Behind the scenes / Q&A with Will

Does 'no contact' mean I wouldn't get a phone or internet connection, and does 'things' include people or animals?

Hello Mr Bennett. I remember meeting you and it was a pleasure.

I guess I feel Hunting the Dark Knight is my most solid and sophisticated work, and that it represents what I'm most recently capable of -- that it is more advanced and in many ways better than my earlier books.

I am quite fond of the BFI Star Wars book though, as it's very nicely produced, in a series I had admired for a long time before contributing to it, and it's like my fond goodbye to Star Wars, a film I loved but a franchise I no longer care for.

Excluding graphic novels as you've mentioned a few of those in this thread, what are you five favourite works of fiction?

Probably the most relaxing thing I do is go to spas. But I do a lot of thinking in spas, too.

That is very tough -- I've certainly thought about it. It is partly difficult because the books I think of as my 'favourites' are often novels I haven't actually read for some time, so I'm reliant on my memory and my earlier feeling (which could be from decades ago) that they were really meaningful to me.

For instance, I always really liked Martin Amis' London Fields. I don't know if I'd love it now, especially if I came to it cold, for various reasons -- not least because it's very 1980s. But on one level I think I have to respect and value the fact that it was my favourite at one point, so it has an important place in my personal history and cultural experience, if that isn't too grand.

Through the Looking-Glass has also meant a lot to me, especially when I was younger (though I did get a book out of it myself, when I was 33). That doesn't mean I would necessarily want to take it off the shelf and read it now. The same would go for something like Hamlet. I am not just naming it because it's a famous classic; I was really into it when I was about 17 or 18 (and I'm sure it's influenced a lot of 17 year olds before and after me).

I also like detailed novels about everyday life and experience, like Orwell's Coming Up For Air, and Updike's Rabbit books. I like David Lodge's academic trilogy (Changing Places, Nice Work, Small World) and Jonathan Coe's novels like What A Carve-Up.

What surprises me a little, thinking about these choices, is that they are all very white male Anglo-American. I went through a period of reading nothing but feminist science fiction (Russ, Piercy, Perkins-Gilman, Le Guin) and I also own a lot of Carol Shields novels, but I seem to keep coming back to very dominant-patriarchal stories about 'everyday life' from a certain cultural perspective.

I would write about David Bowie if it meant I had access to all his personal memorabilia and could interview him at length -- the same is true, for different reasons, about Girls Aloud (actually I would probably write a book about any pop princess like Britney and Kylie, if I got exclusive access to their outfits and stuff).

I have been turning over the idea of writing a book about Batgirl, but that is really quite plausible -- I think I could probably write about the process of producing MSCSI as research/practice, at some point.