Nathan Filer on laughter, loss and Latitude

Matthew Homes, the main character in The Shock Of The Fall suffers from schizophrenia. Was a desire to write about mental illness the starting point of the novel for you?

Mental illness is a part of it, it would be disingenuous to say it is just incidental that he has schizophrenia, but it wasn't necessarily my starting point.

It is a really big part of his life and for readers of The Shock of the Fall who perhaps don't have experiences in their life with people who have illnesses like schizophrenia, it becomes an interesting part of the book, but for me, because I've worked with so many people with that disease [Filer is a mental health nurse] there are other things going on in the book that are more interesting for me.

I was interested to write a character with schizophrenia though; I knew my protagonist was going to have it, partly because I think as an illness it is very misunderstood and misrepresented in lots of fiction. 

I felt once I knew I was going to write a character that had schizophrenia I had a responsibility to do that accurately and sensitively and not propagate the myths.

Matthew's guilt at the death of his brother Simon has a hugely negative impact on him; did you also want to write about grief and loss?

For me, The Shock of the Fall became very much a novel about grief, but that wasn't a driving point for me. What I knew I was going to do was kill Simon. I knew that would happen at the beginning of the book and inform Matthew's delusions and hallucinations later on. I didn't know from the start how much grief would permeate the whole novel and it happened through the character of Matthew's mum.

Susan Homes' life is shattered by the loss of Simon... I never felt like there was a time when I could let go of that, there wasn't a time to let go of the grief.

You have worked as a mental health nurse, was it hard to transfer that personal experience and knowledge into fiction?

Broadly, it was hard to do, because writing the novel was hard to do. There were many things that were hard about it. In terms of handling schizophrenia and drawing upon my work I was just trying to get as close to the character of Matthew as possible. Because I've worked with a lot of people that have this illness and other mental health illnesses for almost 13 years now, I suppose a lot of things - like the minutiae of what it is like on the ward - I was just aware of so I didn't have to concentrate on them; my background knowledge could then just inform the characters.

Despite the tragic things that have happened to him, Matthew is a very funny protagonist, did you enjoy creating him?

There is a lot more to Matthew than just schizophrenia; he's a funny guy and he has a wry take on the world. He's an artist, a son and a grandson.

Writing the book was a bit like an extended acting exercise, I was spending eight hours a day in his company. Matthew didn't come to life immediately; he didn't walk into my life fully formed like you sometimes hear authors say, he developed over time.

The book is very funny - was it hard to get the balance right between wanting to write about Matthew's condition delicately but also comically?

It gladdens my heart that you say the book is funny, because I believe it is and I think anyone that reads it will find the humour in it, but when it is mentioned within these very heavy themes of guilt, death and mental illness, the humour might not necessarily be talked about.

Matthew does have a lightness of touch and is darkly humorous. Those bits to me were probably the easiest bits for me to write. I've been to Latitude twice before as a stand-up poet and I've had a whole ten-year career in writing comedy before writing this novel. None of it was easy, but those bits came quite naturally to me and I really enjoyed letting Matthew's humour be a bit of a pressure valve in the book.

The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer is published by HarperCollins.

Filer will be appearing with Matt Haig at Latitude festival.