Monday, November 02, 2009

Bon mot for the week

"They say there's a good book in everyone. Unfortunately, with most people, it's buried under the four or five really terrible ones that they have to write first."


Froog

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9 comments:

JES said...

Reminds me of an old(ish) New Yorker cartoon. A guy in a hospital gown is sitting on an exam table. The doctor looks at him and says, "That novel inside you? I'm sorry, it has to come out."

I always wondered about authors who made a huge splash with their first book, especially if it was something unusual: did they have the "novel I put away in a drawer" experience? If someone went rummaging through Joseph Heller's old papers, would they find the classic newbie novel about a tortured young author whom no one understands, least of all the lady he has admired from a distance for all of three months?

November 02, 2009 3:39 PM
Froog said...

Hmm, how about "tortured middle-aged author... and the lady he has admired from a distance for three years"?

No, increasing the quantities doesn't make it any better, does it?

November 02, 2009 4:22 PM
Froog said...

I am currently kicking around a thing inspired - fairly obviously, at least to me - by a bunch of things I was musing on last week: The Trial, Funes the Memorious, Cool Hand Luke, The Matrix. Can you see where that goes?

I quite like my opening paragraph, though...

November 02, 2009 4:24 PM
stuart said...

"Can you see where that goes?"

I absolutely can not. But I'm intrigued...

November 03, 2009 12:51 AM
JES said...

I'm with Stuart.

November 03, 2009 3:46 PM
Froog said...

Well, I'm usually very reticent about discussing my "serious" writing ideas, particularly so early on in their gestation.

But, since you've both asked so nicely...

And since I think there is just about no danger that even regular Froogville readers will happen upon this comment... and, even if they did, it will be such a span of years before this thing gets written, taken up, published, etc. that no-one would remember any 'spoilers' they encountered here... and since the finished product will probably be very different from these initial sketches anyway...

here goes.


It's basically a prison story - but, as in Kafka, it's a world somewhat divorced from our conventional reality and stripped of all identifying features. Although there will be quite a bit of "action" (one or more attempted breakouts, a riot or prisoner demonstration, a fire... and perhaps a flood), it's primarily a psychological piece. A key feature of the prison routine is the regular interrogation sessions each prisoner undergoes, where members of the staff question them in great detail about seemingly random and unimportant events in their past lives, particularly about moments of great emotional impact. I envisage trying to keep it fairly short - more of a long novella - to try to avoid taxing the reader's patience too much.

I am quite tempted to eschew any sort of resolution, and leave it as an enigmatic, Kafka-ish fable. But I fear dear old Franz has already done that far better than any of us ever could. So... I have this idea that in the last third or quarter of the novel, there will be a dramatic transition where we do start to understand what this world is all about.

And the scenario is this. This is a far future where organic life has long since become impossible and Mankind survives only through facsimiles of human consciousness within a computer-generated virtual world. Unlike The Matrix concept, the computer here is entirely benign, and there is no 'real world' to escape to. The virtual life within the computer is all that there is.

And even this has come to an end. The computer has suffered some kind of catastrophic malfunction which has erased 'the world'. The prison and its inhabitants are all that it has been able to save. As well as having lost many of the physical details of the former virtual world, the key deficit the damaged computer has suffered is that it has lost the ability to 'read' the subjective states of the human consciousnesses within the program. The computer is trying to reconstruct the virtual world for the surviving 'humans', but in order to do so effectively it needs to understand their emotional experience of the world and how they interact with it. So, the relentless exploration of emotional memories is seen as necessary to achieve this. (A corollary to this pressing imperative is that dreams are distrusted as random distortions of reality, and any attempt to create fiction is savagely punished; only 'real' memories are seen as valuable to the reconstruction.) The computer has created a prison as its 'liferaft' environment partly because that's about all it is currently able to do, but also perhaps because this is a situation that forces people to turn to their memories of the past as a means of survival.

People begin to lose confidence that the reconstruction of the virtual world will ever be accomplished; many sink into despair and suicide (there is no 'outside' the prison; the handful of exits lead only to a void; anyone who chooses to step through instantly ceases to exist - 'permanently deleted'). Well, this is the senior prison staff, the interrogators, who know the situation with the computer - but I think I will allow some of the prisoners to 'cross over' and be promoted to being interrogators.

My ending came to me last night. It is very, very bleak (you thought the above was bad?), but also very calm and simple, and, I hope, very beautiful - essentially it's about the acceptance of death.

November 04, 2009 12:41 AM
stuart said...

Sounds like the Leonard Cohen of novellas, and probably not to be read in conjunction with said artist's moody tones in the background.

I like Cohen's stuff, btw.

November 04, 2009 1:44 AM
JES said...

Ooooh.

Hope Moonrat stumbles across this; it sounds like something right up her alley: smart, enigmatic, thoughtful... (Well, you might need to work in some Oriental pop-rock videos, too.)

Hmm. Any jokes? (It's hard to imagine your going on for too many words with an utterly straight face.)

November 06, 2009 6:14 PM
Froog said...

No, I don't think there are going to be any jokes at all. Kafka is often pretty funny, in a morbid kind of way, but I don't want to seem to be imitating his style. Ditto Leonard Cohen.

I'm particularly concerned to avoid there being anything funny about the computer (human-like computers usually end up being a little humorous, somehow - like the one voiced by Kevin Spacey in the recent Moon; even homicidal HAL has his lighter moments, "I know I've made some poor decisions"). I want there to be pathos with the computer, but no humour. I think it's going to be trapped in a solipsistic nightmare: it's not aware of anything outside of itself; it doesn't know what's happened to it; it only knows that it's losing function, that it's dying.

Is it possible to write a book with no humour at all? An interesting challenge! But I think the answer is probably no.

Actually, I envisage the protagonist as being quite a witty chap, and there is some humour in the interrogation scenes I've sketched out. But I want to keep things as bleak as possible.

The central moral dilemma the prison's inhabitants will face is whether to keep on striving towards this remote - perhaps impossible - dream of recreating the outside world, or whether they should devote their efforts instead to trying to make a better world for themselves inside the prison.

Ultimately, though, I deny them even this choice, because the computer's functioning deteriorates so far that it can't even maintain the prison world any longer. The food stores are no longer being regenerated, so they all face starvation. But there is a 'happy' ending, or at least a calm one (inspired, curiously enough, by two apparently very disparate influences: Soylent Green and Stonewall Jackson).

November 07, 2009 4:46 AM

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