'If Not Now, When?' - An Interview With Jonathan Trigell

Jonathan Trigell is a restless and inventive author; his previous novels have ranged from social commentary to dystopia, extreme sports and crime. His fourth novel, The Tongues of Men and Angels is his most unexpected departure yet, a retelling of the foundation of the Christian church, based around the figure of St Paul. Written in engagingly modern language, and interspersed with entertaining digressions, the structure is described by the author as resembling 'a Biblical road movie'.

Here, he talks about how he approached his historical sources, and getting inside the head of characters from 2,000 years ago.

Read my review of The Tongues of Men or Angels here.

First of all, what drew you to writing about the early days of the Christian church? Is this the product of a long-standing interest?

Very much so, at least I’ve been mulling over writing a story about the apostle Paul for close to twenty years. In my final year of University – studying English - I had taken a course examining the Bible as a piece of literature, looking at who wrote its different books, when and why. By the end of that I had the distinct impression that Christianity as it is practiced today owes at least as much to Paul as to Jesus, probably a good deal more. And I was aware – from the book of Acts - that Paul had led an action-packed life: not only his famous Damascus road conversion, but being shipwrecked, flogged, stoned, beaten with rods, surviving the great fire of Rome and generally finding enemies and adversity at every turn. This was a story always at the back of my mind and so when I got my first ever two book deal, I thought ‘if not now, when?’

Your previous novels largely focus on contemporary social issues. Did you have to alter your approach to writing a ‘historical’ novel? What sort of research did you do?

I did a hell of a lot of research. I probably read more books researching The Tongues of Men or Angels than for my other three novels and two degrees combined. I also downloaded audio versions of the authentic letters of Paul, along with the book of Acts and the Passion narratives from the gospels, so that I could listen to them whenever doing other things. The idea being to try and absorb them so that they would emerge in my own writing without having to be self-consciously inserted. I’m not sure if my approach changed as such, but this was a hard novel to write, none of them are easy for me, but this one was particularly hard.

Did you find any difficulty in entering the psychological mindset of characters who existed 2,000 years ago? Or have we really not changed that much?

For the most part I don’t think we have changed too much. Human beings evolved for an environment just as alien from a Mediterranean city state as from a British market town. If you read the work of Roman Satirist Juvenal – a near contemporary of my novel’s period – you see descriptions of avaricious politicians, social climbers, adulterers, fraudsters and a general bewailing of declining moral standards that would fit comfortably into the pages of a tabloid newspaper. What is harder to imagine is just how brutal and terrible life was for most people, most of the time. Whether it feels like it or not, now is a golden age compared to almost any point in the past.

Although there are direct quotes from the epistles woven into the novel, you’ve consciously avoided using what we might think of as ‘biblical language’. What made you decide to use a ‘modern’ vocabulary in the writing?

I didn’t want to use biblical language because what we think of as biblical is actually the language of Tudor and Stuart Britain: when the Tyndale Bible and then the King James Version were written. The characters in my novel are generally speaking Aramaic, Greek or Latin, but whatever they would have been speaking, I had to write it in English. I guess my feeling was that ancient people spoke languages just as modern to them as ours is to us, so it would be wrong to use a faux antiquity -belonging to an earlier period of our history, but nothing to do with them. Also I find it distracting when other novelists do that, and I quite like swearing…

Which films or novels do you think have been most successful in recreating the ‘feel’ of biblical times? Was there anything you were consciously aspiring to?

Well for books I would have to say Jim Crace’s Quarantine; Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospel – which, rather annoyingly, was published when I was about halfway through my own book. Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is also excellent, although he is more interested in creating a Biblical-type story than an historical recreation. I wasn’t aspiring towards any of those though, my book is as different from them as they are from each other.

For film, if you can get beyond the flagrant anti-Semitism, then Mel Gibson’s snuff-movie – The Passion – is probably the most accurate in terms of the horror of what crucifixion actually entailed.

Do you anticipate getting strong reactions to your novel from religious groups? What sort of responses have you had from readers?

Well it’s still very early days, The Tongues of Men or Angels has only just been published. A couple of months back I would have said I didn’t anticipate any problem. I’m hardly the first to write in this area after all. But then, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, we had this really bizarre intervention from Pope Francis: where he essentially indulged in a bit of victim-blaming and said that you can’t insult someone’s religion. Actually I don’t think I really have insulted Christianity: I know a good deal more about it than most practitioners and although my book is obviously a novel, it is still 95% how I think things most probably ran. If these people really existed then they belong to history just as much as religion. Little of what I’ve written has not already been expressed, just mostly in rather dry academic language. If anything I have steered closer to orthodoxy than to my true beliefs. I guess time will tell. I’m perfectly happy to engage in reasoned argument, if someone wanted a platform debate, but I’m also happy to delete my twitter account if I start getting abuse. I’d probably get more work done then anyway.

What is your writing routine like? Do you write at home, or out and about? And do you listen to anything while you work?

Generally I write at my desk, on a computer. Ideally with Anti-Social or Freedom in operation (I agree with Jonathan Franzen who said: “It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction”). I never listen to anything for the same reason, I know it works for some people, but personally I just find it too distracting.

But I’m also a big advocate of what I call ‘method writing’: to sit at a specific site and try and imagine the events going on around me. During the course of researching and writing The Tongues of Men or Angels I visited Israel, Jordan, Turkey and Rome. Visiting Jerusalem was unbelievably important, because it is of such significance in the story. I honestly don’t think I could have got a real sense of what I was trying to say and what was happening without having been there. The geography and the nature of what went on suddenly became clear. And because it remains such a divided city, I could easily imagine the divisions that rent it in my novel’s period.

Who are your favourite current authors?

I’m probably the wrong person to answer that, because I’m so behind the times. I feel like I’ve hardly read anything but research books the past few years. I’m reading Chris Killen’s new novel In Real Life at the moment. It is very funny in that awkward, painful, self-absorbed way that great comedy often has. Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs was the stand out book by a Brit I’ve read recently, the one that makes you go: I really couldn’t have written that. I just finished A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews, which I loved and only afterwards realised it was the same guy who wrote The Gospel Singer, which I read years ago and also loved. Although I believe Harry Crews has now passed away, sadly, so maybe he no longer counts as current.

What are you working on next?

I’m keeping my cards a little tight to my chest, but it’s got a religious theme to it again, only this time with prohibition-era rednecks…