Under the Bugle-beaded Bonnet
A few months ago, in the piece I did for the Independent's My Book of a Lifetime slot, I found myself saying, "Both my first novel, The Mathematics of Love, and now A Secret Alchemy, are about love, war, and the life of the spirit. At the most fundamental level, I sometimes think, what else is there to write about?" The rhetorical question was designed to get readers disagreeing, and of course it's only partly true of my own work, let alone anyone else's. There are a million other things to write about, from being conceived, to hunting a great white whale, to chasing a nose which grows legs and joins the Russian civil service.
But both the WIP, working title Kindred and Affinity, and the little squeaks of a new story, maybe novel-sized, which I can hear in the gaps, are probably also encompassed in that definition (prescription?) of 'love, war and the life of the spirit'. This evening - maybe it's the Autumn blues - I'm wondering if it's a bad thing to stick with these same basic preoccupations; or is it simply a bad thing that I've become aware that I do? After all, a novel by definition is novel: something new. And I'm also aware that the first two preoccupations, at least, are in some ways the easy option, the safe bet for writers who can't be bothered or aren't able to try harder and write fresher, and whose fiction is therefore dull, formulaic or actively meretricious: cheap in the aesthetic rather than the financial or literary sense. Am I doing the same? Goodness knows I don't sit and think 'war sells' or 'love makes readers cry', any more than I sat down and decided that The Mathematics of Love was going to be a cross between Possession and Birdsong (not least because I hadn't read either). But here are my characters - people, times and places - and the more specific themes I want to explore - say voyeurism, surrogate fathers, enclosed societies. I start to think about how and where to build those lives so as to give the themes a chance to grow and set shoots, to dramatise them in different shapes and times. And the answer to how and where so often seems to be love and war, under the eye of a God or some transcendant and immanent force which my characters - some of them, sometimes - seem to believe in.
And yet when I look at the work of any writer I admire, I see that they, too, return time and time again to the same fundamental meditations, even if each time what the novel dramatises is individual lives: contingent, particular and, yes, new. Granted, as a human being you can't entirely escape your particular preoccupations and tastes, but to turn the question on its head why, if you're driven to examine fundamental things, keep dressing them in new clothes?
I think the newness of a novel is not accidental, nor is it superficial, but equally the oldness is neither laziness nor tedium. Perhaps it's because only it's only new things which we look at properly, being lured by their novelty into examining each bugle-beaded bonnet or pagan tattoo hard enough to see the shapes beneath: the old, fundamental things which underlie them. In other words, perhaps the oldness only works if the newness does too. A small child asks for the same story over and over again not because they've forgotten what happens - heaven help you if you change a word - but because they want to re-live the fear of the wild things, and then the comfort of getting home: it's the new (re-)speaking of the words which conjures up the oldest feelings in the world.
For my own work, I don't know. Because what I most notice in excellent writing is the things I couldn't do myself, and someone else's ideas which I must work to apprehend, I associate excellent writing with ideas and things I don't do. In which case my writing - which by definition is ideas and things which I do do - is not excellent. But maybe I'm just having a wobble about how crude the basics - for which read oldnesses - of one's writing can look, because any broad generalisation, whether it's a blurb or an elevator pitch or a snide, dismissive review, can seem a reductio ad absurdum of the complex of ideas and feelings which is a novel. The whole novel, on the other hand, not reduced thus, gives those ideas and feelings human form, so that they can dwell among us humans, and we in them.
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7 Comments
I'm a big fan of some of John Irving; some of his books are startlingly inventive, others are Yawnsville, Arizona - no half measures - yet in the good ones, the same themes appear - boys growing up with absent mysterious father, odd-but-strong mother, unconventional childhood, wrestling, Vienna, awful calamity striking out of nowhere. In his last book, I felt he'd drawn all his themes together and I laboured through it, hoping it would get better. It didn't. I felt it was a book that he needed to write more than I needed to read. It was as though he was resolving all the conflicts he'd had, all in one go and if he ever writes another one, I'd be curious to see it - he doesn't need to do those same themes any more. What's left for him?
I've certainly learned things about myself through the things I've chosen to write about - I just didn't know they were issues for me until I'd read what I'd written.
And perhaps what's true of painting could be equally true of writing. There is so much to write about, but what's wrong with only writing about what interests you? After all, if it doesn't interest you, it's not going to interest the reader.
The tricky part for me is differentiating between when I'm being lazy - i.e. being overly reliant on familiar themes, subject matter characters etc - and when I'm genuinely trying to do something original with old subject matter.
I usually find the book which consciously wears its agenda on its sleeve, which is overly didactic, and which uses cardboard characters to make its point, unreadable. Nobody likes to be lectured!
Dickens, for instance, who so often wrote about the confusion over a child's parentage or a child being 'adopted' by a benefactor; or Evelyn Waugh, one of whose themes was the betrayal of love; or EM Forster with 'only connect'. I would imagine that whenever they wrote a new book they felt a sense of excitement at being able to explore the theme from a new angle. And maybe that is the key - when writing again on a particular theme, does the writer feel as though he/she is saying something new or repeating what has gone before? In my own experience (although when writing non-fiction) I always know when I'm going over old ground because I become bored with what I'm writing and I know it's stale and flat because it contains no new thoughts. And I would imagine, as Emma says, that such writing is equally unsatisfying for the reader.
But anyway.
Can you not call these things your fundamentals? are they not the raw essence you need to built your story on? Painters need brushes do they not? Gardeners need soil to sow their seeds. Why can't you need the 'love, war and life of a sprit' just because the basis is the same dosnt mean the story and final outcome is. Does it? I am yet sadly to read one of your novel (I will when I can get to a bookshop). BUt from what I know of you I wouldn't have thought that deep down because the essence is based around a (successful) fundamental, that it would effect your writing in other than postive way. You know 'love, war and the life of a sprit' with the deepest knowledge otherwise you wouldn't have been able to produce these books.
To know a subject inside and out, does that not give you the best standing to create a story around? To develop and manipulate the way you want it to?
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