Friday, I finished a course in Studio 3 today early, then went to town where I bought a book on blues guitar and a few picks and then met Misa. Before this I had gone into town with James, and seen a poster for Bank Account Plus which featured a Matryoshka, a Russian Doll. I laughed about this because at one point in the training on Monday moning or afternoon, the guy asked us what triggers us to be angry. I said a couple of things, and then pointed to the corner of the room – it was the Eurythmy room – at a Russian doll. I hate those things, I said, prompting laughter, most people of course thinking this strange.
I’ve been working on this novel now I don’t know how long. Several months. The folder for it, entitled “The Die is Cast” is dated 29th May. I can’t remember how I moved on from the project before that, but of course the shift occurs so quickly, and takes me over.
I can say when I started writing it, though, because that was when I visited Prague with Misa the first time since returning to England, though I am very sketchy now on when that exactly was. There, having not long before been possessed by an obsession with a digital dictaphone, I attempted to record a few atmospheric sounds such as trips on trams and the Metro. I went around taking photos and sat out by the café at Na Pul Cesty with a notepad and an orange juice and Mattoni.
No I can’t remember the exact crisis of the novel before, which had began as another ‘note to self, I must do something very simple.. something so simple that it could so easily be written in a quick burst of productivity and inspiratoin’ kind of idea, and which began, as they do, to sprawl. I do remember that I started researching everything and how I knew I must read Christopher Isherwood, research heroin, oh, and take in all the politics of post 9/11…
And so another quick, simple idea was required. I don’t recall if it was while I was in Prague that I alighted upon the idea I had had years before, of the girl who is raped on taking a lad back for some action after a night on the town, to find herself burgled, or if I had fingered it before I left, but I started with that girl, before the incident, introducing her as having matured since she had had an abortion.
Since then of course I am facing the sprawl and the need to reel it all in (or to increase my concentration and focus and working habits to the extent that I can just keep it under control) and increasingly of late I’ve been of the opinion that in order to do this, if I am to fit in anything like the amount of material I want (I have recently reached for Bleak House, thinking that my novel is of a similar scale, and Anna Karenina!) I will have to make extensive use of comics. I have been toying with this idea for a long time in terms of an approach which would utilise illustrators who I continue to hypothesise have useful connections, a little bit of pull, and less of a slushpile to wade through than both agents and published authors. I had one guy in mind – a newspaper illustrator called Chris Riddel. I thought of this, and also the matter of pace. On pace, for one thing, I know for certain I have little control in a story, and changing from my very internalised, psychologised prose to comix for dialogue-based sections such as the scene of numerous evenings mixed into one that I have long envisaged, would be one way of working with this. It is only recently that I thought also in terms of the logistics of writing the novel I am attempting to work on, which keeps building up to include stories within stories – zamizdat-like stories based on Kafka, plays based on Greek drama! And characters that have no link to each other.
Most recently my real bugbear came to it all. For years now I have been torn between fiction and journalism, indeed, after 9/11 barely able to read a novel, but forever digesting news reports and analysis. Consequently, any hope of ever being as pure a fiction writer as I once hoped to be, writing like Raymond Carver, have truly rotten away. One of my characters got interested in the 9/11 “conspiracy theories”! How could he not after I had long enough suppressed them in myself (I allude to them in The Unforgiving Minutes after having read Michael Meacher’s letter in the Guardian many months after having heard about it) only to read a letter referring to, for example, 911 Scholars for Truth in The Observer or Review. I squinted at first for squibs in miniscule videos of the towers falling, and then looked further into it all. This could not be left out. Especially, perhaps, after having seen an amazing documentary on End Timers in America a week or two before.
The result? The Greg Pallast book I dug out the other day to reread, or restart to read from several years ago is now sitting on my bed with a few others, including Hunting The President and No Place Like Home.
And with this foregrounded, and whilst for many days or weeks now racking my brains (which, for example, in the shower every morning, and in bed at night) for a new title for the novel which I had been working on (despite the folder’s title, which referred to the Die cast men of England, I had quite forgotten), I remembered Sweetcorn teeth, a story I started writing (another quickie) years ago, in Nottingham, when I had just pretty much given up, in exasperation, with politics. The Iraq conflict had started despite us all marching on London, and the book on Iraq that I had bought and never quite got round to reading had been moved to the History section. I am currently without a dentist, my wisdom teeth have been coming through in my overcrowded mouth, and are intermittently painful. And a while ago, last time we were out, we were discussing one girl’s teeth since they had been whitened, making her pretty boy boyfriend (actually a nicer guy than I had long suspected) self-conscious. Additionally, I had been reading a book by Eva Hoffman about Eastern Europe in which she describes the same problem back home. My old best friend used to be called Sweetcorn Teeth. Americans talk of bad teeth as English mouth, and so I thought maybe this is what I could use flippantly as a term for the England I had sought to describe, of the Black Country and Midlands. At the time of the unfinished story, Sweetcorn Teeth was intended as a jibe against a popular novel and what seemed such a rosy portrayal of a happily multicultural England.
The reason for rejecting Family Fortunes was that, despite those times I felt such a theme was absolutely relevant (Darren was from a broken home, the au pair I introduced fairly arbitrarily, wanted to form a family, and many of the events take place around a wedding) I did not want to lumber the novel with an overriding thematic structure.