‘No,’ he said. And he flew off on a tangent about elliptical curves and the nature of the blockchain and how he never wanted to be a deity. I turned off my recording head at that point and stared through him.
Outside the cafe, he shook my hand. I knew I would never see him again. For six months we had allowed each other to think we were friends – subjects need storytellers, and storytellers need subjects. There had been a time when he’d imagined that I could free him from his fictions and build him a new story in reality. I was a willing stenographer, thinking Wright was something perhaps bigger than Satoshi. He was the internet’s habit of self-dramatisation and self-concealment all at once; its new sort of persona. What he actually did may never be known. Either he’s one of the greatest computer scientists of his generation, or he’s a reckless opportunist, or he’s both. We can’t be sure. But there he was, standing in Old Compton Street in the pouring rain, saying sorry. When I left him, he was still talking, looking for a fresh incarnation and introducing his next move. He was standing under an umbrella, a smartphone buzzing in his hand, and I touched his arm before I walked off. When I got to the corner of Frith Street and turned back I saw he had already disappeared into the crowd.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wrote my first reported piece for the London Review of Books twenty-five years ago and I’ve been writing them ever since. That’s almost half my life ago, and I’m still just as keen to leave the house and find stories. There’s no gold medal for that, it’s just a habit some people have, but it seems reasonable to believe that such work sets up conversations that novelists might not otherwise have and that may not be a bad thing. In any event, the point about writing non-fiction is that you stack up a lot of debts doing it. I am particularly grateful, as usual, to Mary-Kay Wilmers, who started me off, and who encouraged these investigations into the human problems of virtual reality. I am fortunate in my publishers and editors – Mitzi Angel, Lee Brackstone and Eleanor Rees at Faber & Faber, Jonathan Galassi and Alexander Starr at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Jared Bland and Kristin Cochrane at McClelland & Stewart – and I thank them for their work on this book. I am also grateful to my agent, Peter Straus. The book is dedicated to Jane Swan, who has helped me from the beginning, and I owe a debt of thanks also to Rachel Alexander, Jamie Byng, Sam Frears, Catherine Freeman, Deborah Friedell, Alex Garland, John Lanchester, Neil MacGregor, Jean McNicol, Lindsey Milligan, Edna O’Brien, Stephen Page, Allan Pedersen, Martin Soames, Daniel Soar, Nicholas Spice, Harry Stopes, Josh Stupple, Inigo Thomas, Andrew Whitehurst and Lynn Wright. In different ways they have shown their friendship and pushed me on. If I went too far, or not far enough, it was because they stepped out of the room and left me by myself, which is where these stories begin and end.
Andrew O’Hagan, London, October 2016
About the Author
Andrew O’Hagan is one of his generation’s most exciting and serious chroniclers of contemporary Britain. He has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize three times and was voted one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. He has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. His most recent novel is The Illuminations (2015).
By the Same Author
fiction
OUR FATHERS
PERSONALITY
BE NEAR ME
THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF MAF THE DOG
THE ILLUMINATIONS
non-fiction
THE MISSING
THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2017
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2017
All rights reserved
© Andrew O’Hagan, 2017
Cover design by Faber
The right of Andrew O’Hagan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–33587–9
The Secret Life Page 22
