Thursday 29 October 2020

The Windsor Knot - S.J.Bennett

 One thing I would love to know - is the Queen aware of this book and what does she think of it? !


This is delightful. I suppose one might put it into the genre of cosy crime? Although the crimes themselves are grisly the treatment and the involvement of our glorious Monarch is just so unique. The author has done some detailed and rigorous research into royal palace protocols. I surmise, too, that she must have studied Queen Elizabeth in some depth because the characterisation is so complete. It was very easy to picture the events in this book. I suspect that may in part be due to the fact that the royal family have such high visibility on the media. But I enjoyed the author’s imaginings of the relationship between the Queen and Prince Phillip.

If you remove the fact that the Queen is a central character and look at it from the crime point of view it’s well plotted and the final denouement ties up all the ends. It’s an easy straightforward read. Well paced. It’s not a twisty, turny crime story, it’s more in the spirit of the golden age of crime classics where thinking is required on the part of the reader, and the characters in the story.

But of course the real highpoint is the fact that the Queen does a most wonderful Miss Marple impression! The observance of royal protocols and the Queen’s role within the hierarchy of her own household, in the media and with the public is so well illustrated by the events in the book. Never more than at the end. The conclusion, where the Queen allows somebody to believe that they have solved the crime without realising that actually it was her Majesty who did it, is most amusing. I enjoyed the way the Queen came across as such a warm, compassionate, highly intelligent person, in touch with the real world in spite of her privileged existence.

And back to my original question. Is the Queen aware of this book and what does she think of it? You know, I rather think she would like it.

My thanks to Readers First for a copy of this most enjoyable novel.
       

The Illustrated Child - Polly Crosby

What begins as perhaps a whimsical and fairy-tale like account of a young child’s bohemian type existence as the daughter of an artist metamorphoses into a story of depth. An exploration of the power of creativity, the complexities of the human heart and it’s capacity for love. A story of loss and longing and ultimately a redemption of a kind. A debut novel of some substance The Illustrated Child is an eloquent coming of age novel.


‘Romilly lives in a ramshackle house with her eccentric artist father and her cat, Monty. She knows little about her past – but she knows that she is loved.
When her father finds fame with a series of children’s books starring her as the main character, everything changes: exotic foods appear on the table, her father appears on TV, and strangers appear at their door, convinced the books contain clues leading to a precious prize.
But as time passes, Romilly’s father becomes increasingly suspicious of the outside world until, before her eyes, he begins to disappear altogether. With no-one else to help, Romilly turns to the secrets her father has hidden in his illustrated books – realising that his treasure hunt doesn’t lead to gold, but to something far more precious…
The truth.’

This is a meandering tale that evokes long, lazy summer days in parts. There are aspects of it that lift you into an otherworld where time has no place. As the story unravels you begin to intuit certain truths that are revealed ultimately. It is not a comfortable or a cosy read. In fact I will confess that there were parts where the tears just rolled down my face unchecked, I was so upset.  It is a slow paced book, the chapters filled with evocative descriptions and images in a languid prose that reminded me a little of Kate Morton. BraĆ«r House is palpable and presents almost as an additional character in the book. I had the strongest sense that neither Romilly nor her father should stray too far from its debatable security.

Romilly is a complex character. By the time you reach the end of the book you wonder just how the hell she’s coped with any of it. She is a paradox. There were times when I actually found it hard to like her or comprehend her behaviour. But then when you learn the full story your heart breaks for her. There is such a sense of a child trapped in the uncomprehending world of adults where everyone speaks in riddles as if they are frightened of the truth. And indeed Romilly has to search her father’s storybooks about her to find the ultimate truth. Made all the harder by what happens to him, Tobias, another character, less complex, perhaps than Romilly but so full of love for his daughter that it seems to paralyse any objective emotion he might have in helping her deal with her past, her present and her future. 

It’s a deceptively dark book. Magical realism sprang to mind at one point when I was attempting to ‘genrelise’ it but there’s no genre exclusivity here. It’s almost a mass of contradictions for the perceived whimsy runs alongside an almost gothic bleakness.
As a debut novel it’s impressive  and arresting, one that will stay with you long after you close its heartfelt covers. 


My thanks to HQ stories for a proof of this unique story.

Friday 23 October 2020

Interview with G D Penman November 2017

A few years ago I did a number of author Q&As for NB magazine. Sadly they're no longer available to read on their current website. But I still believe that what the authors have to say about their work and the writing process is important and relevant and interesting to read so I have decided to blog them.
 
NB Magazine/Nudge Q&A with G.D. Penman



 
 You were a new novelist to me so I did a little Googling before I read your book and I love that you describe yourself as writing ‘speculative’ fiction. It’s a term Margaret Atwood used when The Handmaid’s Tale was being called science fiction. Could you tell us a little about what you mean by the term? 

G.D. Penman: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror are the genres that I tend to lurk around in. They all use allegory to a certain degree to examine elements of life and society. When I say “speculative fiction” I mainly mean that I am extrapolating story elements based on human responses to similar things. I don’t know how people would deal with aliens showing up on their doorstep, but I do know, historically, what has happened when human beings from wildly different cultures first interacted. 

Margaret Atwood used the term because she didn’t want to be relegated to the “genre fiction” ghetto when she believed that her work was “literature.” I use it because it is easier than rattling off the dozens of genres and sub-genres that it encompasses, and it gives me a little bit of wiggle room within those genres.
 
 This may follow on from that question. In the front of the copy of the book I received there are several suggested categories; Fantasy/Urban, Fantasy/Paranormal, Romance/LGBT/Lesbian, Alternative History. Do categories and genres interest you?

G.D. Penman: Because I have made the terrible mistake of writing a book that doesn’t fit neatly into a single category, I now have to wrestle with a list of 15 different genres. The Year of the Knife is a hardboiled detective mystery. But it is also an urban fantasy book. But the technological advancement has been limited by the existence of magic so it is also verging on Steampunk or Gaslamp fantasy. But the existence of magic has also caused history to diverge wildly from ours so it is an Alt. History book. But vampires and skinwalkers exist so it could also be called a paranormal fantasy book. The main character’s growth is certainly tied to her romantic engagements, so I suppose you could just about classify the book as romance?

Some people have an interest in categories and genres, some have categories and genres thrust upon them, and I suspect that I may be in the latter category (or genre.)
 
 There were various sections of the book which, when I was reading, I could clearly imagine myself playing some kind of associated video game. Is this incidental or was it a conscious part of your writing?

G.D. Penman: Video games are where I go to wind down, and I have a history of writing for games, so it isn’t too surprising that some gamey logic might have slipped into the book. And of course, I would be delighted if someone were to come along with a wheelbarrow of money to Witcher my book. 

I think that games have had a lot of flexibility in terms of the scale of conflicts portrayed compared to cinema over the last decade, so when I am constructing some of the larger set-piece conflicts it is only natural that our minds are drawn to them.
 
 Sully is a great character but when I first started reading Agent Sully” it immediately made me think of “Agent Scully”, so obviously Dana Scully and the X Files. That made me wonder what your influences might be?

G.D. Penman: By the time I realised that there might be a Sully/Scully problem I was already far too attached to her to change something as integral to her character as her name

I did enjoy (some of) the X-Files, but they certainly weren’t an influence on the book. Laurell K. Hamilton’s early Anita Blake books were my go-to urban fantasy when I first started reading the genre. I ghost-write a lot of True Crime, so the criminology of real cases viewed through a more fantastical lens probably fed into it too.
 
 I was impressed by the world you have created in this story. I was thinking, for example, of the Schroedinger units and the references to Dante Aligheri and how they all nestle so comfortably within the story yet the historic and scientific allusions are there. Did you have to do a lot of research before writing the story

G.D. Penman: I read an awful lot of non-fiction, and I have done so for decades and while I seem to be incapable of remembering things like how to turn on the damned washing machine, my brain seems to retain strange trivia without any issues. You could argue that I have been researching the book for years? No. Honestly, I had to do some serious reading about American History to make sure that I was portraying things accurately, but things like Dante and my very tenuous grasp on Schroedingers experiments with the degradation of nuclear materials were just things that were knocking around in my head, waiting for an opportunity to escape.
 
 The Year of the Knife was also a song by Tears for Fears released way back in 1989. Just a coincidence or…..?

G.D. Penman: I wish that I had found the phrase “The Year of the Knife” in Tears for Fears b-side back catalogue. Sadly, it actually came into my life while researching the trial of O.J. Simpson. His son suffered from schizophrenia, and he was considered to be a suspect in the murders. In amongst the mound of diaries which were entered into evidence against him was the phrase “This is the year of the knife.” Which was considered quite chilling and pertinent evidence, given the way that Nicole Brown Simpson had been killed. If they had realised he was just quoting lyrics in his diaries like every other teenager they probably would have gotten through that investigation a lot quicker.
 
 The setting of the novel intrigued me; Sully is a witch of the British Empire yet the action takes place in the USA, which creates a wonderfully imaginative fusion of locations. Can you tell us a little about this?

G.D. Penman: Well, I just hate the American spelling of words so much that I had to find a reason for my American characters to still be writing properly.

Seriously though, when I introduced magic into the history of The Year of the Knife, I knew that it was going to cause some divergence. Because technology and disease were less relevant, the whole geopolitical landscape was going to shift massively. 

This meant small things like the Roman Empire still kicking about in a vestigial form. But it also meant that the Age of Empires never ended, the war for America was fought by evenly matched forces, Africa was never exploited by Europe, the Transatlantic slave trade never occurred, the AIDS epidemic never wiped out the generation that were fighting to secure equal rights for queer people decades ago… the list of differences is endless. 

I strongly encourage readers to try to backtrack from any confusing changes in history to try to work out what happened because if I had to suffer through puzzling itall out, everyone has to!
 
 Following on from that question, are these areas that interest you? Or are they just specific to this novel?

G.D. Penman: I am a history fiend. This book just happened to provide a more obvious outlet for my love of history than most of the other things that I have written. The world would greatly benefit from knowing and learning from its history. As recent events have proven yet again.
 
 I thoroughly enjoyed the humour in the book. Does that come naturally? Or did you seek to inject it into the story for a little light relief?

G.D. Penman: I don’t know if I wanted the book to be funny, exactly. I was conscious of the fact that this is a book about magic, and that the best magic in fiction is as whimsical as it is powerful. As for Sully’s sarcastic commentary, that is all her, don’t blame me.
 
 Something I love to ask writers, are you an avid reader yourself? If so, can you remember the first book that moved you to tears (if any have)?

G.D. Penman: You cannot be a good writer if you are not an avid reader. You just can’t. It would be like a chef with no sense of taste.

As for the first book that moved me to tears; I cry at the drop of a hat. I cried just thinking about Thorin and Bilbo in The Hobbit last month. Me crying at a book isn’t a testimonial to its emotional power, it is just a sign of my emotional instability. Literally any book I read as a child could have made me cry, so I can’t give you the first one, but the most recent one to reduce me to proper hour-long blubbering was Robin Hobb’s Fool’s Errand.
 
 
 And finally, having enjoyed this novel so much, I am bound to ask whether you have another book in the pipeline?! And if you’re prepared to divulge anything about it? Will there be any more Sully stories?
 
G.D. Penman: I have some romance books coming out in 2018, starting with Lovers and Liches in January, and Heart of Winter, the prequel to The Year of the Knife that focuses more on Sully’s relationship with Marie should be available shortly after thefirst book comes out. As for sequels… if one were hypothetically being written right now it would probably be coming out in 2019? As for the plot, it is difficult to talk about anything after The Year of the Knife without giving the ending away, so I am afraid you will just have to wait until then. In theory. If I was writing a sequel. Which I am neither confirming or denying.

Thursday 22 October 2020

(R)evolution - Gary Numan


 I don't know if all bookworms are like this but when I was younger I went through distinct genre phases. In my 20s I went through an intense science fiction phase. And being of a somewhat obsessive nature and a completeist, once I found an author I liked I devoured everything they’d written. For a while I gorged on Asimov. Then....... I discovered Philip K Dick. His work just knocked me sideways.

As well as being a book lover I am also a music lover.  It was always a balancing act as to whether I read a book or listened to an album. In the late 70s I heard the most amazing song called "Are Friends Electric?”. What absolutely astounded me was listening to it made me think of Philip K Dick's writing. It was as if somebody had put lyrics and music to that incredible dystopian, futuristic atmosphere that pervades his books. And so I simply had to find out who this incredible artist was. And it was Gary Numan. 




I never looked back. From that day forward I became a fan. I bought all his music. It was as if I was having his music fed intravenously into me. I joined the fan club that his mum ran. I had posters. I had T-shirts. I had badges. OCD? Moi? And I read in an interview that he cited Philip K Dick as an influence. For some reason that made me ecstatic and more of a fan, if that was possible.

But the one strange thing was that I never got to see Gary perform live. It was one of those weird synchronicities of life. Circumstance. Finance. Location. It just never happened. The closest I got was a colleague’s son who saw him at one of the Wembley shows and reported back to me in glowing terms, making me incredibly envious.

And if synchronicity played a part in preventing me seeing Gary perform live it also played a part in enabling me to see him perform live! Somebody I'd known for years turned out to be a Gary Numan fan. It was one of those moments. To cut a long story short when Gary was booked to perform in my hometown that friend and I got tickets. Actually we got VIP tickets. The VIP ticket meant that we got to enjoy the pre show sound check and ………… meet Gary!

I don’t know if you can imagine how that feels? You’re going to meet somebody who has practically written the soundtrack of your life. A life that now extends for more decades than I care to admit. It was very exciting.

Me gazing up in awe and wonder at my hero

When it came to my turn to climb on the stage and talk to Gary I was feeling very nervous. What could I possibly have to say that could be of the slightest interest to somebody like him? But the most wonderful thing about Gary Numan is that it's like you’re talking to one of your mates. There is no pretension, nothing fake, nothing phoney. The thing that struck me was how open and honest a man he is.

And that really brings me to the point of this blog post! Gary's book. His autobiography. For reading it, it was as if Gary was right there beside me, talking to me. I could hear him recount the details of his creative and his personal life. And that same sense of openness and honesty runs through the entire book. The book really is an autobiography. Now that may sound like I’m stating the obvious but it starts with his birth and concludes with where he is now, in this Covid-19 world.

Sometimes a "celebrity" or the flavour of the month for whatever reason - TV, film, music, reality shows - they deem themselves entitled to write an autobiography.  Sometimes they are only in their 20s or 30s! I've always found myself curiously critical of this because I think to write an autobiography you have to have lived a life. Gary Numan has, and his book offers us in chronological detail his struggles, his successes, his doubts, his dilemmas all with the frankness that he brings to everything.  It’s the life of an  extraordinary man.  I think it will appeal mostly to Numanoids although there's a lot in here that will fascinate those interested in the making of music. So many different threads in terms of managers, distributors, record producers and record labels. Light shows and stage settings for the live performances. The punter rarely stops to consider what goes on behind the scenes. You buy the album and listen to it. You turn up at the show and watch it. And reading this book you get such a defined sense of how important every detailed aspect of his craft is to Mr. Numan. For those who make their own music there are some expansive insights into the creative process. The pitfalls, the highs and the lows.

After seeing him live the first time it whetted my appetite and I regretted all the shows I must've missed over the years. But I've managed to see him a couple more times including the most incredible gig at the Royal Albert Hall with the Skaparis orchestra. I remember it clearly because I had the flu and it was debatable whether I should go or not! If I didn't I would've let my friend down and she would've been devastated to miss the show not to mention my disappointment at missing it. So I dosed myself up. And feeling totally spaced out we made the trip. But while Gary was performing I forgot all about being unwell, his performance was electrifying. I was glad to relive it vicariously through the pages of his book.

When I finished this book......put it down.....exhaled......it struck me that Gary Webb really doesn't know how incredible and special he is, he has such an extraordinary talent. I do believe he will go down as a pioneer in the history of popular music. 

 




This is a photo of the sound check, Gary is singing with his daughter, Persia, on one of my favourite songs, My Name is Ruin.











I think Gary puts as much into the sound check as he does the actual show. He is a consummate performer. But, you know what? The sound check began late because he was still talking to all the fans. He wouldn't hurry and he spent time with absolutely everybody. I wonder how many other artists would do that? And he’s put that same care and attention into his book.




When I heard about Gary's autobiography I finally summoned the courage, or cheek (!), to contact Little Brown the publisher. I explained that I am a bookblogger, and also a Gary Numan fan and was there a possibility of a proof copy for me to read and review to coincide with publication day.  Time went by, and of course I had already preordered my copy from Gary's website so I had resigned my self to patiently waiting for that to arrive, when my inbox pinged with an email from the wonderful  Francesca Banks at Little Brown who gifted me a PDF of the book!! I was thrilled. For it meant that I could write this post and have it ready for the big day!! So thank you to Francesca, you made my day. And thank you to Gary for writing this book and, more especially, for the decades of music that I hope will long continue.

Wednesday 21 October 2020

Interview with Liam Brown December 2017

 A few years ago I did a number of author Q&As for NB magazine. Sadly they're no longer available to read on their current website. But I still believe that what the authors have to say about their work and the writing process is important and relevant and interesting to read so I have decided to blog them.

Today the NB/Nudge interview with Liam Brown

 



 After I finished reading Broadcast, I read your Afterword and it made me really concerned for you. You said you were in a state of heightened anxiety. Does that always happen when you’re writing or was it just this book?!

 

Liam BrownHa! You were right to be concerned. I was pretty broken by the time I finished writing it. I don’t think I ate or slept for about three days when I hit the last section. Still, I think it’s normal to push yourself emotionally and physically when you’re in the midst of these things. You have to let it consume you. Besides, I never want to get to the point where I’m not giving it my all. Where I’m just going through the motions. Faking it. Because you can always tell. You end up with limp, bloodless prose. Or you just keep repeating the same things over and over, like a karaoke cover version of yourself. If it gets to that point, it’ll be time to hang up my keyboard for good I think. 

 

What was the motivation for writing Broadcast initially?

 

Liam BrownI was fifteen when ‘The Truman Show came out, and it immediately became one of my favourite films. There’s a line that always stuck with me, when Truman is arguing with the director: ‘You never had a camera in my head!’ I guess that stuck with me, so it became what if you did have a camera inside someone’s head? And then of course there’s the way social media has exploded over the last few years. The oversharing. The hyper-voyeurism. The willingness to hand over the keys to our privacy to major corporations. The need for validation from strangers. The way we’re all expected to live our lives in public now. Or at least, a curated, stylised, photoshopped version of our lives. It all makes me so very, very tired. And so I guess the book is designed to explore all that, both as a satire of social media, and as a lament for the real world. 

 

Regrettably, I haven’t read any of your previous works thus far and so I am unable to compare, but the one big thing that struck me about Broadcast was how visual the writing is. It was like reading a film! And I was reminded of The Truman Show and Inception. Is this typical of your work?

 

Liam BrownI guess so. I’m not a fan of fussy writing. I like bold, stark imagery. Don’t-tell-me-in-ten-pages-if-you-can-tell-me-in-two-lines sort of thing. I guess that lends itself to a fairly visual way of storytelling. Besides, the best books are the ones where the charactersappear to me like apparitions and burn their way into my mind. Where I still wake up in the night sweating weeks after I’ve read the final page. That’s what I’m always striving for. I don’t want to entertain people. I want to haunt them.

 

Following on from that, it seemed to me in many ways that the story would translate to the big screen (or even the small screen for that matter) really well. I would love to see a film of Broadcast. Is screenwriting something you do or would consider?

 

Liam BrownThank you, I’m flattered. Yes, screenwriting is something I’m actively pursuing – I hope to have my first script finished next year. As for Broadcast coming to the big screen? Well, a little birdie with a yellow bill tells me you might be in luck. I guess you’ll have to just wait and see…  

 

The story is very contemporary. It taps cleverly into the modernobsession with personal screens and devices. It shows you have a keen grasp of the various platforms and applications. (MindCast struck me as a very clever name to give that application, for when I first read it I thought it was MineCraft!) Do you have a techie background?

 

Liam BrownI wouldn’t say I’m a techie, really. I mean, I have a phone, but I don’t use it much beyond calling and texting. As for social media, I am on it, but I’m not a frequent user. For some reason, Twitter and Facebook have the effect of making me feel intensely lonely.But I did do a lot of research on technical aspects of the novel, running it by both a psychologist and a computer scientist to check it was plausible, if not currently possible. Although, having said that, I do think the technology behind MindCast is terrifyingly close to being real. Hardly a day goes by without me reading about some new technical breakthroughin the field of mind reading. I’ve got no doubt it’ll happen eventually. Or maybe it already has? I mean, you only have to spend a few minutes scrolling through Twitter or watching YouTube to see people vomiting up their undigested consciousness onto the screen…    

 

I didn’t particularly warm to David Callow as a person and I presume I wasn’t supposed to, since his surname is surely no accident? Is he drawn from real life or is he an imaginary composite of the type of person our digital age might produce?

 

Liam BrownI think it’s true that he’s very much a product of his time. What’s that horrible marketing phrase they use? He’s a digital native. I mean, I don’t think he’s necessarily a bad person per se. His biggest crimes are vanity and self-obsession, which are hardly in short supply in the celebrity world. No, I actually felt a bit sorry for David, especially by the end. He was just a pawn, too busy taking selfies to notice the rug being pulled from under him.   

 

I’ve learnt from previous interviews with authors that being an avid reader is almost compulsory for a writer, so a question I always ask is if you can remember the first book you read that moved you to tears (if any have)?

 

Liam BrownWow, good question. And I don’t know. I would have been young. When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs maybe? I think I was about nine or ten when I read that andit just destroyed me. Or maybe it was The Iron Man by Ted Hughes? Then there was Of Mice and Men, which I read at school. I’m pretty quick to cry, though. Old country songs on the radio. An elderly couple holding hands. Life insurance adverts. I’m a sucker for all of it. 

 

 And finally, what’s next? Are you currently writing and might you offer us a clue as to what we have to look forward to?

 

Liam BrownYou know, I tend to keep my cards pretty close to my chest, for fear of not following through. I’m never convinced I’m going to actually complete a novel until the manuscript is in the post to my publisher. What I will say, however, is that it’s another piece of speculative fiction, this time exploring themes of isolation and alienation. Also, I’m more excited about this current book than anything else I’ve ever written and I predict many more hungry, sleepless nights ahead…

Tuesday 20 October 2020

An Interview with Ryan Ruby

Interview with Ryan Ruby March 2018


A few years ago I did a number of author Q&As for NB magazine. Sadly they're no longer available to read on their current website. But I still believe that what the authors have to say about their work and the writing process is important and relevant and interesting to read so I have decided to blog them.



Nudge/NB magazine interview with Ryan Ruby


Congratulations on The Zero and the One; I found it to be an impressive debut. Could you tell us a little about your initial motivation for the novel and how you came to write it?


Ryan Ruby: That’s very kind of you to say. I’d be happy to. Some writers begin with a character, a plot, or even an image, but because of the way my mind works, I begin with a form. The idea for a way to tell a story comes to me before I know what story I want to tell and what I end up doing is trying to find the story that can be retrofitted into the formal structure I’ve come up with. 


In the case of manuscript that would become The Zero and the One, I was trying to find a story that I could be told as a “four handed novel” with my friend and fellow writer JW McCormack.  As the name implies, a four handed novel is a novel written by two people rather than one: one writer writes a chapter, passes it on to the second writer, who elaborates on what has been written, returns it to the first writer, and so on. The idea I hit upon was a story in which a ghost seeks revenge on someone who had wronged him in life, with one writer writing from the perspective of the vengeful ghost and the other writing from the perspective of the person who has wronged him. “Two characters, let’s call them A and B, have engaged in a suicide pact,” I said, thinking aloud while JW listened patiently over coffee. “But A backs out at the last second. The ghost of B haunts A in an attempt to drive him to suicide, in order to finish what they had started.” JW took a sip from his mug and told me he thought it was a terrible idea.


The reason I remember this is because we had this conversation on Christmas morning, 2011. I was in Knoxville, Tennessee, celebrating the holiday for the first time with JW, his partner Claudia, and his family. In the hour before dinner, when last minute preparations were increasing the stress levels in the house, JW suggested we take a walk. A block away was a muddy ditch about ten feet deep and a quarter of a mile long that intersected the street and made up the lower boundary of a field that lay behind the houses on JW’s street. At the midpoint of the ditch, JW told us, was a tree house where local kids stole away to have their first kisses and smoke their first cigarettes. We walked slowly through the ditch, which was lined with kudzu and filled with old washing machines and discarded car parts, careful not to get mud on our clothes. By the time we reached the tree house, dusk had fallen and we had to get back for dinner. I observed that it would be quicker and cleaner if we climbed out of the ditch and walked diagonally across the adjacent field, instead of going back the way we had come. Leading the way, I hopped the fence at the other end of the field and found myself in the driveway of one of JW’s neighbors’ houses, where a young boy, who couldn’t have been more than ten years old, was standing on his porch, pointing a rifle at me. “You there,” he said, in a high-pitched voice. “Don’t you move.” I lifted my hands above my head and tried to make a panicked gesture to JW, who was now helping Claudia over the fence, to tell them they should stay where they were. “Pardon me sir,” I said with a shaking voice and exaggerated servility. “I’m a guest of your neighbors, the McCormacks. You’re doing a great job protecting your house, sir. I was wondering if you’d let me and my friends JW and Claudia,” who had not understood until they were standing next to me why I had been waving my upraised hands at them, “pass safely through your driveway, sir.” The boy looked at me skeptically. “And what’s yer name?” I told him. “Nah, Ah’m Ryan,” he said. I couldn’t tell whether he was amused by this happy coincidence or wanted me to know which of us our name really belonged to. He pointed the rifle at the end of the driveway and back at us. “Now, git.” 


Several months later, I was in Oxford, visiting my partner, who had recently gotten a job there, and I was looking for a way to join her permanently. A magazine based in Europe had recently announced a novella competition, with a sizable check and paid travel for the winner. I decided that I would try out the idea I had shared with JW and submit the story of the failed suicide pact, starting with the chapters narrated by A, now Owen, the one who had backed out at the last second. But by the time the deadline for the competition had arrived, I was way above the allotted word count and hadn’t even begun writing the chapters from the ghost’s—now called Zach—perspective. The ghost’s chapters would never end up being written, but the final form of The Zero and the One would mirror the original conception as a four handed novel, alternating not between the perspectives of a living person and a ghost, but between Oxford and New York, the two principle settings. And many of the elements from that Christmas—a stranger far from home, a gun, a muddy field, accented English, class differences, first love and first cigarettes, a dangerous double—would ultimately find their way into the fabric of the finished book.

 I found your writing style quite refreshing and it struck me that there was something classic about it. Was that a conscious effort on your part or is it representative of your natural writing style?


Ryan Ruby: Refreshing is kind of you, but I’ll admit that I’m not quite sure what you mean by ‘classic.’ I actually think of the novel as having two, maybe three, different styles. The book’s chapters alternate between different temporalities—present, past—that correspond to different locations—New York, Oxford. Although the narrator—Owen Whiting— remains the same, it seemed important to me to give the odd chapters a different style and mood than the even ones. 


For the New York chapters, set in real time, I drew upon the fragmentary first person present you’ll find in the French nouveau roman, where the point is to convey the immediacy of action and to confront the reader with a sense of the limitations of the narrator’s knowledge. The resulting mood is one of disorientation and dread, of Owen’s being blown about by forces beyond his understanding and control. In the Oxford chapters, the prose style is drawn from the tradition of lyrical realism more characteristic of, well, the ancien roman, which allows Owen the time to analyze and reflect in a mood of elegiac nostalgia. 


Zadie Smith’s essay “Two Paths for the Novel” was often on my mind as I wrote The Zero and the One. In it, Smith plays Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (the representative of the tradition of what I’ve here called the nouveau roman) off against Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (the representative of what I’ve here called the ancien roman). One of the things that I was hoping to show with this split-style approach is that these two “paths” don’t necessarily have to diverge, but can be brought together in the same novel.


A review I read online somewhere described your book as a ‘philosophical thriller’. Does such a description please you?


Ryan Ruby: It doesn’t please me or displease me. It’s not inaccurate, but nor is it really a description: it’s a label. To be honest, outside of “work of genius,” for a description of my book to please me, it’s going to have to be at least a full sentence long. I didn’t write 75,000 words for it to be summed up in two. 

 Possibly following on from that, are you bothered by genres? Do you have a genre that you see The Zero and the One comfortably fitting into?


Ryan Ruby: Yeah, after that, I think you can probably guess what I’ll have to say about this. Readers shouldn’t forget that these days “genre” is a term that is meaningful only to publishers, publicity departments, and booksellers: that is, people who are trying to make money off of you. On the one hand, I get it. If you’re one of these people, you’ve got to find some way to get the book you’ve sunk cash into into the hands of people who have probably never heard of the author in order to recoup your investment. So you, Publishing Professional, simplify, reduce, categorize, try to generate expectations for the new commodity on the basis of its similarities to other, already-existing commodities on the market. 


But no writer—at least no writer worth reading—thinks of his or her book as a commodity. A good book is supposed to violate, defy, or at the very least play around with the so-called reader-expectations publishing professionals use to define genre. (I mean, do you really want to read a book that merely meets your expectations? Wouldn’t it be better if it were to exceed them?) It follows from this that a good book by definition cannot “comfortably” fit into a genre, or any other a priori category for that matter. 


Now I’m not so conceited or poorly-read as to believe that my book is entirely without precedent or totally different from every other book out there. It’s recognizably a novel with sociologically and psychologically plausible (which is not to say mentally healthy) characters, who operate in existing geographical spaces during an actual historical moment. It has a sensibility it would not be unfair to characterize as gothic. It shares plot elements and literary tropes from other books, some of whose authors may be content to consider themselves crime writers, or mystery writers, or thriller writers, or philosophical thriller writers, or whatever. MaybeThe Zero and the One fits into one or more of these genre categories, but if it does, it fits uncomfortably into them. I’ve already read enough reviews of the book to know that people who don’t read between the lines written by the publishing professionals on the back cover are going to be made very very uncomfortable by it.


 Suicide can be an emotive term. I think it’s quite a brave move to use it so openly in your book. I thought the reference to Sarah Kane was very clever in almost subliminally sustaining the concept. Many people have fixed opinions about suicide. Do you think it might divide readers?


Ryan Ruby: I expect it will. That’s just a natural consequence of the fact that readers are not “the reader,” plural not singular, a disaggregated multiplicity not an aggregated singularity. If you get a large enough group together, you’re going to have strong disagreement, especially where a serious matter like suicide, which touches the very philosophical and emotional core of human life, is concerned. But that’s not something that worries me at all; in fact, I welcome it. I mean, the book itself is divided on the question of suicide. And for me, every good book should be divided in this way, and therefore divide its readership, because good books transform their writers and their readers. If you, the author, have fixed opinions about a matter and you write for people who share those fixed opinions, neither you, nor they will have any chance of having a transformative experience, so the whole point of the exercise gets lost. Yeats says that rhetoric is made out of the quarrel with others and poetry is made out of the quarrel with ourselves. In this sense, The Zero and the One was written as poetry, not rhetoric. But it’s still a quarrel. The arguments about suicide that I put into Zach’s mouth are ones I’ll admit to finding appealing, but am by no means convinced of, and when readers eavesdrop on this quarrel with myself, I hope they’ll be both seduced and repelled by them, just like I was when I wrote them.


You’re the first reader I’ve talked to who seems to have noticed the place of Blasted in the novel, and I want to thank you for bringing up Sarah Kane, because she’s an author I deeply admire, for her absolute aesthetic and philosophical bravery, bravery in the face of her audience I might add. I would just tell other readers that she’s not alone as a reference point in the novel. The Zero and the One is a hall of mirrors. Every word in the book was put there deliberately to reflect the concerns of the book, of which suicide is one, and that includes every allusion to other writers, thinkers, artists, and musicians from Socrates and Sophocles and Seneca to Ian Curtis and Chris Burden and Sarah Kane.  


 Are Owen and Zach pure creations of your imagination? Or are they based on people you know?


Ryan Ruby: Well, Owen and Zach are both based on me, actually. Except they’ve undergone the following imaginative procedure: I cut myself in two, gave each character some of my better qualities and some of my worse ones; then I pushed each of those qualities to their logical extremes and imagined how they would interact if they were separated into two different bodies. This is why Owen and Zach may strike some people as polar opposites who are also necessary complements, and if I was able to pull this off, it was because I’ve had the experience of being an Owen-like person in relation to a Zach-like person, and vice versa. But recently a friend of mine told me that the character she thinks I resemble most is Vera, which I thought was rather astute, because Vera is the middle point who is being pulled apart by both these extremes.


I know that all writers are also avid readers and I always like to ask authors about the first book they read that moved them to tears (if any have)?


Ryan Ruby: You know, I can’t recall ever having done so. I mean, I’m pretty frequently moved to tears by music, so I’m not a total monster. But literature, never. I often find books funny: Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities are two books that come to mind that have made me lose it recently. I think this has something to do with the distancing effect of a text, relative to other kinds of media. And as a writer I’m always reading with one eye to technical analysis (that is, I’m always trying to figure out how the machine has been put together and what makes it run) which can dampen a certain emotional involvement in, say, the fate of the characters, though books as different as The House of Mirth and A Naked Singularity have gotten me pretty close. This is not to say that I don’t find reading to be a moving experience at all, only that the affects generated by the books I cherish don’t generally follow the “I laughed, I cried” model of reader response. First and foremost, I delight in the virtuosic use of language. But wonder—the illusion, verging on hallucination, that all things are meaningfully interconnected—and sublime devastation—the brutalizing reality that nothing truly is—are the affects I’m drawn to most. I suppose I could list the authors that come to mind who are capable of producing these experiences, which, if you have the taste for such extremity, can be pretty powerful, but the book that includes them all, and most other things besides, is In Search of Lost Time. 


 Finally, this is a debut work and, I hope, the first of many. Are you at liberty to divulge what you are working on currently?


Ryan Ruby: I hope so too! From the first word to the publication date, this one took about five years to finish, and what I’m working on now promises to be more than twice as long and less than half as publishable, especially as, without some miracle intervention, I’ll be spending a lot of time scrounging up resources from somewhere else to do the research for it, which is going to involve lots of library time and travel time, so who knows when it will actually be ready for the public to read. The idea is this: I’m writing parallel histories of the development of the self and of communications media, especially writing technology, from its pre-history in the Oral Age of Homeric Greece to its post-history in the Information Age of Trump’s America. The argument is that, far from being outliers to their culture, poets have always been the early adopters of new communications technologies, which have in turn been essential in constructing our very conceptions of what it means to be a self. But rather than write a standard academic or even pop-scholarly treatment of this argument, I’m going to tell it as a story, and for that matter tell itslant, mostly through short fictional vignettes or episodes about the very real poets, inventors, archeologists, explorers, monarchs, revolutionaries, businesspeople, shamans, occultists, and media theorists whose life and work is germane to the theme. I’m calling it Into the Middle of Things, and whatever else happens, I really feel that’s exactly where the writing is taking me.