I met the great man’s wife at the Sunday dinner. She had flown in that afternoon. She was not a trophy: only five years younger, the mother of his children, and with a self-deprecating husky voice. She carried off peacock-blue silk with aplomb; she brought glamour and style to our dowdy writers’ gathering. She had all-American confidence. He was holding forth at his end of the table, and she sat some distance from him, but their eyes still met from time to time. They were a couple. I thought about what I could tell her.
On the day your husband arrived he was purely obnoxious. The silence of the writers’ retreat was shattered. The whole place was thrown into a flutter by him. He thundered up and down the stairs demanding bottled water, Internet, a better desk lamp, coffee. We had been told he was there to finish his memoir; it was implicit that we were privileged to be in his company. But please consider: does the world need another politician’s memoir? Is it likely that a motley selection of little-known writers and poets would rally to feed such a man’s ego?
We lingered stubbornly in our rooms, pretending to redraft, ears attuned to his every move. He played Beethoven’s Seventh (for goodness’ sake); he ran an endless bath; he talked importantly on his mobile, which house rules state must remain switched off at all times. It was clear he wasn’t writing for a minute. He was on the floor below our garrets, in a proper en suite double room. But he invaded our headspace. We were filled with unspoken resentment.
Of one telepathic accord, we skipped the predinner drinking hour and sidled down to the dining room only when we knew food was about to be served. Imagine our disappointment, then, at finding the great man was not there to be snubbed: he had been invited out to dinner. Of course. We ate meagerly and retired early to our monklike cells, irritated with ourselves and each other.
The next day his radio went on at six. I wasted half an hour second-guessing when he would go to breakfast so I could avoid him. He played Beethoven all day and when I complained to the administrator I was told the great man couldn’t write without music, and that he was playing it softly especially to accommodate the other writers. I asked if he had heard of headphones but I am not sure the message was passed on.
He finally made his appearance when the rest of us were already at the dinner table that night. He nodded briskly and set two bottles of wine on the table, announcing that the wine here was piss. The administrator introduced us all and your husband gave us each a curt nod. There was a pile of lamb chops on the big serving dish, and when it was passed to him he took four. He declined all vegetables with an impatient wave, and when everyone had helped themselves to a single chop, he took the remaining three, and set about eating all seven with focused intensity. Someone muttered that the Atkins diet had been discredited but he affected not to hear. A desultory conversation about what to do with a jammed printer continued on one side of the table; the rest of us kept our eyes on our plates and ate in silence. He drank off a glass of wine like orange juice, then asked us to excuse him as he had work to do. Beethoven (the First, for the second time) was still playing at 11:00 p.m. when I turned out my light.
On Friday night we had planned to go out to the pub. It would be the social highlight of our week. We were dismayed when the administrator told us the great man would like to read a chapter to us, after dinner. “But it’s Friday night,” we objected. “Readings happen on the last night.”
“It’s his last night, for reading,” the administrator replied. Your husband was giving an after-dinner speech at a charity do on Saturday, and then you were arriving on Sunday prior to your departure together on Monday morning. Clearly the GM knows better than to read in front of you.
After Friday dinner we lounged like recalcitrant teenagers on the sofas and armchairs that were all slightly too far from the fire. It was bitterly cold: drafts rattled the single glazing and sliced in under the hems of shrunken velvet curtains. The great man positioned himself with his back to the fire, effectively blocking it from the rest of us. He gave us a big, warm public smile, arranged his typescript, and launched into a self-serving rendition of his rebellious but politically aware teenage years. He read for twenty-five minutes, which is a long time when you’re cold.
At the end he flourished the pages and bowed, which obliged us to give him a thin spatter of clapping. Maria, who is young and enthusiastic, but who I had assumed knew better, asked him a sycophantic question. He produced a bottle of Scotch from his briefcase, poured himself a good slug, and sent the bottle off around the room, then answered her at length—mellow, smiling and relaxed. He was the nicest man in the world. Barmy Chris and poet Steve ventured nervous contributions, and he expanded, embracing us all in the warm glow of his switched-on personality. To them he is a celebrity. They grew up seeing his face on TV, reading his views in the papers. I thought of him as a chancer who must, by definition, be fraudulent and unscrupulous to have reached so elevated a position. As an American you are probably more generous. When the first small silence offered itself, I chipped in, ‘‘Are we going to the pub, then?’’
The great man stood up, rubbing his hands. “An excellent suggestion, yes. You people must be demob happy, after a week cooped up in here.” People scattered to find coats and boots, taxis were phoned, and when I went out of the front door the GM was standing there with his head tilted back and clouds of steam rising from his nostrils. “Wonderful stars up here.”
“Yes. We’re not cooped up, actually, we can always go for a walk. There are some beautiful walks along the river.”
“Is that what you writers do for inspiration?” He made it sound rather pathetic.
“For exercise. For the joy of it.”
“I like walking,” he said. “How far’s the pub, Lily?”
I was surprised he remembered my name. “Not that far. But there are no streetlights. It’s very dark.”
“I’m game. Are you?”
It was anger as much as anything that made me agree to walk with him while the others rode off in warm, lit vehicles. And it was certainly anger that helped me set our pace, while the GM talked about his travels, name-dropping world leaders and celebrities, and then about his good fortune in having a beautiful and witty wife (he can’t praise you enough) and two high-achieving children. He boasted simply and enthusiastically, like a child. There was no moon. As we moved away from the lights of the big house, the stars shone more and more brightly, and there were answering sparkles from frost on the grass. The air was so cold it numbed my face and felt solid as ice cream in my lungs.
He began to boast about his very expensive hat, which has special thermal properties and was purchased at a ski resort in Canada. I laughed. There was a short silence, then he asked me what I wrote.
“Novels.”
“Best-selling?”
“No.”
“Here,” he said. I made out a glinting in the solid darkness that was him, and he passed it to me—the whiskey bottle. I uncorked it and glugged; it lit a line like the trace of a sparkler, from my mouth to my belly. “So why d’you do it?”
It was hard to maintain my policy of monosyllabic answers, and by the time we got to the pub the whiskey and exercise had thawed me out. He questioned everything I said, as if he knew better, and it ignited a flame of indignant volubility in me. Both of us had raised our voices—we were talking over each other as much as listening; in the pub hallway I felt my cheeks flare red with the sudden heat, and saw his face crimson too. We looked at each other and burst out laughing.
“More of the same?” he asked, and eased his way through to the bar. The pub was packed; I saw a few people glance at him, then stare—perhaps wondering if they really did recognize him. He looked more ordinary than he does on TV. I could see some of my fellow writers squeezed into the corner by the slot machine—two of them were leaning against the wall; there were no spare seats.
I made for a bench under the window and asked the girl sitting at the end to squeeze up a bit. I was peering about for another seat when the GM appeared, bearing double whiskeys in one hand and a stool in the other. He installed himself at the corner of the table, and we launched into another fierce debate, until a general shushing made it possible to hear the sweet lamenting voice of a young female singer, accompanied by two wild-looking men on guitar and bass.
Time passed quickly, as it does when measured in double shots and music and laughter. When I glanced at my watch it was nearly midnight. The heat in the place was incredible; I felt the bright red flush on my cheeks spreading through my whole body until I was radiating heat like a glowing coal. I pulled my jumper over my head; I was wearing my blue V-neck T-shirt, the one that only gets worn under a jumper because it’s too revealing. I saw the GM note the cleavage and I laughed. He looked straight up into my face, grinning, caught in the act. “Let’s get outta here!” The grin and the look were unmistakable.
“What?” I pretended I hadn’t heard.
He leaned forward and breathed his hot words into my ear, cupping his hand around my neck to draw me near. “Let’s get outta here. There’s more whiskey in my room, Lily-gal.”
Your husband was propositioning me.
I laughed again. “It’s probably not a good idea,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows, as if he expected me to explain why. The evening was punctured. His hand had gone from my neck but I could still feel his touch. “I think I’d better go,” I said lamely. He swigged from his glass, then nodded at me with a half smile. He turned his head to the girl who had squeezed up for me. She was twenty years my junior, with smooth olive shoulders and a black fringe over her eyes. He jacked the smile up to full radiance again.
“And where have you sprung from? You live here?”
When I’d hauled on my big coat in the lobby, I went out into the icy night. Glancing back through the window I saw their heads bent close together over their drinks, then the girl threw back her head in joyous laughter. She would be sharing the bedroom whiskey, then. Easy come, easy go.
There was a taxi waiting, and I climbed into it and rode back to the writers’ retreat feeling bereft. I like sex. Your husband was sexy and he was funny. I didn’t particularly like him (the shit—do you?) but he did make me laugh. Fancy the GM fancying me!
Have a bit more self-respect, I told myself.
Oh, stop being such a prude, I replied.
Why encourage him to think he’s god’s bloody gift?
Sweetie, he won’t even have noticed you turned him down.
This pointless schizophrenic squabble dragged on through the night; together with my determination not to hear any sounds from another room, it kept me well and truly awake.
I got up at six, since I was there, after all, to write. I immersed myself in my work and went down for breakfast at half past eight. The GM was sitting with the others at table, and Barmy Chris and Maria were rattling on about hangover cures. When I went to the hatch to serve myself porridge the GM joined me with alacrity, holding out his own bowl for a dollop. “Thank you for being sensible for both of us, last night.” He spoke so low and fast I didn’t take it in till he had turned back toward the table. He finished his breakfast with the same efficient speed and left the table with a brief “Excuse me.”
Replies milled through my head, but on the whole I was glad there hadn’t been time for one, since none of them hit quite the right note. The right note, it seemed to me, was ironic dignity, but any words I thought of sounded both arch and bitter. I admired him for acknowledging what had happened. I had assumed he would pretend it hadn’t. Which made me dislike myself, for my meanness.
Querulous self-interrogation put paid to any further work; after sitting futilely at my desk for an hour, I gave in and went for a walk. The day was thick and damp and cold, with leaden clouds and no movement in the air. The leafless trees jutted out from the sides of the gorge like skeletons arrested in a desperate dance. If I see a squirrel, I thought. Or a bird. Or anything alive. But there was nothing, nature was dead as I clomped dully through it.
On my return the house was silent (no Beethoven) and I took off my muddy boots and crept up the stairs. I was pulling off my coat as I went and when I got to the first-floor landing I somehow managed to flick myself in the eye with the sleeve. You always know the split second before you lose it. My contact lens was gone.
“Shit!” I dropped to my knees, peering at the swirling green-and-brown carpet. I heard the GM open his door.
“All right?” he said.
“Contact lens.”
“Ah, bad luck. Which way did it go?”
I shook my head. “It wouldn’t matter, only it’s my spare. I lost the same eye in the bath last week.”
He knelt down on all fours and rested his cheek against the carpet, staring sideways across the pile. He began to inch across the floor. I ran my hands over my clothes, then picked up the coat and began to examine it. He tilted his head up to look at me. “Do you favor hard or soft?” with a grin.
“Ha ha. It’s hard.”
“Good. Easier to feel.” He pushed his hands in front of him across the carpet. We searched for a while in silence. There were a surprising number of small gritty items in the carpet pile; we agreed the place needed a good vacuuming.
“It’s gone,” I said. “Thanks for looking. I don’t want to interrupt your work.”
“Rubbish,” he said. ”It’s here and we’ll find it.”
‘‘I will keep looking,’’ I said, ‘‘because my glasses give me a headache. But I’d much rather creep about in my own time and not feel I’m wasting yours.’’
‘‘D’you think I don’t waste it myself? This is a far better excuse for not writing than what I was doing before.’’
‘‘What were you doing before?’’
We were gradually moving in a wider and wider radius around the spot where I had lost the lens. Your husband came to the edge of the top stair and felt along it. ‘‘It could have flown downstairs,’’ he said. ‘‘They’re so light they can go anywhere on a random draft.’’
‘‘I know. D’you wear them?’’
‘‘My wife does.’’ He stretched out flat on his front and peered over the top of the stairs, slowly tilting his head from side to side. Then he descended a few steps and crouched against the stairs so his eyes were level with the carpet pile at the top. He scanned the carpet like a searchlight. ‘‘Have you looked properly on yourself?’’
I shrugged. I wanted him to go back in his room so I could be pitiful on my own. He came slowly up the stairs and toward me, peering at the floor all the way. Then he began to scrutinize me, starting at my feet and working up. I was embarrassed.
‘‘Turn around,’’ he said. And then, ‘‘Turn again.’’ Suddenly he stretched his hand toward my head. ‘‘Ah ha!’’ He plucked the lens from my hair like a magician finding a red silk scarf.
I thanked him profusely and he asked me into his room for a coffee. It would have been churlish to refuse. I sucked the lens and popped it back in while he poured coffee from a flask and grimaced. ‘‘Sorry, there’s no way of making fresh.’’
‘‘I know. You’re lucky they gave you a flask!’’ I wandered over to the desk, where his laptop hibernated next to a closed A4 Pad. ‘‘So how were you wasting time?’’
‘‘Texting jokes to my daughter.’’ I looked at him and he shrugged. ‘‘She’s unhappy at university. I’ve got a book, see?’’ He picked up a worn paperback from the sofa arm and passed it to me. It was entitled Best Jokes of 1997.
I laughed. ‘‘Was that a vintage year?’’
‘‘God knows. I always pick up joke books when I see them. You need jokes in speeches.’’
‘‘You’re not going to tell me you write your own speeches?’’
‘‘Why not? From time to time.’’ He looked at me levelly. ‘‘But not the jokes, obviously.’’
There was a silence while we drained our coffee. Why was I so harsh on him? Your husband, the great man. ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ I said.
But he wasn’t paying attention. ‘’What do you do for headaches?’’
‘‘What?’’
‘‘Your glasses give you a headache.’’
‘‘Oh—they can start if off, yes. I need a new prescription. I get migraines.’’
‘‘Me too. Have you tried Migraigone?’’
‘‘No.’’ When I have a migraine I lie prostrate in the dark. People who can sit up and eat and watch TV say they have migraines. There’s no point in talking about it.
‘‘This stuff is good. If you take it soon enough, before the thing really gets a grip—’’
‘‘Right. Can you get it on prescription?’’
‘‘No. I get it from America. Hang on.’’ He went into his bathroom and returned with a box of pills. ‘‘These are all I have with me but why don’t I give you four, that’s enough to see how you go on. You start taking them as soon as you sense it coming.’’ He slipped some pills into an envelope, wrote the name on it, and passed it to me. I started to protest but he cut me off. ‘‘I know how it feels. Nobody should have to feel like that.’’
‘‘Thank you.’’ I got to my feet. ‘‘We should both do some work, I guess.’’
He nodded. ‘‘What are you working on?’’
‘‘A collection of stories.’’
‘‘Really? I like stories. Novels are too long. Tell me when they’re published, I’d like to read them.’’
‘‘Right.’’
I felt myself blushing. He knew I didn’t believe him. Your husband knew just how mean I was. I moved toward the door and he stood up and followed me. ‘‘Thank you for finding my lens,’’ I said. ‘‘And thank you for the tablets.’’
‘‘Enough of the thanks,’’ he said. ‘‘I like you.’’ He leaned forward slowly and kissed me. His lips were warm and firm and dry, they lingered against mine and I felt the sudden swooping intensity of skin, of flesh. I closed my eyes. I imagined the rosy stone gateway to a big sunlit house. I opened my eyes and the GM smiled at me, then he held the door open for me to leave.
Up in my own room I analyzed the meaning of your husband’s kiss. I considered its taste, its texture, its warmth, its promise and its lack of promise. It said things we had not articulated. It said them lightly, without assigning undue importance. And yet it honored them.
![Nicholas Evans is a celebrated storyteller, and the story he tells me is a cracker. A man and his wife go to stay with her brother and sister-in-law, a titled couple who live on a beautiful estate in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands. On a balmy August evening, the man goes out and picks some mushrooms. He brings them back, fries them up in some butter, sprinkles parsley over them, and the family enjoy a relaxing evening meal.
The following morning all four awake feeling not quite right. By lunchtime they are seriously ill. They consult a book in the kitchen – a guide to wild mushrooms – and leaf through until they find a photograph. Anxiously they scan the text, and see the chilling words: deadly poisonous.
The local GP is called urgently. The four are rushed into the local Highland hospital in Elgin. Ambulances race them down to the renal unit at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. On the journey the man begins to convulse, his body shuddering and shaking uncontrollably. He fears he is about to die.
The poison ravages their bodies, the violent vomiting of blood and bile remorseless as one by one all four go into kidney failure. Only the thought of his youngest son, just six years old, keeps the man clinging to life. To his horror, he realises that each couple’s will grants the other couple custody of their children, in the event of the parents’ death. All their children may soon be orphaned. Fearing the worst, he calls his solicitor from his sick bed and has a new will couriered up to Scotland, as the four fight for their lives.
They survive. But the man, his wife and her brother are left without functioning kidneys, and must endure five hours of dialysis every other day to keep them alive. All three need kidney donors. The search for suitable matches goes on for three years – until his grownup daughter eventually persuades him to accept one of her own, and saves his life. But his wife and brother-in-law remain on the transplant list, still sick and still waiting, leaving the family in a toxic tangle of illness, guilt and recrimination.
It is a classic Evans tale – intense family drama set in a cinematic backdrop of epic landscape – and would almost certainly be a bestseller. The author’s 1995 debut novel, The Horse Whisperer, sold 15m copies, and his four subsequent books have sold many millions more. Unfortunately, however, this isn’t a new plot dreamt up by Evans, but a horribly true story.
When he opens the door to his London loft apartment, Evans looks shockingly well. Just three months after surgeons removed a kidney from his daughter Lauren, 29, and transplanted it into his body, the 61-year-old looks so healthy that you’d never even guess he was the protagonist of this nightmarish tale. If anything, in fact, he’s better looking than he used to be; he has an actor’s mellifluous voice, and often used to be likened to Bill Nighy, but with shorter hair and a radiant complexion he looks more like a distinguished architect, say, or a classical conductor. I’m so taken aback that I ask how he would have looked had we met three months earlier.
“Well everybody now says I looked like a walking corpse,” he smiles, “but at the time people said: ‘Oh Nick you look great!’ Now they say: ‘No, you didn’t at all.’ I can see it myself in photographs. I just looked scary. Five hours of dialysis only cleans about 4% of your blood, so you’re still walking around with 96% poisoned blood.”
Before the transplant he could drink no more than one litre of liquid a day, and didn’t pee for three years, so even the 22 pills he now has to take every day feel like a breeze: “I’ve stopped reading the side effects on these things, because you start imagining you’ve got them all.” We meet a few hours after the launch of a new charity, Give a Kidney – One’s Enough, of which he is a patron, which encourages people to make an altruistic donation of a kidney to a stranger on the transplant list. Evans is still reeling at the generosity of the altruistic donors he met that morning, so I ask if he could ever have imagined making such a gift himself.
“No,” he admits without hesitation. “No, I’d love to say that I would have thought of doing that, but no.”
“The whole question of donation,” he explains, “particularly with friends and family, is an immensely complicated emotional and psychological thing. Some people just can’t bring themselves to even think about it – people who love you, and whom you love, but find it’s just too much. One or two friends, my closest friends, one or two of them didn’t ever mention it. And that’s perfectly OK. A very close family member who just couldn’t do it came to see us a lot, and would break down in tears, and say: ‘I feel so guilty, I feel so guilty.’ And you just have to keep saying: ‘That’s OK.”
It sounds like it must have created an emotional minefield around him. “Oh, God yes. Absolutely. You have to keep reassuring people it’s OK. But then there are some people for whom it doesn’t seem a big deal. There’s the mother of a guy who runs a little local garage where we live in Devon who fixes our cars, a family business. I must have exchanged, I don’t know, over the years a maximum of 20 minutes’ conversation. And she just one day said: ‘I’d like you and Charlotte [Gordon Cumming, Evans’ wife] to know that if either of you need a kidney I’d be really happy to give one.’ Amazing.”
Then there were those who told the couple to forget about a transplant and opt for homeopathy instead. “It was astonishing the number of people who tried to persuade us that your kidneys could be healed.” With what – positive energy? “Among other things, yeah,” he says dryly. “My consultant said to me: ‘If you cut your hand off will you grow another hand? It’s like that.’ But there are plenty of people who will say that they know of people who have regrown their kidneys. When you ask for the phone numbers or names or addresses they are, strangely, unavailable.” He’s smiling, but I ask if it made him angry.
“Does now. Because I think it’s so irresponsible to suggest that these things can be an alternative to proper medical care. Somebody even suggested that dialysis might actually prevent our natural ability to heal our own kidneys. In fact, it would kill you.”
A couple of strangers contacted him through his website to offer one of their kidneys – though a man in Texas sent an email which said simply: “Mr Evans. My kidney. $100,000.” A consultant suggested he buy one from India, which he refused to contemplate, and all of his children offered to donate straight away, but he thought it would never come to that.
“No, no it seemed … just outlandish, really. Your every instinct is to protect your child from any risk, however remote. And meanwhile I was having friends offer.”
But none was a good match, whereas Lauren’s kidney turned out to be almost perfect, and this summer, with Evans’ heart beginning to fail from the effects of dialysis, she finally persuaded him to accept it. She was interviewed recently about the experience, and was upset that the article focused on the negatives – the pain, her scar, and so on. “We both want to help people to make the decision to do this, you see,” says Evans. “It is true that it’s major surgery – but you don’t want to talk about that too much really.”
Lauren is one of his two adult children from his first marriage, and he has a third from another relationship. Finlay, Evans’s son with his second wife Charlotte, wanted to give one of his parents a kidney – but he is only nine years old. A friend in Devon agreed to donate her kidney to Charlotte, a 53-year-old singer songwriter, but doctors have found a stone, so now they don’t know if the transplant can go ahead. Her brother, Sir Alistair, is also still waiting, and his wife Lady Louisa has only limited kidney function.
It’s at this point in the conversation that Evans becomes much less forthcoming, and begins to look uncomfortable. He has always taken full responsibility for the accident, but in a recent interview he revealed: “The cause was much more complex than has been talked about. I did pick [the mushrooms], but it was really two people, each thinking the other one knew what he or she was doing.” So what exactly did happen?
“I can’t really talk about that.” His voice is suddenly low and wary. “It’s too sore a subject.” Between the four of you? “No, between two of us. It was a complicated transaction, really, and it involved the two of us suspending our responsibility, assuming that the other one knew what they were doing.”
Because the other said so? “Err …” He pauses to consider his words. “It’s really hard to talk about. I can’t go into this, it’s just too much. It’s caused us too much pain. There’s an unwillingness to share – to take any part of the responsibility. And I don’t want to stir that up.”
He won’t identify the other person, but reading between the lines I guess relations within the family must be hellishly difficult. “Yeah, oh yeah,” he agrees softly. Can he see it being resolved? “I don’t know. I think maybe when we’re all better. I think that will help enormously, when everybody’s got a transplant.”
Evans’ latest book, just out in paperback, had been almost finished when the disaster struck. Coincidentally, The Brave explores themes of dark family secrets, and guilt, and the author has joked in the past that “Guilt is my subject!” He now jokes: “I’ve taken research to a rather extreme degree.” He’s not sure that he’ll ever find a way to write about the poisoning – but does acknowledge that his own life has, quite by accident, featured an unusual degree of novelistic drama. For this was not the first time he found himself lying in a hospital bed, confronting death, with an unfinished manuscript on his computer. In 1994, Evans was a frustrated film director, up to his ears in debt. A TV executive, he’d always longed to work in the movies – but projects kept falling apart, and the bank was getting impatient. The wise course would probably have been a second mortgage – but in a wildly inadvisable gamble, he had a go at writing a novel.
A friend read the first 200 pages, showed them to publishers, and a bidding war broke out which earned Evans $3.15m for the book, and another $3m for the film rights. What nobody but his wife knew, however, was that Evans had just been diagnosed with malignant skin cancer. He didn’t know if he would last the six months, let alone long enough to finish the novel. “The day after the operation, I was going round publishing houses trying to look suave and normal, and I was in a cold sweat, I was just dying, I was in such pain. But I thought, if I tell anyone they’ll think I’ll die.”
He survived, and The Horse Whisperer became the stuff of literary legend, one of the bestselling books of all time and a Hollywood movie starring Robert Redford. “For three or four years my feet didn’t touch the ground.” His marriage broke up shortly afterwards, in part destabilised by his sudden stardom, but his second marriage appears to be strikingly happy, and until the poisoning the couple led what looked like a pretty idyllic life with their young son in a medieval manor house in Devon.
He says he never suffered from the classic second book syndrome, or felt inhibited by his initial success. “No, if you start thinking about what people think of you, and what your readers want, then you’re on a hiding to nothing. You just have to find a story that excites and moves you and write it as well as you can. I think this is what’s happened to TV and movies; it’s all so bloody focus-grouped, and tested, and that rules out anything original. In the creative process I think good things come from obsessions, and trying to please yourself. And really the focus-group mentality has wrecked so much.”
Evans thinks every book he has written since the Horse Whisperer has actually been better than his debut, but accepts that he will never experience that sort of stratospheric success again. One of his books, the Smoke Jumper, was optioned for a movie – “But Hollywood has stopped making the sort of films my books suggest. It’s either big franchise blockbuster movies like Batman 10, or little independent films that cost a couple of million to make. The medium-budget drama doesn’t really get made any more.”
He has also learned to be sanguine about reviews. “The book business is such a strange one – and the very definition of literary versus commercial fiction has always seemed to me to be bizarre. One is defined by how many it sells, and the other by its ideas and so-called literary merit. And there are all kinds of assumptions brought to bear on this. So for example, if you sell tons of books you can’t possibly have any interesting ideas or themes or things to say. And on the other hand, if nobody buys the book it’s considered a mark of its esteem because nobody is bright enough to understand it.”
Does that annoy him? “No,” he says mildly, shaking his head. Evans is far too well-mannered to say otherwise – but I get the feeling he does mind rather more than he lets on.
When he sold the Horse Whisperer, he read newspaper reports declaring him “the luckiest man in Britain” while he was sitting in hospital being treated for cancer. Nearly two decades later, his wife is on dialysis in Devon and his daughter’s kidney is the only thing keeping him alive – all because of a few wild mushrooms. When Evans looks back on his life, does he think of himself as lucky or unlucky? This time I do not doubt his answer.
“I think that I have been amazingly lucky.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8f63943e3ecdb9ff8519b63264e12291/tumblr_ml97wgkMos1rlifcko1_500.jpg)
