For years I tried to write fiction, and failed. Not that what I wrote was awful. It wasn’t bad, some of it, but I never took anything further than a handful of pages. I used to put it down to lack of discipline, or lack of ambition, or plain old fear of failure. And while those may all have been true, my suspicion now is that something even more significant was stopping me. I just didn’t have anything to write about.
“Write what you know” is the advice usually given to would-be authors who are struggling to find their voice. Philip Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman has the same thought in a slightly different form in his novel The Anatomy Lesson: “if Zuckerman wrote about what he didn’t know, then who would write about what he did know?” A very good question. But one thing I learned, as I struggled towards taking my own literary ambitions seriously: you don’t get to choose what you find compelling as a subject. Whatever might be said about my eventual first novel, The Countenance Divine, no one can accuse a story featuring two great English poets, one famous murderer and a possible global apocalypse of narrating a thinly-disguised version of the author’s life so far. In fact, I never intended any of me to be in there at all. Even the very first idea for the book came from a purely ludic proposition, just a bit of fun.
The initial impulse was an exercise suggested by the tutor of a creative writing workshop a decade ago: to identify a significant moment in history, recent or distant, which had not yet been exploited as a scenario for fiction. I still don’t know why, but what came to mind was the anxiety and confusion which surrounded the Year Two Thousand Problem at the end of the twentieth century, the so-called Millennium Bug which threatened to bring our civilisation crashing to a halt exactly at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999.
Almost immediately my mind’s eye played with the digits, and I saw the figures could be inverted, to read 1666. At first, I didn’t look for any more connection between the two years. The pure visual rhyme was all that grabbed me. But I knew that 1666 was the year of the Great Fire of London, and when I looked again, I noticed the spooky presence there of the apocalyptic number 666. I wondered if that coincidence might have appeared equally significant at the time, if such a huge conflagration could have seemed like an end-of-the-world event to some, as I remembered the Millennium Bug had to so many.
Then, something obsessive-compulsive in me demanded I complete the sequence of years: 1666, 1777, 1888, 1999. Immediately, the nonsense symmetry of this pure pattern-as-meaning appealed to my perverser instincts. Here, I decided, was a novel. I thought of books I loved by Iain Sinclair, and David Mitchell, and I wondered if I could find a narrative form which linked the London of the present to the London of the past through four stories, illuminating different ideas of what the apocalypse might mean at these four different moments in its history. I imagined a satisfying puzzle, a certain sort of fun for a certain sort of reader, but I had nothing serious or profound I wanted to say. It was a whimsical notion taken to its conclusion, perhaps ad absurdum. It was only a game.
The idea wouldn’t leave me alone. It nagged away at the edges of my attention when I tried to write anything else. I still had absolutely no idea what stories the middle two years might offer, and no hint at all of John Milton or William Blake or Jack the Ripper, the real-life figures I would later make central to my four parallel stories. The rhythm of that neat historical structure was enough. I was sold. I was in love. I had to get it out of my system.
But while the chronological backbone of the novel was intended to be, and remained, a playful gesture, everything after that was the hard labour of finding a human story in this essentially meaningless progression, building a plot and characters and an internal logic to justify that delicious first instinct. So I set myself to look for human life and depth and mess within the bounds of this fixed, arbitrary frame. The challenge was clear: to find chaos in the order. And being a writer who works largely by instinct, the ludic frame inevitably got filled by the stuff that was already filling up my head.
And of course, the stuff of my own life finds its way in too: personal experience, family history, my own secret fears or fantasies. At first it happens unconsciously, and then once I recognise which area of my life has suggested material for character or dialogue or incident, I might begin to exploit it consciously. An unusually clear example came early in the first draft of the 1666 section. I found myself writing a confrontation about religious belief in a time of persecution between Thomas Allgood, my fictional narrator, and his devout Catholic father, entirely unaware I was dramatising a very similar conversation I once had with my own father, in the equivalent context of a Catholic family in late-twentieth century Northern Ireland. Once I realised, I reflected on what I could usefully draw from this memory, and from my wider experience of that situation, to add emotional detail to the scenario, and to hint at the irony that what is half-forgotten history to the English is still everyday politics in another part of the United Kingdom, whose intractable conflict they so often claim they are unable to comprehend.
But this isn’t a historical novel in the true sense of the world. Too much of what is taken from the record has been bent out of shape to fit my purposes, or made to work in service of an extravagant counterfactual fantasia. For me, writing is always a playful activity first, in spirit and intention. As I go, I stock up the story with the recognisable stuff of real life, much of it indeed drawn from my own experience, and with luck, those who like their fiction authentic and improving will find enough to satisfy their taste, and no one will ever see the joins.
As a reader, much of what I enjoy is extremely worthy and improving; most of my favourite fiction from the last few years is profoundly serious in purpose and tone. But as a writer, I find little joy in trying to wring entertainment out of an attempt to chide or educate or confess. I prefer to shake some truth or depth out of an act of imagination for its own sake, a sincere attempt to scare or confound or delight my reader. And so if I fail to find any meaning, at least it might still be fun.
[ The Countenance Divine is published by John MurrayOpens in new window ]
