Rereading one’s own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print – The Very Model of a Man is the only novel of mine that has – and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous. My understanding of why this novel has been out of print is that it slipped between the cracks that can open when you change publishers: the second publisher having eyes only for new material, the first publisher not being quite done with the old. But what if a rereading shows some other reason? What if it isn’t very good? Or what if – and this could be more painful still – it is too good? Has the world been denied a masterpiece and the author credit for it?

Long before I had published anything, I was an avid reader of the prefaces Henry James wrote for the New York edition of his works. Easier than getting on and writing was daydreaming about an eminence from which, in my later years, I would look back on all I had produced. James’s prefaces are elegant and, by modern standards, difficult. “My clearest remembrance of any provoking cause connected with the matter of the present volume ...” is how he begins his preface to The Lesson of the Master – words that cannot be said to be obscure but are certainly orotund. We don’t speak of provoking causes today; we tell how we got the idea for a book. Though, of course, a “provoking cause” is infinitely more suggestive than an “idea”.

The provoking causes connected to the writing of The Very Model of a Man – first published 23 years ago – are not all clear to me now and probably weren’t at the time. Such provocations are likely to be many, and of those, some will never escape the dark well of the inchoate from which the novelist half the time doesn’t know he’s drawing. And nor should they. The novel they induce is emergence enough.

But I do recall that this novel was written with – by my standards – unusual deliberation. I was consciously wanting to do something different from the three novels I had previously written. Some change had to be effected, it seemed to me, to the way comedy was generally talked about and, more particularly, to the way I was talked about as a writer of comic novels. I was not, in my own eyes, a comic novelist, no matter that I thought every novelist had an obligation to remember his great forbears Rabelais and Cervantes, and make merry, as they had, with sanctimony, hypocrisy, grandiosity, death. Critics had noticed other tones and intentions in my work, all right, but had set what was serious at odds with what was comic in a way I didn’t think was helpful. My novels weren’t serious and funny; they were serious because they were funny. If that wasn’t evident, I needed to make it so. Not by eschewing comedy – that would have been an act of treason against the very idea of the novel – but by writing to a theme whose seriousness could never be in doubt. A novel, not lacking grave comedy, that addressed God, creation, fratricide, vagabondage – the story of Cain and Abel, in short. That would surely fix it.

This isn’t to say that a grand theme assures grandeur of performance. Many a trivial novel has been written about an important subject, and many a profound one about nothing in particular. But at least this time my ambition would be on the table.

There are countless solemn themes I might have chosen, so what was the cause that provoked this one? That’s simply answered: the fact of my being the first-born son. I hadn’t brooded on murdering my brother. But then I hadn’t brooded on murdering my father and marrying my mother either. Our connection to the great myths of our natures is murky. A mother might see the Medea in herself without imagining she will ever do away with her children. Literature more often tells the story of impulses we don’t act on than of ones we do. I could joke about the Cain and Abel story with my brother without expecting him to be worried, though it’s always possible he was more anxious than he let on. Did he know that when we were both teenagers sharing a room, I would get up in the night to listen to his breathing? Did he know how much I feared for his safety?

It was all, of course, a joke. It’s joking we have to thank for the sanity that keeps the great myths of destructiveness at bay. But that which we joke about most must be a preoccupation of some sort, and I thought that I was well placed to imagine myself into Cain’s position. You don’t have to hate your brother to have an inkling of how you’d feel if God were to prefer the incense of his burnt offering to yours. To know what it would be to hear oneself “cursed from the earth” and sent out into an unpeopled world as a “fugitive and vagabond” might require a more than usual consciousness of worthlessness, but that too I believed I could write my way into.

The real difficulty, as I envisaged it, would not be entering into Cain’s story, but finding a language appropriate to the telling of it – an idiom that could at once feel contemporary while retaining some of the simple augustness of expression of the original. I open the novel again after all these years and fall randomly on the account of Cain’s assault on his brother. “When I pulled him close, I couldn’t be certain he was not my father, not my mother, not myself. Get very close and you lose a person altogether ... He almost fell apart in my arms. And when I began to punch him, not hard but persistently ... all that was ponderable in him, all that gave him weight – and all that lent density to his whiteness, all that was silver, all that was milk – fled his body.” And at once I see what I was really writing about – the lure of language, the fragility of self, the sadness of families, and how close hatred is to love.

The Very Model of a Man is published as an ebook by Studio 28 on Monday.