of their wealth. Somehow it’s a really hard notion to get your head around, that someone can become extremely rich for no very good reason at all.

Back then, in March 2009, when I felt the first stirrings of anger, my immediate need was for an outlet for my emotions. I wanted to stage an imaginary confrontation with a banker, force him to justify his wealth, and then demolish his arguments. As the writer I would be in control of the encounter, and so of course I would win. Then maybe I’d feel better.

It seemed to me that the right medium for this was the stage, following in a long and honourable tradition of polemical plays. But even as I muttered and frothed, I knew I would have to get better informed about my subject. So I began the process of examining the whole issue more deeply.

First I had to plunge myself into unfamiliar territory, the world of finance. I read a number of excellent books, and I tracked the ever-unfolding story in newspapers and magazines. In the beginning I think I assumed that the world of modern finance would be beyond me, as, say, higher mathematics is beyond me. This was the last knockings of my belief that highly-rewarded bankers are exceptional people. But quite soon I found I was able to grasp the outlines of the crisis. So many experts and insiders have written about it that anyone can master the credit crunch, given the will. If you only have time for one book, I recommend Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short’.

What you will learn, as I learned, is that the people running the banks didn’t understand their own complex financial instruments, the sub-prime mortgage-backed assets. That they never examined their contents. That they sold them on at great profit to themselves without regard to the contagion of bad debt. That the ratings agencies colluded in this trade in disguised junk. And that no one wanted to be left out while the good times rolled.

Slowly I came to realise that the bankers were neither wicked nor stupid. They were just doing their job, seeking the highest short-term return available. They didn’t ask about the content of the CDOs they were selling, or about the systemic effect of their trades, because they didn’t need to. They were not rewarded for sustaining the world’s financial system. They were rewarded for making money right now.

I began to feel what it must be like to be an investment banker. Every minute of every day you’re under immense pressure to deliver results, results as good as or better than your competitors. These pressures come from all of us, the great mass of small investors who demand that our savings and pensions go on growing. I learned from Michael Lewis’s book that there were a few who foresaw the crash, but they were strange and solitary and exceptional. You have to be exceptional to stand out against herd wisdom. And so I came to the simple obvious conclusion: most bankers are not exceptional people. Why did we ever think they were?

Because they earn so much.

This then became the heart of the play I was starting to write. Not an attack on the greed of evil bankers after all, but the far harder question: what are any of us worth?

An economist will tell you that pay is determined by the market, not by some higher notions of social value. I accept this. I see no feasible method of stopping banks paying their high-fliers huge bonuses if it’s in their interests to do so. Whatever taxes or regulations we devise, they’ll find a way to reward their stars.

But there is another approach. Bankers demand and get such absurd rewards because it’s the only way they know how to measure their level of respect. The problem is more cultural than financial. How can we show as a society that we respect most those who contribute most, rather than the merely rich?

I wrote my play as one tiny push in this direction. It still features one big speech which contains all my anger intact. But as the characters came to life they took unexpected turns. The final coup de theâtre – an actual crash – was no part of the original plan. So despite writing both sides of the argument, I’m not at all sure any more that I’ve won.

Writing a play is one thing. Getting it staged, particularly an ideas play, is something else. My play went the rounds of the managements, and twice came near to acceptance, but both times the producers backed away. Time was passing. I feared my subject was already out of date. Then, early this year, I learned that the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds was interested.

Since then I’ve done a great deal of work on the text, and the subject matter has grown more not less topical. ‘Crash’ is designed to play its part in a needed public discussion: have we gone too far in our worship of wealth? Have we allowed money to become the sole measure of worth? Perhaps the bankers are both muggers and victims – guilty scapegoats onto whom we load our sins.

Our punishment is that we now face many years of painful austerity. The very theatre that will give my play life, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, is sustained by public subsidy. In this new world of cuts, who knows what future it faces? On Wednesday afternoon George Osborne will put us all out of our suspense. And on Wednesday evening my play will open.

Over the months that followed, this first and most intense love affair slowly disintegrated, as such things do. My dread that my girlfriend would leave me scratched away at our happiness until there was nothing left to keep us together. When she did leave me, gently and with care, I suffered appallingly, and for a longer time than I had been happy; but I was not surprised. My need had been so intense I would have left myself, if I could. I was young. It was my first love. I can forgive myself my immaturity. But I think, looking back, that a lesson was learned then which it took me twenty long years to unlearn.

My subject is falling in love. I’ve been revisiting my younger self and my former love life because I’ve been writing a novel about those long-gone days. To help me in my research I have a time capsule of my hopes and dreams of that time in the form of an earlier novel, written by myself at the age of thirty. This novel, called Amator, took as its subject a young man who falls in love at first sight. He pursues the elusive object of his passion and finally wins her. It was never published. I re-read the yellowing typescript, and found on every page the truth of which its author had been unaware. The story was an exercise in wish-fulfilment. My younger self longed to fall in love again, but, finding it wasn’t happening, fell in love in a story.

I begin to see, when I look back, an organic relationship between my love life and my sleeping arrangements. The tent on the island was memorable but unrepeatable, much like that first overwhelming love. Later, when I bought my own flat in west London, I created a different sort of nest in the roof-space. I did this for sound financial reasons. I had no capital, and had bought the flat on an 80% mortgage and a 20% bank loan. The combined repayments exactly equalled my monthly pay cheque. So I let out the two bedrooms to friends, and installed myself in the roof space. I did all the work myself: cut the hatch, boarded over the joists, ran an extension lead for power and light, nailed fibreboard to the rafters, and constructed a vertical ladder for access from the passage below. There was room for a double mattress, but not for a bed. I could stand up, but only in the middle.

Here I lived and conducted my love affairs for three years, while I paid off the bank loan. As a love nest it had advantages and disadvantages. Any girl who followed me up the ladder and sat cross-legged beside me on the mattress could have been under no illusions as to my intentions. At the same time the whole arrangement was so flimsy, so temporary and un-serious, that it negated any prospect of commitment. My attic was both a come-on and a retreat. Girlfriends shared it with me, but they never moved in. There just wasn’t room.

The metaphor and the reality converged one unforgotten night when my then-girlfriend got herself drunk in order to tell me my faults. She did this so thoroughly, goading me so far beyond endurance, that I began shouting at her to get out. She refused. Only then did I discover that you can’t push a grown woman down a hatch. I tried; but it can’t be done. My refuge had turned into a trap.

The burden of her attack on me was that I pretended to be a caring sensitive person with a genuine capacity to love, but in fact I was a bastard. I had no real feelings at all, and only used her for sex, and would be punished for this by spending the rest of my life unloved and alone. This seemed all too likely to me; which is why I reacted with such violence, and tried to push her and her malign prophecy down the hatch.

My more considered response to her accusation would have been that I too had deep feelings; that I was eager to mobilise them in a fully committed love affair; but that to do that, I had to fall in love. However, I didn’t say any of this. I just shouted, ‘Get out! Get out!’ She shouted back, ‘Go on, hit me! You know you want to!’ I did want to, but I didn’t hit her. Nor did I offer my excuse. How do you say, ‘I like you but I’m not in love with you?’

I had got myself into this mess because I was giving out the wrong signals. I was aware that this was happening, but didn’t know what to do about it. It was the only way I knew how to behave. Each time I met an attractive young woman, I found myself unable to believe that she in her turn might be attracted to me. So instead of risking some simple trial of physical contact, I talked. I would ask her about her love life, and learn all about her unsatisfactory boyfriends, and make intelligent remarks that showed how well I understood what she was going through. She would be flattered by my interest, and touched by my insight, and would part from me at the end of the evening thinking that this might be the start of something special and lasting. As for me, all I wanted was an affair.

It was a form of breach of promise. And yet, even as I presented the misleading front of an honourable young man, even as I dodged commitment and caused needless hurt, I was longing to fall in love. Now, thirty years later, I think I understand the curious contradictory processes that were at work within me.

I was raised in a Roman Catholic home and school, and inculcated with a strong moral sense. By my twenties the scaffolding of faith had fallen away, but I remained, in my own eyes at least, a moral individual. I sought to tell the truth, and not to exploit others for my own ends. I no longer believed that sex should be confined to the exclusive commitment of marriage, but I did believe that sex was properly part of a loving relationship, and that sex without love was a form of exploitation. The unexplored assumption here was that women wanted love, and accepted sex as an expression of love, but did not want sex on its own. Men, I knew, worked differently. Men wanted sex any way it came. But I was a nice young man, and I understood that the nice young women I met wanted real relationships, which meant that I must feel real feelings for them. My first love affair had followed just this pattern. I had fallen in love. That was how it was supposed to be. Now I must fall in love again.

In effect, I believed that there had to be love, or at least the chance of love, to deserve the sex. This was where it all went wrong. Eager for sex but forbidden to treat women as sex objects, I formed emotional relationships that then became sexual. The understanding each time, never expressed aloud, was that this affair could well be the one that goes all the way. But I always knew it was not. I should have issued a warning: ‘I love being with you, but in ten weeks’ time I’m going to end our affair.’ But such things are unsayable, and so I said nothing.

How could I be so sure that this was not the one that would go all the way? Because I hadn’t fallen in love.

From time to time I came close, but the women I fell for were always just a little out of my reach. It’s so obvious now that I was caught in the Groucho Conundrum; but I didn’t spot it for years. Groucho Marx famously said, ‘I wouldn’t join a club that would have me as a member.’ The romantic version goes: ‘I could never fall in love with a woman desperate enough to fall in love with me.’ I was excited only by women who showed an interest in me, but then turned away. My bursts of passion went safely unreciprocated. However, because they occurred I was fooled into thinking I could still fall in love. All I needed, I supposed, was the right woman.

I was not altogether stupid. I knew that I was capable of falling in love with a woman who was wrong for me in every way, and that it could all end in disaster. But I wasn’t troubled by the prospect. Not everything works out. I wanted at least to start an affair by being in love, because then I was equally at risk. There’s something fine, something noble, about the act of falling in love: a discarding of protective covering, a blithe willingness to put yourself in the way of harm. The image of myself in love was intensely attractive to me, and not only because it resolved the dilemma of sex. True love brought with it the deepest bond, a companion for life. Of course I wanted that too.

That was how far I’d got when I wrote the novel about falling in love that I called Amator. I remember telling the plot to an attractive young woman I’d recently met, all through a romantic dinner, using it as a means to foster intimacy. The strategy was successful. We enjoyed a short affair. But I was not in love (she had neglected to make herself unavailable) and true to my pattern, the affair trickled away in a few short weeks.

Not long after this time I began to question my single pre-condition for true love: this act of falling in love. While working on my failed novel I’d come across a passage in a letter from the poet Rilke, which I copied out and pinned over my desk:

I sometimes ask myself whether longing cannot so stream out of a man, like a storm, that against it, in opposition to this outgoing current, nothing can reach him.

I had been longing and failing to fall in love for years. Could the two be connected? Could my own desire to fall in love itself be the obstacle that prevented me from loving? And if so, was this what I really wanted? For the first time I contemplated the possibility that my actions revealed more than my intentions: that I did not really want love at all. The more I pondered this, the more it began to seem to me that I had raised a high fence of demands and requirements with the sole purpose of shutting out the chance of love. My desire to fall in love had become my fortification against love.

Why?

The old answer: fear. Fear lies at the heart of my story. Fear of being hurt. Fear of bearing the burden of another person’s happiness. Fear of being smothered by another person’s needs. Fear of inflicting pain. Fear of being told I’m cruel and selfish, and fear of it being true.

So many fears. Better to make only small promises. Better to create only modest expectations. Never send flowers. Never say, ‘I love you.’

Was this cautious milk-and-water lovemaking to go on for ever? No, I answered myself, clinging to the last shreds of my old faith, because one magical day I would fall in love. So went the protective illusion. One day an overwhelming passion would uproot me like a hurricane, and sweep away all my doubts and fears. Then at last I would give all I had to give, my heart, my future, without reserve, because I would have no choice in the matter. It would be beyond my power to resist. And so I would bear no responsibility for the outcome.

That was what I wanted: no choice, no responsibility. A thunderbolt from a blue sky. But stubbornly, it refused to happen.

In time, making the same mistake over and over again wears out even the most dedicated self-destroyer. There came a day when I took further stock of my life and asked myself a new question. How would it be, I said, if instead of seeking to fall in love I sought only to be happy? Who then would I want to be with?

I knew the answer at once: the former girlfriend to whom I’d told the plot of Amator. She had remained a friend, rather to my surprise. She liked me, and saw no reason why we should be strangers just because we were no longer lovers. She went on including me in her social gatherings, and I found myself getting to know her far better than when we had been a declared couple. Nothing was now expected of me, and I felt at ease in her company. In fact, it struck me, I felt happy with her.

Could such a gentle emotion be the basis for true love? It seemed unlikely. But I began to see more of her, all in the way of friendship. The more time I spent with her, the more I came to admire and value her. I allowed myself to think of her in a quite new way, as someone I could picture myself living with for a long time.

Then one day she mentioned that she was going ski-ing with a man called Rupert. I was stunned. Who was Rupert? Would they share a room? Of course they would share a room. It’s so much cheaper. They would push the twin beds together. Love would blossom in the snow. She would ski out of my reach just as I was beginning my cautious approach.

This was all it took to propel me into action. I counter-proposed that she join me on a Greek island holiday in the spring, and she accepted. It shames me to admit these petty details; but actually I don’t care. Something had to give. She still went ski-ing with Rupert, but Rupert, it turned out, was gay.

Our love grew slowly and steadily from such foolish beginnings, in the only way I now believe love can grow: not by the striking of thunderbolts, but by ever deepening knowledge, and trust in each other, and mutual gratitude. We’ve been married now for seventeen years, and I know I’ll love her till the day I die. We have three children who’ll one day soon begin to make their own mistakes in love. But at least they’ll know that their parents got it wrong before them, and still ended up happy.

As for the unpublished novel, it seemed to me that I had half a book – the passionate dream of love – and that I could add the other half – the hard-earned reality. So I re-wrote it from top to bottom, and let my younger self battle it out with my older self, and found it was a more equal fight than I had expected. It’s now called The Trial of True Love, and it’s just been published. Better late than never.

The scene seemed to belong in a film, but I knew at once that I wouldn’t write it as a film. It would be a book. More, it would be the kind of book I myself am so strongly drawn towards as a reader: the life journey. I don’t know how else to describe this category, but it has fascinated me ever since my late teenage discovery of John Fowles’s The Magus, Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. As I’ve grown older I’ve sought out life-journey experiments, Thoreau’s Walden, Kerouac’s On the Road; and so found my way to the great life-journey novels, like The Brothers Karamazov, and War and Peace. These are books that plunge unashamed into the muddy waters of meaning, and flounder their way, sometimes ridiculously, towards Big Answers. I love books that make me cry out, ‘But I’ve asked that too! I’ve felt that too!’ In my play about C.S.Lewis, Shadowlands, I gave Lewis the line, ‘We read to know we’re not alone.’ That has been my own experience. It’s through books that people I’ve never met have reached out to me, saying, ‘This is what matters most to me. Does it matter to you too?’ This feeds something very different to the appetite for entertainment. It feeds, I suppose, the hunger for meaning.

Why not take the medicine neat? Why not read the great religious texts? The great philosophers? Why not write my new book as amateur philosophy? The answer is that we life-journey addicts don’t want to be dumped so unceremoniously at our destination. We want to follow a twisting road. We want to know not just where our guide has got to, but how, and with what difficulties along the way. We want to take that journey step by step, comparing our own fears and longings with our guide’s as we go. We don’t want a sermon. We want a story.

My dark room, my dead man, my bewildered killer, were the beginning of a story. And for me story-telling has become far more than a pastime, or even a profession. It’s my way of making sense of life.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think the hunger for stories is deep in all of us, not as escapism, but as the construction of meaning. After all, our actual experience shows us every day that accidents happen, justice fails, good people suffer, nothing ever gets fully explained. So we take the same elements and rearrange them into stories that have shape and meaning, and this gives a profound satisfaction; or at least, it does if we believe it. Because we know how difficult life is, any resolution, any meaning, has to be earned and paid for. Stories that cheat by delivering unearned happy endings fail us intellectually and emotionally. Well-constructed stories carry profound truths.

I used to be a poor story-teller. I’ve improved. For this I have Hollywood to thank. My years of screen-writing, or rather of ‘development’, as they call it, have taught me lessons that did not come my way studying English Literature at Cambridge. I too have developed. So now, contemplating this picture in my head – the dark library, the gun, the dead man – I knew that what I wanted to do was tell a story with the compelling drive of a good movie, but with the complexity and lasting resonance of a good book.

I was embarked on writing a thriller about the meaning of life.

Many years ago I attended a three-day seminar given by Robert McKee on the craft of structuring stories for the screen. What I remember most vividly was one of his opening lines: ‘If you call yourself an author, you’d better have authority.’ It’s a sobering reminder. Why should anyone give you their all-too-brief leisure time if you don’t give them in return something rare, precious, worth the effort? So if my impulse now was to write a book that asked the question ‘What really matters?’, I had better have an answer.

For the purposes of my book, I asked myself three questions: what did I value most in life? What did I mean by the well-lived life? What made me happy?

These questions are not new to me. When I was nineteen years old and living in college, I constructed a Happiness Machine. This was a simple wooden frame in the shape of a cube, six foot to a side, with white sheets pinned to the frame to form walls and ceiling and floor. Inside hung four coloured electric bulbs. The seeker of happiness sat in the box draped in yet another white sheet, while music played and the coloured lights came on and off: red to blue, to green, to yellow. The theory was that the subject’s perceptions would become bemused by the ever-changing all-embracing colours, and his sense of his own body would begin after a while to blur into the undifferentiated space. Then the ego would dissolve to nothing, leaving only pure being. Needless to say, the Happiness Machine drove everyone who tried it mad, and they had to be let out, jibbering. But the underlying principle was not entirely foolish: that one condition of happiness is escape from the vain, fearful, anxious, ever-dissatisfied scrutiny of the self.

But that’s no more than the clearing away of an obstacle. What does it take to feel positive happiness? I’ve often pondered what I call to myself the Prison Window Paradox. I imagine I’m in prison, serving a life sentence. Out of my prison window I can see the branch of a tree. The buds that grow in spring, the bright leaves of summer, the falling leaves of autumn. I look at the leaves and I say to myself, If only I could leave this prison cell and walk in the park and see the trees again, I’d want nothing more. That would be enough. That would be more than enough, it would be heaven on earth. Then I stop imagining. I walk out of the door. There’s the whole wide beautiful world, waiting for me. Why don’t I feel it’s enough? Must I go to prison first, to learn to appreciate what’s already there? I’m a grown person: can’t I pull off this trick, this realignment of perception, all by my myself?

It seems not. It seems I become aware of what I love and value only when it’s threatened, or gone by. I can look back at it and recognise it. But to be in it – to accept it within its own moment – to say, This is it! This is enough! – that I can’t do. I need the prison cell first.

This is where the making of stories plays its part. It’s not necessary to go to prison to get some small glimmer of what it must feel like. Using empathy and imagination, through the power of a good story, we can touch the fringes of some of these necessary experiences. Horror stories let us discover how we deal with danger and fear. Love stories let us practice facing up to choosing and being chosen, to longing and rejection. The stories don’t have to offer total solutions. They’re just samples. You can try before you buy.

So I decided to make my story be itself the pursuit of my questions. It took me very little thought to discover who the man with the gun had killed, and why. But I wanted the journey to that inevitable ending to be a celebration of everything I valued, however mundane. Our deepest truths aren’t novelties waiting to be found in faraway places, but form slowly within us as we grow, and wait patiently to be noticed and granted respect for the first time.

So I began to construct my thriller. A man on the run, a mysterious pursuer; moments of danger, moments of revelation; and in due course the requirement, even the duty, that I lay my cards on the table, and deliver some answers to my own questions. In the end there were several answers. Here’s one, a paragraph composed by one of my principal characters:
‘If you ask me, What then is the nature of the well-lived life?, I must paint you a picture. In a warm room a group of old friends sit round a table. They have eaten an excellent meal, and now, as they finish their wine, they push back their chairs and stretch out their legs and the conversation flows. Their subject is, perhaps, What is the nature of the well-lived life?’

Talking round a table with friends. Not much of a goal for a life. Unless, that is, you’ve been on the terrifying journey I inflict on my hero, by the end of which everything looks different. I, of course, haven’t been on that journey. My life has never been threatened, I’ve never suffered the loss of all my familiar landmarks. But in imagination, in a story, I’ve tried to feel what it’s like, and to learn what values endure, and to grant them new respect. My book reaches out to unknown readers, asking, ‘Have you felt this too? This is what matters most to me. Does it matter to you too?’

I write to know I’m not alone.

‘Well,’ he’ll say. ‘That’s not a real question. It could never be like that.’

‘Yes, but if it was?’

‘Why are you asking me this? What am I supposed to say?’

So he dodges and wriggles, and if you persist in the end he’ll tell you what he knows you want to hear. ‘Of course I wouldn’t. I’ve got you. Why would I want another woman?’

No husband is ever going to tell you the truth. Except me, now. Of course he’d do it. Any man, given a chance of sex with a woman he finds attractive, would take it if he truly believed there would be no consequences. Men desire and enjoy sex in and for itself, without any other emotional connection. How else do you explain the massive male appetite for pornography and prostitutes? How explain star footballers paying for sex when every club they enter is packed with young women who’ll gratify them for nothing? Men want sex without strings. Just a bit of fun, and then back to work.

‘But they shouldn’t!’ (Forgive me if I put words into your mouth, it’s the writer in me imagining your response.) ‘It’s wrong, it’s selfish, it’s hurtful. You may want it, but tough. Zip it up. You’ve made a commitment. Live up to it. Be faithful to your wife.’ And maybe you add under your breath, ‘I’m glad I’m not your wife. I’m glad I’ve got a decent husband.’

This is where things get complicated. I’ve got history, like most people. I had many relationships through my twenties and thirties. Then I married at last when I was forty. Since then, twenty-two years ago now, I have been faithful. Marriage has proved to be a liberation. I have no desire to return to the freedom I so jealously guarded for so long. I’ve found a happiness in marriage, in commitment, in fidelity, that is greater than anything I knew before.

And yet I’m the same as any other man. I too, like any husband, would enjoy making love with another woman, if there were no consequences. I don’t because there are consequences. Because when I balance up the gains and losses I find I stand to lose too much. Because I no longer get the offers. And because I’m getting older.

There are two more aids to fidelity which have made a big difference to me, but which may not apply to all men. Both are the fruits of marrying late. I’ve learned from my own experience that sex with someone you don’t know, which looks so thrilling from the outside, is simply not as good as sex with someone you know well. And because I was older when I married, I had learned quite a lot about myself; about my desires, my fears, my self-doubts. I told them all to my wife, as if to say, ‘Be warned. Are you still sure you want to make a life with me now?’ She heard me without surprise, and responded by telling me about herself. For the first time it dawned on me that someone who loves you actually wants to please you, and needs only to be told how. It sounds easy. But I hadn’t managed this in twenty years of moving from lover to lover.

Over those same years my central subject as a writer has been love. Even in Gladiator, unlikely as it may seem, my major contribution to the screenplay was Maximus’s love for his wife and his longing to be reunited with her after death. Love and its complications continue to obsess me. My latest novel is about a married man who has an affair; which I have never done. And yet he is me. He’s me as I would have been had I married younger, and had I not begun my marriage with so much honesty. He loves his wife, his children, his home, but he has never felt able to live out his sexual dreams in his real life. It’s the story of what’s called a fling – and why it may not be such a big deal after all.

‘Aha! Now you’re going to start making excuses for unfaithful men! So he has some adolescent fantasies he’d like to act out? Tell him to grow up. Life doesn’t give us all our dreams. And if he thinks I’m going to wear stockings and suspenders and let him whip me, he can dream on.’

No, you don’t have to dress up and feel stupid. You don’t have to be someone you’re not. All you have to do is listen to him and find out who he is. If he can talk to you about his sexual fantasies, it’s almost as good as living them. What he wants most strongly is not the actual stockings or the actual whip, but to be able to include the sexual excitement he gets from such thoughts in his love-making with you. We men long to know that we can still be loved and desired even when revealing our true sexual preferences.

‘But why do they have to be so adolescent? What’s wrong with romantic love? What’s wrong with grown-up sex?’

All I can say is, it may look infantile to you, but this is strong stuff. See it from his point of view. His waistline has expanded, his hair has receded, and these days he can’t always get it up. He meets a woman who wants his body and likes him to talk dirty to her – My God! He’s born again! Just once, oh Lord, just once, let me live the dream!

And suppose he does. What has happened? Has he stopped loving you? Is your marriage now over? Of course not. He’s not turned into a monster. He’s just catching up with himself. He’s having a fling.

‘But it’s not a fling! It’s sex! This is the most intimate part of our relationship, and he’s doing it with someone else. The very thought of it makes me feel physically sick. And ugly. And old. How can I ever be the same with him again? How can I ever trust him again? And you tell me I’m supposed to forgive him!’

Not exactly. What I’m asking for is understanding. Feel it as he feels it and you won’t be quite so hurt.

The plain fact is, it’s different for men. Just look at the basic physical differences. For you, for the woman, sex requires you to open yourself up, to make yourself vulnerable. It’s something that happens within you, something you receive. And it exposes you to the chance of the longest-term consequence imaginable – a child. For the man it’s all the other way round. The act of sex happens outside himself. It’s something he throws away. It has no long-term consequences. So he can have his fling and still love you, unlikely though that may seem. He can have sex with another woman and not love her at all. If you can deal with it, this could be your chance to make a far more powerful marriage, based on the truths you hadn’t dared tell each other before.

‘But how can I know? I feel cheapened by what he’s done. I feel I’m worth less. I don’t love him as I did. I’m angry with him. I want to punish him. Shouldn’t we just cut our losses and part?’

Maybe. Maybe you married young, without really knowing yourselves or each other, and now you’ve grown up you’ve found you’re not compatible. Maybe this affair is his cowardly way of getting out of a marriage that has made him unhappy for years. Maybe this isn’t a fling at all, it’s his bid for escape. How are you to know?

I don’t think it’s hard, if you can bear to face the truth. If you can convince him that you really need to know what he’s going through, and that you aren’t simply seeking more ammunition with which to punish him and make him feel guilty, he’ll tell you.

‘But I do want to punish him and make him feel guilty. He’s behaved like a selfish bastard. Why shouldn’t he be made to pay?’

Because if that’s how you deal with him he’ll go on lying to appease you. And you need the truth. Is he in or out? If he wants to stay, and you want him to stay, it can be done. Your life together can go on, bent out of its former shape, full of sharp new edges, but intact.

Not very romantic? Actually, I think it is. I think two people learning to love and accept each other, failures and all, is deeply romantic. We’re all so needy and insecure, so full of guilt and shame. What we long for is to be known as we really are and still loved. That’s a project that takes time and honesty and courage and compassion. That’s what I call a marriage.

Gorgeous Chloe is now 19, and takes it upon herself to set Alice up with Jack, which would be great except Jack’s dreaming of Chloe… Chloe’s mother Belinda, aged 50, wistfully reflects how much better at sex she is now than when she was young, but she’d never be unfaithful to her husband Tom. So when she discovers he’s having an affair she’s more than angry….

Reviews

Read the most recent Secret Intensity of Everyday Life review in The Observer

‘It’s a reunion of sorts, but you’d never guess they ever had anything in common to see them now. Nick: Securities Trader for Goldman Sachs and collector of art. Humphrey: an artist with ethics and a cheque he’s not sure he should cash. Christine: the beautiful girl they both loved. All together again, in Nick’s Elizabethan mansion, getting ready to celebrate the unveiling of a new sculpture.

But under the surface Humphrey is angry. Angry in the same way that the whole world is angry, angry about how people like Nick seem to have got away with causing a financial meltdown that affected everyone, but still manage to bank their bonuses.’

The Times – 22 October 2010

My first experience of pornography came at the age of nine. As a day boy at a mostly-boarding prep school I was secretly commissioned by a boarder to buy him a copy of the News of the World, so he could look at the semi-naked women. I couldn’t see the point myself. A few years later, now myself at boarding school, I was allowed to look at a friend’s pack of five black-and-white photographs sent in a plain envelope from Amsterdam. I was overwhelmed.

Today any teenager can see full-colour full-action hardcore video porn for nothing at any time they desire. One survey claims that by the age of eighteen, 93% of boys and 62% of girls have watched internet porn at least once. I don’t blame them. If I’d had their access I’d have been glued to the screen.

But I also remember other longings from my teenage years, which were just as powerful. The hunger to be loved, and the desperate need to be approved in my uncertain maleness. These longings were partly sexual, but they were also intensely emotional. When at last I had sex for the first time, with my first ever girlfriend, who I adored beyond all reason, the whole experience was one of glory and wonder. True, a purist with a stopwatch could have clocked my performance at well under fifteen seconds, but the glory and the wonder is with me still.

In more recent years, now as a writer of books for children and teenagers, I found myself looking back on those days with affection. My own children, it seemed to me, could never know such innocence, such ignorance, such excitement. But then I thought: why not? Are they so very different? Just because they can look at sexual acts I could barely imagine at their age, does it mean anything else has changed?

When I was in my teens I knew all about my own fears and longings, all of which revolved round girls; but I knew nothing about girls. It seemed to me that they had all the power – to grant me status, joy, respite for my passions – while I had none. No source of information told me otherwise. I learned the technicalities of sex in the usual muddled ways. I followed the love affairs of characters in books and films. But nothing really connected the two. There was nothing that told the story of love and sex, and how they affect each other, for better and worse.

I think there’s still nothing today.

For all the sex-saturation of our present world, the stories on offer remain segregated. They’re either romantic or they’re pornographic. The victory of pornography is so total that writers and film makers are afraid to include explicit sex in their stories lest they’re branded pornographers. So the battle is lost. Sensitive, intelligent, truth-telling writers – I aspire to be one such – abandon the field to talentless exploiters. As a result a generation is growing up in the belief that porn is all there is of sex; that the ritualised sequences of suck, lick and poke are how it’s done, and are all that’s to be experienced.

My other books for young people are in the end all about love. I resolved that in my new book I would take the next step, and explore the world of love and sex. Rich and Mad is my attempt to tell girls what boys are feeling, and to tell boys what girls are feeling – boys like the boy I once was. It’s my attempt to be truthful about sexual fears and longings. And it’s my attempt to convey the glory and the wonder I felt all those years ago.

One reviewer has called it ‘definitely national-curriculum-approved sex within a loving relationship’, which is true, but makes it sound like an instruction manual. My book makes no claim to any authoritative status. It’s not based on statistical research. It’s a story, made up the way all writers make up stories, out of their own lives and observations. It’s meant to be truthful the way fiction can be truthful, in that readers respond, Yes, I’ve felt that way too. The book is only just published, so I have yet to learn whether I’m right.

The story ends with an account of my characters, Rich and Maddy, having sex for the first time. I have been warned that such explicitness will be offensive to some, perhaps to many, and that teachers and librarians will feel unable to make the book available to their young charges. We shall see. I for one refuse to leave all depictions of sex to the pornographers.

April 9 2010

Why did I write Rich and Mad?

Reviews

Falling in love for the first time is also the primary theme of William Nicholson’s compelling and funny Rich and Mad, now out in paperback. An astonishingly versatile author, who has written plays and screenplays (Shadowlands and Gladiator among them), as well as adult fiction, Nicholson began writing for children a few years ago and this is his first novel for young adults. I would definitely place it at the adult end of the spectrum, since there is plenty of graphic sex and adisturbing subplot concerning violence against women. But within that it is a tender, moving, unexpected and intelligent take on family life, sibling relationships, mid-life angst and, above all, first love and first sex, which examines why we always want what we can’t have and don’t want what is there for the taking. The central characters are wonderfully believable and in Rich, Nicholson has created a lovable, geeky antihero who worships Larkin and gets his ideas about love from a battered copy of The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm’s 70s classic on human behaviour, which his friends suspect is a sex manual. He feels so real you suspect he might well be based on the author’s young self. Alone among his peers, Rich refuses to have a laptop or a phone, reasoning that anyone who really wants to talk to him will actually come and find him. That’s what I call brave.

Lisa O’Kelly, The Observer, April 4 2010

WITH screen credits for blockbusters such as Gladiator and First Knight, William Nicholson must be a writer well used to the term ‘epic’. For the rest of us, perhaps, the closest we can come in real life are those all-consuming feelings of falling in love for the first time, and fortunately Nicholson’s on hand to guide readers on this equally heroic journey. One of the most striking aspects of Rich and Mad (Egmont, 6.99), however, is the lack of histrionics, special effects or CGI set-pieces. Rich Ross and Maddy Fisher are pretty average 17-year-olds and their quest for love is gently witty and moving, never over-blown or gushing. Undoubtedly the final ten pages of the 440-page novel are what everybody will talk about: first love naturally leads to first sex. Yet Nicholson wants to tell the full story of an epic teenage adventure and robbing the audience of this particular climax would surely feel dishonest.

Keith Gray, The Scotsman, April 5 2010

Writers rarely stray as far from their territory as WILLIAM NICHOLSON has in RICH AND MAD (Egmont, £6.99). To go from fantasy writing – he is best known for his Wind on Fire trilogy – to teen fiction is tantamount to dating outside your species. But for something that is against the laws of nature, Nicholson has done a fine job. He has spoken of his concern about the “pornification” of teenage sexuality and this novel is an attempt to redress the balance, but anyone hoping for a literary crusade in favour of abstention will be disappointed. Maddy’s mission to fall in love and understand sex starts with her and a friend watching porn, a woman with bunny ears fellating a headless man “…it was like a little god wanting to be worshipped. On and on with the worshipping, bowing before it, kissing it, on and on. I wanted to hit it with a spoon…”. Nicholson is brilliant on the anxieties and awkwardness of sex, and when Maddy and Rich finally realise their destiny, after both suffering the bitter humiliation of unrequited love, their consummation is realistically short but sweet. But it’s definitely national-curriculum-approved “sex within a loving relationship”. Less realistic is the instant repair job done on Maddy’s parents’ broken marriage, and Rich’s reliance on The Art of Loving – romantic heroes should not read self-help books. (Age: 13+)

Dinah Hall, Sunday Telegraph, April 4 2010

“I hate school! I hate ratings! I won’t reach higher! I won’t strive harder! I won’t make tomorrow better than today!” In the walled city of Aramanth, exams are everything — not only for children, but for whole families. When Kestrel Hath dares to rebel, the Chief Examiner humiliates her father and sentences the family to the harshest punishment. Desperate to save them, Kestrel discovers that life in Aramanth was once different — and if she can find the secret of the Wind Singer, maybe life can change for the better once more. So she and her twin brother, Bowman, set out on a terrifying journey — to the true source of the evil that grips Aramanth…First volume of The Wind on Fire trilogy
Smarties Gold Award 2000, Blue Peter Book of the Year 2001

This is the second volume of The Wind on Fire Trilogy.

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This is the final volume of The Wind on Fire Trilogy.

Each decision she takes has a ripple effect on her husband, her children, and all those she comes into contact with. In short chapter after short chapter we follow the chain of human interactions, shifting each time to a new viewpoint, discovering that our characters know nothing of what’s going on inside each other. They misread each other, fail to notice the dramas being played out before them, absorbed as they are in their own intense inner lives. Over six short days in Sussex we watch a dozen lives collide and transform each other, without any of the protagonists realising the true impact of their words and actions.

These are ordinary middle-class people, getting on with unremarkable lives. But for each one their life is a passionate drama in which they take the lead part. Running through each story is the question: how happy can I expect to be? Is what I’ve got enough? Am I leading the life I meant to live?

Observer Article

Telegraph Article

But these are dangerous times. Secret enemies have sworn to destroy Anacrea. In the imperial city of Radiance, a city ruled by priests where human sacrifices are thrown to their death every evening, the plans to attack the Nom are far advanced. Seeker, Morning Star and the Wildman become caught up in the race to save the god of the Nomana from destruction, and find that they may have to pay with their own lives.

Book Reviews

In this gripping searching novel of ideas, art and literature, William Nicholson weaves an intricate tale of suspense as he explores what it is men and women really want from each other.

“He has nowhere to go. So he goes there.”

Thus begins a novel that is part spy story, part philosophical treatise, one that sweeps the reader along. Hypnotic, intellectually challenging, with all the pace and thrust of a thriller.

Reviews
“A novel I would dearly love to have written… Exciting, funny, wise, and beautifully written…
Nicholson has to my mind established himself with this first work of adult fiction as one of the best novelists around.”
Piers Paul Read, The Spectator

“Buttock-clenching thriller.”
Tatler

“It is thrilling in every sense, but it is also hypnotic, fast-moving, and intellectually challenging and, as it twists and turns, leaving you confused, uncertain, even uncomfortable, and yet utterly hooked. A philosophical master class, it is quite staggeringly good.”
Geoffrey Wansell, Daily Mail

“Like a ratings-grabbing episode of Holidays from Hell… A thought-provoking testament.”
Andrea Henry, Sunday Mirror

“Nothing prepares you for the journey you undertake while reading this incredible thought-provoking novel.”
Waterstones Books Quarterly

“Alongside the action, you have a continual debate over ideas about as the blurb puts it the meaning of life. This is a rare book that does precisely what it says on the tin. This makes it a very un-English novel. There is nothing parochial or narrow about it. It puts you in mind more of a Camus or a Pushkin…. You turn the pages as your mind turns in circles following the mental games going on. It’s a challenge as well as a pleasure, but The Society of Others is a novel that demands attention.”
Peter Stanford, The Catholic Herald

The three are about to discover the secret behind the Nomana. But not before they realise their enemies are closer than they think…

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