Astonishing the Gods was written in the summer of 1993. It was a lovely summer and I was fasting at the time. The novel came out all of a piece, handwritten, in a black casebound notebook. Then it was carefully shaped afterwards.
Ever since I was a boy I wanted to write a book like this one. I never thought I actually would. There are certain books that have an oblique conception. Notions that have lived long in the mind emerge when the inner and outer worlds align for their births. The catalyst for this birth was a curious incident on the Edgware Road in London. That and a lingering sadness for the souls of black slaves re-dreaming the world at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. How to redeem that suffering. The Edgware Road incident itself is unimportant; it was the question I asked of myself because of it that was significant. The question passed into the inspiration, and a meditation persisted, a meditation on invisibility.
The theme of invisibility has been famously played in many keys. Invisibility as history, invisibility as the paradoxical condition of redemption, interested me. In a world blinded by the visible might not its opposite be fruitful as a contemplation of the human condition?
The philosophical fable, from Rasselas to Candide, reveals how much we dream of quests to unknown places. Astonishing the Gods is of that family. In it everything is allusive, indirect – something I learned from Giorgione. It is written with light but fringed with darkness.
The hero of this novel finds what he did not seek, and goes where he did not intend to go. As I did in writing it. I set out to find one thing, but found another. Maybe what seeks us is better than what we seek. Maybe accidental discoveries constitute the magic heart of creativity.
Little Venice, London
August 2014