What inspired you to explore the world of genetics through the eyes of a dwarf?
There are two reasons for this, the one purely technical, the other personal—I needed a sharp, clear genetic condition for my protagonist, and there is no genetic condition sharper or clearer than achondroplasia. It is caused by a simple point mutation, has virtually no environmental component to it, and is obvious in its effects. The personal reason is that some years ago I had a close friend who had the condition and of course memory of her brought the condition to mind.
How did your own experiences as a biologist influence the book? Why did you decide to express your ideas through fiction rather than non-fiction?
My experiences as a biologist obviously contributed to the biology. However, Mendel's Dwarf is a novel and I am, above all, a novelist. I feel, have always felt, that the real place to explore the human condition is through that most remarkable medium, the novel. I couldn't possibly have expressed my ideas any other way.
How much of the information about Mendel's life is historically accurate and how much is a product of your own imagination?
Little is known about Mendel's life beyond matters of rather plain fact. In that respect Mendel's Dwarf is factually accurate—dates, failure at his teaching examinations, the outline of his remarkable research, etc. However, the personal, affective side of Mendel's life is almost entirely unrecorded and therefore unknown to us and it is here that I allowed myself license. Just as I say in the book, Frau Rotwang is mentioned in one single line of the standard biography of Mendel; everything else about her is mine. However, an extraordinary thing about fiction is that it may reveal truths that a pursuit of facts can never unearth.
John Hawkes compared your novel to Beauty and the Beast and Kafka's Metamorphosis. In writing the novel, did you intentionally use elements of traditional fairy tales, and if so, why? Like Mendel, Kafka grew up in what is now the Czech Republic. In researching the background for Mendel's Dwarf, were you influenced by Kafka's dark, unsettling vision of the bizarre role chance plays in our lives?
I was no more influenced by Kafka than any writer is—and certainly not consciously so. Of course I was aware of the tradi-tional view of dwarfs in mythology and fairy tale and the circus; indeed I refer to all those in the book. But my main interest was in the idea of using a dwarf to speak for us all, because I feel that Benedict is very much an Everyman figure. He doesn't just speak for people with genetic disabilities, he speaks for you and me; because whether we like it or not, we are all victims of our genes and of the machinery that the genes have assembled for us.
Mendel's Dwarf is full of black humor, even farce. Did you do this for "entertainment" value alone, or does it serve another purpose?
I'm not sure what constitutes "entertainment value alone," and black humor is never merely for laughs—humor makes you sit up and take notice; it makes you weep the moment you've laughed; it raises the emotional stakes; it sharpens the knife.
Why did you include the actual details of Mendel's experiments, perhaps at the risk of alienating readers who have little or no scientific background?
Mendel was obsessive. He must have been obsessive to carry out the work he did without assistance, without encouragement, without support. In fact it's rather like writing a novel. I gave details of his work because I wanted to give a real flavor of that obsession.
In addition to science, your narrative is filled with references to history. Do you think there are dangerous parallels between the events in Europe during the Nazi period and what is going on in the former Yugoslavia and other areas torn by ethnic divisiveness today?
I think the historical prejudices to which some groups of people cling have been and are still one of the most dangerous forces in the world. Such prejudices are also entirely spurious and illusory because ethnic consciousness is invariably the creation of political ambition; not the other way round. So I am profoundly suspicious of appeals to nation, to race, or to culture, especially when such appeals are exclusive rather than inclusive. The most obvious thing about the whole Nazi nonsense is that its ideas were essentially absurd and yet a large part of a nation fell for them. We no longer believe in the concept of the Aryan race; why should we believe in "Serb" or "Hutu" or whatever other ethnic or racial flag is waved around? Or white or black, come to that.
You contrast Mendel's apparent indifference to the religious implications of his work to Darwin's attempts to reconcile religion and science. To what extent do you think each man's approach affected their theories about inherited traits and the public's willingness to accept them? Do you think it is possible for scientists to have faith in the unknowable?
I don't think Darwin did attempt to reconcile religion and science. He started out a potential clergyman and ended up a declared agnostic (a term, incidentally, that was invented by his supporter Huxley). I think Mendel might well have harbored similar doubts at times during his life, and indeed perhaps he would not have been an intelligent human being had he not done so. Both men saw Man's close affinity with the animal world, and in the context of a nineteenth-century religious life that might well have given rise to doubts in Mendel's mind just as it did in Darwin's. However, it is important to distinguish between belief in God as a means of explaining the complexities of nature, from belief in God on philosophical or metaphysical grounds. No scientist is justified in adopting the first kind of belief. Nature must be explained in terms of nature. But science will never make everything knowable, and will certainly never provide an explanation of why it is all here in the first place. Whether a particular belief in a particular God successfully does that is, of course, another matter.
In his speech at the scientific conference Benedict says "At least the old eugenics was governed by some kind of theory, however dreadful it may have been. The new eugenics, our eugenics, is governed only by the laws of the marketplace." If genetic research today is only motivated by brazen capitalism, what are the ramifications for society?
Market-place genetics? It's already with us. Already the gender ratio of some countries is being upset by sperm sorting and (more crudely) by the selective abortion of female fetuses. And notice how the technically more advanced method removes the moral problem. That's the trick. Make it all painless. The process is sold in the U.S. as "family balancing," a truly wonderful euphemism. Rest assured that choosing your baby's sex is just the beginning. The future?
Well consider for a moment what the mass-market has produced in television—mindless uniformity. Can we expect any better for the human genome once audience ratings rule there as well?
© Copyright 2012 by Simon Mawer. Reprinted with permission by Penguin USA. All rights reserved.
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