and in between the sheets and the novels, The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers,

which was recently made into a film with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, The Child in Time,

and as I said, the new book, The Innocent.

Well, you've been a menacing writer for some time.

And I began to wonder when I was reading The Innocent

why it is that this particular version of the macabre

seems so indigenous to that island of yours?

Well, I don't know.

I mean, I think the issue of subject matter is one of the most recalcitrant in any kind of literary discourse.

In part, I suppose, it's a function of persuasion

that I think

as human beings

we're going to talk in those terms from your theme song

human animals we have a dark side

and I find that

the more interesting side to explore

partly to perhaps a function of my own personality and it's beyond my control.

That said, I mean, I think I'd hope that the innocent would not simply suggest itself as a purely macabre book.

I hope it's got many other tones.

But it does have, it is written on the assumption that we are

at the end of a bloody European century and that the first half of that century witnessed

acts of extraordinary cruelty and depravity, genocides and two major wars and everything else that wars bring in their

...