Max Porter

I write them.

I have grown very angry with the way that some aspects of our literary culture, but also some novels themselves, patronise their readers, clobber them around the head with exposition, thinking they're so stupid, they need all this help.

And I don't believe readers are stupid.

I think if you were to take a sample of all the people that read literature around the planet, you'd be finding the most intelligent, empathetic, ambitious, intellectually adventurous people you could find.

That's what we all have in common as readers of books.

Probably also a good dose of eccentricity.

So I want to rest assured that I have those things ready on page one.

The minute you start reading this book, I know that you're willing to take a leap.

You know, like in my second novel, I did things like remove all the characters' names so you had to guess who was speaking and stuff like that.

In this novel, I'm saying, look, here are multiple Bacons, one of which may be a Bacon you recognise, one of which may be me wearing a Bacon mask in conversation with another character wearing a cameo of Francis Bacon or self-quoting Francis Bacon, because this is Francis Bacon and he's self-quoted all the time.

So the kind of game of representation and going beyond the literal plane

into something more abstract or something more theatrical or indeed something quite tongue-in-cheek and kitsch and quite preposterous.

These are all things that need to be in play when you're writing about Francis Bacon so I love the idea that my reader is not just subjected to that but they're engaged, they're involved, we're collaborating with that act in the same way as you can, there's no point having a picture with no viewer

You may as well have it in a dark room like that Vincent van Gogh in the Japanese banker's vault that no one will see.

That's a dead picture.

That doesn't exist.

A picture only exists when it's looked at and thought about.

That is just a lovely question.

Thank you.

I don't think I want to have any one bacon in play.