Yatterings

Having written the successful Ashraf Bey novels, you’ve moved into standalone books, very much Japanese and Chinese mythology. What made you move from North Africa to another extreme?

What actually happened was that after finishing Felaheen, which is the last of the Ashraf Bey mysteries, I wrote Stamping Butterflies, which has an Arab and North African strand, but also a Chinese strand set in the far future. It was a phenomenally complicated novel to write. Three timelines, three strands to each timeline, so I was weaving nine strands in all. Two days before my deadline I had all the chapters on this table shuffling them about. When I finished Stamping Butterflies I wanted to write something that was completely straight forward – A to B to C – completely linear, no flashbacks, tight third person, sitting on the character’s shoulder and so I wrote 9Tail Fox.

There’s only one flashback and it’s not even the hero’s, it belongs to somebody else. So 9Tail was my attempt to write a straight-forward, almost filmic script, with one detective, and I wanted somewhere to set it, so I chose Chinatown in San Francisco. I was originally going to Beijing and queued at the Chinese embassy for hours for a Visa and they said, “You can go to China but you can’t write about it.” And then the SARS things happened so I ended up going to San Francisco instead.

I grew up in the Far East and lots of my early memories are of Singapore and across the Straits in Jahore. I have strong memories of Chinese temples, Buddhist temples, Hindu temples. So I used these for 9Tail Fox. Coming out of 9Tail, I wanted to write something about Iraq and what is happening there, not set now but twenty years in the future, with what is happening now as a flashback. I had a sniper in the British army as my character and just thought, “Where does he end up?” And then I thought, “Ah, obviously Japan.”

All of my books have come out of a single image. They begin with a single image and then I know what the character is doing and thinking and I work back from how he got there and forward to what happens next. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, my guy was running a biker bar in Roppongi. So I thought, right I’d better go to Roppongi and check that there are biker bars and also do my usual thing and work up the street life. So I made three trips to Tokyo last year, about three or four months apart, to get the feeling; and when I’d nailed down where the bar was and what he could see out of his windows, I had it cracked.

How did you deal with the culture shock between Japan and Britain?

If you’ve been to an English public school, which I have, Japan is not a culture shock. It is hierarchical, it is run on totally arbitrary rules, very little of life makes sense unless you know the rules, and even when you know the rules, they don’t actually make sense. They’re just the rules.

To me it was like being back at school. I went to a place where, according to which year you were in, you wore different clothes, you spoke in different words, and you behaved in different ways. It’s perfect training for Tokyo, and Tokyo is pretty accessible compared to other bits of Japan. If you move outside Tokyo you become much more of an object of curiosity… Small children would point at me in Tokyo but only if I was off the beaten track. Go out to the country and everybody will point at you, because they don’t see that many Western people.

What was the effect of coming back to London?

Tokyo is insane. The only place I can compare it to is Mexico City. They have bigger populations than a substantial number of countries. Tokyo in particular lights up at night into miles and miles and miles of neon. Its possible to sit in a forty eighth storey bar and look across to Shinjuku, where you just have walls of light, like castle walls, rising for hundreds and hundreds of feet.

One thing I discovered is that life in Tokyo is lived vertically. We don’t do it; we’re used to our shops being horizontal and to walking along the street. In Tokyo, you go up. You can start at a cafe on the ground floor, move up to a restaurant on the third floor, a club on the nineteenth floor and end up in a drinking den on the fortieth floor, and never leave the building. Or you can go to the next building, on the thirty eighth floor, and find any number of fairly dubious clubs. I adored Tokyo.

My defining image was pigeons drunk out of their skulls on salary-man vomit, at 8 in the morning, in the Golden Gai near Shinjuku. Everything is closing down, the brothels, the strip clubs. All the salary men and tourists have gone home, and there are just dozens of pigeons staggering around in the early morning light. Tokyo is a city where people get drunk. The police accept this, provided you don’t misbehave. You can be drunk and staggering down the middle of the street and they’ll just come and gently move you to the side of the street. But jaywalk a crossing when the red light is showing and you’ll be in trouble. It’s a very heavy drinking culture, but the feeling is totally different to the heavy drinking culture in this country. When I came back to London it felt very small and very still. Not actually provincial, because 40% of London is foreign and that’s one of things I like about it, but definitely smaller.

In your books you mix genres - sf, crime, suspense, thrillers. Is that just a sense of, if it feels right then use it, or is it trying to push the boundaries of any genre be it sf, be it crime?

A bit of both. I think the really good thing about sf is you can steal anything from anybody and use it. There’s no reason why we can’t take crime novels or literary novels and steal their tropes and patterns and use them ourselves. I’m very bad – and I know publishers hate this – at staying within a single genre. Also I don’t think within a single genre. The books form in my head, and sometimes they’re thrillers and sometimes crime novels and sometimes they have very strong fantasy elements. They all have sf elements, but I don’t sit down and think, “Hey, today I’ll write a space opera… No, I’ll write a fantasy.” God knows I’ve tried to stay within one genre, but it always goes off at a tangent and I don’t really see why it shouldn’t.

Who are the writers who have influenced you?

I think the writer I’d really like to be is Haruki Murakami, largely because he ransacks genres and nobody blinks. He writes pretty much what he wants, but is obviously working at a phenomenally higher level. I know the SF writers I like – China Miéville, Steph Swainston, Mike Harrison. I read a lot of crime fiction, a lot of James Lee Burke, Dona Leon and Carol O’Connell, and quite a lot of mainstream fiction – Banana Yoshimoto, Arturo Perez-Reverte, Isabel Allende and Carlos Fuentes, quite a lot of Latin American novelists. It’s very hard not to be influenced by everything I read, equally as I have to work quite hard not to steal other people’s voices. I’m quite careful, because I don’t want to waste three days writing like who ever I’ve just been reading!

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