Blog | Chris Beckett's Fiction

Words and worlds (2)

Another thing about the novel Henry that I wrote when I was 19 (see previous post): it was written the present tense, and it took place in a stripped down world like a stage set, advertising its own artificiality. At that time I wanted to get away from the formal pretence of the conventional novel that it was narrating events that had actually happened in the real world*. My idea was that, insofar as the events in the book could be said to ‘happen’ at all, they happened in the reader’s head, at the moment that he or she visualised them. Hence the present tense.

I wasn’t at all well-read then, in terms of literary fiction, and even less so in terms of any kind of literary theory, but this was the seventies, and I seem to have been picking up something of the zeitgeist. “fuck all this lying,” the sixties experimental novelist BS Johnson wrote towards the end of a novel that was nominally about a would-be architect, “look what I’m really trying to write about is writing not all this stuff about architecture trying to say something about writing my writing”. On Saturday, in an interview in the Guardian which prompted this post, a more recent experimental novelist, Will Self, observed in a similar vein: “You can’t go on pretending that the writer is an invisible deity who moves around characters in the simple past. I just can’t do that stuff. It’s lies. The world isn’t like that any more.”

I suppose it’s the same sort of thought that led some abstract painters to turn away from the pretence that a painting was a representation of the three-dimensional world. A painting was, and could only ever be, an arrangement of colours and shapes on a flat surface. Why pretend otherwise? Why lie?

I don’t feel that way now (as will be apparent from the fact that my books are narrated, pretty conventionally, in past simple tense, as if the events have actually happened). It seems to me that painting has a pretty long history (over forty thousand years!) of representing real world objects. That, in a way, is the magic of it. (This picture is a bison, and at the same time it isn’t!) And story-telling must surely have an equally long history of narrating imagined events as if they had really happened.

I know we get bored of particular ways of telling stories, and need to try new ones, one of which is to draw attention to the artificiality of the story itself. But this too gets boring after a while.

* * *

*In most SF novels, by the way, things are more complicated: the content of the story pretends that the events described lie in the future, while the grammar pretends that they are in the past.

Words and worlds

I wrote my first novel when I was 19. I’ve still got it somewhere. It was called Henry. The main character knew he was a character and that he was living in a world created by my words.

I was very taken at that time by the idea that I was creating a world. I had the idea that my job was to define that world precisely, to provide a precise instruction manual. But I’ve come to think that descriptive writing doesn’t really function in that way. It doesn’t so much provide a precise instruction manual, as give the reader permission to pretend that what he or she is being presented with is not just words on the page, but a world. (It’s a bit like hypnotism, a ritual which gives people permission to pretend things are other than they really are). Having received that permission, the reader then constructs the world for him- or herself.

To give an example. Dickens often provides meticulous descriptions of his characters: the length of their sideburns, the shape of their nose, the number of hairs on the mole on their right cheek etc etc. But do we as readers meticulously visualise these characteristics, commit them to memory, and then continue to visualise them whenever the same character appears? I certainly don’t, not least because my memory just isn’t that good. No, I gain a general impression from the description, pick up from it a feeling, a gestalt, and construct from that my own rather vague mental image (which may well not fit exactly with Dickens’ instructions), and then work with it for the rest of the book.

Assuming my own way of reading is not that unusual, does this mean that Dickens’ meticulous details are pointless? Not at all. Their precision is what gives us permission to enter into the world. They convince us that the writer really is seeing the world in his mind, not just providing a list of words, and that in turn frees us to see it too. Our own perception of the visual world works in much the same way. We think we are seeing a complete scene, but in fact, if you analyse what your eyes are seeing moment to moment, it is only glimpses, mostly a blur, with a tiny point of focus darting erratically this way and that. (Can you describe precisely, without looking at it, the building four houses down from your home?)

Here is another example, the famous passage from Midsummer Night’s Dream:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.

I love this. It’s one of my favourite bits of descriptive writing. It’s one of those bits that makes me wonder why I even try. And yet I am not sure what wild thyme looks like, I have no idea what eglantine is, and I only know that ‘woodbine’ is another name for honeysuckle because I have just this minute looked it up. The words evoke a lovely place, and do it vividly, but only because, magically, they give me permission to imagine it myself.

Natascha Kampusch (3)

The sequel to Dark Eden

Several people have asked me if Dark Eden is to have sequels. I actually have ideas for two sequels. The first of the two is set several generations on from the events in Dark Eden, in the new, larger, but more violent and more stratified world brought into being by the events in that book.

It’s currently appearing online in the magazine Aethernet, in 12 monthly installments, under the title Gela’s Ring. It will also be published in book form by Corvus in 2014, under the title Mother of Eden. I anticipate that the book version will be quite different in a number of ways from the serialised version.

As to the third book in the series, well, we’ll see.

Miracles

In The Holy Machine I wrote:

There is one problem about being religious. You are taught that the supernatural exists – miracles, angels, the resurrection of the dead – but for some reason it always seems to happen off stage, either somewhere else or somewhen long ago. You actually have to live in exactly the same boringly unsupernatural world as do the unbelievers. It must be hard work believing in things which never actually happen.

So I don’t think it’s surprising that religious folk sometimes erupt in excitement over a statue that appears to weep, or a fish whose lateral markings spell out the Arabic letters for “God is great”, or an oil-stain on a garage forecourt that resembles the Virgin Mary …

This miraculous image of the Virgin Mary has recently appeared on a tree in New York.

Not very convincing, but the willingness to suspend disbelief, is a measure of the depth of longing behind it. I read somewhere that at one of the great shrines of ancient Greece, pots and pans were tied to a tree, and the oracle heard the voice of the god in the way they clanked and banged in the wind. (If the gods are really gods, why can’t they just plain speak?!)

The tree has become quite a shrine it seems. Someone has even adorned it, for some reason, with a full-sized Mexican flag.

(Source: nj.com)

‘The debt’ (2)

(The latest installment in my attempt to understand economics).

My good friend Ian Pinchen, in response to my previous post on debt, said:

“the scale of what ‘we’ owe may not be what it seems – I read recently that, as a proportion of GDP, what we ‘owe’ now is less than what we owed during the first 20-30 years of the establishment of the welfare state. What has happened since the Thatcher years has been less a problem of growth and debt and more a problem of the transfer of wealth away from the population as a whole (including public spending) and towards large corporations and the already wealthy…”

It’s an interesting thought, the idea of wealth having been sucked out of, so to speak, the ordinary everyday sphere, and fits with many things that strike me about the way the world now works.

For instance, nowadays, many of the functions that were once performed by local councils, are now carried out by large corporations. It’s said that the corporations are more efficient (i.e. better value for money) than the councils were. I don’t know if that’s true (the corporate contractors seem to make a lot of crass mistakes, as we’ve seen recently with the security company, G4S), but even if it were true, the fact remains that money that would, in the past, have all been recycled in the local community, is now being sucked out of that community to pay shareholders’ dividends, and the salaries of senior executives (who, for some reason, require and are entitled to, gigantic salaries that would have been condemned as appallingly wasteful if they have been paid to local council managers).

The same with businesses too. Coffee shops, restaurants, cinemas, are increasingly owned by national or even international chains (Starbucks, McDonalds), rather than being local businesses. (A ‘leisure park’ round the corner from me has Nandos, Frankie and Benny’s, Vue… etc, and I’ve seen virtually the same combination in similar leisure parks in other towns: not a local business in sight). More money channelled out of the community.

The very fact that giant corporations now have to be wooed by governments, like giant zeppelins of money floating above our heads that have to be coaxed and wheedled into alighting on our lands, is I suppose in a way a measure of the amount that they suck out.

Perhaps a day will come when we look back on their reign much as we look back on the era of medieval barons (who also insisted that their immense wealth and power was necessary, inevitable, just, and in some way beneficial to all).

Beauty

I wrote previously about the music of Brian Wilson: that he’d chosen to make something gentle and peaceful, rather than something that simply reflected the pain and struggle of his own experience. I like that choice. It is quite a hard one to bring off without lapsing into sentimentality (though in my opinion Wilson’s music succeeds in this), but I think sometimes an anxiety to avoid sentimentality can lead to a kind of unremitting grimness which affects to being tough and gritty, but is really just sentimentality in reverse. (This is an age in which you can go to an art gallery and look at cans of shit, and pickled corpses, and children with penises instead of faces, as if the function of art was to rub our noses in horrible things).

Kurt Vonnegut wrote (I’m not sure where) that artists could help to prevent nuclear Armageddon, not by preaching, but by making life feel a little more worth living. He thought that a lot of people secretly longed for their lives to end, and therefore had no real interest in trying not to have a nuclear war. Art (pompous word, but I can’t for the moment think of another) in this conception of it, is not there just to reflect the world, or to comment on it, but to add something to it.

Brian Wilson is not an articulate man, but he often speaks about trying to put love into his music. And come to think of it, my objection to those cans of shit (and their equivalents in writing) is not their grimness as such, but their lovelessness.

German

I received some copies of Messias Maschine last week from the German publisher, Droemer.

I don’t speak German, and have never studied it, but if my mother is to be believed, there was once a time when I spoke as much German as I spoke English. Both my parents worked when I was a small child (my mother was a GP) and they employed German au pairs to look after me, from whom I picked up German words and phrases. My mother tells a story of me playing in my highchair, dropping something on the floor by mistake, and supposedly muttering, ‘Ach! Gott!’

When a certain au pair – her name was Anke – finished her time in England and returned to Germany, my mother tells me I watched her from the window as she departed, and cried.

‘Anke said “ich leibe dich”,’ I’m supposed to have wailed, ‘but now she’s gone away!’*

This touching tale, frequently retold by my mother, was, however, dismissed by Anke herself when I met her a few years ago.

‘You were only 18 months old,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t possibly have constructed a sentence of that complexity.’

(* I love you)

Brian Wilson

I referred to the work of Philip Dick previously as something that I particularly admire. Here is another tortured Californian who I also admire. I’ve seen him perform a couple of times in recent years, on his Pet Sounds and Smile tours of the UK. The beautiful clear voice of his youth has gone, and, of all rock stars, this frail-looking man is surely the most uneasy and vulnerable on the stage, to the point where the audience seemed to me to be not just applauding him, but reassuring him of its love so as to help him keep going. But his music as ever is sublime, soaring, stately, and, despite his abusive childhood and his precarious mental health, peaceful and full of hope and love.

He’s recently reunited with the surviving Beach Boys (his brothers, Carl and Dennis, are of course dead), and recorded a new album. The single ‘That’s why God made the Radio’ doesn’t exactly push out into new musical territory, but still has all the qualities that makes Wilson’s music such a sweet balm. Many tortured souls make tortured art, but with Wilson, it is as as if he set himself to build in music, the peace that was missing from his life.

‘The debt’

What crisis? The whole business can seem a bit unreal if you are like me, and most of the people you know are on salaries, and are not in danger of losing their jobs. But recently I had a carpenter come to fix some cupboard doors, and he told me that he was now only getting enough work for 2 days a week. The following week, the chimney sweep told me that he was getting so little work that he wasn’t sure he could stay in business. I suppose that getting your chimney swept is a pretty easy thing to defer when you’re short of cash. I daresay the carpenter would give it a miss (if he had a chimney), and I daresay the chimney sweep would postpone getting the carpenter in (if that is what he had been planning to do). Which I suppose is what recession is all about.

It’s all about ‘the debt’, isn’t it, about austerity being necessary to pay ‘the debt’. ‘We’ collectively owe a lot of money, partly as a result of the government having to spend billions bailing out the banking system, which was itself too deeply in debt. But who do ‘we’ owe the money to? You’d think sometimes we owed it to aliens on the planet Zarg, who would come down with rayguns and destroy us if we failed to repay. But in fact we owe the money to whoever chooses to buy government bonds, and that tends to be institutions like pension funds, very possibly yours or mine. Not aliens at all. All very strange.

But whoever ‘we’ owe it to, how does it help ‘us’ to repay it, if the carpenter and the chimney sweep lose so much business that they pay little or no tax, and can’t afford to give business to other people?