At the moment I am reading....To Heaven by Water by Justin Cartwright which is a lovely gentle book about a TV journalist looking back on his life after the death of his wife; Of a Fire on the Moon by Norman Mailer about the 1969 moon landings. It is a remarkable document of its time – one could hardly imagine such a long thoughtful, literary book of journalism being published today so its mostly a pleasure to read – although I do skip some passages...
Which writers do you admire and why?
I admire so many varied and different writers. To me part of the joy of books is seeing the extraordinary variety and scope of human experience. I mean, for example, I love Flaubert’s Madame Bovary – he is a master of the descriptive voice and I continue to learn a lot from him. On the other hand John Le Carre is a master of the pacy narrative. Then there’s Edith Wharton, Jane Austen, Helen Fielding to balance Hemingway and Graham Greene. F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Tennyson... I think I’d better stop here.
What, or who, inspired you to write this book?
In 2001, only weeks after 9/11, I found myself on a steep hillside alongside a T-54 tank dug in on the front lines with the Northern Alliance troops. Below us was a wide gravel plain that stretched to the horizon where the Taliban had their front lines. A clear, cold river ran through the no-man’s-land between us. The sound of gunfire echoed sporadically through the autumn air.
One of the Northern Alliance soldiers, completely unconcerned about the gunfire, banged his fist on what on what seemed to be an ordinary chunk of rock between us. ‘Iskander,’ he said loudly while banging on the rock. ‘Iskander.’
At first I couldn’t understand what he was getting at. Then, suddenly, it dawned on me. That chunk of brown rock was part of the remains of an ancient Greek ruin from the days of Alexander the Great.
He was reaching out to me, trying to share something of his pride in his homeland and its ancient history. It was an extraordinary moment of human solidarity. I wanted to pause and try to speak to him through our interpreter, but there was a real war going on around us and we had journalistic deadlines to meet, so I couldn’t spend any time with him. I snapped a few photographs of him and the front lines and then we had to rush off to film something else.
Some months later I returned to Johannesburg. I couldn’t forget that Afghan soldier and his proud, insistent ‘Iskander, Iskander.’ Because of him I began to research the history of Alexander in Afghanistan. One morning I found an old copy of Scientific American from 1982 in the Wits University library. It was perhaps the last scholarly article on Afghan archaeology written since the Soviet invasion, about the discovery of a lost city founded by Alexander the Great in Northern Afghanistan called Ay Khanoum.
I flipped through the pages, and – it hit me like a bolt from the blue: The cliff face in an old black and white photograph in Scientific American was the same cliff face in one of my photographs from the front lines.
I had been to Ay Khanoum without even knowing it. Call it fate, synchronicity, chance, but the threads of the Moirai are spun deep and wide indeed. I had my story - thanks to that Afghan soldier and his insistence that morning on the front lines in dragging me out of my fear and showing me something that I would never have discovered without him. Now all I needed to do was to find Claire and Sebastian, Abdulov, Mahmood and the others to go on the fictional journey with me.
My earliest memory...
A green lawn in upstate New York suburbia, near Buffalo, the same place where Claire, one of the main characters had her childhood...
What would you say is the most challenging part of writing?
I think that changes as you develop your career. At first it’s mastering your craft, understanding how to write dialogue, create characters, how to use punctuation for better dramatic effect – all those things. Now it is about imagining other people’s lives. I mean Claire is a major character and so writing as a man from a woman’s point of view is challenging. I never grew up in the old Rhodesia, but the other major character, Sebastian, did, so I had to imagine what his life would have been like. Every day, as you write, you have to trust your skill and your intuition and balance the two constantly.
What was the most enjoyable aspect of writing this book?
The research on Alexander and his time in Afghanistan was fascinating while just letting the ‘thriller’ aspect of the story emerge as Claire and Sebastian travel deeper and deeper into Central Asia was as much fun for me to write as I hope it will be for the reader to read. There were many days when writing the book when I didn’t know what they were going to do next, days that I simply had to trust what my subconscious was telling me and discover their journey for myself.
My favourite guilty pleasure...
Finding time to read something completely arbitrary and eclectic on the odd weekday afternoon; drinking wine with Lianne, my wife in our lovely back garden on a weekend.
Is writing your full-time employment? If not, what is your ‘day job’?
My day job... is that of a freelance journalist. I write for a number of newspapers and magazines both here and overseas, and I produce news and documentaries for international networks such as CNN, ARD Germany, NBC and many others. The stress of the deadlines can be tough, but I love working as part of a team and sharing so many incredible stories and journeys with my TV and other journalistic colleagues.The team work balances my life and the long hours of solitary work in my study as a writer.
Which superhuman power would you most like to have?
I’d like to be able to see the incredible lines of fate that connect us all as human beings on this planet and with that trust completely the journeys that we are all making together.
What was your favourite book as a child?
The Lord of the Rings. What else could it have been?
