Now and again, I would hear the story I wanted to tell like a shortwave broadcast from a distant country, the swooping signal fading in and out, carrying unintelligible fragments. But at the moment I turned my full attention towards it, it would vanish.

My long apprenticeship, almost twenty years of it, had at least taught me patience.

At my desk, I made a list of the books I wanted to write: a counterfactual thriller in which Britain had been colonised by India; something about a Viking; something about a psychoanalyst on a spaceship. But each time I started writing, my nerve failed me after three or four pages. Whenever I considered committing to one of the ideas – and I think I knew by now that I could force my way to the end by an act of will – I felt a great weariness.

The problem I kept encountering was that fiction, which I had used for consolation all my life, had somehow lost its charm. Whenever I read a novel, I found myself resisting the necessary conspiracy between writer and reader. I was inhabited by a spiteful internal heckler who would utter a flat denial after every assertion of fact. ‘Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.’ No, he didn’t. ‘In the latter days of July in the year 185—, a most important question was for ten days hourly asked in the cathedral city of Barchester.’ No, it wasn’t. The  weak magic of novels was powerless before this malcontent’s jeering non-co-operation.

There seemed to be nothing special any more about the enchantments of fiction. On the contrary, in every area of human life, someone was trying to tell a story. Sports commentators, politicians, revolutionaries, religious leaders, business people, accountants, advertisers, actors – all were peddling selective and self-serving interpretations of the world. I told my wife I no longer believed anything I read in a newspaper, and she said I was driving her nuts.

Everyone was suddenly talking about narratives. These bogus narratives could justify invasions, absurd inequalities of income, murder, torture, and every kind of cruelty and selfishness. It seemed that people thought that by shouting loudly and insistently enough they could talk any version of the world into existence. I began to understand the peasant distrust of what educated people do with words, of the smooth and lawyerly language that talks you out of everything you own. More and more, I felt that true goodness must be mute.

Assailed by empty words, I longed for something preverbal, an unmediated experience of the world, and the cold water provided it. It told no story.