Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "dostoevsky"

This is my record blog - two! "Blog" is such an ugly word, so full of awful tones because of the l and the g that I'm pretty reluctant to use it, but it's earned its place...it reminds me of "nag" and thus of a Kinks song from the 60s: "stop your nagging woman/naggingist woman in this land..." like blogging is designed to drive the entire planet mad and not just those reading blogs. This may well be true.

Over the past week or so I've been following a "blog tour" by the excellent human being who does the covers for my books, Joleene Naylor. Joleene, who has commented on the first number of this blog, is also an author of "vampire lit" and has done this tour to promote number four of a series she's doing. Before I read the last two of these, I confess I summarily dismissed every vampire book after Bram Stoker's Dracula, which was written rather a long time ago. As per usual with the not so excellent human being who is myself, this was yet more arrogance. Jo's books, which can be found on Goodreads and on smashwords and elsewhere, are well outside what I had considered contemporary vampire literature - that is, a genre beneath consideration, definitely beneath my chosen genre of the thriller, not adult, without hope of redemption.

This is actually all untrue. Jo's books achieve what I would like mine to achieve: they fulfill the requirements of the genre, but contrive to surpass them too. The series she's doing isn't finished, and I think her writing has improved as she's gone along and will improve yet. They are adult, and not just because they are full of sex and violence. Adulthood involves more than that.

Naturally, her achievement makes me think of ways I might be able to improve my own work. The book I am writing now has been influenced a lot by the reading I did for my last book, The Russian Idea, in particular Dostoevsky. While I really do have enough humility not to compare myself with Dostoevsky, some of the qualities of his mind are like mine: he was fascinated by crime, and wrote what I would call intellectual thrillers. My aim when I began was to do the same but I never thought of Dostoevsky's works while working out my aims, but rather other writers like Dashiell Hammett and Graham Greene. Dostoevsky, who is as removed in stature from these writers as they are removed in stature from me, worked out ways of addressing "the big issues" that have given me some ideas for the way I am approaching my current book. In particular, Demons, but also The Brothers Karamazov and even The Adolescent have influenced how I am structuring this book, its characterisation, and its overall perspective, or if you like, its theme. At the mo I am approaching 30,000 words.

But while in one sense this makes it more exciting to do, to write, in another it makes it harder, and makes me more aware of my limitations as a writer. The first bits of this new book are terrible; the writing is really drab. The second draft is going to be much more of a drastic revision than earlier books. There are other things too - there will be more characters and more complexity than my earlier books, and this makes things more difficult in writing terms. So while the working title is Kaos maybe the reality is too!

But while I'm sitting there thinking Dostoevsky, I'm also sitting there realising that Joleene Naylor has incorporated many of the elements I am trying to get into this one, without making it seem hard at all. That gives me a simultaneous feeling of hope and despair.

There you have it. This one is gynormous so worth more than the first one - let's say a seven star number. Go well.

Ah, blog number six! It's mostly about writing, just like the other ones, and this time is about my favourite writer: the Bard himself, William Shakespeare.

It grieves me to admit it, but Shakespeare is not for everyone, even if, as Jonson said in his piece in the first folio, he is for all time. There are people I have tried really hard to interest in Shakespeare - talked to them, taken them to plays, given them authoritative and easy-read editions, done everything I can think of except pass them a Classics Illustrated, and they just don't care. Maybe it's me.

To me, Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever, in any language and in any genre - fiction, drama, poetry, non-fiction...that is, even in the types of literature he never tried, he outshone those who did and do. "Greatness" is a funny word, and by it I mean (in writing) that the work will be just as Jonson said, for all time; so far, that has been true of Shakespeare. Successive generations have discovered and rediscovered him, and I don't see any reasons why future ones shouldn't.

Being lucky and writing in English, a language of incredible adaptability that has now become the er lingua franca of the world, can't have hurt the Bard. And it is also true that at the time he was writing, the language was changing fast, incorporating an explosion of new words that were appearing to describe new things and places that the rising British Empire was meeting and greeting. But there was more to Shakespeare than being in the right place at the right time; others were also. Some of them were very gifted, and we remember them: Marlowe, Donne, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Tourneur, and others. But even in his own time, Shakespeare stood out. Jonson was not alone in seeing this factor in his talent. He was better than the others simply because he was better. Ha! A genius.

When I read Shakespeare, I am aware that I am in the presence of this genius, even when it lets its bearer down. Two Gentlemen of Verona, for example, is a nasty, misogynist play, whose anti-woman attitudes generations have tried to explain away. The Merchant of Venice, despite its deeply moving portrayal of Shylock, is nonetheless, as the Arden edition I own makes plain, anti-Semitic. That it is not so anti-Semitic as Marlowe's Jew of Malta is beside the point.

The point is that Shakespeare's genius rose even above his own limitations, so that Shylock remains a great creation despite the Jew-baiting. Not all the plays are perfect in other ways - structurally, thematically, historically...it doesn't matter: the deep penetration into the reality of the human condition remains, and re-reading and re-seeing the work can bring new insights, fresh understanding.

What with all that you'd think I'd have pumped the Shakespeare references through my own work, no opportunity lost. Sadly, this has not proven to be the case. One of my novels, Savonarola's Bones, has a big Shakespeare component, but I don't regard it as anything like my best book, though the Shakespeare aspect seems fine to me. Another that involves a man searching for a lost Shakespeare play is to me unpublishable. The one I'm working on now has a major bit "pencilled in", but I haven't got to it yet and may change my mind.

Well, it does puzzle me. Giordano Bruno, Savonarola, Celine, Berdyaev, Dostoevsky - they all get there, no problem. And the writers among them stand tall for emulation. But not William S. Sometimes I think that the reason Shakespeare is harder to make work into one of my books is that he is too big to handle, and there might be something in that. Then I think that it's because he was primarily a playwright, if a poetic one, and I write novels. There might be something in that too, but...

My plan now is to make good with the Bard this time. The book I'm writing now owes a lot to Dostoevsky, but not in the sense of discussing him as it was with The Russian Idea, which features a very large helping of the great man.

There is a let-off too, that I do incorporate Shakespeare into my books in my thinking and what interests me and how I express myself and so on. A pale version, without doubt, but a version even so. But I'm not going to flatter myself like that. It's probably not even true.

Whatever, Shakespeare is worth another visit another time. Hope you have enjoyed this one.

This one is another five star effort, but if you don't like Shakespeare and have reached this point, have another two or three. They're free to a good home.

"Popperian" is a word. It is not quite so exotic as "Bohm-Bawerkian" but it is nonetheless pretty impressive according to me. It would be great to work either or both into my fiction, and perhaps I will manage it one day.

Naturally it would be great to discover in a future life looking down on some admiring soul as she or he writes "Evansian" (pronounced e-VAN-sian, thanks) and love her or him for it. Is this likely to happen? No. My paltry contribution, if any, to literature and the life of the mind is a shrunken pea next to these two great intellects. This does not worry me, though it does worry me that I may not reach out and touch the people I would like to touch through my writing. Like all writers, I write to be read, and in the vast seas of literature now washing around the planet, it is not easy for one's public - assuming it exists - to spy what a writer has to offer and snap it up, sharks for style...

Popper must have known he would have a public when he was writing the book that led to his fame - The Open Society and Its Enemies. This amazing extended essay - my version came in two volumes, each with an elaborate set of notes in tiny print to back up the main text - took the stick to Plato, Hegel and Marx, and anyone else the future Sir Karl had in his sights while he toiled away at Canterbury College in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Popper's book was not published till after the Second World War, but had an immediate effect, particularly in relation to Plato, whose reputation has never really recovered from the trashing Popper meted out. Popper's basic thesis was that thinkers who advocated closed systems, with roles attached to various strata in society - as for example in Plato's Republic - were enemies of freedom and dangerous to society. Of his three targets, he had the greatest sympathy for Marx, who he saw as motivated by the harsh conditions for the vast mass of the humanity around him in his time - but, he believed, not merely wrong, but seductively wrong in the worst possible way. Nowadays even Marxists must sympathise with Popper's position in the wake of Stalinist atrocities reflected wherever that monster's example has held sway - Mao's China and Saddam's Iraq but two...all accounting for millions of deaths.

What Popper argued most forcefully was the unknowability of life, the messy, haphazard way things happen. Supposing an inevitability to social development, he said, was wrong in theory, and terribly wrong in practice. Dostoevsky's prophetic novel Demons, showing ideologues ruthlessly condemning innocent people to try to fit reality into the mould of their ideology, comes to mind.

Popper's argument about society was a correlative of his ideas about science, that gave his name its "ian". But it is the social aspect that is most compelling to me - even if, as some may say, he really got it wrong about Marx. According to this view, Marx was betrayed not by his own ideas but by their interpretation by his presumptive followers, be they "vulgar Marxists" or worse, Stalinists. Marx never claimed to know what socialism would be like, this argument runs, on the unsurprising grounds that since it was an entirely different kind of society, he would be unable to picture it. And he was careful, as his friend Engels was careful, to point out that "relapse" from a later stage of civilisation to "barbarism" was always possible: like Spengler later on, they recognised that societies rise and fall, and what this might imply. There is some force to this argument though there is also a great deal of merit in the criticism that Marx wanted to have it both ways; "socialism is inevitable, but I don't know what it will be like" sounds kind of weird really.

To me, trying to figure out the right way to live, to have a philosophy that sorted things out, Popper has been a shining light. He allows me to see life in all its astonishing, hilarious and tragic uncertainties and dimensions, to take in what is worthwhile in thinkers like Marx and Plato - he could find nothing at all virtuous in Hegel - while not falling prey to dogmatism. And when I am writing, or working on writing, Popper's steely gaze scans my lines as I try to reflect my ideas in interesting stories. This has worked out - or not - in different ways in all my books. The Russian Idea, my most recent novel, shows something of a Popperian at work in Vladimir, Nadya's father, while Kathe, the heroine of The Kleiber Monster, is meant to reveal the agonies of the Popperian, existentialist reality. In neither case does Popper come into it as a name. Nor does he figure explicitly in any of the others.

Whether Popper would approve or not - he died seven years before I first put e-pen to e-paper - his example shines for me in another way. He stood for things, at a time when doing it was difficult intellectually and dangerous personally. But even if this weren't true, his ideas are important, it seems to me, for any writer wanting to deal with ideas in any way at all. Many writers are in his debt without ever having heard his name.

As for stars and lollies, I reckon a Chupa Chup for anyone who's got this far, but ten yellow and four purple stars that may be stuck on the case of the PC. Thanks for reading.

This blog is about writing, and for the most part it's been about the writers and thinkers who have influenced me as I've gone along. There are more of these than I've written about so far, but rehashing the past, while interesting to me and I would hope to those who drop in to read these slim offerings, is not going forward really.

And my thinking has been zapping along in different directions lately prompted by all these posts about the past.

My new book, which is just shy of 50,000 words, has the working title of Kaos. Its theme came to me while I was working on my previous book, The Russian Idea, which dealt a lot with Russian religious philosophy, in particular the thinking and beliefs of Dostoevsky and Nikolai Berdyaev. Berdyaev wrote a book with the same title as my novel.

Over about a year before and while writing The Russian Idea I read a lot of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I had not read for a long time, or had never read: Berdyaev was a very prolific writer and I read or reread at least ten of his books, and many of his articles, while reintroducing myself to Dostoevsky through several of his masterpieces and newly through his journalism, and some biographical accounts. Sinking into a writer or thinker in this way can give the feeling for the mind of the person in a way that reading a single book, or reading a book now and again, can not do. My immersion therapies in writers and thinkers tell me that you can come to feel you really do understand what was going on in the mind of the person...and when you don't, when you are troubled, prompts you to keep going. There is a nagging feeling that something eludes me about Shakespeare, and that adds to the mystery of the man, and encourages me to keep reading him, and about him, and his time, and the intellectual movements associated with him, or even alleged to be associated with him. Ditto "secretive" writers like B Traven and Celine.

There is a lot to this: questions of language, its "grammar" and history, of translation, of attitude, of cultural nuance and perceptions, and the more you go into it, the deeper you go, the more amazing it turns out to be. Take one example of this: "a" v "he":

In the Arden edition of Hamlet edited by Harold Jenkins, there are numerous examples of "a" when "he" or "it" is meant. In a note, Jenkins says the "a" is a colloquial rendering of "ha" for "he" that was common in Elizabethan drama. To get this, both the "a" and the "ha", to bring it into oneself, to live with it, so that one reads or hears it spoken in performance as natural and "correct" (because it is), is to bring the Elizabethan age, in this intimate if tiny aspect, into one's heart through imaginative understanding. As I have written in an earlier post, it means not only that Shakespeare reaches out across the centuries to communicate with us, but that through this kind of understanding, we are able to "talk back", to respond creatively. It's teriffic! It's thrilling! We are taken out of our time, delving deeply in another, only to find, when we surface, that we are in our own place but with an enriched understanding that spans the centuries while telling us something about "now" and about ourselves. That's what being "universal" - "for all time" as Jonson had it about Shakespeare - means, sez me.

This is a long way around to get into the aura of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I was living in while writing The Russian Idea but may help explain how while writing that book, I was prompted to want to write another one by my feeling for the moral universe of this pair, in particular Dostoevsky, and to want to write a book something like he might want to write today (so say I) - not in terms of his genius, which of course I do not share, but in terms of his concerns, which I do, even if I find some of his urges unpalatable.

This is not the first time one of my books has been prompted by a previous one. The Kleiber Monster led me to write another book, Tobi's Gift (unpublished) because I felt I had not dealt with something frontally enough. And that led me into new places that prompted Savonarola's Bones.

Demented, however, the book that followed Savonarola's Bones, was not prompted by its predecessor, but sprang out of another set of concerns and experiences. What this says to me is that each successive novel is not, or not necessarily, the "sum" of an author's life to that point - in style, in theme or focus or what have you, it may not only not be an advance, but may even be worse than earlier work, and often a "sideways shift" into something new and different, but not necessarily better. Second novels are said to be the most difficult books for fiction writers, as the first one may all but leap from the mind to the page, and many second efforts are disappointing to the public as well as to the writer. Evilheart, my second novel (the first is unpublished), was very hard to write, and despite many revisions over a decade, is far from perfect. Though I think in some aspects it is an excellent book, in others it remains very disappointing to me.

But even later works can be poor. Raymond Chandler's last book for example must have been an embarrassment to him, and is certainly so to his memory. Any writer would - or at least should - find that worrying. Certainly Kaos is worrying me in that sense: much of the first draft seems quite shockingly written, and I know that later drafts are going to be pretty hard work if the thing is going to be worth reading, and hence worth bringing into public view.

So I am not sure about this one. The premise is good, and as with my other books, has something to say about the world around us and how we might navigate our way through the sometimes tortuous moral maze that can be any individual's life: the choices that confront us, the temptations we are asked to avoid, or invited to sink ourselves into, never to emerge...as I write, I am not sure if the anti-hero becomes a hero, or if he is a hero who becomes an anti-hero: this delicate balance is something that ultimately is going to define the book, and understanding how to express both of these elements of the human personality warring within an individual, so that one emerges at the end to vanquish the other, is the greatest challenge in writing I have ever faced: words that, as it were, "face both ways". Is that Dostoevsky peering over my shoulder, shaking his head in vigorous disapproval, wagging his finger at my poor offerings? Perhaps. I am trying my best, Fyodor! What's that you say?

If you are reading this, you can award as many stars to yourself as you wish, provided that none of them is purple.

This blog is about writing and this is the twenty-fifth post, twenty-sixth if you count the “blog hop” immediately preceding this one on wordpress, which I am not really. Twenty-five is roughly twenty-four more than I thought I’d manage to finish, so it is something of a milestone for me if for no one else. There are people with blogs who seem to write a dozen a week or even more, and many of these are thoughtful and creative. So I am but a tyro.

Till now, what I’ve mainly tried to do is discuss the people and ideas shaping my thinking as I’ve gone about writing my books. To my surprise this has been fun most of the time, and the process has helped clarify what I had previously imagined was already clear. This may explain why I have kept going far beyond what I thought I could do.

The previous post was again about Celine, the French writer whose three “pamphlets” containing anti-semitic themes ostracised the once-lion of twentieth century literature. It was a hard post to write, and though it is ok, I was far from happy with it when I admitted defeat and pressed the “publish” button.

Partly this stemmed from the many ideas I got while writing it – ideas that went in and out of the text not seldom, about writing, about why people write, and why people read, especially fiction, and how those feed into more fundamental questions about life as it “really is”. There are not surprisingly relationships there that run deep and give complexity a good name. As a writer, I can probe my own motivations and confess that I write because I need to – because I feel compelled to do it, even if that is not entirely satisfactory as an answer: there is a question implicitly raised by it (“All right, why are you compelled?”) that no amount of soul-searching may satisfy…. Anyway it is true I’ll write till I die or at least am no longer physically capable, whether people read my books or not. Readers are by contrast not compelled – they don’t have to read (or I don’t think so). There is moreover a great range of means to satisfy whatever urges they might have – escape, or knowledge for example: films, television, games.* Fiction – the novel – is not guaranteed an audience.

The novel is a relatively recent phenomenon; that is presumably why it is called a novel. It is true that there are traces of fiction in western civilisation going back a long way – to Aesop I suppose, and beyond, if we consider fiction to have its roots in fable and myth. Asian civilisation had novels, or what nowadays pass for novels, for a very long time before the novel became an established form in the west: Monkey in China, and Tale of Genji in Japan, for example.

The novel in the west really began in the 18th century and didn’t become a wild success till the 19th. Yes there were novels in Shakespeare’s time – Greene’s Pandosto was the model for The Winter’s Tale – but unless one is a specialist, no one today goes near them. Before that there were “tales” – by Boccaccio, Chaucer and others. But we are really, as readers and writers, following conventions shaped with Fielding and Defoe and their kin and codified, embellished and expanded by a large number of 19th century masters – Austen, Balzac, Dickens…A great deal of this has to do with technological advance, and the sudden availability of cheap magazines and books, and with the literacy that went with it. Where in 1600 the way to reach a wide public was on the stage, by the mid-19th century at the latest the printed book had become a mobile theatre, available wherever you happened to be, whenever you happened to want to crack it.

Talking like this risks Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concresence” – explaining the history of human thought by materialism. It’s not like that at all. Reading is the most complicated skill humans typically possess, but why they read is different, especially as I think people read novels for the ideas in them, even if they don’t recognise that is why they do it. Fiction is morality writ fab – and “morality” is really philosophy. All fiction, whether it is genre fiction or not, is a kind of philosophical treatise.** The process of “reasoning” is presented as a dramatic process, a commentary on life that is at bottom philosophical, even by definition philosophical. In terms of the novel most “how-to” fiction-writing books will advise authors to have a “premise” before starting to write: a philosophical proposition, though few would consciously acknowledge this. A novel’s premise doesn’t have to be a statement for all time about everything, just for the novel itself. Nonetheless, it is a form of philosophy. The premise for Kaos, the novel I am writing and finding hard going at the moment, is “The road to hell is paved with fun”. Plainly, this is not true all of the time, or perhaps even very often: but in this particular book it is true because the “author as god” (me) decrees it.

When this occurred to me, this idea of the novelist as philosopher, whether s/he likes it or not, it was a bit embarrassing. The thought “You mean you’ve only just realised this, as you work on your eighth novel?” jostled with “You mean the author of a cheap trashy romance, say in the Mills & Boon class, is a philosopher?” The answer to both these questions is yes and no.

Naturally, I have regarded my own work as something beyond Mills & Boon, and I have thought of my books as “novels of ideas” – as in the post about “wit”, I have always had a serious purpose, “something to say”. But the notion that every writer including every trashy romance or hard core porn author is by definition a kind of philosopher is very appealing to me, humbling and exalting at the same time.

Put this way, it is so obvious you’d think it scarcely needs saying – but it does. The other day I picked up a book by a man named G Wilson Knight, a Shakespeare scholar, who in 1930 rocked that narrow slice of intellectual landscape with a book whose title came from Lear, The Wheel of Fire. Knight seems to have been provoked into writing what is now a classic of Shakespearian interpretation by a trend disowning any philosophical notion in Shakespeare; he found himself criticised for regarding Shakespeare as a “philosophical poet rather than a man of the stage”. Knight’s spirited rejoinder was that he was a philosophical poet who was a man of the stage and that he would not be performed today if he were not.

Shakespeare may have been the greatest writer in history, but he is not set apart as a philosophical poet: what is surprising to me, having gone through this in my mind, is that Knight’s point had to be argued at all. Yet it did.

Wait! There’s more!

Putting the idea of “novel as philosophy” together with Wittgenstein, and the idea of philosophy as language makes a very neat fit. Beyond the rules of our language that all speakers and writers follow, the “language games” that comprise the rules in linguistic philosophy as I understand Wittgenstein to mean it, are in genre novels such as the thriller which I have been writing, set by the genre. The writer has to adhere to these on one level at least to provide the satisfaction readers want. Breaking those rules makes for failure. Shakespeare, my own primary model in writing, dragged playgoers in to spend their coppers by keeping to the rules of the kinds of drama he wrote – but by providing something more at the same time. In my writing, that has always been my aim.

Yet genre fiction imposes requirements that can exhaust the moral force of a writer, and turn what s/he writes into a commodity, indistinguishable from others of its type, be it romance, thriller, police procedural or whatever. Any reader who has not encountered fiction like this has led – well, has read – a golden life.

The question for me, that was raised in me by Celine’s Bagatelles was how much I had allowed the rules of genre to impose on me, whether I had blunted or even thwarted my purposes by consciously choosing a genre and sticking too slavishly to “the rules”.

I have now written eight novels. Five of them are “published” via smashwords and three lie a-mouldering in my “bottom drawer” for different reasons. What reading Bagatelles provoked in me more than anything was the thought that perhaps I have exhausted my ability to conform to the genre rules and that I must either break them, find another genre, or break free, if I am to succeed as I wish to succeed: to reach people with messages that challenge and move them, that make their lives more enjoyable, more interesting, more fulfilling, more fun.

There is, of course, only one Celine. He broke lots of rules; some of his transgressions, as we know, made him a major literary force while others shrivelled him up to at best a minor figure, a curiosity.***

Even so, he presents challenges to all writers: “first you’ve got to pay for it, then you can use it”.

Of course there many ways writers can use their life experiences to “inform” their writing. Not every novel has to be autobiographical. What evidence there is suggests Celine held genre writing in contempt^, but as I’ve discussed on this blog in the past, writers can imaginatively encounter experiences one would never dream of having in real life, or at least should not – like murder.

“In the future you’ll telegraph or you won’t write at all.”

Celine laughed at his use of the ellipse and other punctuation though he was probably being ironic, at least a little bit. But there is more to this: According to his theory of writing the richly evocative descriptive passage was finished: people are too busy. Yet there are ways and ways, as one of his translators noted. Take this description of a suburban sub-division:

“Not a one that can stand up right…A collection of toys plunked down in the shit!”

Two little sentences (admittedly preceded by some other description) that sum up the emergent mania for suburbia at the end of the Belle Epoque in France – anything for that villa! The cynical perspective of the observer, who cannot see the mud as a future lawn or garden (or even paved road), who notices the poor construction standards and the miniaturisation of floor space to make these contraptions affordable…there is even more there, in his contempt – resentment, as anyone who reads the book concerned (Mort a Credit [Death on the Instalment Plan]) will know: the engagement by the author is an engagement of emotion. Is it the description, or the emotion, that is the point? It turns out to be both.

My plan now – yes, I have a plan – is to try to adjust what I am doing to this approach, which involves rethinking Dostoevsky as well as rethinking me. That really calls for another post as this one has gone on long enough. Dear reader, your perseverance and good humour means so much! Thank you…

*Certainly there is a great range of pastimes available to us all; what I am getting at here is “brain fodder”.

** The same is true of any made-up story, whether presented as film, on the stage, etc.

***Milton Hindus, a would-be supporter when Celine was in exile in Denmark and who visited him there, wrote a (not very good) book on his experience with the apt title Crippled Giant.

^As a doctor Celine might have been expected to find medical novels interesting; he said they bored him.

One of my least favourite books by Dostoevsky is Notes from Underground.* Serious literary people, who know a lot more than I do about everything, have a very high regard for this book, and it is easy to see why. There are purely literary techniques at work in Notes that are admirable and characteristic of this amazing writer. One of these could even be called his chief technique: the use of a narrator/amanuensis. House of the Dead, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov also all use this technique of an observer who is if not remote from the action, not really significant to it except as observer or editor/scribe, yet whose existence puts the "facts" open to dispute. Notes and House of the Dead use a kind of transcriber rather than observer, and in Notes he tires of his task so that the outpourings of the "author", while continuing, will no longer be published....a very exact form of censorship!

Notes is highly regarded as a turning point in Dostoevsky's career and has been hailed as an "existential" novel, even the first existential novel. It does have some Kierkegaardian overtones (undertones perhaps would be better), to the degree that it is certainly possible that Dostoevsky was influenced by Kierkegaard in writing it. Yet for me, Notes is a bore, especially the first part, where the "author" takes the prevailing liberal politics to pieces. The ideas he attacks are so plainly false that it is hard, at this distance in time at least, not to think Dostoevsky was destroying ideas no one actually held, till some background reading reveals that indeed some very peculiar notions were all the rage among the "intelligentsia" in Russia in the 1860s and 70s (and beyond!). Marxism and materialism in general were swallowed then without chewing, with added spices untasted by any others anywhere. That's not the yawn of it, though - threaded through the text he drones on and on essentially (existentially?) about his right to be unpleasant, and the resentment that has provoked his unpleasantness. It is undeniable that this right exists, but hardly needs saying, and the resentment he describes as all too universal is more childish than that. What seems to strike people as praiseworthy is the honesty, especially of its second part. Perhaps.

In any case a bad book by this great writer may be better than a good book by many another.

Dostoevsky grabbed me about the time Celine did, in the 1970s, and possibly for similar reasons; the author seemed to get under the skin of society and of the individual person at the same time, and seemed even more in Dostoevsky's case to understand what it is that drives people to extremes. Dostoevsky had an uncanny ability to sympathetically portray edgy personalities even as he disapproved of them, of their motives, and of their actions. And he could be, like Celine, very funny. He also had a wonderful way of mocking his own beliefs - beliefs he wanted readers to accept and use in their own lives - while giving eloquent support to ideas he found repellent. As a result just what Dostoevsky really thought is not always clear. Digging for these nuggets may not be rewarded with gold: like Celine, Dostoevsky was an anti-
semite, though his dislike of Jews was tempered by the Christian spirit. Many of his views on a wide range of subjects seem quaint when not bizarre to 21st century eyes...and yet...

Yes, "and yet"...What Dostoevsky saw clearly shone crystalline. Demons, inspired by the revolutionary nihilist Sergei Nechaev's murder of a student, was an eerie, indeed frightening and all too prophetic look at what the revolutionaries Russia was producing in abundance in the 1870s would get up to once they had power.** Karamazov, though it is technically incomplete in the sense that Dostoevsky planned to continue the saga of the Karamazov family in at least an additional volume, is even more incredible: like all great writing, it not merely repays re-reading, but demands it of those who wish to try at least to drink full measure from this writer's bountiful fountain of insight.

While I was writing my last novel, The Russian Idea, I read and re-read a heap of Dostoevsky - not just most of the novels and stories but the "post-modern" journal he published before leaving off to write Karamazov, A Writer's Diary.*** What started for me as homage to the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev^ ended a composite with Dostoevsky. While I was writing it, the storyline came to me for my present book, Kaos.

Kaos has not been an easy write, and I've dropped it in order to think things through - and this post is an expression of that. One of the elements of Dostoevsky's writing that I have more or less ignored, now seems essential to me: the labyrinthine network of interrelationships that characterise what I regard as his finest work: The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov. All these feature an enormous cast.

In Dostoevsky's day, when novels were first published as serials in magazines, such vast tapestries were not merely possible but all but expected. Today, following the notion of telegraphy via Celine, they are harder to muster and sustain. All the same, today I reckon it's the key to my present difficulties. Stop the chatter, Steve, and get on with it. Your underground man awaits his day.

* When I read Notes, it was in an old Everyman edition that treated Dostoevsky as if he was a new chum on the English-language literary block, and referred to him as "Theodore", the English version of Fyodor. Hence the title to this post.

** There is my own take on this at work in my novel The Russian Idea.

*** Roughly half of this interesting journal has been translated. It gives, among other things, the real flavour of Dostoevsky's thinking, and shows his anti-semitism in full flower. Indeed, in more than one way, it is similar to Celine's pamphleteering.

^Berdyaev regarded himself as a follower - he called himself a sprout - of Dostoevsky. For more on this you will just have to read The Russian Idea, whether my own or Berdyaev's, or Berdyaev's book Dostoevsky. Berdyaev's Russian Idea and Dostoevsky are in print. I have not written a post on Berdyaev, but will one day. For an interesting account of Dostoevsky as a religious prophet and the tradition he fits in, see Nicholas Zernov's Three Russian Prophets.

As I've gone along trying to sort out this new book of mine, Kaos, I am frequently reminded just how appropriate the title is: what a mess! Every "good idea" I have about it becomes a very, very bad idea within a day or two - only to swing back into favour some time later, mean and resentful at being discarded for some pathetic, twisted and even disgusting wee wrinkle on the rotting flesh of this novel's corpus.

As Kaos came to me while I was working on a book partly about Dostoevsky, while I was reading this great Russian writer and thinker, I've gone back to this source as I've run into trouble with the book - and been told how the techniques he used are now frowned upon: the use of an "external" narrator especially, but also the involved congeries of relationships that today sees his novels prefaced with a character list so readers can sort them out when they get confused - as they do.

It's all true. Indeed, it's even worse! Dostoevsky not only used these now passe techniques, he abused them, made a real hash of them. Here are some examples: in House of the Dead, his thinly disguised account of life in a Russian prison, his central character initially murdered his wife, but as he nears release he becomes - as Dostoevsky was - a "political" prisoner. In The Adolescent, his next to last novel, he changed the name of a secondary character two thirds of the way through its serialisation, but did not bother even to make the name consistent when it was published in book form.

But these are tiny peccadilli compared to the serious ah, "theoretical" difficulties Dostoevsky ran into and bulldozed over. In Demons, a novel with a narrator, there are scenes involving two characters that no one else could have known about to report what happened, scenes vital to the story and its meaning. Did Dostoevsky care about this? It doesn't seem so. When it was too hard to figure out how the narrator could have found out about something, Dostoevsky just switched out of that mode and became the all-seeing, all-knowing god writers so often like to be.

So why would Dostoevsky adopt this "narrator" technique that he used and abused so casually? At times it seems totally unnecessary. With Karamazov especially the narrator seems pointless - he is writing some time after the events he describes, so obviously takes no part in them, and is all but forgotten by the reader, when he is not actually forgotten. Perhaps Dostoevsky intended to bring the action up to the time of the narrator...but even then, he could easily have got along without him.

And he too gets in the way. The murderer in Karamazov confesses to Ivan just before hanging himself; Ivan suddenly comes down with an attack of delirium tremens and isn't believed - but the scene in which the murderer confesses is written as if that is how it actually happened. If Karamazov had been written as most novels are written nowadays, with no narrator apart from the author, who silently manipulates everything, this would not be a problem - it only becomes a problem because Dostoevsky makes it one.

It is even messier with Demons. The narrator is a part of things in that harrowing book, and his naivte helps the narrative work. Very early in his account he reveals that though a part of the "set" of a central character, he had not known crucial things about him. That tells the reader - well, this is what I think - that not everything the narrator is going to say can be taken at face value. It gives the writer a certain freedom, and sparks a frisson the reader may enjoy - to know that what is on the page is at least partly a mask for something else, that even at the end the "truth" may still prove elusive.

To me this is the attraction of the "narrator" technique: that it allows a writer to conceal and reveal in interesting ways that otherwise would not be possible. Perhaps the most famous use of this is by Agatha Christie, whose Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a first person narration by - the murderer.* What seems to be a disinterested account by a bystander turns out to be part of a scheme to conceal "who done it". When the murderer confesses (before doing away with himself) it is not gloating - he's been sprung, and his scheme is a failure, so he fesses up.

Demons' narrator never really takes an important role; he is there, watching and listening, and occasionally performing small errands for one or another of the more important characters, and there is a feeling, never confirmed, that he falls in love with one of them. What matters about him is his implicit unreliability as a witness - the reader can't be sure, as she or he is reading, that this witness has got it right. And in the end, it turns out not to matter - that what counts is the sheer messiness of life, an unpredictability that destroys all pretense of forcing society, and thereby our understanding, into a mould: the central point of the book. Dostoevsky thus gives this technique a kind of thematic force that to me is very impressive.

And this is my idea now, till I have another one.

* Yes, this is a "spoiler", but this book was first published nearly 90 years ago, and anyway, anyone reading this post is not likely to be a fan of Agatha Christie. And if s/he is a fan, and hasn't read it yet - why haven't you? Wikipedia spoils it too.

Recently I changed the title of this blog. It's the same blog, with all the same posts. The original title was given to me by a friend, but I never really liked it, not because it was "bad" but because it "wasn't me". The new one - I'm not sure and will let it sink in for a while before I decide that it's "really me". And if it isn't, I'll change it again. The blog isn't actually about me, but about writing and my attitudes towards writing, so the difference is how I feel about how close to what I'm on about the title manages to be. The new one is meant to suggest that the world of writing is not the world, that when we write, we create a world unlike the world as it really is - even though we are hoping, I think, to penetrate the real world, to reflect it perhaps, to read our written work into it and even to change it, through the creations of our imaginations.This is as true of non-fiction as fiction; in terms of me, of this blog as of my novels.

Nikolai Berdyaev, whose thinking led to my novel The Russian Idea, might have approved of this. One of his books was called The Meaning of the Creative Act, but he emphasised this point in a lot of his writings, in different ways.

Cynics might say that this is all too typical of the fantasist masquerading as a writer, and there is more truth in this than many writers might like to admit. Writers are by definition intellectuals, even if they are undisciplined and incoherent - they are after all living the life of the mind. Perhaps intellectuals in general as well as writers hold dear the illusion that their mental gymnastics can somehow change the world for the better. Certainly writers are often found in this territory. Norman Mailer, for example, tried for many years to bring his stature as a writer to bear on a more general public life. He announced his willingness to be President of the United States and campaigned as I recall for other public offices, though with how much seriousness is perhaps open to dispute.

But Mailer was far from alone. Upton Sinclair, an earlier American writer who wrote social realist novels (one, Oil, was made into the film There will be blood, but an earlier and very successful novel The Jungle was about meat packing, and he could claim to have changed the law relating to food hygiene), ran for office over and over, and once gained nearly 900,000 votes in a California election for governor.

Dostoevsky had what in his time was the equivalent of a blog, A writer's diary, meant to be a monthly excursion for readers through the mind of this amazing man. It ran on and off during the 1870s, and he gave it up to write The Brothers Karamazov. Like most people, he wasn't planning to die, and aimed to return to it, just as he aimed to carry the Karamazov family into further adventures.

The English-language edition - an abridgement with about half the total content - makes more than great claims for the Writer's diary, crediting Dostoevsky with looking so far ahead in intellectual trends that he could discern, a century ahead of his own life, the emergence of post-modernism. The diary was a "project" as the posties say these days, and it had intellectual pretensions in this line that may very well have astonished the writer.

Shorn of its poseur baggage, however, the editor has some very good points to make, and any English-speaking person interested in Dostoevsky who is not a Russian language expert can only be grateful that this edition exists. Dostoevsky becomes, through its pages, a much more rounded, more intelligible, and more intelligent human being than he would otherwise be.

Dostoevsky was engaged with the world, and the "diary" shows it. A woman threw her stepdaughter out of a window and Dostoevsky had some idea that he understood this in a way that should see the woman freed. He went to see her, intervened and in the end she was reunited with her husband though the stepdaughter, who had survived the incident, did not live with the family.

More significantly, Dostoevsky used the platform of his magazine for political aims. He saw his writing, as Mailer and Sinclair saw theirs, as a platform for politics. That's not all he saw it as, but the same idea remains: that a writer through writing reaches from the life of her or his mind to the minds of others, and through that to meaningful action to change the world in a larger, grander, more social and political sense.

Dostoevsky had some pretty strange notions in this regard and it is fascinating to discern in the diary some of the threads that he could not be open about: he was a Christian socialist, and sought to marry two very antagonistic schools of thought about the future of Russia: the materialist, quasi-Marxian industrial-development and internationalist movement and the mystical, religious, Orthodox and inward movement. He consorted with the Russian royal family (this is not made clear in the diary) as he urged his readers to talk across the dividing lines of their political precepts.

Today we might call this foolish. It may have even actually been foolish at the time. But there is certainly something noble in Dostoevsky's wishing his profound insight into the human condition to spread outward to transform our relations with one another that might enrich us all materially as well as spiritually.

Noble or not, the writer's conceit that the mere fact of having a public face through one's writing earns a purchase on a wider public interest, as Mailer, Sinclair and their ilk insisted, is not necessarily a pretty one. Dostoevsky purchased his right to his views the hard way: long years in prison, opprobrium for other aspects of his life, and a willingness to be "out there" rather than "up there". He didn't demand respect. He earned it, even or especially in his craziest moments.

This week I finished the first draft of the bulk of my new book, Kaos. It will be a long time before it appears in print, as I am far from happy about a lot of it, and in addition have a tail-piece and perhaps a prologue to write too. It's not especially long - 63,000 words, a short novel as it stands. It will grow, but hopefully remain short.

Is it political in the broad, Dostoevskian sense? Do I hope to reach across the divide between reader and writer and spur some personal transformations that will in the end lead to larger, more generalised changes? Of course.

Thanks for reading.

This is a dilemma some authors might er, die for: whether to transform a novel originally meant to be a one-off into a series. Having now published a number of one-off novels in the “indie” line on-line, and working on a new one, it has occurred to me that this one might turn itself into a multi-parter.

I’ve had this inclination in the past. Savonarola’s Bones, a romp of a certain sort, has periodically cropped up in my consciousness as a possible part one, and I’ve even toyed with an introduction to the sequel. I may do it yet.

What makes me think more of this now is Joleene Naylor. She is the author of a kind of genre fiction that normally I would never bother with: “vampire lit”. Till I read some of her books in what is called “beta” – apparently some pre-publication version put out to friends/enemies/passersby for a response before tidying it up as a “finished product” – the only vampire novel I had ever read was Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Several “beta” novels in the Amaranthine series later, I know that my contempt for the contemporary dress of this genre (teenage junk lit, inevitably superficial, unendingly boring, without literary, moral, or intellectual merit) was just prejudice on my part. Moreover this is but a reminder of an argument I put in an essay many years ago, and that forms the basis of my own genre writing:any genre can be the occasion of literary merit. In the case of Joleene Naylor, as she has gone along her series has improved as writing, and it has always had a serious purpose.

Nor is there anything unliterary about a series. Many English novelists with shall we say advanced reputations wrote them. Dostoevsky was toying with extending his last finished work, The Brothers Karamazov with a second part. Shakespeare, my model for many aspects of writing, did an eight part play cycle – King John, Henry IV parts one and two, Henry V, Henry VI one two and three, and Richard III. I have seen an argument that this greatest of all writers actually conceived this cycle, and worked out all its ins and outs, from the first.

Actually I find this hard to believe. But who am I?

There are of course “series, and series”. Some writers use a hero or heroine whose exploits and problems consume book after book. This is not quite the same thing but nonetheless there is a link there that allows for development both of character and plot. It is a motif of thriller writers whose principal character or characters is in a sense “the story”. Yes, Sherlock Holmes. Later, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was a model for this type of series, and spun off many similar characters (Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, perhaps most significantly the unnamed protagonist of the first few espionage thrillers by Len Deighton). The plots could be unrelated to one another because the hero was the same hero, but they could have loose or very close connections. It’s a popular wheeze today.

Putting that aside the full-blown series is an epic and takes quite a bit of doing seems to me. Joleene Naylor so far has five parts plus a “prequel” in her Amaranthine series and for those reading this who are not writers, to keep this logical and interesting and relevant is not at all easy. If there is a pot of gold at the end as there should be, all the twists and turns getting to it should add up to something, not just be bumper cars at a literary fairground, banging about haphazardly on the track till at some point time is up.

The promise of a second part to some of my own work, including the present one, is comprised of loose ends. I like loose ends, or at least ends that are not spelled out exactly. There are things that may look like something that isn’t resolved in the existing writing, that I decided to leave unresolved, or perhaps “full of promise” – I like the idea that my books become the readers’ books too, that they engage with the stories and where things are not specified, spelt out just so, colour them in with their own private palettes of the mind. Yet these can prompt another book, and then another…as the loose ends unravel at another end…and if there is still a loose end, another one…and then another one…all of the plot elements remain relevant by necessity. Yet I’m not sure I’m made of the right stuff to do that.

With Kaos, the book I am working on now, I finished the “body proper” of the first draft and was working on a sort of coda when I began writing this post. This coda shuffled into my consciousness as perhaps something that might be quite long by my standards – a part two of the novel, or the second part, that could lead to a series! That may yet come. But for now, I finished the coda off at 10,000 words, knowing that more words are going to spin out of what is there. But I’d like to rewrite the whole thing, so am going to do that and call it a second draft, or even a reworking and a first draft.

So nope, it’s another one-off. So far.

Thanks for reading.

The first post of this blog was written just on a year ago, and at that time I was already working on my novel, Kaos. Since then quite a lot has gone on in my miserable excuse for an existence, including working for the man for eight or nine months. But now that’s done, and so is Kaos.

Or I hope so. I have finished what I hope is the final run-through, and sent it off to the artist and formatter to have the things done to it that it needs to have done before it can join its siblings on the net.

Of course I want it to be the book I had in mind when I started, and when I finished. I want it to be good too, and it certainly would be a wonderful thing if it ah “went viral” and had millions of readers, who would of course then go on to read my other books.

Is this likely to happen? Sadly, no.

Will it stop me from writing? No.

From go to whoa as New Zealanders say, Kaos has taken longer to write than any of my other books. That’s not entirely true in the sense that Evilheart, my second novel and the first to grace the public eye, took a year to write and was revised a number of times later on, the last time just before it went up onto the net as an e-book. Evilheart was however written before e-books existed so the revisions don’t count, at least to me.

To my mind Kaos is my best book, so far. The writing is better, the plot is quite interesting, and the weak parts – which exist in any book of any sort according to me – are not much to worry about. My last run-through was a “read aloud” version and I found myself admiring some of the prose. Amazing! My own stuff! Good! Wow!

Good writing is only part of what makes a good book, and may even stand in the way of certain kinds of books being good. Readers may think otherwise, but a “rattling good yarn” matters more, and rattling good yarns come not from good writing but good plotting. Many best-selling writers write very poorly, awkwardly, very far from stylishly, yet their books sell in the millions. Dan Brown is only the latest of a very shall we say distinguished line of rattling good yarn spinners whose writing is weak. One reviewer said of his latest effort, Inferno, that the writing was much improved but that it was his worst book so far!

Writers like Dan Brown, who provide “rattling good yarns” composed of poor prose dominate fiction. Recently the village where I live in New Zealand held its annual book sale. There were some great writers represented – Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. But their offerings were miniscule next to the Dan Browns, and their ilk…yards of Dan and Stephen King and Wilbur Smith compared with a few WS plays, one Fyodor novel (Brothers Karamazov in its least good translation), one copy of War and Peace.

What this says to me is that most readers are not interested in “good writing”. They want “good reading”. They are the punters too, the ones who pay, and they are quite entitled to want what they want. My aim as a writer has been to give them what they want, while also giving them some “good writing”, and beyond that, some intellectual, “serious” extras that usually don’t come wrapped up in the thriller genre where so far I have worked. One of my few mantras about my aim is that I have a “serious purpose in a frivolous genre”, that I would like the “goodness” in my work to go down easy with readers who are there for the good read, but also to have something to reward the serious reader.

Does Kaos do that? I want it to. Shakespeare did it. Nowadays people think him too elevated to read, or to go see on stage, but the reality is that he was competing not only with other playwrights but with bear-baiting! He had to do the job, to get the “groundlings” to pay to catch his stuff. Shakespeare was not, that is to say, writing for the upper crust, or not for them alone. He wanted to appeal from the top to the bottom of society, and he did.

Of course I am not Shakespeare, but my aim is not that far removed from his. I would like to write books that stay in the mind, that are more than a “good read”. But they have to be a good read first, one that leaves no bodice unripped, no dagger unplunged, no corpse deodorised*. Titus Andronicus fed a woman’s children to her in a pie.I have yet to contrive a story that allows for that. Kaos however has its own “out there” elements, and I hope readers find them compelling and go beyond that to find the “message” interesting.

If you have got this far, thanks for reading.

*But if I write a zombie novel, undead!