NM: In a way. But as the writer you are also—to extend your metaphor—the one who has to design and build the ship. What you bring to bear, of course, is craft, which you hope to apply well enough that no one will notice. You want a novel that moves well, carrying its weight elegantly. You need to establish a structure that enhances both meaning and motion. And to decide how to tell this story: what to reveal and when; which characters to enter and which to remain outside of. One of the most important decisions for me concerned Rajiv. To express his character, with its elusive, provocative, and touchstone qualities, I felt he had to be at once central and peripheral. So I decided to begin the book focused on him, and then to have it open out into the life of the town, and never to actually enter his perspective directly until the end.

Q: What other important structural/narrative choices did you make?

NM: Well, there’s a group of men in the town who play a big part in the novel. I kept them almost invariably together, as if they were a kind of single organism. Of course there are psychological reasons for this—people behave in groups in ways they would never imagine behaving alone. But with respect to the structure of the book, this is also because they inhabit a number of scenes that occur many years before the present time of the novel. To reduce the disruption and potential confusion of these shifts in time, I wanted to have these chapters feel very different from the rest of the book. So I tried to establish a unique group dynamic in scenes that all take place in darkness, in woods, among ruins, giving them a shared atmosphere.

Q: You once commented that “the only thing a fiction writer needs in order to convey all human conflict and triumph is a few people meeting in the same place.” Can you explain what you meant by this?

NM: Sure. I was really talking about character—which is at the heart of all good fiction. I think the reason all true fiction writers are more obsessed with character than any number of ideas is that no matter how great an idea—religious, political, or otherwise—it’s condemned to find its ultimate expression through individuals. Through character. Compare the town’s minister, with his conventional Christianity, to Lewis, struggling to invent his own system of belief. Who is more admirable? But this is not the fault of Christianity, which is about love and compassion. I’m not sure any idea, however powerful, could leaven, in any way, the petty vanity of that man’s character.