Meet the Mohocks

The Mohocks were a bunch of upper-class freaks who ran riot through the streets of London in the early eighteenth century, apparently cutting off people's noses and stuffing women into beer barrels and rolling them down hills. It sounds like a Clockwork Orange-type horror-comic fantasy, but apparently (because Wikipedia says so) the Mohocks were real. Made up of aristocratic types who would hang around and get drunk and then pile into the streets to attack random passersby, the Mohocks were one of several gangs who roamed London in the post-Restoration days. It's a terrifying thought: you're just out for a late night stroll around the city when a bunch of hooligans comes screaming round the corner and sticks a knife up your nostrils, evocative in a way of the atmosphere that swirled around during the riots last year, when at times we seemed pretty close to a scenario in which the law was flat-out ignored, with people doing exactly what they wanted, mugging anybody in their way or just lashing out randomly at civilians, with their inhibitions and fear of prosecution by the police completely removed.

Situations like that really make you aware that we live in a delicately-balanced society, completely at the mercy that fear of retribution raises in the hearts of the scumbags among us. At any point our relatively genteel way of life could be destroyed in minutes if bad guys suddenly stopped caring about the consequences of their actions, or if their actions stopped having consequences, as they seemed to on those few nights when Adidas and mobile phone shops were being slaughtered in cities all around England. It makes me wonder what would happen if definitive knowledge was discovered that the end of the world was nigh; if, for example, scientists learned that we were going to collide with a huge, all-consuming asteroid in four years time, and the destruction of the world was a 100% possibility. Would the population be informed, or would governments hide the knowledge? Traditional thought of the last day on Earth is of an inhibition-free funfair, with people running around having a lovely time, shagging as many people as they can, but if we knew we instead had a few years to live, rather than twenty-four hours, society could instead fall to pieces within days. How could police be expected to keep order in the knowledge that there was no reason not to commit crime, no punishment forthcoming? They would try to carry on as normal, but the enthusiasm wouldn't be there to keep society ticking along, and that could be crucial in descent into lawlessness.  The apocalypse would come long before the asteroid struck, and gangs of Mohocks would be roaming the streets looking for blood.

Down the Post Office

I read somewhere recently that you should be careful when writing autobiographically because there can be a tendency to abandon emotionally evolving your characters, and instead just plow through a chronology of events, going "then this happened, then this happened", until you get the story out. This is exactly the way in which Charles Bukowski's Post Office is written, but it breaks the rules and works, and is a really enjoyable easy read. Bukowski is an interesting character and a great example of how anyone, with a bit of luck, can become a writer. For years he drifted through life drinking heavily and working for the American Post Office, writing poetry on the side, before an editor who liked his poems decided to give him a wage for life, as long as he quit his job and started writing novels. A month later Bukowski had written Post Office, and continued as a novelist until his death in 1993.

Post Office is about nothing more than drinking, gambling, shacking up with women, and being annoyed, but it works. When I read Bukowski I usually have Hunter S Thompson's voice in my head, and the two are quite similar in terms of their self-obsession, with their differing choice of drugs the main thing that sets them apart. Bukowski actually makes working for the Post Office sound like good fun in a twisted, endurance test kind of way. It reminds of when I used to work twelve hour night shifts at a pea processing factory: no matter how hellish it seemed at the time, I can't help but look back on the time with a rose-tinted fondness in my heart. It's the kind of book that you can whip through in a couple of days and it doesn't  change your perspective on anything or affect you when you put it down, but sometimes that's just the kind of book you need: a chronicle of a dirty old pervert who gets smashed all day and works all night.

Matilda: The Musical

For someone so ordinarily repulsed by the human singing voice, I have a strange and paradoxical love for West End musicals. Well, to be fair, the thought of seeing many of them (and there are some real rank sounding ones around) makes me run a mile, but when I like a musical, I LOVE a musical. And as Matilda is one of my favourite books of all time, the chance that I would enjoy this one was pretty high.

I can't remember how old I was when I started reading Roald Dahl, what my first book by him was, or why I read his novels (I guess most kids did back then), but I loved him all through my childhood, and of all his characters, I like Matilda best. A couple of years ago I bought the Roald Dahl Complete Collection (you can get it here for £15.99, probably the best investment you'll ever make) and reading the stories as an adult is just as good as reading them as a kid. The wonder, fantasy, and imagination in Dahl is more brilliantly deployed than by any other author I can think of. And Matilda is just such a beautiful tale that reading it makes me remember all over again what a great place the world can be. A world filled with evil headmistresses, hateful parents, torture chambers filled with broken glass, and fratricide, yes, but somehow it's so easy to put all of this to one side and wallow in the wonder and joy of Matilda's wide-eyed view of things.

The musical is just the same. I actually first saw it when it premiered in Startford-Upon-Avon in 2010, and at the time I thought that it was good enough to go to London. The script by Aussie comedian Tim Minchin is superb: it fuses all the best bits of the novel with a bit of extra stuff that weaves perfectly into Dahl's story, and all the songs seem as if they could just as easily have been written by Dahl himself. The Trunchbull is brought brilliantly to life, played lispingly by a burly bloke (Bertie Carvel) and as much a fan of swinging girls round by their pigtails as she is in the novel. All of the actors are great and seemingly tailor-made for their parts, including Paul Kaye (Dennis Pennis) as the shady and stupid Mr Wormwood. It makes me so happy that a new generation of kids are being introduced to a little girl as great as Matilda, and I hope it's performed for years to come.

Call of the Wild

I can feel my primitive instincts yearning to return to the Wild, to go back to Yosemite Park or somewhere similar and stand with no human being for miles in any direction, and howl at the moon or something. I watched 127 Hours the other day, a great film that brought back some vivid memories of my own struggle to survive the wilderness. Luckily, I didn't have to cut my arm off to get out of there; if I had to I would have given it a go, but I'm not sure I would have managed it. I don't think I'm quite skilled enough for that, plus I didn't have a knife so I would have had to use my teeth. The images in the film, the utter barren beauty of the area that the main character explores, made me ache to be out in nothingness again.

Just before I went travelling I read Jack London's Call of the Wild, and it was only last week that I got around to picking the book back up and reading the second story (novella?), White Fang. White Fang is the tale of a wolf born into the wild, but who subsequently becomes owned and domesticated by a succession of humans. London displays the wolf's instincts and feelings phenomenally well, and shows how linked to our primitive inate desires we are. But for me, the main thing that leaps out from the page is the beauty and wonderful loneliness of old America, and old everywhere in turn. This magical place where you can have a second to yourself, where you can turn around and not be confronted with hoardes of people storming past you in every direction. I was in London this weekend (the place not the writer) and the sludge of people was overwhelming when I first arrived, the ache to return to my wild lupine roots stronger than ever: to be back dashing through the mountains, gnashing my teeth as I chase weasels across the land, not a person in sight. To roll in the snow and leap over brooks; to huddle in a cave against the harsh chill of winter; to stalk my prey for miles and then leap into their throats and feel their blood coarsing over me; to make sweet, passionate love with shaggy-haired bitches in the twinkle of sweeping moonlight. I need to leave the city...

Citrus Asphyxia

A brand new short story, Citrus Asphyxia, is now available over at my site for your viewing pleasure. This is a strange surreal, nightmarish story that I've been writing over a long period of time. I initially wrote the opening segment in a violent fever, but couldn't think of anything to follow it with. It was when writing Meet the Veals that I realised the dual-point-of-view could work really well for it, so continued one narrative with ideas from nightmares and old poetry I had written, and intertwined these with a second narrative in the style of hard-boiled detective fiction. I think they go really nicely together to make one big surreal freakshow, inspired a bit by a G.K. Chesterton novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, that I read last year. The story works really well if you listen to Clint Mansell's soundtrack to the film Black Swan, adapted from Tchaichovsky's Swan Lake, when you read it. This is the kind of paranoid rumbling I imagine rolling around in the head of the main character when he thinks his evil thoughts.

I love the challenges and variety that writing short stories throws up. Every time I finish one I aim to concentrate fully on my novel, but there's always another idea for a short story lurking in my mind. I hope you enjoy this one.

The Inner Scotch Monologue

When I’m caught up in a novel I usually spend my time outside of it walking around and talking in my head the way that the main character does, seeing things the way they see them, using turns of phrases that they use. So, since I’ve been reading Porno (Trainspotting II) recently, my inner voice has mostly had a brash Scottish accent and spent its time insulting passersby in the very worst ways imaginable.

I first noticed the extreme effect that getting too involved in a book has on me while reading Heavier than Heaven, a Kurt Cobain biography, and sinking into a deep depression until I finished. I was a student at the time so didn’t have to leave the house, and I didn’t, sitting in my room for three days sulking until I finished the book. I’ve spent time as Holden Caulfield, sneering at everybody that I interacted with, and, quite disturbingly, as Patrick Bateman, flipping between pretending to be an outrageous yuppie and a sicko while walking around the supermarket. I’ve fantasised about being characters from TV and films, like stealthily running through the streets as Jack Bauer, but it’s only with novels that the characters consume me, and change my inner voice as well as my actions. I hope I can create characters that are so well-drawn and powerful that they can mess around with readers’ minds.

Porno itself, I didn’t think was that good. It was a real page-turner and I was desperate to get to the end, but I think that this was mostly due to loving all of the characters in Trainspotting for the past ten years since I first saw the film, rather than anything so great about the sequel. I think I might be more of a sexual prude than a heroin one, because the smack-taking in Trainspotting didn’t bother me but the constant banging-on about sex in Porno did. It used to make me sad that Ewan McGregor and Danny Boyle had fallen out, and so the prospects of the sequel being filmed were slim, but now I agree with McGregor when he says that he doesn’t feel as if it’s a film that needs to be made. Some bits are very good and the love for characters left over from the first novel keeps things compelling, but there’s just too much emphasis put on shock tactics, and once you satiate the desire to know what happens to the characters at the end, there’s not that much value in the book as a stand-alone piece of art. It’s not bad, but it’s no Trainspotting.