In his latest novel, about a Vietnam veteran, Javier Cercas set out to explore how war can make monsters of 'people like you and me', he tells Sorcha Hamilton
Are we responsible for what we see? Or what we read? Javier Cercas, the bestselling author of Soldiers of Salamis, throws his hands in the air.
"I'm not sure what the answer is," he says, "but perhaps we are, in a sense."
At a time when we can watch war unfolding live on television, Cercas asks uncomfortable questions about guilt and responsibility in his latest novel, The Speed of Light. The book explores the relationship between an aspiring author from Spain and a Vietnam veteran called Rodney Falk. At a pivotal moment in the story, the narrator is entrusted with the veteran's wartime letters, placing an uneasy sense of responsibility upon him.
Cercas, whose previous novel centred on a single episode during the Spanish Civil War, didn't intend to return to the theme of war.
"I didn't set out to write a book about Vietnam," says Cercas. "Vietnam is an excuse to talk about other things."
It all started when he was living in the United States, where the novel is set, when he came across a Vietnam veteran. One day Cercas saw him in a park, watching children, and began to wonder about his past.
"This was the scene that caught my attention," says Cercas. "There are some writers who know the end of the book when they begin, but I didn't know, I began with an image. My intention at the beginning was to solve a problem: how to tell the story of this guy, who is this guy, what's in his brain, why he became who he is."
A similar scene is recounted in the novel - which at times reads like non-fiction - when the narrator watches Rodney in a park. "The book is about our enormous capacity to do bad things. Salamis was about the possibility of heroism; this book talks about something normal, the fact that under certain circumstances, people like you and me, like Rodney Falk, can become monsters. I began writing this book because I wanted to understand the monster."
The awkward, sometimes intimidating character of Rodney always remains somewhat beyond comprehension, however.
"There is a big hole in the novel," says Cercas, who researched the book in Vietnam and Urbana, Illinois, where he spoke to veterans of the war. While the narrator attempts to uncover the missing details of Rodney's past, all the reader really knows is that Rodney - once a bright and sociable youngster - was never the same after his experience in Vietnam.
"We don't know what Rodney did there, but we know that he feels responsible and guilty," says Cercas.
Rodney's damaged character is an apt metaphor for the devastating effects of war. Cercas agrees that there are many moments in the novel when you could be reading about Iraq. "All wars are the same war," he says, echoing a sentiment in one of Rodney's wartime letters in the novel. "They have made the same mistake in Iraq, maybe worse."
"Ninety per cent of people didn't want to go to war in Spain. We said so, we marched in the streets," Cercas adds, before pausing. Smiling, he says he better restrain himself from talking too much about Iraq.
CERCAS STARTED TO write when he was 15, when he first fell in love. For an author who has had his work translated into more than 20 different languages, he is remarkably humble.
"I don't feel that I am a writer," he says. "When I write a good sentence, I think 'yes, you are a writer' - but right now I feel like a fake; I'm just talking about a book."
For Cercas, the many struggles and doubts of life as an author are central to his books. In Soldiers of Salamis he draws us in by the attempts of the narrator, a journalist, to piece together elements of a story. In The Speed of Light, the young protagonist has lofty thoughts about becoming a successful author, and finally "taking revenge" on the world with his masterpieces.
"I very much like the reader to share with me the adventure of writing the novel," says Cercas, who often uses a curious autobiographical technique in his work. At times the reader is overtly made to draw connections between the narrator and Cercas himself. The protagonist in The Speed of Light, for example, enjoys massive success for his book on the civil war in Spain.
"It is autobiographical; all novels are, even science fiction," says Cercas. "I wanted the [book to have the] effect of reality - and one way is to use some facts of my real life, not to tell my real life, but by trying to use my life to say something that is not personal but universal."
Our inability to learn from the past is an ongoing preoccupation for Cercas. How we remember and understand the legacy of war is perhaps the only way we can understand what is going on now. "
The past is the stuff we are made of," says Cercas. "We are the past, it is inside us."
The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas, translated by Anne McLean, is published by Bloomsbury, £14.99