The poet, novelist and playwright on family, Britain’s child soldiers and hating novels set in Hampstead (and then writing one)
From a distance, Owen Sheers’s new novel appears to be missing a title; the cover looks bare but for the image of a flight of stairs, black against a backdrop of bilious yellow, and it’s not until you have the book in your hands that you make out the words lacquered over the top. Tip it to the light and “I Saw a Man” gleams into view like heat haze over tarmac. Put the book back on the shelf and it sinks back into the picture, leaving you wondering whether you saw anything at all.
The title is taken from the opening verse of Hughes Mearns’s well-known “Antigonish”, which Sheers quotes at the beginning of his novel: “Yesterday, upon the stair,” it goes, “I met a man who wasn’t there./ He wasn’t there again today/ I wish, I wish he’d go away…” It’s a queer little poem, shifting back and forth between witty epigram and soured, creepy nursery rhyme, and the cover realises it beautifully. But it’s also a neat metaphor for the provisional, ambiguous story Sheers has written.
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