When I asked queer writer Michael Amherst to describe his recently published first novel, "The Boyhood of Cain" (Riverhead Books), he said it "is about a young boy named Daniel, growing up in a rural town in England, who feels misunderstood by his family and his peers.
Ultimately, the novel asks what it means to be in flight from yourself – if you both feel and are told there is something wrong with you, can you choose to be someone else? And if not, how do we reconcile ourselves with injustice?"
I don't think I could have put it better myself. In just under 200 pages, Amherst takes us through Daniel's "tender, brutal, and enthralling" journey like a seasoned guide.
Gregg Shapiro: Michael, what can you tell us about the inspiration for your debut novel?
Michael Amherst: I've always been fascinated by the story of Cain and Abel. That sense of arbitrary injustice and rage, mixed with envy, at being set apart and found wanting, spoke to me. It's an idea I've returned to time and again over many years.
The story is set in the not-too-distant past, but the tone of the writing suggests an earlier time.
My writing has always been spare. I also respond to stories that embrace myth and that also felt relevant to the universal themes of Cain and Abel.
One of the things that stood out for me while reading the book is the way that you captured the adolescent mind: the self-consciousness, the discomfort, the confusion, the establishment of identity, and so on.
I'm drawn to protagonists and stories that inhabit doubt because by nature, I'm wary of people who are extremely certain about anything. I think Dostoyevsky's underground man was the first truly modern protagonist in that sense – a man wrestling for meaning and certainty in a world denuded of faith. In that way, the adolescent, or even mature child, who is always asking "why" speaks to that need for meaning and certainty while confronted with a reality which appears to offer little of either.
Early in the book, the tone is set for Daniel's complicated relationship with his parents. What are the challenges of writing about a character's parents without indicting your own?
I've always been very clear that this is fiction, so while there may be correspondences to my own life and my own parents, this is not a portrait.
That being said, J.M. Coetzee said that all writing is, in a sense, autobiographical, even essays and reviews. We reveal something of ourselves and our preoccupations. We've all experienced growing up and growing pains in relation to our caregivers. That experience will inform your writing. But the fiction was inhabiting the perspective of a twelve-year-old boy and keeping it as close to that as possible. Any judgement of the parents, I hope, can be seen as the unreliable misunderstandings of a child attempting to make sense of the wider world.
How much of Michael, if any, is in Daniel?
There is certainly some. I was also a very questioning child, but I've leant on many other inspirations. Coetzee has been a huge influence, and his character of Davíd in the Jesus trilogy epitomizes what I remember of a child asking – demanding – more of the world than can be answered.
Also, while Daniel's sexuality is undefined, and deliberately so, I wanted to embrace that sense of perceived difference that is especially true of the queer child growing up. I remain intrigued, though, as to whether some of us become queer as a means of naming or making sense of that perceived difference, or whether it taps in at a very early age to something already there.
Descriptions of Daniel include "he is soft," that he is allied with "the life of the mind," and "even cows have the measure of him." Was it important for you to also depict him as resilient?
Yes, and I feel he is resilient. But I wanted to suggest that oftentimes, resilience can be a burden. Daniel is a boy who is bright and questioning and who uses reason as a means of protecting himself from a world that increasingly feels out of control and threatening.
But I, the adult author, believe that to be a trap – that we can become stuck in reason, questioning and trying to make sense of things at the expense of feeling. We can grow lost in our skepticism. That was what I was attempting with Danny, to show a boy who has the means of overcoming the trials of childhood but becomes trapped by his means of doing so.
In chapter seven, we are introduced to Mr. Miller, the English and art master at Daniel's school. But before too long, we get a taste of his cruelty towards Daniel. You write, "He has learned to be wary of Mr. Miller." Did you ever have a teacher like that when you were in school?
Mercifully not; I was always blessed with good teachers, especially in English. I often wonder what I'd have done had I not been lucky enough to be taught by people who inspired me to search in reading.
The arrival of the new boy, Philip, upends Daniel's world. Did you have a Philip in your orbit?
I think we probably all had a series or cast of others who seem to highlight the things we fear we lack. That was why I wanted Philip to be preceded by the dark boy on the beach and then followed by another, much older boy, who Daniel somehow knows is Philip.
I was that questing child who admired and envied those other children who just seemed to get on and inhabit the world. But I wonder if that is everyone's experience, that those other children presumably also struggled? Life is cursed by constant comparison with others, especially in childhood.
Daniel becomes "the difficult boy who has an argument with the church." Did you have a similar religious struggle?
My family went to church every Sunday and, having taken it very seriously, I found I could no longer believe what I had been taught. That crisis had a deep impact; still does, in a way. I suppose I long for a faith while feeling my rational mind just cannot sustain or allow it. But I think that speaks to something broader in adolescence, when we begin to question what our parents and adults tell us, and that earlier sense of safety and certainty falls away.
Were you published in your school's literary magazine when you were a student?
I was at a very small school when younger, so we all were. I wasn't published in secondary school. I stopped reading and writing for some years in my mid-teens and only went back to reading in sixth form. I don't know why I had that break. I spent a few years just watching an awful lot of television and then found books again.
Have you started working on or thinking about your next book?
I have! It has a different protagonist, although I'm already aware of some commonalities with Danny. I want to explore further those questions about the limits of reason. It frightens me, this world that places such store by knowledge, data, and algorithms that allow statements about individuals based on the general.
It's telling that some of Silicon Valley's greatest should be pursuing cryonics, as there is nothing more offensive to the rational mind than the fact of our having a body. That our body has limits, that it can fail us and ultimately die, is an affront to that egomaniacal belief in our reason.
Yet, our bodies are our greatest source of pleasure as well as the means through which we perceive and understand everything about our world. I want to explore that tension between the benefits of reason but also the dangerous illusion of its infallibility.
www.michaelamherst.com
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