He broke with his parents at an early age and declines to speak of his childhood and education. During his youth he developed the Francophilia that has remained a dominant feature of his life. He learned French in school, and as soon as a small inheritance enabled him to do so, he left England for France. He was teaching English in Paris in 1968 when the student revolts that form the background of his first novel,
The Holy Innocents: A Romance (1988), broke out. Adair lived in Paris for a decade, publishing poems in French and English but earning his living as an English teacher. Realizing that he would have to return to an Anglophone country if his career were to progress satisfactorily, he moved to England in 1979. Since then he has divided his time between London and Paris.
The cinema recurs as a subject and as a motif throughout Adair's early work. He coauthored with the director, Raúl Ruiz, the motion picture Le Territoire (released in English as The Territory), which was produced in France in 1981.
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