Blog | Chris Beckett's Fiction

Words and music

Doing a reading with a musical accompaniment: I’d recommend it to any writer.

This was at Pulp Fiction Bookshop in Edinburgh (a very lively little place with cafe attached), with Southern Tenant Folk Union (a bunch of really talented musicians who play lovely bluegrass-influenced music). I did a couple of readings from Dark Eden. For the second reading, the band cycled round and round the same four bars in the background. It was a bit of an experiment, but really seemed to create tension, allowing long pauses between paragraphs and lines. It was something of a revelation to me, too, having to fit my words around a rhythmic base, and surely the nearest I’ll ever now get to being the frontman of a band.

It’s not all that often done, as far as I’m aware – story-telling to music – or at any rate it’s not a big phenomenon, but the potential is surely huge, when so many people walking around listening to their iPods.

My son Dominic is way ahead of me on this one, by the way, and unlike me, he can do the words and the music. Here is his beautiful The Receipt and Escape.

Narcissus

Here I am, fiddling around with this blog. It made me think uneasily of Narcissus gazing at his own reflection.

I found this picture of him by Caravaggio. I hadn’t seen it before. In the story, as I remember it, Narcissus is a heartless man, who ignores the woman who loves him (her name is Echo) because he is enchanted by the beauty of his own reflection. (Perhaps he was a cousin of Pygmalion, who couldn’t relate to real women of flesh and blood, only the idealised one he made for himself out of stone?)

But in the picture he looks to me as if he feels trapped, as if he wants to pull away. Why doesn’t he do it? Is he afraid that if he looks up and allows himself to see something other than his own reflection, he himself will disappear?

Where do you get your ideas from?

I am a slow writer, and ideas take a long time to brew. The first description of the Eden forest, in the short story called The Circle of Stones (which also includes an early version of a central scene of the novel, and early prototypes of several characters), was published 20 years ago.

At that time I owned an Amstrad computer, the kind with the black screen on which the writing appeared in shining green letters. And I’m fairly sure that this was where I first got the idea from for the Eden forest.

If you write things (and let’s face it, a large proportion of us do spend much of our lives, staring at screens and writing things) your visual field is frequently occupied by patterns of letters. Repetitive patterns seep into your dreams and your imagination. Its the same if you spend the day weeding the garden, or driving, or hanging wallpaper.

Letters on the page have always struck me as resembling forests, with clearings at paragraph breaks. (Somewhere, in some old notebook, there’s a story of mine about people wandering in a winter forest – spiky bare black trees growing out of snow – not knowing that they are just characters in a story.)

The forest of Eden relates to the forests of Earth, in much the same way as the Amstrad screen relates to conventional black letters on a white field. In the Eden forest, the trees, instead of being defined by the light around them, are themselves the sources of light, just like those green letters on the black screen.

So I suppose, in some ways, I have Alan Sugar to thank for that particular idea.

The legend of Eden (2)

God in this story (see previous post) really doesn’t come out in a very good light. Because one woman and one man disobey him, every man and woman for ever more is to be made to suffer.

It’s true, as a matter of simple observation, that the actions of one person may reverberate for generations. One abusive parent may set in motion a chain of distress that is passed on through the family long after he has died. But what would we think of a parent who insisted on meting out punishment to his grandchildren and great-grandchildren for an act of disobedience which happened before they were born?

Even snakes are punished forever, the story tells us, for the actions of that one remarkly articulate snake at the beginning of time. This would be particularly unfair if that snake wasn’t really a snake at all, but the devil in disguise.

The legend of Eden

Dark Eden being selected as reading material for the Green Belt Festival (see previous post) has made me think about the legend of Eden.

I say legend. There are still those, of course, who claim to believe the story is literally true. This is a pretty preposterous claim to make in the modern world (at least by any half-way educated person), but, as I’ve observed before, it takes an almost equally preposterous kind of literal-mindedness to think that, because a thing isn’t literally true, it isn’t true in any sense at all. Clearly this legend has some resonance for me – is, in some way, true – or I wouldn’t want to use it as the starting point for a novel. So what does it mean to me?

I think there are two aspects of the story in particular that have always seemed powerful for me. One is the snake: the idea that even in the most idyllic scene there is always somewhere a flaw, a danger, a threat (like the ‘invisible worm’ in William Blake’s poem, ‘The Sick Rose’). The other is the idea of expulsion: the idea that, for some reason, human beings are cut off from their true home. This is the idea I drew on for Dark Eden, in which a little band of people are cut off not only from the rest of humanity but even from light, and have to live out their lives in the knowledge of that loss.

The same sense of loss, it seems to me, is present in Plato’s notion of humanity huddled in a cave and seeing, not the real world, but shadows on the wall. This rings true for me. It feels like the way things are.

Why it does, is another question. Psychoanalytic psychology would, I think, explain this subjective sense of loss in terms of a child’s painful discovery that parental comfort and love is not always available, that things are not and never can be perfect. That rings true for me as well. In the world of Dark Eden, the particular focus of people’s sense of loss, was their Eve figure, Angela, the mother of them all. Even John Redlantern, who was determined to break away from the past, was particularly devoted to Mother Angela (a police officer from Peckham on her way to goddess-hood), being himself in some ways motherless.

***

Anyway, these reflections prompted me to go back and look at the story as it appears in the Bible. (I was going to say the ‘original’, but in truth, this is surely a story that evolved over many thousands of years before it was ever written down, and it shares obvious characteristics with other creation myths in other traditions, suggesting a remote common ancestor. As I’ve observed before, stories have a life of their own. They travel, they have adventures, they change their clothes, they make new friends…)

What struck me immediately about the version in Genesis is its mythological, child-like, fairytale-like quality. God is pretty much human. (He walks in the garden in ‘the cool of the day’. He appears surprised by events). The snake is a talking animal. (No suggestion that it is anything more.) And, much as Norse mythology offers fanciful explanations for everyday things like the morning dew (it is the world weeping for the God Balder) or the tides (the result of a prodigious drinking feat by the God Thor), so the Eden story offers explanations for why snakes crawl on the ground, why women hate snakes, why childbirth is painful, and why farming is backbreaking work.

And, just as in fairytales and other mythologies, ludicrously obvious things are somehow overlooked for the sake of the story (I think of the Norse legend of Balder, in which the goddess Frigga secures a promise from everything in the earth and sky and in the sea not to harm her son, but doesn’t get round to securing it from mistletoe, which lives neither on the ground, or in the sky, or in water), so here God plants a fruit tree that he apparently doesn’t want people to touch, right in the middle of Eden.

But above all what struck me was God’s motive for expelling Adam and Eve from Eden. It really isn’t because they have committed a terrible sin (how can you commit a sin before you have acquired the knowledge of good and evil?) but because, by eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, ‘the man is become as one of us’ and must be expelled ‘lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’. The expulsion is the act of a jealous God heading off a potential rival.

Above all, what strikes me about the story, on re-reading it, is that it isn’t just about loss. It is also about gain, about people moving from a baby-like or animal-like state to become adult human beings. Which is surely a good thing, and surely something that had to happen, and surely the reason why, if there was a God, he or she would plant a Tree of the Knowlege of Good and Evil in a place where, sooner or later, someone would surely decide to try the fruit, talking snake or not.

So the two elements that were most powerful to me – the loss, and the snake – seemed on re-reading to be far less central than I had remembered them. The great thing about these kinds of story, with their ambiguities and their layers, is that we can different things in them, each time we look. (The great thing, but also the dangerous thing. You can mine misogyny from this story if you want to, it seems, though I can’t myself see that Eve is held much more to blame than Adam. You can even apparently, though this really does require considerable ingenuity, derive the idea from it somehow that humankind is so wicked as to deserve eternal torment, after death as well as before it.)

***

Could there have been a real historical moment, which in some way corresponded to the Eden myth? I suppose it would have been millions of years ago, somewhere in Africa, when some proto-human ape, for the very first time, had some dim glimmer of a insight: ‘This world isn’t just about me, my desires, my instincts. Other creatures have feelings too.’ For such an insight, surely, is the real first step towards a knowledge of good and evil?

But of course that wouldn’t be a one-off event. It would happen again and again. It still happens now.

Dark Eden and Green Belt Festival

I was very pleased to learn this week that Dark Eden has been selected as the ‘Big Read’ book for the Green Belt Festival this year. It’s quite an honour.

This support for my book comes from an unexpected quarter. This is a Christian festival. Dark Eden (like The Holy Machine) obviously draws deeply on Judeo-Christian tradition (one reviewer described the main character John Redlantern, as Cain and Moses rolled into one), but it isn’t a Christian book. It will be interesting to see what festival readers make of it.

Reflections in this blog (some more articulate than others) on my relationship with religion, can be found: here (‘Batter my heart’), here (‘The Christmas story’), here (‘From Bodhisattva to St Josaphat: the adventures of a story’), here (‘A Buddhist temple’) and here (‘Science fiction and religion’).

Natascha Kampusch (continued)

(Following on from previous post about the book by Natascha Kampusch who was kidnapped and held in captivity by Wolfgang Priklopil for 8 years from the age of 10.)

I keep thinking about Natascha Kampusch’s experience. She was beaten, punched and hit with objects, she was half-starved, but for whatever reason, the image that keeps coming into my mind, and the one which I find the most distressing to contemplate, is the idea of her all alone in her underground dungeon for hours and days on end, trying to occupy herself, trying to give herself some kind of life, with the magazines, books and videos that Priklopil allowed her.

I suspect Kampusch herself would disapprove of my dwelling on this: she is determined not to be an object of pity, just as she was determined not to be a mere object onto which Priklopil could project his fantasies. There are video clips here and here of her being interviewed about 4 months after her escape. I think you can see here the firmness of spirit which comes over in the book, and dismiss any doubts that you might have that the book (written with the help of two co-authors) is an authentic representation of her voice.

What is striking is the determination to hold onto her own identity, however little room for manoeuvre. I suppose there hundreds of millions of people have coped in the same way with the experience of oppression that was quite specifically intended to break their spirits. I think of Africans sold into slavery, wrenched away from family, friends, culture and packed into slave ships for the horrors of the middle passage, and how they nevertheless preserved and evolved a unique culture of their own, which was to become global in its influence

How weak Priklopil seems by contrast: a man whose own identity was so fragile that he demanded absolute obedience, absolute submission to his own needs and fears. How weak and baby-like tyrants are in general. Think of Gaddafy, think of Hitler (who Priklopil apparently admired), demanding that others to act out a charade around them, a pretence of loyalty, a pretence of love, a pretence of admiration, presumably because they don’t have the courage to face what they would see if the pretence was torn away.

3,096 Days, by Natascha Kampusch

The tabloid-sounding quote on the cover is misleading. This is a serious and thoughtful book, by a young woman who was kidnapped by a stranger at the age of 10, and remained his captive for the next eight years.

It is very disturbing to read. At times I found the claustrophobia hard to bear, even at second hand. For the first six months Kampsuch was confined in a small hidden underground room, which could only be accessed through three doors, the last one made of concrete, which were so elaborately locked and concealed that it took her kidnapper, Wolfgang Priklopil, an hour to get through them all each time he came to visit her, and an hour again to seal it all up again when he left. At weekends, when Priklopil had his mother to stay, Kampsuch was down there alone for three days at a stretch. One of her fears was that he would have an accident and never return for her.

Gradually, Priklopil began letting her out for limited periods, making her work for him as a slave, and even taking her on trips outside the house. He became increasingly violent towards her, lashing out at her with fists and with hard objects without warning. He shaved her head. He kept her chronically weak with hunger. He forbade her from talking about her family. Yet he also kitted out her dungeon like a girl’s bedroom, with desk, a bunk bed, a computer, fetched her books and magazines at her request.

What is striking about the book (apart, of course, from the story itself) is the firm, clear, individual voice in which it is written. Kampusch refuses to view Priklopil simply as a monster, or herself as a helpless victim, whatever the pressure from the media and society to do so:

The perpetrator must be a beast so we can see ourselves as being on the side of good. His crime must be embellished with S & M fantasies and wild orgies, until it is so extreme that it no longer has anything to do with our lives.

And the victim must have been broken and must remain so, so that the externalization of evil is possible. The victim who refuses to assume this role contradicts society’s simplistic view. Nobody wants to see it. People would have to take a look at themselves.

She says that her refusal to reduce this story to thriller-like categories of black and white, but to insist on shades of grey, has led to her being criticised and subjected to abuse on the internet. But she is absolutely firm on it. In particular she angrily rejects the idea that her ability to see Priklopil as not all bad, is a symption of the Stockholm Syndrome. She hates this label, which she says victimises her all over again, and she insists that her behaviour was essentially rational. Priklopil was the only human being she had contact with for eight years, and she made of that the best that she could.

Her firmness in rejecting the stock narratives that others try to impose on her story, is matched by her small acts of resistance to Priklopil himself. He demanded she call him ‘maestro’, or ‘my lord’, and tried to get her to kneel in front of him, but she steadfastly refused, knowing that it was essential that she hold something back. Somehow, this young woman (she is still only 24, a year younger than my own oldest daughter) managed to hold on to a sense of integrity in these appalling circumstances.

Naturally, when reading the book, one identifies with Kampusch. The appalling claustrophobic loneliness, the miniscule scope for manouevre, the constant anxiety, the fear for the future: for many of us, it isn’t entirely alien territory, for unhappy times in any childhood feel a bit like this: helpless, trapped, alone, cut off from what you need or long for. (The comparison of everyday unhappiness with this ordeal may seem grotesque, but it is one that Kampusch herself makes, reflecting on her own lonely and unhappy childhood before her captivity.) These claustrophobic feelings are ones that most of us are familiar with, I imagine, to some extent, and it is uncomfortable to be reminded of them, or to have to imagine them in the unbelievably extreme form that Kampusch herself endured.

But even more disturbing is to consider Priklopil in the light that Kampusch shines on him. Her insistence on not making him a horror-movie monster, is very powerful, forcing the reader to consider him not as something utterly ‘other’, but as a person on a continuum with the rest of us. Priklopil, as she sees it,

…didn’t want anything more than anyone else: love, approval, warmth. He wanted somebody for whom he himself was the most important person in the world. He didn’t seem to seen other way to achieve that than to abduct a shy, ten-year-old girl and cut her off from the outside world until she was psychologically so alienated that he could ‘create’ her anew.

Kampusch refers to the Greek legend of the sculptor Pygmalion, who didn’t like women, but fell in love with the idealised woman he’d carved in stone. Attempting to meet needs for intimacy by trying to bully or manipulate others into playing roles that we have assigned to them: it’s hardly unique to Priklopil.

Images of the cellar room where Kampusch was confined, from BBC News.

The rotting forest

I read here that warmer temperatures in Canada are resulting in swathes of forest being killed by pine beetles. This in turn makes the forest more vulnerable to fire. Dead forest, rotting trees (makes me think of Gene Wolfe’s decaying world in the Book of the New Sun, though that was a colder, not a warmer world), resulting from climate change, and in turn contributing to it. And all this in a country now busily engaged in an unprecedented new kind of exploitation of fossil fuels that may dwarf everything we’ve seen so far.

Still, one good thing: for future remakes of the Lord of the Rings, there’ll be no trouble recreating Mordor. The Shire may become a little trickier.

Batter my heart

Random cultural treat!

I’m not by any means a connoisseur either of poetry or opera, but I first came across this exquisitely beautiful sonnet by John Donne in the setting of it by John Adams in the opera Dr Atomic, and loved both the setting and the poem. There’s a clip of that setting here, sung by Gerald Finley. The sonnet itself is as follows:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp’d town to’another due,

Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain,

But am betroth’d unto your enemy;

Divorce me,’untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

I do not share Donne’s faith, but I love, and find myself really deeply moved by, this vision of a human soul as a usurped town, begging to be broken into and liberated because it no longer has the strength or will to liberate itself. Instead of a captured city, we might think of a computer riddled with viruses, or a mind so dominated by destructive addictions that it can no longer achieve the level of sustained self-awareness that would be necessary for it to be able to break free.

It seems to me that the vision of an invaded and subverted soul expressed by this poem, shares a great deal with the vision of Philip Dick, for example in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, or The Man in the High Castle. Dick was certainly interested in the ‘metaphysical poets’, of whom Donne was one. And of course he was, if anyone ever was, a master of metaphysical SF.

PS Lovely as the poem is, I can’t entirely suppress from my mind the thought that ‘Batter my heart’ might also be the title of a ballad sung by a lovesick Glaswegian to the girl in his local chipshop.