Yatterings

M John Harrison is one of those writers whose novels excite as well as confuse the living daylights from me. (I am after all a bear with a small brain.) However, I’ve been eagerly awaiting Nova Swing since its announcement earlier this year and I definitely wasn’t disappointed. If Light was a dysfuntional prog rock symphony, the Nova Swing is its lighter, dirtier punk relation. Anyhow, less of me and more of the author… What do you read these days?

I’m interested in a lot of contemporary work, including Ali Smith’s short stories, Michel Faber’s short stories, James Meek, Jonathan Franzen, Nick Flynn. They’re all so different, I agree, that they can’t be made to triangulate anything. They’re more human in some way. They have different scales of narrative focus. They often seem less tensioned, they glance off what they’re looking at rather than rendering precise scenes–scenes melt into discourse somehow even when they’re onscreen for the reader; or maybe it’s that scenes gel briefly out of discourse then melt back in again. I’m interested in that. Ali Smith’s “Text for the Day” seems like a perfect short story to me at the moment.

Were you a writer as a child? That is, did you make up your own stories?

Like most writers of what might be called “fantastic” fiction I took up writing so I could stay inside my own imaginative space and not have too much to do with the day-to-day. That doesn’t make you the most adult person in the world. When you become aware of that perhaps you try a little harder; certainly you get a little more fucked up.

Why do you write genre? Do you feel a stronger affinity for one genre or another?

To be honest, I’m not sure that I do write genre. In most of what I do the genre element, whether it’s horror, fantasy, sf, noir or whatever, is so subverted as to be unreadable by a purely generic audience. That’s why my bank balance was so slim last time I looked.

Who is your ideal reader?

Someone who has never read me before. Someone who has never heard anything about my books. Someone who doesn’t know how to make the distinction between genre and “mainstream”. Someone who isn’t any kind of critic or activist or insider. Someone who doesn’t look at the cover picture or read the cover blurb. Someone like me as a teenager, knowing nothing, prowling up and down the shelves of the public library at random looking for what worked, and as knocked over by The Golden Amazon as by The Jungle or John Bratby’s Break 50 Kill. (The encounter with Bratby, both his books and pictures, became a contributing factor in the later invention of Kitchen Sink Gothic, as in “Running Down” etc.)

How do you write? Do you plan out your books before you start? Do you write every day?

I write something most days, but not necessarily something that contributes even indirectly to a professional project. Much of the writing I do is for me–although it often has to go public in the end. I wrote a How I Write peice for Time Out recently: those non-Londoners who’d like to read it should keep checking out my website.

How did your first book sale come about?

That was The Committed Men. It was published by Hutchinson New Authors–an imprint which had debuted Angela Carter and Elaine Feinstein not long before–and edited by an astonishing man called Mike Dempsey who later managed a punk band. At one stage he sent me a note suggesting, “Can you make the motorway more of a structural metaphor ?”, so I thought for a bit and rewrote the opening of one of the chapters to read, “The motorway stretched away like a structural metaphor.” I can’t remember his response to that, but I’m sure it was equally sly. I recently had lunch with Tony Whittome, the editor who took over The Committed Men when Dempsey moved on. We hadn’t met for maybe thirty years. It turned out that in the meantime Tony had edited both John Clute and my friend Jim Perrin, the climber and travel writer. Small world.

What’s your most popular book? Why?

Light, because it’s full of dodgy sex and violence and has a happy ending.

Of your own books, do you have a favorite? Was it because of the idea, the characters, your life situation while you wrote it, the way it turned out, something else?

Books are like children. You like each book for a different quality. I like The Course of the Heart because its heart is on its sleeve. I like Signs of Life because Choe Ashton is so real and funny. I like the Viriconium twins because they remind me of their mother. Light is dear to me because it was the result of an unplanned pregnancy, but welcome all the same for its heartwarming romance of dysfunctional lovers; and Nova Swing is already such a brazen trashy little thing, all flash and no knickers. But my favourite novel of mine will always be Climbers because it’s real as well as false, a snapshot, a travel book, an autobiography, and a complicated game with snapshots, travel books and autobiographies.

What other writers do you feel you have something in common with?

I don’t know if that’s the best way of putting that question. It might be more interesting to ask, What do you see as the differences between yourself and other writers ? I would certainly prefer to be read for the differences.

How do you feel about the future? What makes you the most hopeful and the most fearful?

There’s an excellent cartoon by David Shrigley in which one of his typical asymetrically-bloated figures is seen sitting in empty space staring intently forwards. Its hair blows back in the wind. The caption reads: “Sitting on a clifftop looking out to sea I suddenly see the enemy armada approaching. I should raise the alarm but I do not feel inclined.”

Does writing have a role in shaping people’s worldview?

I don’t see how it can avoid that. You have two choices, really: you can speak from inside your culture, thoughtlessly, as if speaking that way isn’t a kind of politics; or you can try to speak for yourself. If you try to take control over what you say, your life will be a grim, probably unproductive struggle against cultural overdetermination, but at least you won’t remain a thoughtless voice; and you might change someone’s mind, somewhere. In Nova Swing, the feedback loop between the site and the city (described as a “life cycle”) is, to some extent, a metaphor for the ramped-up feedback relationship between a heavily mediated culture and the individuals who make it up.

What are you currently working on?

Short stories and reviews.

There’s been a lot spoken about post-Seattle fiction, especially by China. Do you see this as in fact happening or is it part of a cycle in literature?

Category-making is an exercise of control. When anything out of the ordinary happens in a genre, an entire immune system of activists–reviewers, bloggers, academics, pseudo-academics, anthologisers, editors, marketeers, piggybackers and other opportunists–rushes to manage, exploit and contain the outbreak by defining it in established categorical and historical terms. Where it centres on the appearance of a young writer, it’s less a discourse than the kind of grooming done by paedophiles. One of its effects is to absorb the other safely into the self and keep the genre’s economics churning. The New Weird started as a joke but rapidly became a way of making an intervention in that process, baiting the immune system a little, bringing it into public view. For me it meant one thing (to name is to claim, and if I have to be claimed then it will be by myself), for China it meant another: but we shared enough goals to have fun. We’ve moved on now, and for us the joke’s over.

You’ve championed writers such as Justina Robson and China Miéville and Joel Lane. What is it about their work that excites you?

Of course, they’re all different. But each of them has written something that gave me pause for thought, a sort of What’s going on here? moment, a This is so weird! moment. Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory did that for me. Joel Lane’s first collection of short stories, The Earth Wire, had as much impact on me in that way as any modern classic has done. And I remember sitting in Dulwich in 1994, with my identity in complete ruins, in a beautiful house I was about to lose along with the life I had lived there and the person I had lived there with, but still thinking of Mike Marshall Smith’s first novel: How the fuck is he doing this ?

You’ve written in a variety of styles and genres over the years. Is this a search for new techniques or ways of telling stories? What is it about the process of writing that keeps you searching for something new?

And–

Do writers constantly need to find new ways of writing rather than allying themselves to one particular school? Is this why Nova Swing is written in a different style to its predecessor, Light?

These two questions seem like aspects of one another. They also relate to the previous question. The idea that writers, painters, musicians, etc, seek the new for its own sake, for the sake of the search for the new, is a by-product of a rather old-fashioned art discourse: it’s a reductive and artificial assumption. Some writers are driven by a conscious need to break moulds, but it’s a rarer pathology than you’d think. Some movements seek change for the sake of it, or say they do, but that’s a process usually motivated by political, social and economic factors, and tails off with the generation it originated in. Some writers are driven, like some human beings, by the constant attempt at self-understanding, or self-definition; or by a pathology of constant self-reinvention, which in the end amounts the same thing. I find that more interesting. I’m constantly in change, in terms of both who I am and what I write: because what I write is trying to reflect, or engage with, who I am now; and vice versa. The thing I like least is to be held back when I see the need for personal change.

There is also the question of finding a form for those things you want to say (or, better, finding a form which will show you what things you have to say): Nova Swing has a different voice to Light because it has different things to say, and those things emerged from the way it found to say them. In a sense the Saudade/event site relationship metaphorises this process, as well as some of the recombinative processes of trash fiction, and the cultural overdetermination process I mentioned above.

In Climbers, you ponder on the fantasy of reality. What is it that interests you as to the blurring or attenuation of those lines?

Is it possible to live? I think it is. It was so nice to hear, earlier in the year, British evacuees from Lebanon describing their experience of war, and of being displaced, as “surreal”. That was a way of articulating very simply the shocking difference between real and mediatised experience. You think you know what it’s like, they said, but you don’t; you think TV has prepared you but find it hasn’t. It’s still possible to face experience in an unmediated way, but only if the experience is forced upon you. Climbers was–to some degree–about not making the easy assumption that you can choose to “be real”. Being real is precisely the result of no choice. I look forward to the time when the privilege of no choice is returned to us all.

You’ve commented that Viriconium is a deliberately unstable world, designed more to reflect life than anything else. Is the Kefahuchi Tract a science fictional version of this?

No.

M John Harrison’s website

M John Harrison’s message board at the TTA Press.