An Interview with Arthur Phillips

Arthur Phillips

Summarizing Arthur Phillips's achievements is not an easy task. Phillips is a versatile and ambitious author whose five novels have reflected a stunning variety of subjects, styles, and experiments in narration. What other writer, in the space of nine years, can boast of having written an eyewitness account of communism's dissolution, a fin de siècle epistolary novel about Egyptology, a Victorian ghost story, a Shakespearean play, and a novel about the idea and experience of music?

Time and again, critics have marveled at Phillips's style: fluid, literate, humorous, thrilling, and occasionally heartbreaking. As Patricia Zohn put it, "Phillips's way of describing things is so haunting you want to crawl inside the sentences and take comfort in their perfect metaphors and canny allusions." Time and again, one experiences the pleasure of being enchanted by the printed word. Time and again, one finds oneself lingering over a particular phrase or rereading a given paragraph, just to experience the joy of seeing what the English language is capable of in the hands of a gifted craftsman.

Equally important is Phillips's commitment to literature. One wanders through the criticism and can't help but be struck by the torrents of comparisons to serious writers. Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham, H. Rider Haggard, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, and, again and again, Vladimir Nabokov are among the authors cited. In this interview, Phillips cheerfully adds Milan Kundera, Italo Svevo, Edmund White, Raphael Holinshed, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung to the mix.

Arthur Phillips's works have been enjoyed and discussed on three continents and published in twenty-seven languages. Three of them are the basis for films currently in production. As if all that weren't enough, in his spare time, Phillips managed to be a five-time champion on television's Jeopardy!

Prague's (2002) re-creation of the collapse of communism in Hungary would in itself have explained its sensational reception. But there is so much more to Phillips's award-winning first novel, which tells the story of five American expatriates searching for truth, careers, and a quick buck in Budapest's chaotic first year of freedom. During that year, they fall in and out of the cultural and economic revolutions, in and out of a mysterious game called "Sincerity," and in and out of a variety of beds. In this interview, Phillips speaks about what it was like to live in Budapest at the time and what some of the more mysterious characters, especially a fascinating creation named Emily, were up to. He also explains how a novel set entirely in Budapest came to be titled "Prague."

The Egyptologist (2004) is an internationally celebrated epistolary novel recreating life in the Egyptian desert as the legendary Howard Carter closes in on the even more legendary King Tutankhamun. It's also a two-pronged detective story and, as Phillips explains, a gruesome if intricate murder tale. Phillips freely acknowledges his inspiration by Nabokov's Pale Fire, talks about the problems of working with dueling narrators ("one is a lying dolt, the other a doltish liar"), and candidly discusses his frustration with the misinterpretations of the novel's much discussed ending.

Reduced to its simplest terms, Angelica (2007) is a Victorian ghost story written by a novelist who admits, "I do not find ghost stories very frightening." But what a ride through Victorian London and mental illness the novel provides! Told from four narrative perspectives—though the reader gradually understands them all to have been written by the eponymous Angelica—the novel spins an intricate tale of ghosts, healers, murderers, social bias, and as Phillips explains, things even more sinister, things like deceit and incest.

The Song Is You (2009) is in a sense a novel about music—indeed, in a sense it's a tribute to music's ability to enchant and inform. Set, as Phillips explains, in the very immediate present, it sends the reader on a wild and "wired" trip as its protagonist chases a song, a woman, and a...