'I like writing about sexual love because it is one of the few transcendent experiences that are available. Charlotte risks everything for love. Her view - and it is a view I have some sympathy with - is that if you are offered this one possibility of transcendence in your life and you deny it, what are you supposed to spend the rest of your life doing? What are you supposed to be interested in? Breathing?'
- Sebastian Faulks in a 1998 interview in the Independent newspaper
Life: In an age of reality TV and grotesque genetic experimentation Sebastian Faulks (right) remains a stubborn romantic. Always pictured staring intently at the camera, his gaunt face framed by his curly, blond locks, Faulks has a thing for the country that seduced Samuel Beckett and Milan Kundera: France.
When Faulks first visited France as a student, it inspired a yearning he could not explain. Eventually, he realised that it stemmed from 'a tremendous greed' for the experience of history, or rather, the recent past.
Faulks never desired to be one of Charlemagne's knights, nor to inhabit 18th-century Paris. Rather, he identified with the 1930s and 40s.
The France he saw - an old-fashioned, un-modernised country - offered him imaginative access to that era. Merely by branching off any main road in any province, after five minutes, he felt that a traveller would arrive back in the 30s.
Faulks' time travel has greatly enhanced his understanding of World War II. He condemns the 'cant' surrounding who did and who did not collaborate with the Nazis. In his view, the whole country collaborated.
