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.

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.

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.

Evers’ blog picked up on a chain of ideas that I had been following since reading David Shields’ manifesto against the (traditional) novel, Reality Hunger. Shields values short fiction over novels because there is so much “padding” in  the longer form. “You have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set.” At first Evers’ blog might seem to support Shields’ assertion (and Evers is, after all, a writer of short fiction). Evers’ argument is that the way we remember novels is as a kind of concentrated nexus of emotions encapsulated in an atmosphere (or, more exactly, a response to that atmosphere) whilst details of plot and character remain sketchy. This atmosphere could presumably, following Shields, be sharpened, distilled and condensed into a short story, a lyric essay, a photograph.

Delillo’s Underworld, all eight hundred and some pages of it, exists for Evers in the exquisite moment when Nick and Marian Shay view the vast installation of B52s in the desert, painted rainbow colours, an image of the postmodern sublime that rings through the rest of the novel: “The piece had a great riverine wash, a broad arc of sage green or maybe mustard green with brushy gray disturbances, and it curved from the southeast corner up and across the north edge, touching nearly a third of the massed aircraft, several planes completely covered in the pigment – the work’s circulating fluid, naming the pace, holding the surface together.” For me, Underworld is Cotter Martin catching the ball at a  baseball game with J. Edgar Hoover in the crowd. But Evers’ point holds true – ask me to describe in detail the plot of this novel, or almost any other, and I’d struggle. Ask me to talk about my emotional response, or moments of sublimity that moved me, and we’d be there till closing time.

Perhaps this says something about the kind of novels I like: labyrinthine, multi-layered, discursive. But I think it says more about how we remember novels. They are, as Evers says, unique – “the art form most attuned to life”. I recognise this as I’m writing. At about forty thousand words, it’s no longer possible to hold an entire novel in your mind. I was teaching at the Faber Academy with the writer James Scudamour recently and we discussed exactly this: at some point after the first thirty or forty thousand words, the novel becomes too sprawling, too variegated to pin down. You have to rely upon knowing the atmosphere you’re trying to create, and how your characters and your plot will work to build this atmosphere, and press on regardless. Indeed, when I start writing, I have less a plot or a theme in mind than a fully-formed idea of the atmosphere and the corresponding emotional response that this should engender in the reader. I judge my success on how true I can hold to this aim. The moments of sublimity – and that which surrounds them – should all be faithful to this original vision.

I think that novels often hang upon a series of moments of sublimity, revelation, violence, that energise and illuminate the surrounding text like flashes of phosphorescence in a dark sea. But to say that the rest of what goes into a novel is useless emballage is daft. The reason that Steve Reich’s music is so hypnotic and compelling is because we are constantly searching for the moments of stunning melody that emerge like lit arrows from the droning repetition. But without the repetition, without the background, those moments would lose their impact. Similarly in Beckett’s prose there are moments of extravagant Romantic lyricism that would be corny on their own. Only amid the wandering aporia do they work effectively – images of those rare moments in life when the sublime shines through.

I, like Evers, hesitate before re-reading books. I keep coming across novels whose publishers push them as “the new Secret History“. I haven’t read Donna Tartt’s book since it was first published and I sat up until the small hours aged thirteen, lost in the rarefied world of Hampden College. It could only disappoint me now. I just re-read Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, a book that was my Bible as a teenager. It wasn’t a total let down, but I found myself preferring the book the way I remembered it – a heady admixture of spirituality and adolescent high feeling. I cringed fairly regularly during the course of my most recent reading. And this is the problem: we don’t remember books as we would read them now, but rather we remember them through the lens of the person we were when we read them. Nostalgia is layered upon nostalgia.

I was thinking of Perec recently, having just read W, his bizarre and moving memoir of childhood and metaphor for the concentration camps. I almost posted it on the Guardian website as my favourite French novel (the Guardian are doing a literary tour of the world at the moment). But I hesitated, wondering if perhaps I didn’t prefer Michel Tournier’s The Erl King (my mental image of that book: a twelve-pronged stag charging through the Bavarian forest pursued by Hermann Göring). In the meantime, a hundred other comments had been made, and I felt my post would be lost, and I don’t like comments sections anyway.

The lead-up to publication was full of excitement and trepidation, marked by mental oscillation between the certainty that the book would sink without trace and sinful dreams of success. The thrill of standing next to Andrew O’Hagan as he spoke about his next novel (Maf the Dog) at a Faber bash; the first time I saw that marvellous ff monogram on the spine of my book, with my name underneath; the foreign rights deals that started rolling in before the English edition was even published… There’s something precious in those early days before a novel is forced to enter the grubby marketplace. The faults that you know are there in the text recede, and you only think of those shining passages that really are the book. You allow yourself to dream without shame.

There were enough good reviews in the press to keep me sane, and you can read most of them here. The Financial Times review arrived in my inbox as I waited for my wife to give birth at UCH (a mere twenty-four hours after the book’s launch party). I tried not to let a grin break the expression of concerned sympathy I wore. The bad reviews tended to be obvious bash-a-banker rants, but I took them far too seriously and personally. Patrick Neate’s review in The Guardian was even more troubling, because – and this is every writer’s worst nightmare – much of what he said was spot-on. I still find it painful to read the review, although his words have helped me to turn my next novel into a far finer work than it would have been otherwise and so I must, through gritted teeth, thank him.

I wrote This Bleeding City in under six months, coming home from work in the evenings and eating in front of the computer, writing until my eyes felt like they would burst from their sockets, and then regretfully staggering to bed. No social life, no family life, just work. It was painful, but it felt necessary. The novel isn’t the masterpiece I wanted it to be, but I’m enormously proud of it, and delighted that – by and large – readers have understood the story I wanted to tell. To those who didn’t like it, I ask you to bear with me, and recognise that I wrote it in a mad rush, while still in my twenties, and, well, sorry…

I wrote a blog this time last year about how, given the economics of the world of publishing, the roulette-wheel nature of bestsellers and the hugely competitive market for fiction, it was unlikely that writing would ever be more than a hobby for me. I didn’t have the kind of City job that paid mega-bonuses, and had only a small amount put away for when the rains came. Two months later, however, I left my job and became that thing I’d only ever dreamed of – a full-time writer. Of course it isn’t as financially rewarding as the City – what is? – but I was wrong to write it off as a way of supporting a family. With foreign rights, and festival appearances, and the odd spot of journalism, it is just about possible to scrape a living as an author.

There have been many high points this year: seeing myself on the bestseller list as I walked past WH Smith on the way to work one morning; Edinburgh, Ghent and Cheltenham Festivals; winning the Spear’s and Edinburgh First Novel prizes; being selected for Waterstone’s New Voices campaign; meeting Diana Athill at the brilliant Shoreditch House Literary Salons… But what This Bleeding City’s success has gained me more than anything is time. I have been able to spend eighteen months writing the new novel – ten of them full-time. The Full Fathom Five will be published by Faber (although it’s now called The Revelations) in January next year – I recently signed a new, two-book deal with them. I have been able to craft it, rewrite it, iron out those faults that haste and chutzpah made me ignore in This Bleeding City.

I don’t want this blog to come across as self-congratulatory, but I remember reading so many depressing and downbeat descriptions of the writer’s life when I was staring out that I thought I’d try and mildly redress the balance. Of course there have been dark days this year, too. The worst, perhaps, a literary festival in the north-west where my mother-in-law and her (small) book group were the only people to come and watch me speak. Or the hype and excitement about a film deal that saw a lot of expensive lunches eaten but no film. Or the American publishers that came so close to taking on the book but then didn’t.

I’ve been hugely lucky. I’ve had a brilliant agent, a fabulous editor and Faber’s magnificent publicity department behind me. I was lucky that Oliver James, whose extraordinary evisceration of the boom years, Affluenza, prompted me to write This Bleeding City, agreed to read my novel and then support it far beyond the call of duty. I have a wonderful family, a grandfather whose wise words are a constant inspiration, a wife far lovelier than I deserve. It has been an extraordinary year, and what’s most thrilling of all is that this is only the beginning.

The novel’s manuscript was found in a drawer by my grandfather when he was going through the possessions of his wife, my grandmother, who died in December 2008. My grandfather and my Aunt Jo spent a year sorting through the various drafts, forming the text into a coherent narrative whilst always keeping faithful to the words my grandmother used. They had the book printed – by the ‘Morgan Women Press’ (Morgan was one of my grandmother’s family names) – and distributed as presents almost two years to the day after my Granny Liz’s funeral. The novel bears a short preface and a postscript – the former explaining the origins of the book, the latter recounting a trip we made to the Birmingham, Alabama neighbourhood in which my grandmother lived. My grandfather writes: “After the funeral, a group of family mourners drove across town to Norwood, the neighborhood where she grew up, to pay a last visit to the family home. All of Norwood was gone: where there had been houses and apartment buildings and little stores there were only weed-grown lots and rubble, with here and there the derelict shell of a big house still standing, uninhabited and unpainted, staring at the wasteland around it through broken windows.” It was indeed like something out of The Wire: menacing youths glared at us from street corners under the brims of their baseball caps, cars slowed to look at us – suited, sombre – as they passed. But, somehow, the spirit of the girl who had lived there so many years ago was with us, and we felt invulnerable because, despite the decay, her presence was in the stones upon which we walked.

The book is beautifully written. Reminding me most of Eudora Welty, it captures with extraordinary clarity something very difficult – a happy youth – and revels in a very particular form of Southern nostalgia. A Small-Boned Woman is the opposite of a misery memoir. This is not to say that it doesn’t deal with weighty issues – racial tension bubbles beneath the surface with occasional violent eruptions. When Sally hears Orrin Butts, a local wheeler-dealer looking for political advancement, reeling off racist cant, she feels “the same sense of unreality I had felt once when I saw a man smashed in a car accident, and expected him to get out of his grotesque, twisted position and walk away whole.” The novel sings with hope, though. Problems, it tells us, can be resolved by intelligent people working together. There is no evil that cannot be beaten through education, discussion and a good Southern sense of fair play.

Whilst Kevin, the Yankee husband, hardly features in the novel, we see Sally’s joy when he returns safe from the war, her excitement at the prospect of their life together in New York. It makes for an extraordinary stereoscopic history when this fictionalised account of my grandparents’ early life together is read alongside my grandfather’s war memoir, Flights of Passage. Just as, I am told, jewellers know when they set stones whether the ring will last, simply from their sense of the integrity of that initial setting, my grandparents’ more than sixty years of happy marriage is unsurprising when you read of the love they felt, all those years ago, as the war ended and their lives began.

It is the beginning of the book that I keep coming back to, though. Sally and her best friend Anna go to Mobile Bay for their summer holidays. It’s an exquisite piece of writing, wonderfully conjouring up the endlessness of those surf-tossed days. I was reminded of my own version of Mobile Bay – a stilted house on North Carolina’s Outer Banks where we’d go with my grandparents and my aunt and uncle and I’d walk along the tide-line looking for jellyfish and shells and then throw myself down on the hot, damp sand. Sally recalls one morning in Mobile Bay like this: “The whole morning we stayed in the blue bay water, sometimes stretching out on the weathered boards of the wharf. A big beam had floated in on the tide, and we played it was a boat. We pushed it out past the boathouse, holding it with our arms and paddling our feet. Then we got astride it, letting the gentle waves propel us to shore.”

It was an extraordinarily moving experience to read the book. My granny’s soft, Southern voice sings on every page. It was, for a moment, like having her back. It is now difficult to unravel the twines of conflicting emotions that the novel has inspired in me. Firstly, a reader’s dissatisfaction at an unfinished book. For I spent two days in the sunny company of Sally Waite and – more importantly – my granny who whispers through and around Sally. Then a kind of sadness that such a good novel was abandoned – I presume when children and my grandfather’s successful literary career got in the way of finishing it. Particularly the first section of the book suggests that my grandmother could have been a very fine novelist; certainly A Small-Boned Woman would have been published, I imagine to some success. But then I sorted through photographs of my grandmother taken in Princeton and Hampstead in the last twenty years of her life, and I saw how happy she was, how proud of her family, her husband, and I knew better than to wish changes to the paths of life’s great binomial tree. We have the novel, it is wonderful, it is enough.

My grandfather sent a copy of A Small-Boned Woman to the editor of the Sewanee Review: the first 25 pages of the novel will be published in the journal later this year.

I was very wrong.

The homme de lettres – Damian Barr – who organises the Salon, insisted that the audience be made up of members and non-members alike, it is his eccentric and egalitarian taste that defines the literary bent of the evenings, it is he who negotiated with a City law firm to stump up for free pizzas and drinks for the guests. There was nothing snobbish, or sneering or exclusive about it: just a large crowd of people who love reading getting together to talk about it.

It was a magnificent evening. The room was packed: there were queues down Bethnal Green Road outside. I spoke between Clare Wigfall, who read a poignant and rather lovely short story, and the extraordinary Diana Athill, who at 92 was as sharp as a button. We talked afterwards about how, many years ago, she had introduced my grandfather to the work of Henry Green, and how he had pressed Loving on me with the same enthusiasm. I asked Damian at the dinner table how he expected to make money out of the project (a sign that you can take a boy out of the City…) “I don’t,” he replied, grinning, “I just love putting on the salons”. Maybe this is a true sign of our times: the death of the profit motive, the opening up of previously hermetic institutions, an example – perhaps – of the evenings of poetry that Marx foretold once capitalism fell.

Whatever it is, Shoreditch House Literary Salon is a thing to be treasured.

As I was writing, I kept thinking that there was something I was missing. Someone else employed this very trick, and could be brought into the essay to support the argument. It was only after I had submitted the piece, and was reading Julia Donaldson’s Stick Man to my little boy, bath-squeaky and pyjama-clad on my knee, that I realised it was from a certain type of children’s book. Because of course repetition is a key facet of myth, and our children’s stories have the most direct relationship with the structures of myth. In Stick Man, as in The Odyssey, we have a hero who must go through a series of tribulations on a long and dangerous voyage before being reunited with his family in his tree-Ithaca. The repetitious nature of these trials builds to a crescendo as the text compresses into single-frame signifiers – from the dog who chases him to the swan who uses him to line her nest we move to a tableau of indignities until Stick Man lies, spent and Christ-like prostrate, in the snow. From the repeated refrain – “I’m not an arm! Can nobody see, / I’m Stick Man, I’m Stick Man, I’m Stick Man, that’s me!” – we suddenly move towards a moment of high lyricism when is seems that all is lost: “Stick Man is lonely, Stick Man is lost. / Stick Man is frozen and covered in frost… He can’t hear the bells, or the sweet-singing choir…”

Similarly in Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea (there’s a wonderful interview with her here) we find the bulk of the story in the repetition of the tiger eating “all the cake” and “all the milk in the milk jug and all the tea in the tea pot”. Only at the end of the tale, when Sophie’s father has appeared and the tiger’s occupation has been lifted, do we come again to a deeply lyrical scene. “So they went out in the dark, and all the street lamps were lit, and all the cars had their lights on, and they walked down the road to a café.” Here the artwork underlines the effect of the language, with the low full moon hanging above the street lamps and and the shop lights illuminating the happy family scene. An orange and black-striped cat appears behind them as a reminder of the return to normality – it is anything but the suave and threatening tiger of earlier in the book.

In one of our favourites, No Matter What by Debi Gliori, the baby kangaroo – Small – asks his non-gender specific parent Large whether he/she would love him under a variety of Kafkaesque transformations (into a bug, bear or crocodile). The answer is repeated each time “I’ll always love you, no matter what”. At the end of the book Small asks “But what about when we’re dead and gone? Would you still love me? Does love go on?” In a gloriously touching scene, with curtains billowing out onto a Van Gogh sky, we find again a moment of lyricsim that interrupts, and is heightened by, the preceding repetition: “Large held small snug as they looked out at the night, at the moon in the dark and the stars shining bright. ‘Small, look at the stars – how they shine and glow, but some of those stars died a long time ago.’”

Whenever my little boy watches The Snowman, with its brilliant David Bowie cameo, he repeats again and again the word “sad”. The lyricism of these children’s stories does have something elegiac about it. The final scene of Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt is a good example. It’s a picture of the bear walking lonely by the shore in the light of a full moon and prompts a “poor bear” from my boy who had previously gnawed his knuckles watching the family scamper away from the terrifying beast. But again a scene of (this time purely visual) beauty in a story that draws upon the repetition of a series of trials (which in Deleuze’s terms are “clothed” rather than “naked” repetition).  The formal technique whereby repetition is interrupted by lyrical beauty does teach us something about life – how beauty is often heartbreaking, how the world is largely mundane but illuminated by snatched moments of wonder which burn brighter for their briefness. We must savour these moments as we rip them from the dull surrounds of quotidian repetition, hold them close to us as we age, as Bowie/James holds his snowman scarf.

I instantly felt the sweep of those fields, the way that the sun would luxuriate over them in its setting, allowing the stubble to turn the same umber as the buildings before finally allowing night with its lazy bats to fall with a thump. My grandparents lived in the shadow of the tower in the distance and I used to visit them almost every holiday. Seven or eight years old I would wander through the empty rooms of the long L-shaped house, imagining myself a Renaissance Prince, a Romantic dandy, a second world war soldier on the run. Or I’d curl up on the swing chair in the garden and read – PG Wodehouse, Enid Blyton, Stephen King… I devoured books on that fusty cushioned chair with its dog hairs and creaking. And in the way that the mind sometimes brings these things back to us, I feel myself in that chair sometimes now when I’m lost in a book, when I am truly given up to the pleasure of reading. I was on the Tube the other day reading Georges Perec’s Life – A User’s Manual and I suddenly found myself sitting on that chair again, and the creaking of the train was the squeaking of the rusty swing.

I remember one morning waking very early in Italy. It was my last day of holiday and my aunt would be driving me to the airport the next morning. I walked out into the fresh morning air, down the steps and into the orchard. There, pecking and preening at the foot of an olive tree, were three hoopoes.

I sat and watched as they kicked at the dusty ground, rising and lowering their extraordinary crests. I was very young, but I remember thinking: “I will miss this”. And it is very rare that even as adults we are aware enough of our good times to really savour them, to hold our world carefully in our minds to protect it from the degradation of fading memory. So I stood there until the morning woke around me, and I felt the nostalgia building even as the hoopoes rose into the thickening air.

Years later I was walking down New College Lane after finals, having wasted my time at Oxford utterly, made a mess of my exams and frittered away the extraordinary opportunities that had landed in my lap there. And the same feeling came to me. I imagined myself into the London future that awaited me, and how I would look back on the boy who walked down New College Lane and envy him his youth and the luxury of his melancholy. And, as I turned under the Bridge of Sighs, I imagined I saw three hoopoes scratching on the cobbles of Radcliffe Square.