In your first novel, Last Call for the Living, Hicklin, one of your main characters was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist gang. You gave a lot of realistic details about this neo-Nazi organisation (the tattoos, the fact that a member is bound to the group for life, the way they act in prison…), how have you learnt about the AB? Have you met those guys?
I’ve always been fascinated by prison gangs and west coast prison culture, and the tribalism that defines it. While contemplating the novel that became Last Call for the Living, the Aryan Brotherhood loomed large in my mind. As a criminal syndicate, they compose such a small segment of America’s prison population, but are responsible for so much violence. I was drawn to their notoriety and ruthlessness, and devoured as much literature as I could about the AB…but that is as far as I went regarding research.
Are the neo-Nazis still very present in the southern states of the USA?
Neo-nazis and white supremacists are still present in the southeast United States (and elsewhere in America for that matter), but I suspect their numbers are relatively miniscule. They are fringe elements in our society, that unfortunately attract a lot of media attention when they congregate.
Do you think that Trump election (and what he said, for instance, after the events in Charlottesville) has strengthened the voices of the right wing extremists, for example of the KKK?
Trump’s comments after Charlottesville were typically baffling. He’s inarticulate, frequently incoherent but there is no denying white identity/white nationalists compose a section of his base. I don’t think Trump has strengthened their cause, however. He has no ideology and no principles, and he’ll eventually abandon his promises to them as soon as it’s politically expedient.
I feel like the subject of the neo-Nazis is rarely covered in novels or films (I can only remember Oz or American History X). Why did you chose that subject and did you fear their reactions?
I took a warped sense of delight in writing a character such as Hicklin in Last Call for the Living, a psychopathic killer who harbors such despicable beliefs. My hope was that despite his prejudice and penchant for violence, by novel’s end the reader would—despite themselves—summon some sympathy for him. I’ve always loved complicated villains in film and fiction. As far as reactions to the novel, to this day I’ve never heard a word from anyone associated with the prison gang.
You live in, and the action of your novels takes place in, South Georgia. Human trafficking, corruption, prostitution, racism, murders, alligators, mosquitoes, boiled peanuts… the tourist board must not thank you… is it so terrible to live there?
Nah, south Georgia is not so bad as I paint it. Just like anywhere, there are good people and bad people out and about…places that are beautiful and places best avoided.
If I am right, your second novel Ghost in the Fields has not been published in the USA yet, only in France, by Gallmeister. Is it because you talk about upsetting topics (racism, poverty, economic crisis…)? Or is it because the publishing business is not well right now?
Ghost in the Fields does not have an American publisher yet. I don’t think the subject matter or quality of the novel is the reason for it’s orphaned status. Let’s just say as far as the publishing business in my country is concerned, I would rather be lucky than good.
Are you surprised that French people are so interested in your work?
I am surprised and incredibly grateful for the interest from French readers. I have Editions Gallmeister to thank, for believing in and supporting my work. France seems to have a thriving book culture, which sadly is not the case in the United States.
Your French publisher has changed the title of your second novel. They have chosen The Devil Himself. Do you think it is a good title?
I was surprised by the title change but I love it. It works beautifully.
You were the singer of Cable, a metal hardcore band, whose last album was released in 2009. Did you write the lyrics of The Failed Convict, which you used as epigraphs in Last Call for the Living? Is it in Cable that you have developed a taste for writing?
I co-wrote lyrics to The Failed Convict with our bass player Randy Larsen. Indeed, being a vocalist and lyricist in bands for many years laid the foundation for writing poetry, prose and eventually fiction.
Don’t you miss playing music live and working with other people, as writing is a very solitary experience?
I have many, many fond memories from my time writing and performing with Cable and other bands, but I’ve always been a loner and preferred my own company. The solitude required for fiction writing is and always will be a major attractant.
Your art of writing is very special. You make the scenes played again by the different characters, so the reader never knows where the truth is. It is very efficient to build suspense. How do you manage to get into several people’s heads at the same time? Are you schizophrenic?
In the middle of writing a first draft, I probably am a bit schizophrenic! Haha! Fiction writing certainly requires imagination and empathy, and it’s easy to feel a little unmoored if you’ve been living in a character’s head for a few days or weeks.
Several scenes of your two novels are extremely violent. You have a really great talent to imagine tortures and awful ways to die. Is it to reflect the violence of American society? Is it much funnier to create dark “heroes” full of anger and hate than ordinary guys?
I’m not sure the violence in my novels is a reflection of America, which overall is a fairly safe country. But it certainly reflects human nature, as we all possess the potential for violent action given the circumstances. Some people are simply cruel and psychotic, others (criminal sociopaths for example) seem to have an extra gear inside them, and use violence as any predator would. These are the characters that frighten and fascinate me.
Which scenes were the most pleasant to write? The hard ones (the death of Grimes, with his burning head), the funny ones (Willie’s arrest and his 130 kilos of nakedness), or the tender ones (Leonard’s buying tampons to his young protégé)?
I enjoyed writing the scenes between Leonard and Maya the most. Their bond is the heart of the novel.
Mexico, the dangerous pimp of Ghost in the Fields quotes: “An armed society is a polite society” and Leonard says: ‘My law here. My justice.” There are so many guns in your novels, and in your country I guess. To take the law into your own hands is a recurring theme of the western movies. Is it efficient because it is not a cliché but American reality?
Vigilantism isn’t very common in America, but it is true—many estimates suggest there are at least 250-300 million firearms in our country. Where I’m from, gun ownership is fairly common, as firearms are used for a variety of lawful purposes, from hunting to self-defense. As a responsible gun owner, hunter and competition shooter, I value our right to own firearms. Likewise, as a crime fiction writer guns are the tools of the trade so-to-speak. As a fan of westerns and noir, there is simply nothing better than a well-written (or well filmed) gunfight.
Aren’t your books also tributes to pulp fictions, or western movies, or dark novels? I think about Harry Crews‘s Feast of Snake and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter…
Harry Crews is one of my all-time favorite writers, but my tastes in fiction are varied. I certainly appreciate westerns, pulp and noir—and elements from each genre trickle into my writing—but my favorite authors tend to be regional, with a strong sense for place and geography. Ron Rash, Rick Bass, Larry Brown and Flannery O’Connor are a few examples of writers I hold dear.
You describe the importance of religion in the rural communities. Baptist churches are everywhere, (which is strange for French people), with specific cults (the snakes, for instance), and the preachers have a prominent role. Do you think that religion impregnates people’s way of thinking, your way of looking at things?
My views on religion have changed over time, but, yes, people from the southeast United States can be and are very passionate about their faith. Fanaticism and zealotry are dangerous, and every day around the world unspeakable violence is perpetrated in the name of one God or another. But I can’t fault anyone for his or her faith. If it makes you a better person, or helps you through difficult times, who am I to say you’re deluded? I simply ask that you keep your religion to yourself. The world would be a better place if more people adhered to that.
The notion of redemption is very present in your novels, and the sense of guilt. Hicklin and Leonard struggle inside with opposed forces, good and evil, right and wrong. Do you think that everybody has goodness in his heart?
I am—to a fault—cynical and misanthropic…just like Leonard. Fatherhood has softened my perspective some, and I have experienced and benefited from the goodness in people without a doubt. I do believe humans are basically kind at heart, but we are a complicated species and continuously evolving (and not for the better I fear). You can never let your guard down, however, and never forget that there are monsters out there among us.
Can you explain us where the title Last Call for the Living comes from? It sounds very biblical.
It was an unused song title from an old book of lyrics.
In Last Call and in Ghost, a lot of your characters’ difficulties come from the bad relationships they had within their family. Is family Hell?
Haha! Family is hell, isn’t it? I’ve seen estrangement in other families and certainly my own, and estrangement is a major sub-current in both Last Call for the Living and The Devil Himself. Families vary wildly, and are like little ecosystems. I find them all to be dysfunctional (to some degree or another), with depths and complexities that can be mined for great fiction.
Haven’t Hicklin and Leonard a lot in common, actually? They have done dreadful things because they had to; they have built legends bigger than themselves; they shine in the dark; they are changed by love. Aren’t you finally an incurable optimistic?
There are some threads of connectivity between Hicklin and Leonard for sure, as both their lives are disrupted and altered by unexpected friendships. As for being an incurable optimist, I don’t know. Fatherhood has changed me for the better, and I don’t feed off negativity like I once did. But I still find time to wallow in misery and despair…old habits die hard. ☺
Interview published in New Noise n°41 – November-December 2017
In your latest novel, a dystopia, there are no more countries in Europe, but a supranational State, the United State of Europe, run by a technocratic elite. Crats, Bureaus, Controllers are at the service of the centralised power based in Brussels and Berlin. In this New Democracy, “there is no more need for elections.” The Good Europeans are happy to respect the rules. Those who have incorrect ideas, the Commons, are considered as terrorists and must be monitored and repressed. As written on the back cover, « while set in the future, the book is very much about the here and now ». Do you really think that the Europeans live in a travesty of democracy, and that the EU is leading us to dictatorship?
I don’t think it’s that bad yet, but I do believe democracy is being eroded, and at a national level we have seen our elites transferring sovereignty to Brussels. There will always be people and organisations that want to control society, and while we have easy credit and a level of material prosperity, it would be a mistake to think this is no longer true. And so I do feel the EU could become a dictatorship one day, yes, but it would be very different to those we have seen in the past.
We are not talking about screaming leaders and marching soldiers and blitzkrieg invasions. It would be more subtle and longer lasting, achieved through the manipulation of law and a clever use of the internet, the slow brainwashing of populations as history is rewritten and a liberal veneer applied.
They say that the real strength of a totalitarian system is in its bureaucracy rather than its army, and I think of the brilliant novel Alone In Berlin, by Hans Fallada, the fear that the main characters feel, living in a society where nobody dares say what they think, as they are surrounded by informers. I always have George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the ‘power of the proles’ in my mind, where the only hope rests in the people, the potential strength of the masses if only they could unite. In these books, information is controlled and news distorted. What is true and what is not?
The EU’s mission to create a superstate has been played out across the generations, and for decades this slow-motion coup went on in the background, with anyone who questioned it insulted and smeared. But the EU is only a part of something bigger – globalisation, world government, the ever-increasing power of the banks and multinationals, the exploitation of the internet and new technologies.
Isn’t there a kind of provocation in the title you chose The Liberal Politics of Adolf Hitler, a kind of punk provocation?
The title is an absurdity, reflects the extent to which history has been distorted in the era of New Democracy. Hopefully people will only think about it for a few seconds before they move on from the literal meaning. It is doublespeak. Triplespeak even. Again, it matches the way language is warped in the novel. I didn’t think of it as a provocation, but you are right, and there are a lot of punk connections made in the book. As The Clash sang in White Man In Hammersmith Palais: ‘If Adolf Hitler flew in today, they’d send a limousine anyway.’
What unites the Good Europeans is uniformity, conformity, nothing but vacuum. They all think the same, eat the same. Do you consider that the EU denies the specificities, the identities of the different countries?
There has always been that element in society, but it has got bigger, become more accepted and influential. The novel takes things further, to the extent that the thoughts of these Good Europeans are self-censored, an extension of so-called political correctness, which can be stifling and destructive when language and behaviour is misunderstood. I believe in free speech and free thought, but I can see how the first of these at least is being attacked. If you obey the rules you will be rewarded… That is not new.
With regards the EU, what we see today is different to what we will see in a year’s time. It is becoming stronger, dominating national governments, looking to expand its borders, building an empire and thinking about forming an army. Eventually, it has to homogenise the cultures of Europe and create a single identity. It already has a flag, anthem, legislature, paramilitary force. It likes the idea of a giant theme-park full of tourist attractions, but does not want strong local feelings, as these threaten the success of The Project.
In the USE, new rules and regulations are constantly promulgated, rules that can’t be discussed, or understood, by the people. Because « change was good. Change meant progress ». The technos use new words to create new ideas, new absurd concepts. Is it easier to be obeyed when you’re not understood?
Simple feelgood slogans in public, complex and hidden regulations behind the scenes… Undemocratic law-making works its magic. The idea that all change is good suits business as it means everything has to be replaced, which in turn increases profits. It is perpetual revolution for capitalists and a handy tool to force more debt and through that control on people. The truth is that some change is positive, some change is negative, and we need a balance, but at the moment people are branded backward-looking or nostalgic for trying to preserve or questions things. We see it in ever-changing gadgets and the weight of new regulations, and on a larger scale the disruption of communities through the lust for land and property and privatisation.
How did you create that Newspeak, that new language, very efficient in your novel? Was it funny to do that?
It developed as I was writing the book, happened naturally, by using words and warping their meaning, adding some childish terms, a sort of ‘baby-talk’ in places, taking to extremes the way language is manipulated today. It was a lot of fun to do. Adding distortion and feedback and turning up the volume like King Tubby! But through words rather than sound.
In your world, History is rewritten. The heroes are the unifiers (Stalin, Hitler, Merkel, Napoleon…) whereas Churchill, for instance, was “a drunkard and a gangster, he was bitterly opposed to unification. He rejected the advances of men such as Controller Adolf and Controller Joe.” Good Europeans are convinced that “there has never been an England. It is a myth.” What’s the importance of History in the building of the future?
There are histories passed down through families and communities, and there are official histories. Both are open to distortion, whether accidental or intentional, and we interpret events according to our own beliefs, but at the state level there are other factors involved. History is essential to building the future, in my opinion. Those with power and wealth and a stake in the EU were furious at Leave voters in the aftermath of the EU referendum here in Britain. They say we are uneducated, stupid, confused, racist, too old. They just can’t accept the people’s view of history, their interpretation of events and sense of identity.
My novel White Trash looked at these same prejudices, the division between those with power and those without. The accusation that older people were somehow selfish and cruel for voting to leave the EU is revealing. The Remain campaign insisted that leaving the EU was somehow backward and inward looking, but this is not how the majority saw things. Voting for independence was all about the future, wanting to be free of an undemocratic system, looking to engage with the wider world. Older people were less afraid than the young, as they have seen the EU evolve, know its history and where it is going.
Where are the young going to hear the most honest history? From their families and communities, or from a government that is in bed with the banks and multinationals, a collection of careerists working for their own rewards? These attempts to turn families against each other, to divide young and old, is a disgrace.
A Free England, far from Heartland, still exists. These locals are seen as under-educated and dangerous by Good Europeans. « The Commons could never be left to their own devices. » Is this a version of the elite versus the people, as in true life?
Yes, and we see this beyond England, and it goes back through time. The kings and queens of the past, who intermarried and controlled Europe, have been replaced by an international set that preaches liberal values but does not live them. They share the same elitist culture of past royals and landowners, have a similar distaste for the masses. It is the same in France I am sure, and across Europe and the rest of the world.
Concerning the kings and queens, what do you think about the monarchy in the UK? doesn’t this system cost you a lot of money?
I think most people here like the queen. It might seem like a contradiction to some of my other views, and really it is, but I am not anti-monarchist and wouldn’t like to see it disbanded. I don’t feel subservient, feel they have no political power, represent a tradition and are a focal point for our country when it is being threatened. I don’t care about the wider monarchy though, the land-owners and all the rest of them.
There is a continuity many people like about the queen, as she has lived through so many stages of our modern history, but I don’t know what will happen when she dies. The royals do cost a lot of money, but the argument is that they pull in more through tourism. People say it would change society if we no longer had a king or queen, that we could have a president like other countries, but who would we get? Tony Blair? Nick Clegg? Sir Bob Geldof? I would much rather have Queen Elizabeth. I am pretty sure Johnny Rotten loves the queen as well.
One of your character in Free England says : « The old Saxon burr of the Southern and Eastern shires had been insulted for centuries by the Latin – and French-loving aristocracy, the Europeanised rulers of the pre-bubblehead days driving a racial prejudice that still persisted. » Do you feel that?
Yes. There is a big division in the English language, as well as the accents. It is the difference between ‘fuck’ and ‘copulate’ – one is a swear word and the other is ‘proper’ English. The monarchy and upper-class was often foreign / international, interbred and even spoke a different language to the masses. The natives were seen as low class and ignorant, as were their customs and culture. That is still true today.
European culture has always been prized as more sophisticated by the rich of this country, and when a new middle-class evolved it followed the pattern as they mimicked the upper-class. This brings us back to the European Union and the division between the feelings of the masses and the drives of the rich and those with power. It is a very old prejudice being replayed. Again, it is stripped bare in The Liberal Politics Of Adolf Hitler.
For you, the only way for people to recover their identity, to fight against the contempt of the elite, to be free, is to leave the EU? Brexit cannot be an end in itself…
It is not the only way, and voting to leave is not an end in itself, but it is a start, and it will certainly help us to preserve our identity. The vote to leave the EU was a major defeat for the elite, but they are still here, and the battle now is to make sure there is a proper Brexit, as they will do everything they can to not honour the decision. This involves leaving the ‘single market’ and customs union, and if we achieve this, the domestic battle will be over the nature of the society we build in the future. That never changes. But staying in the EU would have been a disaster. Half-leaving would be little better.
In your Free villages, people are quite self-sufficient. Values such as solidarity, friendship, respect of the elders are not empty words. Is localism the solution?
The Liberal Politics Of Adolf Hitler is a very green novel. It is all about localism. The decentralisation of power. People working for each other, beyond the profit motive.
As countries do not exist any more in the USE, and rebels fight for the defense of the English nation, is localism a form of patriotism in your novel?
I try to link localism and patriotism in the novel, as they are the same thing in many ways, even if expressed differently. That is maybe a provocation for some people, especially in some left-leaning and green and liberal circles, as any display of patriotism is seen as right-wing and evil. I think it is positive that people are cautious, but that reaction can also become bigoted in its own right. By seeing the common ground it is possible to bring people together. So yes, patriotism is localism and localism could be patriotic.
During the referendum campaign, people who were for leaving the EU have been accused of racism, which made you very angry. You use that formula in your book. The Commons are supposed to be racists, and « Racists questioned the centralisation of power. « Can you explain us?
It is easy to brand someone a racist or a fascist in order to shut down an argument. There are racists who voted to leave the EU, and there are racists who voted to remain I am sure, and the media focus on immigration was a way of distracting from the important issues. The other area of ‘debate’ was trade. That was it. There was hardly any discussion of where the EU is heading. It became a TV spectacle with politicians shouting at each other. For me and most people I know it has always been about the loss of democracy, identity, the corporate nature of the EU. But these ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’ smears have been around for decades.
I think those who throw the terms about so loosely are cheapening their meaning.
The EU is not to be blamed for all evils, though. England itself, and all its governments from at least the 80’s, are guilty of contempt towards its people, and proletarians suffered a lot with laws on the NHS, the railways, the education, the trade-unions, the employment contracts… When you write about the USE : « Love flowed when credit was available and profits increased », isn’t it a good definition of capitalistic Britain?
Definitely. The British establishment and the EU establishment can’t be separated. They are the same people. UK governments have looked to change the NHS, privatised the railways and other core industries, attacked the unions, and this is what the EU is doing on a larger scale. The British state took us into EU and kept us there and campaigned to remain during the referendum. It handed over sovereignty and billions of pounds of taxpayers money and betrayed the people. To fight back against the ‘liberalisation’ of the NHS and renationalise the railways, protect wages through the control of labour, well, we have to be outside the EU as it laws and directives oppose such moves, but we also need a change of government. We would benefit from a new sort of politics, and this seems to be happening. You don’t have to agree with them, but the success of the SNP and UKIP, the changes within Labour, are all big shifts. Rejecting the Brussels elite was the same as rejecting the British elite.
Doesn’t the elite of a country include also the intellectuals, the writers, the scientists, the poets…? Do those people have to be rejected like those who have the money and the power?
It’s down to definitions really, and the term is loaded, whether we are seeing the elite as elitist, but these people you mention should really be separate. If anything, you’d hope that writers and poets and philosophers are far removed from the elite, so that they can question things properly, but there is a system that takes people from these and other fields and controls them through financial rewards and honours. Not so much with science, but culture. Universities are there to channel thought, to control and redirect it, and that in turn links into the elite – in my opinion. If you obey and fall into line, life is a lot easier.
Who decides who is the best in a specific field? There is a canon in literature, for instance, but that is decided by a professional class that imposes rules and even censorship. But we shouldn’t reject anyone for their background or their wealth, but listen to what they say and work out what they believe. You can be born into an elite, but rebel as well. We have to be fair.
Wasn’t the EU a beautiful idea at the beginning? Wasn’t its aim to unite people and stop wars? If not, why did they build it? And why is the elite still so committed to this idea?
The idea to create a single European state goes back much further than the Second World War, though the need to stop future conflicts between Germany and France was clearly important. But it was the US military and NATO that preserved the peace. Maybe that is why so many European governments have been negative towards the US over the years. The same applies to Britain and Russia. Do someone a favour and they never forgive you…
There were idealists involved in the formation of the EU, I would never deny that, and there are now as well, but as someone who wants England and Britain to not be broken into regions of a European empire I reject it, and I also reject it for its political leanings.
There is another argument that says the EU was created to limit the social gains made after the end of the Second World War, to protect capitalism and the Western elites. Others say it has fascist foundations. The Nazis were white supremacists more than nationalists. They wanted to build a European superstate, but were defeated by patriots who fought to save their cultures as expressed through the nation state. We fought to save Britain, the French Resistance and Free French fought to save France, the Russians fought to save Russia, not communism. They call it the Great Patriotic War. There are a lot of different views on the origins of the EU, and I don’t think it is wrong to consider them.
In your novel, all the Good Europeans share the same culture, a kind of watered-down remixed culture. They listen to soft versions of Abba, The Rubbettes or Jean Rotten. Physical books or records are prohibited. Are technology and digitisation dangerous?
Technology isn’t dangerous, but the way it’s used can be. In the book, digitisation has been enforced as a means of social control. Humans evolved ways of passing information on to future generations, tried to beat death and time and share their experiences and knowledge, but digital versions of books, films, photos, history only exist in cyberspace. By accident or on purpose, history could be lost if there are no physical records.
To publish physical books and defend english literature, is that why you’ve created London Books?
We started London Books because there were these old London novels that we thought deserved to be in print, and while I tried to interest a couple of publishers, there was no reaction, and so we started to put them out ourselves under the London Classics imprint. I edit the London Classics and our aim is to produce a series that reflect a forgotten – and I believe dismissed – literature that is socially aware and for the most part based in and around working-class London. It is another view of the city. And if we had the resources we would like to print more new fiction, give a chance to emerging writers from the wider population, but we are small and our main work is as authors, so progress is very slow. We want to represent another tradition, a strand of English literature that has been marginalised.
In your novel,he internet has moved into InterZone, a large social network where everybody shares the same information at the same time. Isn’t the internet also a big space for freedom and democracy?
The internet is a miracle of science, means everyone can in theory bypass the controllers, but there are negatives, and I think it is only a matter of time before it is taxed and more intrusive surveillance is brought in. It is already happening, as we know, and while there is a casual jeans-and-trainers image applied to the internet, the companies driving it are billion-dollar concerns.
Maybe there are two areas to think about – opinions and news/information. Every opinion imaginable is out there, but with the ‘following’ of twitter and the ‘friends’ of facebook, holding a different view can see person insulted in a way that would never happen in real life. Individuals can be destroyed, and not just by trolls. People are scared to say what they think. So we are more connected, but in a way more restricted.
When it comes to information, how do we know what is true and what is not? Stories can be invented and circulated and accepted as truth, which seems to have happened on a large scale during the American election. I have taken this on in The Liberal Politics Of Adolf Hitler, shown a society where official views are accepted and any sort of argument has been removed through peer pressure and self-preservation.
« Privacy was suspect. » The technology allows a frightening surveillance. Terror is diffuse but real. Everybody is watching you, can be an informer and call the Cool or Hardcore Units. (and If I remember well, London was one of the first major cities to install security cameras). Do you think people are ready to sacrifice their freedom for their security?
There is a lot of appeal in the ability of surveillance cameras to stop crime, or at least track down those responsible, and I think most people tend to accept that as a good thing. But there has to be a limit. Once the cameras are accepted, then the boundary is pushed, and it is much more devious and intrusive inside computers and mobile phones. This has led to a change in mentality. People are filmed and embarrassed and shamed on the internet. They are increasingly tracked and monitored through their devices.
Privacy is no longer respected in the way it used to be, and there are spies and informers everywhere, waiting to tell tales, keen to brand people for the smallest of ‘crimes’. It is becoming more and more petty. Soon there will be nowhere to hide and it could be similar to sleep deprivation maybe. People need privacy and some secrecy and can’t be on guard every second of their lives. They will go mad. Can we still function as individuals if we can never relax? We need privacy.
Don’t people take pleasure in a voluntary servitude? Nobody is forced to go to Starbucks or MacDonald’s instead of pubs, or obliged to buy the latest connected gadget, or watch stupid TV programs.
Most of us like an easy life. The dictators of the future will exploit this, I am sure. Why make people suffer and force them to fight you? The modern leaders will not be ideologues in the same way as Hitler and Stalin. People will want the toys and accept the debt. A remixed version of Sixteen Tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford is going to play the shopping malls of the world. None of the physical hardship, but lots of pressure to keep working.
Rupert is a kind oh a libertarian. As a Good European, he is encouraged to be cruel with animals, to have sex with dates who come from Africa and have been deported, educated for his sexual pleasure. There are no more « moral » values in the USE. Those who have the power can do anything. Are they human anymore?
They are human, because humans can justify anything to excuse their behaviour, and that is what Rupert does when it comes to animals and dates, but he is backed up by those around him, which is essential. He sees himself as very moral, and more so than the commons, and really, people’s morals vary, don’t they, and between different societies as well. Those examples of animal cruelty and the exploitation of women are hidden behind the label ‘freedom of choice’, and again that is the same today.
These careerists of the future are only taking what we have now and moving it on. There are some people here in Britain, and probably elsewhere, who want to show the mechanics of animal slaughter, to be ‘honest’ about where meat comes from, and then to justify the killing as ‘humane’ and ‘necessary’, and above all as free choice – a free choice we make. The same applies to prostitution and pornography. They feel they are great moralists. Look across the world and we can justify the worst crimes. We all feel we are right. Humans are self-deceiving and destructive. The sooner we die out, the better for the planet.
There are lots of references to three major novels in The Liberal Politics of Adolf Hitler, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Did you want to pay tribute to them or do you think that fiction is more effective than pamphlet as whistle-blower?
Fiction is a great way to get ideas across as it offers a freedom non-fiction does not. It can feel much more personal and immediate. The Liberal Politics Of Adolf Hitler is a tribute to those authors in some ways. The books you mention were inspiring when I first read them, but more than anything I feel they reflect much of what is happening today. The technology is different, as none of them predicted the internet and digitisation, and maybe they are overlooked a little now for that reason, and yet Orwellian doublespeak and Huxley’s genetic engineering and Bradbury’s burning of books and ideas are all totally relevant to 2016.
The Liberal Politics of Adolf Hitler is very near 1984 in the narration (it is written in the past, the characters embody their functions, there is a creation of a Newspeak, of a frightening world) but I see more irony in it. Controller Horace is very cynical (« The best European was boring and conventional and ready to obey every order ») and sometimes very funny. Your book is less desperate, isn’t it?
I did laugh a lot when I was writing this book, often when playing with language, showing the self-deceptions of characters such as Controller Horace and Rupert Ronsberger, but the repackaging of culture meant I could have fun there as well. I hope people get the humour, and yes, it is less desperate than Nineteen Eighty-Four, more of a satire in places.
I suppose this reflects the different eras, as Orwell was writing shortly after the end of the Second World War, and the world he imagined was rooted in that horror, while The Liberal Politics Of Adolf Hitler reflects life in 2016, which is much easier. Those who want to strip back our rights are more likely to be faceless and nameless, their actions marketed as moral advancements, and it is easy to accept the propaganda. Maybe the reality is too terrible to admit. A parallel is there in people’s refusal to confront the meat industry.
As I read the description of the cities in the USE, I felt like I was in the Village of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner. Everything is clean, fine but it is impossible to escape, and you don’t know why you’re here. Did you like that television series?
I was very young when it was first shown, but I have seen episodes since and can see the comparisons, the psychology and the madness, like something from Franz Kafka. Maybe I had the likes of Metropolis and The Truman Show in my head more, the Potzdamer Platz domes in Berlin enlarged for the East Side Gates. A Clockwork Orange world just outside. I could add Trump Tower as Pearly Tower after the American election.
How has your book been received in England? You were for Brexit but far from the UKIP ideas in many ways. Didn’t you fear the confusion?
I think Nigel Farage and UKIP are right about the EU, and without them there would have been no referendum, and Britain would have faced disaster, but I don’t agree with their domestic policies or the excessive focus on immigration. I don’t fear confusion. There are people from every party who voted to leave the EU, with big numbers of socialists and anarchists among them. The independence vote crossed over. My feeling is that if the vote was held tomorrow, the victory would be much greater. Few who voted to stay in the EU are pro-EU. Many were swayed by fears of an economic collapse, which has not happened, as well as an unease over the focus on immigration. Despite establishment lies, the country does not feel divided. At least not in terms of numbers.
I know that the future is unwritten but aren’t you afraid of it? Do you have absolute confidence in your people’s wisdom?
I feel less afraid that I would have done if we had voted to stay in the EU. If we had chosen to remain we would have seen more and more power handed to Brussels, more money wasted and, in time, we would have joined the euro. I don’t want to see Britain and England dissolved, and that is what would have happened eventually – and still could, because the establishment here will do everything it can to not honour the vote. I do not trust our political class to deliver on the referendum.
We are very lucky that we are not part of the single currency as it means we can make a relatively easy break. The same cannot be said for those in the eurozone. Most people I have spoken to on the continent seem crushed, as if they have given up. This is my impression talking to friends from France, Greece, Croatia, Germany. When France rebels, as I believe it will, there are going to be huge problems, the sort of things have not had to face. I am more afraid for the likes of France and Greece than I am for Britain.
In your Free England, people read and listen to punk rock, they go to the pub, they sing and drink together, they don’t eat animals and are close to nature, they are non-violent but resist, they have emotions. If Heartland is your hell, is Free England your heaven, your utopia (if we except the fear they live in)? Are you scared that this heaven, the England you love, is dying? Are you melancholic in anticipation?
I don’t think a Utopian society is possible, but I suppose I have created my own version in a way. There is a gentle patriotism that fits with green politics and veganism and strands of Eastern thought combined with a native paganism and the socialism of Christianity. I have punk links in the anarchist bodies Conflict and the Subhumans, while the Wessex Boys and GB45 follow the Oi Oi tradition. I like bands from both these areas, feel they have a great deal in common. Others won’t agree, but maybe my brain is wired up differently.
England isn’t dying. It is evolving. Which is natural. But it is better evolving from the people up, not have its direction shaped by businessmen and bankers, people from the other side of the globe who see London as nothing more than an investment opportunity. The destruction of London and its culture is very sad, but I am an optimist. I was elated as the sun came up over the rooftops and the vote to leave the EU was confirmed. My skin tingled. It was one of the happiest days of my life.
Interview published in New Noise n°37 – january-february 2017
Among all the novels you have written, only two have been translated into French, Born under Punches and The White Room. You said about them that “these two books were the books you became a writer to write”. Why are they so special for you and different from the others?
Okay. There’s a few answers to this one. They’re actually the first books in French under my own name. I’ve also written a series of thrillers under the name Tania Carver, four of which were published by Ixelles Editions a few years ago. I don’t think the books caught on in France, very big in Germany, though. And they’re doing well in the UK. But yes, back to the stuff under my own name. I owe a great deal of thanks to the brilliant Cathi Unsworth for persuading Rivages to publish them.
I had written three crime novels set in Newcastle before them, all with Stephen Larkin in. With Born Under Punches I wanted to do something a bit more ambitious. Use the crime novel as a social novel but not in a worthy or dull way as is so often the case. I wanted to use it to explore the legacy of the miners’ strike in Britain, mostly in the north. It was such a pivotal event in our country’s history and I think that only now are we seeing the long term impact that Thatcher’s decisive, damaging and detrimental policies had. I still can’t think of her as a human being and when I do think of her all my old anger is still there. I wanted to channel that anger into something worthwhile, hence Born Under Punches.
The White Room came about because of two kind of obsessions of mine: T Dan Smith and Mary Bell. Smith was the leader of the Newcastle City Council, an allegedly committed socialist with hugely ambitious redevelopment plans for the North East of England. If his vision had happened as he originally intended it, it would have either been quite spectacular or all pulled down by now as an example of horrendous brutalist architecture. Unfortunately he allowed that vision to be diluted by easy options, mixing with criminals, back handers, illegal deals . . . everything. And the restructuring he did was really horrible. Most of it’s been pulled down now. Mary Bell was a child killer. When she was eleven she killed two small children just a few street from where I lived. I was the same age as the kids she killed. There was also another girl involved but her parents managed to keep her out of it and let Mary take the rap for both of them. Mary had had a tragic life up until that point. Her mother was an S&M prostitute and Mary was being sold to her punters from six months old. It was a huge case at the time and no one knew what to do with her. She was placed in a rehabilitative environment and now lives under an assumed name. I have an enormous amount of sympathy for her. The genesis of the book was realizing that Mary literally killed in the shadow of one of T Dam Smith’s awful towerblocks. To me that was such a strong image that I had to write the novel to fit round it.
A strange thing happened while I was writing The White Room, or rather several strange things. I’m not given to all that hippy shit bollocks about writers being channellers and all that, but there were some strange coincidences. I bumped into an old college friend in a traffic jam in central London and she told me all about how Dan Smith would come to tea when he was in a open prison and working on their community centre. I met a woman in an art gallery who had made a film about the life of Dan Smith. My oldest friend’s partner had just taken part in a political debate against Smith. And strangest of all, I started to have dreams that pieced together secret hidden histories of Newcastle, things I honestly didn’t know about until I subsequently went to research them. Weird.
You mix fiction with reality, and some of your characters, who have existed, had an impact on your own personal life. In The White Room, Dan Smith was an influential politician in Newcastle during the 60’s and your father used to work with him. Born under Punches relates the miners’ strike of 1984 and you said that it was the one event that politicized you, that it was a pivotal moment for both the country and yourself. Do you think that it is because the reader feels your implication that he is so touched by the stories you tell?
I’d like to think so. As a writer all you want to do is transfer your passion for a story over to the reader. Sometimes it doesn’t work and crashes and burns horribly. Stories that are personal to the writer can be so badly, self-indulgently handled that they end up touching no one. Although I wanted to put all the stuff in that was vitally important to me, I had to make sure that the characters were real and not just ciphers, that the plot was truly engaging and that the reader would be entertained while reading it. Angered, appalled, and enthralled, whatever. But I’m not a journalist, I’m a novelist.
To mix fiction and reality, fictitious persona and people who have really existed, stories set against a background of true events, in order to dissect England’s history… Did you want to expose Newcastle as Ellroy exposed LA, in a way?
That was the idea. Like Ellroy in LA and George Pelecanos in Washington DC. Reclaim the past and make it your own. Present the secret histories of our time. Unfortunately, especially in Britain, no one really cares about Newcastle or the north of England. Or at least not in the south, in London. I remember my agent at the time asking me, ‘Why should I care about the miners’ strike?’ and then telling me, ‘Well if you’re going to write about it, make it sexy.’ LA and Washington DC have a degree of exoticism by being in the States that Newcastle doesn’t. Those two books were a hard sell over here. I had/have others planned too but no one wanted them in Britain. I still want to write them though. And I will, when I get a chance.
You were born in 1963. What are your memories of the miners’ strike? Do you remember the young man you were at that time? Did you listen to a lot of music? Read a lot of books?
Absolutely. I think it was around that time that I was finding what I really loved. I’d just discovered Raymond Chandler and it was not so much like having the windows opened but having the side of the house blown off. And listening to LOTS of music. I particularly like the whole Paisley Underground thing that was happening in the States at that time, the Long Ryders, Green on Red, soundtrack for the era. And I remember the miners’ strike vividly. Especially what was happening locally with what was being reported on the TV. A huge disparity. That’s when I first realized that everything could be manipulated, even news, depending on who gained from it. I’ve got that anger now because it’s still going on now. Just look at our Tory government and what they’re trying to cover up. John Whittingdale, the culture and media secretary, has hidden his affair with an S&M prostitute (a lot of which was paid for through taxpayers money) and the media won’t touch it because he’s bought them off with promises of no regulation. David Cameron starves the poor even further while keeping his millions in off shore accounts. Disgusting. And this is all being disseminated through social media, not mainstream media channels, they won’t touch it until a critical mass builds and they can’t ignore it. I think if we’d had social media then Thatcher wouldn’t have been able to get away with what she did during the miners’ strike.
Sorry. Rant over.
In your two novels, you draw a very sad report of 50 years of politics in England. You depict the end of socialist and humanist utopias in the 50’s and the 60’s, through the fall of Dan Smith (whose dream of a new city, an egalitarian society, “a brave new future was destroyed before it had already been built”), who has finally been convicted of corruption. Do you think that betraying their ideals, politicians have killed the hope for a better world? Does power corrupt?
Unfortunately yes. Or rather not corrupt, as such, in most cases I think it just allows the user to become distanced from what they intended it was for in the first place. The majority of politicians are self-serving, only in it for the money and themselves. Or at least that’s how they end up, no matter how they start out, no matter how good their intentions are. The machinations of the machine take over.
Having said all that, I think that in post war Britain there was still a broad consensus between both parties when they were in power. They both seemed to accept that a kind of public-owned socialism worked alongside a responsible capitalism. Margaret Thatcher took her far right Tory fringe to the centre of the part in 1979 and began dismantling our country. Selling us back utilities we already owned, selling off council houses, creating not so much a working class but a Tory underclass.
Socially, politically, economically, how is England today? Does Thatcher’s politics in the 80’s still have an influence on people’s conditions of living, especially the poorest? Has the election of Tony Blair’s New Labour changed something?
Thatcher changed everything. Blair just continued her work under the guise of being left wing. This government we have now, propagating the lie of austerity, is the worst government Britain has had, certainly in my lifetime. Even worse than Thatcher. More corrupt and much more incompetent. People are starving and dying as a direct result of this government’s policies.
What do you think of the organization of the referendum about staying or not in the EU?
I’m firmly pro. Definitely, absolutely. The EU is a flawed organization, no doubt, but it’s worth sticking with. And the only ones in this country who want to leave are all on the far right. Why would I want to be allied with them?
About your characters, most of them have grown up in a very violent social and family background. And they use violence on weaker than they are. Did you want to show the influence of the environment on personalities?
Definitely. I think we’re all products of hereditary and environment. Again, in everything I write I try to remain true to people as they are and present them as they would be if put up against the situations and circumstances of the novels given their hereditary and environment. I can’t stand fiction that presents characters as having been somehow formed in a vacuum. They’re either good or bad and there’s no in-between. Boring. Dull. Lazy. And those type of writers, if they present a bad character, or someone who does villainous deeds, then they’re presented as some kind of folk monster, not created by the good people here, something or someone we can’t imagine being doing horrific things. It’s like they want the villagers to hunt them with flaming pitchforks. I hate that kind of writing. It’s giving glib, lazy answers to where the monsters among us come from. No. Any monsters in our society are created by us. Actions have consequences. Always. Any writer, who doesn’t show that, especially a crime writer presenting what they claim is a true picture of society, doesn’t deserve to be read.
Jack Smeaton and Stephen Larkin stay true to their principles, they keep their ethics. So it is possible. No one is born evil but everyone has to fight to be a good person?
Yeah. Exactly that. John Lennon said, ‘We’re all Christ and we’re all Hitler.’ Absolutely right. It’s a daily struggle to make sure the right person emerges. And yes, it’s often easier to get rid of your principles and take the east route but I’m always fighting to make sure that doesn’t happen. I suspect most people are too.
Some scenes of your books are so terrible. I think of moments when Monica or Mae as little girls are being raped by men, members of their family, sold, beaten, almost killed. You have a very special way of writing these scenes. You don’t describe the violence but its consequences afterwards. You let the reader fill in the blanks. Do you use ellipsis because it was too hard for you to write details about such horrors, or because horror is worse when it is only suggested and not described?
Thank you. When I came to approach those scenes I was torn between being honest to what was actually happening and presenting that as such, and coming across as gratuitous and sensationalist. But then again, i didn’t want to show that these things hadn’t happened, and hadn’t had the most traumatic of effects. I eventually decided on an approach that I saw as shutting a door on the action itself, hearing screams from behind that door and focusing on the reaction of a character on the other side of the door. And of course, as you say, showing the consequences afterwards. People come up to me and tell me about the terrible things I described in The White Room and when I ask them which part, they realize it’s all been in their head and I never described anything. I just suggested it and showed the aftermath. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t think about it and go through what happened in those scenes in real detail. I did. And it affected me so much that it took a lot to get over it afterwards, probably more than I’m willing to admit.
Your plots are very complex. The lives of your characters are interlinked. You use a lot of flashbacks. But it is easy for the reader to follow the story. Do you make a very detailed outline before you begin the writing?
Well, I used to. Make a huge plan and pin it up on my corkboard and try to follow it rigidly. But then I found it was taking its own turns, and things I’d imagined at the planning stage weren’t fitting in with how the book was going. And then in Born Under Punches one character kept forcing his way into more and more scenes and I kept wondering why. Eventually I realized he was one of the central characters and the whole of the novel orbited around. After that I became a bit freer with the plotting. Now I usually write about a quarter of the novel, using the characters as a kind of audition. If I like their voices, if they’re interesting, then I keep using them. If they’re not working I drop them. Or kill them, even. I also find that if I plan to rigidly it always takes longer in the working out and then needs re-plotting. I think now I just try to trust the process. At the start of a novel these characters may seem disparate and unconnected, but I know that through the course of the narrative their connections will become apparent.
Music plays an important role in your books. You gave each novel the title of a song. Born under Punches is a song of The Talking Heads and The White Room a song of Cream. How do you choose them? At what moment? Do they influence the stories?
Yeah. As I mention elsewhere here, I do love my music. And I can bore on about it at great length. My first novel, back in 1997, was called ‘Mary’s Prayer’. A song by a band called Danny Wilson from the Eighties. It fitted somehow. Then the follow up, ‘Little Triggers’, was named after an Elvis Costello track. And it went on from there. I thought it would be my thing, song titles as book titles. And that continued until the fourth Joe Donovan novel, ’Speak No Evil’. (Cocteau Twins, in case anyone was wondering. Changed by the publisher from my first choice, ‘Murdered Sons’, a Lydia Lunch track). Then came the Tanias and I fancied a change. But even then, the third Tania Novel is based on a line in a Warren Zevon song. Cage of Bones is the name of the book. ‘Excitable Boy’ is the Zevon song.
I do think they influence the novels, though, the titles. I find it hard to get started on a book, to really envision it, without a title. I know some writers who can just call it ‘Untitled Novel #14’ or whatever, but I can’t do that. I need a title to see where I’m going. And because I thought song titles were my thing, I spent a long time trying to find the right title for the right novel. I had to make sure they were the right ones, that they reflected and enhanced the story, that they became a signifier to a reader, and that they weren’t just something slapped on.
In a passage of Born under Punches, Larkin is upset because he has spent the night listening to his old albums (Lloyd Cole, Costello, The Talking Heads, The Smiths). The music has woken up memories and ghosts and it hurts him. Is music an important part of your life? Do you often listen to old albums you loved? Does it hurt?
Yeah, that part was possibly a bit over-indulgent on my part . . . but yes, I’m always listening to music, old and new. Some that I like discovering (old and new) and some stuff that means a lot to me. Tom Waits is probably my all time hero. Sometimes I’ll listen to old stuff and feel sad that I’m not that age any more and never will be again. Any hurt comes from that. The depth of any hurt depends on how much I’ve been drinking at the time… But I also like moving forward. I hate that attitude people have about not listening to current music, that somehow music was better when they were younger, or that use that hated phrase ‘my era’. No, music wasn’t better when you were younger you were just younger and your self-defiing memories were being formed. And this is still ‘my era’ and always will be until they nail the coffin lid down. I’m listening to music as I write this. Sixties Southern soul. Stax Records. A huge passion of mine. It was either that or the new albums by Richmond Fontaine and M Ward. I’ll play them next. Or the Santiago 77 album. Love that. Or Midlake. Or…
Do you use music as a means to describe your characters’ personalities? As a means to talk about the period?
Absolutely. It’s a great short cut in a narrative to showing character or setting an atmosphere or an era. I know writers come in for a bit of criticism for this, especially male ones, because not everyone knows the music or gets the references. And it can look just like that boy’s thing of making lists. I try never to fall into that trap. It’s not a new thing, though. Cornell Woolrich was doing it in the Thirties.
Your novels are dark but, as you said, “not without a redemptive ending. Because there has to be redemption. Otherwise what’s the point? » So, are you an incorrigible optimist? And, above all, as love is part of your “happy endings”, incorrigibly romantic?
God no! Well, not an optimist, certainly. I’d like to think I am, or that some part of me is, otherwise, as I said, what’s the point? But when I look at the news, at the actions of our government, at what corporations are doing to our planet, the Trump circus in the US, I despair. I’m not an optimist but I am a fighter. As for being a romantic… you’d have to ask my girlfriend that!
Can you tell us who is Tania Carver?
My female alter ego… A few years ago now, I was asked by my publisher if I could write a thriller under a female pseudonym. Actually, it was like he bet me I couldn’t do it. I came up with The Surrogate and Tania Carver was born. As I said earlier four of those books were published in France and there are eight in total. It’s been interesting writing as someone else, especially a woman, but I’m ready to be Martyn again now.
You have written a book, unfortunately not yet translated into French, with three others authors, Mark Billingham, David Quantick, Stav Sherez, called Great Lost Albums. The presentation of the book says: « From the 60s to the 00s, with track listings and full histories, Great Lost Albums reveals the recordings that—just perhaps—never existed, but really should have done.” Which band have you chosen to talk to? Why? Was it fun?
Enormous fun. The best fun I’ve ever had writing. The other three are just about the best bunch of people you could want to work with. Great friends, great writers. We didn’t actually talk to any artists, mainly for fear they would try and put an injunction up against us. As it was there was some stuff (usually mine, I have to say) that we couldn’t get past the lawyers. We just holed ourselves up in a hotel in Hastings on the south coast for the weekend and came up with it. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much in my life. It wasn’t a massive hit but it should have been. It’s the funniest book ever written (I reckon).
Interview published in New Noise n°34 – july-august 2016
Your characters are out of the ordinary in contemporary literature. They are Working Class heroes, or Unemployed heroes. Did you want to give the floor to people who aren’t generally listened to? Was it a conscious purpose or was it obvious for you to write about what you knew?
A little of both. As a writer I mostly write the things I feel compelled to write about and often these things are about my own complexities with how I personally relate to society and individuals. I suppose I’m writing to try and understand my place in the world. However, I have always been aware that people ‘like me’ or those from community aren’t represented (or are often represented in a very lazy way) in the arts and I’m grateful for the opportunity to address that.
Do you consider you’re a part of a specific literary movement? Do you feel close to some writers, dead or alive? Scottish ones?
Scotland has a far stronger tradition in working class literature than the rest fo Britain: Janice Galloway, James Kellman, Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh, Lisa O’Donnell, Jenni Fagan, Val McDermid…the list of successful working class writers is long. I’d like to think I’m contributing to this movement though wouldn’t be so bold as to put myself alongside those names or consider myself ‘belonging’.
You describe the environment and the daily life of your characters with very accurate details. I was struck by the way you depict colors, smells and landscapes, and above all the food they eat, and the beverage they drink. Is what people eat and drink revealing of their social class, like an ice-cream float?
I love that you’ve noticed this! Yes, I believe how we eat, what we eat, our relationship to food shows so much about us as people and where we are in society. Food was a huge deal when I was growing up…quite simply, at the end of the week before our benefits cheque, there often wasn’t enough of it and a ‘treat’ like an ice-cream was a real celebration in our house. How much food reveals about the way we feel about ourselves, those around us and our bank balance continues to be a fascination for me.
In this regard, your French publisher has chosen to change the title of your second novel from Thirst to La couleur de l’eau (the color of the water). What do you think of this title?
This comes from a line in the book ‘as plain and everyday beautiful as tap water’. What is meant by that line is that when we truly love someone we appreciate not just the big beautiful things but every simple, banal detail. When you love someone everything about them, even the unremarkable, becomes imbued with beauty. I think it’s a perfect title for Dave and Alena’s love affair which is both very simple, in that people fall in love every day, and also life changing for them.
Your first novel, Tony Hogan Bought Me An Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma, was based on autobiographical elements. Where does the idea of your second one come from?
I wanted to write about love. When I was writing it I was coming to the end of a passionate but very unsteady ten year relationship and I wanted to explore what ‘love’ was – magic, need, luck, evolutionary programming? At the same time I was living in Hackney, London which is an extraordinarily energetic place and saw a man who seemed both tough and yet incredibly vulnerable and lonely. He became Dave and then I very much wanted to find find him a love and so I ‘made’ Alena. There is less of ‘me’ in my second book there is a lot of my own loves on those pages too.
In spite of all their difficulties, your main characters have a strong life force. They all have grown up with a loving mother. Do you think that everything is possible if a child has received true love from his mother?
I’m not a psychologist but, yes, I believe to feel loved as a child is a huge part of being a healthy adult.
Reading your novels, it is impossible to miss out on the extreme violence against women (physical, sexual, spiritual, the violence of being left). Men are rough, cowards whereas women face the problems. You can always count on them for anything. Your heroes are heroines. As in real life?
Not absolutely in every case – I know and have known many decent, strong, brave men. But in my case, yes the majority of women I have known have been heroes. I grew up in a environment where women held everything together, kept themselves together, because they were mothers and in often terrible circumstances. That had a huge impact on me as a woman.
You have founded the WoMentoring Project, which mission is to introduce successful literary women to other women writers at the beginning of their careers who would benefit from some insight, knowledge and support. Do you think it is more difficult for a woman to succeed in literature?
I set it up in response to a Guardian report which proved that women were being reviewed less than men, therefore they sold less, therefore often their contracts were either not renewed or they were paid less for their next books. There’s a cycle there, underlined by the general false belief that women write ‘unimportant’ books while men write books of ‘substance’. I was seeking to readdress some of that imbalance. The scheme is over 120 women mentoring for free and we have a waiting list for people waiting to offer mentoring – I think this is an issue we’re all too aware of but are at least trying to tackle.
Is female solidarity more important than class solidarity?
I don’t divide things this way. I was lucky to be brought up to be told that I should challenge anything that seems unjust. Solidarity is about standing up and joining your voice with those who don’t have as much ability to speak up.
The way you describe female relationships is very peculiar. Is there nothing to expect from men?
There is of course. More and more what I see in the people in my life (many of whom identify as queer) is that the binary male/female attributions are being rejected. I am a woman, I grew up in with a single mother, I had a ten year relationship with a woman, I have sister and many female friends who’ve shaped my life…I don’t think it’s surprising this is my focus.
Dave is very endearing. He is tender, patient, attentive, shy. He has traits that are usually supposed female qualities. Is he an ideal man?
I think, as a queer, woman I was interesting in slightly subverting those gender roles. Yes, Dave has more ‘feminine’ qualities and Alena could be considered to have some ‘masculine’ traits. Dave is far from ideal, perhaps that’s the point, he is flawed and a little broken…like most of us.
Dave and Alena find a special way to talk : the body language. They discover themselves more through gestures than words. They touch themselves, kiss, sleep together. Nevertheless they don’t have sexual intercourse. Is sex a kind of violence?
They do in fact have sex but it comes very late in the book. I think sex is a beautiful and fundamental part of life if it is trusting, honest, uninhibited. However, Alena has come to regard sex as an act of violence and with Dave she must slowly learn to unpick that thinking and instead learn to see it as an act of love, intimacy and closeness.
Dave’s dream is to travel and you travel a lot. (Vietnam, Cambodia, Russia. You live in Berlin and London). Is it central to your own stability, essential because you’re a writer?
I grew up moving around and that followed me into adulthood. I love stories, new people, new foods, new things to look at and different perspectives. I am constantly excited by all there is to see and learn out there in the world. I’ve been hugely fortunate to find a ‘job’ where that hunger for travel only benefits my work.
You travel alone. Is it a way to put yourself at risk, or because you are very independent, sociable, and because you like human encounters?
It’s because I’m independent, I like encounters with strangers, there is something about being totally alone which allows you to observe and experience something in it’s fullness without the ‘noise’ of someone else beside you. At the same time, I have travelled with people I love and that has a different sort of richness to it too. Ideally I do both when I can but I’d never not travel simply because I had no one to do it with.
You travelled through Russia and Siberia. Was it necessary to understand Alena’s background?
Yes, it had many purposes. I travelled to some of Siberia’s bleakest towns and tried to understand where Alena had come from, why she would take the risks she does. I also took the same train journey as Dave to understand how hard that journey might be for him. Finally, I wanted to take the reader to Siberia and I could only do that by observing tiny details to make it live in their imaginations.
You said that Russians are very hard and never smile. Did you feel lost there, without the words to talk to strangers, like Alena?
It was a very hard trip. I had travelled a lot but, since I am very open and friendly, am used to being embraced by locals when I travel. To encounter not only coldness but often hostility was very hard for me. That said, just like Dave and Alena lost in cities that aren’t their own with no language, when I encountered kindness it meant so much more to me.
Your characters, Dave for instance, are strangers in their own country because they don’t have the words to integrate other social environments. They are intimidated by culture (Dave does not dare to go to the Museum). Is it hard for him to understand that culture and art are for everybody?
I think this is a common problem and it goes back to the idea that if we look for our own lives, stories and societies in art and we cannot find them, we assume that art is not meant for us but ‘other people’. And if we’re not exposed to art it is hard to access the part of us, or the confidence to believe we might create something ourselves. It’s another perpetuating cycle. Much of my work for 2016 is going to involve going to communities who wouldn’t normally consider themselves writers and encouraging them to tell their stories and realise they have real value.
Before you decided to travel a lot, was reading a way to escape, go anywhere?
Absolutely. I never imagined I’d ever get to travel when I was growing up but reading allowed me to access new worlds, to push open my horizons.
As a young female writer, how have you been welcomed in the British literary landscape? Did you fear or feel contempt? Did you have the rules to adapt?
In the beginning had a lot of anxiety that my work might be rejected because I wasn’t like (nearly) ‘everyone else’ but I decided that I would stay absolutely true to my own intention as a writer and be myself, be honest about where I come from. I don’t think I’ve encountered fear or contempt but I do think I’ve subverted some preconceived ideas about the working classes and hope to continue to do so.
Do you consider yourself as a Scottish woman, or as a citizen of the world? Do you often go to Scotland?
I’m going to Scotland tomorrow! About half my work is in Scotland so I’m there a lot. I am actually half American, half Scottish but I consider myself a Londoner…a black sheep who found her island.
What are your projects? Are you working on a third novel? If so, what is it talking about?
I’ve just about finished my third novel. A ‘travelling’ novel what is set in London, France, Budapest, Sarajevo, Palestine, South Korea, Vietnam and South America. It’s about what it means to be a woman in contemporary society and the way women are often silently punished for failing to behave the way we’re expected to.
You have written two novels John the Revelator, published in 2009, and Shall We Gather at the River in 2012. Before that, you have been a drummer in rock bands, (in The Tulips and the Grasshopper), then music and art journalist during thirteen years for Music Week, The Irish Times, Rolling Stone…and on RTE’s The Works, an Irish TV program devoted to arts. Have you always wanted to be a writer or was there a triggering event that convinced you to write novels?
Well, I grew up on rock music, comics, films and books. As a child I played around with designing my own hand-made fanzines and strips and stories. Stephen King was the first author I read compulsively. When I was a teenager I wrote essays and stories for school assignments. Lyrics too. I filled notebooks full of ramblings, wrote a lot of letters. I bought all the music magazines. I remember my father, a post office clerk, brought home copies of Creem magazine that had been sitting in the dead letter office for years, and it was like discovering hidden treasure. I started playing music when I was eighteen, but I kept trying to write poetry and stories. I remember feeling so frustrated because I had this immense appetite to say something, but I didn’t have enough life experience to know what it was I wanted to say. Then when I became a journalist I learned how to become more disciplined. Shortly after my father died in 2000, when I was about 33, I returned to writing stories. If I could pinpoint any trigger, I’d say that was it. The realisation that time was ticking.
Music has never left you completely. You have recorded The Sounds of John the Revelator, an album where you read passages from your first book set to music, and you performed it on stage with the Revelator Orchestra, like a rock band. Likewise, The Brotherhood of the Flood, the second album based on your second novel, is about to be released. Do you still need to express yourself in a musical way? Or did you miss being on stage?
I didn’t perform live for about twelve years, and a big part of my life was missing. The Revelator Orchestra was a wonderful accident. I love collaborating with other people; it’s an antidote to the solitary work of writing. Being on stage is like being in a fight or something: every second is heightened and intense. The adrenalin is addictive. Just recently I played drums on stage for the first time since 1996. I’m no virtuoso, but I love the feeling of playing with a band. And the Revelator Orchestra gives me permission to let the evil alter ego out of the cellar.
You have declared that “your understanding of biblical language came from rock’n’roll”. Isn’t it strange from an Irishman, a kind of blasphemy?
It’s not that strange when you consider Irish Catholics aren’t really taught the Bible, either as doctrine or literature. For a long time the Irish clergy functioned as middle-man, interpreting and misinterpreting Biblical stories for the benefit of the peasants: you weren’t encouraged to question their teachings, or investigate the Bible for yourself. Catholic doctrine is pretty limited, it doesn’t really go beyond the four gospels and the epistles, which are beautiful, but often interpreted in a very obvious and literal way. I discovered the Old Testament through gospel and blues and Hank Williams and Johnny Cash and Flannery O’Connor. Biblical language is powerful. It’s like Melville, or Shakespeare, or Cormac McCarthy.
“John the Revelator” is a traditional American gospel-blues song. Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash are omnipresent in Shall We Gather at the River. Is it that mix between religion and rock’n’roll that leads to your so peculiar musical writing?
Well, rock ‘n’ roll came from blues and gospel. If you look at James Brown or Jerry Lee Lewis or Bruce Springsteen or Nick Cave, they’re consciously drawing on the tradition of tent-show revivalist preachers. Some of my favourite books about music draw on this kind of fundamentalist zeal, whether it’s Lester Bangs or Nick Tosches. In many ways I suppose music is my subject.
You have proposed a playlist for your second novel: ‘Blue Moon’ – Elvis Presley, ‘Lost In the Flood’ – Bruce Springsteen, ‘Old Man River’ – Frank Sinatra, ‘Suzanne’ – Leonard Cohen, ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ – Sam Cooke, ‘A Rainbow In Curved Air’ – Terry Riley, ‘The Killing Moon’ – Echo and the Bunnymen, ‘Faster’ – Manic Street Preachers. Are they songs you particularly love? Do you listen to music while writing?
I like all those songs, but they’re not necessarily my all-time favourites, just songs that conjured the mood of the world I was trying to create. The true soundtrack of the book (or at least, the half that doesn’t concern Enoch O’Reilly, that comes later) is The Brotherhood of the Flood, the album I just released with The Revelator Orchestra. I listen to music all the time, but not while I’m writing. It tends to jam the signal. Although if I find myself at a loss during the process, I’ll often play a certain piece of music in order to remember the tone I wanted when I embarked on the story.
I have found the perfect soundtrack for Shall We Gather at the River. It’s the latest Black Strobe’s album, a french band, Godforsaken Roads. Do you know them? The singer is, for me, the perfect incarnation of Enoch, don’t you think?
He’s got that sort of unlikely charisma alright. A formidable looking gentleman.
Enoch O’Reilly is a kind of independent evangelist, a preacher who could be found in the USA. He says he’s not sure to believe in God, that his God is Elvis, and that he believes in the power of words. The more he lies to people, the more he is listened to. Is he a false prophet talking to false believers?
That’s one way of looking at him. He might also be considered a wanna-be rock star or presidential candidate or local councilor. The current generation of Irish politicians are no more than snake oil salesmen: amateurs, incompetents, jumped up village idiots who display no values, no integrity, no motivation but to stay in power. They lie to our faces and sell us out at every turn. Worse, they don’t know how to dress themselves.
Is religion always so pervasive in Ireland nowadays?
Not any more. In the space of a decade, Ireland became a secular country, but the legislation, and the continuing marriage of church and state, doesn’t reflect this, hence the controversy over our abortion laws and same-sex marriage. The church is holding on for dear life, trying to maintain a hold on our educational system. But the churches are half-empty on Sundays. In a generation or two, practising Catholics will be a tiny majority. The church did a lot of good in this country, but it also abused its power. I’ll be glad to see the back of it, but I’ve no illusions: whatever replaces it won’t be any better. That’s just the way it is with mechanisms of power and social control.
A lot of Irish writers have emigrated through the history, because they felt oppressed. Have you been tempted by exile? Is it possible to say and write everything in your country now?
Well, it’s different now. It’s not so hard to travel, New York is only seven hours away. I’ve got three daughters, so thus far I’ve been kept in Ireland by the desire to stay close to them, but when my youngest turns eighteen I intend to travel and live abroad. Ireland can feel very small at times, but there’s nothing stopping any writer from getting out if he doesn’t like it. Flights are cheap.
Where would you like to live, if you’d leave Ireland ?
Let’s see… Berlin, New York, New England, Barcelona, Malaga, Morocco, Rome, Turin, Paris, London… I love cities. Probably because I’ve spent so much time in the country or in small towns…
Is Ireland, on the contrary, a king of paradise for writers? And I don’t speak only about the specific tax system that has attracted several French writers.
Ireland is no kind of paradise for anyone. It’s a physically beautiful country, and I love the people, but it’s been run into the ground by a cabal of short-sighted, spineless, conniving, two-faced crony-indulging cretins. We have tax exemption for artists, but the vast majority of artists barely make enough money to qualify for the minimum taxable rate. Plus, compared to most European countries, our road tax, property tax, VAT and Universal Social Charge, plus the many other taxes they seem to invent on an annual basis, are extortionate. The cost of living is unbearable. There’s an unbelievable amount of anger in the country at the moment. We’ve been ripped off, sold out and strip-mined in order to pay off the banks and appease the EU and the IMF. The only way to survive is live carefully. The latest proposed Irish Water taxes have incited people to the point of revolt.
Enoch O’Reilly is not a friendly character but his voice is very seductive. Did you want to express that the important thing is not what he says but the way he says it, like all the political or religious charlatans?
Precisely. Enoch is all about style over content. He craves recognition, but really has nothing of substance to offer in return. I suppose it’s a kind of reflection on the devaluing of celebrity in recent years. Until the late 90s there was a sort of covenant: if you produced something great, you were rewarded with fame and riches. Then, somewhere around the turn of the millennium everyone wanted to be famous without actually producing any work of merit. This was indulged and exploited by the mainstream entertainment industry.
He pretends that “he will give the people what they want: bread and circuses.” Even if the action of your novel takes place in 1984 (why in 1984?), when the economic growth had not already taken place, do you think that your contemporaries have succumbed to materialism and consumerism?
1984 seemed like a key year, a crossroads between the old world and the new, a collision between the retro and the futuristic. I remember it as a kind of analogue sci-fi era. As for materialism and consumerism… You have to remember, until the mid-1990s, Ireland was effectively a third world country. Nobody had any money when I was growing up. It was understandable that when the economy began to thrive, Irish people would get a little drunk on it. It was the first time we had disposable income in the history of the state. As a writer, I didn’t benefit much from that era, and either way, it didn’t last very long. This so called age of austerity has created an entire generation of working poor.
You live in Enniscorthy in Co. Wexford, surrounded by beautiful landscapes, I guess. The nature is very important in your novel. The river is almost a character in itself …Do you think that the Irish people moved away from their (super)natural eerie background, from their mythology, that they are less dreamy? Is the economic crisis of 2008 has brought them closer to nature and fantasy?
Ireland is like any European country on the surface. People are concerned about the fundamentals: money, food, shelter. They shop in Aldi and Lidl and Tesco, they put petrol in the car and oil in the tank, they struggle to pay the mortgage or the rent. But I think there still endures a sort of racial appreciation of the supernatural, of art and music and words. It seems to come right out of the ground. Once you leave the suburbs, you see a very ancient land. That hasn’t gone away.
Isn’t Shall We Gather at the River? also a book about the influence of family, or the lack of family, on people’s fate?
I think so. So many people miss that. It’s about the sins of the father, the absence of the mother and siblings, the dangers of isolation to the soul, and what happens when the ego runs rampant, unchecked by friends or community. Enoch’s great tragedy is that he let Alice Stafford disappear from his life. They couldn’t have been lovers, but they were kindred, twins who should never have been sundered.
You have given talks about the connection between Irish literature and punk rock, and you have compared Iggy Pop with Cuchulainn. Can you explain us your point of view?
I think Irish poetry and music and mythology often get rendered in a sort of sepia-tinted, soft-focus tourist-board way. But what I respond to in those old myths is the humour, the madcap exaggeration, the anarchy. Whenever I read Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Tain, particularly the passages describing Cuchulainn’s warp-spasm, it reminds me of seeing Iggy and the Stooges. That unbridled rage and energy. Same with the early Pogues or John Lydon with the Pistols or PiL.
As a novelist, do you think you are in line with an Irish literary tradition?
No, I don’t think I am. I love Flann O’Brien and Beckett and Yeats, but I never gravitated towards O’Flaherty or McGahern or any of the domestic realists. I appreciate their craft, but I don’t share their aesthetic. I feel a lot more kinship with the younger Irish writers: Rob Doyle, Kevin Barry, Donal Ryan, Eimear McBride, Paul Lynch, Sara Baume, people like that.
Your novel is impossible to classify. It is full of mythological, biblical, musical, film references. It is a kind of hilarious horrific gothic surreal book. In the same way, you wrote about your performances on stage with The Revelator Orchestra: “We go from tragedy to slapstick to psychodrama. It takes people a few minutes to get their heads around us: ‘Is this a rock ‘n’ roll band or a weird theatre troupe or a spoken word act?” Do you have the desire to build a “total” work?
A ‘total’ work is a good way of putting it. It’s like I’m pursuing an ongoing project, trying to construct an imaginary universe using words, music and images. To me, it’s all part of the same wellspring. Whether the ideas are made manifest through live shows or graphic novels or novels is just a technicality. The important thing is the content, the ideas. The world that David Lynch created with Twin Peaks, using film, music and text, had a huge effect on me.
Is your first novel as strange and « total » as Shall We Gather at the River? It has not been translated into french yet, can you tell us what it is talking about?
John the Revelator is on a much smaller scale, mainly because I was still learning the rudiments of writing. It’s a tiny story about a boy and his mother, about parasites, and crows, and Biblical language, and nature, and the terrifying power of nightmares and visions, about Rimbaud and John of Patmos, about friendship and betrayal, and ultimately about making peace with the death of a loved one. I haven’t read it all the way through since checking the final proof six years ago, so I can barely remember it. It’s a bit like a dream told to me by a younger brother.
And what about your third? Are you writing it right now?
Yep. I’m right in the throes of a third book. It looks likely to be a short story-cycle. But I won’t know its true shape until the final weeks. That’s something I’ve learned to surrender to. The book always seems to exist in a state of crisis, like it might capsize at any moment, until near the very end.
Do you want that your readers cry from laughing or from despair?
I want them to feel as many emotions as it’s possible for a person to experience through the transmission of the written word, maybe culminating in some kind of appreciation of the ineffable mysteries of existence. A tall order I know!
About Shall We Gather at the River, Richard Hell wrote: “This book is majestic and squalid at the same time, as if the Bible were actually about Elvis. The rhythms and music carry you like a baby on a raft on the river, but it’s the precision of the words that cinches you.” Such a compliment from a musician writer must have been exhilarating for you, no? Do you read the reviews about your work in general? Do they affect you?
The Richard Hell quote made my day. I loved his music, his sartorial style, his intelligence. I first learned about Huysmans’ Against Nature through Lester Bangs’s interview with Mr Hell. When I was in my 20s, that downtown New York CBGBs mythology was inspiring. I longed to be part of a community of punks, poets, guttersnipes, artists and writers. People who created something for the hell of it, not because some marketing drone had located a niche in the demographics. Regarding reviews, if somebody takes the time to write a well-though out piece I always appreciate it, regardless of whether they like the book or not. But in all honesty, they have no influence on the work, mainly because they’re always — by nature — retrospective.
As a journalist, what question would you like to ask to yourself?
That’s a hard one. I am totally stumped!
Isn’t it annoying that the singer of Bauhaus has the same name as you?
Yes! It really irks me. I don’t like his music. At all.
Interview published in New Noise n°25 – january-february 2015
Until recently, music seemed to be your favorite playground. Involved in the punk scene of Washington DC from 1987 as the bassist of SWIZ, your first hardcore punk band, then from 1992 to 1999 as the lead guitarist of post-hardcore indie rock band Shudder to Think, you have built your professional trail as a musician. Member or founder of a lot of groups like Hot One, Mind Science of the Mind, or A Camp, you are also producer for several artists, you have released solo albums, and you are above all a very famous film score composer (Boy’s Don’t Cry, Dirty Pretty Things or Silent House…). The publication of your first novel, The Dewey Decimal System is quite new (2011). Was music the obvious choice for the teenager you were, and literature a more mature artistic form? Or did you want to write fiction for a very long time?
Many have said this before, but I don’t think I ever had a choice but to do music. It just happened. What I did have was the the good fortune to have a supportive family and infrastructure, for which I am eternally grateful. And the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, as the hardcore punk scene was really peaking in Washington D.C. I got involved with that scene, and as it turns out that was a very pivotal movement in « indie rock » here in the US, so that led naturally to everything I’ve done musically.
I had always written a little bit, lyrics and such, but never done a long-form thing coming even close to being called a « novel ». My buddy Johnny Temple ran a publishing house called Akashic, known for really great noir compilations. Johnny himself had been in bands in DC that I had toured with, so was an old friend…he clearly saw something in me that I didn’t because he more or less asked me if I could give a try at writing a short series of books.
So I figured why not, tried it out, and about 50 pages in realized I was actually doing it. Johnny thought it was great, and it all went very fast and very smoothly so I’m once again very very grateful, because I realize now that I jumped over a couple of steps along the way (getting an agent/ getting a publisher etc)
Literature is by no means a more mature form of art, it’s something I’ve always had with me as a creative being…and I’ve always read a huge amount which seems to be one of the most important thing when it comes to writing. I can do music, and write books, and express myself in other ways, and I can make a living doing it so (for the last time) I am a very thankful fortunate person.
What is the most exhilarating for you now? Playing with a band, composing soundtracks or writing?
When I am enthralled in writing a book, which is like a massive flood that I just get caught up in, it’s the most exciting thing in the world, and the most depressing when things are not going smoothly. You think you’re going to die. You think your work is shit. The key, at least for me, has been to work as fast as I possibly can, to stay ahead of that horrible voice everyone seems to have in their heads somewhere, the voice that says « you suck » and « how dare you even try to write a book, you’re a joke » etc. If you can outrun that voice you can get it done, which is the important part: actually doing it. A lot of people talk about writing a book and I’m certainly not the first to discover that the only way to write a book is to just fucking write it. It will suck, it will need more work, but it will exist outside of you, it will be real. This is a huge leap.
At the moment I am not writing anything except score music, which is sort of my day job so has become not the most exciting thing in the world… and writing music for a new band, which is totally great. I’ve also had an occasional job playing guitar in a Late Night talk show band, which has been a blast, just cos I don’t have to always act as my own « quality Nazi. » But I don’t anybody should ever expect to be absolutely thrilled with their jobs all the time, that’s an impossibility and asking too much of the universe. I’m extremely satisfied as it is.
What’s this new band you are talking about, if it is not too soon to tell us a few words about it?
Not too soon, it’s myself and some friends who I’ve wanted to work with for ages…kind of a Sly Stone/ Prince/ Talking Heads/ Kate Bush space funk kind of thing. Not at all rock. Some people involved are also in american indie bands like St. Vincent, The War On Drugs, and Beirut, people who have played with David Byrne, also my friend Angelica who has this project as well, My Midnight Heart.
Do you think that to be a musician has an influence on your writing style? Did you write songs’ lyrics?
Yes I always write or co-write the lyrics on projects I’m involved with. I love doing it but it’s a lot harder than writing a book! It seems to take more energy somehow, you’ve got to really communicate something memorable, something you can live with, that can exist in a four minute song. It’s tough to make that work.
As far as being a musician, yes certainly both the punk ethic of doing it yourself, and doing it cheap and fast, as well as the film score thing, which is all about speed and not looking back…all of this has contributed to my approach to writing prose. And the end result may not be perfect, there may be stuff you’re not totally satisfied with, but you did it and that’s the point.
If your novel would become a movie, would you like to compose the score for it ?
There is talk of making all three novels into a TV series, we’ll see, the chances of this actually happening are quite low but possible. And no way would I want to do the music. Never. I would not make new choices that give the narrative a different perspective. I would be so grateful to see somebody I respect do this work.
Can you explain how you work as a score composer by the way ? Do you need to see images from the movie before composing or do you have ideas as soon as you know the storyline?
I need to be alone with the picture. I need to study its contours, its tempo (all editors cut to their own clock, consciously or not, and it’s part of my job to find their “pocket”), the way the camera moves, etc. I then need to map out a speed for a certain scene, only then can I start applying different textures and seeing what works. I find I need to begin work in terms of sounds and colors rather than melodies; the instrumentation comes first, and then the themes or motifs.
I am lucky to have a fantastic studio in my home, and a studio in Brooklyn which has a very different atmosphere. The project will usually dictate where I begin. My Brooklyn space is dirty and raw, my home studio clean and comfortable, cocoon-like…the work that comes out of these locations will be affected by my surroundings, and I put what energies the environment contributes to my mood and my body in the music.
Unfortunately it’s a very small percentage of the actual time spent as a composer. As lucky as I am to be doing this work, it is not for the weak-stomached. There’s a point in every project where you flow, and all the politics and drama associated with the movies power dynamics can be ignored. Until you get to that point however, you are forced to contend with a lot of bullshit: figuring out who you need to please, discovering how to communicate with hitherto total strangers, dealing with monstrous egos, financial people, directors and producers who feel the need to be abusive because of their own insecurities or fears. Sadly, about 80% of the time spent is on the politics and interpersonal aspects of a job. The creative part is dependent on having solved or avoided potential problems, gotten past blockages that were there before you came on the job, etc. You need thick skin, and you need empathy and patience. Sometimes it’s hard to muster these skills. Sometimes you don’t feel like it. But the fact is the composer is one of the last people on the production chain, on an expensive product that has been under construction for years in some cases, so a lot of anger and negative energy has built up by the time you enter into the fray. There are degrees to this and sometimes it can be a relatively smooth and mellow process, but it’s inevitable that the composer is asked to correct aspects of the film that people have been unhappy with for ages, and this might well be impossible to correct musically. So again, my relationship with this film music work is a complicated one. There are days when I just want to say fuck it. But then something beautiful happens to counterbalance this.
You have written a text in « The First Time I Heard » book series about David Bowie. Can you tell us about it? Was David Bowie one of the first musicians who made you want to play music? Who are the others?
David Bowie certainly. My parents had a Miles Davis record that scared the shit out of me, I didn’t understand it at all. It felt evil, but in a wonderful way. Really it was punk rock that made me do it. It was just so irresistible. I learned much much more about music and musicians as I went along (for example Sly Stone or Kate Bush, who are two of my favorite artists), all of that came later, and I learn about new stuff every day. But it was punk, it was Black Flag, X, the Circle Jerks, Fear, Minor Threat, Void, the Bad Brains…this is my DNA
You have formed a band (A Camp) with your wife, Nina Persson, and contributed to her solo album Animal Heart, released in 2014. Is it easy to work with the one you love?
We have a fantastic working relationship, it’s one situation where we never fight. We’ve been working together as long as we’ve been together as a couple so it’s just a natural thing. I doubt if this is super common but it works for us.
You have contributed to the tribute record Monsieur Gainsbourg revisited in 2006. Do you know well France and French artists?
I had an apartment in the Bastille for a while in the ’90s, and then again near Rue Oberkampf. My wife and I were engaged there New Years 2000, and we had our honeymoon there. Most of our good friends are gone now but there was a time when I spent a lot of time there. I studied French for 6 years and if I wasn’t so shy I would try to write and speak the language probably quite badly. My good friends used to run what is now Maison Kitsune and the Kitsune record label but again it seems that people tend to leave Paris eventually for whatever reason.
Gainsbourg I have loved for so long, his body of work is so huge that it’s impossible to discuss. He’s a genius and obviously a complex/ controversial figure. The French understanding of hip hop is probably the greatest in Europe, and in dancers like Les Twins you have perhaps the best contemporary b-boys in the world. I could go on, I’m not that well versed in French pop beyond the brilliant Phoenix, Air, Justice and of course Daft Punk…I remember having a « punk » record by a band called Telephone when I was much younger, I think they’re French?
Also perhaps one of my top ten writers is Boris Vian. I am in awe of him and pretty scared about the Gondry movie that in english they’re calling « MOOD INDIGO » (yikes) , this version of his immortal L’Écume des jours. I feel a special affinity with him as he was also a musician, like to play with genre, and had some advanced ideas about race.
The Dewey Decimal System is very hard to classify in a distinct literary genre. It is a kind of pastiche of a black literature with a hard-boiled hero, a sci-fi spy novel mixed with dystopian elements. Where did your inspiration come from for such a frenzied story? Did you want it to look like nothing else or did you like to pay tribute to different genres you like as a reader?
I saw a black guy who looked a lot like a man I once knew sleeping on the floor of the Rose Reading room in the NY Public Library, wearing a nice suit. It was dark and something had happened. That image came to me and I started working with it, I did the cheapest trick one can do which was to simply start there and have him wake up, and see what happened. And to whatever modest degree it worked. I never knew what was going to happen next, which was the entire point of it, it’s what made it fun. It’s hard to imagine outlining a novel as some writers do, though I’m sure that they wind up with a much more controlled end product. I wasn’t interested in control, I wasn’t capable of it. And of course having read so much I just ripped off everybody I loved. Not unlike David Bowie. That’s how you do it, you rip off everything you love and run it through your own prism and hopefully get something unique.
The parameters, or the rules/ frame I had been assigned, were extremely helpful. I knew I needed to write a noir-y dystopian thing, so within those goalposts I got to play with whatever came to mind. It would be scary to write something without such parameters but that’s what most writers do so I guess I’d better learn how!
You live in New York and in your novel NY is devastated. It has suffered from terrorist attacks, a flu pandemic, those who could have run away and those who couldn’t try to survive with a lack of water, food…Was it funny for you to describe what could happen in a close future, in areas you know well, or was it the expression of your biggest dread?
The setting came about because by the time I reached the second page I realized, how could this guy be in here? And also I hated the idea of everybody having the fucking internet and mobile phones and everything. This made things easier to plot. The dystopian thing has become a real genre which is amazing, because (and I certainly didn’t contribute to this) the dystopian thing became a massive deal about a year after I wrote this book, which was 2009, with the Hunger Games etc. And it’s really quite a cliche at this point, it’s fun how different writers approach it but there’s just so much of it now. So I do look forward to creating a new world for my next book, and I’m happy with the way I wrapped up the whole thing in the third book in this series.
Do you consider your novel as a post 9/11 novel?
Yes it has to be, because being exposed to an event like 9/11 (and everybody has a 9/11 story which I respect but especially if you’re a New Yorker nobody wants to hear) showed us how it was possible…how it could all just be destroyed, what it might smell like, what your mouth would be filled with, what it might feel like, how it would look. The experience of 9/11, since we are so conditioned by Hollywood and particularly computer generated effects, almost looked like a CGI rendition of somebody blowing up the World Trade Centers. In this sense it did not seem « real », and this was probably a protective measure our psyches took, but I’ve heard many people describe the same thing.
These books are fundamentally about empire who overreach, and about human xenophobia and clannishness. That if you reduce people to the basest level they will return to ethnic/ religious/ social distinctions and want to destroy the « other. » By creating a character who had his foot in a couple different worlds (he’s black, educated, multilingual, an intellectual, yet also a military person) I’ve allowed him to sort of move between clans.
But these books are about what our former President Eisenhower called the « industrial/ military/ congressional complex. » What might happen if this is taken to it’s extreme logical conclusion. This is something I explore more intensely as the series progresses.
I despise what my country has become since 9/11. I mourn what could have been. We are an empire in decline. 9/11 was a tremendous opportunity to turn things around, and we failed that test entirely and destroyed ourselves and many many other countries/ families/ peoples in the process. I have nothing but disgust for the « Freedom Tower », with all of it’s 1776 (get it) feet.
Do you think you would survive long in the environment you describe?
Nah. I’d just kill myself.
Dewey, your major character, refers to a system he has created, composed by rituals (turn left or right, clean his hands, swallow pills…). Do you have a system to survive yourself? Do you have rules you try to respect when you are creating?
Yes. We share some compulsions. I need to be in the same very specific places, though I travel a lot (my wife who is Swedish and I have a place in Sweden so we divide our time between Harlem NYC and there) , under the same very specific conditions. I hate sand, I hate the beach, I have nightmares my mouth is full of sand, and this comes into play in Book 3.
You have named your hero Dewey Decimal, after the classification system of books in libraries, because he has become the librarian of a famous NY library. He loves literature and paintings. So you are not so pessimistic if you think that there still will be art defenders after chaos?
Not at all pessimistic, just trying to be realistic. He’s a good guy despite his violent tendencies and the terrible things he’s done. I just believe, and this again is just based on math, that the people with the biggest guns and the money are not the good guys.
Within a decade, the richest people in the world will have inherited their fortunes….not worked for them. This is something that hasn’t happened since something like the 14th century. Greater minds than mind have wrestled with this subject, but this can’t be positive news for the rest of us.
Dewey is a very disconcerting character. Moving as well as violent, he has forgotten who he is and the reader can’t take what he thinks for granted. He is paranoid or he is really in danger? He is hypochondriac or is the risk of being infected high? The reader is only sure of one thing, he is so funny !(even if he doesn’t know he is). Did everybody appreciate your special sense of humour?
Well thank you I think he’s extremely funny. Which is just a posture, as all comedy is, to protect yourself from pain. He is both paranoid and in danger. He is both a hypochondriac and a potential sick person. He’s very smart, and he’s had kind of a shitty life, and he’s decided he wants to stay alive.
You have chosen several songs for the French edition to be the soundtrack of your novel : Songs of Sly and the Family Stone, Steve Reich, Black Star, the Viscounts, Mulatu Astaqe, Wu Tang Clan, Miles Davis, Jay Z & Alicia Keys, The Stooges, Robert Rodriguez (which goes from rap, minimalist music, funk, rock’n’roll, jazz, to hip-hop). Can you comment your choices?
Minimalists like Steve Reich were extremely important to me to get in the « zone ». I would sit down and put on this music and instantly be focused. It still works, I did it today while doing my taxes! It creates channels in the brain and quiets other channels. It’s magical music. All of the other artists mentioned have meant so much to me that it’s hard to say much besides I love what they represent. i was also attempting to approximate what Dewey would have been exposed to in his environment growing up, just as I was.
The Dewey Decimal System is the first novel of a trilogy. The second one, not yet translated in French, The Nervous System, was published in 2012, and the last one is about to be released. Without revealing their plot, can you tell us some words about them? Do you think that your writing style has changed?
Yes I’ve learned a bit about writing…hopefully each is better than the last but I don’t know. I like to think so. It was important to me to do these books in very quick succession, which was made complicated by the joyful occasion of the birth of my son just as I finished THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM.
Things don’t improve for Dewey, really. He is boxed in tighter and tighter until he has to start making choices about who he wants to be aligned with. We learn the details of what actually happened in New York, and why. Just as Dewey had to delve into the world of the Russians and Ukrainians, he has to do the same with the Koreans, the Chinese, and eventually the Saudis and what is left of the American Government.
Even if you are not writing at the moment, don’t you have any ideas of what could be your next novel?
You were 22 when your novel Apples was published. I have read that you begun to write when you were 12 and that you wrote five or six novels before being published. Have you always felt that you were going to be a writer? Did you feel you were different from your mates?
Yes, when I was about 11 the UK was in the heights of what the media called ‘Cool Britannia’: an intense feast of culture ranging from Britpop, the Young British Artists (Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Chapman Brothers etc) and British film was booming with Trainspotting and the like. Seeing all this incredible art in the mainstream made me want to be creative – I took up the bass guitar at the same time I started writing, but always felt fiction was most special to me, the way you can create completely new worlds using just simple symbols on paper. Some of my mates were interested in the same films, books, bands etc but yeah, I was tormented quite a bit by other kids when I was in school for trying to be a writer. I guess it’s seen as an obscure, studious hobby when you’re 11 – and requires you to be reclusive. I withdrew myself a lot when I was in my early teens, before being spat back out the other end again towards my later teens.
Did success change a lot of things in the life of the young man you were?
It was strange at first, yeah. Apples caused quite a stir in Britain when it came out (in 2007), I think because I was so young when it was released, and I was writing about Middlesbrough, a post-industrial area that tended to get bad press (for its deprivation, unemployment, drug problems etc) but had rarely been represented in modern literature. I don’t think I’ve changed much in terms of my personality – I’ve always been fairly reserved, modest, but determined. I guess it’s just strange allowing people an insight into your unconscious. Like Virginia Woolf says: ‘Books are the windows to the soul’ but hopefully I’ve still got the psychedelic curtains partially drawn. I’ve still got more to show.
Irvine Welsh, one of your favorite authors, has declared that you are « a major talent ». Has such a compliment changed your perception of yourself as a writer?
I was blown away by Irvine’s review in The Guardian where that quote came from. He was the author who inspired me to write after I read Trainspotting aged 11, and so to get that recognition from him, I felt like I must be doing something right. But in truth I try not to pay too much attention to reviews, both good and bad – I feel like my writing’s improving with each book, but I still have so much more I want to explore and experiment with.
Apples tells the story of Adam, 15, a rather solitary boy, still virgin, with obessive-compulsive disorders who loves Eve, 15 also, already initiated to sex, alcohol, drugs. Both are confronted to violence. You describe the way they grow up, how they fight against difficulties in a very realistic manner. Did you put a lot of autobiographical elements in your characters? I have read that you had OCD when you were 16, like Adam, and at the same time, Eve’s voice is very accurate, were you closer to Adam or Eve? Was it so hard for you to be a teenager?
I’d say Adam and Eve represent the two sides of my character when I was 16. I had (and still have) some OCD traits, such as washing my hands relentlessly, checking doors, hoarding, fear of illness etc, but through writing I think I’ve managed to put this obsessive side of my personality to good use. Writing has definitely become my biggest obsession – I get withdrawal symptoms if I don’t write for a few days, for instance. As for the ‘Eve’ side of my personality, when I turned 16 I realised I could get served alcohol in the pubs in my home town, and it opened my eyes to a new world of experimentation. I always admired the debauched artists of yesterday – William Burroughs, Baudelaire, The Beatles, etc – and so always knew I’d get involved with certain liquid or chemical stimulants once I had access. And so I guess, at 16, my life began to transform – from being quite reclusive to indulging headlong in all manner of earthly delights. Apples marks that transformation.
Girls are major characters in your works, thank you for not depicting too much sweet and weak creatures. Even if they are more violently abused (they have to face male violence, rapes, unwanted pregnancies), hope comes from them although. Do you think that life is harsher for girls?
One reason I wrote Apples was I kept seeing girls being mistreated by males in the pubs and clubs I’d begun drinking in. I wanted the novel to be a kind of ‘anti-macho fairytale’, and so most of the cruelty in the book towards women is intended to draw attention to the dubious behaviour of some men, the way they often objectify women, especially in a pub/club situation under the false bravado of alcohol. I think at school age, girls and boys have it as difficult as each other – but since girls biologically develop faster than boys, I guess they attract the attention of older, predatory males from quite an early age. 15/16-year-old boys tend not to have the same problem of being preyed on by older women until they’ve developed into ‘men’ themselves – I wanted to address this strange chasm between the sexes.
You tell the experiences they make, the apples they taste, as answers to their environment, without notions of judgement or guilt. Do you think that your Adam and Eve deserve to be chased from the Garden of Eden? Will they find their paradise?
I didn’t want to apply any kind of morality on the characters – it was up to the reader to judge them, or identify with them, or have sympathy for them. I’m always interested by the mixed responses people have about the characters – some readers seem to disregard them in the same way they’d cross the street if a group of teenagers were up ahead, while others have told me they understand the kids on their estate, or the kids they teach, better after reading the book. I feel hopeful about Adam and Eve’s future – they’re both forced to grow up quickly but, like many youngsters, they have an incredibly acute understanding of their own worlds, and hopefully they can carry that along with them through life.
Apples is realistic in its form and style, we know they live in Middlesbrough, but don’t you think that you have written something more universal, more timeless than your own experience?
Definitely. That was the main reason for me naming the characters Adam and Eve: the most classical of first names. Anyone who has made it through their teenage years should understand the social seesawing and power struggles in the book.
Adam doesn’ listen to music which was « popular » among teenagers in the 2000’s. Whereas we could expect Adam to listen to Radiohead or, maybe Coldplay, or Britpop, he listens to the Beatles, the Stones, the Byrds. What did you want to say through that very particular characteristic?
I think, again, I wanted the choice of music to allow the book to seem more timeless. I think forcing your characters to listen to the year’s current hits could age a book horrendously. But also these were the songs I was listening to a lot at the time – the messages in Beatles and Stones songs seemed to fit the themes of Apples well. I love how there’s a Beatles or Stones songs relevant to any kind of feeling of being in and out of love, everything from being smitten, to jealousy, to desperation, to indifference.
Eve listens to Laurent Garnier and Dance Music. What does it reveal about her personality ? It seems that music has not a real importance in her life, it is no real pleasure, just like sex, am I right?
Yes, I think music for Eve is more of a means to an end. She doesn’t collect records and attach personal significance to songs in the same way Adam does – the songs merely soundtrack her nights out. They’re a catalyst allowing her to indulge in what she wants to do, ie join the dancefloor with her friends, get close to certain men, or avoid men by sticking close by her friends.
What did you listen when you were 15?
I was listening to similar music as Adam: Britpop mostly, like Blur, Oasis, Cast, Sleeper, Elastica, etc. I remember staying up late listening to John Peel under the covers at that age too – he was a legendary Radio 1 DJ in the UK, who used to play the most obscure, innovative, often deranged records. When I was about 15 I discovered bands I still love to this day: Mogwai, The Fall, Sonic Youth, etc.
Do you listen to music when you are writing anyway? And painting? The same kind of music?
Yes, always, though I have a slight OCD trait in that I listen to music at a barely-audible volume 1 when I’m writing (my hifi goes up to 100). I think, in a way, listening to music too loud can be distracting – especially when you can hear the lyrics clearly. For instance, I love The Fall, but find them almost unlistenable when writing because it’s too tempting to rip off Mark E Smith’s beautifully bizarre imagery. Bands like My Bloody Valentine, Mogwai, Sonic Youth seem more suitable to write to, since the lyrics seem secondary to the incredible, obscure guitar textures.
In the french version of your novel, you have added a lists of songs : Whigfield / « Saturday Night », The Rolling Stones / « She’s A Rainbow », Laurent Garnier / « Coloured City », Elliott Smith / « Independence Day », The Beatles / « Yer Blues », Percy Sledge / « When a Man Loves a Woman », The Fall / « Industrial Estate », Energy 52 / « Café del Mar », Jefferson Airplane / « Somebody to Love », The Beatles / « All You Need is Love », did you listen to that songs while writing Apples, or are they supposed to be listened by your characters?
Yeah, those were the songs Asphalte included in the back of the book as a playlist – they all relate to the story in some way, and many are mentioned directly in the text too. For instance, Claire wishes her unwanted baby was conceived to ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’, ‘Industrial Estate’ relates to Middlesbrough’s heavily industrial skyline, ‘Independence Day’ is the song that inspired the chapter narrated by a butterfly.
Do you think that music has an influence on your style ? Does it help you to create a special atmosphere, peculiar feelings and images?
Yes, definitely. Another contemporary author from England, Joe Stretch, once said the sentences in my books are like miniature pop songs, which I’m very flattered by. I do make the effort to add as much rhythm and energy to each line as I can – and I’m sure this comes from my love of music. I think fiction somehow seems to be lagging behind music in terms of experimentation. There are so many popular bands who use incredibly innovative, mindbending sounds on their records, whereas many authors seem to adhere to quite a rigid, almost classical approach to constructing sentences. Music has definitely inspired me to be more experimental, more playful.
Your second novel, Ten Storey Love Song, describes the lives of the inhabitants of a block, Peach House, in Middlesbrough. Bobby is a painter living with his girlfriend Georgie who sells sweets in a shop. They share moments with the community constituted by their neighbours. You have used a particular construction for this novel, only one paragraph, why?
In all my novels I want the subject matter to influence the form. With Ten Storey Love Song I wanted to reflect the apartment block setting by structuring the novel as a literal ‘block’ of text: one continuous, streaming paragraph. I was living in an apartment block at the time, and found it interesting how living in such close proximity to other people allows you to overhear certain aspects of their lives against your will. It’s usually the more extreme aspects: like arguments, sex, what music they listen to, etc. In the novel, the characters ‘interrupt’ each other’s lives mid-sentence, just as they do in a real apartment block: characters pass in the hallways, wake each other from slumbers, hear drama through the walls.
You have also added a list of songs for that novel : The Stone Roses / “Ten Storey Love Song”, Bardo Pond / “The High Frequency”, Joanna Newsom / “Peach, Plum, Pear”, My Bloody Valentine / “Loomer”, Mazarin / “Henry Darger”, DJ Alligator / “Lollipop”, Nico / “Chelsea Girls”, The Fall / “How I Wrote « Elastic Man »”, The Kinks / “Victoria”, Frank Sinatra / “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, Syd Barrett / “Waving My Arms In The Air”, David Bowie / “Magic Dance”. Did you use this title because you particularly love the Stone Roses ? And tell us about the other songs you chose?
Yes, partly I named the novel in homage to my friends, who introduced me to the Stone Roses as well as certain drugs that feature in the story. The individual aspects of that song title seemed to fit the themes of the novel: the ten-storey apartment block setting, the twisted love lives, and the importance of music in the book, the lyrical prose. As with the Apples playlist, the other songs relate to the novel or feature directly in the text: ‘Peach, Plum, Pear’ are the names of the other blocks on the estate, Bowie’s Labyrinth is mentioned during one of Bobby’s bad trips, and I always thought of the wild characters haunting the Chelsea Hotel in New York in the 1950s/60s while writing the novel, hence ‘Chelsea Girls’.
Bobby, in the novel, goes to London to sell his paintings. He is very disappointed by the city. He finds that it is full of superficial and snobbish people, and he is happy to come back to Middlesbrough. Is it a criticism against the scene of contemporary art you know well yourself, or most generally against London? Does it still exist a dichotomy between North and South in the UK? Is Boro the Garden of Eden?
I think more generally it’s a criticism of London, though I transposed a lot of my feelings about the literati of London onto the art world. Yes, there’s definitely a North/South divide still in the UK – being a proud Northerner, I’d say people are warmer up North, self-deprecating, and each town in the North seems to have a greater sense of identity, with a wider array of accents and traditional industries etc. I spent three years studying in London and, while the city excited me at first, there’s a coldness and claustrophobia there. It’s a place where it’s easy to blend in and be anonymous, but in doing so, you can feel very detached from your fellow species.
And in music, are there still geographical differences ? Do you feel more the influence of Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle, or Leeds, in Middlesbrough, for instance ? When Adam says that “he feels like a boy from a Smiths’ song” (sorry for the translation), has it a specific meaning because he is from the North?
Possibly. I love so much music that has come from those cities, but in truth a lot of bands tend to move to London to make it big. I think it just comes from the identity and pride these towns give these bands – there seems to be more of a tendency to write about everyday Northern life in their lyrics, and in doing so the songs ring true across the country.
Are there bands in Middlesbrough? Sorry, I didn’t find a famous band from there, only articles about your football team.
Middlesbrough has a thriving, small-scale music scene – there are plenty of bands, indie nights, clubs etc, but strangely there haven’t been many bands of note from the region. Paul Smith from Maximo Park is from nearby (Billingham), but yes, we’re much better known for the football team. Even though the team’s been dreadful lately.
Do you write for a specific public?
Not particularly. When Apples came out I was seen as ‘the voice of youth’ in the British press, but I don’t tend to think of anyone, young or old, when I’m writing. It’s more a case of me trying to keep myself entertained.
Do you think of people’s reaction when you write? Did you use self-censorship sometimes?
I tend to go by the rule: if it entertains me, it should hopefully entertain people who share my taste. It annoys me occasionally when an author seems to have self-censored their work – they’re happy to spend five pages describing a picnic in a park, but a sex scene might receive a flippant, cursory sentence or two, as if the camera’s coyly panning away in a 12-rated film. Of course, that’s not to say sex is more important than picnics in the park – but I just feel some authors are more worried about what their grandparents might think of their writing rather than them allowing themselves to be honest and unabashed.
Your novels are said to be representative of British working-class youth, what is it to be British for you nowadays, and to belong to the working-class?
What with the current economic climate, it’s been difficult for people up here recently – jobs are scarce and so a lot of my friends have been forced out of the country to work on oil rigs, ships, etc. The working classes have been hit hardest by government cuts etc, and on the back of that I keep seeing pubs, libraries, working mens’ clubs in these areas shutting down. But, as has always been the case, people seem to pull together in times of adversity – it’s difficult to break that working class pride, stoicism. The black, almost gallows humour you find in the working class pubs around Britain reflects that defiance.
Bobby takes drugs when he paints, and his works are very psychedelic, colourful. I have seen yours, full of colours too, what do you take? At least, you must have tasted some to describe the way your characters react, no? Did you taste taking drugs while writing also?
Yes, I’ve experimented with plenty of substances over the years: Ecstasy is my drug of choice since it seems to go well with my personality – carefree and generally exuberant. I’m mainly inspired by hallucinogenic drugs when I’m writing and painting – I’m interested in how they’re a fast-track route to a dream-like state, though I’m inspired just as equally by the Surrealists. Though they rarely took drugs themselves, in a sense taking drugs and exploring your unconscious is similar to the Surrealists experiments with séances, automatic writing, trance states in the early 20th century. I can’t write under the influence though – it seems clever at the time, but looks awful the morning after.
Ten Storey Love Song seems to be more happy than Apples, even if there is full of hope in it. Are you relieved not to be a teenager any more ? Do you feel like an adult, now?
I’m not sure – I kid myself I still feel teenage today, and I do miss those years, but I can feel adulthood’s set in recently: my hangovers are crippling nowadays, friends are wrestling with parenthood, others have moved away to follow careers. But in terms of creativity I still feel very young. I think it was Marcel Duchamp who said: ‘When you stop seeing life through the eyes of a child, you start dying’. I try to cling to that sentiment.
Have you been disappointed by the literary microcosm? Have you been confronted with reactions, behaviours that you had not expected?
Yeah, it was strange being in the midst of the London literati while I was studying down there. Apples was just about to come out and there was quite a bit of hype behind it – but it was strange being lauded by people who hadn’t even read the book. I remember one bloke proclaiming I was a ‘genius’ just because I looked young and was wearing a tracksuit top at some complimentary-drinks party. I quickly realised it’s an industry based on exaggerations and fickleness. It was refreshing moving back to Middlesbrough, since people here are much less inclined to kiss anybody’s arse.
Do you think you belong to a specific literary movement? How would you define it? Are there young artists in Britain (authors, painters, musicians…) with whom you share artistic points of view?
I don’t think I’m part of a literary movement, though I often read with other young British authors, like Joe Dunthorne, Michael Smith, Joe Stretch, etc. I love that there’s been a recent slew of psychedelic, shoegaze-influenced bands, like TOY, Temples, Tame Impala – I possibly feel more affinity with these bands, the way they feed their sound and ideas through a kaleidoscopic filter, and are always experimenting.
I’ve read that you were working on Apples‘ film adaptation. Can you tell us about it?
Yes, I wrote the screenplay for the film, but at this moment the cogs have slowed down slightly. It’s understandable in this economic climate that financiers are less willing to risk funding new films – and the current government have slashed funding to the national film council, so it’s proving harder to make new British films. But I’m hopeful it will still happen – I’m pleased with the script, and I’m sure any audience could relate to the twisted teen themes in Apples.
Your latest novel, Kimberly’s Capital Punishment, has not been translated in French yet. What it is talking about? Is it also “musical”, and will it have its own soundtrack?
The book’s more experimental than the first two – it follows the narrator, Kimberly, as she attempts to be as nice as possible to humankind after feeling responsible for her boyfriend’s suicide. Halfway through the novel Kimberly perishes, and the reader’s invited to roll a dice to see what happens to her in the afterlife: she either goes to Heaven, Hell, is reincarnated, resurrected, turns into a ghost, or rests in peace. The book uses a lot of experimental devices, like Burroughsian cut-ups, wordplay, acrostics – the wordplay might explain why it hasn’t been translated into French yet! The novel doesn’t reference music as directly as the first two novels – though I think it pushes the ‘rhythmic’, musical prose further.
Tell us about the Electronic Voice Phenomena project. Isn’t it precisely a kind of surrealist experiment?
Yes, it was interesting being given a brief to perform a five-minute piece based around Electronic Voice Phenomena: the phenomenon of hearing voices from the beyond through radio sets, seances, etc. I’m heavily influenced by the Surrealists and especially love the increasingly crazed experiments they did with seances in the early 1920s. For my piece I wrote a short, scattershot biography of the poet Robert Desnos, who was said to be able to ‘speak surrealist at will’, and I interspersed this with random blurts of his ‘Rrose Selavy’ poems and puns. I only wish I could read French better, to appreciate his wordplay in the original!
What are your plans ? Are you working on your fourth novel?
Yes, I’ve nearly finished my fourth novel. I’ve spent the past few years visiting boxing halls and gymnasia – the book centres around a twelve-year-old deaf boxer with extreme tinnitus, interspersed with vignettes following the characters who surround him in a strange Welsh village. It’s a bit of a departure from my first three novels – it’s a bit less dreamlike and surrealistic, but still has certain shades of strangeness and mystery…
