BARRY I think it’s important to keep you attention within the peripheries of the desk and everything else will follow from that. Not thinking, “Will this be published? Will this be bought?” because that’s inviting disaster. I think just think about the story and what’s happening on your desk and if you’re doing it right all else will follow from that. MCVEIGH You use humour a lot and it seems to really capture readers. There are those of the opinion that by writing humorously you’re not taken seriously as a writer. I was wondering what you thought about using humour, how do you value it and what you think people’s perceptions of it are? BARRY I think you’re absolutely right. I think in some quarters there’s a perception that if it’s funny then it can’t be serious. And I believe very much to the contrary. As a reader, a lot of my very favourite stuff is at some level funny, even my favourite novelist would be someone like Saul Bellow, who is fundamentally a comic writer, and Philip Roth. Hilary Mantel is in many ways a comic writer, there’s a lot of other things going on, but they are funny as well. For me, comedy is a very natural human mode, a very natural form, it tends to be how we get through life, in the ‘if you didn’t laugh you’d cry’ sense. It’s natural for me to write in a comic mode. I’m troubled by the term comic fiction or comic novel, in the BoomTish one-liners and zingers and I hope I don’t do that. And there’s nothing worse than intended comedy, trying too hard to be funny, it has to be sprung naturally.
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