I emailed the author some questions. He replies:
I had a feeling word would get to you eventually. I thanked you in
the book (and thank you now) for all the material on your encyclopaedic
website. It doesn't matter to me how much is true and how much is myth
- what I find interesting is the whole shadow industry around adult
that informs and reflects what's going on in other industries and other
places. I haven't looked at it all that much lately, but when I was
putting together the book your work was both entertaining and hugely
helpful.
Now, to your questions. I hope some of this is useful:
>First, and most important, what
has gone wrong with Australia's test team?
I think it's more what's gone right with the English team. Our team
has grown fat and lazy by pummeling weak opposition - they've been dropping
a lot of catches for two years but getting away with it - so it was
only a matter of time before a good opponent would make them pay. This
England team - not the batsmen so much as the bowlers - is extremely
talented and has been aided by some good (Australian!) coaches (Rod
Marsh, Troy Cooley). It's all downhill for Australia from here. Warne
and McGrath are the heart and soul of the team, and they're 36 and 35.
Only two players are under 30. England, who only have one player over
30, might hold the Ashes for a while now.
>What provoked you to write this book?
Initially I wanted to write a kind of huge documentary novel about
porn, including a Reuben Sturman character at the top, working its way
down through producers, distributors, even the guy who drives the truck,
the camera operator, the performers/models, right down to the owner
of the sex shop and at the very end the consumer. I did a first draft
of the novel in that shape about five years ago. It didn't really work
- turned out that the character I was most interested in was the man
at the end, the last link of the chain. He never really gets written
about seriously, and he's the ultimate reason for the whole thing existing,
and there are millions of him out there. That kind of magic in the transmission
of how a porn film, say, is made into what enters the head and heart
of the man using it - and a 67-year-old doctor discovering hardcore
porn for the first time in his life in some office 10,000 miles away
- is what interested me. So he meets the porn star in the end, with
interesting results.