Bloomin' Eck, My New Book Is Finally Here!
A little about 1983, a brief extract, and me reading another one aloud...
My second novel, 1983, will be published in the UK tomorrow. In fact, let’s call it today, because tomorrow is nearly here (isn’t it always) and 1983 is already out there in several shops, and possibly in the houses of a few people reading these words right now. Obviously I’m excited about this, as I completely revelled in the experience of writing it and am chuffed to bits with how it’s turned out, but - since it’s my fourteenth book overall - I’m also experienced enough to know that for most authors publication day is generally a bit of an anticlimax. What tends to happen is you sit there, mildly waiting for something to burst into flames, but almost nobody has read your book yet, so you vacuum the house then go out to buy some picture hooks and spiced beetroot, and life goes on pretty much as normal. I did have a launch event scheduled for tomorrow evening at an independent bookshop in my local city but unfortunately that was cancelled a few moments ago due to the rumoured activities of local racists in the area. 1983 isn’t going to hit the bestseller list, probably won’t get made into a film or TV series, and definitely won’t enable me to buy an architectural masterpiece in California then rip it apart for no reason like Kanye West, or even just a house. What it is going to be is another commercially marginal book I’m extremely proud of, which will help me write more books in the future, and hopefully be enjoyed by most of the kind of people it’s written for, except for the ones who are yet to learn to read or be born.
What is 1983? For one thing: not a prequel to 1984. That said, it does concern itself a little with the contrasts between a slower-moving, non-surveillance-themed analogue society and the one we live in now, and what the future used to promise to be, especially for a younger generation. It’s a book about childhood, mining, brilliant women, robots, art, outer-space, gardening, education, the “nearly north” of England, cosmic geology… and alpacas. It’s got numerous narrators: someone a bit - but not totally - like me journeying back into his seven- and eight-year-old brain (I found this curiously easy to do, once I got started), his parents, a Pagan robot maker, a proto version of one of the thugs who are responsible for the cancellation of tomorrow’s event, a primary school headmistress… and ”some others”. An early reader called it “Kurt Vonnegut rewritten by Alan Sillitoe”. I doubt that’s true - I suspect it’s much more like me rewritten by me - but I liked it.
When I go away from 1983, I keep thinking of it as “just a small, silly book”. That might be because it’s set only over the course of one year in the land of my roots and is just 259 pages long, with a linear narrative, while its predecessor, Villager, was set over the course of almost two centuries, sprawled and weaved all over the place and was much longer, and the other novel I’ve written for next spring since finishing 1983 is arguably more epic still. But sometimes small is good. There are a lot of epic jazz and psychedelic records that I love that sound like they come from another planet but there are a lot of two and a half minute autobiographical bubblegum pop songs I love every bit as much. I have discovered I slip into being a bit of a mean snob about my own work, in this case. When I’m not looking directly at it, the occupants of some lofty rear mezzanine of my brain dismiss 1983 owing to its brevity and the middling familiarity of its setting. But every time I go back to it - such as just now, when I was trying to select an extract to post here - I am taken by surprise at how proud it makes me, how much weirdness I was able to thread into its pacy simplicity, how far away from this planet it veers. I’d be delighted if a few of you found time to read it, in our constantly overwhelming, extremely non-1983 world.
Lots of love,
Tom
In all honesty couldn’t decide which extract from the book to choose, by which narrator, so there’s a typed version below and another longer bit, read aloud by me, here:
COLIN
When was love invented? Was it when one dinosaur looked across an inlet in a great swamp and spotted another dinosaur, discerning an indefinable something in its walk and eyes that was suggestive to it of a mutual future that was exciting yet warm, mysterious yet safe. Did that dinosaur then successfully woo the other dinosaur? Did they then live along- side one another in harmony for a number of years, eating the same plants, structuring their life around a shared set of values and goals, living more for each other than they did for them- selves? Did one of the dinosaur couple then, out of the blue, break all the trust that had been established between them, leav- ing the other dinosaur on the floor, with all four of its legs in the air, staring at the sky, reassessing the precise point of existence? Did the beleaguered dinosaur then turn itself back the right way up, dust the dead ferns and insects and crusty vegetable matter off itself and slowly hit upon methods to reassemble its life? Did that dinosaur then meet another dinosaur and try its best to trust again but unintentionally bring some of its paranoia and hurt into the new relationship and teach it to the third dinosaur? Did those dinosaurs then part ways and teach more hurt and mis- trust to other dinosaurs? Did that hurt and mistrust grow exponentially, across species, for millions of years? Did it mutate into bitterness and wariness and cynicism and keep expanding until finally it seeped into some people’s actual DNA, and they were sometimes born with it right there, pumping through their veins, ready so easily to heat up into outright hatred, until finally we were in the second half of the twentieth century and you had a furious man standing on a grass verge in a village in the East Midlands, poisoning some flowers, just because it briefly made him feel better about all the wretchedness that he fundamentally was and diverted him from dwelling on other things, such as his face in the mirror in the morning, with his life written indelibly upon it?
Barrowcliffe trashed my place, but I suppose it could have been worse. I suspect it was carried out with assistance and intended primarily as a warning. The ‘Composted’ on my hand-painted ‘Trespassers Will Be Composted’ sign had been crossed out and replaced with ‘HERE’. Surprisingly witty, I thought. The living-room carpet was a write-off: paint thinner and baked beans and vinegar and at least three other liquids from bottles in the kitchen all over it. Rosa Bosom’s left arm had been snapped off, but that would be easy enough to reattach. The tyres on my bicycle had been slashed and there was a little smouldering pile of ashes in the garden where magazines and books and notes had been incinerated, apparently at random. What I mostly felt was lucky. Lucky that I wasn’t short on money, wasn’t struggling, and this wasn’t the final gust of wind which pushed me over the cliff edge. Many people might not have been so fortunate. Looking back, particularly at the political situation at that point, you see the inauguration of a certain attitude: every man for himself, do what you can to nip ahead. If you’ve got the dosh, you’ve got your cushion, ready to fall back on if the hard times come. If not, sod you, m’duck.
I opted not to call the police. I’d seen Barrowcliffe in the pub, drinking with at least one of the local bobbies. And what kind of spavined leg would I have to stand on, when they accused me of starting it by burgling his shed? Instead, I went to ground, further to it even than before. I wrote. I changed my walking routes, heading away from the village, over a BMX track, past an old gatehouse and more profoundly into the woods. I took my sketchpad and sketched a ruined priory I’d found a couple of miles away. I planned – but did not rush – my escape. I swallowed my original intentions and bought a car from a man at a chicken farm: just a Vauxhall Viva, three previous owners, 63,000 on the clock. I drove it into the city, tried to ignore a smell on the upholstery which put me in mind of straw and amniotic sac. I ate packed lunches in libraries, bit wincingly into thick-skinned apples and watched the goosebumps spread along my arms, bought carbide lamps and Victorian chisels from dingy antique shops on reticent streets. I overheard disparate conversations which soldered together in my mind: ‘I’ve done sixteen fish today . . . I’d shoot the whole ruddy lot of ’em all if it were up to me.’ I saw the clefts in the earth on the mound the city’s oppressed had once climbed to set the old castle alight. I was serenaded by pigeons in a giant equine underpass carved through the sandstone and I wondered why people had not told me about it, wondered why they did not walk around raving enthusiastically about it every day. I witnessed disagreements – disagreements pulsating with little histories, disagreements that sounded to an outsider like uncrackable codes – between trios of men with not a full mouth of teeth between them, then realised that some of them were not men. At the end of the day, when the shops closed, the city felt like the bottom of a glass that too many people had been drinking from.
You can order 1983 from Blackwells here with free international delivery. Or, if you’d prefer, from bookshop.org or Amazon.
Reading your posts here on Substack is a delightful part of my day. Your way with words makes my heart sing and my mouth smile. Thank you Tom for bringing your work to the world.
My head was slightly exploding at the surrealist, yet familiar tone you have woven in your posts that I have come to love and cherish. If this descriptive derivative of mangled bodies, slurpy beverages and bleeting llamas wins you a coveted Pulitzer, we will all be eternally, ceremoniously grateful.