'I want to lie'

Simon Mawer doesn't seem the sort to whom accidents happen. He is at ease in the cool living room of his house on Rome's hushed outskirts, his officer-class good looks and patrician tones combining to create the impression of an orderly existence; a life well planned. To hear him tell it, though, nothing could be further from the truth.

While the architecture of his life is conventional — boarding school, Oxford, teaching, marriage, children — the neatness of the grand narrative disguises some devilish detail. From the "mess-up" at school that pitched him into a 40-year career as a biology teacher to the encounter with a cliff-face that kick-started his writing, the real story (the one Mawer himself would tell) is riddled with contingency. These two threads — order versus chaos, impulse balanced by propriety — pursue each other through his fiction as through his life, intertwining and grappling down the pathways of his novels.

Mawer is funny on the vagaries of life as a midlist author: His publishing history reads like a tour of the industry's battlefields, with himself in the role of cannon fodder. The Gospel of Judas was, until The Glass Room, his only commercial success. But it was Mendel's Dwarf that saw him come into his own as a writer. "I'm distant enough from it now to say it's a [very] good book," he grins. "I was fascinated by Mendel but he led a dull life, if intellectually extraordinary. So I had Lambert tell Mendel's story while telling his own. It wasn't going to be a biography ... I'm a novelist. I don't want to tell the truth. I want to manipulate things as I choose. I want to lie."

No time to take roots

Mawer was born in England in 1948; his father served in the RAF and his early years were, consequently, "chaotic. We went from one air force station to another. ... We had moved something like 20 times in 22 years." The family's first foreign tour, to Cyprus, cemented his sense of deracination. "It had a profound impact on me. ... My first view of the place was thrilling: dust, hills, barbed wire, soldiers with rifles. I think that set the pattern for my adult life: the need to be away, the fascination with difference."

Casting around after Oxford, he found himself wandering into teaching. "Have you read The Magus by John Fowles, the bit about him leaving university and seeing an advertisement in the TES for a school on a Greek island? That is more or less what I did, except in my case the island was Guernsey. I had this idea that it would be wonderful: detached, strange. But it was actually intensely claustrophobic." Nevertheless, he has Guernsey to thank for introducing him to the passion that would dominate his life for the next five years. "Guernsey itself was overcrowded but its cliffs were utterly empty. I spent a wonderful year with a friend, climbing them."

Mawer fell for climbing in a big way. "Climbing pushed writing out for those years. I thought, this is better than writing or the idea of writing." It was an affair he revisited in his 2003 novel, The Fall, which netted him the Boardman Tasker prize for mountain literature. He might well never have picked up a pen again, had the affair not come to a dramatic and decisive end. "I had a fall, an enormous one. I was leading on an ice route when a cornice collapsed above me and knocked me straight off. I fell a full rope-length on a 150-foot rope and ended up out of sight of my partner, hanging upside down. When I managed to right myself and looked up, my first thought was ‘I'm not even going to try it'. And that was the moment I knew I wasn't going to be a serious climber."

Passion broken on a cliff-face

He was able to call down to a group of walkers and survived to tell the tale. But Mawer's taste for the high life had soured and he began to spend less time waiting for routes to come into condition and more visiting his family, by then stationed in Malta. "My father was Air Commander there and they were living in end-of-empire opulence. ... I was going out there, living in super-luxury, then coming back to Scotland and sleeping in bothies. It was a very curious split life." These shuttlings between light and dark surface in Mawer's work as metaphorical transitions.

But if darkness tends to win out in his fiction, in life the pull of the light has proved stronger. "It was in Malta that I met Connie, my wife. The Mediterranean has been home ever since."

It was in Malta, too, that Mawer finally began writing in earnest, spurred by a fascination with the island's most famous residents, the Knights of St John, a military-religious order founded in 1113. However, following a scuffle over work permits, he and Connie decamped to Rome, where Mawer took up a post at an international school. "Then I got involved in Italy, hillwalking, fatherhood and the writing stalled again, until I started on a story inspired by places around here. That became Chimera, my first book."