The Drowning - FREE for a limited period

To prepare the way for a new novel, I have set the price of The Drowning to zero at Smashwords. My thrillers are popular, but I'd like to expose my more literary work to a wider audience.

This is a special promotion for a limited period only, so please grab a copy right away if you want one. It is available in the following formats:

.mobi (for Kindle - just add to your "documents" folder via USB cable)
.epub (most modern ereaders except Kindle)
.pdf (good for reading on a PC)
.rtf (loadable in word-processor)
.lrf (older models of Sony Reader)
.pdb (Palm Doc, for Palm devices)
.txt (plain text, but you lose italics and other formatting)

I hope you like it! If you do, and if you feel so inclined, I would very much appreciate your leaving a review, however brief, at the ebook site of your choice.

UPDATE, 25 February: the Smashwords offer is now closed, but for the next few days you may find the book listed for nothing at other retailers.

The subconscious in fiction

The promenade at Selsey

In several posts on this blog I have referred to my belief that an author’s subconscious does most of the heavy lifting. His or her conscious mind is just a willing amanuensis who puts the boss’s ideas into motion.

The subconscious is the big-bellied, smoke-blackened cooking pot where experience gets rendered down, a process that most of us, quite rightly, take for granted. If we didn’t, life would be unlivable. For the artists among us, however, things are a little different. By creating an artefact, the artist (author, painter, sculptor, whatever) is left with something tangible to ponder. A conscious mind is able to survey a product of its subconscious and can try to understand some of its complexities.

My last book, The Drowning, came together almost magically. I had the feeling that it was writing itself. The choice of start-date for the main narrative, July 1965, was arrived at pretty much by chance, but yielded a rich field of circumstance (e.g. the timing of the civil war in Nigeria) which in turn suggested the mechanics of the story. This was the first time I had attempted a full-length novel without a synopsis, and I was pleased by the integrity of the structure that finally emerged.

At this remove, six months after finishing the first draft, I am no longer wholly sure what the book is about. It explores Buddhist ideas about the quest for release from suffering, and compares Buddhist and Christian notions of morality. But under the surface (quite literally, in some respects) more is going on. The opening scene describes a man’s escape from a ruined submarine. In a closely following chapter the agnostic protagonist is sitting in a cathedral; rather against his will, he overhears a reading from the Book of Jonah. My choice of this text did not arise from an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Old Testament: instead I opened a Bible at random and, having turned a few pages, lighted on the opening of that book. Something told me to use it. I was unaware, then, of the congruence between an escape from a submarine and being disgorged by a big fish.

The Book of Jonah is about anger and redemption. An evil deed arising from the escape of the submariner blights the lives of several of the principal characters, especially the heroine’s mother and in consequence the heroine, Elspeth, herself. Elspeth is a Buddhist. Through a selfless adherence to Buddhist morality, she quashes the repercussions of that evil deed and prevents them from doing further damage. It is hinted that, like the proverbial dewdrop slipping into the shining sea, she thereby clears the final hurdle and achieves nirvana.

An influential scene comes early in the book. Elspeth, her sister and younger brother, together with the protagonist (her brother’s tutor) visit the seaside for a day’s bathing. The metaphors there are obvious; what is not so obvious is the choice of Selsey for their picnic.

Selsey is a resort in West Sussex that I know well. However, it is an improbably long way from Winchester, which, somewhat remodelled, and renamed “Alincester”, is the city where Elspeth’s family live. A more obvious choice would have been a resort further west, such as Southbourne. Crucially, though, Selsey has a lifeboat station.

Only when partway through writing the Selsey sequence did I remember that fact. A visit to the lifeboat station fitted in beautifully with the theme of shipwreck and suggested in turn a further tightening of the plot, yet my choice of Selsey as the picnic venue had been directed merely by a vague feeling that it would be right.

Ablution, especially in the form of showers, features unusually often in the story. I only realized this once I had finished, but these are of course a metaphor for baptism, absolution, submersion, and all the rest of it. I describe a shower taken by Elspeth’s bridegroom, shortly before the newlyweds move to Nigeria. While showering he is thinking about his coming job in Lagos. Oil has recently been discovered in the Niger Delta.

Even without the oil, it would have been instructive to be on hand to follow Nigeria’s political development. With it, conditions had become as explosive as the methane now flaring in the skies above the mangrove swamps.

Charles turned off the shower valve and stepped from the enclosure.

Thus the oil – its potential for igniting a civil war – is drawn into the general theme. Fire is the opposite of water. Moreover, turning the valve temporarily cuts the flow, raising the pressure in the pipes: Charles has been having misgivings about his bride. Elspeth in turn feels, at heart, that her wedding was a mistake.

When she arrives in Lagos she has a horrible time. Before she rises above it, she also takes a shower.

The club was air-conditioned, the bungalow also, but the car-ride back made her crave another shower. While standing under the lukewarm sprinkles, she noticed that the bottom of the plastic curtain, where it rested against the tub, had started to go mouldy. The curtain had been new only a fortnight ago.

For “curtain” in the last sentence, read “marriage”. In the last few months I have uncovered more of such stuff, but the foregoing gives you the general idea.

Readers are turned off by symbolism. Allegory has long since gone out of fashion. Yet in constructing a plot, especially a flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants plot like this one, the author cannot help subconsciously building it in. He defers to his judgement, or taste, or whatever you want to call it, and lets it ensure all the arrows are pointing in the right direction.

I submit that the reader’s subconscious picks up these signals. Unless the reader is a student of literature given the job of analysing a piece of prose, the signals usually escape the conscious mind, but they play an indispensable part in making a story satisfying.

Yet it is fatal to the author, while writing, to be too aware of them himself. If that happens the work becomes portentous, its vitality snuffed out at the very start. What the writer needs to produce is an apparently realistic and unpretentious narrative. The conscious mind of the reader enjoys it because what happens is interesting, amusing, or identifiable.

One need not understand why this book or that is satisfying or otherwise: the benefit from a well-made novel is derived silently, internally, moulds itself to the sensibility, and becomes thereby a part of one’s outlook on life – and that, I suggest, is the underlying purpose and value of fiction.

The Drowning

I have just released a new book. The title is The Drowning and the extent about 125,000 words. It is set in England and Nigeria between 1944 and 2015 and represents something of a departure for me in that it is a purely literary novel.

One of the nicest things about independent authorship is freedom from the shackles of genre. Publishers, especially these days, have become timid. They expect their authors to produce more of the same: hence the popularity of series novels. That puts the author in a quandary. Should he continue on the treadmill, writing the same book over and over again? Why is he even bothering with authorship at all? There are many other treadmills in this world, and nearly all of them pay the operative more.

My previous books have all been more or less classifiable, but the classification is arbitrary and restricting. It exists for the benefit of booksellers, not readers – unless they are of that variety that likes to stick with what it knows and regards reading as an activity akin to chewing the cud. Nothing much wrong with that, I suppose, it’s harmless enough, but supplying fodder to such an audience was not really the siren call that lured me into this trade in the first place.

No, I like to tell stories. The setting and the “genre” are important only so far as they feed into and reinforce the narrative. Thus The Tide Mill had to be an “historical novel” because of the level of technology required to make the plot work. The mill itself, its dependence on the moon and tides, its function, its politics and legal status, and its place in the religious beliefs of the time, all act as a framework and a metaphor in the account of human relationships I was trying to portray. On their own, tide mills are not especially gripping for the general reader, and to find out about them you would be better off looking at textbooks.

The Drowning is about conscience, the phenomenon that may or may not be the end of a thread leading into the most mysterious labyrinth of all. Exploring the labyrinth – trying to understand the apparently senseless fact of our existence – is the proper business of the novelist. Of course, on the journey he has to intrigue his companion, the reader. Partly the reader must be entertained and informed, but more importantly he must be offered the chance to compare his own life with that of the characters, to wonder how he himself would react in similar circumstances, and to draw from the story whatever meaning the author has consciously or otherwise built into it.

If a book remains with the reader after he has finished it, then it is a success. I believe The Drowning may be such a book, but giving a verdict on that is not the proper business of the novelist: it is yours.

See first chapter

Review by Ru Viljoen at Goodreads

Dec 09, 2011

Rated: 5 out of 5 stars

This book is beautiful. Romantic, subtle, politically insightful and philosophically insightful.

I always enjoy books that span a lifetime. It makes the reader re-appraise their priorities from a more distant perspective than is usually used.

I would recommend The Drowning as heartily as it was recommended to me.