I don’t know how you define redemption, but I think yes, we do need it. But how you go about that – Boy! Not everyone’s a Gandhi, are they? In a very broad sense, my own perception of redemption involves setting a good example with my life. I think reflection is an important dimension of it. I think that making the time for reflection is also important.

My new novel is largely about this issue. So many people are trying to find self-fulfilment through whatever they do in life, but that’s just thinking about yourself and doesn’t take into account anything larger. Anything you do just for yourself can only end up smaller in so many ways You have to live your life on a few levels. One is the day-to-day. There’s another level at which you look at your desires in the framework of eternity: What is the impact of my actions in the long run? Is there something higher or more noble about what I am doing or what I know? What did I do to improve it? Can I improve it?

I have a friend in New York called Jacob. I ask him, ‘Jacob, Jewish people don’t believe in the New Testament, is that correct?’ He goes, ‘Yeah.’ ‘But wait, that means there’s no redemption.’ He says, ‘We believe you live on only through your deeds.’ This sort of thinking goes completely against my intuitive feeling of there being some kind of afterlife – or something. You have described the soul as a twinkle of light that hovers just outside ‘the meat’, the body. Christians believe in a bodily resurrection –

This is news to me. I thought Jesus was the only one that got resurrected. I had no idea it was everybody. What happens? You get your body back?

Well, the Bible talks of an afterlife and it’s not just a disembodied one.

Does it give any details? Are there clouds, or a castle?

An earthly utopia as opposed to heaven? Look at it this way. If you were to take all 5.5 billion people on earth and wave a wand and, suddenly, ping! everybody’s at peace, an hour later they’d be squabbling again. I think one’s utopia is in one’s head – I don’t think there’s an earthly utopia. Whatever your situation might be, I think everyone is striving for some sort of purity, some kind of order.

My brother just made me executor of his will. I said, ‘Oh, you don’t want to be cremated, you want to be embalmed?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely – in case they can bring people back from the dead with DNA. I want to have some of that ready for them.’ That was two weeks before cloning hit the news.

In my next book, I have one character from a really churchy family, and he’s being a bit too sententious and too righteous and parroting words without really knowing what he’s saying. And, suddenly, there’s two of him, and each of them thinks that they’re the original. It’s kind of fun for a while – and then an angel comes down and says, ‘Oh, there’s only room for one of you.’ Suddenly, they have to kill each other. So, they go on this mad hiding-and-killing spree, but the thing is, they both think exactly the same way and so each of them thinks he’s found a cool hiding spot – but, of course, the other one finds it at the same time. There’s been a lot of argument about how: you can clone a body but you can’t clone a soul. How do we know that? It’s all just speculation. We won’t know until someone does it. And it’s going to happen. You know how we people are: there’s some new technology around, people mess with it. Probably within five or 10 years.

I’ve asked a lot of people this and everyone seems to agree: ‘I was born and around five or six I started having memories and I can’t remember ever not feeling like myself.’ As you grow older, your perceptions change and you can get more pointed in various specific directions; but you still feel exactly like you. I don’t think that ever changes.

In New York, a magazine called Details is reconfiguring itself as a magazine for young people about work. They say there is no counterculture out there to present. What that says to me is that the culture is all about work: work, work, work, work, work. And if you have any time for reflection at all after that, it’s taken up by more work – or exhaustion. This is where so many people’s personal story gets lost, I think. That’s the reason that people are going astray: it’s not through any wilful act of straying, they’re just trying to keep their heads above water financially. That gets overlooked a lot. Everyone says, ‘Oh, it’s the times we live in – people are selfish.’ No, they’re not: they’re just working. In the ’80s, they were isolated cool moments; now, I think, we only have uncool moments. Period. People don’t have enough time any more to think things through. The biggest luxury now is time to reflect. I consider myself lucky in that way – but then my job is to put my reflections on paper. I go through life trying to do as much reflection as is possible in this culture. I don’t know what it’s like in England, but here in Canada nobody has free time any more. Things like arts and crafts and hobbies seem to have vanished. And then when people go to sleep at night they figure they have to spend eight hours working out their problems. That’s so sick! Life is all work. I always find it strange that people spend a third of their lives sleeping and almost none of their lives trying to figure out why.

Life does just become another commodity, yes, and I don’t think that’s good. At this stage of capitalism, life’s components are certainly rendered into price-pointed activities. All your needs – even some you didn’t even know you had – are taken from you and then sold back to you in some reified form. Is there any hope for the poor when to have a life you have to buy it? How can they ‘choose to live’? It’s a kind of no-win situation. People who have a lot of clock-time on their hands, like the chronically unemployed, are probably not enjoying it, because they’re worried about where they get the next meal from. I don’t think you find anyone who lives a life of leisure, at any level of society, any more. If they’re urban, they’re frantic. If they’re middle-aged and have kids and stuff, they’re wrapped up in that. If they’re older, like 60, 70, they’re trying to prepare in some way for the end that’s ahead. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who lives a life of leisure and pleasure. Have you? One of the most chilling moments in the movie Trainspotting is at the very end: he says, ‘Get a job, get a haircut and then I’ll be just like you.’ You realise, ‘OK, this guy is still screwed up on smack or whatever, but at least that was interesting. Now he’s going to stop being interesting.’

An entire culture in a state of despair? No. But certainly there are phases in life in which a citizen is slated for unavoidable hard-core despair – usually in the mid 20s, the early 30s. It usually lasts a year or so. It makes you empathetic to the plight of suffering unseen by the protective device of youthful blitheness. Some people emerge from this despair with the worry that they’re perhaps becoming bitter. It scares you. Even worse: ‘Nothing is working out, and going shopping is not going to make me feel any better.’ I think that’s a point that everybody reaches somewhere in life. I don’t think there’s one person who’s ever lived who didn’t say, ‘This isn’t working. I need something else.’ This is where religion enters. Me, I come from a completely secular household and a completely secular neighbourhood and I can’t imagine what it’d be like to have been raised in a family with church and religious trappings. When you get stuff that young, I think, it always comes back to you when you’re older. But a culture of despair – I think the despairing now is probably over jobs and the economy. You have to live in this world; you have to pay the rent. Ironically, metaphysical issues are on the back-burner at the exact point when they should be up front.

I think that goes back to what I was saying about how you can live your life solely for yourself and have self-fulfilment and happiness, or you can live your life according to some transcendent values, or with a code of ethics that gives you foundations to stand on. It’s extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to build a religion on your own. (How many religions are there? 20?) Jenny Holzer says, ‘Many things are decided before you are born,’ which is quite true. If religion is part of your culture, your society, your community, and you like living in that milieu, then there’s something to it and you should maybe have a look at it.

Neither. I think it’s more that six days out of seven you go to work, or you’re taking care of the kids or whatever your life is, and very few people can say, ‘Today I developed the Theory of Relativity,’ or ‘I’ve just written this song.’ Most people at the end of the day just have to say, ‘I lived my life.’ And that’s fine, but it’s kind of scary, too, when your life seems small or you don’t think you’re doing anything worthy. I think religion is important because it makes you feel that even if your day seems like it was small, it was big and you did something worthy. Even though you didn’t write a song or invent a theory, you did make some kind of metaphysical bridge or window.

Primarily transcendence and epiphany, yes.

That’s personal. It would be between only us.

Either Abraham Lincoln or Vaclav Havel, because they both have a lucidity of thought that is so rare that when you find it, you treasure it. Dressing like them would be a way of saying, ‘Okay, the world’s over, but look, there were some good things about it as well as bad.’

It sounds good in theory, but in practice it stinks. Imagine going to a party where everyone was exactly the same! Whoooeeee! I wonder if the world would be more harmonious if every single soul was both confident and eccentricÖ Good luck! I’m always suspicious of people who rely on their ethnicity, beliefs, hair colour or what have you as a major part of their identity. Like, don’t you have anything else going for you?

I think nostalgia is simply memory looked at with sentiment.

When you go to a dinner party, the chef very rarely sits down at the table. He or she has maybe a glass of wine and then they’re back in the kitchen. And they rarely eat because they’re too busy making sure everyone else is having a good time. But 20 years on your friend will think, ‘What a beautiful wedding it was, as I remember it.’ Except, now she doesn’t have to wait 20 years. Video accelerates that memory. That’s okay. It was going to happen anyway, so it may as well happen now.

It has to be set after 1920, for then people had telephones and cars and plots become accelerated and more varied.

I like the New Testament much more than the Old, probably because it has more narrative. I worked briefly in magazines, and a story would come in and then everyone would give it a read and everybody would tamper with it and in the end there was a great big muddle. Which is not to say that the Bible’s a muddle; but don’t we all just know that a ton of material has been taken out of it, to suit whatever agenda was popular at whatever time in history? It’s been so really heavily edited – dozens, if not hundreds, of times. It’s distracting.

I’ve never thought of that before. Yes, it’s bizarre. The issue gets scrambled when it comes to cartoons: in some shots, Donald Duck is wearing pants and in some he’s not wearing anything. So, are those naughty shots?

I have such a strange relationship with the body. I was pencil-thin up until about 31, 32, and decided I’d had enough of that, so I ate properly and went to the gym and I now have a body. But I can’t wear any of my old clothes any more. The fact that at the moment I’m wearing gym clothes, I guess, is reflective of who I am becoming. The US painter Georgia O’Keeffe used to wear only black and white and when asked why, her answer was: ‘I have to put all my colour energy into my painting; I don’t have to think about colour in the morning when I’m putting on clothes.’

I think most people wear clothes to amplify their good bits and hide their not-so-good bits. As a culture, our naughty bits are all covered. Heavy-duty experimentation with clothing and style tends to happen in arenas where there’s a religious vacuum – in youth culture, or places like Los Angeles, which is a city entirely estranged from its conception as a Protestant metropolitan utopia. I also notice that most people are estranged from religion from about 17 to 27, and I’ve noticed that the need to keep up with the latest fashion and whatever is something that happens in your 20s.

I’ve actually been trying to research when mirrors were invented. The first people who had good mirrors, not just little tiny reflective things, were the French, I believe. Its influence was enormous. Only the kings and queens were able to see themselves, and their fashion became so ornate and detailed. The aspiring middle-classes might have had them, but otherwise no one had mirrors. Mirrors really are like the wheel or fire: an unbelievably fundamental and transformative object. If no one had mirrors, I suppose you’d never quite know why people were treating you the way they do – because looks, certainly in North America, have a lot to do with the way people treat you. People would walk around wondering why no one looks at them, or why everyone does.

Well, in the States – and in Canada, though not nearly so much – I’ve noticed that people who are Baptists, ‘televangelical’ and fundamentalist Christians dress to look as antiseptic and free of orifices as they can. And they put that blue water stuff in the toilet bowl. I don’t mean that as a snide comment: that’s just what I’ve noticed. And in their fridges everything is completely orderly. It’s as if the more they add order to the universe and to themselves, the closer they are to the Christian God. I don’t know. I don’t think God’s dressed like these people. I don’t think he’s wearing a three-piece suit.

I’m not the best person to ask – I’ve been in a church once, for a friend’s wedding. But, off the top of my head, I think sin has to be recalibrated. There’s no real scale of one to 10: if you do one thing wrong, you’re screwed for eternity. Atonement should more closely relate to the transgression. The future and the afterlife are two different things altogether: if someone dumps toxic waste in a pond and then dies, it’s like, ‘Ha ha! I got off easy.’ I think there has to be some ‘Uh uh, you have to pay for that.’ Our role on earth is partly to shepherd nature, and keeping the world clean is fundamental. There’s no ecological dimension in any religion and I think that’s just pathetic. And I think religion should probably try to find a bit more fusion with the economy, the way people actually have to live their lives, and connect with the way work is going. Wow! These are some of the best questions I’ve ever had. I hope I’ve been answering them.