To an Anglophone audience Pascal Bruckner is most likely to be known through the Roman Polanski film Bitter Moon (an adaption of his novel Lunes de Fiel), or for his left wing criticism of multiculturalism. I feel this is a shame. This is not because his political criticisms lack merit, but because one could easily fall into false assumptions about his fiction. It is simply a fact that it is hard for authors to have multi-faceted reputations. For in addition to his books discussing the weighty issues of western guilt and cowardice, Mr Bruckner has also written an imaginative modern fairytale of man and marriage.
At the very start of My Little Husband, Bruckner’s central character Leon is the envy of every man around him. He has just married the flame-haired buxom beauty Solange. She is a six foot goddess who stirs the desire of every man she meets. He is five foot six. Despite their height disparity, and the disapproval of her family, the couple’s mutual love and attraction sees them married and then settled in Central Paris. Although there are a number of niggling matters; such as the difficulty Leon has in keeping pace with his wife’s very long stride as they walk down the street, and of course the cutting remarks made by jealous men. Despite these niggles, Leon is very happy.
His happiness proves short-lived. After dutiful performance of his connubial responsibilities, he finds his wife is with child. Initially Leon is overjoyed at the prospect of being a father. Their little boy is named Baptiste in accordance with Solange’s wishes, and a cat is purchased to provide him with future playmate. Leon’s paternal joy is undiminished as he performs the messy chores of cleaning up after his son. What comes as a mighty shock to him, is that following the birth of his son he has shrunk by fifteen inches. Leon’s visit to the doctor results in a referral to a growth specialist called Dubbelvitz. Believing Leon has a prematurely collapsed spinal column, he blithely informs him that he is simply going through what the average 70 year-old endures. He marvels at Leon, considering him to be a “staggering example of precocious senility”.
Although shrinking by 15 inches is obviously a disquieting affliction, Leon finds the essentials of his life much the same; Solange’s love is as ardent as ever and his career is largely unchanged. To top it all off his wife is pregnant once more, and life has yet to damage his strong paternal desire for a large family. Two weeks after the birth of his little girl, Berenice, Leon finds himself shrinking once more. The result of this shrinking spell is that Leon once more loses 15 inches. After he has finished shrinking he is just over three feet, barely bigger than his first born child. Leon’s journey from diminutive man to his wife’s biggest child is complete.
Leon suffers a simultaneous contraction of all his members and organs but one. This one particular of his body completely retains its original length and proportions. Far from soothing his ego, the “ridiculously long appendage dangling between his legs” proves a burden, “Nature had robbed him of everything apart from the organ of reproduction, the better to reduce him to that role”. Solange positively delights in the combination of child- sized husband and oversized phallus. Whilst playing with his penis Solange christens her husband with the quite unforgettable nickname, “little bighorn”.
To help him cope with the anxieties of his diminishment Leon goes regularly to see a psychotherapist. Whilst sometimes his therapist lectures him, other times flatters him, on one occasion when he is feeling especially morose he whispers to Leon, “You must realise, old chap, that every woman turns her husband into a child. It’s the story of every marriage. She tames him, domesticates him, mothers him. At first he’s My Wild Beast, then My Pet, finally My Baby”.
At the end of the first part of the novel little Leon is in the maternity ward at the hospital. Solange is about to give birth once more, and this time to twins. In keeping with the jocular fairy tale logic of the novel, the connection between Leon’s shrinkages and the birth of his children is only discovered at the last minute. His doctor urgently phones him, shouting at him that he must prevent Solange giving birth. Convinced of his doctor’s lunacy, he watches as Solange gives birth, not to two helpless little infants, but two preternaturally strong and well-developed children. Emerging from their mother without the assistance of the nurses, in fact politely declining any such assistance, the whole birth takes only half an hour. Leon feels weak at the sight and begins to shrink before the very eyes of the nurses. He continues to shrink until he is only 4 inches tall. When Solange is discharged two days later, she is holding two babies in her arms, and harbouring a husband in her coat pocket.
The second part of the novel describes the humiliating existence Leon endures. His size now imprisons him within his house and ends his medical practice. His domestic environment has now become a gauntlet of terrors. His children all tower over him. His doctor, Dubbelvitz, has started to pay court to Solange. Solange keeps her little husband as an accessory in her handbag. And of course there is the cat, of whom Leon lives in perpetual fear. He has naturally been relegated from the matrimonial bed (for safety’s sake of course), and now lives in a dolls house at the far end of the flat.
Leon strives to win over his children and his wife. He becomes a little toy valet to his wife, and a dinner table jester to his children. Stowed away in Solange’s handbag when she goes grocery shopping, his size allows him the better to inspect fruit. At mealtimes he performs daring balancing acts for the crude entertainment of his giant children. He is even rewarded by Solange with a little Jaguar and later a little toy plane. The latter device allowing him to perform even more eccentric and dangerous stunts as he tries to impress his children. His escapades eventually prove so disastrous, that he is completely shunned by the entire family, and is separated off in a barricaded part of the apartment. There is a quite beautiful moment later in the novel where Leon is convinced the family cat – who has finally found him alone – is going to put an end to him. Instead of an ignominious death, Leon finds his last remaining ally in the family, who shares his food and sleeping place with him – an experience that occasions some regret in Leon that he had not made the habit of buying the cat nicer food.
Many writers would manage to squander the potential in the story I have described, perhaps drawing the central conceit out too far, intruding too many overbearing moral remarks, or trying to make this a three hundred page novel. Bruckner however manages to ensure he creates a memorable fable which is amusing, clever and rather poignant. Leon’s tribulations at first incline one to laugh, but very soon one sees him as the worst sort of tragic figure, one who is ridiculous and a source of mirth in his despair.

Who is your favourite recurring crime fiction hero/detective, and what is it you love about them?
Regarding the roman noir heroes I am “romantic”. My preferred ones are Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, the legendary characters  of Dashiell  Hammett and Raymond Chandler’s novels.  Both are dysfunctional beings, living in a corrupt and morally sick society, and although they are outsiders, they have a very strong ethical sense, which gives them a very special charm. I was never a fan of  rational detectives, who solve crimes in their offices, using just logic and reason.

What was the very first book you remember reading and really loving, and why?
I  remember reading my first book, A Vaca Voadora (The Flying Cow). I was probably six years old and it told the story of a cow who used to meditate. I fell in love with the book (and the cow). Of the noir literature The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett was my first reading experience . I was fifteen years old and had a dream of becoming a scriptwriter.  His characters full of pathos, his pulsating rhythm, every detail in his literature had a strong impact in my future literature. What struck me specially was the way he makes the city and society  characters in his novel.

Before your debut crime novel, what else had you written (if anything) unpublished manuscripts, short stories, articles?
I started my career as a screenwriter. After having written many scripts for films and TV programmes I lost the passion for both those media. The scriptwriter’s job is very frustrating, in my opinion. You’re a kind of horse for the director. You feel always tied. The freedom you find in literature is unique. I am increasingly convinced that literature  is the freest of all art forms.

Outside of writing, and touring and promotional commitments, what do you really like to do, leisure and activity-wise?
For many years, books and films were my greatest pleasure. When I turned 50, out of the blue, I started painting. Since then I have been studying watercolor techniques, and discovering with great enthusiasm fantastic watercolorists as Joseph Beuys and Rodin. I created the cover of my latest novel in Brazil. Unlike writing, which causes me immense anguish, painting is just pleasure for me.

What is one thing that visitors to your hometown should do, that isn’t in the tourist brochures, or perhaps they wouldn’t initially consider?
São Paulo is not a city, it is a world: 18 million inhabitants! It is not a beautiful city, the traffic is crazy, life is expensive, there  much violence, but there is not anything like it in Brazil in terms of cultural life. If you are around it, rent a bike (the city has now a good  network of cycle paths) and go to Vila Madalena, a neighbourhood full of small art galleries. Then you will have a good notion of our contemporary cultural production.

If your life was a movie, which actor could you see playing you?
If my life was a movie I would prefer to choose the director: Eduardo Coutinho, the most talented documentary director Brazil ever had, who sadly died last year in a tragic way. Maybe he would choose not just one but various actresses to play my role.

Of your writings, which is your favourite, and why?
Fogo-Fátuo (Ghost Light), my last novel. Although I was labelled a crime novelist since my first book, this is really my first crime novel. It tells a story of the mysterious death  of a famous actor during a performance. For the first time I have a detective, Azucena, leading a difficult investigation  in a corrupt police system.  I tried to create a “classic” detective novel using elements of contemporary Brazil.

What was your initial reaction, and how did you celebrate, when you were first accepted for publication? Or when you first saw your debut story in book form?
 I thought to myself “finally I will get rid of producers and directors”. Jokes aside, it was a great feeling of freedom. I mean, artistically speaking. For a long time, I kept an almost pathological curiosity about the readers. I had a friend who owned a bookstore, and I use to call him daily to ask about the people who had bought my book. Who are these people? What else they buy? Readers are almost metaphysical figures in writer’s lives.

What is the strangest or most unusual experience you have had at a book signing, author event, or literary festival?
When I was publishing Acqua Toffana, my first novel, I received an anonymous letter, with flowers, during the book signing. The author, in a dubious and “poetic” way  treated me like his partner in crime. I was scared for some days. I felt I was in a Hitchcock film.

A few weeks ago the $10,000 Read Russia Prize 2015 was won by Vladimir Sharov’s Before & During, translated by Oliver Ready and published in 2014 by Dedalus books. The novel beat new translations of novels by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; Sharov is a towering intellectual presence who stands comparison with these greats of Russian literature.

Dedalus prides itself in publishing books which are different and unlikely to be picked up by another English-language publisher. Bizarre, fantastical, intellectual game-playing novels appeal to us, books which are very European in style and content. We use the term ‘distorted reality’ to describe such works, but Before & During must be the most extraordinary novel which we have published in the last 30 years.

Before & During blends Soviet communism with religion, a hundred years of history with the drama of everyday life, and gives a voice to individuals denied one in the Soviet era. The most unusual character in the book is Nikolai Fyodorov the ascetic philosopher, who believed the human race was to be saved by the self generation of its ancestors replacing human reproduction. Indeed the heroine of the novel is the self-replicating Madame de Staël. We start off with the 19th-century Madame de Staël and end up with the 20th-century begetter of the revolution, mother and then lover of Stalin. Tolstoy and his followers for a time take centre stage in the novel, and we learn that Tolstoy’s oldest son is in fact his twin brother whose gestation was delayed and was carried on by Tolstoy’s wife.

Although Sharov’s writing has been described as magical historicism and is full of fantastical occurrences it does not read like science fiction or fantasy. The quality of the writing transcends all else. It is, as Rachel Polonsky writes in a July 2015 article in the New York Review of Books “at times funny, at times so piercingly moving, so brimful of unassuaged sorrow, that it causes a double-take.”

Whatever I say cannot prepare the reader for what he or she will read, especially for readers not versed in Russian culture and history, so get ready to be surprised and start reading.

Our first commissioned translation was Giovanni Verga’s masterpiece I Malavoglia, translated by Judith Landry under the title of The House by the Medlar Tree in 1985. It is the kind of book I find irresistible, like the novels of Dickens, which appeal both to the heart and to the mind. Novels which fit into this category in the Dedalus list include Sylvie Germain’s fantastical The Book of Nights, translated from French by Christine Donougher, Yuri Buida’s The Zero Train, translated from Russian by Oliver Ready and two Italian novels translated by Judith Landry: Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar and Antonio Pennacchi’s The Mussolini Canal.

DEDALUS EUROPEAN CLASSICS/DECADENCE FROM DEDALUS

In 1986 Robert Irwin suggested we do classics with bizarre, grotesque and fantastic subject matter. The inspiration was the French literary fantasy of the 19th c, especially The Saragossa Manuscript of Jan Potocki. This led to a line of books which included The Golem by Gustav Meyrink, La-Bas by Huysmans, Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau, Lucio’s Confession by Mario de Sa-Carneiro, The Dark Domain by Stefan Grabinski, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin and The Maimed by Herman Ungar. Almost counter-culture classics and when we first published them they were considered to be on the margins of literary culture. One of the things we have tried to do with our classic series is to produce the whole oeuvre of a writer so that books which are referred to in reference books are available to read and readers can form their own judgement on an author. So there are for instance 6 books in translation of Gustav Meyrink, 5 by Octave Mirbeau and 6 by J.K. Huysmans.

Gustav Meyrink’s novels are also very much occult titles. My favourite is The Angel of the West Window, which is the first title Mike Mitchell translated for Dedalus in 1991, which combines John Dee and Elizabethan England with Prague, and a twentieth-century story in a spine-chilling narrative. It won the Occult Book of the Year Award. Of the Huysmans title, translated for Dedalus by the Huysmans-scholar Brendan King, La-Bas with its black mass and satanism and Parisian Sketches, a collection of essays about Paris before Baron Haussman changed it forever, stand out. The anarchist French novelist, Octave Mirbeau’s Torture Garden still seems shocking over 100 years later, while the sheer misery of his auto-biographical trilogy – Le Calvaire, Abbe Jules and Sebastien Roch – about growing-up and coming-of age in France puts most people’s unhappy upbringing in the shade.

Mario de Sa-Carneiro is a very interesting writer who committed suicide when he was 26, a poet and friend of Pessoa he left behind a small jewel in Lucio’s Confession, translated for us by Margaret Jull Costa. It is an enigmatic love triangle riddled with madness and jealous, set in fin-de siecle Paris and Lisbon which still seems innovative today. Stefan Grabinski, often called the Polish Poe, is one of the great masters of short-story writing. It is not that he is not well-known in England but he is also relatively unknown in his native Poland. After China Mieville has championed Grabinski’s work in a long piece in The Guardian his stock has risen. Mieville says of Grabinski:’ here is a writer for whom supernatural horror is manifest precisely in modernity – in electricity, fire-stations, trains; the uncanny as the bad conscience of today.’ The Dark Domain collection was translated by Miroslaw Lipinski.

In this vein is Alfred Kubin’s gothic macabre fantasy, The Other Side, translated from German by Mike Mitchell. Kubin was the illustrator of Poe, Meyrink and Kafka and this his only literary work, published in 1908 with his own illustrations, shows that he had little to learn from his contemporaries as a novelist. The Other Side is one of the most popular classic titles Dedalus has published.

Not all Dedalus classic titles fit into into this distorted reality/literary fantasy category and Dedalus’s most praised classic title is The Maias by Eca de Queiroz, in Margaret Jull Costa’s flawless prize-winning translation. One of the greatest of the great, from the golden age of the novel, Dedalus has published nine books by Eca de Queiroz which in 2017 will become ten, when Margaret Jull Costa completes our project with a new translation of The Illustrious House of Ramires. My favourite Eca title is The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers, which was not published in Eca de Queiroz’s lifetime and with its theme of incest and social satire, is a precursor of The Maias.

Another star is the European Classic list is the first German best-selling novel Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen, published in the 1670s, which is a compelling read on The Thirty Years War. Some of the characters, such as Courage and Tearaway gets their own book as Grimmelshausen wrote a number of spin-offs.

Herman Bang’s impressionist novels, Ida Brandt and As Trains Pass By (Katinka) have tragic heroines who deserved better from life.These Danish ‘outsider’ novels certainly leave their mark on the reader’s imagination that one wonders why Herman Bang is so little known. We have published three works of fiction by the Symbolist poet, Georges Rodenbach, with Bruges-la-morte the best known although my favourite is The Bells of Bruges.

CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN FICTION

In 1992 to celebrate the European Single Market as a cultural event Dedalus started publishing contemporary European fiction. We tried to publish two translations from the languages of the then member states. An early star was Sylvie Germain, the most translated foreign author on the Dedalus list with 11 titles. Her early novels had big stories with larger than life characters with a bid dollop of magic realism and for some readers bring to mind the novels of Angela Carter. Bizarre, grotesque fictions which also pull on the heartstrings with some truly horrendous things happening. The Book of Nights, Night of Amber, Days of Anger and Medusa Child are from this period. When Sylvie Germain left France for Prague her writing changed with atmosphere replacing the big stories and colourful characters, with the narrative pared down to the bone. There were a trilogy of Prague novels – The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague, Infinite Possibilities and Invitation to a Journey. Returning to France her writing changed again with more story and character, the novels midway between the early novels and the Prague trilogy. Images have always been important to Sylvie Germain and often her novels are inspired by an image in a painting and French critics have even compared her novels to paintings, dubbing her the Vincent Van Gogh of her generation. The Book of Tobais is a good example. Of the later work Magnus springs to mind, written in fragments, it conveys with great economy of style the horrors of the Holocaust.

Someone totally different was Herbert Rosendorfer, whose first novel The Architect of Ruins, wonderfully translated by Mike Mitchell is a novel in the manner of The Saragossa Manuscript, with a story-within-story as a group of friends get together to play their instruments, waiting for the Apocalypse, in a giant cigar-shaped container. In Germany Rosendorfer is best known for his satire of contemporary German life, Letters Back to Ancient China,which sold more than two million copies. Mike Mitchell’s translation won the German translation prize.

In 1992 to represent Danish fiction we published Glyn Jones’s translation of The Black Cauldron, by the Faeroese novelist, William Heinesen, the first of five books we have published by him. Heinesen gave to the lives of his characters in the tiny communities of The Faroes an epic quality, good examples of this are The Lost Musicians and his historical novel, The Good Hope, considered to be his best novels, although I must admit a preference for The Black Cauldron. We were fortunate to have such a good translator for a minority language as Glyn Jones who also translated for us, Barbara, another Faeroese novel which is one of the most successful Danish-language novels of the 20th century and tells the story of a Moll Flanders-type heroine who marries three clergymen but her unbridled passion leads to disaster. The novel was left unfinished at Jacobsen’s untimely death and so his good friend, William Heinesen, finished it off for him.

Something totally different for us were the four novels of Yoryis Yatromanolakis which we published. They are exercises in style, with for example, his first novel, The History of A Vendetta, written in the manner of a modern Herodotus and his Eroticon, using the style of a medieval love manual. Although a novel about the various ways of having sex, it is such an exercise in linguistic game-playing that it is more cerebral than sexy. The translation by David Connolly is masterful.

Travelling further east we encounter the works of 2 Russian masters Yuri Buida and Vladimir Sharov. For me Yuri Buida’s The Zero Train is one of the standout novels on the Dedalus list, bizarre, grotesque and dark with the flashes of love obliterated by the cruelty which takes place. It is a short novel which packs a powerful punch while Buida’s Prussian Bride, is a long short-story cycle recounting the lives of the Russians sent to replace the German inhabitants of Koningsberg, renamed Kaliningrad in the aftermath of World War11. It certainly is a magical mystery tour into the lives of uprooted people trying to make sense out of their new lives. Oliver Ready’s translation won the inaugural Russian Translation Prize. One could say Buida’s work is unusual until one starts reading the novels of Vladimir Sharov.

Before & During mingles a hundred year of Russian history, communism with religion, the great icons of Russian culture like Tolstoy, Fyodorov, Scriabin and Stalin with the people not recorded by history. Fyodorov’s theory that the world must be saved by regenerating one’s ancestors and not in recreating new generations is at the heart of the novel. Suffice it to say the heroine is the self-replicating Madame Stael, who in her third existence is both the mother, and later, the lover of Stalin.Tolstoy’s eldest son, proves to be not his son but his twin-brother whose delayed gestation is taken over by Tolstoy’s wife. Although focussing on such bizarre happenings makes the book seem like it is a curiosity when it is a major piece of literature, which is both profound, thought-provoking and heart-rendering. Recently Oliver Ready’s translation won the Read Russia Prize 2015, triumphing over new translations of Crime & Punishment and Anna Karenina. Vladimir Sharov certainly deserves to be put in the same company as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. In the autumn of 2016 we will publish his novel The Rehearsals which will add to Sharov’s English-language acclaim.

A novelist very much in the Dedalus mode is Jean-Pierre Ohl, whose game-playing novels have a story-within-a-story framework and blend many disparate elements into a harmonious whole. From Bordeaux he looks towards Britain for his inspiration with Mr Dick or The Tenth Book inspired by Charles Dickens and The Lairds of Cromarty, set in the Scottish Highlands

In 2005 we began publishing Euro Shorts, designed to fill-up the time on a short flight or on a Eurostar journey.The first book in this series is the most memorable, Lobster by Guillaume Lecasble, translated by Polly McLean. Having seen his father devoured aboard the Titanic by Angelina Lobster is next for cooking pot and is put in the boiling water. The Titanic hits the iceberg and Lobster is thrown to the floor. He finds his partial cooking has changed him and he feels sexually attracted to humans and Angelina in particular. He gives the woman who has eaten his father a life-changing orgasm as the ship sinks leading Angelina to bring Lobster with her to the lifeboat. As Nick Lezard put it in the Guardian:’There was a Lobster-shaped hole in world literature which has now been filled by this remarkable work.’

Happily our most successful translation has come in the last few years with Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar (2011) selling over 25,000 copies. It is the first in a trilogy of novels with The Last of the Vostyachs and The Interpreter, on the themes of identity, language and belonging. You learn a lot about Finnish grammar and culture in the novel but it is the quest to belong and its unforeseen consequences which captures the reader’s imagination. It is certainly a book which brought tears to my eyes. Another Italian novel which also did that was The Mussolini Canal by Antonio Pennacchi. It serves up one hundred years of Italian history, and reading it is like eavesdropping on a private conversation and gives an insight into the Italian psyche. There is so much in this novel which is memorable, indeed it is hard not to fall in love with it, which is something the translator, Judith Landry did. I asked her for a short sample for a translation grant application and Judith forgot to stop and translated the whole book.

Anthologies

In 1992 as part of our celebration of the European Single Market as a cultural event, Dedalus began its European Literary Fantasy Anthology Series. Each volume has its jewels, but there are three standout volumes; Austrian, Finnish and Greek. Johanna Sinisalo’s choices and David Hackston’s translation for The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy unlocked for me a literature I knew nothing about, while David Connolly, both as an editor and a translator of the The Dedalus Book of Greek Fantasy, produced a mesmerising volume of Greek fiction, reflecting its excellence in surrealism. For the quality and variety of the contents it would be hard to find an anthology which could put The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000 in the shade. Indeed the critic, A.S,Byatt said it was one of the best anthologies she had ever read in a full page review when it was selected as The Guardian’s Book of the Week.

Summary

There are many wonderful books I haven’t been able to mention or to describe, including The Saragossa Manuscript(Thirteen Days in the Life of Alfonse van Worden) even though Jan Potocki’s book is the inspiration behind most of what we publish. There will be for some readers glaring omissions in my survey and I hope in that case they will post a blog to rectify them. Each period of our thirty years has seen great books published, but I am happy that so much of our major work has been published in the last five years. The best I hope is still to come.

Eric Lane

Jebel Marra, short stories, and writing war
I used to work for a humanitarian aid agency in the UK, and in 2005 I spent six months working for the emergency relief effort in the centre of a war zone in Darfur, Sudan. It was my day (and night) job, unrelated to my writing, and I had no intention of writing about my time there, until I came back. The UK I returned to was full of vast shop windows and adverts, newspapers that said nothing about the place I’d just come from, said nothing about the war, and it was bewildering. I returned to the UK with a head full of questions and rage, shocked at how silent even mass slaughter is when it’s far enough away. That’s when I started writing. It wasn’t fictional, at first. Fragmented vignettes at live literature events, written with something like compulsion. Pieces of memory and broken things that I was holding on to, didn’t know where to place, and at every event people would approach me afterwards and ask about the war, confessing that they didn’t know about it. There were never more than fifty people in those rooms, and it wasn’t enough. I still had questions, and rage, and no idea what to do with it.
How do you write about a war, a vast and ongoing violent struggle, tactical oppression, the tearing apart of whole communities, whole people? How do you write about something that huge? Well, for me, it was with help from a few committed others. Jebel Marra became a single-author collection of short stories, but it wasn’t built by one person.
It was built with a mentor, a very skilled and experienced writer who laid out a path for me and guided me through the early drafts of much of the book. It was built with an editor, the kind of committed, hands-on editor that seasoned writers tell me is a rarity these days. Someone with his eye on the literary potential, someone who could push and encourage in equal measure. It was built with support from a group of fellow writers – novelists, mostly – who knew about stamina and finding words for difficult things.
Each of them helped me write my way through the thicket of questions and rage, the close up personal view of absolute disaster that had thus far spoken to me only in wordless flashes. My way was lit by others, standing beside me while I slowly (very slowly) turned flashes into words, and, eventually, words into worlds, into stories that have their roots in something far bigger than anything I can create.

Jebel Marra is out now with Comma Press

What Became of the White Savage is based on a real-life incident. How did you find out about it and how did the character of Narcisse form in your mind?
I first heard of this story when I was living in the South Pacific, in New Caledonia about twenty years ago. I don’t remember exactly how I became aware of it, maybe from an article in a local paper.
There were only two places in the world where this tale was known: St. Gilles Croix-de-Vie, the village in the Vendée on the Atlantic coast of France, where Narcisse was from; and in Australia, where it was one among many tales of castaways told in maritime circles. But this particular story stood out from the others: its radical nature made it unique. And from Sydney, I suppose it must have made its way to Noumea.
I had forgotten all about it until one evening in 2009. At the time, I was Director-General of the resort of Val d’Isère. I was gazing at the snow-covered landscape, and probably, as Octave says, feeling nostalgic for the skies of the Pacific, when the memory of it came into my head. And I started to write.
Narcisse came to me of his own accord: his character and life story revealed themselves to me just as they do to the reader, as the story progressed. For novelistic reasons, I changed several details, such as the year the events took place, the young sailor’s age, the circumstances of his being abandoned. It wasn’t too difficult to imagine the experience of a terrified young sailor. But describing him after his return, filtered through Octave’s point of view, was more of a challenge.
The novel begins with a straightforward narrative but in fact, more than half of Narcisse’s story is told in the form of letters written by Octave de Vallombrun. Why did you decide to tell the story this way? Is Octave based on a real character?
Once I’d written the first chapter – Narcisse’s first three days on the beach – I realised that maintaining that intensity to describe the days that followed would not be so easy. So I thought I would describe the first three days of Narcisse’s return to our world, as a sort of mirror image of those days on the beach. And to make sure the reader would immediately realise that we had jumped forward in time, I started to write a letter in the style of the period. Then I came back to Narcisse on the beach, and so on. I didn’t try to make each letter answer each chapter exactly. The trajectories of two stories naturally echo each other.
I didn’t have an exact model for Octave, although characters such as Octave, honest men who are curious. . . and wealthy, appear frequently in 19th century literature. Octave’s personality is revealed gradually through his letters. I was really interested in the change he undergoes – from his initial well-meaning certainty to breaking completely with his original way of thinking. I realised after I’d finished that he was more or less a contemporary of Darwin, Marx and Freud, thinkers who took the sciences of their time – natural sciences, economics and medicine respectively – saw their limits and completely rebuilt their foundations. Octave sets out to do something similar. . . without success.
So, in the real story, there is, I’m sorry to say, no Octave. Very few people were interested in this poor sailor, let alone in his memories of faraway Australia.
Narcisse spends seventeen years living in the Australian bush with the tribe that takes him in. Are the people you describe based on any particular Aboriginal tribe? How much of this story is based on historical events?
There were at least two potential pitfalls in telling this story: 18th century notions of the “noble savage”, and 19th century attitudes towards “inferior races”. (To say nothing of 21st century notions of political correctness!) And what’s more, in the book we only see the tribe indirectly, from two points of view: through the fears of the sailor whose dream is to escape; and through Octave’s enquiries as he examines Narcisse’s strange behaviour in search of information.
I’ve always been interested in anthropology, particularly with regard to the Pacific, but I’ve never studied it formally. I could have spent years studying the Aboriginal cultures of Cape York; such an academic approach would have been both interesting and legitimate. But I didn’t try to do that. I’ve said elsewhere that I chose not to out of laziness. Which is true, but there’s more to it than that. The reality of Narcisse’s story is so powerful that the more I learned about it, the more I risked constraining my imagination. I was in danger of being crushed by the weight of reality. I had to put it aside.
So I gave the tribe characteristics borrowed from different cultures around the Pacific – a sort of collage or marquetry picture. Every behavioural trait had to call into question notions that are fundamental to our culture: ideas of private property, sense of community, time, interpersonal relations, power relations. . . The people of the tribe are described as having complex social and family structures, oral traditions, rites, sophisticated geographical knowledge and understanding of their environment, and so on. And at the same time, women’s position in the tribe leaves much to be desired, tensions exist, and so on.
With this in mind I avoided using the word Aborigine and used the vocabulary employed at the time the novel takes place. My “savages” are not real. But I hope that they are believable.
What Became of the White Savage is your first novel, but you have a long career in government administration behind you. When did you start writing and what made you decide to write this novel when you did?
Actually, I’ve always written novels. I wrote the first one when I was seven – it was three pages long. I fear it’s definitely lost and gone! And later, I wrote legal articles, non-fiction books, and two or three novels that were refused by publishers, probably because they were no good.
What Became of the White Savage enjoyed phenomenal success in France, which came as a great surprise even to my publisher. It’s been translated into Korean, Arabic, Croatian, German, Italian, and now into English, soon into Farsi. Above and beyond the story of Narcisse’s adventures, the book suggests that the only happy time in Narcisse’s life was when he lived with the tribe. I think readers today have a deep nostalgic yearning for an elsewhere, that other place they’ll never find.
Since then I’ve written two more books and I’m working on a fourth. I must confess I have a soft spot for the terrifying story of Narcisse Pelletier . . . It’s a novel that can be read by a seventeen-year old as an adventure story, but really it’s more of a conte philosophique – a philosophical tale, with few characters and a straightforward plot, in which readers can find, if they so wish, some reflections on our current perceptions of identity and relationship to other cultures.

Round about the time that I became a teenager my father became an Orthodox priest. He would go out and about in all this priest’s regalia, black robes and black hat, beard like Rasputin, this massive eastern crucifix chained about his neck. You could see him a mile off. He looked like that even if he was going out to Boots to buy toothpaste. I don’t think my mum liked it very much either even though she could be quite stern about her faith too.

I went to a Catholic primary school so God was pretty much everywhere. He was there too in secondary school because the headmaster was a lay-preacher. Priests never visited my secondary school like they had my primary school but a band called Amessiah did play. I had no idea what they were singing about but I thought the guitar playing was great. I loved how loud it was too. I didn’t have pop music at home, in fact we didn’t have a record player. Watching Top Of The Pops was frowned upon. I did have a radio in my room and I was given this old record payer in a suitcase thing that someone was throwing out. I began to discover music.

When I was fourteen or so I went to this Evangelical church which was like a hypnotists’ show. One of the preachers told this story about how once, when they were flying somewhere, they needed cheering up, because their life was not going as it should, when all of a sudden an air stewardess appeared and offered them a seat in business class. It was an obvious gift from above and a sign that he was real. It was a great sales pitch, you could really see it hooking these kids. Then some people started falling on the floor and wailing. It was quite creepy.

My R.E. teacher was a rugged looking old Teddy Boy who was rumoured to be a raging alcoholic. He brought this man in to chat to us about God. He took out this old watch on a chain and said that it had been made by a master craftsman. Then he said that the universe was like the watch, the economies of scale made this plainly ridiculous. By this point in my life I had really had enough of religion, which did not make any sense when compared to all that I was discovering about just about everything. But, it was not until I was at university that I said that I was an atheist out loud. There was a small wood out the back of my halls and I said it out there. I was not smited down. Which I was very relieved about.

Writing Bristol

I spent my youth roaming the hills and streets of Bristol. At
the age of thirteen I was on roller skates at a break neck-speed to Redland, over Kingsdown, backwards down Park Street. Then I traded the skates for a push-bike which I ditched because I preferred walking. All over the city, from Filton out
to Ashton Court, Southville, Henlease, Redland, Cotham.

As a child I played in the trenches of the old Iron Age fort up on the downs. I had my first kiss at the foot of Cabot Tower. For a while I lived not far from where Cromwell parked his army before taking the city from the Royalists. I performed on a stage that
had been raised on the profits of slavery. As a kid I spent hours in the museum, peering into the gypsy’s waggon or being over-awed by the skeleton of a giant deer. It has a face like that of death peering into the world.

I have now lived away from Bristol for as many years as I lived there. Firstly I moved out to the Cotswolds before making the journey East, living in London for a while. I came home to see my parents, but that was in on the M32, then straight back out
again. I thought I still knew the city, but returning to write The Romeo And Juliet Killers I discovered that the geography of my memories was askew. My setting around Cabot Tower wasn’t exactly as I remembered it. The tarred remnants of a neolithic hunter, in the museum, has been superceded by the sarcophagus of some minor Egyptian bureaucrat. An entire park was not where it should have been. Some places I had completely made up. Sometimes I corrected mywonky memory, but other times I preferred it, choosing to montage the reality to the unreality.

The other day I took my family to Fishponds, in Bristol, to
see where the star of my book Daizee lives. She lives in a bedsit in a loft conversion with a skylight in the roof. The house overlooks an old Jewish cemetery. Then I took them to where Franky shows Daizee the way to Australia, from the top of Cabot Tower, and in the distance, in an oatmeal blur, I pointed
out the estate on which Daizee grew up. Later I took them to my old school and the parks I used to hang out in, some of which feature in the book. And what I hope is, that I have, for my children at least, confused the bits of Bristol that I made up with those that actually exist. It all seems very real to me.

King Crow came from a concrete incident and a concrete image. Regarding CAFE ASSASSIN I have a friend, who I’ve not seen for a while, also called Nick. At the time the story was forming in my head, I was seeing quite a bit of him. He was in a very dark place. He was seething with anger. The energy of his hate had a purity that I found attractive on one level and I started to think about writing about a character whose primary motivation was hate. It all came out of that question, why was he so full of hate and the answer in CAFE ASSASSIN is that Nick was betrayed by his best friend and spent 22 years in prison for something he didn’t do. When he gets out he wants revenge. He wants his best friend’s life. He wants everything he has, his wife, his children and his house. It is about betrayal and revenge and sating that hate.

Whenever I was in trouble at school, which was a lot, my mum reminded me how lucky I was with the story of this girl she had taught in a residential unit, whose step-dad sold her to sailors from out the back of his van, which he parked up down the docks in Bristol, when she was three years old. My mum said she was a handful, as were the other girls that she was working with, and that nearly all of those teenage girls were prostitutes. That girl became the template for my character Daizee.

Nothing was done for the real life Daizee even though enough people knew about what was going on. There were no trials, no convictions. There wasn’t even a scandal. I don’t think it was because nobody cared, my mum did for one, but her job was to teach her English, not to keep men off her. That was someone else’s job. My mum did say that the girl and her friends did keep getting themselves in trouble, and that no matter what doors were locked they always managed to sneak out. But like I said my mum wasn’t there when all the nastiness was happening. I guess there was no point in going to the cops because these kids already had reams of paperwork on them and as we now know the cops don’t have the best of records when it comes to ‘wayward’ girls.

In Rotherham the coppers said of the girls that were systematically raped that it was their fault, they chose to be prostitutes, it was their ‘lifestyle choice’. And I thought of the real life Daizee being fiddled with in the back of a van at three years old. Different coppers echoed those in Rotherham in Bristol and then again in Oxford. I am sure it will be echoed again and again as more cases come to light. Then came an echo from that Delhi rapist/murderer, though a Chinese whisper had morphed it into, “A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.” Because men like to blame women or, in the case of Daizee and girls like her, teenagers, kids, for their own downfall.

My Daizee, like the real life one, is not fallen, she is no Eve who tempts Adam, because Adam has already raped her long before she got anywhere near an apple. All looked on by a male God, who in a later story sent his angel to do his business and then after that his priests. And in that religion like most of them there is an onus on female modesty because men can’t stop themselves.

Daizee, like lots of Daizees, has had to live with what life has thrown at her. And she does, with bells on. And that makes her a beautiful handful that needs to be celebrated and loved, even though she would probably tell you to fuck right off. But fuck off, or switch off, you must not do. Especially us men. Because the problem is not Daizee.