NewBlog – Page 48 – Chris Beckett's Fiction

Brian Wilson

I referred to the work of Philip Dick previously as something that I particularly admire. Here is another tortured Californian who I also admire. I’ve seen him perform a couple of times in recent years, on his Pet Sounds and Smile tours of the UK. The beautiful clear voice of his youth has gone, and, of all rock stars, this frail-looking man is surely the most uneasy and vulnerable on the stage, to the point where the audience seemed to me to be not just applauding him, but reassuring him of its love so as to help him keep going. But his music as ever is sublime, soaring, stately, and, despite his abusive childhood and his precarious mental health, peaceful and full of hope and love.

He’s recently reunited with the surviving Beach Boys (his brothers, Carl and Dennis, are of course dead), and recorded a new album. The single ‘That’s why God made the Radio’ doesn’t exactly push out into new musical territory, but still has all the qualities that makes Wilson’s music such a sweet balm. Many tortured souls make tortured art, but with Wilson, it is as as if he set himself to build in music, the peace that was missing from his life.

‘The debt’

What crisis? The whole business can seem a bit unreal if you are like me, and most of the people you know are on salaries, and are not in danger of losing their jobs. But recently I had a carpenter come to fix some cupboard doors, and he told me that he was now only getting enough work for 2 days a week. The following week, the chimney sweep told me that he was getting so little work that he wasn’t sure he could stay in business. I suppose that getting your chimney swept is a pretty easy thing to defer when you’re short of cash. I daresay the carpenter would give it a miss (if he had a chimney), and I daresay the chimney sweep would postpone getting the carpenter in (if that is what he had been planning to do). Which I suppose is what recession is all about.

It’s all about ‘the debt’, isn’t it, about austerity being necessary to pay ‘the debt’. ‘We’ collectively owe a lot of money, partly as a result of the government having to spend billions bailing out the banking system, which was itself too deeply in debt. But who do ‘we’ owe the money to? You’d think sometimes we owed it to aliens on the planet Zarg, who would come down with rayguns and destroy us if we failed to repay. But in fact we owe the money to whoever chooses to buy government bonds, and that tends to be institutions like pension funds, very possibly yours or mine. Not aliens at all. All very strange.

But whoever ‘we’ owe it to, how does it help ‘us’ to repay it, if the carpenter and the chimney sweep lose so much business that they pay little or no tax, and can’t afford to give business to other people?

Words and music

Doing a reading with a musical accompaniment: I’d recommend it to any writer.

This was at Pulp Fiction Bookshop in Edinburgh (a very lively little place with cafe attached), with Southern Tenant Folk Union (a bunch of really talented musicians who play lovely bluegrass-influenced music). I did a couple of readings from Dark Eden. For the second reading, the band cycled round and round the same four bars in the background. It was a bit of an experiment, but really seemed to create tension, allowing long pauses between paragraphs and lines. It was something of a revelation to me, too, having to fit my words around a rhythmic base, and surely the nearest I’ll ever now get to being the frontman of a band.

It’s not all that often done, as far as I’m aware – story-telling to music – or at any rate it’s not a big phenomenon, but the potential is surely huge, when so many people walking around listening to their iPods.

My son Dominic is way ahead of me on this one, by the way, and unlike me, he can do the words and the music. Here is his beautiful The Receipt and Escape.

Narcissus

Here I am, fiddling around with this blog. It made me think uneasily of Narcissus gazing at his own reflection.

I found this picture of him by Caravaggio. I hadn’t seen it before. In the story, as I remember it, Narcissus is a heartless man, who ignores the woman who loves him (her name is Echo) because he is enchanted by the beauty of his own reflection. (Perhaps he was a cousin of Pygmalion, who couldn’t relate to real women of flesh and blood, only the idealised one he made for himself out of stone?)

But in the picture he looks to me as if he feels trapped, as if he wants to pull away. Why doesn’t he do it? Is he afraid that if he looks up and allows himself to see something other than his own reflection, he himself will disappear?

Where do you get your ideas from?

I am a slow writer, and ideas take a long time to brew. The first description of the Eden forest, in the short story called The Circle of Stones (which also includes an early version of a central scene of the novel, and early prototypes of several characters), was published 20 years ago.

At that time I owned an Amstrad computer, the kind with the black screen on which the writing appeared in shining green letters. And I’m fairly sure that this was where I first got the idea from for the Eden forest.

If you write things (and let’s face it, a large proportion of us do spend much of our lives, staring at screens and writing things) your visual field is frequently occupied by patterns of letters. Repetitive patterns seep into your dreams and your imagination. Its the same if you spend the day weeding the garden, or driving, or hanging wallpaper.

Letters on the page have always struck me as resembling forests, with clearings at paragraph breaks. (Somewhere, in some old notebook, there’s a story of mine about people wandering in a winter forest – spiky bare black trees growing out of snow – not knowing that they are just characters in a story.)

The forest of Eden relates to the forests of Earth, in much the same way as the Amstrad screen relates to conventional black letters on a white field. In the Eden forest, the trees, instead of being defined by the light around them, are themselves the sources of light, just like those green letters on the black screen.

So I suppose, in some ways, I have Alan Sugar to thank for that particular idea.

The legend of Eden (2)

God in this story (see previous post) really doesn’t come out in a very good light. Because one woman and one man disobey him, every man and woman for ever more is to be made to suffer.

It’s true, as a matter of simple observation, that the actions of one person may reverberate for generations. One abusive parent may set in motion a chain of distress that is passed on through the family long after he has died. But what would we think of a parent who insisted on meting out punishment to his grandchildren and great-grandchildren for an act of disobedience which happened before they were born?

Even snakes are punished forever, the story tells us, for the actions of that one remarkly articulate snake at the beginning of time. This would be particularly unfair if that snake wasn’t really a snake at all, but the devil in disguise.

The legend of Eden

Dark Eden being selected as reading material for the Green Belt Festival (see previous post) has made me think about the legend of Eden.

I say legend. There are still those, of course, who claim to believe the story is literally true. This is a pretty preposterous claim to make in the modern world (at least by any half-way educated person), but, as I’ve observed before, it takes an almost equally preposterous kind of literal-mindedness to think that, because a thing isn’t literally true, it isn’t true in any sense at all. Clearly this legend has some resonance for me – is, in some way, true – or I wouldn’t want to use it as the starting point for a novel. So what does it mean to me?

I think there are two aspects of the story in particular that have always seemed powerful for me. One is the snake: the idea that even in the most idyllic scene there is always somewhere a flaw, a danger, a threat (like the ‘invisible worm’ in William Blake’s poem, ‘The Sick Rose’). The other is the idea of expulsion: the idea that, for some reason, human beings are cut off from their true home. This is the idea I drew on for Dark Eden, in which a little band of people are cut off not only from the rest of humanity but even from light, and have to live out their lives in the knowledge of that loss.

The same sense of loss, it seems to me, is present in Plato’s notion of humanity huddled in a cave and seeing, not the real world, but shadows on the wall. This rings true for me. It feels like the way things are.

Why it does, is another question. Psychoanalytic psychology would, I think, explain this subjective sense of loss in terms of a child’s painful discovery that parental comfort and love is not always available, that things are not and never can be perfect. That rings true for me as well. In the world of Dark Eden, the particular focus of people’s sense of loss, was their Eve figure, Angela, the mother of them all. Even John Redlantern, who was determined to break away from the past, was particularly devoted to Mother Angela (a police officer from Peckham on her way to goddess-hood), being himself in some ways motherless.

***

Anyway, these reflections prompted me to go back and look at the story as it appears in the Bible. (I was going to say the ‘original’, but in truth, this is surely a story that evolved over many thousands of years before it was ever written down, and it shares obvious characteristics with other creation myths in other traditions, suggesting a remote common ancestor. As I’ve observed before, stories have a life of their own. They travel, they have adventures, they change their clothes, they make new friends…)

What struck me immediately about the version in Genesis is its mythological, child-like, fairytale-like quality. God is pretty much human. (He walks in the garden in ‘the cool of the day’. He appears surprised by events). The snake is a talking animal. (No suggestion that it is anything more.) And, much as Norse mythology offers fanciful explanations for everyday things like the morning dew (it is the world weeping for the God Balder) or the tides (the result of a prodigious drinking feat by the God Thor), so the Eden story offers explanations for why snakes crawl on the ground, why women hate snakes, why childbirth is painful, and why farming is backbreaking work.

And, just as in fairytales and other mythologies, ludicrously obvious things are somehow overlooked for the sake of the story (I think of the Norse legend of Balder, in which the goddess Frigga secures a promise from everything in the earth and sky and in the sea not to harm her son, but doesn’t get round to securing it from mistletoe, which lives neither on the ground, or in the sky, or in water), so here God plants a fruit tree that he apparently doesn’t want people to touch, right in the middle of Eden.

But above all what struck me was God’s motive for expelling Adam and Eve from Eden. It really isn’t because they have committed a terrible sin (how can you commit a sin before you have acquired the knowledge of good and evil?) but because, by eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, ‘the man is become as one of us’ and must be expelled ‘lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’. The expulsion is the act of a jealous God heading off a potential rival.

Above all, what strikes me about the story, on re-reading it, is that it isn’t just about loss. It is also about gain, about people moving from a baby-like or animal-like state to become adult human beings. Which is surely a good thing, and surely something that had to happen, and surely the reason why, if there was a God, he or she would plant a Tree of the Knowlege of Good and Evil in a place where, sooner or later, someone would surely decide to try the fruit, talking snake or not.

So the two elements that were most powerful to me – the loss, and the snake – seemed on re-reading to be far less central than I had remembered them. The great thing about these kinds of story, with their ambiguities and their layers, is that we can different things in them, each time we look. (The great thing, but also the dangerous thing. You can mine misogyny from this story if you want to, it seems, though I can’t myself see that Eve is held much more to blame than Adam. You can even apparently, though this really does require considerable ingenuity, derive the idea from it somehow that humankind is so wicked as to deserve eternal torment, after death as well as before it.)

***

Could there have been a real historical moment, which in some way corresponded to the Eden myth? I suppose it would have been millions of years ago, somewhere in Africa, when some proto-human ape, for the very first time, had some dim glimmer of a insight: ‘This world isn’t just about me, my desires, my instincts. Other creatures have feelings too.’ For such an insight, surely, is the real first step towards a knowledge of good and evil?

But of course that wouldn’t be a one-off event. It would happen again and again. It still happens now.

Dark Eden and Green Belt Festival

I was very pleased to learn this week that Dark Eden has been selected as the ‘Big Read’ book for the Green Belt Festival this year. It’s quite an honour.

This support for my book comes from an unexpected quarter. This is a Christian festival. Dark Eden (like The Holy Machine) obviously draws deeply on Judeo-Christian tradition (one reviewer described the main character John Redlantern, as Cain and Moses rolled into one), but it isn’t a Christian book. It will be interesting to see what festival readers make of it.

Reflections in this blog (some more articulate than others) on my relationship with religion, can be found: here (‘Batter my heart’), here (‘The Christmas story’), here (‘From Bodhisattva to St Josaphat: the adventures of a story’), here (‘A Buddhist temple’) and here (‘Science fiction and religion’).