Perhaps fiction is the best way to challenge the hypocrisies and philistinism of our times. After all, the dehumanising effects of modernity has been a central preoccupation of literature since the Romantic period. Whether immiserated by urbanisation and the factory system in Dickens and Victor Hugo, or crushed by the state bureaucracy in the works of Gogol and Kafka, the modern hero struggles to break free from everything that is inhuman and reductive.

The hero of my novel is engaged in the same struggle as Frankie is in real life: he has to make sense of the world despite the best efforts of the authorities to belittle, confuse and isolate his experiences. And if he is going to search for meaning and true education, he knows he will have to do so outside the system, for the system is interested only in measurable results. Gradually he comes to realise that, in treating the young like this, our society is committing an injustice against the human spirit which is indefensible on anyone's terms. ‘To speak a language,' Franz Fanon wrote, ‘is to take on a world, a culture.' And to be deprived of language - the language of the wider world, and of the past with all its tragedies, sufferings and achievements - is to be cut off from the means of entering that world, or even discovering that it exists.