Robert Lukens

It's a romance.

And it also becomes dominated by these sequences of, well, action.

And when I say action, I mean Jean-Claude Van Damme action, machine guns, explosions, people running around, people going up and down ladders.

And I suspect this will be the point in the novel where you either go with it or you don't because it changes from being this Kafkaesque world of...

Ideas and challenge and it becomes something I suppose more conventional and we perhaps lose some of those ideas But so I suppose that's the moment where you either need to go with it or you don't

Well, it's a quite simple equation.

For every other that breaches the wall, one defender is cast into the sea.

So the defenders are in no confusion as to what their job is and the peril that faces them.

So it's one in, one out.

Yeah, it's a world of euphemism and it's a world of reduction.

So you are one thing or the other.

You are wholly good or you are wholly bad.

And so, yeah, you become the help.

You are a slave in this society and you are a defender, which has all these connotations of goodness and strength, or you are an other, which has this

All these ideas of faceless terror from the outside.

And also there are the elite and there are the breeders.

Things are reduced and reduced and reduced down.

And this is kind of Lanchester's MO.

This is what he does with his novels.

He's a novelist of ideas.