Michael Amherst is a writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, New Statesman, and other publications. He is the author of Go the Way Your Blood Beats: On Truth, Bisexuality & Desire, which won the 2019 Stonewall Book Award for nonfiction, and his debut novel, The Boyhood of Cain, is out now. The novel is a coming-of-age novel about a boy named Daniel, whose intense longing for love and recognition leads him into a complex web of desire, power, and betrayal. Set in the English countryside, the story follows his deep attachment to a new classmate and their shared fascination with a charismatic teacher, forcing Daniel to navigate the painful contradictions of devotion and self-discovery.
Amherst and I chatted via email about the intuitive nature of writing, the tension between knowing and uncovering a story, and how setting shapes the characters who inhabit it.
You’ve written nonfiction and fiction and have worked in journalism and criticism. Before we get into The Boyhood of Cain, I always love asking writers how they got into writing and why they write. How and why did writing become such a large part of your life?
I write as a way of making sense of things, be they experiences, ideas, or questions that I have. I’ve come to realise that my thinking is often quite intuitive – I like to think I’m very logical and rational, but, in truth, often I feel I have a sense of something that I slowly work my way towards. The novelist J. M. Coetzee has argued that we dress our intuitions up with reasons so as to seem rational afterwards – I agree with that. I write as a means of exploring those intuitions, to try and make sense of something I feel close to an understanding of but cannot articulate. I think it’s about points of meaning just beyond my reach and maybe beyond literal articulation too.
Your previous book, Go the Way Your Blood Beats, explored truth, bisexuality, and desire in a nonfictional context. How did that work inform The Boyhood of Cain, and what made you shift to fiction for this story?
Some version of this novel was in the works before Go the Way Your Blood Beats but I had to write that essay first before freeing myself to write it. Towards the end of the writing process, I had a realization that as an essay it was a sort of argument against argument – that individuals are often mysterious, including to themselves, and to demand a coherent, singular position is in many ways antithetical to what it means to be human. We are messy. So writing Go the Way Your Blood Beats freed me to trust in meaning that was more nuanced and complex. Flannery O’Connor describes how too often, we want a neat, singular meaning from a story, but if a story can be reduced to a singular meaning then it is no good and could be told simply through interpretation. The idea that fiction should always mean more than can be articulated by interpretation feels true to me, as well as exciting and freeing.
This is a deeply introspective and observant book. What was the biggest challenge in capturing your protagonist Danny’s perspective so authentically?
I wanted there to be an ironic distance between the narration and Danny’s perspective – so the reader understands more than Danny himself – but it was crucial that the perspective should maintain that closeness to Danny. There was a section I wrote very early on, which features in Chapter 2, where Danny speculates whether he could be Jesus as a means of getting out of school. When did Jesus begin to suspect he was the Son of God, he wonders? That section felt very real and authentic to me, and if I was ever struggling or anxious that I was straying too far from his eyeline, I’d go back to that.
I also love place a lot when thinking about books. How did setting shape the story, and was it inspired by a real place?
Setting was very important and it is a real place: I grew up in a village called Chaceley, just outside the town of Tewkesbury. My family lived in or around Tewkesbury for my entire childhood. Like many children from small towns, I feel intimately shaped by it. The village remains one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever encountered in summer, while becoming cold, damp, and featureless when the river floods in winter. Yet I didn’t want to name it in the book – I wanted the story to have a certain kind of mythic quality, while making some specifics opaque enough that perhaps people could project their own hometowns or childhoods into it. But the inspiration is that area, which I feel should be the setting of more fiction and film. That being said, Henry Green depicts it in Pack my Bag and John Masefield in his Elmbury chronicles. It is also not far from where Dennis Potter set many of his incredible TV plays.
Your writing delves into complex relationships and power dynamics, exploring themes of mentorship, desire, and betrayal. How do you approach capturing these intricacies with nuance and care in your work?
I certainly don’t set out with a plan of what I wish to depict, or an end point or goal. I take a very long time writing and my process, if I can call it that, is very disordered. I like to see what comes up. Again, Flannery O’Connor talks about not knowing what would happen in her stories until a page or so before the end – believing if you did know what would happen the story would be dead, that you have to uncover the action and the meaning as well. I believe in that, although I feel it would be more convenient to my work to know everything beforehand! So while I had an idea of Mr Miller, the teacher, and an idea that he would not be a perfect, alternative father figure for Danny, I didn’t know how this would play out. One of the things early readers have talked about is Danny’s resentment at not being chosen for preferential treatment, in spite of all the awfulness that being the favorite would entail. I felt uncomfortable writing that but it also felt true – that if you desperately desire love and preferment then you will take it in whatever way you can get it. I suppose a shorter answer is that when I feel the discomfort I try and write towards it, against my initial inclination.
How do you approach language and style when crafting a novel like The Boyhood of Cain?
Part of the style and language was dictated by the close perspective to a child and the influence of Danny’s voice. I have some short stories that perhaps have a more ‘rarefied’ style than this, but I think the essentials remain the same. A teacher at school once called me ‘the master of brevity’ – I think because my homework was often so short! But I didn’t see the point in a lot of extraneous detail. There are writers who I deeply admire with a gift for language and description that doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s not that I believe in brevity for brevity’s sake and I’m also aware that stylistically I have a habit of repeating myself, but provided the repetition refines what is being described I’m happy with it. A combination of economy and ever increasing refinement of the particular, I suppose, is what I’m reaching for.