It is tricky to get an unreliable narrator right.

Catcher in the Rye is the model, I suppose. “But it requires judgement, as you try to find an engaging voice to offer the reader fresh-seeming ways to hate the world. “It is very easy to believe in someone who has a million ways in which they feel superior to their surroundings, especially when you know they are wrong,” Dunthorne said. So what is the appeal for Dunthorne of the deadpan, misanthropic voice of such anti-heroes? In the narrative, Ray keeps up a critical internal commentary on the world around him, targeting estate agents, open marriages and the threat posed by sensitive men. Things generally seem to be getting more modest and more destructive.” I don’t know if this is just my life, but everything seems to be narrowing. But the final thing is so short it is almost not a novel. “The novel was twice as long at one point. The Adulterants marks something of a minimalist turn in his career. “Maybe a prequel might be possible one day, if I could make a younger boy the centre of that kind of story.” “People have asked me to write a sequel,” said Dunthorne. The novel told the story of an unpopular Welsh schoolboy, Oliver Tate, and his growing feeling for his friend Jordana. “I am famous through my connection to the world of the film.” “Although there are a lot of people who know me through Submarine, I certainly think that book would not have made me well-known on its own,” he said.

Richard Ayoade’s 2010 film of Submarine raised Dunthorne’s profile exponentially. Now he seems to be sleeping.” It's tricky to get an unreliable narrator right “The birth of my son ousted me from my study and then up until just before Christmas I was really on the edge. He became a father to his first child, Lorne, last summer. “It took more out of me than the others have done.”ĭunthorne’s second novel, Wild Abandon, came out in 2011, but the progress of The Adulterants, which is about “stalled masculinity” and facing up to parenthood, was slowed further by a change to his lifestyle. “It seems to be getting harder each time, which is really disappointing,” he said. In his first interview ahead of the book’s publication, Dunthorne, 35, told the Observer why creating the darkly funny story took so long.

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