Wesley Robins Interview

I cannot draw. At all. So I have huge admiration for the skill of artists and regular readers will know of my interest in graphic fiction and non-fiction. After reviewing his graphic adaptation of Jed Mercurio's Ascent earlier in the week I was delighted to be able to ask artist Wesley Robins about the process of creating a graphic novel and in particular an adaptation from an already written text. Thanks once again to him for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer my questions.

How did you come to be involved in transforming Ascent into a graphic novel?

I'm not sure how long the idea of transforming the book had been floating about, but I was one of a number of potential artists who'd been earmarked by Jed after he'd seen some of my work at the end of year show at Kingston. We then went through a sort of audition process - submitting a spread from the book, plus a few sketches. The different artists were eventually whittled down and I ended up being the last one left!

Both you and Mercurio are credited on the front of the book, did you work together and how closely?

Basically Jed would provide me with a script - an already edited down version of the book chapter by chapter. I would then go over it, roughing out each page to get an idea of the pacing and layout, the compositions of each frame etc. I'd send this over to him and we'd discuss and make any changes/ adjustments needed. Once that chapter was agreed, I set to work on the final images.

The book seems tailor-made for the comic book treatment but I'm guessing it was tough to condense it down. How did you decide what to leave out and what was the toughest thing about making this book?

I suppose my job was a bit easier in that respect as Jed had the hard part of cutting down his original novel - choosing what and what not to keep, and turning it into a script for me to interpret visually.The original novel was very technical in places - especially when it came to the dogfights of Korea and the space chapters, and trying to keep that feel was a bit of a challenge. Researching the soviet space program, finding references for the rocket and lunar modules etc - all things that until quite recently were denied to even exist was a bit of a problem at times, and so deciding how to show particular movements/ procedures in space and the equipment used took a lot of working out (plus it was easy to get distracted looking into the history of the subject as it was quite fascinating!) Getting all those references as accurate as possible, from the docking mechanisms on the craft to the type of gas masks the fighter pilots were wearing was one of the toughest things I think. Especially when you were trying to find a balance between historical accuracy and keeping that engaging/ exciting, 'boys own adventure' feel of the book.

Where there any influences on your visual style for this project?

The book is quite dark, and Yefgenni and his story are a pretty brooding/ solemn one, so I wanted to keep that feel - making the images quite grainy and murky. I had some fun with the front end pages after looking at some old Soviet memorabilia - old commemorative stamps and matchboxes, and wanted to include some of that.

Are there any parallels between the stoicism and perseverance of Yeremin and the work of a graphic artist?

Ha! Yea, I suppose you need to keep plodding away, never giving up and all that...! Though you do really need to keep at it. Think there are more opportunities/ areas to dip into/ cross over as well at the moment - you're not necessarily bound to working in one particular area any more.

What are you working on now?

I've recently finished some storyboard work for the upcoming BBC drama 'The Line Of Duty', and am currently working on a range of children's travel cards (comics and puzzles etc) for Best Publishing Ever Ltd.

Would you like to recommend a neglected book to readers of this blog? (graphic or otherwise)

I always like Shaun Tan's books and have a few of his. Am re-reading a lot of Philip K Dick at the mo.

I always ask my interviewees to 'do a Hemingway' and write a whole story in just six words. Would you have a go? (or would you perhaps prefer to draw a story in a single panel?)

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Tom McCarthy Interview

Tom McCarthy has gone from being a writer who endured rejection from the major publishers (but then found a cult readership through the publication of his debut novel, Remainder, by a Parisian art outfit) to one given something like mainstream acceptance after being included on last year's Booker Prize short list. As someone with a particular interest in one of his major themes I was very pleased to have the opportunity to ask him about his work and the idea of authenticity.

My reading of Remainder couldn't help but be hugely influenced by the fact I'm an actor. I was fascinated by the ideas of authenticity and repetition, especially as repetition can be the very enemy of authenticity when performing a long run onstage. What attracted you to those themes and what were you hoping to say in writing about them? 

Repetition is the enemy of authenticity indeed. Authenticity is a pernicious meme that needs to be dismantled brick by brick, and repetition has always been a battering ram well-suited to the task. Repetition is beautiful, lyrical and seductive. It's the basis of all poetry.

I have to ask, have you seen 'Synechdoche, New York' and what did you make of it (and its similarities to Remainder)? 

I haven't seen it I'm afraid.

(Another film I wonder whether you have seen or not is Certified Copy which deals with notions of originality, copying, authenticity and fakery. I think you might like it)

I haven't seen that either... But Dennis Hopper's 'The Last Movie' is great in this respect. And so is Tarkovsky's 'Solaris'.

The theme of authenticity runs through your work; the art forgery of Men in Space, the parodic work of the International Necronautical Society and even the sale of 'genuine copies' of their documents. Is it likely to remain a recurring motif in your work?

I'm interested in doubles, forgeries, mediations and displacements of all kinds. I imagine they'll continue to feature, although hopefully mutating as the books progress.

You have said in previous interviews that you are influenced by writers such as Blanchot, Derrida, Beckett.... With such strong influences I might ask another writer if they have ever worried about escaping those influences to assert the authenticity of their own voice but I don't think you're that kind of writer. How would you describe the authenticity of your work?

I'd never use that term. Literature is about modes of inauthenticity, and always has been - look at Hamlet or Don Quixote if you doubt this. I'm influenced by lots of other writers, as were all those other writers themselves. My voice was never mine in the first place, and I'd never want to make that claim.. I'd like to think I'd built some good echo-chambers though.

You haven't much time for the 'sentimental humanism' prevalent in a lot of fiction. Could you explain what you mean by that?

I mean a cultural ideology that posits the self as the origin and source of all experience, and language as a tool for self-expression. It's a reactionary dead-end. It's the default ideology of almost the entire cultural industry (visual art being a notable enclave of exception), but all good work subverts this in some way or other.

There tends to be a fair bit of it on fiction prize shortlists. C was nominated for the Booker last year. What was your experience of being part of that bandwagon?

The ice-cream desert at the dinner was very good.

Do you have any thoughts on this year's recently announced longlist?

You're asking the wrong person: I've never read a novel on the Booker list in my life.

What are you working on at the moment and how does it fit in with the rest of your work?

I'm working on a book about pollution and mutation. It will end in a zombie parade. I'm interested in the insistent return of the material, and the dead.

Is there an underappreciated book that you would like to recommend to readers of this blog?

'The Adventures of Mao on the Long March' by Frederic Tuten.

I always ask my interviewees to 'do a Hemingway' and write a story in just 6 words. Would you have a go?

'For sale: shotgun, one previous owner.'



'C' is now available in paperback.

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Jill Dawson Interview

As I mentioned in my review of her new novel, Lucky Bunny, Jill Dawson is something of a specialist when it comes to creating narrative voice. I wanted to ask her a little more about that and her work in general and I'm very grateful to her for taking the time to answer my questions.

Lucky Bunny is the story of Queenie Dove, an East End girl whose life is overshadowed by crime. Where did she come from and why did you decide to write about her?

Years back, in the early nineties I think, when I was living in Hackney and hadn’t yet published my first novel I tore something out of the Guardian about a funeral that went through South London, of a woman thief. She’d had condolences sent from the Kray Twins, and Buster Edwards the Great Train Robber attended in person; the funeral cortege had fifteen black Daimlers. It fascinated me and stuck with me….

As part of my background reading I read The Profession of Violence – the cult biography of the Kray Twins by John Pearson - and lots of other books with titles like ‘London’s underworld: three centuries of vice and crime’ but they rarely mentioned the women, except to say things like (describing a terribly bloody murder in Stoke Newington) ‘a blonde cleaned up the place’. So I started to think about women that associated with criminals, who belonged to this criminal underworld and what their role was. And in which ways it would be profoundly different, being female. I wanted to write in the spirit of Moll Flanders, that is her own account of her doings, un-ashamed and unrepentant, really.

In Moll Flanders there’s an exaggeration, a sort of comedy that stems from the fact that no one person could have experienced all that Moll does and I wanted to faintly echo that in giving Queenie a part in all the major criminal events of her era. Defoe draws on the established conventions of the rogue biography - a genre that presented the lives and escapades of real criminals in semi-fictionalized and entertaining ways. I read loads of memoirs by criminals or criminal associates and also wanted to playfully mimic in the style of Lucky Bunny their exaggeration and glamorisation of their own crimes.

I have read three of your novels now, all of them first-person narrations, what is it about that perspective that you like so much?

I suppose I like to show how much of how the world we shape according to our own feelings, bend to our own vocabulary. In Lucky Bunny I know from the outset that I was keen to write a novel where the central female character flavoured everything: you know those portagonists like Becky Sharp, Emma Bovary, Tess of the d’Urbervilles…. who aren’t someone’s girlfriend, or the love interest, but a driving force of the novel. I was hoping to create a character the reader felt they hadn’t heard from before. I don’t write about North London dinner parties – there are others doing that.

Each of those three novels is very different, but they all share some basis in fact. How do you light upon the periods, subjects and characters of your writing?

My novels often start with a place. And there’s usually a novel or poem that I’m interested in re-reading and thinking again about – Lolita in Watch Me Disappear; Brooke’s poem in The Great Lover, The Wasteland in Fred and Edie. Moll Flanders, as I’ve said above. Lucky Bunny is set in Hackney and the addresses that Queenie lives at are places I lived – Well Street, Lockhurst Street, the Frampton Park Estate.

There will usually be something too that I’m working out for myself. I don’t necessarily always know what it is until the novel is finished. In Lucky Bunny I realise now that Queenie’s attraction to danger and risk-taking was always at the back of my mind. I was re-visiting themes of a violent relationship, which is the subject of my first novel Trick of the Light.

I think I do have some other recurring themes. How far people deceive themselves, and how far they collude in their own downfall; how far they are victims, what aspects of their destiny they can control, what it means to face the truth and an individual’s longing to live authentically (in the way that Sartre meant it – that is be themselves, live a fully realised life and not conform to society’s dictates). That’s a theme of The Great Lover, Magpie and Fred and Edie. And sexuality and how far that is constructed or ‘natural’ and how far that shapes our lives is a recurrant theme – Fred and Edie, Watch Me Disappear, The Great Lover

I was very worried about getting things 'right' when I voiced the Rupert Brook sections of The Great Lover for the audio book. Given the factual basis of some of your characters how much do you worry about getting it 'right'?

Yes, I worry horribly about getting it right too. Especially because someone will always point out the ways in which we don’t. For The Great Lover I spent a lot of time in Grantchester and reading Rupert Brooke’s letters; for Lucky Bunny I went back to my old haunts in Hackney and tried to imagine what they were like fifty years earlier. I talked to a survivor of the Bethnal Green tube disaster and to my husband’s aunt who was a land girl and my father in law who was evacuated from London during the war. I think of fiction as an investigative tool. I can apply ‘fiction’ – the tricks and skills a novelist has up her sleeve - to the ‘facts’ of a story and see what happens. Of course something true, something that feels true to the reader, is what I want to create. I’m interested in how we construct stories for ourselves and how highly subjective lived experience is. I don’t deliberately change inconsequential, factual things to improve the plot. Quite the contrary. I believe they are the plot....

Authors are often criticised for failing to write convincingly from the perspective of the opposite sex. Having written from both the male and female viewpoint did you find it any harder to get inside the head of a man and how did you go about it?



I live in a household of men – I’m married and have two sons, and their friends are always around – so I feel I’ve spent my life surrounded by boys and men (my eldest is twenty two now, the youngest is eleven). So it’s easy to imagine inhabiting a male body. In fact, I’d say another theme of my work is masculinity and how it’s constructed by society, what it is to be a ‘good man’……Wild Boy especially looks at that, and a third of that novel is written from a male point of view, a third from the point of view of an autistic child and a third by a woman.

You are, if you don't mind my saying, a master of creating narrative voice. Have you ever been tempted to write something that is genuinely made up of only dialogue like a play, film or TV drama?

Thank you! I have had a go at film scripts. I’ve adapted a couple of my own novels and written one original script. What I found frustrating there is how much money, time and effort is needed to get them off the ground. A novel is something I can do on my own. I’m highly independent, not really good at working for or with others I’m afraid, been self-employed since I graduated at twenty-one ….

Would you like to recommend a neglected book to the readers of this blog?

I recently re-read Beryl Bainbridge’s Winter Garden. I know she can hardly be described as neglected, having just been awarded her own Booker…..but I do love that novel. In places it’s hilarious (especially a funny little sex scene, a knee-trembler in the kitchen), it’s full of mystery and endlessly entertaining, with that Bainbridge voice that is utterly original.

I always ask my interviewees if they will 'do a Hemingway' and create a story in just six words. Would you have a go?


Surely no writer has said yes?

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Glen Duncan Interview

There are a few authors who I happen to have caught at the right time in their career and in my reading patterns to have been able to read their entire oeuvre. Glen Duncan is one of those. I am always interested to know what he will write next and never really surprised when it turns out to be something completely different from the last book. That said, I was a little surprised to see the title and premise of his latest which I reviewed on Monday. I was therefore very grateful to Glen for giving me some of his time to answer a few questions about that novel and the rest of his work.

As someone who has read all of your previous novels I must admit that part of me was a little surprised by the appearance of a werewolf book. Can you explain a little about what lead you to write this particular novel?

Here is the honest answer. After A Day and a Night and a Day had been published and had performed exactly as its six predecessors - which is to say not enough people bought it and it didn't win anything - I had a very frank and curiously refreshing conversation with my agent, which went like this:

Me: If I write another literary novel, do you think you'll be able to sell it?
Agent: No.

So I decided to write a straight, commercial genre novel, and began work on a Victorian serial killer story. The pitch was Oliver Twist meets The Silence of the Lambs. I didn't enjoy it much. I hated all the research, for a start. Plus it turned out I wasn't very good at plot. By New Year's Eve 2009 I knew it was going nowhere.

Traditionally my partner and I celebrate New Year at the house of the musician, The Real Tuesday Weld (aka The Clerkenwell Kid, aka Stephen Coates) my oldest and dearest friend. 2009 was no different. After the freezing roof terrace, abused fireworks, forced down champagne and collective psychic wobble at The Actual Stroke of Midnight, we all come back inside and try not to slash our wrists. Invariably talk turns to what we've done over the last year and, more worryingly, what we plan to do in the new one. When it was my turn, having drunk my annual cocktail of self-pity and boredom and fraud and rage to the dregs, I found myself saying that I was going to write a novel about the last werewolf on earth, titled - and here's where creative genius really sidestepped the obvious - The Last Werewolf. The idea met with unanimous feeble approval. And so a work of art was born. In line with the original plan, it was supposed to be a straight commercial genre novel. It didn't turn out quite that way.

My first encounter with your writing came after I picked up a hardback of Love Remains on Charing Cross Road, intrigued by the blurb and sold by the cover. I was genuinely shocked by the darkness and bravery of what you were willing to confront in your writing, something repeated in your subsequent work. Is it fair to say that you write about dark topics and if so why do you think you are attracted to writing about them?

It's not that I set out to write about dark things, it's that other writers set out to ignore them. The novelist's business is with the whole human animal, a business still best expressed in the Auden's poem:

'For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must
Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just
Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.'

Anything less is shirking. So yes, there are dark ('filthy') things in my books, but there's a good deal of the vulgar complaint, too. Plus compassion, friendship, comedy, tenderness.

You've collaborated with your friend Stephen Coates (aka The Real Tuesday Weld, aka The Clerkenwell Kid) in creating soundtracks for your novels I, Lucifer and The Last Werewolf. Is music important to you whilst writing and in what way?

I never listen to music while writing, and am amazed that anyone who wanted to write well would try. There might be an argument for instrumental music, I suppose, but it's not for me. If I've had a particularly productive day or nailed something tricky there's a good chance I'll put on some Led Zeppelin and swagger around the kitchen with testosterone renewed, but that's about it.

Stephen's soundtracks are a whole different phenomenon. We did the I, Lucifer double-act just for our own amusement, but people liked it, so we're doing it again for The Last Werewolf. It's not really even a collaboration: I have zero musical input (commensurate with zero musical talent) and there's no imaginable universe in which I'd invite literary input from Stephen. That said, once both the book and the music are done there is a peculiar, satisfying symbiosis. It only works for some novels (rule of thumb is the fiction needs to have an element of self-consciousness or play) but we share a pretty solid intuition for which those will be. He has an occult and depressing knack for getting what I've just spent ninety-thousand words on into three verses and a chorus.

I described you as something of a mercurial writer in my review, there's no telling quite where you might head next, but in thinking about your work as a whole I wondered if a unifying theme might be how your characters come to terms with monstrosity (often their own). Would you say that that is something you have been writing about?

Coming to terms with ourselves and each other is what art and imagination are for. The novelist is always trying to outgrow himself, to accommodate, to become something bigger than his vices - but bigger than his virtues too.

It's nauseous to say that writing the books I've written has made me a less frantic and tormented being (the aforementioned annual cocktail notwithstanding) but unfortunately it happens to be true. The real trick of course is to make your readers less frantic and tormented beings. If art's doing its job that's what should be happening to the species. And by and large, however strange this might sound, I think that is what's happening.

Is there an under-appreciated  book that you'd like to recommend to readers of this blog?

Birds of the Innocent Wood, by Deirdre Madden. Understated, unsentimental, lapidary, heartbreaking. One of the saddest novels I've ever read.

I like to invite authors to do a Hemingway and write a story in 6 words. Would you have a go?

Hail horrors! Hail—fuck that's hot.

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John Burnside Interview

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have often championed the work of John Burnside. His last novel Glister was one of my favourite books of last year and his memoir A Lie About My Father remains one of the best memoirs I've read. Like many of my favourite writers he excels in several areas including poetry and journalism. All of which means that I was as pleased as punch when he found time amongst his full-time teaching at St Andrew's and the rigours of being a father to two boys (something I will share with him come October) to answer a few questions for me. If you haven't read any of his work already then I sincerely hope you will do after reading this.

You worked as a computer programmer at the same time as writing your first poems. Did any of your colleagues have a clue that there was a poet amongst them?

Not to begin with. I soon got caught out, though – and much leg-pulling ensued, though mostly about my author photo. When I finally came to leave the job and walked into the Technical Director’s office and handed him my company car key, announcing that I was quitting, he smiled and asked if I was off to write a novel. I think the general feeling was that I was having one of those midlife crisis deals and would be back, somewhat chastened, in six months. I think I did too, to begin with.

That said, many of my colleagues were interested and supportive of my writing. I think they thought I was crazy to think of it as anything other than a hobby – though I did receive some kind messages after The Dumb House came out.

I read The Dumb House shortly after seeing a production of Marivaux's The Dispute in which four children, two of each sex are raised in isolation and then placed together to see which sex will be unfaithful first. It is a comedy whereas your novel, which shares the premise of children raised in isolation, is about as far from comedy as I can imagine. Can you say a bit about where that novel came from?

The original ‘hero’ of The Dumb house was language. I was interested in language and I wanted to dwell for a while on some stories about language acquisition and the relationship between language and the soul. I especially liked that story about Akbar’s keeping children in a silent palace, outside the city, to see whether they would speak if they didn’t hear language used. That would have been a horrifying thing to those of his court who believed that language and the soul are closely related – to think that they – the court – had doomed so many to a soulless existence, which would have been confirmed by the silence of the children in the ‘dumb house’.

Of course, that wasn’t enough of a starting point for a first novel – not enough narrative. That was when Luke arrived – one day, he just appeared, and became the central character (though not, of course, the ‘hero’). In many ways, he was a version of me, though he was a negative image, as it were, of my concerns and interests.


As a writer of poetry, memoir, fiction, and journalism, what are main differences for you personally between those disciplines, and when you have an idea do you know immediately what it will become?

I do know, now, what an idea wants to be (as it were) though there have been times, in the past, when I didn’t. A poem always knows it’s going to be a poem, of course, but there have been occasions when I thought a nascent short story was on the way to novel-hood – maybe because the short story is a very difficult form, (and much undervalued in commercial terms, too). It takes a while to get a strong sense of that.

There are also grey areas that are interesting – between memoir and fiction, essay and memoir, travel piece and memoir, etc. Maybe that’s why I like the memoir as a genre (if you can call it that). It’s very flexible – you can close in and become intimate, then open out and talk about ideas.

Do you have a preferred medium?

They all have their attractions, (I suppose that is to state the obvious, since I keep going back to them all). I’ve just finished a second memoir – it’s called Waking Up in Toytown, and it’s due early next year. It differs from its predecessor (A Lie about my Father) to a fair extent – but the next one, which is already suggesting itself to me, will be different again – using the essay form as a way in, to reflect on time and memory. For me, everything is about time. How we see time determines everything: how happy we are, how directed, how we think of such things as ‘success’ and failure’, how decent we manage to be as people. It all depends on an understanding of time.

I guess, to begin with, I would have said poetry was my first love – because I mostly wrote poetry then. I still do write poetry, but I have an equal fondness for the short story and the essay. I love the essay. It offers so many possibilities to a writer. As for the novel – well that’s love, too, but it’s more like unrequited love. You give it your all and then you can’t bear to think how badly you failed that gorgeous initial idea. Because it was as perfect as jewel to begin with but – not surprisingly, given that it is worked on over years during short breaks from the everyday demands of work and domestic life – it ends up being a piece of knitting, with plains where there should be purls, and vice versa. I carry around a lingering fondness for a couple of my books – the Dumb House, The Devil’s Footprints, Glister, say - but now they make me think of children who looked so wonderful and clean in their christening shawls, but quickly turned delinquent.

Going back to what you were saying about time and how we view it, what do you mean about the differing ways of seeing time?

The time question presents itself in two ways. First, a commonplace piece of mystic thinking – put briefly, the idea that the now is eternal. Which is the case, but hardly new – as a thought. As an experience, however, it is astonishing. This moment is everything – though if you try to stop and think about what ‘this moment’ I, it’s gone, and another, equally fleeting moment is there, or there and gone, in its place. So the only way to live in this eternal now is to forget about it, and let it roll, so to speak.

The other way the time question presents itself is when we thinking of it on the larger scale. Time passes, or we pass in it – and pass on too, as the cliché goes. The now is eternal, but we, as we are in it, are not. We pass away. The odd thing is that, when experiments were done on how to help people become happier, one of the steps was to spend a little time each day in a cemetery – and it did help people, the awareness of death made them feel more aware of, and so value, the present. It drew them back into the now.

On a larger scale, there is the matter of dialectic (one name for a universal idea), viz the idea that the wheel turns, yin and yang seek balance, etc. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, new thesis, forever and ever amen. Seeing that this is a universal principle – that things are always in flux – helps us to overcome our local attachments – by which I don’t mean that we lose interest in, or passion for, anything, but we do see that things pass, and this moment’s pleasure or pain is clarified by the knowledge that it will pass.

There’s a tradition in Spanish poetry that I like – where the poet is in his garden, looking around, listening to the birds, enjoying the warmth and the scents, when it comes to him that one day this garden will still be there, but he will be gone, and someone else will be experiencing these things. Someone he doesn’t even know. This is a cause for celebration, though, not elegy or regret. The game continues. James P. Carse talks about this as ‘infinite play’ – there are times when we cease to play the game of being for finite ends, and play for the sake of the game itself, a game that will go on without us.

I know, I know. New age-y mysticism and such have made all these ideas into clichés. I was a sub-hippie myself once. But as experiences, these things remain true, and cannot be diminished. Except, perhaps, in rambling on about them – which I’ve just done!


Can you give an idea of your writing process? Do you start by planning a story out or begin with a character and see where they go?

It varies, depending on what I am doing. The essential thing is to have an origin, a core if you like, of the non-directed, spontaneous, organic. It’s important to wait the right length of time before pen is applied to paper – this can be a matter of hours, or years. For the novel I am working on now, it has been almost a decade – I started in 2000, but had to stop and wait because something was missing. I didn’t know what, so I had to wait.

In a few of your novels the main character seems to be a man living in ‘self-imposed exile’. Why do you think this type of character keeps recurring?

I suppose, if I’m honest, I have to admit that this character is a variant of me. I don’t mean that any of my characters resemble me at all (though one person did say I was John the Librarian from Glister…) but I do stand at an angle to the world. I just start from a different premise than the society I find myself in – though I don’t think I’m unique in that. On the contrary, we all know – ‘in ourselves’ as they say (which is an interesting phrase) – that public events, i.e. everything from what politicians talk about to who gets the prizes at the Oscars and the Brit Awards is a giant lie. We all know that politicians are put in place by commercial concerns and have to pay the piper in all kinds of ways (from GM crops to buying vast quantities of antiviral drugs that probably won’t even work when needed to building warships nobody will ever need) just as we know that there are all kinds of musicians, writers, film-makers, artists, etc who are doing imaginative, interesting and moving work that, for whatever reason, has to stay outside the mainstream.

Why do you think society has become so divorced from the reality of most people’s inner lives?

Oh, God, don’t invite me to take out the soap box. Seriously, though, the problem has been well analysed and we pretty much know what has gone wrong – we lost organic connection with the world around us, everything was commoditised, our politicians and business folk became hopelessly self-serving (as they have often done, through history, but recently it’s been so blatant it saps the spirit just to watch them get away with it), we have a neo-medieval culture of celebrity, excellence became embarrassing, we began to think in soundbites, we published more and more books about ‘complexity’ but schooled ourselves to think in simpler and simpler terms. I could go on. The central thing, maybe, is that we were the first society to know – actually to see and hear – the misery that was being endured in faraway places, by people our appetites had impoverished, while we enjoyed our bland and joyless feasts at home. What a burden of guilt that is – and along with that guilt comes a feeling of helplessness, a sense that there is nothing we can do about it.


In the industrial landscapes of Living Nowhere and Glister there doesn’t seem to be much hope or optimism, does that reflect something that you feel personally about industry and urban living?

Yes and no. I think cities could be wonderful places, if the planners, commercial interests and politicos put people first. And the only real problem I saw when I worked in factories and (briefly) British Steel was a lack of respect for the men and women who did the work. Most of the people I encountered took pride in doing what they did, or if not, wanted to do so. The problem was that this pride was eroded by daily insults of the most basic kind – a lack of participation, a sense that someone else made all the decisions, even the most basic ones.

I thought of both Living Nowhere and Glister with the recent 'toxic soup' liability case in Corby. How did you react to that victory?

I think it's great that the families won - though of course it's the Council who pick up the liability and not the companies who created the problem in the first place. So I can't help thinking that it's a bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul, while the guys in the good suits just walk away. The Council are culpable - but the list doesn't end there as anyone who knows Corby (and many other industrial towns) can testify. (As it happens, the initial 'inspiration' - in part, at least - for the toxic landscape in Glister was Weston, near Runcorn, and the land in that area poisoned by ICI).

You asked for A Lie About My Father to be treated as a work of fiction, is there something essentially unreliable about personal history?

There is, inevitably. I tried to be as accurate, in purely actual terms, as I could in that book. But I was – am – partisan. Did I do my father justice? Did I do myself justice? I hope so. But I was telling a story, and the governing factor in making that book was the wish to tell that story – which is not documentary, but narrative. Every story is as much about what is not told as what is told – say I leave something out because I don’t think it is essential to the story but somebody else reads the book and thinks that what I left out was the most important detail of all?

The other thing I would say here may sound merely contentious, but I feel it is a valid point and that is that fiction is more ‘true’ than fact. You can take ten thousand photographs of a bamboo plant, say, from every possible angle and it still will not capture the essence of bamboo as a drawing by Hokusai does. I think that is what fiction is after, that essence. Not fact. Truth.

After reading A Lie About My Father I felt that I could see some of the crossover from fact into your fiction (the stunning description of an LSD trip for example). Do you find it easier when writing from personal experience?

I’m not sure. I have to reimagine everything that is drawn from personal experience anyhow, because it has to be the experience of this character, rather than my own. I did acid on a very regular basis for a number of years, but the trip that opens Living Nowhere, though it is informed by my memories, is not my trip. It’s Alina’s (I hope).

The writer Paul Abbot has said that a good character is often a composite of three people you know, would you agree with that?

It’s an interesting notion. I wonder if Melville would have said as much about Ahab? I used to think that there’s a little piece of the author’s father in the villain of any story – now that I’m a father myself, though, I’m not so sure.

Speaking of that, would you say that fatherhood has altered anything in your writing? When I compare the objectivity of the children in The Dumb House with the concern for them in Glister I wonder if there is an element of care coming through subconsciously. I know that I see the world differently since becoming a father.

Fatherhood has altered my entire life – in many more ways than I expected. I don’t think, though, it changed my writing in a moral sense. The Dumb House was an angry book – a very angry book – to begin with. The coolness was necessary to keep that anger from undermining the argument. Cruelty appalled me, then, when I wrote that book, as much as it does now – but I had to write from Luke’s point of view in that book because I didn’t want to be shouting from the rooftops, I wanted to insinuate. How different, say, is much of the animal experimentation that goes on, from the crude ‘science’ that Luke engages in with the twins? That was a question for me, but I didn’t want to ask it in those words – as I say, it had to be insinuation.

There is often a moment of catharsis in your fiction. Do you find the process of writing cathartic in itself?

I’m not altogether sure about catharsis. The etymology bothers me. Purification, cleansing, etc. I’d prefer to think in terms of revelation. I like to work with alienated male characters who have become denatured for some reason. Hopefully, something happens which reveals to them that they have been wrapped in a lie, or self-deceit, or social conditioning – that they have been blinded to their true natures. Writing is also a process of this kind of revelation. I renew my sense of the world as I write. Maybe that is a cleansing. If it is, though, it’s not a one-off thing – it’s an iterative process. Catharsis can sound a bit final.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’ve returned to that novel I mentioned earlier, begun in 2000. It’s called A Summer of Drowning, it’s set in the Arctic circle in an island in north Norway. It’s about belief, superstition and storytelling. That’s all I dare say right at the moment.

Could you recommend an under-appreciated book to readers of this blog?

Hundreds, I fear. How about Lancelot by Walker Percy, for starters? Or Flannery O’Connor’s wonderful novel, Wise Blood, (she’s not just a story writer…)?

One thing that bothers me is how little we translate in this country. We’re missing some great French novelists, for example: Jean Echenoz, Regis Jauffret and Stéphane Audeguy to pick just three favourites of mine. We need good translations of these and so many others.

I always ask my interviewees if they would do a Hemingway and compose a story in six words. Would you give it a go too?

Afterwards, we had coffee and pie.



John Burnside's latest poetry collection, The Hunt in the Forest, is published today
His other works can be found here.

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Hugo Wilcken Interview

At the end of last month John Self got the ball rolling in a concerted effort to shine light on a novel neglected on its release but well worth your attention. His review is here, mine here and my review of Wilcken's first novel can be found here. Amidst all this attention Hugo very kindly agreed to answer a few questions.

How did you feel when you found out that your novel Colony was the subject of some concerted blog scrutiny?

It's been a fantastic opportunity to get a second hearing for my book, and I'm really grateful to everyone who has shown interest. Clearly, as newspapers continue to struggle and cut back on reviewing space, literary websites and blogs are going to be increasingly important for readers, writers and publishers.


I want to ask you about The Execution first. Where did that idea come from?

I tend to work by collage, putting two ideas together and seeing what meanings are produced when they rub up against each other. With The Execution, I was initially inspired by the Claude Chabrol film La Femme Infidèle, and thought I could write a good noir-ish novel about adultery and murder. At the same time I wanted something more than that. I’d written the first few pages of a short story about a condemned man writing to a human rights campaigner; the man is innocent, but also wants to die. I thought I’d somehow combine the two ideas. Lurking in the background of the novel is also Camus’s L’Etranger.


I've noticed a lot of novels featuring men around thirty at a crossroads and wondered whether their genesis and creation might come from something similar to what I felt at that age. Was it like that for you?

My protagonist in The Execution turns thirty in the last chapter, I think. The idea behind that was a marker of time finally going forward again, following a period when it had somehow become suspended in a nightmare. It’s just occurred to me that Sabir in Colony is also thirty – I guess it’s a good, balanced age for an ‘everyman’ protagonist: still young, but old enough to have had a fair amount of experience as well.


There is a feeling for the main character of being trapped in his life which spurs some of his actions and you later developed the theme of escape in Colony - Was this a conscious development?

What connects the two novels for me, thematically, is the idea of pushing lives to the point where existential questions must be faced. Stylistically, the novels both use genre models that they ultimately break free from. There are similarities of tone in the two novels, but I think Colony is more ambitious and covers more philosophical ground.


I definitely agree that Colony is a far more ambitious book. You may have noticed that those of us that have reviewed it have found the works of different writers reflected in it. What writers would you say have particularly influenced or inspired you?

Looking to other writers for inspiration can be a pernicious business. I was captivated by Beckett in my mid-twenties, then wasted a couple of years writing bad Beckett pastiche. For Colony, I got the most out of reading the memoirs of people who had been to the penal colony – convicts, guards, doctors, etc. The prose was often workaday but the atmosphere was there. But I was obviously following a tradition of novels about moral breakdown in the tropics – Heart Of Darkness of course and plenty of Graham Greene. There’s also the shadow of Rimbaud over the book, but more for his life story than for his poetry


I couldn't help but recall Apocalypse Now visually when reading the book. Did you have any visual references when writing it and what kind of research did you do?

Well, Apocalypse Now is a favourite film of mine, and I think there’s something of that (and the source novel Heart Of Darkness) in Colony. You sense that it wouldn’t take too much for my Commandant to become a Kurtz-like figure. I love movies but my references tended to be more literary than visual. Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps about exploring the Liberian jungles in the 1930s was one I remember taking ideas from, when it came to building atmosphere.

I researched the novel basically by reading histories and memoirs of the period at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. From the beginning I’d toyed with going out to French Guiana. But for a long time I wasn’t sure I’d be able to write the novel, and I didn’t want to waste money going out there if that were the case. Then when I finally realised I’d be able to write it, there was no longer any point in going out there. It was all in my head already, and I didn’t want the reality to spoil that! Historical fiction is not ultimately about history, it’s about inventing parallel or alternative worlds to our own. Colony hews fairly closely to the historical reality of the penal colony, but when reality got in the way of the story, I jettisoned the reality and not the story.


Were you ever tempted to use your native Australia as the setting?

I did think about it. But that would have placed the action in the early nineteenth century. I wanted something more modern, because in fact the idea of modernism is important to the novel. Years ago, before The Execution, I actually wrote 70 or 80 pages of a novel set in an imaginary penal colony, but ultimately it didn’t work out.


There is an ambiguity in the two sections of the book which leaves lots of room for the reader. Why did you want that?

Those ambiguities are at the heart of what I was trying to do. The two sections shadow and mirror each other in distorted form; they are internally consistent, and yet not quite consistent when set side by side. The novel travels along a narrative faultline, resisting a totally logical, realist explanation, forcing the reader to look elsewhere for resolution.


As well as writing those two novels you also wrote about David Bowie’s album Low for the 33 1/3 series. How did that come about and what was it about that album that made you want to write about it?

I wrote the Bowie book in the middle of writing Colony. I was beginning to wonder whether I’d ever be done with Colony and wanted a small project to prove to myself that I could actually finish something. I pitched the editor of the 33 1/3 series out of the blue, and he commissioned the book. Low was part of my teenage artistic awakening. Its atmosphere of modernist alienation, its expressionism, its blend of genres, its schizophrenic quality – these were all things I thought I could write about in an interesting way.


Are you working on anything at the moment?

Yes, I’m writing a novel set in New York in the 1940s.


Would you like to recommend a neglected book to the readers of this blog?

I recently read and was very impressed with Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton.

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Michael Kimball Interview

Michael Kimball kindly agreed to answer some questions about his novel Dear Everybody on this, the final stop of his blog tour. My review can be found here, but far more interesting is to talk to the man himself and find out more about those publishing exclusives I promised you.....

Dear Everybody obviously has an interesting format. How did the book take shape? Did you plan to write it as a series of documents?

Dear Everybody started with one short letter, a man apologizing to a woman for standing her up on a date; the man is wondering if they had gone out that night, if maybe his whole life would have been different, better. At first, I didn’t know then who was speaking or that it was a suicide letter, but I did have a strong voice and a skewed way of thinking. That one letter led to a rush of about 100 letters—Jonathon, the main character, apologizing to nearly everybody he has ever known—and the novel opened up from there. The other documents—the psychological evaluations, the newspaper articles, the yearbook quotes, the obituary, the eulogy, the last will and testament—all of that came after the letters.

I am guessing that writing an epistolary novel involved creating lots of letters which didn't make it into the finished book. Are there any that were edited out that you wish had survived?

The very first letter that I wrote didn’t make it into the final novel and I cut out maybe 100 or so more. I collected a bunch of them and they will soon in a chapbook called “Some Recently Discovered Letters from Jonathon Bender, Weatherman (b. 1967-d.1999)”—out with Publishing Genius Press.

That first letter is just this:

Dear Jessica Cooper,

I’m sorry that I stood you up for the date that we were supposed to have on Valentine’s Day in 1989. Do you think that we could have been happy together?

Robert is confused by the encyclopedia entries that he finds amongst Jonathon's belongings and I'll confess that I was a little too. Can you say anything about the relevance of those pieces?

The idea was that those pieces would function in a few ways—first off by advancing the narrative in a new way; also by calling attention to certain thematics; but mostly they are supposed to call the narrators into question a little bit, both Jonathon and his brother, Robert, adding a certain unreliable quality that both draws the reader in and adds to the emotional complexity.

That unreliability is really key isn't it. The whole idea of having Robert, who never liked his brother, be the one who presents him to us is quite an interesting set-up. How did you come to make that decision?

The unreliability is absolutely key. And Robert writing the introduction was one of the happy accidents in writing Dear Everybody. That introduction was actually the third introduction that I wrote for the book. The first one was written by a fictional Michael Kimball. The second one was written by Jonathon’s sister, who was ultimately written out of the book by Robert. I knew Robert was right for the introduction, and as the one who collects the documents of the book, when I realized how he could call the truth of the narrative into question, but in a way that, paradoxically, seems to make what happened all the more clear.

One of the great strengths of the book is the way you allow the reader to decide for themselves what may have happened. This is most obvious with Robert and his denial of abuse which leads him to censoring one of the letters. Why did you choose to keep things ambiguous?

I wrote what happened to Robert and then later decided to black out those lines. My feeling was that it added to the emotional narrative of the novel, that spelling it out, so to speak, would have caused some of that emotional energy to dissipate.

You write with great empathy about mental illness, especially the lack of support for its sufferers. Does this come from research or any kind of personal experience perhaps?

It’s both. I’ve edited psychology textbooks for 15 years or so, and have learned a lot about mental illness through that. But the empathy comes more from seeing certain people I know struggle with mental illness, how difficult it can be for the person suffering and how difficult it can be for the people around him or her.

Some of the most effective parts of the book are the shortest pieces, it's amazing how much you can say with just a few words. Hemingway famously spoke multitudes with just six (For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.). Would you care to add your own six-word story?

The very first poem that I ever published (I was a poet before I was a fiction writer) and was really proud of was a title with no words. It was this “Now Do You Remember?” (and then the rest of the page was blank).

These six-word stories are more difficult that they look but here goes:

“Missing Person: Last seen driving away.”

In my attempts to write a six-word story, I also wrote a five-word story for Jonathon Bender:

“Born in snowstorm, still cold.”

Almost as a natural progression from writing someone's life in a series of short documents you're working on something else called postcard life stories, what's all that about?

Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard) started when my friend Adam Robinson, who was the curator for a performance art festival, asked me if I wanted to participate. I asked him what he thought a writer could do as performance and we made some jokes about that. But then I remembered these promotional postcards that I had for Dear Everybody and I suggested that I could write people’s life stories for them. That's how the project started.

I thought it would be fun and funny and that I would ask a few questions and write on the backs of a few postcards and that would be it. The first postcard I wrote was for Bart O’Reilly a painter, who quit art school in Dublin to work as an ice cream man in Ocean City, MD—which is how he met the woman who became his wife. When I finished writing the postcard and looked up, a line had formed. For the rest of the night, I interviewed dozens of people and wrote each person’s life story on the back of the postcard. I did this for four hours straight without getting up out of the chair that I was sitting in. I was completely exhausted by the end. My mind was racing with the details of people’s lives and the hope that I had done their various stories justice in the space of a postcard. I was astounded by what people told me, the secrets and the difficulties, the pain and wonder and hope that they revealed.

People sometimes ask me how I get people to tell me the things I write about them, but there’s no real trick to it: I just ask questions. The one thing that I have learned so far: Everybody is amazing.

Are you working on anything else at the moment?

I recently finished a new novel – Friday, Saturday, Sunday – which takes place during those three days. And there have been a couple of inquiries after the postcard life story project, so I’m writing an introduction for that.

Could you recommend a neglected book which readers of this blog simply must read?

The list that could be made of neglected books that must be read, but I’ll just pick one: Stanley Crawford’s Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine – a crazy, great, short novel published in the 70’s that was just re-issued by Dalkey Archive in the U.S.

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Sebastian Beaumont Interview

Just before I started writing this blog I read a brilliant book called Thirteen by Sebastian Beaumont, a dark and surreal tale about a late night taxi-driver which was brought to my attention by Scott Pack. His review of that book is here. On the publication of his second novel, The Juggler, I got the chance to ask him some questions about his work. Many thanks once again to him and editor Anne Westgarth at Myrmidon Books.

Your first novel Thirteen drew on your experiences as a late night taxi driver in Brighton. What was the strangest thing that happened during that time?
Well, the scene in Thirteen where an immediately post-operative transsexual asked me to de-flower her was absolutely true, so I guess that was pretty strange – and there really was a fire when I got her home, although whether they were rabbit hutches that were burning is another matter.

What was the inspiration for writing The Juggler?
Thirteen is very much a book about personal ‘stuff’ and the process of dealing with it.I became aware quite quickly, though, whilst writing it that we all carry stuff that can be seen as impersonal – what we have to face because we are human beings, regardless of our biographies. In Buddhist philosophy these are often referred to as ‘the five hindrances’ – Sense desire, Ill Will, Restlessness & Anxiety, Sloth & Torpor and Doubt & Indecision. These are the titles of 5 of the chapters of The Juggler.

Does that mean that you hope people reading The Juggler will find relevance in Mark’s story regardless of their own personal biography and indeed his, that there will be a universal appeal to this impersonal enquiry?
Yes, as far as the relevance of it goes. I would also say that what I value most in the literature that I read is a sense of psychological truth. No matter how weird a story becomes, does it hold to its own truth? I pondered this a lot whilst writing The Juggler.

Reading your books I was reminded of writers like Kafka and Auster. What writers have influenced you?
Hermann Hesse, Andre Gide, Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre.

You highlighted the top 10 books about psychological journeys in an article for The Guardian. What attracts you to this kind of writing and is it a style you’ll continue to use?
I don’t really think of it as a style, but more as a subject matter. I am more and more interested in what psychological authenticity is, and how we can achieve it. Most people (myself included) spend a lot of the time being flotsam before a whole set of habits and ego-dominated drives towards judgement, gratification and status. This can be pretty dark stuff if you look at the internal tyranny involved, and getting to grips with it has to be a journey of some kind, I guess…

You work as a psychotherapeutic counsellor. Can you explain a bit more about what that is?
My counselling training was framed within psychoanalytical theory, although my practice is very much about building a relationship with my clients (rather than being the ‘blank screen’ of the psychiatrist). Perhaps this was where a lot of my interest in authenticity comes from. People in the West tend to be addicted to ego things – stimulation and arousal (intellectual as well as sensual), inflated self-worth, competitiveness. We often seek peace, but when offered the time to genuinely sit peacefully with our own experience, we distract ourselves with busy-ness, chasing our tails and yet yearning for that which we are denying ourselves. I try to help people sit with themselves for long enough to see what’s beneath all that ego chatter.

Do you see your fiction as an extension of that work, vice versa, or are the two separate?
My fiction is a product of my own therapeutic enquiry. A question such as ‘Who am I?’ can never be answered, but the journey of trying to understand it as a question has limitless possibilities, and can lead to very counter-intuitive realisations.

In that search for psychological authenticity is there a danger of not liking the person that you find?
In the apparently paradoxical way of these things, the answer seems to be both yes and no. What often happens is that when people really sit with their experience for the first time, they will inevitably come across stuff about themselves that they dislike. However, what they’re really seeing are the parts of themselves that are not authentic. Getting through that to the genuinely authentic in ourselves will always be a journey towards happiness.

How do you go about the process of writing? What is your writing environment like?
I have no specific environment, and work at any computer at any desk. What I need is head-space, and time to think. The environment is secondary.

There is a malign presence in your work, a real sense of danger. Where does that sense come from?
Ha ha! Well, ‘malign presence’ is quite a way of describing it! If you think of what I have said above about ego-domination, then I think that every one of us who has not yet mastered their ego (i.e. 99% of us) has a part of themselves that is a ‘malign presence’. How many times have you done something even though you know you ‘shouldn’t’ or in the knowledge that you’ll end up regretting it? I am just being true to human-being-ness…I would add that I think the world provides plenty of opportunities for humour and that, really, the other side of ‘malign presence’ is a humour at the absurdity of the world, and at ourselves.

You may have noticed that this is question 13. Are you a superstitious man?
Most people are superstitious, even though they try not to be. I wanted to say ‘no’ to this question, but then I remembered crossing my fingers about something only this morning, so there we go!

Without spoiling anything of course, can you explain a bit more about what the character of the juggler represents?
The Juggler is one of the most powerfully symbolic of the Tarot cards. He can taunt, tease, infuriate and challenge but is ultimately wise. He is the teller of uncomfortable truths.

I seem to have read quite a few books recently featuring men of about 30 being forced to evaluate their lives. Is the mid-life crisis happening earlier?
Mid-life crises usually happen when a person realizes that the drive for money, status influence and respect is not really going to come true in the way that was imagined. Usually, people are happier after they’ve had their crises and dealt with some of that unhelpful yearning, and so I guess earlier is better.

It’s interesting that many people use that moment of crisis and conflict as the starting point for a creative work. Out of the ashes…
Yes, I am certain that is true, although I am also rather wary of it as a concept. I have known a number of writers who have felt that you can only write from a position of personal angst, and although it does seem to be true that angst can cause a sort of gush of creative energy, other more benign states of mind work just as well (in my opinion). I think using a moment of crisis as you describe can be very cathartic and helpful, but perpetuating it for the sake of creativity as many people do is very harmful.

Are you working on anything right now?
Yes, a dark, optimistic novel called The Conjuror, about a counsellor…

Could you recommend an undervalued book that readers of this blog should rush out and buy?
Hermann Hesse’s Journey To The East, which is back in print, thankfully. Hesse is brilliant at the mythic, but also at the ephemeral nature of our own desire to know ourselves.

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