Matt Thorne joined our Faces and Places reading circles in Budapest, Szolnok, Kecskemét and Szeged. He read from his latest novel Cherry and took part in an informal discussion. If you missed the chance to ask him, read Judit Friedrich's questions and Thorne's answers below.
This is not the first time for you in Central or Eastern Europe. How have these experiences influenced your notions about the role literature can play in people’s lives?
The big thing for me is the excitement about literature. This was true in Croatia, and it is also true in Hungary. Every writer I know who has visited Central or Eastern Europe in a professional capacity has been totally rejuvenated by the experience.
What is the literary scene like in today’s multicultural England and UK?
I think the literary scene in "today’s multicultural England and UK" is a healthy one, with lots of new and different voices. The only down side is that there is a certain lack of support for developing writers. So, often writers are forced to look out for themselves. A good example of this is Courttia Newland’s Tell Tales project.
You are writing in a rather learner-friendly, clear English, free from regional dialects or any other special register drawing attention to itself. Is this lovely flow of English sentences the result of your New Puritans credo?
The New Puritans credo is certainly one that encourages a directness of expression. But it’s more a question of personal taste. I prefer writing that which doesn’t draw attention to the individual sentences, it’s a desire for elegance of expression through minimalism. Some people see these questions as beginning with Hemmingway or Carver or certain American crime writers, but it can be traced back to the Renaissance when "Eloquence versus Plainness” was a matter of serious debate. It probably goes back even further.
Many of your characters are defined by various forms of input from their culture (films, music, teachers, parents) while they seem unable or unwilling to do anything themselves. Are these characters so lost because they are so young they have not found out yet what they could do or do you see young people today as characters who have been trained by their entire upbringing not to do anything?
I suppose it’s a question of how you define “doing” something. I think in the western world in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first being a participant is probably the primary form of personal expression. Whether it’s attending a certain concert, or taking part in a political demonstration, we are defined by being somewhere. Personal history has been replaced by a collective history. This may also be connected to celebrity. Historical periods are defined as much by what is happening to certain celebrities (at the time of writing, Michael Jackson’s trial is dominating the newspapers) as it is by major political upheavals. I think when I started writing I was eager to avoid political commentary in my novels, but by my second book, Eight Minutes Idle, I realized this was foolish. But I think it’s a fallacy that politics is any more important than what’s happening in pop culture. There is so much more information in every sense these days that it seems like the best way to be a modern world citizen is to process this input. The characters in my novels are intended to be realistic (but fictionalized) representations of the people I meet in everyday life.
Along similar lines: all this passivity seems to be hiding something. These characters seem neither willing (or able) to do anything nor willing (or able) to enjoy not doing much of anything. Do you want to suggest that passivity is an overwhelming feature of life for young people today? And, in the case of Cherry, do you mean to say that extreme passivity opens up a character to be readily influenced by others?
I’m not sure if I accept that the characters in my previous novels are passive. The musician Michael Stipe from the band REM said something after one of the elections that I think was his own comment rather than a quote: “withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy. ”Sarah in Tourist has done something active in that she has chosen to leave the life expected of her and move to the seaside; Dan in Eight Minutes Idle has chosen to leave his home and move into his office, and then later chooses to seduce his boss to escape the prison of work; Chris and Becca in Dreaming of Strangers have chosen to create their own romantic world that is separate from the expectations of the people around them; Martin in Pictures of You, although slightly feckless, has a relatively high-powered, glamorous job and both Gerald in Child Star and Steve in Cherry have reasonably decent jobs as teachers, even if they don’t like them. Steve’s problem is not that he’s passive, it’s that he’s lonely. It’s not extreme passivity that opens him up to being exploited by others, but the lack of a moral compass and friends or family that will support them. If he suffers from anything, it’s confusion. And this is what allows him to be influenced, and exploited by others.
Teachers and parents loom large in your novels. Do you think this might be because these are the works of a young writer?
I don’t think so. The only thing that I thing reveals these are the works of a young writer is that none of the characters have experienced parenthood for themselves yet. After all, everyone has parents and unless you are exceptionally solitary (or your parents are dead) it seems likely that they will play a role in most people’s lives.
Do you have special opinions or special experiences about teaching and teachers?
I have worked as a teacher at various times in my life, and still go into schools today (with events connected to be children’s books.) Also, my father teaches computing, and both my parents worked as teachers when they were younger.
Dou you think your characters are trapped in adolescence, defined by these figures of adult authority?
No, I don’t think so. Or at least, not all of them. The most adolescent characters in my novels are Dan in Eight Minutes Idle and Gerald in Child Star, and both of those novels are, to a certain extent, rites of passage novels. In Child Star, this rite of passage is relatively straightforward: Gerald deals with his past and achieves adulthood, represented in the novel by a fully functional relationship and a change in his social surroundings; in Eight Minutes Idle it’s much more complicated. Dan defines himself as a “mud puppy,” an animal that is defined by its’ inability to become adult. But this is an illusion, because although he sees himself in this way he is forced into adulthood by economic restriction.
Your narrators (who tend to be also your central characters) are slightly older than you are yourself. Is there any special reason for that?
With Tourist, I wanted to get away from myself, and did this by writing from a female perspective, embodying a character who was several years older than me. I did the same thing in Pictures of You and Cherry, but by that point I was doing it deliberately, as a sort of joke. The characters in the other books tend to be my age or younger.
You are also writing books for children. What age group are you targeting there?
8-12 year olds.
Dou you get any response from your young readers? Do you do readings for children as well?
Yes, I very much enjoy getting letters from my young readers. Sometimes they send me drawings of characters or suggestions for covers for future novels. I enjoy their honesty. I am just beginning to do readings for children, and have several events coming up this year.
Two of your characters in Cherry discuss being 17 as a special experience, although for different reasons. Was being seventeen special for you?
Well, the reason the characters describe 17 as being a special experience is in reference to the Frank Sinatra song rather than for an autobiographical reference, but yes, being 17 was special for me. I suppose in retrospect I would define it as one of my happiest years. Prior to that time my romantic relationships had been a bit tortured; in that year I met my first long-term girlfriend and my social life expanded considerably. It also felt like a very bright time. In Cherry, Steve’s special year is 1987, but he’s older than me, my year was 1990-91. There’s a line in the new Ian McEwan novel about it seeming strange in retrospect that the nineties has emerged as a sunny, optimistic era, and that really rang true for me. I think the nineties were a much happier time (in Britain at least) than we’re living in now.
You emphasise in the New Puritans manifesto the importance of writing about the present. And then you have characters in Cherry talking about whether the present is the best possible time or the worst possible time to be alive. How do you feel about living at this present time of ours?
It’s interesting. When I read that line about how this is the worst time to be alive in the history of the universe it gets different reactions in front of different audiences. Sometimes it makes people laugh; other times I see everyone in the audience nodding. But it wasn’t supposed to be a comment on this era. It’s part of a larger scene in which Harry Hollingsworth talks about the scientific advances that he thinks are going to be made in the near future. All of these predictions come from science magazines. Some scientists really do seem to believe that we are on the verge of discoveries that will significantly increase the lifespan of the average person. So I thought it would be fun to present my characters in this novel as part of the last doomed generation. It also runs contrary to the usual pessimism about the environment and the future of the planet. In general, though, I’m an optimist. I’m as happy living now as I would be in any period of the past or future.
Your recent novels are set in London, but this London is not a very inviting city. How do you feel about living in London yourself?
I think London is an extremely complicated city. When I was a child, I loved living in Bristol and hated visiting London. After university I moved back to Bristol and I don’t think I would’ve moved to London if I hadn’t felt it was necessary in order to promote my first novel. But then when I got here I really started to love it. I found it a socially welcoming place and very culturally vibrant. But at the same time I am aware that it’s very easy for people to get lost in London, or to become depressed or isolated due to the size of the city. So Cherry is a portrait of the darker side of London. At the same time I prefer London to New York, although I would be very happy living in Miami.
Do you consider any earlier writer as having a definite influence on your work?
Earlier writers, but also writers alive and working now. Here is a list of writers who I have been inspired by at one time or other: Herman Melville, Marcel Proust, Haruki Murakami, Nicholson Baker, Paul Auster, Stephen King, Bret Easton Ellis, Kathy Acker, William T. Vollmann, A.S Byatt, Jane Austen, Rupert Thomson, Geoff Dyer, Nicholas Blincoe, John Barth, Robert Coover. There are countless others. Medieval and Renaissance literature, especially Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, has been a big influence on my children’s books.
The All Hail the New Puritans anthology was not a generational venture. Do you feel you are defined by your generation or rather by your authorial intentions and preferences?
I feel that when it comes to writing, it’s not very helpful to define writers by their generation. It’s a question of finding kindred spirits. For example, J. G Ballard or Muriel Spark are much more modern writers than many authors of my generation. Every writer establishes a lineage for himself or herself, and they have writers who they consider friendly spirits.
Even though Cherry is possible to read in almost one go it is far from the sunny world of Dreaming of Strangers. Do you like alternating between light worlds and dark worlds in your novels?
I don’t deliberately alternate between light and dark worlds, but I think a writer who only works in one register or genre is not being true to the whole of life. Of course, every writer has personal restrictions, and if you are an extremely pessimistic person then it’s likely that your fiction will reflect that vision of the world. There is a certain received wisdom that the best writers or artists stick to the same small patch and revisit it over and over again. This is true of literary fiction as much as it is of genre fiction. If readers enjoy a book they tend to want the author to give them the same experience again if they buy another one of their novels. I understand this feeling, and to a certain extent, as a reader, share it myself. But as a writer I am keen to write lots of different types of books, whether children’s fiction (my series 39 Castles), romantic comedies such as Dreaming of Strangers or to a lesser extent Child Star, and dark, almost-thrillers like Eight Minutes Idle or Cherry. I can’t imagine anyone enjoying all of my novels equally, but I am pleased when people have different favourites.
The book begins with a character called Steve Ellis telling his own story in the first person singular. To what extent do we want to believe him?
This is a big question. I can’t really get into this without giving away certain elements of the book that I want readers to discover for themselves. But at the same time I dislike it when authors get all coy about explaining their work so if anyone reading this has yet to read Cherry, skip this part. For everyone else: Cherry is Steve Ellis’s alibi. The whole novel is being told in the way someone might defend themselves to a parole board, or another prisoner. But Steve is not a straightforward unreliable narrator. There are two elements that complicate his defense. The first is that even as he tells it, his alibi is collapsing around him. Cherry physically deteriorates, his home falls apart. This is not to say his story isn’t true, it could be collapsing because his memory isn’t strong enough, but he is definitely hiding a lot of things. These things poke through the text at various points, and allow the reader to construct a different version of events. The second element that changes what is being told is that Steve is being manipulated by forces outside of his control. In Steve’s version of events, these forces are easily explained, but this may not be the case in reality. There are several keys to unlocking the novel. A good starting point for this is whether Steve is telling the truth about Cherry looking different when she comes to visit him in the prison at the end of the book. It was interesting to me that someone in the audience at the reading in Szeged said that Cherry is the true villain of the book, and even worse than Harry Hollingsworth. I’m not saying that’s true, but your take on Cherry forces a definition of the rest of the book. That’s as open as I can be without shutting down the possible alternative readings of the novel.
You seem to be playing with the novel form quite a lot in this book. You have a unique way of characterising Cherry for the reader before we (or the narrator, for that matter) ever meet her. This is also a very special way of making two characters meet. And you place hints that prepare the ground for these events in the story – comments about how others can figure out what women they want and then go out and find her, or how other lovers in the book had first met. Are you considering this work as a postmodernist, metafictional turn in your career, away from the straightforward storytelling of the New Puritans?
I don’t consider this a postmodernist or metafictional novel. But as I wrote in the introduction to the New Puritans, “I think we’ve moved through the excitement of seeing old genres subverted, reinvented and modernized. The challenge now is working out what from this intellectual exercise remains useful to us. We can still write from experience; it’s just that our experience has been enriched by modern culture’s constantly changing hall of mirrors. The films we’ve seen, the books we’ve read, the games we’ve played: these are all now part of our available autobiography. And, most of the time, there’s no reason to play it straight.” So, even within the New Puritans, there was room for a certain amount of experimentation. The New Puritans was never about ‘straightforward’ storytelling, but rather that storytelling should be of primary importance. Rule 3 talked about moving towards new openings, and “rupturing existing genre expectations. ”Although the rules were only designed to be applicable for the stories written by the authors who participated in the New Puritans project, in this sense Cherry is not a massive departure.
There is a definite emphasis on numbers. Being 17 is a special year for the characters, Steve Ellis being almost twice this age at 33, the novel starting in 2003 – are you building towards a significance of numbers in general, or are there different reasons for specifying these particular numbers?
As Jake says in the first chapter of this novel “everything’s maths, when it comes down to it. ”And this is certainly true of Cherry. Every number mentioned has a significance (the same is true in Eight Minutes Idle and in my children’s books, which are also structured around numbers), but although there is a significance for all the numbers used in general, there is also usually an emotional or narrative weight to each date. For example, take the novel starting in 2003. The novel begins with Steve saying that these events take place in 2003, but when you get to the end of the book you see that the date when he wrote the novel is 2005. So the question this presents is what has happened between the end of the action conveyed in the novel (still in the year 2003) and the date in 2005 when Steve has sat down to read the book. And that points the read to the clues within the book that Steve’s circumstances are now very different to the way they were when he wrote the book.
Do you see Steve Ellis as a Christ figure, with his Christ-like age of 33?
It’s not that he’s a Christ figure, but that the Christ age is seen as a significant one. To quote a musician again, the singer Jarvis Cocker formerly of the band Pulp has a line on his This Is Hardcore album, “a man told me to beware of 33/he said it was not a good age for me” and this is an articulation of a fear that seems quite deeply ingrained in literature and popular culture. So it seemed the perfect age for a character going through a hellish trial. There are lots of deliberate religious references in the book, though, most of which have been picked up by various reviewers. In fact, the various theological conversations in the book are very, very important to understanding the book.
The story in Cherry departs from realism at the moment when Steve’s specifications for his perfect woman get formulated and then become realised. It seems that the book could move towards fantasy – either working out Steve’s sexual fantasy or, in the style of David Lynch, moving into a character’s projection of his fantasy over the other characters. Yet you offer a perfectly realistic explanation, among others possibilities. How do you feel about leaving the readers with options for various interpretations, as opposed to offering definite closures to your stories?
I don’t think Cherry departs from realism at this point, but instead stretches realism. It’s important to me that there is a perfectly realistic explanation for all the events in the book. And if you don’t believe the realistic explanation, the next level is that Steve is an unreliable narrator. The possibility that this novel is fantasy or science-fiction is quite deeply buried in the text. In order to unlock that reading, you have to negotiate some fairly obscure cultural references (my reason for this is not to alienate certain readers, but because, to an extent, Cherry is intended to be a different experience depending on what you bring to it. If you are a fan of noir films or novels, you will pick up on certain references; if you are a fan of science-fiction, the homages you’ll pick up on will be different.) The main reference is to a little-known film called Cherry 2000. When Cherry asks Steve if he is making a reference to this film (which he hasn’t seen), she is implying that there is another explanation to the events of the novel.
It is interesting to see that even when you break with realism for the moment you prefer to move into the personal fantasies of your characters, avoiding the historical fantasies magic realism offers. Do you consciously define yourself against the tradition of magic realism?
I’ve never been interested in magic realism. I think it had a terrible influence on world literature, and all the literary groups that have aligned themselves with the New Puritans, whether it is the FAK group in Croatia or the ‘Crack’ group in Mexico have felt the genre in a particularly oppressive manner. Most of the writers of magic realism seem to believe that their brand of fiction defines their countries in a way that realist writers cannot manage; it is the grossest arrogance.
The part in Cherry where Steve Ellis gives his specifications for his perfect woman is really lovely. It creates such a feeling of freedom, as if the story could go anywhere from this point – at this moment everything is possible in the novel. How did you decide which direction the story should proceed from there?
Usually, when I start a novel I have the whole plot, including every scene, in my head before I start, although I don’t make any notes on paper. So I know exactly what is going to happen and there is no room for deviation. But at the same time I am doing everything possible to prevent the reader from guessing what is going to happen next. I have two rules, both for my own writing, and for what I look for in books and films as a reader or audience member. The first is that any stage I don’t want to be able to guess what is going to happen next, or how the plot is going to work out; the second is that I don’t want to be able to guess the intelligence or personality of the person telling me the story (I mean the director or author, rather than the narrator.) So I would often rather watch a B-movie that goes in strange directions than read a novel by an author who offers a “well-told tale.” I think the very best modern authors, and here I am thinking of someone like Haruki Murakami, manage to convince you that anything might happen in the book, while at the same time allowing you to feel that whatever does happen you will be constantly entertained. One of my favourite books on film is Frederick Raphael’s book on working with Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Open (sic). Throughout the book there is a battle of wills between Kubrick, who seems completely unconcerned about whether the film has a classical structure or internal logic but would be perfectly happy, it seems, for the film to be a string of unconnected scenes as long as they are interesting, and Raphael, who is pushing for greater coherence and a through-line for the plot.
You seem to prefer first person singular narrators in your novels, even if the narrator character is a woman, like in your first novel. Why do you find this device helpful?
I have written six novels for adults and three for children. Two of the novels for adults and all the novels for children are written in the third person. Many of my short stories are in the third person too, so it’s not something I shy away from. But, you’re right, I definitely find the first person singular easier. It creates an immediate relationship between the characters and the reader, and seems more truthful somehow. I want to get better at the third person, though.
You have been also taught how to write at a course in creative writing. What was that experience like?
It was a very positive experience. I was taught at a course in St. Andrew’s in Scotland under the poet and short story writer Douglas Dunn and the novelist Carl McDougall. They were both very good teachers, and helped me get my work to a publishable standard.
What advice would you give to budding creative writers?
I would tell them to relax about the question of being published. I know this sounds paradoxical as being published is a young writers greatest desire (it was certainly mine.) But I think that can sometimes become so all-consuming that it can squeeze the joy out of writing. Write for yourself, for your friends, for a big audience, but only do it if it is something you love, and simply cannot stop yourself from doing.
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