Blog | Chris Beckett's Fiction

Letting go of the past: Dark Eden at Greenbelt festival

I did a talk and reading this morning at the Greenbelt festival. It was certainly the largest bunch of people I’ve yet met to talk about the book, and most of them had read it too. There were many interesting questions, a couple of which really made me think about this book (some 20 years in the making, as I realised when I was preparing my talk) and its relationship with my life.

One questioner asked me whether the book had changed me, which I’ve never been asked before. It’s something of a cliché that ‘this book [whatever book it is] will change your life’, but I’ve never thought about whether the writer is also changed. The answer was, yes it has. The book is about letting go of the past, and in the course of writing it, I’ve certainly learned something about that painful process. How much the book shaped that learning, or reflected it, I’m not sure I can say, but I feel sure that, to some degree, it shaped it, for I have always believed that the stories we make up function, like dreams do, as a way of processing and recombining things that can’t be resolved by pure reason.

Another question was about the process of breaking free of our family of origin in order to be ourselves. Of course the book is all about that, and I knew that before, but it had never quite struck me before how much my whole adult life so far (and I am in my fifties) had been about just that: breaking free from, and simultaneously reconciling myself to…

Intrusion, by Ken MacLeod

I read a while ago, in a book about Queen Mary, about a teenaged servant girl in Mary’s reign who was tried, convicted and burnt at the stake for suggesting that the bread and wine in the communion service did not really turn into the flesh and blood of Christ. It seems bizzarre now that such a thing could be seen as a capital offence (indeed a worse than capital offence, requiring not merely death, but prolonged excruciating pain). But those who tried her and found her guilty, those who tied her to the stake, those who lit the fire, must somehow in their minds have been persuaded, or more or less persuaded, that what they were doing was justified (even though many of them would have been old enough to have lived and worked under Mary’s protestant brother Edward, when what was now compulsory had been a crime), or how otherwise could they keep on going?

To live, to stay sane, to get on with our lives, most of us adjust, accept (within parameters) the rules, and even (at least to some extent) buy into the rationale (Foucault’s ‘regime of truth’) that is said to justify those rules. The death of that servant girl made many people complicit, gave them a stake (no pun intended) in believing in the rationale. Perhaps that, even more even than its obvious deterrent effect, was its real point. Queen Mary, as I understand it, would sincerely have believed in the weird cannibalistic doctrine of transubstantiation, but, in terms of the machinery of power, that is a minor point. The point is to shape and control.

What Ken MacLeod has achieved in this clever and erudite book, is to bring into focus the rules and assumptions that shape and control us in our own society by the time-honoured method of extrapolating them into a near future context, where they are a little more obvious pronounced. Torture is routinely and unabashedly used, for instance, rather than furtively as now, and this is justified by the need to fight terrorism. (In a nice touch, you get offered trauma counselling afterwards). More insidiously, and more challenging to me personally, with my own career in social work, are the ways in which public health and child protection are also used as a means of control in the world of Intrusion.

Hope Morrison is being pressured to take ‘the fix’: a pill which will correct most harmful mutations in her unborn child. It isn’t exactly compulsory, but not to take it, you are told, will lead to questions being asked about your parenting, since what truly protective parent would want to deny her child protection from disease? And if you don’t take it, this becomes part of your profile, a profile built up by surveillance of many different kinds, from the ring you wear on your finger to monitor your health status, to the cameras that watch you at home and in the street. If you don’t take the fix, and have visited unlicenced open air cafes where people take cafeine and smoke, and have had contact with people who themselves have come under some kind of suspicion (perhaps because they are Asian, and have been questioned under torture about links with Hindu extremists, and have said something or other to make the torture stop), then things start to look pretty bad for you. And if your husband… Well, read the book.

I must admit, when I read Intrusion’s early digs at current anti-smoking policy, I wondered uneasily if I was letting myself in for a Jeremy Clarkson-style rant about health-and-safety-gone-mad etc. But MacLeod is doing something much more subtle than that, showing how the very reasonableness of (for instance) concern about public health or child protection, can be used to rationalise a regime of surveillance and control, in which midwives, doctors and social workers feel quite justified in being part of the same system as torturers, drone pilots and secret police. Surveillance and control always have a rationale, always seem more-or-less justified to those complicit in them, but they always have additional consequences to those that provide the rationale. (In the book, pregnant women aren’t allowed to work in places where smoking once occurred: ostensibly it’s about the health of unborn babies. In practice it restricts women’s access to employment.) I admit that, in a career in social work, the existence of these kinds of additional unstated consequences are something that I have often worried about (as indeed have many others: see this book for instance, which argues that social workers’ belief in their own benevolence is precisely what makes them effective agents of control). MacLeod goes on to show that even the critics of the system, even those whose function is to expose and anatomise it, can in fact be part of the machinery that makes it work.

There’s a lot more to this book. It’s sharp too on the way that things mutate over time: an Indian Marxist group absorbs Al-Qaeda and becomes a globalist Nihilist network, the Labour Party becomes the party of the Free and Social Market (which helps people to make the consumer choices they would have made if they’d been properly informed), Iran becomes a militantly atheistic ally, India a hostile threat. It’s interesting on the way that unorthodox ideas can be permitted if they are part of a recognised belief system, but not if based on personal belief. It’s strong on the technology of control, the way that devices that make life easier for us, also have the effect of making us trackable and measurable and countable (as is already the case of course, with mobile phones, google, debit cards etc etc all making us much easier to track than was the case with their predescessors).

And the book is also a well-constructed page turner, with a plot (hinging not only on Hope’s resistance to the fix, but on an unusual genetic ability possessed by her husband) that leads the reader willingly through this scary, and in many ways very plausible, world.

Intrusion on Amazon UK.

Where do you get your ideas from? (2)

I’ve already given some credit to Alan Sugar and the Amstrad computer, for giving me the idea of Dark Eden. Here are some other, perhaps more obvious, influences:

William Golding (Lord of the Flies)
Brian Aldiss (Helliconia)
Russell Hoban (Riddley Walker)
J R R Tolkein (Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit).
The countless unnamed storytellers responsible for the stories that ended up being written down in the books of Genesis and Exodus.
David Attenborough etc, from whom I learnt about the sunless depths of the sea, where there really are both luminous life-forms, and whole ecosystems powered by geothermal energy.
Whoever it was that taught me about the lakes that exist under the Antarctic ice, melted by geothermal heat. (That’s the sort of place that life on Eden first evolved).
I think maybe, too, the Norse creation myth is in there somewhere, in which the world emerged from under ice.
Whoever invented the literary device of faster than light space travel. Say what you like about its plausibility in practice, it allowed authors to travel on to planets beyond the solar system, when we had learnt too much about our neighbouring planets to be able to endow them any more with forests and animals and breathable air.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain

This is the most engaging novel I’ve read for a while. It’s about the Iraq War but is entirely set in America. Billy Lynn is one of a group of soldiers who took part in a conspicuously heroic action in Iraq, an action which was fortuitously captured in its entirety by a Fox TV cameraman, and put on the internet. Billy and his surviving fellow-soldiers are being paraded around the USA (and particularly, some of them notice, to swing-states), in order to boost flagging support for the war with their story of American heroism and military success.

The story is told, in the third person and the present tense, from the viewpoint of 19-year-old Billy himself, who played a particularly prominent role in the famous firefight. The whole book covers a single day in which he and the other soldiers visit the Dallas Cowboys football stadium, where, as well as a football game, Destiny’s Child will be performing, and the soldiers themselves will be taking part in some unspecified event. They are being followed around by a Hollywood movie producer who has promised to make their story into a film, and is constantly on his Blackberry to well-known stars and funders.

The book is funny, I suppose, though the funny things are so close to being real, that they didn’t exactly make me laugh. What we are shown is the attempt by the well-heeled supporters of the war and of George W Bush, to repackage these young men’s terrifying existential experience to meet their needs, personal and political, and the young men’s growing awareness of just how much they are being used (and used by people, by and large, who themselves have always managed to avoid being directly exposed to war.)

Reviewing this book in the Guardian, Robert McCrum observes ‘The unintended consequence of Fountain’s bravura performance is to reduce the experience to words and style. It is… extraordinary writing, but essentially fiction for non-fiction readers.’ This doesn’t make any sense to me at all. The writing is consciously stylish (and very occasionally I felt it wasn’t sure what style it was aiming for), but I felt the experience of these soldiers was rather vividly conveyed, and that Billy himself, a very young man attempting to negotiate the transition to adulthood in quite exceptionally weird and difficult circumstances, was really beautifully drawn.

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).