For such a young author, Tariq Goddard has already generated a fair amount of controversy. His first two novels Homage to a Firing Squad and Dynamo are set against the backdrop of some of the most crucial moments of twentieth century history - the Spanish Civil War, Stalin's Russia - yet both are shot through with a dark and bawdy humour, where the reader is more likely to encounter sex and boozing than theory and politics. Rather than taking the conventional historical literature route and mobilising his characters in such a way as to comment directly upon the wider social and political events, Goddard instead creates a polyphonic arrangement of individual perspectives with all their attendant selfish, venereal and visceral preoccupations. This separation of the personal sphere from the wider historical context has, on occasion, led to him being fingered as a literary chancer who uses history to lend his 'lad-lit' preoccupations some backbone. More seriously he has even been accused of actively misleading his readers about history. Spoiled Ink caught up with Tariq Goddard in London to discuss some of the charges.

Strangely enough, with a couple of steaming pots of tea in front of us and the afternoon hubbub of Fortnum and Mason's filling the background, it proves fairly difficult to keep Goddard on the subject of his writing. Veering deftly between Hunter S. Thompson and the dangers of being interviewed on Radio 5 live after a stag weekend in Ilfracombe, it's only via a thoroughly improbable conversation about the captain of Middlesex Cricket Club, whose mother apparently gave Goddard 'a bollocking' for setting two novels within cultures he barely knew, that we get onto the subject. Seizing the cue I prompt that this wasn't the only criticism he got in that respect. Referring to an interview conducted around the time Homage to a Firing Squad was shortlisted for the Whitbread first novel award, Goddard recalls his indignation at being accused of 'misleading people about history';

'That surprised me actually; it's something I'd never thought of because it's such a basic, dull objection. Fiction and history are different genres. If you want to read about the Spanish Civil War there are innumerable books. But I was making it up. This was fiction. The criticism was so dull and obvious I thought no more about it.'

However, similar criticisms followed the publication of Dynamo, Goddard's novelisation of the Moscow football scene during Stalin's dictatorship. He concedes; 'even the good reviews said it was a bit tasteless - a bit nihilist.'

This seems a rather sweeping criticism, for though politics and ideological discussion are rarely directly encountered in Goddard's novels, it would be difficult to argue that they aren't there. On the face of it, Dynamo is a story about the choice which Spartak coach Copic and his team must make as to whether it is better to throw a match to the state sponsored team, and be subservient, or to play to win and beggar the consequences. On a deeper level, it is also about the ability for the individual to make a self-determining choice in the face of the overwhelming, over determined plod of history: arguably a choice about freedom, and as such, political.

'People have very obvious expectations of what politics in a book should be, almost a semi-didactic view that politics should be black and white, good and bad, portraying characters that conform to these political and ethical stereotypes. Like a morality tale where the politics is dealt with in a very straightforward, crack-handed manner. Whereas for me, politics, as well as everything else - context, history - is subservient to the story I'm telling.'

Goddard however remains guarded about any attempt to over-intellectualise what he'd doing; 'I think this is quite a straightforward rebel book about standing up to authority. People must have wilfully ignored parts of the book to suit the types of argument they wanted.'

Goddard traces the sensibilities that inform his writing to, amongst other things, an anti-Nazi league march he attended shortly after the murder of Stephen Lawrence: 'I was never involved with the SWP or anything like that, but I was young, and I'd spent an entire summer trying to convince myself of a type of anarchist hardcore Marxism. I was just ironing ideas out, getting rid of the edges and bits that didn't agree, and marrying it to this really powerful version of existentialism'. My raised eyebrow elicits a frank nod, 'total logical positivist'¦really hard work for my friends.

'I was probably at my most keyed up. I'd read everything, not just by Trotsky, but even Bukharin, and I went on this march and got stuck right up at the front. The police had basically cornered everybody in some narrow streets, and this huge police charge just kept coming in. It was quite Arthurian, very sunny; you could see the reflection on the shields'¦The last thing I was thinking about for the following forty minutes was ideology.' Even whilst recalling such crossroads in his intellectual development, he displays a keen appreciation of bathos; 'Not until some six hours later, whilst trying to find a bus to Tottenham'¦'

Goddard connects this insight with the way he conceptualizes political and ideological concerns, and how this has fed into his novels, becoming a way of escaping the woodenness of overtly expressed theory in fiction. Questioning more abstracted formulations of ideology, he turns rather to its material, lived manifestation; 'the way it exists in the raw, at the sharp end.'

'What I wanted to do in the first two books was create convincing human subjects, which means treating politics indirectly, because no one outside of that small group of activists that exists in every epoch of history, ever treat abstract politics personally and immediately. These are things that you work your way out to.'

Goddard's first novel, Homage, can be seen as a working through of this idea. Set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, it tells the story of four republican soldiers who embark upon a mission to assassinate a member of the Cortez. Travelling to keep their fateful appointment across a landscape by turns comic and grotesque, they find themselves moving against the grain of events, gradually becoming aware that they are merely part of a much bigger picture in which their own motivations - childhood rivalries, unrequited love, plain cross purposes - are far more contingent and opaque than any purely political drive. Goddard waves a tea-strainer illustratively:

'In my first book, the consequences of the characters' actions were ultimately political, but they didn't begin as such. The characters find their way out of personal life into politics. They weren't at once and the same time political, they contributed to a vaster politics that they participated in. Similarly in Dynamo, the ultimate consequences of what they're doing will be political, and politics feeds into their lives just as their own lives contribute to a politics, but that is always one step away from where they are and how they immediately relate to themselves'

This gap between the personal and political is often dramatized in Goddard's novels, especially at moments of tension, as a kind of turning away from the abstract. In Homage Don Rojo's daughter Lucille awaits her lover, unable to link the sounds of nearby battle with the failure of Antonio to appear:

'Her interest in the bigger picture was intense but inconsistent'¦.the gap between her feelings and her feelings for the world too large for any dialogue.'

Like many of Goddard's character's she cannot connect her own interiority to the grander historical movements happening in the world. The author holds his hands up; 'These are people that can't. One day I might write books about people who can.'

I put it to Goddard that we have at points seemed to be veering towards a kind of existentialism. These are stories about people who are - when it comes down to it - essentially seen as constructed by their decisions. He agrees partially;

'Yeah. Defining yourself through you actions. Finding yourself on the spot. I wanted in both books to make that really clear; your own interiority is the most important thing in the world to you. And just because the outside world often pays no attention to it, and just stampedes away, it doesn't stop being the most important thing to you. That's why in both books I have really hard, pressing down narratives, that kind of ignore and run alongside, and beat down the care and indulgence the characters treat each other and themselves with... I wanted to get across how the world does do that. It's absolutely disinterested. A bullet will finish your life for ever - even though up until that moment you were the beginning and end of your own world. And I don't think the fact that the bullet can hit you, or that my narrative rides roughshod over my characters, stops you being the beginning and end of your world: you still are, and that's brilliant. I wanted both to exist at the same time without contradiction'¦'

He makes as if to push all this talk off the edge of the table; 'But you know, the third book is really going to piss over the first two'¦'

For Goddard keeps a lot of pots boiling. Not only is there a film of Homage to be made, but a succession of novels that are planned and ready to be written. The third, a work in progress entitled War Pigs is a more ambitious project, and before I can even ask the obvious'¦

'It borrows a lot of stuff from the Second World War. I'm moving forward into the present. It's about a group of men from the Bovington tank regiment who can't adjust to civilian life, and just hang around getting pissed and starting fights in pub car parks'¦ A bit like a British Deer Hunter really.'

In spite of the obvious parallels to be drawn with his earlier work, Goddard is keen to get across the changes he has undergone as a writer now he us safely over the other side of that 'tricky second novel' (He laughs - it clearly wasn't that tricky).

'In the first two books I was learning how to write, I'm not hiding that. All the characters were facets of my personality, and I tried not to privilege any one. I'd try and abstract myself as far away from me as possible, so that any kind of insights I had at all could be expressed through my characters, and I'd be left out, because that's the bit that ruins the insights, when the reader is reminded about the ego, that I'm responsible for it all. Now I'm more confident about this technique, I let my characters go wherever, make a real mess, whereas before I cared far more about precision and maintaining control.'

The sketches for his fourth and fifth books seem even more intriguing. Next up is a foray into literary horror - a genre he feels has 'been neglected for about a century, since Turn of the Screw.' As an aside he tells me about a charity bash he attended with horror doyen James Herbert and Frederick Forsyth. I agree that there's certainly material there for a whole new direction in horror writing, but he assures me that both authors were charming, even if Herbert displayed a slightly disturbing resemblance to some of the subjects in his own fiction.

It is with Goddard's description of his projected fifth novel - a Conradian odyssey into West Africa at the time of British military intervention - that a pattern begins to emerge. He accounts for the recurrent military theme partly in terms of his father's military career and partly with regard his early literary influences; 'Every writer has one bad literary influence, and Sven Hassel was mine.' Pulp war writer Sven Hassel, whose fiercely politically incorrect tales of rampaging Nazis and huge prostitutes, clearly had a big effect on Goddard's. Given that many family holidays inevitably involved a stack of titles like Legion of the Damned and Reign of Hell, it becomes clearer where his clear mastery of depravity originates (cf. Secret police sex party in Dynamo). However, Goddard's interest in war reaches far beyond the scatological:

'War is an extreme example of a raw experience you have no control over, like going to jail, or to Kinshasa, where you end up sitting on a runway for eight hours because you didn't know you had to pay a $50 bribe.

'Anything like that tends to give you a very clear idea of what you're like. All the experience you've been able to build up and filter things through, in a safe environment, becomes useless. Just like when you're on drugs and suddenly your entire intuitive system collapses and you're on your own, and you've got to work your way back out to the world again. War, and the Army, are convenient literary tools to express that, just as Irvine Welsh found housing estates in Kilbride places he could tell the types of stories he wanted'¦'

We're back on to an existentialism of sorts, and a curious paradox strikes me. Though both Homage to a Firing Squad and Dynamo champion a kind of existential freedom of self-definition, at the same time their narratives drive relentlessly on to seemingly implacable conclusions, with often grim and portentous implications. In essence, Spartak might make the decision to win the game, but the shadow of the gulag, the inevitable punishment for disobedience to the totalitarian state, haunts the closing paragraphs of Dynamo.

'It's what's called compatibilism in philosophy. If free will and determinism are compatible, then you're free to choose what you want, but you're not free to choose the basis of your decision. Which I'm not altogether sure I agree with. Maybe it's that only once or twice in your life you find yourself at moments where there is no overwhelming coercive force, at which points you exist in a true existentialism. But once you've chosen there's very little you can do about what happens next. Until you next get the freedom to choose, which is why choice is so important, because you can't make it all the time. Both novels exist in that space; that moment of 'fuck it, let's see what it feels like'.

Three hours later, and we are actively putting this apophthegm to the test. Goddard, myself, and Spoiled Ink's editor are ensconced in a pub round the back of Piccadilly. Appointments have been missed, friends offended, and time has turned into a formless mush around which a vague, almost authorial voice keeps reminding me'¦don't lose the tape'¦ But you know what? At the time it feels pretty damn good.


Homage To A Firing Squad and Dynamo are published by Sceptre

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