'Francis Bacon In Your Blood' by Michael Peppiatt

Michael Peppiatt was twenty-one when he first met the now mythic shock painter Francis Bacon, then fifty-three, for an interview.  From there they begun a life long friendship, spiky though it could be, and Peppiatt charts it all in 'Francis Bacon In Your Blood', a subjective memoir.

And what memories.  Peppiatt seems to have remembered all of Bacon's cutting remarks, his witty retorts and his acid phrases.  "Champagne for my real friends, and real pain for my sham friends" was one of his most memorable sayings, probably because it so well distils Bacon's feeling for life.  He was a great boozer; settling in dingy Soho clubs drinking wine after wine (that's bottles, not glasses) and gambling in casinos until his money ran out.  He also seemed to know something about pain.

If you've ever seen a painting by Bacon then you will know that pain was his subject, the great existential questions as to why we suffer.  Cadavers with wide open mouths on plinths and screaming bishops, he was no picturesque portrait painter.  With his brush he could dissect a victim, blood streaming and with a vital viciousness that went beyond mere sadness.

Of his youth little is known and came to painting somewhat late, just after he was thirty.  When asked how he became a painter he says:

"Well, I've spent so much of my life just drifting...from bar to bar, person to person.  I often regret that I didn't have more discipline and concentrate myself when I was young.  I mean, when you think of how many French artists...have been so concentrated from the start.  I didn't really to paint at all seriously until the war.  I did little before, but it was no good.  When the war came, I was turned down because of this asthma of mine.  So I had that time to just drift in and do nothing.  It's true I'd been doing odd jobs to make my way- I worked in an office for a bit, then I tried to design some furniture.  I even became someone's valet.  But I had been thinking a great deal about painting.  about how I might perhaps begin to make this thing work a little."

Worked it did.  Bacon was one of the greatest British painters in the twentieth century who pulled no punches and did extraordinary works of art.

Though a great drinker he was also extremely hard working.  He went over and over canvases and was always trying to go deeper into his subjects for many hours in the day.  "One is never hard enough on oneself" he says.  He was also a great lover of life, laughing until he cries and drinking bottles of champagne as "it's all we have" and that "for some reason, although I believe in nothing, my nervous system is filled with this optimism".

It's no wonder that Peppiatt feels surprised that he's drinking with one of the great masters of art as a friend and confidant.  In fact for Peppiatt, Bacon is like a 'father figure' where he helped guided the young Cambridge student into maturity and worldliness.

Bacon is a great personality and looms large in these pages and though I wouldn't be so comfortable with meeting him, I am glad that he lived (to 82, 82!) and glad that Peppiatt recorded it all for us.  Though Bacon is a spiky figure the friendship between the writer and painter is actually a tender one and an interesting one.  His opinions on then current art trends and his place in it are fascinating glimpses into an uncommon mind.  Yet Peppiatt remembers fairly of his father figure and doesn't write a hagiography as Bacon can be kneecapingly unpleasant and his treatment of those who he dislikes is visceral.  

Reading this book made me feel like I was drinking with them, that close and personal is the tone of this book and it was one hell of a drinking session.

'A History of Warfare' by John Keegan

Starting off with a denouncement of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, 'war is not the continuation of policy by other means', John Keegan begins a thorough survey of all aspects of military adventures throughout history in his 'History of Warfare'.

For a nominal pacifist with deep ignorance of the army I found much to my surprise in this book that has changed the way I see warfare.

For example: did you know that 'the great nobles of Japan...did not seek military reputation at all, but stove for literary glory' thereby meaning that the samurai all wanted to be poets?  Or that, also on the samurai,  'for whom fighting was an act of self-expression by which a man displayed not only his courage but also his individuality'.  This sentence alone gives me a deeper understanding of why man makes war.

Keegan argues that it is not politics that drives war but culture, that 'war embraces much more than politics: that it is always an expression of culture'.  This somehow makes war into more like an art than a necessary tool for survival.  Yet the objects and stories of war are consumed with fascination by people who want only second-hand experience.  But as Keegan suggests some people are only fit to be soldiers embracing the lifestyle boredom punctuated by moments of terror.

So to the question:  would I fight?  Say their was a group on their way to murder everyone in my town, friends, family, my friendly newsagent, would I try to organise a group with whatever weapons were laying around to fight them off?  I suppose I would have no choice, though as Keegan says

'when men of equal worth fight on unequal terms the side with the better weapons wins'.  Right now I probably couldn't, despite having a black belt in karate (though not practicing for fourteen years), but if I had a few months and some decent weapons then maybe.  But I'll do it Celt style.

The closest I've come to warfare was playing  Gavrilo Princip, assassinator of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in street theatre.  I sat on a bench, gun in hand, waiting for my moment.  Then when the time came I launched off in front of the wooden car and fired two shots.  So maybe my revolutionary potential is there.  Acting is one thing but what about the real deal?  Well if war is supposed to be a type of performance I could probably convince myself to do some heavy method acting.

'Just Six Numbers' by Martin Rees

To think that there ae more stars in the sky then there are grains of sand on a beach gives our home a bewildering context.  Carl Sagan says that the work of astronomy is character building and it's clear why: it puts us in our place.

But there is one thing that dominates in this universe and that is all powerful mathematics.  According to Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, there are six numbers more important than the rest that shape the universe.

I read this book like I would read 'The Cloud of Unknowing' as a piece of meditation on the deep forces that call all into being.  It's filled with uncomprehendingly large numbers, complex interactions, and non-common-sense theories.

It is a book to enlarge the imagination by full frontal challenge to all it's previously held notions of space and time.  Marvelling in sentences like 'Time may become like space, so that in a sense there is no beginning of time' it makes me wonder more about what is hidden to us that may be illuminated by science.

Though I have an interest in science I myself am not scientifically literate.  I can barely begin to make sense of the mathematics and the physics of this book, yet I yearn to learn more; because in learning the little bits I can grasp it makes me hungry to have a few more bites before the whole feast of science and the universe.

This book, with it's remarkably clear prose, gives me a chance of understanding what I never knew existed right before my eyes.  It makes us think about things that previously we never gave a second thought and gives us more perspective on who we are, on what our purpose is.

It demands re-reading and it's a short enough book to have a fair chance of multiple re-readings.  It's a great book that I highly recommend even if you are not literate in science.  Don't let that worry you, just be taken on a ride through the universe and enjoy the journey.  If you pick up a few things on the way then it might give you an appetite to learn more, think more, observe more and enjoy the understandings of our world in a wholly new perspective that you might not expect.

'Makind in the Making' by William Howells

Every few years I make a pilgrimage to a very special place.  In Temple Cloud, near Bath, is a building that is my heaven.  It has this divine quality because it houses hundreds of books, some quite old.  I buy about twenty books and spend the next few years reading them.  The last time I went I was becoming more interested in their non-fiction section of old Pelican books and went away with a good selection of physics, biology, education and history.

One of them was the very first to be read, William Howells 'Mankind in the Making', discussing evolution.  Published in 1959 it goes into detail about evolution in human beings, from the first early days of walking upright to what could be called modern day humanity, with a informative yet easy enough to read style.  These books may seem a bit more formal than todays non-fiction casual easing-you-into-their-arms friendliness but they don't condescend as much as you might think.  Their aim is to be enlightening not to be your friend.

In this instance they are the best kind of authority.  They that know more than you do and are happy to pass that knowledge for your own benefit.  In short: a true educator.  

In this department I know little about evolution other than the basics, a theory that seemed to me in Secondary School eminently plausible.  That animals adapt to their surroundings seems safe to accept and I found it easier to do so.  What I couldn't grasp was the billions of years needed to see species adapt into new species (still it is a tough job and a fit subject for meditation), nor did I understand just how revolutionary the idea is.  So here comes Howells doing the job that I had trouble to do for myself.  And what a job it is

What's interesting is that this is not supposed to be a remarkable book.  In fact the presentation of facts almost seem banal and totally accepted.  Though the idea of evolution, in it's present Darwinian form, has only been around for just over a hundred years yet biologists have made it a cornerstone of biology, showing that without it you get an incomplete picture of the diversity of life.  The implications of this idea is fleshed out by Howells, who joins the dots and links the links of the theory.

I found this book to be compelling- testament to the fact that I actually finished it in good time- and it's story, the story of us, fascinating.  The fact that our foot is our most human characteristic surprised and delighted me as did many other of the facts that are contained in this book.  The fact that evolution works on such a large timescale is a challenge to the imagination and its one that stimulates me to think deeper and provokes my wonder.

How could it be that a dog was once a wolf?  How could it be that we are so shaped by the world that our forms change?  It is exciting and inspiring to know that our day to day lives contain this almost cosmic quality where our behaviours today are the new limbs of tomorrow.

Howells does a fine job at explaining patiently everything a lay person would want to know about evolution.  The style might seem a tad deated but it is perfectly readable for someone who wants a good primer on the subject and doesn't know where to start.

It's a book that I'll enjoy re-reading in order to dredge up the fine jewels from the depths of evolutionary theory.  To think of when I am in the woods or in front of a fire.

Interview with Iain Banks

This is an interview I conducted with Iain Banks a few years before he died.  This was on my old defunct blog and I have decided to put it up here for the interest of current readers.

Iain Banks, writer of mainstream fictions such as ‘The Wasp Factory’ and ‘The Bridge’, who is also Iain M. Banks writer of science-fictions such as ‘The Player of Games’ and ‘Consider Phelbas’, meets me in the lobby of the Hotel Josef as I study a poem by Michael March, president of the Prague Writers’ Festival, that is printed in English on the wall.  After shaking hands and deciding that the hotel’s garden would be better for the interview we walk outside, taking my copy of The Wasp Factory with me.  We sit at a table in the clear sun underneath a parasol.  I offer my bottle of water to quell his dry coughing and we begin to talk.  He’s never been to Prague, only arriving by train the previous night, and after giving my thoughts about the city I ask him my first question:

You’ve been invited to the Prague Writers’ Festival for the first time with its theme of Heresy and Rebellion.  What do they mean to you?

IB:  I’m not entirely sure with these things.  Broadly drawn subjects or ideas to fit so many dispirit writers within.  I think it sounds like a great idea as an overall theme, as it were, and I suppose all writers are prone to both heresy and rebellion.  As a writer although you are within society you also have to be outside it to be able to comment upon it, to be able to have any objectivity or any sort of perspective.  I guess.  That applies to outsiders and heretics and that predisposes you to both heresy and rebellion.  It’s not necessarily always the case but I think as a general rule the cliché about writers and artists are more prone to being not living by societies normal rules is probably true, is probably right.  Of course part of that is simply writers and artists using that cliché of that reputation as a way of getting away with stuff that perhaps the rest would like but can’t because of normal social rules that prevent them.  But I think there’s been a lot of exceedingly bad behavior by, I would argue more by artists then writers, but particularly male writers and artists towards females.  They just treat women really badly, ‘oh that’s because I am a creative darling’, it’s bollocks, you know, it’s just an excuse for behaving badly and getting away with it.  It’s slightly childish and immature.

Is there anything a writer should definitely not do?

IB:  oh, I wouldn’t go as far as that.  All the things a writer ought not to do are the usual things; like murder people, torture, you know.  I think probably the greatest vice writers are guilty of in any consistent basis is taking themselves to seriously.  You have to make a distinction between taking your work seriously and taking yourself seriously.  I think for too many writers there’s no barrier there.  It’s remarkably purist to the extent they take there work seriously ends up that they take themselves too seriously.

A lot of books read as the writer’s View on Life as pure idea, but you seem to have a lot of fun.

IB:  oh god yeah

You seem to enjoy experimenting in different forms and going into different genres.

IB:  I don’t think I’m as reckless as I probably ought to be, but probably if I applied myself I’m sure I could be more adventurous.  I think I’ve settled down in my old age, I’ve got a bit boring.

Just going over the same patch?

IB:  not really, but I think if I stretch myself in terms in profoundly different genres I could probably kept on going.  I think it starts to look a bit over deliberate if you start doing that.  I’ve joked about that I could write westerns as Iain Z. Banks or pornography as Iain X. Banks.  These are obviously jokes but I suppose in theory I could have wrote profoundly different areas of writing, which I haven’t.  I found what I enjoy doing and what I find rewarding and kinda stuck with it.  That’s because I love science fiction, for example.  I love writing in the mainstream, I love the immediacy of the mainstream writing but I also love science fiction just because you can let your imagination run wild.

You’ve said before as an analogy of these two types of writing as the mainstream being a piano and science fiction being an organ, which clearly defines what you think of both types.

IB:  I hope so; it’s not just saying that science fiction is better because it’s not as good as the emotion nuance on the piano.  You can’t really do that on the organ, it’s built too gigantic a scale.  The, if you get technical about it, individual keys on a keyboard are more than just switches.  In that respect the most sophisticated, beautiful, gorgeous organ in a cathedral is very similar to an old fashioned conventional digital keyboard.  Again the switches are just on or off.  They don’t work as pianos do; you haven’t got lots of control of the action normally of the key itself.

I’ve read that you wanted to write a symphony.  How’s that coming along?  

IB: (laughs) yes, it is actually.  I normally hit my deadlines but I missed that one.  It was supposed to be finished for end last year.

Is this new territory for you?

IB:  yes and no.  Yes in terms for anything to put out for general consumption.  I’ve been working on music for years now.  I’ve got a friend, chap called Garry Lloyd, he and I been working on music for ‘Espedair Street’ (is it the fifth novel?) an old novel what I wrote many years ago about rock music.  So we were working on songs for that.  I’ve been writing bits of music for a long time, mostly songs and pieces.  I always been attracted to the longer work and tend to write novels, very rarely have ever short stories.  There is a lot of commonality between the novel and a long piece of music.  You’ve got literally themes and they’re linear things.  You start at one end- you go through towards the end.  Things develop and change and influence each other and so on.  I always love the idea.  I’ve been working on that, and still am and it’s about…erme…I’m not entirely sure how close it is to completion now.  Almost certainly get it finished by the end of this year.  It’s amazingly complicated.  I feel there’s an episode of the Simpsons where Homer, for some bizarre reason, is in charge of the whole nuclear power station, Mr. Burn’s one, and he complains: ‘doh!  Who would have thought running a nuclear power station would be so complicated?’  I feel like I’m in that situation.  Who would have thought writing a symphony would be so complicated?

What’s complicated?

IB:  making all the bits fit together, making it sound…

Coherent?

IB:  yeah, making it sound like a proper symphony orchestra.  I got this fabulous software, the stuff I’m using is Logic 7, there’s Logic 8 out now but Logic 7 is a lot of ways better if you’re going to be serious about it (it’s easier to use, 7 is probably a bit more intrinsic usability).  Anyway, there’s this big computer Mac and a keyboard and all the rest of it.  Now redundant as external sound modules can read you anything in your computer now.  You can have umpteen different, well I’ve got fourteen different instruments.  Getting it to sound like a proper symphony orchestra takes quite a lot of doing.  The main problem is balance between the woodwind and the strings.  It’s a very conventional proper symphony using a proper symphony orchestra.  No electronic instrument, well in a sense it’s all electronic but you know what I mean.  Going for probably three movements, I’m still not entirely sure about that, but very melodic.  Pre-firebird as it were.  Getting the balance between the very loud woodwinds and the quiet, relatively quite, strings are a bit of a challenge itself.  Then working out all of the nuances of sound of what instruments sound good together.  A couple of times just by accident I’ve hit on a combination of something like a cur anglais and subdues and violins and it sounds really good.  It’s very eerie and beautiful about it, a kind of luck.  It’s a grotesquely steep learning curve.  Yeah, basically what I’m doing, I’ve got no formal education as it were, I’m feeling my way.  I like to think if I’m mad enough to embark on ‘Banks’ Second Symphony’ it’ll go a lot quicker (laughs)

Will your music feature on future audio books or podcasts?

IB:  I don’t know.  Potentially I’d love to.  You have to be pretty careful of doing that terrible thing where you have some sort of fame in one medium and you have something that’s basically a hobby and you decide to do that.  It’s like “I’m going to do all my own album sleeves in future” and you can imagine the record companies going “oh my god here we go” “yes I’m a brilliant painter I shall paint all my album sleeves” “oh kill me now” you’ve got to be careful of that.

(at this point I couldn’t help thinking about Nobel Prize Winner Gao Xinjing, also attending the festival, who has recently returned from a retrospective of his paintings, which are used also for his book covers) 

You want the people around you to be honest, basically.  I’m lucky, I’ve got friends, my girlfriend, and so on, who are prepared to tell the truth and say “No, that’s a terrible idea Banksy”.  I think my publishers are not stupid “Don’t you dare, it’ll be commercial suicide.”  Potentially yeah, I’d love to.  I think the obvious one again is ‘Espedair Street’.  It’s an area where publishers are desperate to be able to find ways to make this relevant to the electronic age.  They’re all really worried about their revenue streams for the next few years.

The cover designs for your books are very idiosyncratic, your brand distinctive, was there any input from you?

IB:  usually just a corrective thing, if the designer’s done something wrong.  It used to be more a case of the old fashioned ones in the pure black & white ones, those were really striking.  But I think it was gradually seen as being a bit to eighties.  It was kind of inevitability that somebody came along and gone for the more monochrome.  In the case of ‘The Crow Road’…no, sorry I mean ‘Complicity’ I think they had a knife shown on the cover, an ordinary butter knife.  A rather innocuous looking knife, an, no.  It’s got to be a proper fuck-off Schwarzenegger type knife.  One that’s got the runnels for the blood to drain down.  For ‘The Crow Road’ they just had a picture of a crow and “that’s a bit literal guys, why not have it so that it’s ambiguous if the crow’s in flight or being splattered across the road?” and then muttered to myself whether it would be possible to get it embossed with a tire track going across it.  “Yes, let’s do that!”

One of the criticisms of modern cover designs is that they are too literal.  For example the over Comac McCarthy’s book ‘The Road’ was simply a road.

IB: (despairingly) yeah…

Where is the imagination in these designs?

IB: I think there’s not enough time.  You go to an artist and ask them “give us an image for a title called ‘The Road’” and the artist flashes “uh…sure; a road…a never ending road into the distance.”  ‘Catch-22’ years & years ago way back in the late sixties (late sixties?) or whenever it was, and it’s a picture of a man in shorts on a runway looking up with his fist to the camera, it’s taken from above from the aircraft, and it’s title: ‘Catch-22’, that’s a weird title but it instantly took your heart.  It’s had different covers since.  But I know what you mean.  I know when I had more control as a writer was for one of the science-fiction novels, ‘The Algebraist’.  I think it had some sort of cover, some generic science-fiction cover you know.  I said: “get the bands around Jupiter in the background and turn it ninety degrees, so the bands went around vertically” and it was a great cover, that one.  I’m very proud of it.  Generally my publishers get it right first time as far as I’m concerned.  Now and again I’ll say, “Why don’t you do this?”

Is there anybody here at the festival you’re excited at the prospect of meeting?

IB:  I think this year all of them.  I don’t think there’s anyone I’ve met before.  I’ve already talked to Bahaa [Taher], the Egyptian chap and had some fascinating conversations.  I don’t think I’ve talked to anybody else…oh; I’ve talked to John Wray, a very, very brief conversation.  I’m still finding my feet.

Do you think this is a good opportunity to meet other people in the same profession?

IB: oh definitely.  That’s what it’s about for the writer.  Looking around this town its completely different from, say, Edinburgh the National Book Festival

Or Hay-on-Wye

IB: yeah, you walk on do your bit and walk off again.  You might bump into one of the author’s yurt but you go into slots, you’re stacked up like aircraft approaching Heathrow.  With something like this you’re here for the duration and given the chance to mix and mingle so it is fascinating.  It’s been great fun.  I’ve only been here for a brief time but I really love Prague.  The opening ceremony was great fun, a great party.

I’d agree.  Prague is easy to love, it’s easy-going, but a little bit rugged too, and it’s not pristine.

IB: I know what you mean.  It feels more human.

It has plenty of plant life, wonderful environment.  You came by train to get here and I read that a couple of years ago you sold all of your cars?

IB: all that I had at that time.  We had about three-five cars quite quick, big, fast cars.  I had a Hybrid Lexus for about a year and a Yaris Diesel.  There has been a bit of ecological backsliding since then.  When I got rid of the Diesel Yaris I got one of the most green of open top minis.  I got a few other cars, which are not fiercely green.  I’m still a petrol head.  I love cars, I miss them, especially the fast cars; on the other hand I find that overtaking is largely about attitude.  I still do a lot of overtaking, but sensible.  I miss them.  The thing I miss most of all wasn’t the acceleration, or the luxury, it was the open top motoring.

The wind in your hair.

IB: yeah (chuckles)

I don’t know much about Scotland, I’ve visited Glasgow & Edinburgh but I wondered what you thought the differences are between them?

IB: Edinburgh is largely more classically beautiful in terms of architecture than Glasgow.  People in Glasgow are much more fun, more in-your-face, Edinburgh’s a bit withdrawn and polite & so on.  They are terrible generalisations and they change over time with different generations as well.  In a sense they are better connected now.  You can get from one to another in fifty minutes easily.  There are some areas of distinction that’s better than it was.  Edinburgh’s still slightly up itself.  It’s a fabulous city and I love it, but Glasgow is more fun- I guess- it’s what we were talking about earlier, something like Prague.  It’s a bit more earthy.  If Edinburgh had any dirt it would sweep it under the carpet whereas Glasgow wouldn’t bother.

I read that you were part of Scotland’s second renaissance in terms of novelists, but you seem to have a lot in common with James Hogg…writer of Confessions…

IB: …of a Justified Sinner.  Really?  I hadn’t read him because I’ve heard that said before and I didn’t want it to colour my writing too much, to be too over influenced.  I do know of it.

Hogg uses themes and methods similar to your writing: multiple narratives, criticism of religion…

IB: I probably should, it’s about time.  Especially now between novels.

One book that has influenced you is Alasdair Gray’s ‘Lanark’

IB: oh yeah definitely

I haven’t read it but I bought it in Edinburgh because, well, it goes back to cover designs again.

IB: ah yes, stunning cover designs by him; particularly ‘Lanark’

So is he one the exceptions to…

(banging noise from the scaffolding above)

IB: I think we’re safe sitting here.  Yeah I still think Lanark is a great piece of work of Scottish literature in the twentieth century in terms of novels.  I read it when I thought my time for being influenced was over.  Lanark opened my eyes to what, reminded me, what you can do, how free you can be- to mix the mainstream with the fantastical.  I know it’s not Alasdair’s favorite; he prefers 1982.  I think it’s a masterpiece of literature.

And ‘The Bridge’ came out of that?

IB: Definitely, I think it would have still existed but it wouldn’t have been as good without the role Lanark played.  I don’t think I’ve written any novels that owed to any book or writer the The Bridge does to Alasdair.  There’s a direct link.

I’ve been reading The Bridge at the moment, half-way through, enjoying the different voices and dialects, particularly the Scottish one where it takes a while to understand its meaning.

IB: good.

People who read your work in translation, or whose English is their second language, find your work physically difficult to read.

IB: I can imagine that.  I occasionally feel sorry for my translators.  I often get very, very long documents full of questions from translators saying “what do you mean by this?” and I try to answer them as honestly, as fully as you can.  Yeah, I think it’s problematic to translate.  I know I am.  I have a working, very slight working knowledge of French, Italian, a spattering of German and Spanish, you know good enough to order a few beers.  It’s taken me so long to develop any sort of proficiency, never mind mastery, over the English language; and now I’ve got it I tend to use it.  It’s there.  It’s such a fabulous language to work with.  I don’t know about others, not having any others but what I gather, is that it’s one of the best ones to write with.  It’s got such a gigantic vocabulary, is it a half million words or something? And it keeps stealing words from other languages and it keeps changing.  There’s so many synonyms, there’s so many ways to describe…if you are stuck for a word or you repeated a word then you just hit the ‘Thesaurus’ button or look in the, as I do less & less frequently nowadays, just look in an actual physical thesaurus.  You’ve got a choice of words to use and almost every one’s “ah yes, that’ll do perfectly”.  So yeah it’ll be a strange thing to write so that it is easily translatable.  You could do that.  I suppose it would be like writing for children or adolescences, where again you can’t choose so many long words or sentences.  I hope I’m not being presumptuous or condescending.  I suppose it would be a bit like that where it is easier to translate then to charge headlong into the mass that it English.

You do have a lot of fun with language

IB: that’s what its there for.

Have you ever thought of inventing your own Burgess type Nadsat?

IB: not really.  In a sense there’s a ghost of one, the Culture’s language: Marain.  No, in terms of one to tell the novel in as it were.  It’s necessary to consider, absolutely.  I loved that Burgess did that in Clockwork Orange, but he did it so well it’s a hard mark to come up to.  If he hadn’t done it so well I’d feel more confident about producing something that would be fairly good in comparison to everybody else’s attempts.  There’s definitely possibilities, but I think the way not to do it is to have that idea and then do it regardless.  It’s really an intellectual exercise.  I think the way I’d approach it would be to do it because the story called for it, some intrinsic need for the story itself or it wouldn’t somehow work unless you did that.  Having said that, that’s the purist option, as it were.  Even so you could angle any given idea towards that treatment, if you like.  So any idea you come up with you can say “ok will this work if you try to meld the language onto it?”  And in that case you find that to your own surprise that form might work even if it wasn’t actually suggested by the original idea but it might turn out to hone something to it.  So if you got that idea in the back of your mind then quite possibly you might end up applying it and find it surprising yourself, as it were.  You never know.  I’d like to do it but the trouble with that though, especially to do that through out the whole novel, is that there’s a very high risk factor- if you get it wrong you get it badly wrong, so you have to be very sure your getting it spot on.  Exactly.

How sure are you before you send your first copy of a novel to your publishers?

IB: Usually pretty sure. The quality control has gotten pretty good over the years (laughs).  There’s somewhere you think “au…don’t know about this” and there’s other ones where you think, “ah…that’s a cracker, that’ll do nicely” (laughs).  I think I wasn’t entirely too sure about Transition, when it came out last year.  I was a bit concerned people might find it a bit too all over the place.  The template for Transition was The Bridge, I just wanted to go back and do something like The Bridge, which combines the mainstream and the fantastic.

For you the mainstream & the fantastic seems to have merged with Transition published as Iain M. Banks in America & Iain Banks in Britain.

IB:  aha.  Yes very funny that.  It’s not an artistic device, it’s simply marketing.

We can’t tell with you postmodern authors when you are joking and when you mean it.

IB:  that’s all part of it.  Readers can make up their own mind.  It gives them some sort of leeway.  With Transition I was a bit concerned, but in the end people seemed very happy with it.

There must be hardcore fans that you cannot displease.

IB:  well…I sometimes thought my career consisted of trying to shake off my fans (laughs).  Almost succeeding on a couple of occasions.  Yeah I think there are absolute hardcore fans that will buy any rubbish.

Like a symphony.

IB:  yeah exactly.  You can’t base your career on being self-indulgent, also it would be commercial suicide, you know.  People would stop buying the books.  You can get away with one bad book, one indifferent book- you can’t get away with two in a row.  You have to believe in what you are doing but not in such a blinked way that you’ll think “whatever I write will be brilliant because I am a genius”, “oh no your not”. 

It’s nice to see a high-class author not taking himself too seriously.  I love that you went on celebrity mastermind answering questions about malt whiskeys.

IB: and the distilleries of Scotland.  I’ve written a book about it a few years before, so I had down the research.  It was nerve-wracking.  It really is.  I did university challenge as well.  That’s okay because there’s a few other people who you can share the blame if I all goes horribly wrong.  The other thing with university challenge is that its general knowledge, you can’t swat up for it.  There’s nothing you can do, you can’t swat up for it.  There’s nothing you can do.  You can’t read the Encyclopedia Britannica the night before.  Whereas with the specialist knowledge of mastermind there’s always more work you could have done.  Sitting down in that chair you’re shitting yourself thinking “oh I wished I did more work, read more books on the subject”.  General knowledge: you know it or you don’t.  Specialist knowledge bit is the killer.  I was lucky.  They mostly asked questions I knew the answer to.    

One of your great gifts to readers is, I think, your energy & enthusiasm for life.  A lot of writers can be dour & introspective.

IB: I know. “Life’s so terrible ugh & I’ll tell you exactly how terrible it is” (laughs)

But life can’t be that bad because you wrote a book.

IB: yeah, I know.  I think it’s that old thing, where in a sense, happiness is sort of expected but not always got.  There’s not much to write about when things go well.  Tragedy is where the real meat of storytelling is, there’s comedy as well, but we definitely think the highest art is tragedy rather than comedy.  I suppose think of a story of a bank robbery where everything went smoothly, they didn’t have to kill anyone and they end up with lots of money, the end.  You’d think “wha….?”  What you want is Reservoir Dogs.  The robbery is irrelevant; its what happens afterwards is where you get the fun of it.  Horrible, murderous fun.  For a narrative you need tension and you mustn’t be able to perfectly anticipate what’s going to happen.  You can’t just write purely about real life.  That’s a diary and it’s rather boring frankly.  But at the same time if it is overly programmatic, defined purely just on ideas will tend to lack that essential spark that sounds or feels or looks like real life.  It’s getting that balance between the chaos that is real life & the orderliness of the intellectual idea.  It’s getting them to work together that is the hard bit.  I don’t have a formula but I think if you’re lucky you’ve just got a vague idea of how to do it & muddle it through each time.

Paul Auster is good at doing that.

IB:  another writer I’ve heard of but not read.

What are you reading at the moment?

IB: I’ve just finished a book by a Scottish novelist Alan Warner called The Stars In the Bright Sky.  A bit like my writing I tend to go from mainstream to science fiction & back & forth like that.  I’ve been reading a book of short stories, The Solaris Book of Short Stories; I’m a couple of stories into that.

Are you working on a next novel?

IB:  Not really.  I’ve just finished one called Surface Detail.  It’s a Culture novel, one of the science fiction Culture series.  There’s some last things to do.  One is looking at the copy editors comments & seeing, and again they are very complex notes and it’s probably going to have “used the same word twice”.

Then you say, “Yes, I meant to do that”

IB:  Sometimes yeah.  More often it’s just correcting a mistake I haven’t correct myself.  So there’s the copy editor bit and then the proofs, when the proofs come in.  The proofs have got to go out to translators & reviews but you still got a chance to change little bits.

Do you ever receive your proofs back & think, “No, no I hate it, I hate it all!”

IB:  now you mention it…no (laughs) very occasionally I’ve had the feeling of that there’s a bit that’s not working.  In Transition there was a whole chapter as a precursor to another chapter, as an introduction to the chapter I’m talking about and it was taken out.  It just wasn’t working.  I really liked it in a lot of ways, and it had a good effect later on in the novel, but it just wasn’t working.  It wasn’t really relevant.  It was out of place.  It had a lot of intrinsic value merits but it wasn’t tied into the rest of the book.  So from that point of view, that sort of scale, yes.  It’s always about the stage for the writer to catch it before it actually gets into the finished edition.  Happily no, I’ve never had it on the strategic scale thinking, “This book is a disaster!”  Actually it did happen on a book size scale.  I wrote a novel called O, just the letter O, and it was my third novel.  I gave it to my editors and I wasn’t sure about it and they said, “No, it’s not good enough.  I can tell you if you want to go to half-a-dozen other publishers then they’ll take it.  We don’t think it’s very good but we hope your next one will be better.”  I thought the book was a mistake so I throw it away and wrote The Bridge instead.  Quite quickly as well because I was running into deadlines.  But then I still think The Bridge is possibly one of my best novels.  So that error, that error of judgment, what may look like a disaster came out something really good.  So yeah that happened.  It didn’t get to the stage of actually getting published thankfully but what was published was much, much better.

It’s interesting you’ve only heard of Paul Auster because there’s a book of his called Oracle Night where the main character’s last name is Orr, just as in The Bridge.

IB:  oh really?

The two books have some parallels.  In Oracle Night the main character at the beginning comes out of hospital still recovering from a major accident or illness and he is compelled to buy a mysterious notebook.  It’s about him re-evaluating his life, layered with different stories, similar to The Bridge.  It’s reads like a ghost story without ghosts and it’s terrifying.

IB:  oh I’ll definitely read that.

I know you’re a political animal so I am going to have to get your opinion on the coalition.

IB: ooo…well…I think better than just having the Tories back in power.  Definitely.  To that extent it is probably the best we could have expected from the result.  I saw at the time having got thirty-seven per cent of the poll and thought the Tories did not have any sort of real landing and there was.  Not in terms of seats but in terms of the dissolution of the vote.  There was a working majority for an elect coalition.  It’s a bit bizarre; the Liberals have leapfrogged over the centrist, right centrist, Labor party to get to the more right-wing Tory party, which is why it will definitely be unstable. 

Not so much having a few bad apples in the barrel as having a completely different kind of fruit.

IB:  I feel a lot of people think it’s a very limited exercise.  Depends if it lasts, you know if it lasts a whole parliament then it’ll have a bunting effect on the Tory magus, basically.  So it’s a good thing.  I think looking at it from a Scottish point of view it’s probably quite a good thing for Scotland.  I think it might be the death of the Lib Dems as an oppositional party in Scotland as an alternative to the Tories I think it’ll probably benefit Scottish Labor.  It’ll be good news for the Scottish nationalist party and I’ve been supporting them recently.  Not because I’m a dyed-in-the-wool nationalist but they’re more or less left.

Is it encouraging that the Green party got one seat?

IB:  it’s a start, but I think the whole green agenda is very much on the back foot after Copenhagen.  I think if you are of a more downcast sort of mind you’d be in despair.  That was our last big opportunity to really turn it around and I think the only way people are finally going to be convinced of what’s really happening is when they are confronted with a genuine rising sea-level.  Something that is impossible to ignore, but at that time it’s too late.  That’s the point.      

Like an oil-slick

IB: yeah.  That will have an effect.

Peter Mattiessen was saying yesterday that the only good that can come from such an event is that it will make people change their way of living.  He also said that students should be angry.  What do you think would be the best way for students to make a change?

IB:  oh god…I don’t know. (Laughs) It’s simply just getting enough people to vote in a progressive fashion.  Vote for progressive left-wing parties rather than the bunch of dingbats that people tend to vote for at the moment.  If Parliament consisted of a genuinely left-wing Labor party with a very large Green opposition, or the other way round, certainly in terms of a British context it would make life much better, more equal and a more ecologically thoughtful country.  If everyone votes like that.  But the idea of changing America, it’s obviously one of the countries to change, just seems like pure fantasy.  And as for China, because England has a proper democracy, it’s a very strange hybrid of ultra consumerism and communism.  It’s fascinating.  It’s kinda like watching someone with two very highly, highly stacked trays of crockery and glassware on either end of the poles negotiating walking over Niagara Falls.  It will all be spectacular if it does it.  If it doesn’t...you know.   I think a lot of this comes down as a result of democracy.  I love how that is something not working in America where they’ll believe any fucking thing they hear on Fox News, for example.  I think far too many people are happy to get the news, to get what’s going on in the world, from right-wing billionaires.  I find it incomprehensible in so many people I know that are happy to take The Times or The Independent, even.  Buy The Guardian, a paper not owned by a right-wing billionaire!  So yeah…cause and effect.  If you accept what right-wing billionaires want you to believe in then of course your going to have a kind of police system that is forever and ever in power and fabulous wealth.  You’re being a mug basically.

Hacked: Part 2

Turns out this album is perfect to work with as I write in my studio.

Part of the reason for this is what characterises the second part to the Hacked Minidics by Radiohead; namely a meandering nature.  For these songs ebb and flow, going out in long ideas and coming back in repetitions, with no discernible end point or goal.

It's what I'm liking about these behind-the-scenes sounds as it shows a band working on music, re-working songs, and just mainly experimenting with what they have.

A lot of the songs on this part are unheard of.  There's some versions of 'Motion Picture Soundtrack' with haunting synths, there's 'Airbag', and 'No Surprises' with slightly different lyrics to what we now know.

The unknown songs generally tend to be little acoustic riffs with no drums or bass guitar, which reminds me that, especially with the recently released 'Anima', Thom is not just an electro-boy, he can do acoustic songs pretty well too.

But then he is something of a poster boy for geekdom, so know your audience, I suppose.

This part is pretty relaxed though some songs do end abruptly (bit like this blog)- also a joy in these unlike studio albums they can be fairly rough and ready with some surprises.

If you have enjoyed this then please think about supporting me on Patreon where I'll be doing what Radiohead does and matching the amount of money I get from you and donating it all to Extinction Rebellion, which you should join so that we may all survive the extreme climate and keep doing wonderful things like this.

Hacked Part 1

Being a long time  Radiohead fan how could I not resist them releasing almost 18 hours worth of 'not for public consumption'  music from the Ok Computer era.   So I bought it and have been listening to it ever since.  This is a blog series of each track, all 18 of them, so buckle in.

The most interesting bit in part one is the first track where two songs used to be one.  Both 'Exit Music (for a film)' from OK Computer and 'Life In a Glass House' from Kid A were at one stage one song.  Though their lyrics were slightly different.  But how fascinating is that?  One song had so many ideas that they had to split it into two and for two very different hours.

Listening to the first track makes me realise how much they work in advance.  One of their new songs is one called 'I Promise' and another called 'Lift', which both have only just been made into music videos in the last year, was written during the OK Computer era.  It must show that they have such a huge back catalogue that they can draw upon it when they need to.

One of things I love about Radiohead is their willingness to experiment within the pop/rock conventions- it just gives them a left field freshness that is unexpected yet appreciated.

There's a version of 'True Love Waits' that is accompanied by an oceanic synthesised keyboard just pulsating between points, which just goes on in a wonderfully trippy way.

Do I wonder if I will get fed up of 'I Promise' since it's played at least three or four times on this track and possibly many more later on.

There's some acoustic songs which I can't identify but just shows Thom playing around with ideas and themes, which I enjoy because I've never heard any of them before.

There'll be bits where Thom talks to the other bandmates and whether or not it's on tape and the like.  I like these bits because it shows them as a working band, trying out material, going back, re-working bits that don't work.  It is much more behind the scenes.

So this is my first blog out of eighteen and like Radiohead I am also going to donate money to Extinction Rebellion by matching whatever my Patreon support is.  If you wish to support me and Extinction Rebellion than come to my Patreon site and donate to me.