DON’T MISS

Trump’s “big, beautiful” wall the genesis of his novel, I ask Lanchester, 56, who thinks long and hard before answering questions, when we meet at his publisher’s London offices (the only interview I have ever come away from with a list of the best places to eat in Edinburgh, where I live and London-based Lanchester does not, as well as instructions to try bere bread baked with Orkney meal. Food is one of his many interests: his first book was 1996’s glorious The Debt to Pleasure, written in the form of a cookbook.)

“Trump’s wall may have been there subliminally but, no, this book began with a dream,” he responds. “That is not something that has ever happened before with any of my writing, although if I can’t sleep I can’t write.

“But I had this strong vision of a figure guarding a wall. It was a recurring thing. I was writing another novel, with a large cast of characters and set now, but I abandoned it to write The Wall, because this image forced itself on me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It popped out of the unconscious.

“The book is based on research and yet it is totally imagined. When I was writing, I was thinking what that [future] world would be like rather than what in our world I was drawing on; I was trying to fully imagine this other place.

“I wanted to write about climate change in fiction because I think people are reluctant to think about it. People can’t bear it, which is why David Attenborough’s programmes, say, don’t go there. In a novel you can make people look at the bright light, make them contemplate the world that we are making, the world that we are on track for.

“For some reason stories are more effective than documentaries that refuse to let us to see that bright light. As James Baldwin said, ‘The way writers change the world is by changing the way people see the world.’ There is research showing fiction has an effect on people’s empathy. As a writer you always hope that that is what you might achieve, that you can affect people’s thinking.”

Is that why he writes fiction? “I’d love to say that is the reason but it is almost like a musical thing, liking language, putting sentences together. Gradually you accumulate other reasons for thinking you should do it. Having children has really had an effect on my thinking about the future,” says Lanchester, who is married to the historian and biographer-turned-novelist Miranda Carter, with whom he has two teenage sons, Finn and Jessie.

“You think a lot about the world you will leave behind and that definitely played a role in the feeling in the book. With a novel I write about something that bugs me internally; it is pressing on me and I can’t stop thinking about it and I have to excavate it. I’ve said in the past that writing a book is like having a secret room in your head. The next book is always behind a locked door.”

I tell him I find The Wall an anxious read -- as is Capital. “I can see that, but it is a different sort of anxiety. I suppose [in Capital] the kind of urban

bitcoin to Agatha Christie. He has written two non-fiction books, Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, about the global financial crisis, and How to Speak Money, a primer in popular economics. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, he’s won the Hawthornden, the Whitbread First Novel prize and the EM Forster Award.

“I have many, many interests,” he admits. What is exercising him at the moment? “Apart from having just enjoyably reread the wonderful collected works of Agatha Christie for an LRB article, I love telly -- the box sets, long-form shows that copy the Victorian serial novel. There is so much good writing on TV nowadays, often better than the novel. I’m a tragic nerd -- a massive, massive fan of Game of Thrones.

“I have also got very interested in baking sourdough bread. There is something magical about that: the fermentation, the bacteria, the use of these invisible things that are around us all the time. Fermentation is like that line in The Tempest about ‘the invisibleness of the air’. Quite magical!”

The Wall is out now, Faber & Faber, £14.99, and the audio book is available on CD (£20.41) and download (£16.99)

Whether Hesse was bisexual, homosexual or possibly even asexual remains unclear. He liked to be photographed during nude rock-climbing, though this may be German naturism in extreme form.

His closest bonds seem to have been with le petit cenacle of aspiring poet-intellectuals he adhered to while trying to free himself from childhood Calw and its atmosphere of Swabian piety. As always, though, the more one attempts to escape a background, the more it influences the life.

All great writers tend to show their flaws in print, rather than hiding behind polished craft, but Hesse was not just capable of writing fearful rubbish. He was almost committed to an aesthetic of kitsch superficiality, insisting that the act of writing was more important than the text.

He is one of those figures – DH Lawrence was certainly one, Norman Mailer may have been another and there is an important third – who is almost as important as a presence as he is for anything actually published.

A more obvious parallel, and again instinct with the 1960s counter-culture, is JD Salinger, who was valued for his silent absence as much as for the deliberately anti-virtuosic writing of The Catcher in the Rye. Hesse’s withdrawal from literary life; his final 40 years are dealt with in maybe 50 out of nearly 800 pages. I’ve never held a book from a major university press that was so poorly proofread, or that used so many exclamation marks – more common in European usage, admittedly – to reinforce points. And yet, weirdly, the very sloppiness of the text, and Decker’s waffly, speculative