Listen to Sebastian Faulks from the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival

The 12th Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival began on Monday, March 31, with great style, a packed marquee and a tremendous air of excitement. Oxford has never looked more beautiful and – appropriately, perhaps – the loudest background noise to be heard as Sebastian Faulks started to speak was birdsong.

Faulks, who was talking to the Sunday Times fiction editor Peter Kemp, was engagingly self-deprecating in an interview which took him from his earliest fictional efforts – as a DH Lawrence smitten schoolboy – to his current work-in-progress, which he describes an English Bonfire of the Vanities.

It’s taken him more than 20 years, he said, to find a way of writing about present-day England: the great American writers, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike and co, have never had a problem in writing seriously and significantly about contemporary life, but the English tend to lapse into satire or comedy. “There is something about contemporary English culture,” he said, “that is just intrinsically self-parodying.”

Faulks’ best-known novels deal with France - Birdsong, Charlotte Gray - and he was fascinating about the research done for both books. For Birdsong, he followed the advice of the poet James Fenton, who told him that all poetry, and, by extension, all novels, should contain a new piece of information.

Few first-world-war historians knew anything much about the tunnels beneath the Western Front in northern France, he discovered…so bingo! A subject. Although Faulks immersed himself in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, read 20 books on the subject and thousands of documents, he breezily insisted that this really wasn’t very much research at all. We in the audience were duly impressed.

Faulks’ next book is a new James Bond novel, dashed off, he stressed, in a matter of weeks at the request of the Ian Fleming estate, which is about to mark the centenary of Fleming’s birth. He gave away no secrets about the plot, but insisted that he was an odd choice for the job: “No one was more surprised than I was. I told the Fleming estate, look, my last book (Human Traces) was 600 pages about psychiatry in Victorian times, no guns, no bikinis, no exotic vacations.”

The new Bond novel will make the Fleming estate richer, he said, rather pointedly: “The Fleming family are bankers, one of the richest families in Britain and though they have made a fortune, they remain very keen on making lots more money. That’s the difference between rich people and us.” Faulks, who lives in great style in Notting Hill, did not say how much he expected to earn from the book himself, though under interrogation, he confessed he had the film rights in mind as he signed the contract. At this point, his mockery of the Flemings’ avarice started to ring a little hollow…

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