My writer friend Peter Beere, an excellent children’s author by the way, regarded Franz Kafka with great awe.  Peter once said to me, ‘Whenever I sit down to work I want to write like Kafka, but I always end up writing like Peter Beere’.  So when I first visited Prague, in 1994 I went straight to the Kafka house and purchased a post card.  On it I wrote, ‘Whenever I sit down to work I want to write like Peter Beere, and always end up writing like Franz Kafka.’  I sent it to Peter, who I know is not alone in his admiration of the wonderful works of Kafka: I doubt there’s a fiction writer alive who does not hold the Czech Jewish writer in awe. (I originally wanted to entitle my novel ‘Kafka’s Motorbike’ but the film ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’ put paid to that plan.)

Visiting Prague that first time I was overwhelmed by the beauty and magic of the architecture: Old Town Square with its fairy-tale churches; the Charles Bridge; Prague Castle and St Vitus Cathedral; many more.  Then there were backstreets full of what we would call alms-houses, painted in pastel colours.  The magnificent astronomical clock, the puppet theatres, the Vtlava River.  It was a magical city, previously hidden from us by the Iron Curtain.  As soon as I saw it I knew that I had to set a book there, in this place where the exotic name of Dvorak did not just belong to a composer, but was the name of the local baker, or butcher too.

So, I had my where for my novel, but I needed my when.  I have always been interested in being on the cusp of time-line change.  Electric street lighting, telephones, cars, motorbikes: all surging into the modern world.  Yet horses and wagons, candle-lighting, water from the pump, all still there in great numbers.  Prague was then the capital of Bohemia, a state under the thrall of the Austrian Empire.  Many of its citizens were of Austrian origin.  Kafka’s first language was German.  I have no proof that there were dissident groups of Bohemians wanting to free their city from the Austro-Hungarian yoke, but I’m sure there must have been.  And what better building for the nefarious secret police (secret policemen always being nefarious!) than Karlstein Castle, whose impressive towers and ramparts entered my writer’s mental storeroom the moment I first saw them.
 
You cannot walk the squares and streets of the Old Town of Prague, the alleys and passageways, or walk over the Charles Bridge towards the wonderful palace and parks, without being touched by a sense of history - a tingling feeling goes through you.  Your nationality is of no account.  You still feel a strong connection with its antiquity.  In 1903 the old and the new were coming together for the first time.  The odd long-bonneted car cruising through the dung-filled streets, its headlights sweeping across the portals of the fairy-tale Tyn Church.  The opera house disgorging top-hatted, tail-coated gentry bound for homes blessed with electricity and bathroom taps.  The street-sweeper going back to a candle-lit room to wash in water poured from jug to basin.  A time of great change in an ancient city of grandeur and magnificence.

Garry Kilworth, April 2008.