“I’ve kind of made peace with the fact that we are where we are,” he says, “and I can’t really do anything to change that. Often trying to change that big picture actually makes it worse. I’m just going to do what I can do in my small life. Work this land, do my writing, see where that goes. If you’re really convinced that we’re living the wrong way, then you have to make some attempt to live the right way, don’t you? Even though you are part of the same culture, you can’t ever be a paragon of anything or an example to anybody. But it’s like Rilke said, ‘You must change your life.’”
He explains: “What that means to me is that you must change your opinions and write different things but you must do some stuff. Build a compost toilet and plant some trees and work the land – and that kind of knocks the hard edges off your ideologies as well, when you do that.”
If those hard edges were the result of his upbringing, he doesn’t make that connection. His father died nearly a decade ago but they made peace, he tells me, after his first two books were published: this was the kind of success that his father could recognise.
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