the allure for me about marcus conway is that he's an engineer and engineers make the world.d earth and then he hands it over to engineers. and engineers make the world, and i was interested in seeing this man, who has this complete involvement with the world he makes, and that. so that was what i found attractive about him. well, you talk about the engineering, you also dropped in god there, and of course the book unfolds on all souls' day, the idea that there are these souls drifting around all over the place. it begins with the tolling of the angelus bell and that bell seems to toll right through the book. i mean, you talk of its rhythmic character and the way it rolls on, and i suppose the sound of that as a kind of call to prayer, it really goes right through the book from beginning to end, doesn't it? the book is an hour long and it's suspended between two temporal markers. one is the divine marker at 12 o'clock and the other is the temporal marker for the one o'clock news at one o'clock, so the book is spanned between... it's an hour—long but in that hour he gets, he's