Not every book looks and feels like an artefact when you pick it up. Oftentimes it is just words printed across cheap paper, the literal form of it separated from its content, cased in a merely functional cover with some gluey binding. But with Five Wounds, an “illuminated novel”, the very object itself is part of its mythology and there is a sense of something big, something heavy within it, if you have the time.

It is not very often that a review of a book demands also a review of its physical presence. Crossing genre and classifications, both narratively and visually, and switching tone between allegory and playfulness, the book is clearly a labour of love for its writer, Jonathan Walker, and its illustrator, Dan Hallett, in what is the pair’s second collaboration. It is undeniably a sublime thing to behold. The first time you pick it up and turn it over in your hands is, as Walker and Hallett have intended, like reading the first lines of its mystic story. An impressive hardback almost biblical in feel, its appearance matches, too, its biblical layout of chapters and verses.

The story follows the escapades of five fairytale characters inhabiting a composite Venice made of historical and modern snatches of the city, strikingly illustrated by Hallett based on, among other things, Goya’s etchings. The designs are impressive and densely detailed throughout, with a glossy series of 18 plates in the centre pages occasionally referred to in the text. We are first introduced to Cur, a beast-like man and leader of a pack of dogs, being photographed by Magpie, a thief and daguerrotypist. An interweaving, lattice of a story emerges which involves a devious ‘saviour’, Crow; the hero origins of Cuckoo, a gambling man with a face of wax; as well as a de-winged angel, stolen identities, kidnapping, murder, and some questionable cuisine.

Five Wounds makes the admirable move of not taking itself too seriously, which certainly works in its favour. There is a vein of quaint humour that runs throughout; revisions and asides are scribbled upon the page as if the work was still incomplete; arrows point at things and comment upon them matter-of-factly (“Not a whale”); surreal events transpire through droll, imaginative wording; and it is all set off by a dedication that reads: “To whom it may concern”.

But intermittently there seems inhibited intrigue to a story built as if by Calvino dealing tarot cards at random, that stakes everything on its desire to be deciphered. By so blatantly attempting to lure the reader into interpretation, the result is a story that has a hint of hollowness if insufficient effort is dedicated in reading to create an interpretation. Too often we become aware of Walker’s knowing lack of intention. Events go from one to the other in a sometimes repetitive, staccato rhythm reminiscent of faux parables and, though it reads like a writer having fun, it occasionally ends up giving the story an odd dashed-off feel that is incongruous with the meticulous nature of the book as an artefact. The book is now leering at me accusingly, for being too lazy.

Of course, all of this could work in the book’s favour, to add to its ‘world-building’ design. We know that the story has the purpose of creating multiple meanings, and its style possibly works as a part of that. But as a storytelling experience, something seems missing. This illusiveness makes the story of Five Wounds somehow less exciting to read, somehow less absorbing, as we are too aware of the writer’s and the reader’s roles though perhaps this method, in theory, functions as a comment on the book that it imitates and, conceivably, parodies; the Bible.

But this comes in waves. For the majority of its telling, particularly warming into the second part, the writing alternates between robust allegory and surreal, comical fantasy, with the highlight being Cuckoo’s journey to claim himself a face. His tale is something ghostly, like the daguerrotypes of the long ago buried, with Walker’s words taking on some of the lore the book is torn from, as he deals in his grainy haunted images.

If you have the time to commit to this book, there is surely reward for what you put in. And you know a writer is doing something right when you seek out his previous work, hints of which are revealed in this novel, where the historical accounts are genuinely fascinating and always communicated with gusto. The punk history biography, Pistols! Treason! Murder! also illustrated by Dan Hallett, about the 17th-century Venetian spy, Gerolamo Vano, was the first part of their developing partnership. It is waiting patiently on the shelf.

Further Resources:

• The design of Five Wounds at Spike Magazine
• Jonathan Walker’s incredible Five Wounds website
• Jonathan Walker’s blog (including a free sample chapter of the book) and further fascinating insights

For a debut novel, Alexi Zentner’s Touch has already earned a startling number of accolades, including nominations for the Giller Prize and the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Awards. These nominations are less surprising, however, once you open the pages of Touch. Zentner has managed to craft one of the most compelling stories of hardship and loss to hit bookshelves in recent years, coloured with mythical encounters that might have been lifted straight from the pages of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The combination of his characters’ bleak, hand-to-mouth existence and the fantastical events that underline their lives is both refreshingly new and shockingly traditional, and has led to the coining of an entire literary subgenre – mythical realism. Canadian by birth, but currently living in Ithaca, NY, Alexi Zentner has handcrafted a new literary landscape for the frosty wildernesses of the North.

How (and why) did you settle on the title Touch? The connection to the narrative isn’t immediately obvious, but it suits it so perfectly!

I usually know the titles of stories or books I’m working on early in the process, and the same was true of Touch. The impetus of the book was an image of a girl trapped under the ice. I was fascinated – terrified might be a better word – by the idea of having somebody you loved so close to you and yet to be unable to help them, unable to even touch them.

When I first started writing Touch, my daughters were younger, and though I think, as a father, the feeling never quite leaves you, I was acutely aware of just how dangerous the world can be, and how little, ultimately, I can do to keep my daughters safe. You never want your kids to get hurt in any way, but it’s almost worse when you can see it happening and can’t quite get there in time to stop it, and that is part of why that image stuck with me.

It’s interesting, because I have been asked about the title, and it was never something that I questioned. I had that title before I was more than a page into it. Almost everybody reacted positively to the title, although my French editors had to change the title to The Woods of Sawgamet, since Touch didn’t really translate well. I do think the title fits well, though. Aside from the image of the girl trapped under the ice – something that almost every reader has said stays with them – there are all of the different ways in which characters touch or fail to touch each other. Obviously, that’s in a physical sense, but also in the way that stories are passed down and changed from generation to generation, and the way that somebody who is long dead and gone can reach out and touch somebody else through myth and memory.

Do you find that your fiction tends to develop from single images in this way? Or do your stories generally spring from a different impetus?

My fiction always comes from an image, a first sentence, or a situation. Very, very quickly, that impetus is surrounded and shaped by characters and settings, but I’ve always had to have that spark to build the fire. I was given an assignment for the Canadian magazine The Walrus to write a story that had to follow five rules selected by another author, and it wasn’t until I had the first sentence that I had the rest of the story. I know that other writers can do it, can pick a theme or a character or even a place and just build a world, but I need something to hang it on to avoid ending up with a character study.

Weather and physical conditions affect a large aspect of what happens in Touch, from the first chapter onwards. Do you spend a lot of time outdoors? Is this an important theme for you?

I don’t spend as much time outdoors as I’d like. Part of it is a simple laziness. As much as I love hiking and camping and being outside of the city, I’m not particularly good at getting myself to do it in the first place. It’s usually my wife who suggests we take the dog and the kids for a hike, and after I grumble about it, I end up asking why we don’t do it more often.

Before I had kids, I used to spend a lot more time in outdoor pursuits. I actually met my wife because we both rock climbed, and there was a period of years where I lived in the American Midwest, and going rock climbing outside of a gym meant driving anywhere from three to seven hours. After work on a Friday we would pile into a car and drive to Kentucky. We’d set up camp at three in the morning, grab a couple of hours sleep, and then climb until we could barely lift our arms.

Now, we live in a smaller university town, and part of what I like about it is the ability to find spaces where I can still feel like I might be alone. I try to take trips to parts of North America where there is still wilderness – or, at least, the feeling of wilderness – but the city I live in has pockets that feel more untrammelled. As a writer, the appeal of locations that are more removed from big cities is that they strip things down for the characters. In Touch, and in the novel I just finished, The Lobster Kings, which is set in a lobster fishing village on a small island, the decisions that the characters make have real ramifications. If you are underdressed in a snowstorm in the city, you get cold. If you are underdressed in a snowstorm in the woods outside of Sawgamet, where Touch is set, you can die.

I would never argue that weather or landscape serve as characters in and of themselves, but they can have profound impacts on the decisions that characters make. In a story, setting is simply the stage upon which the characters play their lives, but if that stage is a place where the natural world has a certain dominion, it can amplify the actions of characters. In Touch, in particular, this is true, and I found that the world I created in Touch was one that I was very drawn to.

I should add that, as a writer, I find the natural world is where I prefer to be. I’m not particularly precious in my writing habits – give me a laptop and a pair of headphones and I can write anywhere – but I envy the idea of having some sort of a cottage on the ocean or in the mountains, somewhere hard pressed against the natural world where I could write for part of the year.

A lot has already been made of your use of myth and fantasy in the book, and you’ve coined the term ‘mythical realism’. Can you explain what mythical realism means to you, and why it attracts you?

On a base level, when people hear magical realism, they think Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I admire Marquez – Love in the Time of Cholera is still one of my favourite books – but I’m not trying to ape him, and I use the term mythical realism at least partially to distinguish what I’m trying to do from his work. Magical realism is very strongly associated with the landscapes and traditions of central and South America and Europe, and I think that when you take those frameworks of magical realism and just map them over a different culture and landscape you end up with a work that is a palimpsest; the ghostly images of those other cultures and landscapes show through your own work.

There are plenty of writers who have created interesting work this way, but I’m trying to do something new. I’m trying to wrestle with the questions of myth and storytelling, trying to figure out how it is that in my cultures and landscapes – Canada and the USA – stories become myths, how the vastness of the North American landscape and immigrant experience shapes who we were, who we are, and who we will become. I actually think that in the past year there have been a number of books that are experimenting with mythical realism, fumbling with trying to figure out the role of myth in our cultures. I’d argue that as far as literary trends go, we went through a painful period of detached irony as the main driving force for writers, and that one of the things that I want to do is to try to reclaim the sense of wonder that I think all readers strive for.

Look, what I really want to do is to try to tell good stories, to give readers the chance to lose themselves in a book, to remember what it was like as a kid to hear a story and to believe in something greater than ourselves. Mythical realism is something that should be woven throughout a book, in the same way that myth and story are woven through our lives, not just dropped in like a parlour trick. I don’t want a reader to think, “oh, that’s beautiful.” I want them to feel it. And if that means that, as a writer, I need to risk being overly sentimental, I’d rather risk that than risk nothing at all.

Which books stood out to you as being in this vein? Are there any particular writers you admire right now?

I hesitate to speak for other writers, because I think that not all of them would agree with my assessment of their work as mythical realism, but there is a new generation of writers who are including myth and magic in their work in an unapologetic way that is completely different from the way it has been used in magical realism. As for writers who I admire right now, it’s kind of an endless list. One of the great things about writing a book is that it gives you a chance to meet other writers. Both Peter Mountford (A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism) and Alan Heathcock (Volt) had books come out around the same time as Touch, and I both admire their work and was glad to have brothers-in-arms to talk with as the publication process moved forward.

You’ve recently returned from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and while I know that many American writers rate it highly, I’m sure that readers elsewhere have no idea what it is. Can you explain Bread Loaf for us briefly, and give us some insight into what it’s done for you?

I love Bread Loaf. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a conference for writers that takes place near Middlebury, Vermont. The campus – and outpost of Middlebury College – is within sight of Bread Loaf Mountain, hence the name. The conference is about ten days, and consists of workshops in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, as well as readings, craft lectures, and other activities. The entire conference revolves around the written word. It’s a bucolic setting that’s in a part of the USA that I love, and it’s an incredibly intense period of focus on writing. I think, because the campus is sort of isolated, it’s a heightened experience.

I’ve been twice. The first time was as a work-study scholar. The work part of it is that you work as a waiter during the conference, which is pretty demanding on top of the packed schedule, but you become very close with your fellow waiters, all of whom are picked for their “promise” as writers. This past summer I went as a “fellow,” which meant that I assisted the faculty member in workshop, taught a craft lecture, and gave individual consultations. More than anything, what it’s done for me is help me to become close with other writers, so that no matter where I travel or what festivals I attend, there is usually somebody there that I know. It’s a way of making the writing world smaller and friendlier.

Do you think writers are naturally driven to seek each other out? Or are we more private, solitary creatures?

Reading teaches you how to be alone, and any successful writer is also a reader. I need a certain amount of time to myself, and find that when I have house guests or am staying with somebody else for an extended period that I end up hiding out in my room so that I can read or write.

That being said, I also love hanging out with friends and enjoy doing literary festivals. I like doing panels and am comfortable on stage, and I love teaching and being in front of a room. I need a balance of both. I love meeting other writers, because it’s such an odd profession and it’s nice to have other people who understand what it means to be alone at a desk. Part of it is that other writers are also readers, and I love talking about books and literature. I’m not sure that I necessarily seek out the company of other writers – because I have kids and don’t teach right now, I have a large group of friends who aren’t writers – but I do enjoy the company of fellow writers.

Still, after every trip, every conference, every festival, no matter how much I enjoy it, I’m always happy to get home again. To get to the point where people want you to come and talk about your book you have to spend a lot of time in a room by yourself.

You strike me as someone who loves telling a story. What’s the attraction to storytelling for you? Do you think the nature of storytelling is changing at all as we move further and further into the digital age?

I don’t think the digital age changes storytelling. That’s the short answer. That makes for boring columns, however, and it’s a lot easier to freak out and write about how the internet is changing everything, how storytelling is dying – but we are hardwired to respond to stories. I realise that the way that stories are conveyed is changing, but the human need for stories isn’t. Stories are how we figure out who we are as humans, both individually and in the aggregate. We seek out information so that we can know things, but we seek out stories so that we can feel things.

I love telling stories, but honestly, what I like even more than telling them is being told them. I think that most writers – most storytellers of whatever ilk – follow that path because at some point in their development they came across some sort of a book or a movie or even a piece of music that captured them, that made everything fall away. I’d argue that reading in particular is important. Aside from the idea that stories help us figure out who we are, reading teaches us how to be alone, how to be comfortable with ourselves.

For publishers, there are business model concerns. I can’t even pretend to understand the business model of publishing and making films. Speaking specifically about movies, it’s frustrating to me to see the amount of absolute shit that is produced, the number of films where the budget for fake blood has to be triple whatever they spent on writers. I’m personally quite happy to go see an action movie, but I’d say that about half of what I see could have been made a lot better if I’d been given the script and a weekend to rewrite it. Story comes first. Story comes last. True for books, true for movies. The movies and books that stay with us do so because they tap something inside of us. I don’t care how it’s delivered – though an e-reader, a real book, on a movie screen, on your phone – what matters is that there’s something that captures the reader/audience.

I know you’ve just finished writing The Lobster Kings… is it too early to ask for a preview? Will readers see similar themes to Touch, or is it a departure from your first book?

It’s set off the east coast of North America on an island that is actually contested territory, neither Canadian nor American. It’s told from the point of view of Cordelia Kings, a lobster fisherman (though she’s a woman), who is one of three daughters in a line that can trace itself back to the first white settler on the island, Brumfitt Kings, who was both a fisherman and a painter. There are Shakespearian undertones – which is probably evident from the name Cordelia, though this is certainly not a retelling of King Lear – and mythical realism: the Kings carry both a curse and a blessing through the generations. I think that The Lobster Kings is very different from Touch, and yet it will still feel familiar to readers. So it’s both a departure and similar.

Until recently, the promise of Steve Aylett’s £750 foray into feature-length film productions had seemingly been wandering desultorily around the Internet for quite some time, indulging in some shallow vanishing since 2009, popping up here and there on blogs, before triumphantly reappearing for its premiere in Brighton earlier this year. Followed closely by a London screening, it has since been saddled up for a couple more dates, in Northampton (October) and Portland at Bizarro Con 2011 (November).

If you’re not already familiar with Jeff Lint or Steve Aylett, then this paragraph is my opportunity to appear smug. Which is off-putting, isn’t it? If you are already a Lint obsessive then a review for this film is pointless, as the mere realisation that there is a Lint film in existence would mean you have now closed this window and opened a new one, searching for the next screening. Which puts this article in an odd place. Anyway…

In a quoted excerpt for Lint, Aylett’s 2005 book, the reviewer calls the creation a “laugh-out-loud funny mock biography of a pulp fiction writer who only exists in the author’s imagination”. But now, it seems, the character occupies also the minds of an array of esteemed Lintian pundits, who, riffing on the endless possibilities of such a character, clearly relish the chance in Aylett’s debut movie project.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=giBumjfVTUI

Working both as an introduction as well as an extension of the Jeff Lint history, the film mixes in some of the speculation and anecdotes that makes up the original Lint book and its sequel, And Your Point Is? (2006) taking some of these ideas further and giving them worthy airtime. Thankfully they survive the transfer from page to screen and remain full of Aylett’s sly subversions.

Lint was the ultimate non-conformist, to the point of failure. A variable variety of talking faces (the shots are usually that close-up) gladly confirm this. Intercut with archive footage, the faces detail much of the Lint legend: his distrust of waiters, his failed Star Trek and Patton scripts and his ‘magic bullet’ theory. Further highlights include some startlingly demented clips of Lint’s cartoon Catty and the Major and recounted tales from a gravelly Lord Caul Pin, writers Alan Moore, David Harlan Wilson (Codename Prague), Mo Ali and Bill Ectric (Tamper), plus comedians Stewart Lee, Josie Long, Robin Ince, and Aylett himself.

Similarly to its source material, Lint The Movie runs episodically with nugget after golden nugget of supreme absurdity, which often go beyond the simple exposition of Lint’s antics and instead into the realm of something meaningful and satiric (despite Aylett himself noting, “Satire has no effect – a mirror holds no fear for those with no shame”). But exactly what this ‘something’ is is hard to define, making Aylett’s Lint all the less boring and all the more satisfying.

Appropriately disrespectful of power, institution and instruction, Aylett is a writer who makes it look as if he is at play, before cunningly twisting on you with sudden twists of truth which make Lint, in all his forms (man/book/movie), true originals.

Now all we ask for is a full series of Catty and the Major.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=et2ZSHz7Q7Q

As a foreign news correspondent for the BBC you’ve travelled all over the world and must’ve seen horrifying and extraordinary things: can you give us examples of humanity at its best and at its worst?

I have witnessed first hand many instances of the horrific treatment of vulnerable people in my work as a correspondent: young girls being enslaved to work as prostitutes, babies being bought and sold, the mental ill being kept in chains and villagers murdering fellow families because they’re from a different caste or religion. And that is not counting the suffering and violence associated with armed conflict and, in a different way, with natural disasters.

It would be easy to have a cynical view of human nature. But what heartens me is the knowledge that I am not the only person who finds such stories distressing. In all these environments, I have come across many examples of people who are brave enough to take a stand against injustice and fight for other people’s rights and safety, often at great personal risk. I’ve also seen great acts of kindness – for example, families who are desperately poor themselves but who willingly take in a family of strangers and feed and shelter them, just because they are in need – or, during murderous riots, people who risked their own lives by intervening to try to defend those under attack. In a less direct way, it is also humbling when I have broadcast a report and afterwards “ordinary” people, who live thousands of miles away in a different culture, get in touch with me to ask how they can help or how they can send money to the people in need.

You’re currently based in London: do you prefer to be at home and travel on assignments, or do you prefer long-term postings abroad, such as those in Delhi and Washington, DC? Would you like to leave the UK again and, for that matter, do you consider the UK your home?

I definitely consider the UK to be home. I was born and brought up here and my family lives here – and has done for as far back as we can trace the family tree. I loved living overseas for almost all of my 20s and 30s. It was exciting and I learned so much about other cultures, about people, about news and, of course, about myself. But now I am very happy to have the best of both worlds: living in London but having the chance to travel often for work and pleasure.

To what extent are the characters, locations and situations described in your novels based on your experiences as a journalist?

I try to draw on elements of my own experiences to give my novels credibility and authenticity. My real life experiences help me, for example, to give a strong sense of place and describe what a particular environment feels, smells and looks like. It also feeds the books in terms of developing key themes and ideas.

My first novel, The Last Kestrel, is set in Helmand Province during the current conflict and it would have been really hard to describe a village in Helmand, give a sense of the local culture and reflect an experience of a journalist who is embedded with the British military if I hadn’t experienced these things for myself.

But it’s also extremely important that the actual events, the plot lines and characters are all fictional. It’s almost a case of knowing a place to start with – then taking a big step away from the real world, going into the imagination and only then starting to write. Also plot is very different from real life and needs to come to reasonably satisfying resolutions and conclusions.

Far from my Father’s House is a case in point. I’ve spent time in relief camps in North West Pakistan, interviewing people who have escaped from communities which had been taken over by the Taliban and some of the stories I heard and the women I met made me inspired, some time later, to sit down and imagine a set of fictional characters and the journeys they might take.

Do you write your fiction with an agenda? That is to say, are you trying to create a work of art or raise social issues? ‘Both’, of course, is an entirely reasonable answer.

I don’t want to pursue an agenda. That would imply for a start that I thought I had the answers – and a theme in the novels is that no-one really does. Agendas are too simple. The moral landscapes in all my novels are very grey. There are no good or bad characters. The characters are all people who are doing the best they can to survive and to pursue their dreams in very difficult situations and while they are coming under immense internal and external pressure. I’d like readers to have a sense of the humanity of these characters – with all the complexities and struggles that humanity involves. So they’re not intended to deliver simple social messages – that would be unrealistic and too convenient.

Who are the writers that you admire and enjoy?

I used to love Virginia Woolf when I was a teenager – especially To The Lighthouse. Her use of language was so lyrical and groundbreaking. More recently I’ve really enjoyed the novels of Sarah Waters – probably Fingersmith is my favourite – for their clever plotting and very clean but evocative use of language.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road blew me away when I first read it. It’s harrowing but also a very moving examination of a man’s love for his child.

One of my favourite recent books was Wolf Hall – a very worthy winner of the Booker Prize. She has such a gift for narrative and for character. I felt bereft when I finished it – and can’t wait for the sequel to come out.

Do you feel that any of them influence your style?

I suspect that all these years as a working journalist have influenced my style more than other writers. My writing used to be more lyrical when I was younger and I was interested in language for its own sake. Now I see language as a means to an end, not an end in itself. The narrative and the characters matter and the words only serve them. Journalism also taught me the discipline of sitting down and getting on with it.

Finally, as a journalist, do you think the recent phone hacking saga will make the public wary of the media as a whole, or reinforce trusted organisations like the BBC?

There’ve always been good and bad journalists, some who are very ethical and some who are less so. I think the public has the sense to realise that good journalism is valuable, in fact essential, and needs to be safeguarded. The current scandals are a terrible shock for the profession but hopefully it will lead to wider debate about what’s acceptable and what isn’t, what’s genuinely in the public interest and what is not.

As McGivering says, all her characters are fictions pulled together from strands of reality and this is most evident in the central character of Layla who is presented to us through the first person. The author gives Layla a very convincing voice which makes the relationship between the girl and her family so engaging, and equally evocative are the descriptions of Pakistan itself. Layla is educated as the son her father never had and sometimes wishes that she indeed been a boy so she could work and travel as the men of her people do. Gender inequalities are a central theme of the book but McGivering is able to avoid ever sounding like a preaching churl of Western values who thinks Muslims have everything wrong.

Layla’s father attempts to resist the Taliban but, despite his courage, his school is crushed by the oppressive agents of that glorified crime ring. There are more attacks on education later in the novel, highlighting that under all totalitarian regimes freedom of thought and expression must be crushed in order to protect the thugs who would seek to control every aspect of their supporters’ lives.

Ellen, a British journalist, and Jamelia, Layla’s father’s first wife, are the other two voices in the book – this time in third person. Sometimes it can be a distraction switching between first and third perspectives but one must ask oneself would anything be lost if it were written in one or the other? In this novel the answer is yes, if the novel were written all in third person then we would lose the keen insight into Layla’s thoughts and feelings; conversely, if it were written in first person from Ellen’s perspective this would be too easy for McGivering.

Throughout the book the author builds tension well and the opening chapters are an immediate hook for the reading – Layla’s fear of being seen by Taliban supporters, even on the first few pages, is especially well rendered. The events surrounding Ellen are narrated equally vividly, however, certain plot twists were somewhat too loudly signalled: the use of the character Adnan by the Taliban and the involvement of the sinister aid huckster Quentin Khan, for example. However, Jamelia was another credible character who lent her strength and wisdom to the men of her family and struggles to overwhelm their inertia in the face of the Taliban.

If there was an off-putting branch of the narrative it was the relationship between Ellen and Frank; this felt superfluous to the overall plot and was not required to keep the reader engaged. One might say that this novel was aimed towards a female audience but the lives of the women themselves are remarkable enough to stand without a love angle.

Perhaps the book could have probed further into issues such as equality for women and education for girls but, as she says above, McGivering does not write with an agenda and literature is not an engine for social change. It is enough to have written a satisfying book that encompasses mystery, adventure and suspense whilst making you think – and all set in a country which every Westerner thinks they know, but which might yet yield some surprises.

In a literary landscape dominated by celebrity memoirs and vampire soft porn, Peter Mountford’s debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide To Late Capitalism, stands out like a shining nugget of gold. Telling the story of equities analyst Gabriel de Boya as he collects information on Bolivia for an unscrupulous hedge fund, it’s a novel that feels both steeped in tradition and undeniably of its time. As Gabriel wrangles with his conscience and falls in love, Mountford uses his plight to comment on the political situation in South America, the financial bubble of 2005 just as it was about to burst, and the ethical implications of our Western culture of greed.

It’s also a fantastically good read, and it’s little wonder that the literary world has taken note of Mountford’s achievement. Marrying thriller and romance aspects with unashamed political and financial commentary, A Young Man’s Guide To Late Capitalism is one of the most exciting novels to have come out of the current financial crisis to date–and it’s all the more remarkable for being a debut. Peter Mountford currently lives in Seattle, where he is writer-in-residence for the Seattle Arts and Lectures programme.

When and why did you decide to become a writer?

I started writing by accident. I was 11, I think, and I had this very ornate daydream, but I couldn’t keep track of it all, so I started writing it down. Next thing I knew, I had 50 pages, a novella. When I was 14 I outlined a fictional diary of Vlad Tepes, the medieval prince who was the model for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Needless to say, I was slightly out of my range with that one and it never came to be.

As an undergraduate, I studied economics and international affairs, and then I went and got a sensible job at a think tank writing about international economics. But I was already a writer, I just didn’t know it. I was sneaking off to write fiction, and the way I was looking at the world, the way I was cultivating and maybe even hoarding interesting life experiences–it was as if I was doing research, and I think I sort of knew it. So, after a couple interesting years being a policy wonk, I quit and started reading Nabokov, Annie Proulx, Milan Kundera–dozens of other great writers. And I started writing three to four hours a day, seven days a week. I haven’t stopped.

Now, mind you, that was 2002 and my ‘debut’ novel was published in 2011.

So what was your journey to publication like during that time?

After embarking on the writing life with lots of youthful vim and vigour in 2002, I began to encounter what’s known, in the business, as the real world. And it was humbling, if not to say crushing. I wrote huge volumes of fiction and got lavished with rejection. My first acceptance for a short story came in 2006, when I was 30 years old. On the plus side, it was an acceptance to the anthology Best New American Voices 2008, but still. By that point I’d collected about a thousand rejections (I keep them all). I’d written and abandoned two-and-a-half novels, and 20-some stories–at least a thousand pages of fiction that will never see the light of day.

In the summer of 2005, my writing turned a corner. I remember it vividly. I was in the middle of the MFA program at the University of Washington and I went to Ecuador for a few weeks, feeling very dejected. The first year at the UW had been a deep low-point. I got savaged with rejection and some very demoralizing critiques. It really broke me down. I began to realise how much higher I needed to aim, how much better I needed to be. At the end of that year I had a very revelatory class with David Shields, who said something to the effect of: ‘Do you really just want to be this dutiful craftsman, creating these quaint stories that are totally antique, totally separated from the world we actually inhabit?’ He said he couldn’t stand to even read that stuff, and I had to admit that I felt the same way.

That summer, Shields got me reading J.M. Coetzee. I went to Ecuador and wrote and wrote and wrote and read and read and read. And when I came back, I was a very different kind of writer and it was obvious, immediately. Within a year, I’d started winning some awards and fellowships and grants. I started publishing in some well-regarded literary journals. In fact, most of what I’ve written since then has been published.

A Young Man’s Guide… reminded me strongly of Graham Greene, specifically the combination of exotic setting, intrigue, and an underlying discussion of everyday morality. Did Greene influence you at all?

Yes, Graham Greene absolutely was a huge influence. In many ways, I more or less aspire to write like he did–both the so-called diversions and the weirder stuff. He was obsessed with God, seemed incapable of not writing about God. I think I’m similarly obsessed with money, how it operates in our planet and in our minds–I set out to write a story about my granny and I end up with a story about money. Other writers I adore include Deborah Eisenberg, Milan Kundera, J.M. Coetzee. Nabokov. And scores of others, of course. The list could go on for days. I’m reading Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists right now and it’s tremendous.

Money is one of those topics that great literature often deals with (like love, or religion) but it seems that modern writers are sometimes afraid to address it, or they wilfully avoid it. Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s a topic that should be addressed more often?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, recently. It seems that literary-minded people have quietly agreed that finance is somehow not central to the zeitgeist. Money is a deeply taboo subject, obviously, and all the more so among people who consider themselves to be artists. Finance and economics are complicated and often poorly understood, also, and they’re not thought of as sexy. A lot of writers I know are proudly dismissive of economics–they paint it boring–it’s either viewed as nerdy, in the unattractive way, or it’s associated with these cartoonish preppy monsters.

That is nonsense. A cursory glance at our recent history reveals that economics and money are not just the engines of our era, not just what defines virtually everything about our time, but they’re also spectacularly dramatic. It’s not an abstract subject. It’s not just a guy with a calculator. It’s very emotional and makes and breaks the lives of–well, everyone. So, yes, I think it’s a topic that should be addressed more often in literature.

The foreign location feels like a big part of A Young Man’s Guide… too; it’s hard to imagine it being set anywhere else. How early did you settle on Bolivia as your setting? Why that country in particular, and South America in general?

I’ve travelled a lot and most of my writing therefore concerns people living in or visiting foreign countries. It’s not a conscious thing, but I suppose I think that when you’re away from your comfort-zone, your home, you have a slightly heightened perception of things, and it casts your own community, your circumstances, in a radically new light, so it can be an awakening. I like having that space as a kind of foundation for a story. That change in perception is all the more true if the place is extremely different, like Bolivia, rather than, say, England.

Bolivia’s also the poorest country in South America, and it’s a bit intense, a bit too hardcore for most people. Not a big tourist destination. So I liked that. And it’s gorgeous, like you’re on the moon–the moon with shantytowns.

And, finally, and maybe most importantly, Bolivia’s history is a near perfect example for the overall experience of countries that were colonized and brutalized by the Europeans. Their history is heartbreaking. It’s occasionally bizarre beyond belief, too–they lost their coastline in a war with Chile over bat guano, which Bolivia wanted to tax (it contains a useful ingredient in gunpowder). There are countless other surreal milestones, like when someone traded a vast swath of oil-rich jungle with Brazil for a nice white stallion. But beneath it all there’s a harrowing history of Northern-hemisphere-dwelling people, mostly Spanish–although the US certainly did its part during the Cold War, in particular–siphoning natural resources from the land without properly compensating the Bolivian people. In Bolivia this aspect of their history it’s referred to ruefully as ‘El Saqueo’–the sacking.

Having spent so long writing about Bolivia (and talking about it in interviews!) do you feel a stronger bond with the country than you used to? How did writing about it change your relationship with it?

When I started writing the book, I was very interested in Bolivia, and I thought its history was gorgeously bizarre and also very apt, a kind of perfect model for the corrosive long-term effects of centuries of colonial pillaging. Now, I love the country and feel a very personal connection to its people. I have a Google alert on Bolivia and so I now read the news about the country daily. Also, I’ve been very heartened by the responses of Bolivians who’ve read the book, because it’s not the most flattering portrait of the country–but I’ve been contacted by a number of Bolivians who told me that they felt I’d captured La Paz perfectly.

I know you teach creative writing in addition to producing your own work. How do you find that it feeds back into your own writing? Is it an integral part of being a professional writer today?

Richard Ford was in Seattle the other day for an event and an audience member asked him what he liked most about teaching, and he replied, ‘The money.’ So, yeah, it’s an integral part of being a professional writer, especially if you’re not writing bodice-rippers. If you’re writing books that take years to write, the kinds of books that don’t sell very well because they’re ‘difficult,’ then teaching is probably how you pay the rent.

There’s another reply to this question, of course, one that talks about how inspired one gets by one’s students, but that’s nonsense. Or, if someone says it sincerely, they’re probably not much of a writer. I like what David Foster Wallace said about this in a Charlie Rose interview, he said something to the effect of, ‘The first couple years it’s really revelatory, you learn a lot from your students and it’s a very hard experience. Then, once you’ve seen a few thousand undergraduate stories, it becomes just another day job and you no longer learn anything at all from it.’

I like teaching because it gets me out of the house, and it generates some income, and I like the act of talking about writing–that’s why I’m friends with a lot of writers, and when I teach I get paid to have those kinds of conversations. Also, it’s very fun to discover a writer who is fucking amazing and doesn’t know it yet. Some woman, say, who does data entry at a medical supplies company, and I get to inform her that she’s ready to get published, and that she should get in touch with a top-shelf literary agent in New York City at her earliest convenience. That’s fun, but it doesn’t happen that often.

If you were given a time machine that allowed you to go back and tutor your younger self, what advice would you give to the younger you? Or are there any particular skills that you’d tell yourself to work on?

I’d tell myself to aim higher, stylistically, intellectually–in every way. Like so much fiction by beginners, mine felt like the writing of a person who just wasn’t working hard enough, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. If a sentence isn’t doing several jobs at once, it’s probably dead weight. I’ve heard that there’s only one rule with writing: never be boring. I like that, the writing needs to be fucking riveting, one way or another. I’d add that authenticity is very important–if you’re not writing about something that really matters to you, deeply matters to you, it’s probably going to feel a little trite.

Imagine that the appearance of a book is part of the story it tells, as if it was an artefact created by the imaginary civilisation it describes. Book design becomes an aspect of what the science-fiction community calls ‘world-building’, and as such it applies the principle of ‘Show, don’t tell’ to the surface of the page itself. My fantasy novel Five Wounds uses design in exactly this way. What, then, does the page design in Five Wounds show us?

The first thing you might notice is that the text is divided internally into books, chapter and verses, as if it reaches us only via the hands of priestly interpreters. It is also surrounded by several different kinds of image, in several different visual idioms: miniature heraldic coats-of-arms, woodcut- and etching-style illustrations, and, more disturbingly, neurotic doodles, including handwritten scribbles and corrections added on top of the typeset text, as if it has been defaced by an editor who is not no longer certain of its canonical status. Perhaps this is the same reader who has coloured all the coats-of-arms in an enthusiastic but incompetent manner. Below is a sample page from Five Wounds, which shows some of these features.

Five Wounds describes the intertwined fates of five freakish protagonists: Gabriella is a crippled angel; Cur is the rabid leader of a sect of dogs; Cuckoo is a gambler with a wax face; Magpie is a myopic thief in search of the perfect photographic subject; Crow is a leper trying to distil the essence of death as an antidote against dying. Their stories constitute a kind of alternate history of Venice, although we don’t know where we are in time; or rather, we seem to be in several different historical periods simultaneously.

Wherever we are, the Bible is still the exemplary book, but the boundary between sacred text and perverse marginalia has become unclear. Five Wounds looks like Holy Scripture, but the events it describes are more like those of a fairy tale. Indeed, ‘world-building’ is perhaps a misleading term in this context, since the novel’s setting, like that of a fairy tale, seems both distorted and imprecise: more like an image in a fairground mirror than a realistic portrait. In any case, the book’s design helps to describes this grotesque imaginary landscape.

Cuckoo’s Reflection

Following a single motif through its various manifestations in the text, the illustrations and the design may help to explain how this works. One of my five protagonists is Cuckoo: a gambler whose wax face can be reshaped at will. Cuckoo’s dilemma – Who am I if I have no face of my own? – drives several incidents in the plot, but it is also dramatised in the illustrations, in which Cuckoo’s face is always scratched out. He is literally defaced, as in the illustration above. His scratched-out face also links Cuckoo by analogy to the scribbled corrections on the typeset text. Like the blacked-out text, his face is ‘under erasure’, and the revelation of his true self is continually deferred.

Cuckoo is obsessed with his reflection, precisely because he cannot identify with this unrecognisable double of himself. The text that accompanies the portrait above comments on this motif:

1. AS Cuckoo angled his mirror, the candle flame flared off the blade, obliterating his reflection.
2. He imagined the glass as a recording device, which would retain only the movements of the knife’s point and edge across his face, reducing his efforts to a simple pattern of lines.
3. What was his face now but the summation of these tiny, accumulated motions?

In fact, I added this passage only after seeing Dan’s image. Thus the interaction between the various elements works both ways in Five Wounds. The images are a commentary on the text; but the text is also a commentary on the images. As the artist R.B. Kitaj put it, ‘Some books have pictures and some pictures have books.’

The broader point here is that key ideas should be present throughout the DNA of Five Wounds, and as such, they should be manifest in every aspect of its production. My job as art director was to ensure that these ideas circulated freely between the text, the illustrations and the design.

Perhaps this all sounds rather abstract, but in every case an emotional question precedes and generates the formal questions. In the case of Cuckoo, the original question was, ‘What does it feel like to have no face of your own: to be alienated irrevocably from your own body and your own emotions?’ The design of Five Wounds doesn’t just help to describe the world in which the story takes place. It also shows what it feels like to be Cuckoo.

Further Resources:

• Jonathan Walker’s incredible Five Wounds website
• Jonathan Walker’s blog (including a free sample chapter of the book) and further fascinating insights

Charlie Hill’s debut novel seems already to have been pigeonholed as a love-story, a certainly tragic one, between its narrator, Arch (a character who has already made appearances on the independent literary scene) and Vee, the counterpoint to Arch’s solipsistic, inward-looking existence.

Set in the early 1990s, the novel begins at a party in Birmingham’s alternative district of Moseley to celebrate Thatcher’s tearful resignation and the hope of upheaval that followed. Arch encounters Vee for the first time.

This inchoate, anti-romantic relationship however, seems merely to be the axle that the novel wishes to rotate its wheel of ideas on.

And so begins their intertwining. She resists his placid Beat-quoting and Bukowski-infused conversation to confront him on his easy, ready-made beliefs as to how the good man lives, and how one ought to connect with the outside world. From early on, his reading, his knowledge and his ideas represent the kind of universal influences still batted about today, along with their relation to the 90s youth’s view of history: that seemingly nothing came before the Beats, before the 60s, or before the current uprising, a cycle that finds its repetition in all youth movements since.

This taking of universal influences – still popular in equivalent crowds today – lends an allegorical slant to Arch’s false journey of the self. Locking in contemporaneous ‘End of History’ sloganeering and the ‘End of Politics’ chat, we’re offered an insight not only into Arch’s psyche but also Moseley’s easy-answer, misguided disconnection from the world.

Hill’s depiction of the place is written as a kind of Brummie precursor to London’s boho, hipster-glamourised Hoxton of the noughties, where ostentatious angel-headed hipsters fart around at changing the world, playing at making a difference, all amongst the green smoke, chemical raves and mute squeals for revolution. And Arch, though he keeps an aloof distance from the ‘believers’, is sucked in when Vee calls him out on his go-nowhere, existential ennui. After a night of quick connection and zappy sex, she leaves him and returns to Yugoslavia to cover the ongoing war there, leaving him with the impression that to have her, he has to move his ideas forward.

Meantime, Arch endeavours to make more of his position in this Moseley whirlpool of ideology and revolution, throwing himself into the inbred vortex of poseurism, becoming a ‘believer’ in the cause and evangelical in his limited concepts. He becomes involved in the street protest movement, his false and forced awakening coming at the weeklong free rave at Castlemorton, his transformation induced under the leadership of the volatile Stripe and his vacuous girlfriend Sorrell who epitomises all that he wants to avoid in his newfound, self-satisfied belief of making a stand against ‘The Man’.

He gets into the techno-rave scene and finds intellectual and emotional solace in the engirdling ideas of fellow protester Ig’s civil disobedience vs. Stripe’s brand of direct action – revelations that he thinks will change Vee’s wilted view of him. And so he busies himself with the self-serving, delusional journey from lugubrious impassivity to the ‘anything is possible’ system of beliefs spouted by the movement. He is convinced by the likes of Ig and Stripe of the real, genuine personal responsibility the individual has, slotting neatly into his new box of ready-made views.

And when Vee returns, she furthers his ‘almost’ connection to the outside world, he wants to show her how he has changed, how he has been brought out of his near-sighted slumber, without realising he has merely moved into a different kind of ideological somnolence. It seems Hill’s charge here is that it is just another easy out to go from one kind of complacency to another, easy in these communes of self-belief to continue living within this pipe-dream.

But this ideological transition is not as prosaic or didactical as I seem to let on. Hill’s style is bright with humour, he has a natural ear for rhythm as well as a depth of slang both playful and unobtrusive, slang that has seen the novel compared with Welsh’s Trainspotting, a book overtly referenced by Arch’s culturally voracious squat-mate, Mike. At first, Arch’s narration reads, at times, as an updated Burroughsian Junky, though (initially) softer in its drug of choice, the melange of characters indulge in whatever they can get their hands on. As Arch’s ideas begin to twist into his zealous evangelism, the prose takes on a journalistic intensity, albeit at times a little too pedestrian in its delivery of real events. But these instances are rare, and Hill handles Arch’s clay-footed leap of consciousness and ensuing distress with remarkable pacing and emotion.

The central crux of Arch’s futile journey embodies a very real search for answers. And Arch seems to think he has found them, though they are as illusory as his relationship with Vee, which ends, as made clear in the opening, with loss and stillness. But Arch holds onto his ideas for as long as he can, this impermanent state of mind that has a ragged edge when bordering on a complacent sense of conviction. And this state of mind, no matter what side you are on (if there even are sides) is merely that, a momentary belief in a momentary something, no matter how poor placed or how convincingly argued, and it all becomes a “shit-eating grin” of complacency and self-satisfaction.

Hill deconstructs the ideologies through his characters, each seemingly representing one way or another, and pokes a stick at the inward visions of a hipster crowd like that in Moseley.

Perhaps it is over-simplifying the complex and enigmatic character of Vee, who is never really a part of the protest scene, to say that she is merely the opposite of the Arch. But it is this ‘pipe dream’ of changing the world that brings these characters together, albeit from differing points on the Moseley political spectrum. Vee, with her ‘Endless Inquisition’ and outward view vs. the movement’s limited ‘Finding, Latching on and Believing’ plays out as a battle of ideas that has no feasible winner.

It is easy to see why The Space Between Things has been viewed as a love story (the couple’s penchant for Velvet Underground brings to mind the song ‘I Found A Reason’), but Vee, Arch and the rest of the misfit gang are narrative tools for Hill’s multifaceted scepticism. It is a bleak tale (for the reality is bleak) that can relate directly to the intermittent and possibly futile calls for uprising within protest movements today, its questions true to the questions that face all protest movements, particularly where, like here, few seem fully prepared to put it all on the line. Though that doesn’t mean Hill doesn’t hope we/they do:

“We don’t live in a world of simple answers and I’m wary of those who think we do. We don’t have it in us to create a utopian society, in which the freedom of the individual is not subject to any limitation and the needs of those who can’t provide for themselves are met. The way in which we interact with other individuals and other communities is characterised by compromise – moral, intellectual, emotional. As a species we don’t do intellectual purity. We are flawed. We do fudges and suck it and see.

Acknowledging that this is the human condition doesn’t mean that we should give up on the idea of change – or changes – for the better. I just think we’ve got to accept that striving for improvements in the way in which we organise ourselves is an ongoing and ultimately frustrating process. I think it all comes back to that Beckett line about trying again, failing again, failing better. And I think that on a practical level, if we accept our limitations, we have to be prepared to work with  – and not just against – what we’ve got, however unsatisfactory that may be…”

“A pint a-Carling yeah and whatever you’re havin’,” a white-spit mouth, mine, chums out familiar to the bar girl. I’m pointing at the tap and reaching my hand out as it pours, my fingers snatching at the half-filled glass. I can’t wait around. We’re in La Paz for 3 days. I’m counting pints in my head. We have to fit it all in somehow. I just been ridin’ down the World’s Most Dangerous Road on a borrowed mountain bike and I need a pint of England’s finest to savour the moment. Yeah I know. Top Gear did it in jeeps, the legends.

A gulp on the frosty pint. “Put on some fuckin’ Oasis” I shout at no one in particular.

“What else is there to do round ‘ere?” I ask the maid, some English nectar dribbling down and out the side of my mouth onto the corners of the St. George’s flag draped round my Aquascutum shoulders. England tastes good cold.

“Well,” she says, a sneer and a sip on the bottle of Inca Kola I just paid for, “you could head down to the San Pedro prison.”

“Yeah? What’s all that then? I don’t need to come all the way to Bolivia to see the nick.” These foreign birds love the cockney chat. Learnt some off the Internet before I flew ere. Desk job at Foxton’s funds me handsomely.

Her eyes roll back white before pulling up the tap and this thick black book from under the counter, pages all dog-eared like Chav, my bitch Staff I’ve left back home. “All in this book, Marching Powder. But you go down there and see it for yourself. There no other prison like it. I know a guy can get you in. I’ll call him if you want.” She walks off to serve some tanned flip-flop Aussie cunt.

I look at it. Books. I ain’t got no need books. Only book I need is the Lonely Planet. Gap year don’t finish ‘til September. Cambridge mugs better be ready.

I turn the black book over in my hands: “By Rusty Young”. Sounds amusin’ enough. This prison gaffe might be worth a shit.

“Oi you. Yeah, make that call. I’ll get the lads.”

“Too late today. Have to be tomorrow if you still want go.”

“What? A day?” Bolivian mugs. “Yeah alright. Tomorrow’s fine.” I lift my empty and show it to her, adding a belch for effect. Foreign birds love that. “Another Carling, ta.”

Morning. My mobile’s alarm is going off. Max and Paddy: “Wake up, fat slob. Wake up, fat slob.” £4.50 well spent that was. Funny though innit, a gram of Bolivian white set me back about the same last night. And the night before. Off my tits I was. Whoever’s churning out that gak must be loaded.

“Turn that shit off”, a voice from a top bunk in the 12-bed dorm.

“Your mum.”

“Nick, turn it off.”

“Yeah, yeah. Get your shit together lads, we’re off.” We bowl out of there looking for that bar girl.

“Turn the light off!”

We keep walking. “Fuck ‘em.”

We hit the bar and it’s two o’clock. We get a couple rounds in before she turns up. She gives us the time we have to be at the gates and makes another call to her contact for us, speaking colonial gibberish into her phone. She tells us it’s sorted, gives us the number for Kenneth and says that we should go now if we want to get in. Her broken English just about doin the trick. Will and Mickey, nursing their bottles of Cusqueña (foreign muck), quickly down them before we leave. I take my Carling with.

“You not comin’ along, darlin’?”

“Yeah, no thanks.” She walks off into the back room. We watch her leave.

We get in a cab and show the driver a piece of paper. Mickey bolt upright starts saying: “San Pedro prison, yeah?”

Drives eyes us and says: “San Pedro. Si.” Catching sight of my pint he speaks louder this time, turning in his seat: “No beber aqui. No beber aqui.”

“Yeah mate no baby a key. No worries mate.” Fuckin mug.

“Come on, Drives.” Will is pointing at the road through the windshield and mime-steers an invisible wheel then points at the potholed tarmac again. The cab driver sighs. “No hay dos sin tres,” he says as we roll out, looking into the rear-view at us: “Gringos.” I ain’t got a clue what he’s on about.

“Yeah mate. Gringo Starr,” Mickey.

“Bit stroppy this one, ain’t he?” I polish off the pint, some of it dribbling down the side of my face and onto the knot of the St. George’s flag round my Ben Sherman, tightening it around my throat.

We pay off Drives and get out in a lively part of town. A few beggars are in the square in front of the prison, lying in the sun. I light a cigarette, take a few puffs and drop it on the floor. One of the tramps comes up to me, gesturing an imaginary smoke at his lips and asks for one with his hands out saying “English? English?”

“Yeah mate.” I hand him the glass and we walk off laughing. The wind blows the corners of the flag into Will’s face. We call the number we’ve been given for Kenneth, the man who sorts the tours. He’s already there. No need to waste my credit.

“You ready to go in?” Kenneth is wearing sunglasses, can’t see his eyes.

“Yeah, how much is it, Ken?” Will is reaching for his wallet, drops some coins on the pavement and turns to see the beggar coming back moaning something with his hands out. The flag licks at his hair. Will picks most of them up and puts them back in his wallet, spinning away from the tramp. He kicks the rest into the gutter with the sides of his plimsolls.

“250 Bolivianos,” says Ken.

“Done.” We hand over the money and wait while he counts it. I light another cigarette take a couple puffs and drop it under my Reeboks and squash it, looking at the beggar and smiling.

Ken starts to walk off, “Vamonos”.

We go through these old maroon double doors streaked with blue, “They must be Hammers,” I says. Inside there’s a metal grill with a desk in front of it. Ken walks back out the door after a few words with the black Guard. Through the gridiron we see life within, prisoners and children. Will and Mickey start emptying their pockets for the guard pretty sharpish so I do the same, looking into the concrete courtyard of the jail and seeing the kids run up and down, middle-aged men round the edges sat under a hoop. The guard searches Will and Mickey then they put their stuff back in their pockets. The guard looks at my digital camera and wags his finger putting it in a wooden box and locking it. “Later”, he says.

He tells me to raise my arms for frisking by lifting his slightly. He goes to patting me down quick without really searching. Keeping up appearances. He misses the mobile in my pocket but handles the red and white cape on my back and tries to yank it off over my head. “Later”, I say, winking at Mickey. He keeps pulling at it over my head so I let him, then fold it up neat and tidy before handing it over. He stamps our hands and nudges us through the gate in the middle of the iron fence where this white South African inmate, Daniel, leads us to a tight spiral staircase going up to a hatch in the corner of the yard. Behind us I hear the word “Gringo” again and laughter.

Finding it a bit of a chore, I’m the last to climb through the hatch and the last to see the room of t-shirt boys sitting silent round a table. We take our pews at the patio table. I’m looking around and sniffing the loose snot up my runny nose, all the oily glitter of £4.50 sucked back up for a second wind. There’s a grey haired bloke standing over us with an accent I can’t pin down:

“Welcome. This is, as I’m sure you already know, San Pedro Prison. I’m Cisco, I’ve been in here for two years and I’ll be your gracious host for today.” He sits down on his double bed. “What we’re going to do is break you up into smaller groups so you can do the tour with whoever you came with. Daniel will take the first group down and show you around. You other boys will wait here with me…” His scrawny smacked up girlfriend with a running video camera takes a shuffled step forward from the side of the bed. He turns and smiles at her, “… and my girlfriend, Julieta. I’ll answer any more questions you have when you come back. And we’ll discuss the tip then.”

The first group fucks off quietly. They’re Dutch or something. They walk off speaking gibberish to each other.

It goes quiet. “Now, you boys. Where you from?”

“England, mate.” Will looks uncomfortable when he says it. I narrow my eyes at his weakness. Reminds me of Tyndall.

“London?”

“Yeah, mate” I say.

“Alright, mite.” This Cisco guy’s a bit of a joker. “What did you come here for?”

“Some bird told us about it, said we might wanna check it out.”

“So you know what goes on in here.”

“Not really.”

“This is a prison.” No shit. I keep schtum though. Don’t trust his long hair and scarred cheeks. “The prisoners run this place on the inside. The guards we pay off to let in tourists and people like you. It’s a democracy in here, we make our own decisions. We have committees and a forum on Tuesdays. Any problems, we sort them out ourselves. It is our little island.” He looks down at his hands then back up, “So, what about drugs, you tried our drugs over here?”

“Yeah a little bit, mate.” I sniff the snot again. “We tried a bit.”

“You like?”

We nod at him.

“You wanna try some of ours? We make it in here ourselves. The purest of the pure. Uncut.”

“How much?”

“50 for a gram. 25 for a half.”

“Yeah go on then.” I look at the other two, they start getting their money out. Cisco’s bird still has her camera on us.

“Don’t worry about her. We’re just filming for fun.”

“Yeah no worries mate. Don’t wanna see this on YouTube though yeah.” I don’t smile.

“Don’t worry about that. You know Brad Pitt is making a movie about us?” He smiles.

“Yeah?” We put the money on the table. “How many grams did he have?”

Cisco ignores the banter and hands Julieta the notes, who gets some wraps out of a black bin bag.

“We do it in here or what?”

“Yes, in here. Don’t worry about the guards. Just finish it all before you leave. You can’t take anything with you. You might have problems with the guards and end up in here.”

“No problem mate.”

“Here, use this.” He hands over a thick black book. Marching Powder again.

I loosen the wrap and tap out a trail, rack it up and pass the book to Mickey when I’m done. He does likewise.

“So, what you in here for?” Mickey makes small as he chops.

“Drugs.” He says. “Most of us in the foreign section are in here for drugs. Some of us innocent. But there is nothing we can do about our situation here apart from get on with it and wait. Drugs make money for us, yes, but in the end it is all shit because there is no other way to live in these conditions. We have some serious addicts in here. But when I’ve done my time, I’m out of drugs forever.” The book comes back to me and I rack another thick one. I hand it along again. I look at Will and Mickey and they’re both tense, chopping up and sucking it in. “Happy days,” Will says.

“What about weed, you like weed? 30 for a spliff. Good stuff.”

“Yeah, you got a drink though?”

“Beer or soft drink?”

“Beer if you got it.”

“Sure, 10 bolivianos.”

There’s the exchange of money and beer.

“So, how’d you get busted?” Will asks.

“Trafficking coke is a dangerous business.”

“Yeah? You always been doin that?”

“No, I used to be in the military.”

“Bolivian?”

“No, Argentina.”

“Falklands, yeah?” Cisco goes quiet. Touched a nerve. St. George safely wrapped up in his box downstairs.

“Get him his beer.” Julieta pushes the bottle across the table looking at me. Doesn’t smile much this one.

“This is fucking mental, mate”. Mickey looks up at me before he huffs another.

“Is there a toilet in here, blud?” Will looks around as he speaks. Cisco points behind him to a cupboard.

“It’s in there,” he says.

“Cheers, mate.” Will goes over and slides the door across and revealing a cramped shitter.

Two more guys come up the hatch with Angelo, a Dutch inmate. Black. “Two more Gringos,” he says looking at us before climbing down the stairs.

Me: “Alright lads?”

Them: “Yeah not bad.”

“Where you from?” Mickey puts the book down, his wrap half done.

“England.”

“Two more Brits”, Cisco.

“How about yourselves?” One of them asks, taking a seat. A fuzzy-lookin Chinese lad he is.

“Norf London, mate.” I say with usual charm. “Wait. Aren’t you in our hostel?”

“Not sure. We’re at the Wild Rover,” one of them says.

“Yeah that’s us,” says Mickey.

“You’re not the guy with that shit alarm, are you?”

“Nah mate. It ain’t shit.”

Will comes back from the bog straightening out his Evisu’s: “How do lads.”

This bloke Angelo sticks his head out of the hatch and says: “Ready?” We wrap up the rest of our gear and stuff it in our pockets. The Dutchies come back and I hear Cisco quizzing them about coke and how much they want. “See you soon,” he shouts as we’re slipping down the spiral, “Hopefully no one fucks you while you’re out there”.

Angelo laughs, looking at me: “Yeah then we’ll have to charge you!”

“Yeah, not funny mate.”

Angelo walks ahead of us and we’re looking at these Bolivians lounging around the courtyard in the sun. They mostly sit in the shade, chatting gibberish at each other.

“It’s not gibberish, it’s Spanish.” Angelo says looking at me and Will. “You speak only English, yeah?”

“Course, mate. Only language I need.”

Angelo skips ahead and starts speaking with the two lads from the hostel, “Right, so this is the courtyard, over there we have a basketball court, this is an open area where people hang out.” They are drinking cola ignoring us and killing time.

“Out here people sit and talk, play games, whatever. There are men who live here with their families so there are women and children too.” I look a kid in the eye and he looks happy to see me.

“The women cannot afford to live without their husbands so have to live inside. Of course the young children see some of the violence but that cannot be stopped. The violence would probably be much worse without them. Plus there are no guards in here, which keeps everyone a little happier. Then there’s the kitchen, a restaurant too over there where you can get food and drinks. Up there are some of the rooms. We’ll go up there later. If you are rich, or have a job in here to work for one, you can get your own room, like Cisco. He is one of the richest. Commands a lot of respect around here. Money makes the power. Like your democracy back home, right?”

I don’t get what he’s on about. But the other two lads smile and keep walking, not saying anything. The inmates look at us and greet us. When we get around the corner we go into a corridor with some cells along the wall. “These are some of the rooms where people share together. At the end here, is solitary confinement.”

I hear a shout: “Chino. Ey Chino!” This guy sitting in solitary, one of two in there actually, is lying on his bunk looking out a small opening, shouting at the Chinese lad. Chino ignores it.

“This is solitary?” Chino’s mate says. I hear him being called ‘Uno’.

“This isn’t a regular prison,” Angelo says. Will and Mickey rub their noses. “Right, in there’s the chapel if you want to have a look.” Uno and Chino poke their heads in and come back out.

“Nice is it?” Mickey asks from outside.

“Small”.

“So now let’s go upstairs.” Angelo leads and we go up a flight of stairs and look down on the scattered inmates in the courtyard. “Come in”. There’s a bloke standing in the room and he’s got these pictures in his hands.

“This man sells cards of Saint Peter and asks for a small donation if you want one.” We look at them, little holograms of a man with a beard and a halo looking up at something.

“Quite religious, aren’t they” I say to Will handing back the card. “You’re alright, mate.” Uno and Chino give the guy some notes.

“Let’s go upstairs.” The steps go up to the attic. There’s a wide skylight and far away outside there are snowy mountains.

“You can see the Andes from here. I come up here a lot to look out. Some people have tried to escape over this wall here.” It’s a big drop with craters and overloaded bins for a safe landing. Angelo shuts the skylight again and the view of the mountains disappears behind the dirty window. The noise from outside silenced.

“That’s pretty much the tour.” We turn to leave. Coke bars and beers waiting.

“But now I ask you gentlemen for a donation. A tip.” I look at Will and Mickey who are looking at the floor. “I’m in here but I’m innocent. I got put in prison because I took the rap for my girlfriend. She was pregnant. We are from Holland and I couldn’t let her go in prison. It is rough here. So I took the drugs she had and now I’m in here.” Coke bars fill with backpackers. “So I ask for just a little donation.” We’ve been cornered.

Uno and Chino do the honours. I ignore the heartfelt speech and start to make my way toward the steps again and ask where I can get a beer. “Cisco will give you one,” Angelo says.

“If someone else doesn’t first,” Uno says. Chino likes that one.

We go back to Cisco up through the hatch and sit with a few beers and the shift the rest of the gak skyward. We laugh and shoot the shit with Cisco, tell a few stories and chat to the quiet Dutchies. We’re the only ones laughing.

“Did you give Angelo a tip?” Cisco asks.

“Yeah mate. Plenty.”

“So now I ask you for mine.”

Cornered again. Swindle. I take out some coins and put them on the table, on top of Will and Mickey’s notes and pass it over. “Cheers yeah, Cisco. Take it easy.”

He says nothing. I run my finger over Marching Powder and rub my gums. Books ain’t so useless. We go down the spiral and get back to the gate.

“Later Angelo,” we shout. He doesn’t hear.

We step through to the other side of the gate and I get my digital camera from the box. I unfold the glory of St. George and lift it. I put it back over my head where it rests round my neck and we go out the West Ham doors. The cigarettes from the pavement, gone. The coins still reflecting a dull sun in the gutter.

The square is quiet. Shit engines chuck out fumes as they pass. I light another fag: “It’s the last night lads. Let’s get mashed. Route 36.”

I throw the unfinished cigarette and we walk off as my St. George chokes me to death in the breeze.

Titan books have released their second omnibus of the Daily Express comic strips based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Francis J. Okolo gives the debrief

A cursory flick through the illustrations in this wonderful collection sends you hurtling back to a pre-swinging-’60′s London of oak-panelled offices, old school ties and gentlemen’s clubs. John McLusky’s drawings prove a prescient bridge between the Bond of Fleming’s imaginings and film producers Broccoli and Saltzman’s (initial) vision as portrayed by Sean Connery in their highly successful film series.

McLusky’s artwork has a tangible air of Bondian authenticity, he gets the visual details for  the character just right. “The comma of black hair over the right eyebrow” comes straight from Fleming’s description of Bond, whom he often said resembled a young “Hoagy” Carmichael – look him up! Yet, at the same time, some of the granite jawed/two-fisted resolve in the sketches are eerily suggestive of Sean Connery. There has been some speculation as to whether McLusky’s illustrations may have influenced the casting of Connery in the first place. Outlandish as that may seem, it’s worth remembering, McLusky  produced the first of these strips in 1958, four years before Bond’s debut Dr. No hit cinema screens. In many ways, the Express strips would provide the visual template for Bond and his world. Also striking is how often the strip pictures echo the eventual look of those early Bond films. It is tempting to imagine they could have been useful storyboards for EON’s set design and production teams.

This second omnibus brings together Fleming’s later novels which include some of the highlights of the series. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice were the final two books in what is often referred to as the “Blofeld trilogy” – Thunderball being the first. The Spy Who Loved Me was a not wholly successful attempt to have the story told from the POV of the female protagonist. The Man With The Golden Gun was Fleming’s last completed novel, while Octopussy and The Living Daylights were collected short stories released posthumously.

By the time he was writing these books, Fleming was in rapidly failing health. As a result, the novels and lead character acquire a dark, introspective quality. This tonal shift, though never reflected in the film series (which, post-Lazenby, would descend into gadget riddled slapstick) is very well conveyed in the McLusky/Horak comic strip.

Alongside the novels themselves, this omnibus release is a wonderful reintroduction to the character of Bond as Fleming originally imagined him.

Published a few years before the works that made him a posthumous literary superstar, Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas is an evasive, hybrid beast. Ben Granger gets to grips with it

This arcane curiosity of a book – first published in Roberto Bolaño’s native Chile a few years before more his more famous and fêted works The Savage Detectives and 2666 – raises many questions about what literature is for. Nazi Literature in the Americas is a mock encyclopaedia, portraying a selection of imaginary 20th-century authors, South and Central American in origin with the odd Yank thrown in, most of them insane and quixotic, and all of whom are connected to extreme right-wing ideologies. Why? What effect is it seeking to create?

One answer might be absurdism. In real life no true collection of fascist Latin American writers really exists, at least not to the extent of the pantheon, or oeuvre on display here. When we see the immense consideration accorded to Italino and “Fatso” Schiaffino, two Argentine brothers who wrote lauded poetry, novels and social commentary while simultaneously leading both a football hooligan gang and a Galtieri-era death squad we are clearly entering into a brutal whimsy, a Carrolesque fantasy with no real parallel in reality.

Not all examples are as strange as the Schiaffinos and, as the meticulous details of these bizarre reactionary salon scenes emerge, surely the answer is really satire? But satire on what? That there was no real right-wing literary movement in Latin America could be seen as a sledgehammer battering of the right, pointing out the incongruity of buffoonish bigotry in the artistic soul. Of “soccer player futurist” Silvio Salvatico, we hear a list of his beliefs: “the re-establishment of the Inquisition, a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation, polygamy, the extermination of the Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentinean race; a massive influx of migrants from the Scandinavian countries in order to effect a progressive lightening of the national skin colour, and the abolition of tax on artists’ incomes”. We also hear “he worked as a gossip columnist and copy editor for various newspapers in the capital, hung out in dives, and practised the art of the novel, which stubbornly declined to yield its secrets to him”. The often lingering implication in many entries is that the talent of these individuals is largely a figment of their own diseased imaginations. The ‘artistic temperament’ is the last refuge of the scumbag, a passport to endless selfishness and limitless cruelty, as displayed by many of the subjects here. The likes of Salvatico play at being the artist to sate their own sociopathy, talent is an afterthought, a hoped-for extra.

Yet, in reality, the most burning insight and talent can co-exist with unsavoury ideology. In early 20th-century Western Europe we really did have our right-wing literary heroes – T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis on this side of the Channel, Marrinetti on the other. Is Bolaño extrapolating on the perverse allure such artists have, and giving a farcical twist to see what they would look like in South American drag? (A recurring theme is how odd it is for the “mestizos” to follow Nazi cults of racial superiority while they themselves would not pass the Aryan test.) Certainly the demonic buccaneering Chilean Pedro Gonzalez Carrera, a trigger-happy adventurer offering his gun hand for the forces of Franco and the Fallange seems to echo the demonic buccaneering avant-swagger of Marinetti.

Bolaño himself said of the book “when I am talking about the right, of course I am really talking about the left” – a left to which he definitely belonged and yet was far from unafraid to criticise. In this sense the outrageous crassness and excesses of the characters on display could be seen as looking-glass distortions of their equivalent counterparts on Bolaño’s own political side. Ernesto Perez Mason for instance, a swaggering Cuban drunk who continually challenges foes to duels who are too scared to appear, and who secretes the acrostics “LONG LIVE HITLER” and “KISS MY CUBAN ASS” in his journalism seems like a fascist doppelgänger of Hemingway. Are these the real targets?

So perhaps Bolaño’s satire aims in two directions at once? And perhaps sheer absurdity? And maybe the competing streams are there to add to one straightforward torrent – to make the reader laugh. Humour is perhaps the most subjective value of all, and it certainly seems true to say that if you don’t find the book funny, you will not see its ‘point’. Plenty of reviewers have sat po-faced through the work and given it the negative notices they believe it deserves, Alberto Manguel in The Observer being just one of many nay-sayers, the good burghers of the Amazon review corps seem similarly non-plussed.

Myself, I found it hilarious. The necessarily flat pomposity inherent to the encyclopaedic style contrasts brilliantly with the demented and demonic behaviour in display. Hazlitt wrote that we laugh because we see the gap between things as they are and as they should be, and the conceit of the encyclopaedia is highly suited to bringing out this contrast, with the gaps of what is unsaid just as vital as the facts on the page. Of the troubled monarchist Mexican poet Irma Carrasco and her ‘tempestuous’ relationship with Communist husband Barreda, the bare biographical facts belie the violence beneath.

In 1953, after another reconciliation with Barreda, who had become a renowned architect, the couple travelled to the Orient: Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines and India inspired Irma to write the new poems of The Virgin of Asia, steely sonnets fearlessly probing the open wound of modernity. The solution, it now seemed to her, was to return to 16th-century Spain. In 1955, she was hospitalised with various broken bones and extensive bruising.

The reactionary Brazilian Catholic philosopher Luiz Fontaine De Souza and his crusade against the figures of the Enlightenment yields a similarly muted gap of anguish, as he follows his Refutation of Voltaire, Refutation of Diderot, and Refutation of D’Alembert with further works on this well-thumbed theme. In 1930, A Refutation of Montesquieu (620 pages) appeared and, in 1932, A Refutation of Rousseau (605 pages). In 1935, he spent four months at a clinic for the mentally ill in Petropolis. De Souza later bites off more than he can chew with his refutation of Hegel and Marx.

Fontaine was, irrefutably, well versed in French philosophy (his command of the language was excellent) but not, by any means, in the work of the German philosophers. His “refutation” of Hegel, whom he confuses with Kant on several occasions, and worse still, with Jean Paul, Holderlin and Ludwig Tieck, is, according to the critics, a sorry affair.

Again, it is the dry staid bibliographic tone surrounding it which makes this passage so funny. Well, for me, at least.

And yet the themes go a fathom deeper than that. With his expertly crafted idiosyncrasies Bolaño has created another universe here, a breathing, thriving world. Bolaño has been accused of the solipsistic sin of self-reference – writing about writing – and perhaps nowhere could that accusation be more accurately levelled than here. Yet by featuring windows on other authors’ narratives Bolaño fashions a dream bridge between different minds, creating a eerie universe of shared perception, in a way truer to life than linear narrative. And in the more bizarre and outré landscapes forged by such damaged misanthropes as Zach Sodenstern (a science fiction writer whose immensely popular Fourth Reich series imagines a noble tribe of Caucasian barbarians reconquering a post-apocalyptic US), Bolaño conjures up the tormented demons of the mind which can give life to real-life nightmares. “The sleep of reason produces monsters” said Goya. In showing the beasts stalking the reason-starved imaginations here, Bolaño shows these monsters can be as seductive as they are bestial.

The far-right is only the secondary subject here. The real focus is the literary world and its feuding literary journals, and cliquish literary societies are distorted but recognisable replicas of those Bolaño himself must have known. The strange self-destructive paths the authors travel down also seem to have an anchor in the realities of Bolaño and those around him. Bolaño was a heroin addict, which may have contributed to his early death aged 50. Different methods and different pathways to be sure, but Bolaño and the buffoonish monstrosities on display here are gripped by the same urge to self-destruct, and to write. They are blood-brothers under the scarred skin.

In real life, as a subversive Chilean leftist, Bolaño was at real risk of torture or even murder at the hands of the country’s right-wing putschist tyrant Pinochet. For him to identify with these monsters, the spiritual brothers of his oppressor – is a strange game, playfulness at its most unnervingly masochistic. The final chapter, on Carlos Ramirez Hoffman, takes a different turn. Longer than the other entries, the writing takes a more straightforward novelistic style, and the narrator is Bolaño himself. He spends the chapter tracking Hoffman, a lauded poet now gone to wrack and ruin and a retired killer in league with Pinochet’s death squads. As Bolaño seeks him out, and the more passages open into more conventionally striking prose unconstrained by the bibliographical format in previous chapters, we see a strange, eerie fruition of synthesis, the encyclopaedia breaking out into the world. The epilogue of characters, books and journals only serves to complete the creation of this dark universe.

This work is not a satire, not a comedic whimsy, not a dark jaded quasi-autobiography. And yet it is all this and much more, a schizoid laugh as much as a peer into the abyss. Bolaño has been the posthumous literary sensation of these past few years and I’ve yet to read his more lauded works, 2666 and The Savage Detectives, put off probably by both their length and fashionability. After the weird brilliance I found in this work, I await their delights with wonder.