Alex Preston

I wanted to say a few words about faith. When you write a book it’s hard to know exactly how it’ll be interpreted by readers. You can suggest things in interviews, guide people towards your intentions, but in the end you’re just an author, and we all know authors are dead. Viv Groskop highlighted what she felt was one of the weaknesses of the novel at the end of her review in the Observer: it takes agnosticism as its guiding principle. Everything in the novel, from the existence of God to the nature and perpetrator of the crime that unfolds at the religious retreat, is left open. I wanted, as far as I could, to write into the novel my own feelings about belief, or rather about the doubt that is at the heart of whatever you call my own tentative attempt at faith.

I was a choirboy as a child. I sang in some beautiful churches.

First this one:

Then this one (less pretty, I know):

Then this Gormenghastian monstrosity (until the school to which the chapel belonged chucked me out):

I also sang in the Southern Cathedral Choir, a group that, as the name might suggest, toured the cathedrals of the south.

In short, I spent a lot of time in church as a kid. I listened to some inspiring sermons and some indifferent ones, watched sunlight flooding through stained glass as I sang Ave Verum Corpus or Adam Lay Ybounden, heard massive organs (quiet at the back) roar out toccatas that seemed to pick up my soul and toss it around like a tennis ball. I was the child of more or less atheist parents (dad more, mum less) and yet I was exposed to God more regularly than anyone I was at school with.

Adolescence hits most of us like a rake in the face, but for me the horror of it all was compounded by the corruption of that pure and etherial singing voice into something that sounded like a set of bagpipes being humped by a hyena. Not only was I expelled from the Eden of childhood, I lost access to those quiet, dust-breathing churches. While I was kept on as a tenor for a while, rather in the way 35-year old footballers are given coaching roles by their clubs before the inevitable booze-fuelled breakdown, my voice was out of control: one moment a growl, the next a yelp. I was a freak next to the fresh-faced soprano angels. I quit the choirs and left the church.

I spent my teens and most of my twenties in a state of unthinking agnosticism. The existence of a God seemed possible, if unlikely, but I was too busy having fun to think hard about the deeper meaning of things. This was the era of the big  atheist books – The God Delusion, God is Not Great, The End of Faith – which I read with great interest. I found, however, that the effect of these hyper-rational polemics against the evils of belief had a rather unsettling effect on me. I began to think back to my days as a choirboy, to the safety and quiet reflection I’d enjoyed in the churches of my youth. I didn’t recognise my own experience of religion in the loony literalists that Dawkins et al held in their fierce gaze. It felt wrong that the sensitive, questioning priests I’d encountered should be pilloried alongside their snake-wielding, hellfire-invoking brethren.

I started to read other books, books that seemed to suggest that it was possible to believe without subscribing to the nastiness and hypocrisy that underlies so many of the old religions (or rather the churches that promote them). I found that there were those, like me, for whom belief started not with a mad leap into blind faith, but with uncertainty, with a recognition that doubt is a reasonable, indeed necessary, part of any attempt to contemplate a higher power. I read Karen Armstrong and Richard Holloway and found their wise, searching voices expressed exactly what I was reaching towards. Faith doesn’t have to be exclusive, it doesn’t have to be judgmental, it doesn’t have to be certain.

The Revelations is a novel about four young people who are looking for a way to believe authentically in an alienating and disenchanted world. They are bright, confused, questioning, and they feel that the God-shaped hole is harder to fill now than ever before. This is not, as one reviewer suggested, a book that frowns on all forms of religion, but intends instead to show how the fiery interdictions of certain branches of Christianity wreak havoc on young lives. It also, albeit hesitantly, suggests another way of believing, a questioning, doubtful openness to transcendence that barely deserves the name “faith.”

I wrote before here about saying a prayer for my daughter. I’m not sure I’m much further along the path to proper religion than I was back then, but the “constructive agnosticism” probably deserves to be upgraded to “tentative belief.” If you haven’t read Holloway and Armstrong, you should start here and here, and do let me know if there’s anyone else I should be reading along similar lines.

I came to Jamaica with a broken heart. I was twenty – maybe the best time to have your heart broken. The teens are spent lurching from one emotional train wreck to another, but underlying the pain rests the knowledge that things are not yet serious, that your heart is not yet quite en jeu. At university things changed – relationships suddenly developed a certain seriousness. People went on to get married from here, we thought, as we flirted and dated and fucked.

Hearts only get broken once. The muscle cells of the heart do not regenerate. Each further assault after the first break merely serves to continue the destruction of the organ. Later-life events like divorce and bankruptcy and the death of a child are all tragedies that serve to confirm that fatal original blow.

When my godmother heard about my misfortune, she sent me a ticket to Jamaica. It was early September – we would go for two weeks, stay in a villa that an old friend of hers owned on the northeast of the island. I had been in bed for two weeks reading Rimbaud and Hölderlin. I needed the change of scene.

I arrived in Montego Bay the night before my godmother and checked into a hotel next to the airport. I sat on the balcony and watched the sun go down, sipping at a Red Stripe and feeling a delicious sense of loneliness. I was alone on an island miles away from the world that had so wounded me. Crickets rose their voices to the fiery evening sky. Night birds called out as they flew in swift shadows down to the seashore.

My godmother landed early the next day and we made our way along the rutted track that led to Ocho Rios in an open-top jeep driven by a beaming Rasta called Henry. We passed coves of white sand overlooked by nodding palms, boats pulled up almost to the road filled with fishing nets and harpoon guns. We stopped at Noel Coward’s house – Firefly. It was white and modernist and rather unimpressive. I ate conch from the shell. We finally came to the villa that was perched on a hillside overlooking the sea. We unpacked and strolled down the steep slope for a swim.

The next day we set out to visit a friend of my godmother, Patrice Wymore. She lived on the coconut plantation that she and her husband, Errol Flynn, had bought in the 1950s, just as his career was beginning to fade. We rented a car in Port Antonio and drove under the shadow of the Blue Mountains until we came to a headland where the road described a long curve between clumps of scrub and acacia trees. Sad-looking horses grazed on dusty grass. There was a huge pile of coconut husks by the side of the road. The flesh in some was still rotting and a black shimmer of flies rose up as we passed. We turned off the road and drove up the hill until we came to a lightening-struck tree with a sign hanging from it that read Mulholland Farm.

The house was surrounded by lush trees, swamped with bougainvillea. It had once been white, but had come to take on the colour of the land, dusty and sun-bleached. Pat was waiting for us as we drew up outside.

Errol and Pat Flynn lived at Mulholland Farm throughout the 1950s. The house, perched above the coconut plantation, looked down on a forest of palm trees, and was built to provide an escape from Errol’s dissolute Hollywood existence. He and Pat rode across the surrounding countryside on horses, rowed down rapid-furrowed rivers before drinking sundowners on the beach, lived like young honeymooners even though he was heading towards fifty, and his liver (an organ whose cells are thankfully extremely regenerative) was much older. Flynn’s wild lifestyle wasn’t entirely left behind in LA. He once loosed a crocodile in the centre of Port Antonio market; Pat told me that rumours of him driving into their swimming pool smoking a cigar weren’t true. “He didn’t smoke cigars,” she said.

The swimming pool now stands empty. Errol Flynn died in 1959, aged 50. Pat has lived on the estate ever since. The rooms are dark and full of dustsheet-covered furniture. Birds squabble in the roof. Dust blows in waves across the floor.

Pat poured us drinks and we sat overlooking the concrete lacuna of the swimming pool, watching the sun move slowly across the plantation below. Pat told us stories of living at the farm with Errol. Her eyes misted and she paused occasionally with a distant smile on her lips as she reminisced. When my godmother told her of my own recent romantic misfortune, Pat placed her hand on mine and fixed me with a gaze of extraordinary warmth. “Love comes again,” she said, and she led me by the hand down to a spot where we could see the sea surging up the mouth of a river, bright birds in the trees, mangoes hanging heavily from dark-leafed bushes. “Errol and I used to come and stand here,” she said as the wind whipped around us. “I still come down here every night and look at the river.” A closeness built between us in the thick Caribbean air. We drank some more and then it was time to go.

I found out afterwards that we had visited Pat on the first anniversary of her daughter’s death. Arnella Flynn, a one-time model in Europe, was found by plantation workers dead in her bed after a short life of drug abuse. She was Errol and Pat’s only child. I look at the picture of Pat, hand on hip, smiling, and I try to find that pain, try to locate the sadness she must have felt. And I wonder whether it was her warmth, her kindness despite the crushing weight of her loss, that caused my solipsistic self-pity to evaporate as we stood looking down over the river that evening.

We didn’t really do Gap Years in Worthing. Gap Years were for the beautiful daughters of Kensington millionaires to screw their way through a ski season and then find spiritual redemption in India, or for the double barreled sons of City financiers to dye their already flushed cheeks vermillion in the Africa sun. But due to an administrative error involving a bottle of gin and some incorrectly filed forms, I had to take a year off before Oxford.

The idea of a traditional Gap Year filled me with dread. I had no interest in saving the third world, no wish to find myself. Finally reaching the end of an adolescence whose turbulence would have plucked planes from the sky, I only wanted to be away at university, in a cosy study room, reading Kafka. As it was, my mother put in a telephone call to an old friend, and I was found a job working for my sister’s godmother who was the CEO of a fashion company in Paris.

It was perfect – I lived in a penthouse apartment on the Quai d’Orsay, walked over to the office on the Avenue Montaigne every day, stopping for Le Monde and a noisette at the Café de l’Alma on my way. My task at Céline – that’s the name of the label I worked for – which I accepted with great enthusiasm, was to audition models for catwalk shows. I was in eighteen year-old’s heaven.

On one of my first nights in Paris, I was invited by some colleagues at the fashion company to a party in the Bois de Boulogne. It was a fantastic, glamorous bash and I, drunk and star-struck, finally headed home in the early hours. My taxi surged through empty streets until we were within a few minutes of my flat when we suddenly came upon a stationary traffic jam. I got out and walked through the mild August night, and soon saw the cause of the jam. Directly opposite my flat there had been a terrible traffic accident. An ambulance nosed its way between a reluctantly parting sea of cars, policemen stood, looking slightly bewildered, at the mouth of the tunnel that snakes beneath the Place de l’Alma. I skirted the scene and took the elevator up to bed. Remember that crash, though – I’ll come back to it.

At the end of my year in Paris, it was decided that I should have had at least a taste of the traditional Gap Year. Whether it was my new habit of sporting a flambouyantly coloured cravat at my collar, or when, on a visit home to Worthing, I ordered an amaretto instead of my usual pint in the Half Brick, my father decided I needed toughening up. For the final fortnight of my pre-university freedom, I was sent – with my best friend Julian as a reluctant wing-man – to Kenya.

The sense of shock descended when we landed at Jomo Kenyata airport. I had grown used to a certain way of living in Paris – easy, cultivated, luxurious. I still remember very clearly the swarm of mosquitoes that hung in the flickering halogen glow of the baggage hall. “Malaria, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis” beat a doom-laden tattoo in my head. Where were my monogrammed handkerchiefs? Where was my silver-plated cigarette holder? Where was my shark-skin lounge suit?

Of course nineteen year olds are as resilient as they are malleable. Within a few days I had settled into the life out there and was happily negotiating my way around Nairobi in the back of the Nissan Sunny vans called Matatus that fling themselves along the city’s potholed roads, somewhere between bus, taxi and rollercoaster.

And here I come to the heart of my story. With a few days left to go, Julian and I decided that we’d like to visit Karen Blixen’s place on Lake Naivasha. We’d need to catch a matatu to the Nairobi railway station and then take the Kisumu train northwards. We packed rucksacks for an overnight journey and made our way down to the main road to wait for the next matatu. A black Nissan with tinny music blaring from its speakers pulled up and we were just about to squeeze ourselves into the interior – which already held seven locals on their way to market – when I patted my pocket. I had forgotten my camera.

We had time to spare before our train, and so, with many apologies, we backed out of the matatu and waved it off. Across the entire back window, I remember very clearly, was a sticker – in shiny red green and gold – of Bob Marley. We ran back up to the house, I picked up my camera, and we caught the next matatu into town, having lost no more than five minutes in our detour.

For the sake of narrative tension, I’d like to say here that we felt the windows shake as we drove into town and thought nothing of it, but actually we were blissfully unaware that a car bomb filled with 500 cylinders of TNT had been driven into the secretarial school next to the US Embassy in the centre of town moments before our arrival. Over two hundred people were killed that day – the vast majority Kenyans – and four thousand injured. The embassy was directly opposite the train station. Our matatu pulled over to the side of the road and we walked up towards the plume of smoke that rose from the shattered building where the bomb had exploded.

When we got there, the security forces were already on site. A cordon had been set up and we pushed ourselves to the front. A hundred yards down the road, its nose buried in a ditch, I saw a black Nissan van, all of its windows blown out save the back one, which was held together by the metallic red green and gold sticker of Bob Marley that stretched across it. We went to the bar of the Hilton and got roaringly drunk.

The poet John Oxenham said “life begins at death’s first touch” and I’ve always thought that there was another me, who’d remembered his camera that day, and got into the black matatu. For all I know the people on board escaped unhurt, and anyway there must have been scores of black Nissans in Nairobi with Bob Marley transfers in their back windows. But that day I was aware for the first time of the way that tiny decisions can rule our fate, and the thin line that separates us from death, and the way that our own life as we know it is only one of an almost infinite number of possible lives and deaths that we could have lived.

I said I’d come back to the car crash: it was, of course, Princess Diana who died in the tunnel under the Place de l’Alma that night. Monica Ali’s Untold Story – a better book than the snide critics would have you believe – is the newest in the ranks of counterfactual narratives that pose the great ‘What If?’ around historical events. Her book imagines what would have happened if Henri Paul hadn’t crashed, if Diana had carried on living, just as I did when I patted my pocket, and saved my life.