John Lanchester: The acclaimed novelist on secrets and lies

"The thing I've always found with novels," says John Lanchester, "is that in a weird way they're not difficult. They're either do-able or not do-able, either possible or impossible. I sometimes think it's a bit like maths. If you plonk a bit of maths down, I can do it, but if it's got algebra in, I can't... I've had things that have gone into dead ends and just conked out."

Well, if he has, they certainly haven't been published. It's hard to think of many literary first novels that have created more of a stir than The Debt to Pleasure. On its publication 11 years ago, this cookbook-cum-murder mystery had critics across the land, and across the Atlantic, drooling over their desks and abandoning their keyboards for casseroles. Tarquin Winot, Lanchester's super-snobbish, psychopathic narrator, was hailed by Cressida Connolly as "the best character to come out of an English novel since Charles Dickens". John Walsh, writing in this newspaper, described the book as "a fully achieved work of art... a supreme literary construct that's also deliriously entertaining". His own copy, he added ruefully, was "flecked with stains of ragu and ratatouille".

Lanchester, a former restaurant critic for The Observer and, at the time, the deputy editor of the London Review of Books, was hailed as an heir to Nabokov. He had, it seemed, performed a rare feat. Offering a culinary and literary feast for the most refined of palates - a kind of bread-and-circuses for the British Library - he had managed to dazzle some of the fussiest readers on the planet. The book was translated into 20 languages, and won a clutch of prizes including the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize and a Julia Child Award for "literary food writing".

If Mr Phillips, the eponymous accountant narrator of his second novel, seemed like a less obviously interesting character than the prissy poisoner so obsessed with pleasure, his inner life proved strangely fascinating - and extremely funny. Musing on sex, the double entry accountancy system (as applied to the geese in the park) and the erotic allure of The Railway Children, Mr Phillips offers a suburban stream-of-consciousness which is gradually, miraculously, transformed into a moving snapshot of an Everyman. Zadie Smith said that she wished she had written it. Adam Phillips saluted a "contemporary Tristram Shandy". Germaine Greer, not known for her unqualified enthusiasm, described it as a masterpiece.

The Midas touch continued with his third novel, Fragrant Harbour, an epic tale of intertwined lives set over the last 70 years in Hong Kong. Once again, it garnered plaudits from the critics and was an international bestseller. Here, at last, was the evidence that Lanchester could do not just super-clever-but-perhaps-a-bit-chilly. He could also do love, courage, integrity and what one critic called "cracking emotional thrust". And now he has written a memoir. Middle-class boy goes to boarding school, reads English at Oxford and becomes the toast of literary London. Just how interesting can that be?

In Lanchester's hands, very, probably, but that isn't the memoir he has written. Family Romance (Faber, £16.99) is indeed the story of a banker who marries a nice Irish girl and produces a clever, bookish son. Like all Lanchester's work, however, this is a story in which the surface bears very little relation to what lies beneath. It is also a story built around silence. "Nietzsche said that ignorance is as structured as knowledge," says Lanchester in the introduction to his memoir. "I've come," he adds, "to agree." On questions of ignorance he certainly speaks with authority. When she died in 1998, he discovered not only, as he suspected, that she had been a nun, but that she was nine years older than he thought

Julia Gunnigun, alias Sister Eucharia and Mrs Bill Lanchester, spent 15 years in convents before plucking up the courage, at 38, to go out into the world. When she met, and fell in love with, Bill, John's dreamy, sweet father, she feared that he wouldn't marry her if he knew her real age. And so, systematically, she set out to wipe out her history. Using her younger sister's birth certificate, she obtained a new passport, and new papers, with a new birth date. And for the next 37 years, she kept her mouth shut.

"I always thought that I would want to write about my parents," Lanchester tells me, over tea and scones in Soho, "even though I didn't know anything like the full story... The research that proves the existence of the unconscious shows that people react quite strongly to images before they consciously form a thought. When [my wife] Miranda said 'there's this thing about your mother', there was complete surprise, but at some level I knew it was true."

In his mother, then, Lanchester discovered yet another unreliable narrator. It was only after completing a first draft of the book, however, that he noticed that his novels "all concern people who can't quite bring themselves to tell the truth about their own lives". Now, at last, he understood why. "I was left," he tells me, "with the strong feeling that the unconscious was always the strongest component in any transaction and that the unspoken things in human relationships were often the main part of it... Something you can't say takes on extraordinary importance. The 'Do Not Enter' sign on a conversational area or part of the mind turns into Bluebeard's castle."

Lanchester speaks, and writes, as one thoroughly imbued with the work, and insights, of Freud. By the end of his adolescence he was, he says, " about as far out of touch with my emotions as it is humanly possible to be". It was after his father died, while he was at Oxford, that he had a breakdown. His descriptions of the chronic anxiety he experienced at this time, and the full-blown panic attacks it gave rise to, are among the most vivid I have read. It was therapy, he says, which helped make him "more human". It was therapy that enabled him to address his emotions, to manage (but not eliminate) his anxieties - and to write.

The title of Family Romance comes, he explains, from Freud's dictum " about children having a family romance about their parents being more interesting than they are" - a fantasy which, in his own case, proved entirely unnecessary. It also comes, of course, from the word's meaning as a love story, and also a lie. "It was," he says, "the doubleness of it that appealed to me". As a story alone, it is hugely absorbing. As a study of silence, and its ripples through a family, it is utterly fascinating.

It's a story he feels he couldn't have told if he hadn't written his novels. "Jonathan Raban always says that 'facio', for fiction, means to make," he says, "it doesn't mean to invent. In that sense, having written fiction is very useful. I felt that I brought things that were useful in terms of how to tell the story and how to make the characters alive... Having a kind of sense of the map of it, how to do it, made it easier. I think it would have been emotionally overwhelming just to pitch in and do it and not know how."

In a piece he wrote at the time of the publication of Fragrant Harbour, a novel which drew heavily on the experiences of his grandparents in Hong Kong, Lanchester said that "reality is good for providing hints and leads, but bad at supplying the whole story". In Family Romance, he expresses the wish, at one point, that he was "writing a novel instead of a memoir". Unable simply to fill in the gaps, he was forced to develop other techniques, ones which combine historical evidence with a hefty degree of speculation. Quite unlike any other memoir I have read, Family Romance reads, in fact, like a combination of history, biography, archeological excavation (with footnotes!) and psychological thriller.

The biggest challenge of all, however, was one that transcends questions of literary form. This highly intelligent, intensely private man was determined to be "fair as well as factually accurate" and to take full responsibility for a work that will inevitably involve personal exposure. "I've always had this ostrich-like approach when a book was coming out," he confesses. "I wished the book very well and at the same time didn't feel an umbilical connection. I sort of felt they were having their fate in the world. But there was no point in pretending I could do that this time... I have to face the fact," he says with a slight grimace, "that I've written it, otherwise it might well jump up and bite me in the bum."

Biography

John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. Brought up in Hong Kong and educated at Auden's old school, Gresham's, he read English at Oxford. He started a PhD on "Rhetoric and Diction in Three English Poets of the 1590s", but abandoned it to work at the London Review of Books. His first novel, The Debt to Pleasure (1996), won a number of awards, including the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Betty Trask Prize. His second, Mr Phillips, was published in 2000, and followed two years later by Fragrant Harbour. Family Romance is published next week. John Lanchester is married to the biographer, Miranda Carter. They live with their two small sons in south London.

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