Julian Gough's literary novel Jude will be published in three 'levels' - it's an attempt to reinvent the form, he tells Belinda McKeon.
One moment, Julian Gough was sitting in the Bafta building in London with the other four finalists in the National Short Story Prize. The next thing, he was submerged in the deep end of a swimming pool. At least, it felt that way. "My hearing went," he remembers, still looking as flabbergasted as he must have been that morning in April. "When I heard them announce the winning story by reading its first line, halfway through I realised, hang on, that's my line! And everything went wooomph; my hearing went, my eyesight dimmed, everything greyed out on me. There was such a rush of blood, everything sounded like I'd gone underwater for a couple of seconds. It was extraordinary."
For his story, The Orphan and the Mob, Gough had just won the first prize of £15,000 (€22,100), which is the largest prize for a single short story in the world; it was founded last year by Prospect magazine and BBC Radio 4 to breathe life into the British short story. For a writer fresh out of a seven-year stretch working on a novel, a dedicated, no-other-work stretch that had seen him lose his agent, his publisher, most of his money and his home - Gough moved to Berlin (via an "illegally built" cottage in the French countryside) after falling short once too often on the rent for his house in Salthill - the prize money came, to put it mildly, as a welcome boon.
But equally welcome was the validation that the prize - judged by writers including Monica Ali and AS Byatt - represented for Gough's story, a narrative spree tumbling through comedy, farce and satire, which seemed to pulp underfoot the conventions of the traditional story form, a frantically-pitched tumult described by Gough himself as a Tipperary version of the Luke Skywalker story.
Picture Luke, if you will, as an orphan in the care of the Christian Brothers, with a dog called Agamemnon at his heels, a rabble of angry Fianna Fáilers on his trail, and a charred letter containing a clue to the secret of his birth on his mind. From there, the whole Star Wars trilogy should just fall into place, with its climactic scene somewhere around the Rock of Cashel. Shouldn't it? And sure enough, Gough's story does open on to the complex corridors of a trilogy; the escape of his young hero, Jude, from the blazing hay sheds of the orphanage is just the beginning of his journey. The Orphan and the Mob was actually written as a way of stepping outside that seven-year writing stretch to get a clearer view of the origins and the impetus of the novel's hero, who happened to be Jude.
Winning, for this by-product, the biggest short story prize in the world, was clearly a happy side-effect. But the novel, Jude, goes on.
And true to his fondness for doing things differently, Gough is presenting it to its readers in a slightly unconventional way. As though it were a computer game, Jude has three levels, and each level will be published separately. Level 1 has just appeared in book form from Gough's new publishers, Old Street; a publishing house, he says, run by editors rather than accountants. Level 2, meanwhile, is appearing in weekly instalments - "we're doing a Dickens on it" - on his website (www.juliangough.com), with a new episode coming online every Thursday, and Level 3 will follow in the same way, with a hardback edition combining all three levels due next year from Old Street.
Gough is hands-on about HTML; online publishing is something in which he takes clear delight. He maintains his own website, keeping a journal, a forum, a "photoblog" and a MySpace page going full steam alongside the instalments of the novel (which are being read widely, and passed around by their readers - a recent excerpt that riffed on the UN mission in Somalia found its way to the offices of the UNHCR, where it was read with interest and, apparently, enjoyment), and he comments frequently and at length on other literary blogs. It's a sensibility Gough puts down to his background in the indie music scene; he was the lyricist and eccentric frontman of the Galway band Toasted Heretic, who had a cult following in the 1980s and 1990s, and whose oeuvre (including a brilliantly brattish performance by Gough on children's programme The Den) is well represented on YouTube.
"It wasn't about the money, it was about having people listen to your songs," he says of the Heretic days. "And you often gave away a lot of your stuff. And I think that, not to get slushy, but it's really good karma to give stuff away. We live in a cultural universe where so much stuff is owned and controlled by corporations rather than human beings. And they don't want to give you any of it, unless you pay up front. Which is fine in some ways; a lot of what the culture gives in terms of books and films and that is just industrial product, so charge for it like that, fine. But some of it was created out of noble human impulses, in an attempt to communicate with human beings, and to over-control the distribution of it is, I think, not nice."
AS TO THE question of whether Jude was created out of "noble human impulses", Gough has little time for shows of false modesty. Why be modest when you're attempting to do nothing less than reinvent the literary novel? Which is precisely what Gough, with Jude, is attempting to do - and he's not going to make any apologies for it.
It's not a question of arrogance, or of blind fantasy, or of self-adoration; but neither is it a case of idiotic earnestness. If Gough is a little high on the euphoria of having come to the end of his seven-year literary itch, it's because he believes he has come very close to scratching that itch; he speaks carefully and eloquently about what he thinks the contemporary novel needs to be and to do - his long, wide-ranging, subversive essay on comedy and the novel, in the May issue of Prospect magazine, shows how deeply and how seriously he has thought this through. "The task of the novelist," he writes, "is . . . not to fake a coherence that does not exist, but to capture the chaos that does. And in so doing, perhaps we shall discover that chaos and permanence are not, in fact, opposed. The novel, self-renewing, self-destroying . . . is the art of permanent chaos."
And if the Star Wars analogy summed up the prologue, then the idea of permanent chaos goes a long way to explaining what's happening in Jude: Level 1. The sense of bewildering, hell-for-leather, tongue-in-cheek, cross- referential ruckus does not let up after the opening pages, but grows steadily more surreal as Jude hurtles through Ireland on his quest to discover his past (and to consummate his love for a Supermac employee), colliding with drunks and developers, and with Charles J Haughey himself, as he goes. Subsequent levels will be set in England and in the US, says Gough, and will seek to darken and complicate the more ingenuous comedy of the first level. "In Level 1, I burn my house and you laugh," he explains. "In Level 2, I burn someone else's house and you don't laugh quite as much. In Level 3, it's your house."
So what is this revolution of which Gough speaks? What, in concrete terms, is he attempting to do with Jude, other than to make his readers first laugh and then shudder? "As I was writing it, in its weird little way, it relived the history of the novel," he says, with the sudden, alarmed laugh that punctuates most of his pronouncements on his own craft. "And Level 1 is a reworking of a very old-fashioned kind of novel. Or rather, of a very old way of writing a novel, which I find very fresh. Which is the way Voltaire wrote Candide. Or the way Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels. Where you basically take an innocent gom and you fly him around the place like a ball in a pinball machine, and you have him bounce violently off everything that you're interested in in the modern world. And he tells a tale without understanding it. He doesn't necessarily grow or learn anything from it, or get profound insights into life. But the reader might . . . "
Gough has an "outsider perspective built in" - he was born in London, and moved to Tipperary with his Irish parents at the age of seven. He speaks with an accent that morphs the two childhoods; sharp corners dissolving into soft vowels, cut glass caving to colloquialism. As a child he hung around the farms of neighbours and read books that made him beg his mother never to allow him to read again, such was their emotional impact - Black Beauty was his first read, and it thrilled and horrified him in equal measure. By the time the family had caught up on everyone else in the county and bought a television, he says, it was too late. "I'd learned to read, and I was more interested in that. Not having a pipeline of stories pouring in all the time, you start to explore your own resources," he says.
"It's one of the reasons books still work so well. Because the actual software and hardware that creates the images and sounds is in your own brain, and you can't get a better audio-visual set up than the human brain for imagining a world. Because we're designed to do it. So it doesn't age. The brain, as a format, doesn't get superseded by Betamax or VHS. And it won't be superseded by Blu-ray either." Blogging is another question, but for Gough, it's clearly a force for good.
FOR ALL THE relentlessly modern aspects of Gough's journey with Jude - the internet presence, the stridently contemporary nature of the Ireland he writes about, the brand new quest to come up with a brand new take on the novel - there's a deep sea in it, too, of the ancient, of the timeless. Very little about the book made sense to him as it was emerging in its earliest incarnations - in fragments, in odds and ends, in 300-word soap opera segments for the front of a Galway freesheet - and it was only a chance encounter in Charlie Byrne's Bookshop in Galway that, quite literally, showed him the way. The story, as Gough tells it, comes with suitably mythical portents; a dusty stack of books, a gust of wind, a child standing in a shaft of sunlight, and then, the book he had been meaning to read for years but could never find, Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces, his 1949 exploration of the existence of the archetypal hero. "The idea that all the world's myths are telling the one story, about an orphan or young man who doesn't know the truth about his origins, who is forced out of his life by some catastrophe, who must hunt for the grail, finally explained to me what I had been trying to do for years," Gough says. "I feel a bit retarded not having noticed it for myself."
But then, the hero must set out as the "innocent gom" if he's to learn anything. And this is a truth Gough knows only too well.
"It was method mythology," he says, with another manic laugh. "You're sometimes not grown up enough to finish your own book. If I'd tried to write this from beginning to end in a year I'd have written a facile . . . a much worse book. It needed to take seven years because I needed to grow up enough to be capable of finishing it."
And gaining a few things along the way - a new home (in Berlin, where he can "actually afford rent"), a new publisher, a huge whack of prize money and a baby daughter among them - hasn't hurt, either. Not at all.
[ www.juliangough.comOpens in new window ]
Jude: Level 1is published by Old Street Publishers, £7.99