Books: A natural history of Neil

English-born Wellingtonian Neil Cross is a busy writer. With several novels and a remarkable childhood memoir behind him, his career as a screenwriter is taking off. He's also the doting dad of two small boys and says the discipline of combining both roles has made him a better writer. Finlay Macdonald spoke to him as his most recent novel, Natural History, hits the shops.

The publisher's blurb for Natural History suggests another book about what we might call the darkness at the heart of the family. It's a theme your previous books have hung on, too. Is it a fair description?

It's fair, but not entirely accurate or at least not definitive. Natural History is a suspense novel which centres on a family. But really, it's a novel about the nature of fear.

Fear is neither a particularly subtle, nor refined survival mechanism. We fear things that represent no danger to us, because in evolutionary terms, a false positive makes better sense than a false negative: it's better to waste resources running like hell from something harmless than to hang around for something that, whoops too late, wants to eat your face.

Not much these days gets the chance to eat us, but we've maintained that precautionary fear response. We need it, to be human. Which means that a function of our humanity is the groundlessness of much of our terror.

Absurdity doesn't make those fears any less real at 2am, I'm sometimes paralysed by terror of things I know not to exist. But the intellectual side of me, the daytime side of me, knows that what we should fear isn't always, or even usually, the predator that's snuffling around outside the cave.

That's what Natural History is about. And it's about monkeys, too.

Have the personal parental paranoias you documented in your memoir Heartlands, and fictionalised to some extent in Always The Sun, diminished at all?

The disproportionate fear response has all but gone, although I suppose most parents never stop being anxious for the well-being and happiness of their child. I'm not sure if my more relaxed state is a function of improved mental health, simple parental experience or living in New Zealand.

New Zealand does have its problems, which recently have centred on attitudes to children, but on the whole it's a great place to be a child. Which makes it a pretty good place to be a parent, too.

How do you even find time to concentrate, what with running around after the children so much of the time?

Being a parent taught me discipline. It means, I've got work to do and a limited time in which to do it. There's no faffing around waiting for inspiration. Being busy made me a better writer.

Speaking of writing then, your latest book is a suspense novel and you also like the crime and thriller genres plainly you're not a snob about these things, then.

I've never subscribed to the notion that books are like brown rice or oat bran: something to be endured in pursuit of some ill-defined personal improvement. Nor have I ever recognised any formal distinction between popular and literary novels: the quality of a novel is defined by how well it's written, not by the nature of the story it tells: it's fallacious and vulgar to compare Smiley's People to Joyce's Ulysses, or Vladimir Nabokov to Elmore Leonard. So why try?

What is true is that a truly good thriller is a rare thing. Bad thrillers are easy to write and easy to publish; all that's required by the publisher is to slap on a carefully derivative cover. This is, essentially, how publishing works. It's no less meretricious than any other industry: if a publisher can sell you shit and make money, it will.

None of which alters the fact that life offers few greater pleasures than a truly well-written, plot-driven novel. This year I've loved thrillers by Robert Louis Stevenson, Graham Greene, John Le Carre, Michael Connelly and Don Winslow. And my favourite novel of the year owes a great deal to genre writing.

Give it a plug then.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It's a flat-out masterpiece, maybe the finest novel written so far this century. It scoffs at anything so beggardly as genre any novelist who reads it can surely but gape in awe, and wonder why they get up in the morning but its plot borrows a scenario familiar to readers of genre fiction.

But it's a genre that's been moribund for almost a generation. The last example I recall is probably Stephen King's The Stand. And even that, on publication back in the early 1980s, when our fears of annihiliation were beginning to fade looked somewhat anachronistic.

But our fears of apocalypse are back and The Road revisits, articulates and wholly redefines them. The Road is many things, but among them it's one of the greatest horror novels ever written, and certainly the most beautiful.

At the risk of sounding like your CV, you've got a new novel in progress, you're working on a new drama series for ITV and a new series of Spooks as lead writer; next year you're going to write a film for the BBC, as well as other film script projects here and in the UK.

Apart from finding the time, do the books and writing for TV or film exercise similar muscles, or are they entirely different challenges?

The two are about as different as it's possible for two activities to be, which employ identical muscles in identical ways.

A script is a recipe, the first step in a long process which requires a great deal of further creative input from a very large number of people, all of whom know their onions. A novel is entire of itself, and exists entirely between novelist and reader.

I tend to "plan" novels after I've written a complete first draft, telling myself the story as I go along. But a script must be outlined in advance or you'll find yourself in all kinds of trouble, the kind you can't write your way out of.

We've had Spooks on TV here. How would you describe it? Post war-on-terror paranoia-drama, propaganda for the clampdown state, what?

Hmmm. If I absolutely had to, I'd describe it as a post-911 action adventure drama. It makes for bad clampdown state propaganda, though. If we tell a story about Islamic terrorists, chances are there'll be deeper agendas at play national, international or corporate. Which is a coy way of saying that America and Britain have been the villains far more often than al Qaeda. This isn't because we're anti-American, anti-British, crypto-communists or pro-Islamicist it's because such twists and turns make for better spy drama. Say what you want about the al Qaeda death cult, but dramatic subtlety is not its strong point.

Of course, I should mildly protest that "paranoia" isn't a neutral term. The recent attacks on London and Glasgow failed, but the attacks in July 2005 didn't. It's a certainty that more attacks are on the way. If you're resident in Britain, the fear that you (or someone you love) might be the victim of such an attack is thus more of an anxiety than a paranoia a term which implies a level of delusion.

This level of anxiety doesn't really exist in New Zealand, which is a fine thing. In fact, this anxiety barely intrudes on life as it is actually lived in Britain, which is also a fine thing. But it is real anxiety, and Spooks reflects that. Which is a fine thing, too.

What about your own politics, then? You make drama out of contemporary geopolitical reality, you must have a philosophical underpinning of your own.

I'm a slightly left-leaning libertarian in the European tradition. I admire Camus and execrate Satre who was a snivelling Stalinist pimp, an apologist for totalitarianism. Because I believe in the collective moral imperative of protecting the vulnerable, I recognise the necessity of the state as a means to redistribute wealth and provide health care, welfare and educational services. But I never entirely trust it.

I believe in personal liberty and free speech, which is inconvenient as it sometimes compels solidarity with those whose views I consider asinine or, at times, evil. Free speech entails the right to offend, the right to be wrong and the right to be an idiot. It does not excuse bigotry, but it does permit the expression of it.

I believe that religion (allied with poverty and ignorance the wolves which perpetually lope at its heels) has exercised a supremely malign influence on human history. I include in my definition of "religion" Christianity in all its flavours of banality and madness, Judaism, Islam, fascism and communism. I include in it, in fact, any system that lays beligerent claim to a universal answer. Such systems are inherently wicked and I consider them inherently, therefore, my enemy.

I believe that this is it: that all we've got is a few years, and each other. So we might as well spend those years being nice to one another, absurd as we might appear in one another's eyes.

You told me once that becoming a writer was the only thing you could have done is the reality what you imagined it might be?

Luckily, yeah because honestly I don't think I had much choice in the matter. It's not a life for everyone though. It's more solitary than people tend to imagine, and almost entirely untouched by glamour. You spend most of the day by yourself, typing.

Plus, to some extent you're always working even when you're doing the vacuuming or cleaning your teeth. But writing is what I love. Actually, it's worse than that: writing is what I'm compelled to do. If I'm not writing, I feel peculiar restless, anxious and irritable. If I can't write for a week or two, I begin to dream in violent and fearful Technicolor and worry that I'm going mad.

Besides all that, it allows me a great deal of freedom and as you've mentioned time with my family; the kind of time a normal job just sucks out of your life.

I decided to be a writer when I was a kid. So far, at least, it's proved to be a pretty good decision.

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