Writers always seem to have some fantastically strange jobs lurking in their CVs, which turn up again in their work at some later stage. Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan's first job was as surreal as they come. When he was 21, he worked for a small magazine for the war blind. Part of his job involved taking sightless war veterans for walks across the South Downs of England, guiding them along with the aid of a clothesline pole.
"I used to read poems to them and describe what I could see," he recalls. O'Hagan was fired when he read the scene from King Lear about Gloucester being blinded, in a similar location to the play - near the edge of a cliff. "They didn't mind, but the authorities did," he says deadpan, with just the faintest trace of a smile.
Since then, other jobs which have appeared on O'Hagan's CV include those of contributing editor to both the London Review of Books and to Granta - which he describes as "a capacious bag for human thoughts and feeling" - and features writer with The Guardian. In 1995, he tapped into a source of people's deepest fears when he wrote his acclaimed first book, The Missing.
The missing of the title are those people who have vanished. Some simply dropped through the arcane holes in a society where people can vanish, apparently into the legendary thin air, and never be heard of again - as in the darkest of fairytales. This was what happened to the teenager Lee Boxell, who vanished from his Surrey home while his family were out visiting.
O'Hagan also wrote of women like Patricia Docker, who never came home from a dance in Glasgow's Barrowlands dancehall, and of women who went missing - and were unmissed until their bodies were discovered years later, secreted under the innocuous domestic suburbia of patios and neat gardens, like the victims of Fred West.
O'Hagan spent two years researching this book, which is both moving and lyrical without ever straying into the regions of voyeurism: an intricate cartography of absences. To read it is to feel disorientated and challenged about the geography of society: that you have been taken under a coat and walked through your neighbourhood, knowing you were going somewhere you should know, yet not being able to identify exactly where it was you were.
"It's a strange, odd first book," O'Hagan says. He admits to being overwhelmed at how successful it was, and shrugs off its success - "I think too much was laid on it." Yet the fact is that The Missing was exceptionally successful for a non-fiction book, shortlisted for several awards, with sections made into documentaries both for radio and television.
"It's a book about urban atmosphere. The people in it were undocumented people. You look at some of the women Fred West murdered. Nobody missed them. By the time of the West trial, they had just become names; completely objectified. It was as if they had been denied their existence twice over; once by criminals and the second time by the media."
He took the bus to London the day after he graduated from Strathclyde University. "I always knew that I'd go there one day and that I'd never come back," he explains simply. "I wanted to make London my place, to disappear into it." A decade on, he still lives there.
Andrew O'Hagan has just published his first novel, Our Fathers. He commutes with style between the non-fiction of The Missing, the extended reportage-style features for the Guardian, and the fictional characters in his Glasgow-set novel. "I think the genesis of that novel came out of listening to the stories that the war veterans told me in that first job," he says. "The dimensions these really old men had lived through."
Our Fathers examines the story of three generations of Scottish men: grandfather socialist Hugh, his alcoholic, negative son Robert, and his wary, complex grandson Jamie. Each of them is defined to a large extent by the actions of the others and the results of those actions.
As a young boy, Jamie decided to leave his abusive father and abused mother and live with his grandparents in their brand new tower block apartment, the brand new answer of the day to the housing crisis. When the novel opens, Jamie is returning to Scotland after a long absence: his dying grandfather has called him back to the decaying tower block where he still lives. The novel weaves the stories of the three men together; at times it tells the story of one family as closely as a documentary, but the stories are fictional. It is a haunting read.
"Thatcher devastated the world I grew up in Scotland. It'll take a whole generation to recover. You could look at the faces of the miners' wives during the strikes and see ghosts. They could see their whole reality, their way of life, just passing before them and vanishing. People ask me if I'm Jamie in the novel, but I feel more like Hugh, an affinity with that era he lived in.
"I've always been interested in the borders between fiction and non-fiction," O'Hagan says. "Of sending writing into some other place. You can never fake it in journalism, but that's what fiction is all about. I have some 18th-century sort of notion of journalism. I really believe in literary journalism."
O'Hagan's chosen media, fiction and journalism, work off each other; in the opening pages of the second chapter of Our Fathers, there is a long passage about the origins of coal: "layer upon layer of carboniferous fruit". The meditations on coal will turn up in newspaper form shortly. He is currently working on a 7,000-word feature for the Guardian in which he follows a bag of coal from its origins in a Polish mine across Europe to the place where it will eventually be burned in a British hearth. A similar recent feature on the journey of tulips to a London flower market "attracted more letters than any other article I've ever written."
There is something of the detective gene in O'Hagan, uncovering the stories of missing people, tracing the progress of bags of coal and bunches of tulips along the defined geographical and undefined routes of associated human contact involved in their journey. "It sounds crazy, writing 7,000 words about a bag of coal or a bunch of tulips. But if you do it carefully enough, and look at all the odd connections, it's about lives."
Our Fathers, by Andrew O'Hagan, is published by Faber and Faber at £16.99 (UK).
