An Interview with William Sutcliffe
Part thriller, part love story, William Sutcliffe’s new novel We See Everything is a powerful and disturbing novel. The stories of two teenage boys who never meet are set against the backdrop of a cruelly divided city. Those who see everything have absolute power. Those who are watched survive in a society riven with insecurities, sustained by the faint possibility that things might, just possibly, perhaps some time in the future, change for the better. There is an active resistance, but drones follow its members’ every move. Brutal airborne attacks take place without warning.
The novel’s cast may be modest, the characterisation intimate, but its emotional range is richly textured. Anger, elation, danger, risk, violence, hate, foolhardiness, affection, desperation, courage, despair, love in many guises – the writing draws us in, but in doing so reaches out into the world its readers inhabit, offering mirrors and windows, challenges and revelations. Some readers may miss the echoes and reflections of modern geopolitics, but William Sutcliffe has very deliberately structured his novel to reflect his personal views, bolstered by extensive research. ‘It’s so important to me,’ he says. ‘I really want people to read the book and think.’
The divided London in which Sutcliffe has set We See Everything, was a careful choice. ‘I wanted people to think about what it’s like not to be able to leave a place. London – the London in the book, divided and broken – is a fictional construct, but is very closely based on the reality of The Gaza Strip.’
Brixton, Camden Town, Kennington Road, Parliament Hill. Even those who don’t know the places will be familiar with those names. Like his previous novel, The Wall, which was set in a fictional town very closely based on a West Bank settlement, We See Everything is set in a reimagined London closely modelled on the current situation in the Gaza Strip. Sutcliffe had visited the area with the Palestine Literary Festival, Palfest, an experience he describes as ‘hugely educational, intellectually and emotionally life-changing’. He considered himself well informed before he went – the politics of the West Bank, the Gaza strip, the history of the refugee camps, the vast wall (twice as high and four times as long as the Berlin wall), the checkpoints, the settlements – but the reality was unlike anything he could have imagined. ‘It was shocking. Often terrible.’
So he went back, better prepared this time, working to see things from another angle. But the impact was still brutal. ‘It’s such a complicated subject,’ he says. He read more – The Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizmann made a particular impression. ‘Amazing descriptions of the impact of war in that part of the world. The more I read, the more I discovered what’s possible.’
The ability to kill remotely is an extraordinary and very new power
He became increasingly interested, troubled and informed about the way modern wars are fought. ‘The goal of every army is to dominate and control land while minimising the risk to your own soldiers. Drone technology pushes that to an extreme – you can see everything your enemy does while remaining invisible and physically removed. The ability to kill remotely is an extraordinary and very new power which has been used extensively in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. Assassinations are made by guys sitting in Creech Air Force Base in Arizona, who can go home at the end of their shift to have a barbeque in the garden with their family. What they do must feel utterly unreal, yet the killing and destruction is absolutely real.’
This “other self” feels very real to the millennial generation
Issues of moral authority lie at the heart of Sutcliffe’s novel. ‘Today’s young people – digital natives – construct carefully curated avatars in the on-line world which are better, happier, more successful versions of themselves. This “other self” feels very real to the millennial generation – almost as if they have two selves. Alan (the drone operator in We See Everything) is an expert gamer and for much of the book he’s proud of himself, sees what he’s doing as little more than a live video game. His activity as a drone pilot feels to him almost like a social media avatar. He is at first utterly dissociated from the consequences of his actions. As he learns that his targets are not mere pixels on a screen, but real people, his confidence as a drone pilot begins to crumble.’
Sutcliffe questions the quality of information telling us what’s happening in the world. ‘We never see the whole picture. A really big question for me is why we don’t talk about victims of war until they become refugees trying to get into Europe. By transposing the distant horror of Gaza to London, I am trying to make the empathy gulf shrink – to make us imagine what it might really be like to be a civilian victim of a 21st century war – by posing the simple but important question, “What if it was us?”.’
We See Everything is about living in a world in which nothing can be relied upon, nobody – on either side – can be entirely trusted. ‘A plot is a machine with its own logic,’ explains Sutcliffe. ‘I did lots of research to make sure I got it right. So much of what we know of war comes from a military standpoint. We see footage of military patrols, journalists are embedded with the troops. I wanted this book to present a civilian’s eye view of conflict. I’d like to think that what happens to Alan and Lex will make readers think, extrapolate from the novel how those boys must have felt, and then how they might feel in similar circumstances.’
We See Everything is a remarkable book, big-hearted, brave and compellingly written. Like all the best writing, it shifts perceptions.
Lindsey Fraser is a partner in Fraser Ross Associates, a literary agency she co-founded after working for Scottish Book Trust for many years. Her reviews of children’s books appear regularly in The Sunday Herald.
We See Everything is published by Bloomsbury, 978-1-4088-9019-6, £12.99 hbk
