Trevor Byrne, author of Ghosts and Lightning, who was interviewed in our Talking with… series last month, sat down (virtually) with Tom Anderson, who recently launched his latest travel memoir, Chasing Dean (Summerscale).

TB: Writer, surfer, teacher, traveller. You’re all those things. If you had to put them in an order, which would it be?

TA: Hmm. Surfer first for sure. But then I keep thinking as a writer I need to get away from surfing in case I get pigeon-holed. But I am a surfer before anything else. It’s what I live for and it’s what led me to the life I lead. But then again I love travel, too. Gosh – I’m going to cheat. It’s surfer in first place, then a tie between writer and traveller, and I’m sorry to anyone who’s been in my classes but teaching is tailing the other three a little at the moment.

TA: My dad was a surfer and my grandfather was a lifeguard. The sea was always waiting for me. I was properly hooked by twelve, and obsessed by thirteen. Moving to Porthcawl was the big moment, because it allowed me to become a beach rat immediately.

TB: Is surfing a kind of religion? When you write about the act of surfing (which you do brilliantly) it seems like a transcendent experience. Also, the surfers in Chasing Dean seem to worship, in a way, violent storms and hurricanes and the waves they bring. The named hurricanes struck me as a pantheon of nature spirits.

TA: Yeah, they are, man. And when you surf you are tapping in to that energy. When it becomes instinctive and you get that kinaesthetic bond with a wave then you realise that what you’re doing is indeed transcendent. When surfing’s going really well for me I can end up squirming around when back on land, just mind-surfing on the spot. It’s as if the waves stay with me – and that probably means the storms that made those waves do too.

TB: Chasing Dean and Riding the Magic Carpet are non-fiction. Do you have any plans to write fiction? Does the novel form interest you as a writer?

TA: Definitely. I have to confess that there’s a heavy dose of fiction-dust in both the books and I’ve started allowing people to call them novels lately – especially now Chasing Dean’s out. You’ll remember you and I sat and talked for ages about my characters and narrator voice one time, back when I was drafting the book, so it was definitely something I took control of from a third-person perspective at times. A lot of the Beat writers used to write semi-autobiographical stuff which then got recognised as novels – and a lot of it was travel- and journey-related too. Dean certainly felt like practice for novel-writing by the end. So yes, a full-blown novel will come along soon, and probably in the third person too. Although I’m terrified of failing to find a publisher for it when the time comes, because I’m getting a name now as a travel writer. But then again great travel writers like Paul Theroux and Jonathan Raban wrote novels that did well, so it can be done.

TB: Do you really believe in Gaia theory?

TA: I’m open to it for sure. Let me tell you the thing I loved most about Gaia: James Lovelock, the guy who came up with it, was mauled by Richard Dawkins when the theory came out – who told him it ‘simply didn’t fit in to the theory of evolution by natural selection’. Lovelock took a couple of years to come up with an answer to that, and in the end realised he was looking at it back-to-front. He replied by telling Dawkins that Gaia didn’t fit in to Darwinian evolution, but that Darwinian evolution did fit in to Gaia theory. It was, in effect a bigger theory than that of evolution. I love that stuff. Planets are much more interesting to study than organisms, and to find out Earth could be behaving like one . . . I mean, why not? I’m really in to quantum physics too, because it deals with these massive, seemingly unanswerable pre-biology questions. Did you know an observatory in Hawaii spotted a star that was thirteen billion light years away this year? That’s insane – it’s almost the dawn of the universe. I love all that stuff. If we live in a universe where string theory could be possible, where there may in fact be eleven dimensions and where the E8 shape could be the Theory of Everything, then Gaia seems by comparison like a relatively solid idea. I’m happy for people believe all sorts of stuff anyway. You can argue all you want about the Big Questions but basically we inhabit and understand a ridiculously minute fraction of things at the moment, and that’s a really exciting thing to think about.

TB: At the heart of Chasing Dean is the topsy-turvy relationship between you and your surf buddy Marc. Who are your favourite duos (books, films, whatever?) For me, it’s hard to look past Withnail and I, and Jack and The Duke in Midnight Run.

TA: Well, that has to be Beavis and Butthead. They’re so dull, and yet they have this razor-sharp ability to understand each other and to strip things down to what they really are. You have to hand it to anyone who can say something like ‘your butt sucks, Beavis’ and make it seem meaningful. That’s high art. Then there’s Richie and Eddie from Bottom and Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber, which is one of my favourite films. The couple in True Romance, Clarence and Alabama I think they’re called, are great as well. In literature I loved Raoul Duke and his ‘Attorney’. Also, when a reviewer likened Chasing Dean’s duo to the guys in Sideways I went and had a read of that to see what they were on about – I thought the dialogue was really snappy. Of course I could go all deep and talk about the guys in Waiting for Godot too. Oh – and do Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde count?

TB: What’s the point of telling stories? Why do you do it?

TA: I think I believe in something like Salman Rushdie’s ‘sea of stories’, and I want some of it. Good stories often embody some kind of hard-to-explain truth about the world or our lives. I also get a real high when I realise a story I’ve told or a character I wrote has come to life in someone else’s mind – you know, when people tell me something about it that I didn’t know myself. I like telling stories because I think they come to life once you release them in to the ether, or whatever you want to call it. In a way I think every story is real once it’s been told.

TB: I can’t swim, let alone surf. Never mind sharks or legitimate dangers, if a meaty-yet-harmless fish so much as brushed my leg in the sea I’d freak out, cry, purposely drown myself. The sea and its denizens are a terrifying prospect to me. What are your feelings about it?

TA: It’s probably almost a kind of god to me. I’m totally reverent of it. You can actually develop a relationship with the sea. Its smells, sounds and rhythms get in to your soul. It’s one of the most powerful forces on the planet. Water gives life, shapes continents, coveys energy waves, carries nutrients, conducts electricity, runs the world’s weather systems – and yet it can take back everything in the blink of an eye.

TB: Who’d win - Jaws or Moby Dick?

TA: Moby Dick for sure. Moby would swat Jaws with disdain. One ate a few stupid tourists and then got killed by a wimpy, whiskey-sodden policeman while the other sunk the Pequod, man! Plus Moby Dick is a symbol, the embodiment of intense good and evil at once. Talk about transcendent … Moby Dick’s a metaphor, a concept, an entity of prophetic importance. It would be no contest.

TB: What’s next for Tom Anderson? Travelling? More books? As an Arsenal supporter, a year of woe?

TA: No way! We’ve bought another player I’ve never heard of – and this time he’s a defender too. I’ve got a good feeling about the football this year. Wenger’s magic is finally going to bear fruit. Meanwhile, I’m doing up a house over the summer, then going to take a look at things from there. I’ve got an idea for a teenage novel, so I’m going to bash out ten thousand words or so of that first. My agent reckons I’ll know by that point if it’s going to be for me. I’ve got a couple more travel ideas too, a novel idea, a sci-fi short story idea. I’d love to write a play or script one day too as I love dialogue – although the reality will be that I have to also think of the commercial viability, marketability, what’s best for me as a writer and all that mambo ja-hambo. I’m going to decide over some surfing, and maybe a trip or two. Once the poxy house is done, that is.

Previously: Josh Lyon talks with Trevor Byrne.

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