I’m thinking about this book because I’ve been asked to join a book club in Alaska by Zoom next month to talk about it. Several things about this are rather out of the ordinary.
First, it’s in Alaska!
Second, the book is set in America, and Alaska is in America, a country where I’ve spent a total of one week, and that week nowhere near any of the places that are the setting of the book. Americans might quite understandably feel I’m writing about something I know very little about. (Luckily I’ve met this book club before, and I know they are very nice).
Thirdly, both I and the members of the book club will be aware that many of the events in the book seem to be beginning to unfold right now, e.g, (a) President Trump making extraordinarily hostile and aggressive statements about his neighbour and ally, Canada, while also stating that the border is an artificial one (which is what Putin says about Ukraine) and that Canada ought to join America as its 51st state. (There is something particularly insulting, I feel, about suggesting that Canada, which is slightly bigger than the whole of America, and has more than 10% of its population, should join as a single state!) (b) Trump threatening the use of military force if another ally, Denmark, does not hand Greenland over to America. I’m not going to spell out exactly how close these things are to what happens in the book, but suffice to say the parallels are striking (and alarming), and I think Trump’s motivation for these threats are quite similar to Slaymaker’s. If you want to get elected you have to give your voters something, and one of the things you can give them is an enemy.
I wrote about the origins of this book here, and also here, but here are a few more thoughts.
Parallels with Trump
Although the parallels are obvious, I didn’t write this book originally as a satire on Trump, and Slaymaker is not based on Trump. America City‘s first iteration was a short story called ‘Destiny’ -as in ‘Manifest Destiny’- which I wrote in 2012. (It was rejected by Asimov’s SF, at which point I realised it wasn’t really a short story and should be a novel).
At that time I had no idea Trump was ever going to stand for President. I wanted to write a story that dealt with climate change, and I was inspired by the wonderful surname of a secretary at the University of East Anglia where I then worked. However I modelled the character on an Afrikaner man who owned a hotel by Lake Malawi where I stayed for a night while visiting my daughter there. He was a big, strong man in late middle age who had extraordinarily fierce blue eyes. He said he was of German descent but had never himself been outside of Africa, and didn’t think he’d like Europe because -imagine a very strong Afrikaans accent here- ‘I like to be surrounded by Ifrikans’. We didn’t get into politics – and for all I know his politics were absolutely ferocious – but I found him quite mesmerising, just as Holly finds Slaymaker mesmerising.
As I mention in one of those earlier posts, I didn’t get down to writing the novel until 2016, when Trump was of course very much on the scene. So then I was aware of the parallels and, rather like now, the book was in a weird sort of race against reality.
Why America?
Because America is big, almost a world in itself, with huge variations in climate across its territory, and is so much bigger and more powerful than its neighbours that it is in a position, if so inclined, to force them to bend to its will. Britain is small and just wouldn’t cut it. As someone or other pointed out, you can write songs about roads in America, like ‘Highway 61’ or ‘Route 66’ and they sound epic, even mythic, but you just can’t pull that off with songs about British roads. (‘Get your kicks on the M6’ – no, I don’t think so.) And I needed a country so big that global processes like mass movements of refugees could be acted out within its borders. It’s good to put familiar things in unfamiliar settings, and that’s pretty much how all my books work.
It’s difficult to set a story in a country you have very little direct experience of, but America is a sort of world, and one which us Brits inhabit regularly in our imaginations. I’d guess nearly half the TV series and films I watch come from the USA.
Google Streetview was handy for looking at places like Seattle, and I even did a little light research.
What drives Holly?
Her desire to distance herself from her awful parents, by being their opposite.
Why ‘America City’?
The eventual title of a book is often the result of a negotation process with the editor (in this case the brilliant Sara O’Keeffe). Other possible titles were ‘Destiny’ (too vague), ‘Slaymaker’ (which might have evoked the sort of fantasy novel that has a ripped and half-naked barbarian on the cover, wielding an enormous bloody sword) and ‘The Medicine Line’ (Sara thought it would just suggest a drugs thriller). America City is a slightly abitrary choice since it is actually just the name of a new city that’s built in the course of the book under Slaymaker’s rule, but several important scenes take place there, it’s where the book ends, and it locates the book in America.
Beowulf
The quote from Beowulf which begins the book (and is also mentioned in the text) is, to my mind, key to the whole thing. If you want people to follow you, you have to give them things, and often the easiest way of doing that is to take things from someone else. The quote sounds amazing in the original Old English, and though most of it is impossible to understand for a modern English speaker in Britain or America, the final sentence ‘þæt wæs god cyning!’ (‘that was [one] good king’) is still easy to make out at 0.39 in this youtube clip.
What’s it about?
I’m interested in political processes, and in how our political ideas are shaped by our circumstances, so that personal things like our own life history, but also external things as apparently material and physical as a small change in the average temperature of the air, can completely change how we see the world and one another.
