Factors rarely give interviews. When they do, it is not always the most edifying experience. I remember a television interview with Sir Anthony Hopkins in which he came across as smug, egotistical and rather cold.
Feet of clay are everywhere. My "spiritual" relationship with Jim Farrell, cherished for some years, has taken a battering with Lavinia Greacen's biography. But the man's novels, although so splendid, are flawed, and it is naive to expect him not to have been.
But I had been so sure of the connection with his spirit in his writing, for I had found a friend in his novel The Siege of Krishnapur, and finding a friend is a dilute version of falling in love. It is comforting and exhilarating at the same time, without the danger that underlies the more powerful and exotic feeling.
I found my friend Jim Farrell three years ago, in Stockholm. At that time he had been dead just on 17 years. But he connected with me through the pages of Krishnapur, with the subtle display of wit and the attitude to the world and its injustices that distinguished his thought.
I was covering a UN-sponsored congress on the sexual exploitation of children - pornography and prostitution. My emotions were at a high level because of the nature of much of the material we were given during the daytime sessions.
At night I hobbled back to my hotel in the one, unfortunately tight, pair of shoes I had brought with me. After filing my tales and trying to interest the newsdesk in them, I collapsed on the narrow bed in my cupboard-like hotel room and took refuge in the sunbaked plains around Krishnapur, where the British garrison, a wonderful collection of characters, was holding out against the mutinous sepoys in the year 1867.
The hero, George Fleury, was a slightly ridiculous figure, and the heroines were all, humanly flawed.
It was enjoyable, but the turning point into enthusiasm came with the description of one character looking at another "as if he were an orange rat trying to get into bed with him". Perhaps it was the fact of lying in my cramped cot, and visualising an orange Swedish rat peering cheekily up at me, but the humour struck a chord. From that moment I thought Jim and I were something special.
Oh, yes, there had been others. Paul Auster, the New York novelist, and I had been "an item" on my shelf for some time. Peter Carey, the Australian "magic realist", has a place in my heart. But Farrell seemed to be Mr Right.
When Krishnapur was published, its reviewer in the London Times said it was "a novel of quite outstanding quality". I liked to think that its author, whose promise was so truncated, also filled that description. Lavinia Greacen's vast piece of work has told me, at least, more about Jim Farrell than I really needed to know.