ASIM issue 55 Page 19

  GD: When I was young one of the things I loved about the idea of being a novelist was the thought of intense imaginative connection with strangers who would remain just that: strangers. The notional model was the message in a bottle. It seemed a wonderful and romantic thing to be able to get into the heads and hearts of people I would never meet and who would never meet me. Intimacy via relative anonymity.

  The world has of course moved on. Readers Tweet writers and vice versa—and for the generation of novelists coming through now, in their twenties and thirties, this is no more bizarre than downloading a track from iTunes or posting your wedding night photos on Facebook. (By the way, I wasn’t aware that I have a Facebook page. If it exists, I can only tell you it’s not by my hand.) I’m not a Luddite about it. I have no political objection. But two things have thus far stopped me joining the conversation. The first is that I spend most of my working day looking for reasons not to start work—or rather, looking for things that will create the illusion that I’ve started work, when in fact what I’m doing is dicking around putting it off. I do considerable damage as it is, reading reviews, researching things I’m never going to use, writing redundant emails and checking my inbox every twenty seconds. And that’s just the stuff that can masquerade as work. That’s before we consider the stuff that can’t: smoking, coffee, porn, staring out of the window, lecturing the cat. Add social networking and I doubt I’d ever finish another novel. Or start one. Secondly, novelists worth their salt are always better in their novels than they are elsewhere. (Including interviews.) I can’t think of a single novelist I’ve admired who hasn’t been slightly disappointing off the page proper.

  All that said, times are hard, and my publishers do keep telling me I’m forfeiting sales by continuing in cyber-silence. So I’m considering an experiment: embrace social networking for a year—say, just around publication of the next novel—and see if it makes a commercial difference. If it does, watch me Tweet myself hoarse.

  JE: Given the gritty, uncensored nature of your take on genre fiction— confronting , to offload a buzzword—and the adult subjects broached within your literary novels, some would-be readers may be surprised to learn that your work contains plenty of humour. In addition to the comic timing and wit of the prose itself, you seem to delight in the absurdity of having your characters exposed to stark, unsanitised reality while retaining ironic awareness of the Hollywood overlay that distorts readers’ expectations. Is this the natural outcome, do you think, of your having come to the genre from the outside? Or was it something you consciously injected so as to offset the grimness that otherwise pervades?

  GD: My take on everything is gritty and uncensored. What’s the credible alternative? As far as humour goes, it’s an aspect of the books when the fictional situation entails or generates it. Three of the nine novels aren’t in any way funny: Love Remains; Death of an Ordinary Man and A Day and a Night and a Day. Their subjects are, respectively: rape; suicide and child murder; extraordinary rendition and torture. Funny to a sadist or sociopath, perhaps, but not to me. On the other hand, a perennial fascination is the inappropriateness of consciousness. That is, the extent to which consciousness departs from the prescribed (Hollywood-bolstered) script, moments when, in spite of knowing what it is you’re supposed to be feeling or thinking you find yourself feeling or thinking something entirely different. Talulla refers to this as ‘the dark hilarity’—but it’s not always a sense of the comedic or absurd. Sometimes it’s ambivalence or indifference or distraction by trivia. In any case, I regard the humour in my books as organic rather than consciously injected; it arises from the situations or from the psychology of the characters. To the extent that, for example, The Last Werewolf is a comic novel, it’s because the protagonist’s predicament struck me as funny: a person who is more than ready to die, suddenly surrounded by forces bent on keeping him alive. (Plus, pragmatically, I’m with Byron on the relationship between our capacity for laughter and our ability to survive loss: ‘And if I laugh at any mortal thing, ’tis that I may not weep.’)

  JE: You’ve said of The Last Werewolf that your crossover from literary to genre fiction was motivated at first by pecuniary self-interest, but that the speculative element at the story’s heart then provided an unexpectedly opportune means by which further to cultivate the Duncan perennials of love, sex, death, cruelty and compassion. Given the ‘never the twain’ relationship that in recent history has existed (or been perceived to exist) between genre fiction and literature, did you have any misgivings about bringing the two together? How well was The Last Werewolf received, both by readers of your previous novels and by those people who only discovered your work through dint of this foray into genre? Sufficiently positive, it seems, to see the experiment continue.

  GD: No misgivings whatsoever—especially since the distinction isn’t clear, if it exists at all. (Is Margaret Atwood ‘genre’? J G Ballard? Ray Bradbury? And if they are, does that preclude them being ‘literary’?) There’s more than one way to skin the thematic cat, and sometimes you skin it with a 200-year-old bibliophile billionaire werewolf scotch connoisseur with guaranteed immunity to lung cancer and STDs.

  It’s true the plan was to write a straight commercial page turner, unencumbered by existential angst or abstract ideas, but once I started with Jake (who is just me, as a werewolf, or the sort of werewolf I imagine I’d be) it was obvious it wasn’t going to turn out quite that way. What I’ve learned is that whatever it is I think I’m writing about, what I end up writing about is love, sex, death, memory, betrayal, forgiveness, cruelty, compassion and the laughable desire for meaning in a universe that pistol-whips us with its absurdity on a daily basis.

  How has the book been received? Given the amount of ‘reception’ now available via the internet, finding out and establishing a consensus would be a full-time Sisyphean job. But as far as I can tell the books have been gratifyingly divisive: sensible people love them, po-faced morons and prudes hate them. And though some readers of the earlier work were initially surprised by a novel ostensibly ‘about a werewolf’ the first couple of chapters have been enough to establish that it is in fact business as usual.

  JE: Publishers of speculative fiction traditionally have upheld a proud (if often misguided) policy of stretching any good idea into a trilogy—and often further; yet seemingly in opposition to this convention lies the renowned Duncan trait of unpredictability, and your tendency to move on to entirely new projects. Having stewed from the werewolf scenario the hot juices of the human condition, were you reluctant at all to return there with Talulla Rising ? Or were there aspects that offered you something new as a writer? The imperative, perhaps, to dissect life from inside the mind of a bona fide female protagonist?

  GD: I’d signed a contract for a trilogy, so a trilogy was always what it was going to be. These books are worthwhile as long as they refresh the human mysteries (or stew the hot juices of the human condition, as you have it) which has been the grandiose, doomed, necessary goal of everything I’ve written. Talulla was a challenge, not least because there was a wretched temptation to re-do Jake (in a dress)—which I hope I’ve resisted. There was only one reliable way into my girl’s story—for me the only way into any story: put yourself in the character’s shoes and try very hard to imagine what that might be like. Once I did that (one has to remind one’s idiot self every time that this is how the book gets written) new vistas opened up. Heidi Julavits’s recent review in the New York Times Book Review calls the novel ‘feminist’, which is very provocative, and will have ruffled a few feathers, I’m sure. I didn’t set out to write a feminist novel. I didn’t have an axe to grind about pregnancy, female sexuality, the body and ambivalent motherhood. But I knew that given the protagonist’s gender and condition my thoughts about these things would find their way in. Plus, although I’d written from a woman’s point of view in the past (see Love Remains) I’d never done a novel in which a single female voice carried the entire narrative load. So yes, that was p
art of the appeal.

  JE: The cover grab for Talulla Rising has the Times touting you as ‘The cleverest literary horror merchant since Bram Stoker.’ This appears fitting in that it harks back to the literary origins of genre fiction, when any fantastical element was the means to an articulatory end rather than the be-all and end-all it so frequently became; yet, the comparison also seems apt with regard to the feeling of place that pervades your two genre novels—the dark Londonness, if you will, that effortlessly calls to mind at once the hauteur of a social elite and the bloody eviscerations of a Jack the Ripper. How much does the city exert its influence over your work? One can almost picture you handwriting your chapters at an antiquated mahogany desk, a pallid lamp casting its glow on the pages as you gaze pensively at the lonely city without.

  GD: Believe it or not I used to handwrite, in pencil, even after I became the gurning and hamfisted owner of a computer. Those days are gone, not least because (à la Winston Smith) my handwriting is now so dismally deformed as to be illegible even to me. However. The city. You’re right to make the gothic connection. From the start I knew The Last Werewolf’s opening scene would be set in the antiquarian library of an old London house, with firelight, calf-bound volumes, single malt and a window looking out on hurrying snow. Partly because the novel is very much about books and reading, but chiefly because I wanted to honour genre trappings and traditions while looking at them through a jaded self-conscious lens—established in counterpoint the moment the characters open their mouths. London has been a profound influence on many of my books, along with New York. What both cities have in common is a generous personality greater than the sum of their parts. They’ve seen it all, but their appetite for humanity’s tragedy and farce remains unblunted. Which is true of Literature, of course. And would be of God, if only He were there.

  JE: By Blood We Live is due for release in 2013, bringing to a close (presumably?) your werewolf trilogy, the three books of which have found their release in quicker succession than your down-the-line literary novels. What whispered allure calls next to Glen Duncan? Would you consider taking the voyeurism of Death of an Ordinary Man and visiting your poetic and carnal appetites upon the formerly hackneyed SF trope of telepathy? Or will it be something altogether different?

  GD: I have absolutely no clue. I like the idea of doing a crime novel, a murder story set in a dystopian near-future—but honestly, the next book could just as easily turn out to be about a retired Brazilian sky-diver.

  JE: The Last Werewolf and Talulla Rising are out now. The Glen Duncan back catalogue— Hope ; Love Remains ; I, Lucifer ; Weathercock ; Death of an Ordinary Man ; The Bloodstone Papers ; A Day and a Night and a Day —is easily accessible to those with a penchant for clicking the mouse. There is no website; no senseless twittering; nowhere to become blogged down. Just the books. Glen, thank you for stoking the fires old-school.

  GD: You’re very welcome. Safe travels.

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  Eternal Flame

  …Stephen Gallagher

  He said, “Did you ever wish for something, and then be sorry when you got it?”

  “Who hasn’t?” I said. “I had this Aunt who couldn’t wait to have all her teeth taken out …”

  “Yeah, all right,” he said, and we settled into silence for a while. I sneaked a glance at him, his face reflecting light from the fire. He hadn’t taken to my attempt at a joke. We’d been friends for years, but I’d been working away. When I left, he was living in a nice house with a half-nice garden and a small shed where he could hide from his wife and tinker around. He still had the house, but his wife had moved out. The garden was a blasted wasteland of cinders and ash. Where the shed had once stood, a blade of flame roared fifteen feet or more into the night sky. It was white at the core and made a sound like a beast that nothing could satisfy.

  He said, “There was something in that fog. I should’ve known it. It just didn’t feel right.”

  I said, “Fog?”

  “Bank of fog. Across the river. You know that bridge in the dip on the way back from Richard’s house?”

  I knew the place he meant. I could see that he was getting ready to tell me more. This was a November night, but the burning spear of light in the yard made it warm enough to sit out. The paint on the back of the house was blistered from times when the wind had turned and driven too much of the heat this way.

  He and the aforementioned Richard had once been partners, importing machine parts and widgets for the various small businesses in the valley. Richard had bought a remote farmhouse, out beyond a picture-postcard village with a church and a stream. I’d been there a couple of times. There was a low point on the way where the country road made a sharp bend over a stone bridge, deep in woodland. Late at night, with the high valley sides blanking out even the stars, it could feel like the darkest spot on Earth.

  He said, “It was the night we broke up the business.”

  “That was years ago.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s been that long a story. We signed the papers and had one last drink and then I set off. I was alone in the car and I was feeling a little bit low. More than a little bit, if you want to know the truth. On my way down the hill I looked at the fuel gauge, and that was like the last straw. I realised that with all the stress of the past few days I’d forgotten to fill up the tank and I’d be lucky to make it all the way home.

  “And because I didn’t know what the future held I started thinking, wouldn’t it be great if we never had to worry about money. If by some magic the tank was always full and there was always cash in your wallet and food in the freezer whenever you went to it. Then I had to slow right down because the fog had come on so thick that I couldn’t see more than a dozen yards. It forms in the hollow and hangs there over the stream. It’s spooky enough that you can see where all that local talk of fairy folk and witches comes from.

  “I was out of it a few seconds later and I thought nothing of it. I just about made it home on fumes, and forgot the whole thing until a few weeks later when I was trying to work out what had happened.”

  He stopped, and looked at me. It was the look of someone already resigned to a losing battle.

  He said, “You’re not going to believe this.”

  “Try me,” I said.

  “You remember my old Mondeo?”

  “Do I? You ran it until pieces began to fall off.”

  “But I never told you why. It was the car I was driving that night. I didn’t put two and two together right away, but after a couple of weeks my wife noticed that it didn’t seem to be using any petrol.

  “At first I thought the gauge must be broken. But it wasn’t.

  “After almost a month I began to wonder if someone could be topping up the tank when I wasn’t around, just to mess with my head. But why would anyone do that? And the cap was always locked. All I knew was that no matter how much I drove around, the needle stayed where it was.

  “When I had to drive to London and back, the needle never moved and after four hundred miles
, the tank was still full. Now I was actually starting to get scared. I talked to the people at my local garage and they thought it was a joke. When I tried to make them believe that I was serious, it became a joke that had stopped being funny.

  “I took to carrying a long wooden stick in the back of the car, one that I could slide into the tank and check the level, just to reassure myself that I wasn’t on the point of running out. After a while I stopped bothering. Whatever I did, however far I went, whether I drove cautiously or burned up the miles, it made no difference. My tank was always full.

  “Now, you know me. I don’t believe in miracles or horoscopes or fairies. But I started to become obsessed with the notion that something extraordinary must have happened in the fog. Not your traditional three wishes, but … something. Something that took one thought and made it real. I tried going back down the same road, looking for another fogbank in the same place. Tried it many times over the years but it didn’t happen.

  “I drove everywhere. Never took another train. Bought a generator for the house and siphoned off the gas to make my own electricity. Never walked if I could take the car. Why would I?”

  “A bottomless petrol tank,” I said. “That’s so cool.” And we both stared into the flame for a while.

  He said, “It’s why she left me. All I did was tell her the truth. She thought I was taking the piss. When I backed off and tried to pretend nothing out of the ordinary was happening, apparently that was just a more subtle form of mental cruelty. According to the papers I got served with.

  “And there was a problem. The car was already old when all this started. After a couple more hundred thousand miles it was falling apart. Whatever I was saving on fuel, I was spending just to keep the stupid thing running. Clutches, pistons, serious money. When bodywork started to go, I had to make some kind of a plan. I was damned if I was going to start paying out petrol money again. But soon I’d be reaching the point where the law wouldn’t let me keep the car on the road.