Interviews

Charlie Hill speaks with Ann Morgan about becoming a better writer book by book, the value or otherwise of creative writing degrees, and knowing when to complicate the battle and when to eschew nuance.

Writing the Funny Pages - Dan Coxon talks to Charlie Hill, author of Books – a satire set within the world of bookselling and international bestsellers – about the state of the industry and his decision to write a satirical novel.

What made you decide to write a satirical novel? Where did the initial impetus come from?

A few years ago, I was working at Waterstones and reviewing books for the papers. Far too many of the books I reviewed were variations on the same formula: uninteresting bloke muses about dull relationships with two-dimensional women. Judging by the covers on them, this sort of rubbish also made up most of the novels we piled up at the front of the shop. I wondered why publishers were putting so many resources into promoting this particular literary idiom above all others, and what would happen if the ‘Cult’ sections of High Street bookshops were enormous and the ‘Mainstream Fiction’ bits tiny. I also thought that if I couldn’t write better books than the ones I was being asked to read, I’d stand stuffing.

As with much comedy, Books has an underlying current of anger in it. It even has a character called Anger! What angers you most about the publishing industry today?

I don’t know if I’m angry with the publishing industry. Frustrated is probably a better description. I am, however, interested in publishing’s place in the culture. Is its timidity a symptom of our present, colorfully vile malaise? Or in some way a cause?

Both Richard Anger and Gary Sayles feel very true to life… was either based upon a particular writer?

Richard Anger has one or two bits of me in him. Gary Sayles is a fictitious character. Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

In reading Books I thought I detected a debt to Kingsley Amis, and possibly, in its wilder moments, to Will Self. To what extent were you aware of writing within the cultural history of British satire?

That’s an interesting question. I’m not sure I was aware of it, really. I’ve never read any Kingsley Amis and don’t get on with Will Self’s fiction (although I love his non-fiction.) The only Martin Amis I’ve read is Night Train and The Moronic Inferno. I tried to read Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, but didn’t get very far. I haven’t read Cold Comfort Farm. I have read Come to the Edge by Joanna Kavenna and as a kid I absolutely loved Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure by Tom Sharpe, but I doubt his influence on my writing is strong enough to place me in the tradition.

In any case, I’m wary of being lumped in with other writers. I don’t think it means much and can be unhelpful. I’m a writer who comes from Birmingham. There are others. Talking about us on Facebook the other day, someone coined the term ‘Brumlit’. It’s lovely that there are other writers from Birmingham. But I rather wish they hadn’t…

Anger has a love of both alcoholic excess and avant-garde literature. Which writers excite you? And what’s your favourite tipple?

I’m fascinated by the relationship between booze and writing. I can’t write after having a drink but I do revise. I like what Guy Debord said about it: “I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk much more than most people who drink.” I’ll drink anything, but I prefer red wine, Guinness or malt whisky.

My reading preferences are less fixed. At the moment I’m excited by Marilynne Robinson, JG Ballard, Richard Brautigan, Ali Smith, Katherine Mansfield, Alison Moore, Ann Quin, Jim Crace and George Pelecanos. I’m hoping to be excited by Junot Diaz and John Williams.

Do you have a specific place you like to write, or a regular routine? What does your writing space look like?

I don’t have a routine. Which might explain why it once took me a year to write and place a 500 word story. If I’m struggling with the structure or tone of my writing, I go out for a walk. Sitting on trains or buses helps too. It’s almost as if being out in the world gives me a clearer sense of what my work is or needs to be. Where it fits, if you like.

I can’t write sentences though – at least not good ones – unless I’m at my desk. Which is always covered in empty wine bottles and whisky glasses.

You’ve been writing for many years and The State of Us, a short story collection, is your fifth (sixth?) book. You have previously published novels and a memoir. What is it about writing that appeals so much and when did you start telling stories?

I don’t know when I started writing, but I do remember a story I read out at junior school. It was about a tiger hunt, and used lots of exclamation marks. The story went down well with my classmates — even now I feel the exclamation mark is an underrated piece of punctuation — and I’ve written ever since. Not always fiction though; for about ten years, I thought that nothing was as fun or illuminating or confounding as real life, so I stopped bothering with ‘stories’ (the relationship between the two had yet to fully reveal itself…). I’m not sure that writing has ever actually appealed, though. I think it’s closer to a compulsion than a choice or vocation.

*The blurb of The State of Us mentions Samuel Becket and elsewhere you have talked of your respect for Alain Robbe-Grillet and Anna Kavan. Can you say something about the literary influences on your writing? *

There are writers I love — Robert Walser, Ilse Aichinger, Gwendolyne Brooks, for example — but I’m not sure any of them has been a particular influence on me. It’s true that I spent four or five years trying to write the sort of odd, textually slow-moving but intellectually mercurial fiction that Anna Kavan perfected but that was before I’d read any of her stuff, so I’m not sure that counts. I was influenced by Robbe-Grillet though, at least for a few years. Not that it was an altogether good fit. I admired what he was trying to do, but I’m not really someone who has fidelity to any particular theory. And I found the emphasis on repetition, and forming slightly austere patterns, took away the pleasure I take — and hope to communicate — in language and the construction of sentences.

*The State of Us is billed as satirical fiction. Ben Nicholson once said, ‘Satire is … deadly serious, and when politics begin to break down, there is a drift towards satire, because it’s the only thing that makes any sense.’ Certainly, a sense of anger about the state of our world comes through the book. Is satirical fiction a useful way of channelling that anger? *

I think it is. As someone recently said, if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention, and I think there are two different ways you can express that feeling on the page. The first, of course, is by producing obviously angry work. The second is by exploring the relationship between anger and laughter. And whilst I’m furious about a lot of things — austerity, mindless obedience, ‘citrussy’ beer, etc. etc. — there are plenty more that are only fit for ridicule. Which is why I’m drawn to satire, whether that’s Tom Sharp’s Riotous Assembly, or Zoe Pilger’s Eat my Heart Out, or Katherine Mansfield’s The Modern Soul, or Joanna Kavenna or Stewart Home.

You have talked elsewhere about how, in your fiction writing, you tend to vacillate between two extremes. You have an affinity for writing at a distance, with a cool detachment, but you’ve also long been fascinated with interiority and modernist immersion. Both kinds of fiction are apparent in The State of Us. ‘Work’ and ‘Pulling Together’, for instance, are written in the third person with more satirical detachment, whereas ‘On the International Space Station’ and ‘When Helen Levitt Met Vivian Maier’ are written as first person monologues with close attention to character interiority. Can you say something about the process of writing from each of these points of view and whether you find one harder?

I find writing at a distance much harder, because it’s difficult to generate the energy — the intellectual or emotional propulsion — that all prose needs. ‘Energy’, in the context of prose fiction, is often associated with cheap tricks, and a conservative mindset, but even the Tom McCarthys of this world need to create that propulsion, or pages would be left unturned and books unread. Writing interior monologues, or streams of consciousness, is easier. At least it is if you’ve done your research and spent enough time thinking about the character. It’s more fun too, although you have to guard against self-indulgence.

Your fiction addresses the political and cultural state of the UK. ‘Take Back Control’, with its character of Nigel who believes he is ‘sticking it’ to the establishment and standing up for people like himself while actually engaged in a futile, juvenile act of rebellion, is clearly an allegory for Brexit. ‘Pulling Together’ explores the growing hostility to people perceived as ‘other’ under the guise of filling out a form, Be a Better Neighbour. ‘The State of Us’ is a speculative story about how a melting pot of people and cultures make up modern, post-war Birmingham. Can you tell us a little about why this subject preoccupies you as a writer? How do you go about balancing the political and narrative aspects of your stories?

I write a lot about Birmingham because I’m from there, and have lived there all my life. I’m ambivalent about the significance of this circumstance to my understanding of the world, though (in this I’d endorse what Damian Lanigan of Weatherglass Books has said about Manchester, his home city: ‘Just like anywhere else? Maybe, but maybe not.’ And although I understand the importance of ‘place’ to fiction, I’m resentful about being reduced to ‘a Birmingham writer’.

I’m preoccupied with rebellion because over the course of the last twenty years, social media has turned us all into rebels (or at least has helped make our rebellious impulses more visible (if only to ourselves). Whether or not that’s the same thing is moot. I don’t think of politics and narrative as being distinct, because I think that all politics has a narrative and all narratives are political. Or, to put it another way, I take the old-fashioned view that everything is political, that every interaction and behaviour — everything we think or don’t think, and do or don’t do — has real-world consequences for other people.

Although, Jesus. When you put it like that…

Some stories seem to be set in speculative, if recognisable, worlds. ‘Taking Tapas on the Terrace’ takes place in an unnamed but familiar city. The night after a controversial mayor has been elected, two couples have dinner on the roof terrace of one of their apartments. Tensions emerge, especially between the wealthy George, who supports the mayor, and his friend Maddy, who doesn’t. This is a world in which politics isn’t just a matter of difference in opinion. A riot (with gunfire) has started in the city in the aftermath of the controversial mayor’s election. George, whose apartment building is protected by two armed African men, seems to treat the whole shenanigans as a bit of a game and enjoys goading Maddy about the fact that his candidate won. The story seems in part to be a meditation on class and privilege, and how these can blind a person to the real consequences of their political choices for others (and themselves). Is that a fair assessment?

It is. Audrey Lorde famously tried to move progressive discourse away from the idea of a hierarchy of oppression, but I think there’s little doubt that the structural imbalances related to class attract far less remedial attention than, say, those related to gender or race. We seem to have been side-tracked by quibbling over definitions, and what ‘class’ actually means, whereas in practical terms we could do worse than start from the point of ‘economic status’.

*‘On the International Space Station’ is about a man alone on the space station who keeps trying to communicate with the home base of Houston. Is there any nod to ‘Houston, Do you Read Me’ by James Tiptree Jr, the 1978 sci-fi short story. Also, this is the longest story in the book and I wonder if you could say something about how easy the first person voice was to hone because I found it so convincing. Part of the magic of writing is being able to experiment with unusual points of view, but to pull off a monologue like this about what may be the end of the world seems an act of radical empathy. *

Thank you! I like the sound of radical empathy! I haven’t read that story though. ‘On the International Space Station’ took years to write and I only persevered because I thought it was an original idea; if I’d known there was something else like it, I probably wouldn’t have bothered.

It might be convincing because I did a ridiculous amount of research into both the International Space Station and Toronto. Then again, it was supposed to be about a woman. And given you’re the second person out of not very many to think it was a man, I’ve got to consider the possibility it wasn’t my most successful act of ventriloquism…

I reread ‘On the International Space Station’ to work out why I thought the protagonist was a man. Actually, I think I misread it because the way you have written the character doesn’t seem obviously gendered. Could you say something briefly about the process of writing the character and why you, the author, consider her to be a woman? I found her interesting and convincing regardless, a person who goes through all kinds of thoughts and emotions.

I wanted my astronaut to be a woman because, although I’ve never read a story about an astronaut of any gender, I’m guessing there are more in which the astronaut is male. I also think that as long as it is done with care and respect, it’s important that authors continue to make use of life experiences that differ from their own. Not least because this is an integral element of writing fiction. I didn’t obviously gender the character, though. I just imagined her to be a she as I was writing the story. And, to go back to my research, I made sure I focused on the experiences of women astronauts (YouTube is great in that respect, with everything from guided tours of the ISS, to the spoken testimony of female astronauts from a variety of space programmes…)

*What are you working on at the moment? Any projects in the pipeline you’d like to tell our readers about? *

I have a second collection of short stories coming out in August. It’s called Encounters with Everyday Madness, and whereas this one is principally outward-looking, Encounters… focuses on interiority, and various depictions of consciousness.

“I have no idea what ‘authenticity’ means … it’s bullshit”: an interview with Charlie Hill

I’m always delighted when a cool new book comes out of a cool small press – I mean, it happens all the time, obviously, but it’s no less delightful for that. Small presses are often particularly good at books whose form isn’t necessarily easy to define or else goes against expectation, so the new book by Charlie Hill is in its natural home with Repeater. I Don’t Want to Go to the Taj Mahal: Stories of a Birmingham Boy is an addictive, confessional and grimy-funny speed-read which, shall we say, is a memoir-in-flash? No, let’s not say that, because it’s way too tortured… let’s call it… a book.

Charlie and I know each other through the fairly small and cosy – sorry, wild and edgy – world of short stories. Yet there is so much more to his writing than “just” the short story, and so I wanted to see what he had to say. I caught up with him shortly after publication of what his publisher evocatively calls a “vision of drinking, drugs, culture, sex, politics and masculinity”…

Firstly, congratulations on the publication of I Don’t Want to Go to the Taj Mahal: Stories of a Birmingham Boy. You’ve published two novels, a collection of short stories and various other uncategorizable bits and pieces, and when I ask you about what you’re working on you’re always cagey about labels! But this is the first book of non-fiction you’ve published, right? How has it been, working on a non-fiction book? Is there a different kind of imperative behind the writing of it?

Thank you! I think the simple answer to your question is ‘no’. For me, the imperative – the compulsion to get things down on paper – is exactly the same. This is because, for me, memoir is fiction. Every element that goes into making us who we are – our memories, our perception of how we are viewed by others, even our emotional responses to particular situations – is constructed. By the time we have finished processing them they have been squashed or slotted into any number of narratives we have created to help us navigate the outside world, narratives that often bear no resemblance to those created by other people. Not that this makes them any less real, of course…

Mm, that’s interesting. I’m aware that I’m harping on the difference between fiction and memoir (and that you’re probably getting wound up over my apparent insistence on these boundaries), so, sorry, but I’m going to carry on by asking: did you find it difficult to pitch this book to publishers because of its form? Did you feel under pressure to describe it in a certain way that didn’t feel completely authentic to you (there’s a leading question…)?

I don’t really find it difficult to pitch a book to a publisher. I mean, I think I used to, when I was starting out, but that’s partly because I was also thinking about pitching to agents and was caught up in the side of the business that is concerned less with the work itself than how to sell it. Now I just describe whatever it is I’m working on as honestly and directly as possible and leave considerations about where it might fit in the marketplace to other people. Having said that it obviously helps that I’ve been lucky with reviews in the past, so I have a profile. Of sorts, at least.

Obviously the form you’ve chosen – short, almost postcard-like episodes that condense an experience (or set of experiences) into just a paragraph or two – strikes the reader as soon as they open the book. It makes it addictive reading, and handily cuts out “the boring bits” of traditional memoir. Was that why you chose that form – for efficiency/impact? How much do you consider the reader when you’re writing?

I didn’t really make a conscious decision about the form of the thing at the outset; over the last few years I’ve been writing a lot of very short fiction and some poetry, and it was just the way the material found its shape on the page. Once you’ve started on a project though, the question of form becomes more pressing. You ask yourself is this the best way of doing what I want to do? And when it did with this one, I could see these particular shapes were an effective way of approaching the writing of a memoir. After all, we construct other people’s lives by piecing together a disparate selection of experiences, and imposing on them a meaning of our choice. And the source material does contain a lot of gaps.

I don’t consider an ideal or homogenised reader when I’m writing. I think you’d go mad if you did. And the work would be unfinished and terrible. However, while I do read the first drafts of my work as a writer – is this distinctive enough? – I look at later versions as a reader – does this work? So there is a reader involved in the process, it’s just that reader is me. And if it works for me, I’m happy. Which might explain a lot about the trajectory – or otherwise – of my career. Or otherwise.

I tend to think memoir is doomed to be “false” to a certain extent because, in a traditional form, so much context ends up being constructed around the important nugget of experience at the heart of each episode. So this postcard form feels more authentic to me. Is “authenticity” something that feels important to you, something you’re seeking, as a writer? Or is that one of those literary-criticism concepts that feels imposed from the outside?

Definitely the latter. I have no idea what ‘authenticity’ means. I guess it’s connected in some way to the truth but I’m not prepared to think about it anymore than that. It’s bullshit. Part of the language of commodification. I mean I understand that art and commerce are inextricably linked, but I’d rather leave the detail of the relationship to other people. Which might explain a lot about the trajectory – or otherwise – of my career. Or otherwise.

I’m really interested in Birmingham as a “character” in this book, or at least a “flavour” running through it. I realised how little I’ve read, fact or fiction, that’s set there. Why? Is there something anti-literary about Birmingham? Is there something anti-Birmingham about literature?

I’m not sure. Does Birmingham have a lesser literary reputation than Manchester? Or Liverpool? Or Frankfurt? Or Lyons? I genuinely don’t know. Off the top of my head, I can name a number of contemporary writers closely associated with Birmingham and working in a variety of genres: Jonathan Coe, Catherine O’Flynn, Jim Crace, Kit de Waal, Helen Cross, Alan Beard, Sharon Duggal, Luke Kennard, Annie Murray; further back there’s John Hampson, Henry Green, etc., and doubtless countless others I haven’t come across.

The book manages to have an arc, almost in spite of the form, which is a really nice achievement. I think it also has a lot of sensitivity and vulnerability, in spite of its focus on the “rancid” (to quote one of your blurbs). Does it feel different to be putting a memoir out into the world, in comparison to your previous books of fiction?

Thank you. It does feel different. I lost a lot of sleep over what to include and how. There are innumerable stories that – for all of my involvement in them – don’t belong to me. As it is, I think I got one or two calls wrong, but not many.

There’s also the question of how the thing is going to be received. When you’ve written a novel or short story – however multi-faceted you hope it is – there are certain elements that you want people to pick up on. Its essence, if you like. And you like to think you have – as a writer – been able to nudge readers in this direction. By dropping in connective tissue and all that. When you’re writing a memoir with a structure such as this one, you can have no such expectations, because it’s all about the encounters and the gaps between them; you’re excising as much connective tissue as possible, which means you have even less influence over a reader’s response than usual…

I finished reading The State Of Us only last week and I’d like to sort of creep up on THE STATE OF US if that’s alright with you. By which I mean I’d like to first hit you with an array of questions – like a flurry of punches thrown by Ali in his prime - about the form itself… Here goes: What are some of your favourite short story collections? Why are they special to you? Why would you, why should anyone, choose to read a collection of short stories instead of a novel – which is traditionally the more popular form? What are you looking for in a short story – be it your own or a story by somebody else?

I think I’m going to answer these questions with the same sense of urgency as they were thrown at me. By which I mean impulsively, and without recourse to Wikipedia or my bookshelf. Which means, of course, that I’ll forget a lot and get a lot more wrong…

I love Katherine Mansfield; I think she was a lot more subversive than she is given credit for and certainly more self-aware – in relation to her social/economic class, than the Bloomsbury bunch. I suppose that might have had something to do with the way she was treated, at least at first, by the incorrigibly snobbish Woolf. I can’t think of a particular collection though – the one with At the Beach? And that one with the woman with the pram, in the park? Though I also like the one that was serialised in the magazine Rhythm. In a German Pension, I think it was called.

I also love Anna Kavan – I recently read some of her stories in a collection of her short fiction and non-fiction called Machines in the Head. They’re deeply unnerving, and a little bit uncanny, and what I imagine Kafka to be like (not that I’ve read much that’s ‘uncanny’. Except that fella. Whatshisname. 1950’s and 1960’s. Robert? Edric? No, it’s no good, I’ll have to Google it. Aickman!! Robert Aickman, that’s him! Or any Kafka…)

When it comes to writers who aren’t dead I also like, in no particular order and for completely different reasons, Ruby Cowling, Neil Campbell and Joanna Walsh. Ruby is a mate of mine but that doesn’t mean I read her uncritically, and her first collection, This Paradise, was superb, a pitch-perfect mix of formal experimentation and near-dystopian anxiety. Joanna Walsh’s Vertigo was better known and equally terrific, an exploration of various iterations of interiority that managed to strike a balance between the personal and the universal. And Neil Campbell is one-of-a-kind, a poet whose deadpan prose is like the dark still water on the surface of a particularly deep pothole.

If you’re leading a short story workshop, what will you be saying to your students to help them produce work that’s of interest and quality?

I think it’s all down to focus. I’ve delivered a few workshops, and my favourite is one I devised on the sentence. Even in a longer story, you have to know precisely what each sentence is doing and how. Pay each sentence the same sort of attention as you would a line of poetry; even those that aren’t, on the surface, doing very much, need to doing it with the right rhythm, the right nouns and verbs, the right punctuation, the right sound, the right feel.

What was the first short story that you ever published? Where was it published? Do you still have a copy of it? When did you last read it? What did you feel about it when you did?

The first short story I had published was in the first anthology from Tindal Street Press. It came out in 1999. I don’t read it very often because I don’t think it’s very good. Or at least, I think my writing has improved out of sight since then. I mean I’d be in the wrong business if I didn’t think that but there are some early stories I love and would happily re-read. Not that one.

Though I am still proud of the central character’s subsequent re-appearance (in my first novel, The Space Between Things, that came out 10 years later…)

It says in the author bio at the end of THE STATE OF US ‘This is his first collection of short stories’ – why is that?

One of the reasons is that I’ve always moved about as a writer – shifting the focus of my work, altering my formal approach, throwing my voice wherever my fancy takes me – and the vogue these days is for collections that are thematically, if not formally, linked. It makes them easier to sell. To package. Then again, I have previously published a pamphlet, so it should probably say my first full-length collection.

*Okay, now to the collection itself – THE STATE OF US. As I said I finished it very recently, and thought it was absolutely terrific! It opens with a marvellous story called WORK, which brought Beckett to mind. Was that conscious? Do you count him as an influence? With this story was it your intention to examine some of the absurdities inherent in the workplace? *

Thank you! I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have favourites, and this one of them, not least because it was first published by the late and much lamented Ambit. I don’t think it was written consciously to read like Beckett, though. Although I do love Molloy I haven’t read much else by him, so I think it’s probably more accurate to say it was written to read like my idea of what Beckett is like.

And yes, it was certainly my intention to satirise work. I’ve recently become a part-time Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, working with students on their academic English, but before this I’d had 30 plus years of menial near-minimum-waged work. And I hated it. I hated being woken up by an alarm, and being reprimanded for being late by people who did half as much in a day as I did before lunch, and I hated being told what to do by people who made no effort to earn my respect, and had no interest in doing so, and I’ve never understood the ‘work ethic’, or people who never take a day off work, or people who win the lottery and go back to work. I mean what a way to spend your life! It’s insane! Can’t you find yourself a park and sit in it, for Christ’s sake?

When I read this story, and several of the others, it made me laugh out loud, which I think is wonderful - does your own work make you laugh? (I think it’d be brilliant if it did – I read that Kafka used to laugh uncontrollably when reading his work to friends.) Do you ever find yourself laughing at the absurdities you encounter in the real-life workplace?

I used to laugh at the absurdities I encountered in the workplace, but then I stopped. I mean it’s only funny for so long, isn’t it? My writing though, that’s a different matter. It doesn’t happen often – more often than not I just snigger – but I do remember coming up with a line that made me laugh out loud in the Waterstone’s canteen. It was from my second novel – Books! – that was about books written by dull 30-something blokes that were so mediocre that they shut down the electrical impulses in the brain. The line ended with: ‘...was killed after becoming cognitively becalmed during the course of a particularly laborious pun on page 32.’ I vacillate about the rest of the book, but I still think it’s a corker.

*Next, I’d like to talk a little about PULLING TOGETHER. Am I wrong to see it as a story where – sadly - the microcosm of Laburnum Avenue is emblematic of the macrocosm of the UK in the 21st century where we’re all being pressed to be compliance machines and it seems that there’s little tolerance for anyone not on board? Why dark humour rather than vitriolic anger? The last line ‘Yasmin sighed’ seems pessimistic, as if she’s resigned - is that what you feel about the state we’re in, now? *

Yeah, that’s about it. It’s also about our instinctive mistrust of the other, and of difference of any kind. As for the last line, I think there’s a few reasons it’s resigned, rather than angry. I think the character in the story has probably been through so much that resignation is the most likely response to her situation. I also think that although anger is necessary – not least because it can serve the same purpose as laughter, and help to keep you mentally healthy – you can only be so angry so often before you give yourself a stroke.

ON THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION is the longest story in the book. Tell us how it came about and in particular how you managed the balancing act between dark comedy and the existential, dystopian ‘An end to the irrelevance and the meaning, an end to my part in the failure, an end to all of it.’

This was a story that took years to write. I kept ditching it. I’m not sure how I arrived at a balance between comedy and existential dystopia beyond allowing myself to be guided by the female hero. Once I’d set the situation up – during a crisis, an astronaut decides to refuse the offer of a shuttle back to earth and instead stays on the ISS – I didn’t really have a plan, and let the character lead the way.

I see THE EXPERIMENT as another masterclass in rendering absurdity - the fact that man and woman are un-named emphasising their universality and their situation a metaphor for the corner it seems we’ve been backed into, was that your intention? If you were teaching this story to a class of A Level English Literature students, what would you say about it?

Thank you again! I do like the way this interview is shaping up! This story is another that took years to get right (it was eventually published in Stand). I think it is about something universal, yes. Specifically, how we impose meaning on the world, what that meaning means, and the relationship of that meaning to the truth of things. That’s probably how I’d describe it to A Level students. Though I might throw something about the nature of free will in there too.

*I like all the stories in this collection and will go back and re-read them, but at this moment in time another of my particular favourites is THE TALE OF BIG HAL AND THE BETHANY TOWER. It seems to me to be both a condemnation of consumerism and neoliberalism – ‘an overly typical suburb’ that once again uses humour ‘a post ironic fondue’. How important is the humour to this story? *

This was one of the stories in the collection I was least sure about. I set out to write a fable and it turns out this is quite difficult to do. Particularly given the fact that there are so many targets (those you mentioned along with – unsurprisingly enough – bad parenting.) I think humour is particularly important because it’s the most overtly moral – or at least the most straightforwardly moral – of all of the stories in the collection.

Okay, finally, would you please describe, for THE STATE OF US, your ideal reader (If you say that they’re colour blind I’m going to think you’ve cheated by looking to see how Anthony Burgess described his ideal reader) and the ideal location in which for them to be reading the anthology.

I wish I could think of something smart to say here, but I can’t. I suppose… someone who likes to put a bit of work into their reading? On the understanding they’ll get more back? Someone who can appreciate the value of both laughter and anger? Dunno. Tricky one…