In The Boyhood of Cain, Michael Amherst introduces a protagonist you won’t easily forget. Danny, a young boy who challenges authority at every turn, embraces the label of “precocious” when it’s thrown his way. However, as his home and school life unravel, he finds comfort in the presence of his art teacher, Mr. Miller (who grumbles about Danny’s love of Constable’s paintings), and a new student named Philip, whose unexpected attention captivates Danny in a way no one else has.

Amherst’s previous book, Go the Way Your Blood Beats, was a part-essay, part-memoir about bisexuality that won the 2019 Stonewall Book Award for Non-Fiction. With The Boyhood of Cain he makes his fiction debut, presenting a novel that acts as an update on classic boyhood stories but through a queerer, more poetic lens. We sat down with Amherst in the run-up to the novel’s publication to find out about its beginnings, its inspirations and the move from writing non-fiction to fiction.

Barry Pierce: The Boyhood of Cain is almost out in the world. How are you feeling?
Michael Amherst: Both really excited and, occasionally, quite anxious. 

BP: You’ve written a lot in the past but this is your debut novel. How did writing this differ from your short fiction and essays?
MA: I imagined it would be different. But I feel like my process is the same for everything, which is really inefficient and really bitty. With Go the Way Your Blood Beats, I just wrote all of these disparate bits and in hopes that I would eventually find an argument and that the bits would fit together, which did happen. I’d have imagined that, particularly with a novel, that would not be the process because I’d need a chronology. But that didn’t happen. I had a vague idea of a chronology, but I just wrote the different scenes here and there. I vaguely hoped that a through-line would emerge, which it did.

“…lots of fucked up protagonists who are envious of somebody else.”

BP: When did the novel first begin for you? Was there a character or a scene that wouldn’t leave your head until you fleshed it out into the novel?
MA: Yes, the final scene was, in some ways, the first thing I wrote. It wasn’t even going to be included in the novel at one point. But, eventually, I felt that because it had been there since the very beginning of the writing process, I had to include it. I actually wrote a novel before this, my bad first novel which didn’t go anywhere. I’d always been fascinated by the Cain and Abel story and, also, the Anthony Minghella film of The Talented Mr. Riple –particularly that thing of, does Tom Ripley want to be Dickie Greenleaf or does he want him? So I started a bad first novel which focused on the blurred line between those kinds of things and then gave up on it, but I think it influenced this novel. In terms of the character and the voice, very early on I wrote the scene where Danny is talking to his mother about whether or not he might be Jesus. That scene wrote itself, almost. Once I got that, it felt so strong that if ever I was struggling I would go back and re-read that scene to get myself back into the voice. 

“I feel that if you name everything, you take away from some of the universal aspects of the story.”

BP: I think you’ve made a brilliant protagonist in Danny, this precocious child who you weren’t afraid to often make quite unlikeable. But, ultimately, you do warm to him and his ways. Where did he come from?
MA: I mean, I was a weird, questioning child, so that part very much came from me. Also, I love JM Coetzee and I’ve read everything of his. I love his Jesus trilogy and the character of David in those novels. I felt really seen by this irritating, overly questioning, interrogative child. I think children do question a lot. My sister has three kids and I love how much they question. But I find it awful how adults will, at a certain point, be like, “I don’t know the answer to that, so I’m going to tell you to stop.” I worked hard for Danny to be both funny and for him to be quite annoying. I’m pleased that he’s sort of likeable, but also perhaps irritating because, I mean, I think people are, and perhaps children more so.

BP: I’m interested in why you decided to write about boyhood. There has certainly been a trend in writing about girlhood recently, theorising about it, especially in non-fiction. Perhaps it shows a gap in my contemporary reading knowledge, but all the novels that I can compare The Boyhood of Cain to are from forever ago. Stuff like Tom Brown’s School Days. Why did you decide to tackle boyhood?
MA: I don’t think it was something that I was really aware of. Somebody asked me recently, why boyhood, not childhood? And I had no good answer to that really. It was only afterwards that my partner said, “Well, it would have to be boyhood, because it’s so clearly about boyhood, rather than childhood in a more general sense,” which I think is true. But do we have good examples of male relationships that are either not sexual or that aren’t sort of rivalrous? I feel that it’s almost encouraged that boys should be in competition with each other. 

“I’ve always been drawn to writing that leaves a lot of space for inference.”

BP: That is very true. In a lot of literary criticism, it’s common that when two young boy characters are very friendly with each other, there is always the possibility of a queer reading. Which, yeah, I don’t think can be as easily applied to tales of girlhood. I’m thinking of David Copperfield and Steerforth, for example, their relationship has constantly been read as queer. I can’t think of any examples of stories where young boys are friends that don’t have that queer or rivalrous context. I mean, often there’s a link between the two.
MA: I was interested in questions of sexuality and masculinity anyway, so they definitely did inform the novel. But I do think it was more a case of my protagonist being a boy, so that’s how that came about.

BP: I’m curious about your writing style because it’s one of those novels where you have to pay attention to the context clues. You don’t give away information readily. Where the novel is set, for example, is never plainly stated. Neither do you tell us when it is set, but you can figure out from the cultural references that we are somewhere in the mid-1990s. Why did you write it like this?
MA: I’ve always been drawn to writing that leaves a lot of space for inference. I suppose quite a lot of the writers I love tend to write in a way that leaves things slightly vague. Early on, there were almost no specifics in the novel at all. But I started feeling as though maybe I was withholding too much. I feel that if you name everything, you take away from some of the universal aspects of the story. I’ve been really pleased that people talk about the town in the novel, which is Tewkesbury, where I grew up, but because I didn’t name it, I feel that for a lot of people it becomes this generic small town that they can easily relate to.

BP: Were there any novels or writers who were a direct influence on The Boyhood of Cain?
MA: Oh yeah, Coetzee with the Jesus trilogy, and Boyhood. It’s funny, I went through university having never heard of him and only afterwards read Disgrace, which I didn’t really like, it’s one of my least favourite of his. The second book I read of his was Youth and I was just blown away by it. I found it so deceptively easy to read, so painful and so funny. I remember Martin Amis saying that Coetzee has no humour, but I think he’s really funny. There are also some influences that have been there for such a long time I’ve almost forget about them. Steinbeck’s East of Eden with the Cain and Abel connection and his wonderful symbolism. We read [Peter Shaffer’s] Equus at school when I was about fourteen or fifteen, which sort of ruined our tastes because the same teacher tried to teach us Jane Eyre later on and we just refused, we were like, “Give us something like Equus!” And, of course, The Talented Mr. Ripley is in there. Basically, lots of fucked up protagonists who are envious of somebody else. [laughs]

The Boyhood of Cain by Michael Amherst, published by Faber, is out today