Chris P. asked Nick Harkaway:

I'd love for you to expound on how you weave serious and often horrifying subject matter around big, pulpy genre tropes, but I am not sure how to put that into a proper question. Is there a specific process there? Do you ever find yourself steering too far in one direction, getting too silly or too morbid?

Nick Harkaway The first thing is that I don't think they're a mismatch. You can't make someone genuinely scared, for example, until you've let them laugh for a while. Laughter is often our first response to something unsettling, but if you as the author take ownership of it from early on, you get to choose when it's allowed, and you can block it at the crucial moment so that something disturbing really hits home. It's a rhythm thing, a dance. So I want to be able to make you happy, sad, confident, nervous, optimistic, desolate, and so on. If I can make you love someone, I can make you fear and hate whoever threatens them.

The next thing is that pulp has always been sneakingly serious. It's often been a refuge for ideas, groups, sexualities and so on that the mainstream isn't talking about. What we do in our entertainment, what we look for, what we fantasise about, is indicative of how we feel. Lots of 70s and 80s movies are about the creeping threat, others are about total annihilation - the two faces of Cold War angst. In the early 2000s you get the infiltration of Marvel's universe by a string of terrible shapeshifters preparing to wreak havoc... pulp is always about serious stuff, and gets away with that by being pulp.

And yes. Yes, I do get too silly. I had to cut 25k words of elephant narration from Angelmaker because it was completely screwing up the narrative. It's a balance, you're in dialogue as you write with an imaginary reader, trying to work out if they're with you or thinking you've jumped the shark. If you're not close, they're bored. If you actually go over, they're laughing at you. So you dance and hope like hell.

flag