The Auguste is a complex novel, what would you say is the major theme?
Keith Blackburn: A young man named Algy Tuckett, aged 22, wakes up one October morning in 1932 to discover he has turned into an old clown. He could also be an alcoholic with all the empty whisky bottles he finds under his bed.

His first urge is to leave his room, anxious to get to work on time, and hopefully see a doctor to sort his problem.

But then, seeing that the whole outside environment has changed and realizing this is a dream, he immediately tries to return to his room and his bed in a bid to awake again back to normality.

The book then becomes a kind of pilgrim’s progress as he meets various bizarre characters who distract him from his aim.

Throughout the novel there are hints at symbolism but these could merely be part of the performance. Scenes are enacted as though in a film studio, the actors reading their lines before the camera. The Auguste is the sad clown who tries to imitate the acts only to get in the way. Yet he is a romantic, a poet yearning for Lumina, the beautiful young lady he sees as the love of his life, only to be thwarted as things go against him.

Gradually his belief that he is a young man trapped in the old clown’s body begins to fade. There is to be no return to his bed, especially when he sees the house where he lodges being demolished. He is left to face whatever fate bestows, and if it is a dream, then it could be that of an old man as he dies to awake from his transformation.

How much of yourself do you see in Algy Tuckett?
Keith Blackburn: I was 26 when I wrote the first draft of the novel in 1970. The dread of growing old was there in Auguste’s metamorphosis, but though still a romantic at heart and perhaps a little wiser in experience, I have been able to take a far more objective approach with Algy, more the creative puppetier dangling the strings.

There are many allusions to other writers and performers in the novel, who do you see as your main influences?
Keith Blackburn: My first inspiration was reading the work of Gunter Grass, especially The Tin Drum. Further inspiration came from John Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the idea of Christian travelling through the book in search of the Celestial City. Kafka was also there, his Metamorphosis inspiring another ‘let’s suppose’ approach. Let’s suppose a young man in his early twenties, full of romantic notions and with youth on his side, wakes up one morning to find he has changed not into a beetle, but an old man with filthy rags for clothes.

There’s also a hint of the Commedia dell’Arte with Zillah and the man with two hats, and of course Lewis Carrol has played a small part, offering the ‘trial’ towards the end.

Algy’s final dialogue is borrowed, if ever so slightly, from the last dialogue in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.

Does being a painter help you as a writer, and in what way?
Keith Blackburn: In many instances writing is an extension of the paintbrush, painting pictures with words rather than paint. Perhaps in that sense painting has helped the writing, also the discipline of seeing the project through to the end.

At times The Auguste is very British, at other it seems very continental. Has the fact that you live abroad changed the way you write?
Keith Blackburn: I’m not sure whether this has influenced my writing, although I was able to base the first scene of the street beyond his room on the view from a room I had on the Utrechtsestraat in Amsterdam. Lumina uses some choice Dutch swearwords in her role as a mill-worker, and there are the ladies-not-ladies seen in the tents.

Have you had much initial response to the novel - what has it been like?
Keith Blackburn: I paid for a literary consultant to read the work. He said he had become so involved with the story he was forgetting to be critical. Needless to say, he gave his personal criticisms, some of which I agreed with and amended accordingly. As for the work in general, he stated that it sometimes came closer to poetry and was full of ‘cleverly observed grotesque characters’.

Are you planning any more novels? Could you give a hint about what they will be about?
Keith Blackburn: The sequel to The Auguste, entitled Pilgrim, is already written in first draft. It is a fable with tarots, the pictures from certain tarot cards providing a backdrop throughout the book.

The last paragraph of The Auguste is the opening paragraph of the first chapter, the protagonist, no longer Algy but a young man called Ayeme, being symbolically born and following his own pilgrimage through the book.