Melvin Burgess: Face Value

'This girl goes along with it and the guy chloroforms her and steals her face. His daughter has had her face burned off in a car accident. The daughter wears the face for a bit but then she starts rejecting the face and is trying to get another one.

I started thinking about it in a more modern context, thinking about the meanings that are clustered around it, like celebrity, self-harm, being thin - Michael Jackson and all those people.

'It's a beautiful but rather scary film, one of those films where it's rather unlikely and slightly surreal, and I immediately thought: face transplants, body image … but I couldn't just modernise it. Then I started thinking about it in a more modern context, thinking about the meanings that are clustered around it, like celebrity, self-harm, being thin - Michael Jackson and all those people. Then I made the story out of that.'

In Burgess's novel, the beautiful Sara wants to change her appearance by having plastic surgery. She craves fame and has the chance to achieve it when, during a spell in hospital following an incident of self-harm, she meets rock star Jonathan Heat, who convinces Sara that he will help launch her singing career. But Heat has ulterior motives. Extensive plastic surgery has destroyed his face and, forced to wear a mask, he plots to have Sara's face transplanted onto the ruins of his own.

Structured as a documentary - complete with video diaries, interviews with Sara's friends, and a third person narration in the style of a voiceover script - the details are presented so that both reader and narrator are unsure for much of the book whether Sara is Heat's victim or his willing collaborator.

'I sometimes get criticised because I don't necessarily want people to like my characters,' Burgess admits. 'You have to be involved with them rather than like them. But I did quite admire Sara because even though she's damaged and fragile, she's also quite a piece of work and she's going for it, isn't she?'

The detached style marks a departure from Burgess's previous books. In novels like Junk and Doing It, his authorial voice had seemed noncommittal, which, given the controversial content, made some readers - usually adults – uncomfortable. Here, his feelings on the subject come through clearly.

I disapprove thoroughly. Celebrities do it, and people want to be celebrities without being hugely talented or even attractive. I think our whole concept of beauty is a form of self-abuse. It's amazing that beauty should have ended up like that. It's a real travesty.

'It's about someone on the one hand having their face stolen and on the other being an accomplice in their own abuse, as of course people who have plastic surgery are.'

'Women don't want to be beautiful, they want to be something else. And also, it's about someone on the one hand having their face stolen and on the other being an accomplice in their own abuse, as of course people who have plastic surgery are. I think it might be a product of the form, because if you're doing a journalistic investigation you're being very open about it: a “God, isn't this awful” kind of thing.'

The journalistic technique was inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. 'That is set as a police investigation. It follows the last day in the life with flashbacks. It's really, very beautiful. He does do reporting. And it also reminded me of things that Kurt Vonnegut has done, like appearing in his own books. I wanted to do that, appearing in my own book. I've got the coda at the end in a Vonnegut kind of way.'

Burgess found the format of the novel a challenge, and admits that writing Sara's Face was a struggle at times. 'As I get older and more experienced there seem to be more and more options, so I get it wrong more. As the books get more ambitious you're working on more unknown terrain. You can get more experimental, but you also have to pull it off better, or as well. And you don't know what you're bloody doing half the time!' he adds, laughing.

I got it badly wrong the first time I did it. I did it all through flashbacks so that one knew what happened and it was about how she got there, but it just didn't work. So I had to rewrite the whole bloody thing, and then I had to rewrite it all again!

'The journalistic style makes things quite distant. It doesn't bring characters to life, because you're reporting. So I inserted the video diary in order to bring Sara, in particular, to life. Everything happening in the last day didn't really work because it was unbalanced. The last day wasn't actually particularly significant. I also made a bit more incident in it, because it was all too [reliant upon] reported speech. You can't ever find out what happens in real life when you talk to a group of people about anything because they all have different versions.

'Novelists have it easy because they always pretend that they know, even in first person narratives. So I wanted to pretend that I didn't know for much of it. And that again is distancing. So it was like reading one of those very long newspaper articles where you read the first few paragraphs and you say, that's really interesting, then you read the next three paragraphs and you get a bit bored, and then you skip to the end to see what happens – or not. So I had to colour it up, and the video diary was one way of doing it, and the coda - that was there quite early on. It was to try to make the reader more involved.'

Although the novel ends on a cliffhanger, Burgess's epilogue goes some way towards dispelling the grim tension of all that went before, and it also offers an unexpected measure of resolution. 'The idea of changing direction at the end, I do like that. When you do that, it casts a different light on the whole thing. The first time I ever did that was in Junk, when you have a piece by Tar's dad. It sort of puts Tar in context.'

'When I started off writing Sara's Face I wasn't sure how it would turn out. You don't necessarily know. I don't particularly like happy endings, but I don't like them because I feel they're very predictable. But I didn't feel that was an ending that you might have guessed.

'But it wasn't totally happy, was it, because she went through that and she put herself through that. And then at the end she's going for what she's got even though she's paid with her looks and with her heart as well, I think. She sort of came through, didn't she? It's a coming of age thing in the end – sort of!'