By Dr Zoe Bolton, published 24th April 2024 

Simon Mawer talks about the inspiration for his novel Mendel’s Dwarf, his fascination with the language of science and what advances in genetics could mean for the future.

Simon Mawer sits in his office surrounded, as one might expect of an author who has published 12 novels and two works of non-fiction, by towering, well-stocked bookcases. He is at his home in Italy, on the outskirts of Rome, where he has lived for more than three decades after falling in love with the Mediterranean as a child.

Mawer exudes writerly confidence but his path to literary success was a meandering one. He spent a peripatetic childhood as part of a military family (his father served in the Royal Airforce) moving around England and then to Cyprus and Malta. He was educated in boarding schools, an experience he initially detested, and went on to study zoology at Brasenose College, Oxford having been refused a transfer to English Literature “because there was no evidence that I had good enough language”.

After graduating from university, Mawer became a biology teacher working in the Channel Islands, Scotland and Malta before eventually settling in Rome. It wasn’t until he was 40 that his first novel, Chimera (1989), was accepted by the publisher Hamish Hamilton. It would be almost a decade later before his scientific background and literary ambitions collided in the novel Mendel’s Dwarf (1997) – his first major publishing success.

“Mendel’s Dwarf is the only book that I’ve written that has centred on science or biology, although it might creep in in other places”, says Mawer. “That’s because the science is obviously part of my intellectual existence, and I think that’s very important”.

The science in Mendel’s Dwarf focuses on genetics. The novel is narrated from the perspective of Dr Benedict Lambert, described, by himself, in the opening lines as ‘the celebrated Benedict Lambert, the diminutive Benedict Lambert, the courageous Benedict Lambert’.

The fictional Benedict is an internationally-renowned molecular biologist with achondroplasia (‘dwarfism’) and a descendent of Gregor Mendel, a real-life nineteenth-century Austrian friar who is often credited as being the father of modern genetics. The novel interweaves their stories as Benedict strives to isolate the gene for achondroplasia – ‘one single, hideous spelling mistake in the whole instruction manual, me’ – with disastrous consequences. The book brings to the fore issues of choice, chance, ableism and offers an often bleak critique of the dangers of genetic science.

“Any novelist, at any time, is always scratching around looking for a subject.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the inspiration for the novel did not initially come from Mawer’s knowledge of biology and his interest in genetics, but from a serendipitous 1993 visit to Brno, the home of Mendel, in the Czech Republic. As Mawer explains:

“The natural thing driving from Italy is to arrive via Vienna into the eastern part of the Czech Republic which is Brno, and so we [Mawer and his wife] went to Brno, and that was the first city in the Czech Republic that I’d ever visited. And of course to a biologist, a geneticist, Brno means Mendel, because that’s where he lived and worked. So I went as a tourist to visit the abbey.

“Any novelist, at any time, is always scratching around looking for a subject. It did later occur to me that there was the basis of a novel here in some way. I was interested in him, I was interested in the period, but actually dear old Gregor, his life story would be phenomenally dull if turned into a novel on its own. So I made practical decisions that, if it was to be a novel, it was going to be partly about him, but it was going to be about genetics because he’s the person who unleashed it all”.

Mawer was so taken with Mendel that, almost ten years after the publication of Mendel’s Dwarf, he published a non-fiction book, Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics (2006). But, in the early 90s, it was a coincidence that would lead him to conceive the idea for the novel. His visit to Brno occurred around the same time as the gene for achondroplasia was isolated. An ex-pupil sent him copies of the scientific work on the achondroplasia gene and, as Mawer puts it, “the two things came together” and Mendel’s Dwarf was born.

The science in the novel is informed by Mawer’s diligent research, which included buying a two-volume edition of the Mendelian Inheritance in Man which he subsequently abandoned “in a laboratory somewhere”. Now publicly available online, it is a catalogue of human genes, genetic disorders and traits, which is continuously being updated with the latest discoveries.

“It was the sort of thing that I got into, which I found fascinating from a biological point-of-view”, says Mawer. “You can probably see the effects in the book, because I found it immensely exciting to discover these things. And I got that, I hope, into some of Benedict Lambert’s mindset”.

“I’m a novelist above everything.”

Mawer’s fascination with the science of genetics comes through in Benedict’s narration. The novel is full of references that pay homage to the jargon of science: in-jokes for the informed reader. When Lambert takes up a post at the Royal Institute for Genetics, for example, the Director is James Histone – histones are proteins that DNA wraps around to provide structural support for the chromosome.

“Obviously, I’m a novelist above everything”, says Mawer. “As a lover of language I found all these wonderful phrases that fit so well into their context scientifically, but also into the context of the novel. So I just sort of peppered the narrative with them”.

Mawer also made a self-conscious decision to include footnotes in Mendel’s Dwarf to imitate scientific publications. “The footnotes are just a joke”, Mawer explains. “They’re a joke about academic writing and, of course, novelists never put in footnotes”.

There are also nods to key figures in genetics in the book. Jean Miller, the main female character in Mendel’s Dwarf, lives on Galton Avenue in ‘a semi-detached house of the kind that was cloned all over suburban England during the 1930s. When eugenics was at its height’. Francis Galton was the Victorian originator of the eugenics movement and a proponent of behavioural genetics.

There is also a joke that seems to be targeted at Professor Richard Dawkins, the high-profile author of The Selfish Gene (1976), when a teacher admonishes the class clown at the grammar school Benedict attends: ‘Stop talking, Dawkins. You never stop talking boy, and you never have anything worth saying’.

As Mawer acknowledges, the science in the book is now out-of-date, because of the rapid advances in genetics since it was published over 25-years ago, but he remains proud of the novel’s accuracy bar one small error that was pointed out to him by a geneticist at a conference:

“One day was about Mendel’s Dwarf at the conference, and one of the geneticists was given the task of reading it to give his view. To my utter shame he said, ‘I only found one error.’ He said, ‘It’s not in the body of the book, it’s right at the beginning. In the dedication it says to the memory of my father who gave me half my genes and much else besides’. As soon as he started reading it out, I knew what he was going to say”, laughs Mawer.

“Fathers do not contribute half your genes, they contribute only a Y chromosome if you’re a male. Whereas the mother gives you an X chromosome which is full of genes. The Y chromosome has effectively none except for male determining. The mother contributes all the mitochondrial DNA. Of course I just put that down without thinking when I was doing the dedication. I thought about every single other bit of the book”.

“I chose achondroplasia for very specific reasons.”

Mendel’s Dwarf was generally well-received by reviewers when it was published and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. However, the social scientist and bioethicist, Professor Tom Shakespeare (CBE), was heavily critical of the novel in his review in The Guardian.

Shakespeare, who has achondroplasia, described the book as ‘distasteful’ and the understanding of the social experience of disabled people as ‘utterly spurious’. ‘It certainly isn’t an accurate representation of life with restricted growth’, he wrote.

Just for a moment, Mawer’s effortless confidence slips and it is clear that Shakespeare’s criticisms of the book remain a sore point all of these years later:

“My objection was that one of the things that Tom Shakespeare said is that this is not how dwarfs think, or this is not like it is. However noble Mr Shakespeare is, and I am a great admirer of Tom Shakespeare in many ways, he is only himself, and Benedict Lambert is Benedict Lambert, that’s how Benedict Lambert thinks whether he likes it or not. That’s it, it’s a matter of your idea of the man. There are plenty of books written about people who don’t suffer from achondroplasia who think peculiarly, for heaven’s sakes, and I think that Benedict is fair enough.

“I chose achondroplasia for very specific reasons,” Mawer adds. “I wanted something that was massive, that was completely genetic. Achondroplasia is – in fact I think somebody says it in the book – a dominant gene and it has 100% penetrance. It’s merciless”.

“The alternative is what nature has given us, which is this horrendous sort of random.”

The mercilessness of genetics is something that comes up throughout Mendel’s Dwarf and, ultimately, contributes to the novel’s tragic conclusion. But does Mawer consider the overall message of the book to be about the dangers of genetics?

“The genetics bomb could be a disaster”, says Mawer. “We are going to get people genetically made to order. I’m not sure who it is, whether it’s Benedict who says it, I think he says it, or maybe actually that intrusive narrator, the author, says it but what’s going to happen is we’re all going to end up like Barbie and Ken, because it’s going to be a matter of taste and you choose.

“What’s the alternative? The alternative is what nature has given us, which is this horrendous sort of random, which is very peculiar. What Mendel’s Dwarf tries to do, is show the paradoxical position we’re in. And I won’t be around to see how it pans out because it is a long-term explosion”.

Mendel’s Dwarf is published by Little Brown and is available to buy in book stores and online.

Read our blog ‘Spotlight on CRISPR-Cas9‘ to find out more about current advances in gene editing. 

This blog draws extensively on an interview with Simon Mawer conducted by Professor Sara Fovargue and Professor Sharon Ruston, Co-Investigators on The Future of Human Reproduction programme, on 11th March 2024. An edited version of the interview transcript is available here:  Interview Transcript_Simon Mawer.