Extracts l / m / n Reviews "Immensely enjoyable ... almost unbearably tense." The Guardian "Energy, humour and a roller-coaster plot are more than some debut novelists manage but 26-year-old Tom Bullough hits all three bullseyes with A." Financial Times Order A Signed Copy You can order signed copies of A & The Claude Glass at my online shop Thoughts behind A Unfashionably, I am one of these people who thinks that a certain amount of certain drugs is not merely good for you but positively essential. As I write this, I am three days back from walking in the Cévennes, in the south of France. Standing above the Gorge de la Jonté, the granite fell thousands of feet beneath me, rocks made needles against the towering sky, vultures turned on nine-foot wings. I could feel the parameters of my mind easing slowly outwards. Legal issues aside, I don’t see any great difference between this and drug-taking – especially psychedelic drug-taking, especially if you’ve some idea what you’re doing. Both are illuminating. Both are moderately dangerous. As a teenager in the Welsh borders, magic mushrooms were a staple diet in the social lives of everyone I knew, and there is no doubt that their unfettered wonders and horrors – or, at any rate, my subsequent reflections on them – were vital to writing Andrew in The Claude Glass. Before The Claude Glass, however, there was A, which I finished when I was twenty-five. The book emerged out of a particularly low point at university when I was living in a sort of exo-depression of a house, where moulds boiled from the tea cups and those few residents who had yet to be institutionalised lay stunned among a good foot of refuse. Don’t thinking I’m bigging up drugs senselessly. In this damp, freezing hellhole (in Staines), there was one particularly bad week in which – of the original seven residents – one had to leave with ME, another turned out to be in prison in France and, one morning, a third materialised in handcuffs on the doorstep accompanied by a troupe of policemen, having been apprehended in West London with a pocketful of pills. There were two of us in the house at the time, and I had the ill-fortune to accompany one of the officers as he conducted his search of the premises. My own room is described closely in the book (as Nick's), and its condition was so horrendous that the officer refused point blank to search it – eventually asking me directly whether it contained an LSD factory. There was, it seemed, such a thing somewhere in the Staines district – it was the object of their investigating – and among the many stories I fiddled with in the succeeding months there were at least two in which we actually had one. The way I saw it at the time, an LSD factory enabled me to write something with humour and narrative drive which simultaneously engaged my perennial interests in the nature of reality (see the Thoughts behind The Claude Glass). In spite of the comments of one reviewer, A was never about dance music, nor did it adulate the joys of Ecstasy. Nor, for that matter, was it ever intended to be a thriller, although I admit that in the scramble of editing and my enthusiasm to be published there were times when I wound up struggling to recall my original purpose. To date, only one person I have met seemed to "get" A as I intended: that is, as a book which could be read at whatever level the reader chose. Which is, of course, my fault, and the sort of thing that you learn through experience. At the core of A is Angus: a former member of a communal house at Kingston University now undergoing a mental meltdown in a very basic cottage in the Welsh borders. Essentially, he has fled from his former life – from drugs and his luminously attractive ex-girlfriend, Belle – and, along with tormenting himself and talking to the mice, he is occupied with writing a story about Japanese kamikaze pilots at the end of the Second World War, which appears in sections through the book. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site, I am a firm believer that books reveal themselves in ways of their own, regardless of linear conceptions of time and any other such notions. For instance, A is basically about growing up, but it was not until I had finished a second draft that I realised the manuscript contained twenty-six chapters, which were obviously to be titled A to Z. Similarly, at a certain stage in the book’s development I found myself drawn towards Vice-Admiral Matome Ugaki, whom I had discovered in a book about the Pacific War. Ugaki was the head of the kamikaze corps and, with the declaration of surrender in 1945, he assembled a squadron of eleven Suisei dive bombers to crash into the American fleet at Okinawa and restart hostilities. As the story goes, the planes launched from Kyushu, reported sighting the fleet and were never heard of again. In the book, the events become dreamlike and italicised, the desperation of surrender echoing Angus’s own misery, but the essentials – the radio reports included – are real, and I altered only details that were completely irresistible. The Suisei dive bombers, for instance, had to be changed into Zeroes. One of my favourite scenes in A finds the unnamed pilot-narrator suspended in his Zero above the Pacific Ocean, with the red sun sinking on one side of the sky, the earth in shadow and full moon rising on the other. The end result of these strands is that, while Angus is writing, his former housemates – owners of an acid factory – find themselves in urgent need of a bolthole. This took things out of the city and into rural Wales for the first time, and this, for me, was when writing really started to happen. I had typed a first draft of A in London while working in the evenings and suffering a bottomless depression, but, thankfully, not a word of it survives. In March 1999 (I think), I moved to a three-room, road-less, water-less cottage on a hillside not far from Hay-on-Wye and it was around about May, whilst applying myself to another draft, that I first experienced writing. Personally, I think that some people are writers in the same way other people are gay or, in traditional African societies, spirit mediums. When I discovered writing that spring, I had been writing stories for years, and had already written two manuscripts of 90,000 and 70,000 words, but I had never before written. There is a direct analogy here with sexuality. As a twelve or thirteen-year-old, you know that something’s going on; you’re drawn by rumour and instinct towards girls or boys and masturbation of some kind or another, and then one day you have an orgasm. There is probably a language in which this sentence would be constructed "one day an orgasm has you", and this is the language I would sooner be using for the moment. The first time I wrote, the world transformed, the words on the page became clear and perfectly weighted, effortless to arrange, a great vertiginous elation picked me up and I remained awake for three days straight. The result was chapters l, m and n in A, and their setting was the Welsh mountains, which seem to stir me like nothing else. Some time later, in 2003 (I think), I did an interview with Phil Rickman on Radio Wales, who suggested that A was a rejection of gritty urban books in favour of some fresh, romantic ruralism. In point of fact, I would never have done anything so calculating – I don’t know anything about gritty urban books, anyway – but at the time I was devising The Claude Glass, and, in the context of my writing, he was absolutely right. A is a first novel and I would never write it now, but it is not the "road movie" that the jacket suggests. A is where it started.