by James Meek
I am grateful to the president of the Arun organisation in the town of Tura, in the Evenk Autonomous Region (‘Evenk’ is the name of the native Siberian people formerly referred to by Russians as ‘Tungus’) for her gift to me of Evenk Heroic Epics, a gift which, at the time, I ungraciously tried to refuse, thinking I would never read it. I was wrong. I am grateful to the people of Tura, Krasnoyarsk, Yeniseysk, Norilsk, Novosibirsk, the Kuzbass and Chukotka for their hospitality and patience during my visits there, and to the Guardian and Observer for making those visits possible.
Russian readers may recognise in Samarin’s song my attempt at a translation of a poem by Innokenty Annensky from 1901. I first came to know it in the much later version set to guitar by Alexander Sukhanov. I subsequently found that Sukhanov made slight changes to the original text, but it is his version I have translated. Anna’s song is, of course, Bulat Okujava’s Vashe Blagorodiye, written long after the events described in the book and, I hope, its only blatant anachronism.
My apologies to Czech-and Slovak-speaking readers for my decision not to include diacritical marks in rendering Czech and Slovakian names. I’ve also followed the usual English literary practice of spurning accents to show which syllable should be stressed in Russian names. ‘Samarin’ should be stressed on the second syllable, ‘Balashov’ on the last.
I would like to thank the people who gave me places to write away from big cities, namely Tanya and Slava Ilyushenko, and John Byrne and Tilda Swinton; Leslie Plommer, for a berth in Berlin; Duncan McLean, Eva Youren, Lenka Buss, Marion Sinclair, Michel Faber, Natasha Fairweather, Susan and Russell Meek, and Victoria Clark, who read the book in manuscript and gave precious support and advice; Jamie Byng and Francis Bickmore at Canongate; and my dear Yulia, for correcting my Russian, tolerating my absences and feeding me jokes.
James Meek London 2004
Author Interview
James Meek in his own words
Interview by Andrew Lawless courtesy of Three Monkeys Magazine.
Andrew Lawless (AL): Many novels come wrapped in a title of convenience, a title that is easy on the ear (and the eye), but that neither adds nor detracts much from the work within. The People’s Act of Love, as a title, it seems to me, bucks this trend, acting almost as a key to unlock meaning within the novel. Is that fanciful? How important was the title to you?
James Meek (JM): The title is a quotation from the book. I found it in the book after I’d written it, and made it the title. In that sense it is embedded in the narrative and in the ideas of the character who expresses it, and by choosing it as the title, I’ve drawn attention to its significance to me. If there is one thing which the four central characters in the book – Anna, Samarin, Balashov and Mutz – agree on, it is that love exists and matters. What they disagree on is what love may be. Samarin and Balashov believe that it may go beyond the love of man for woman, or mother for son, or friend for friend, beyond individual love; that there is a real love which is greater than individuals. This is God’s love; this is the People’s love; this is your country’s love. Anna and Mutz are more skeptical of this kind of idealism. Yet Samarin’s and Balashov’s yearning for God’s love, or the People’s love is, until it is taken to extremes, attractive to Anna; Mutz knows that he lacks something, for her, without it. The people’s act of love is, literally, an act of cannibalism. But to Samarin’s mind it is a small gesture of love, of care and cherishing, from one failed, dying generation of humans to the next, happier generation. The ability to see something wicked and cruel as an act of love is characteristic of the extreme idealist and, in some form, characteristic of a particularly male way of thinking. This idea is reflected throughout the book.
AL: You are an award-winning journalist as well as a novelist. The differences between journalism and fiction-writing are obvious: one discipline requires the writer to make things up, the other precludes this. What, though, are the similarities between journalism and fiction writing?
JM: I’d make a distinction within journalism between reporting, which is what I have done mainly, and other kinds of journalism – reviews, commentaries, interviews with the famous, coverage of sporting events, gossip. One of the main constraints on the reporter, as opposed to the novelist, is space. The reporter is required to be economical with words, sometimes extremely so. The 150-word news story leaves little room for considerations of rhythm or poetry, and the 1500-word news story not much more. As a rule, there is a close deadline involved, too. It might be thought that this training in economy would benefit a fiction writer. I’m not sure. To be comfortable as a novelist, you shouldn’t rely on some outside editor telling you in advance how long or short your book has to be.
Over the years the kind of reporting I’ve done has changed. Lately I’ve been given the opportunity to write pieces which may be longer, which may be impressionistic, more about mood and atmosphere in a particular place at a particular time than about the actions of leading players in an event considered news. In that kind of piece, there may be a similarity between the novelist and the journalist in two senses – the figurative eye of the writer (actually his eyes, ears, nose and touch) needs to be able to pick out the few details which convey a sense of place and time without the impossible tedium of listing everything perceived. The difference is that the fiction writer is likely to be remembering these much later.
The other similarity is imagination. Imagination is usually thought of as the expansion of the real, but it is, equally, a tool to curb the vastness of the actual world of experience. Just as the novelist uses his imagination to delve only into those tiny parts of the infinite world of possibilities which serve his narrative, so the journalist, before he sets out to report a story, needs to use his imagination to decide in advance where he is going to go and who he is going to speak to – to imagine the kind of things which might be happening there and the kind of things real people will actually say to him.
AL: Writing in the London Review of Books about a rash of World War II books, you commented, ‘For novelists, war is the bass line, not the melody’. This begs the question, what’s more important – the bass line or the melody? To what extent, by setting events against a backdrop of war, does the novelist automatically create drama?
JM: In the same article I wrote that war turns the simplest relationships into a ménage à trois – the girl is flirting with a soldier, but the soldier is flirting with death. In times of civil war and tyranny, everyone is flirting with death. To that extent the novelist has certain dramatic possibilities. I don’t think there’s anything automatic about it. Books set in wartime can still be bad and dull. If a writer relies on any setting for drama, he will fail. Gravity’s Rainbow and A Farewell To Arms are not great novels because they’re set in wartime, but because of what the characters do in that setting. Besides, few human acts, no matter how extreme, occur exclusively in wartime. Times of peace are full of the germs of cruelty, suffering and loss. They are less likely to achieve their full evil flowering. But they are there, waiting to grow, they can be seen and they can be written about.
AL: You’ve written a novel about religious fanatics, war and terrorism. Despite the fact that it’s set in 1919 in Siberia, it seems particularly relevant to today. How much, if at all, has the post 9/11 ‘clash of civilisations’ weighed upon the writing of the book?
JM: Although the book was far from finished on 11 September 2001, its outlines and content were already set. It wasn’t revised in the light of that and subsequent events. If it seems relevant, it is neither because I was influenced by 9/11, nor because I foresaw it, but because religious fanaticism, war and terrorism are eternals. Like any of civilisation’s diseases, the necessity to treat them by the best means available doesn’t preclude acceptance that they will always be with us. Historically speaking, of course, to say that the clash (there hasn’t been much civilised about it) you refer to began on 9/11 is like saying that the Second World War began on 7 December 1941 with the bombing of Pearl Harbour, wh
en it began for Europe 14 months earlier, and for China earlier still.
The foregoing doesn’t mean that the book isn’t relevant to what has become a three-way conflict between Islamic fundamentalists, Christian–Jewish fundamentalists, and secularised liberals in the US, Europe, Israel and the Arab world. In the actions of the present-day Islamic suicide bomber you see the perfect fusion of Balashov’s and Samarin’s idea of sacrifice. Like Balashov, the suicide bomber sacrifices his body for an intangible ideal, for the love of God; like Samarin, the suicide bomber sacrifices innocent civilians for an ideal, for the love of the People. Like Balashov and Samarin, the suicide bomber turns his back on the world of parents, children, lovers and friends – or tries to, at least. The jails of the world are full of suicide bombers who, when it came to it, like Balashov and Samarin, couldn’t turn their backs. If it makes some readers uncomfortable that Balashov’s religious fanaticism is Christian, and that Samarin ultimately sees in that Christian fanaticism a solution to personal distraction, I’ll have had one success.
AL: The book is epic in terms of subject matter, and also length. As someone who has written prize-winning journalism and short stories, as well as novels, how difficult was it to write and sustain the narrative of The People’s Act of Love?
JM: Difficult. Are there any writers who find writing easy? It’s hard work. It makes you tired and it makes you hungry. I should say that I don’t think of the book as being particularly long. Four hundred pages – it’s not Remembrance of Things Past, is it? But it is the longest book I’ve written, it does have a large cast of characters and there are a lot of events. This, together with the fact that I wrote it at intervals over a period of ten years, meant that the proportion of thinking and note-taking to actually writing the book was unusually high for me. By note-taking I mean taking notes about what I was thinking, about how the characters might develop. At one point, when I had about a dozen characters all interacting in a single chapter, I wrote all their names on little pieces of paper, folded the pieces so that they sat upright, and arranged them in front of me, like an audience, to make sure I didn’t forget that any of them were there. I had them there for weeks.
AL: Speaking at the Edinburgh Literature festival, you commented about some of your previous work that ‘I think I avoided difficult tasks in writing by making it all surreal, I wasn’t looking my characters in the eye’. Did you set out deliberately then to change style with this book, or did the subject matter automatically lend itself to a less surreal, traditional narrative?
JM: Many of the writers I admired and tried to emulate in my teens and twenties – I still admire them – were characterised by one or more of four elements. First, an element of unreality, of surrealism, of absurdity, which can’t – unlike magic in a generic fantasy novel, for instance – be used by any of the characters as a tool, but is rather a phenomenon which has to be endured, like the weather. Sometimes the unreality is not metaphysical, but behavioural. Examples would be the transformation of humans into rhinoceroses in Eugene Ionesco’s play of that name, or the unsettlingly narrow reactions of Kafka’s characters to the extremity of their experiences. Second, a spare, lean style, low in topographical description and in modifiers, where characters’ appearance is seldom mentioned, adverbs are shunned, and anything which resembles fussiness or euphemism or cliché is subject to a rigorous test for survival in the finished text. Third, an avoidance of the strictly culturally specific – always a generic city, a generic man or woman, a generic country at a generic present time to be preferred to, say, a Catholic Irishman in Dublin in 1916. Fourth, an identification with the underclass, with people in trouble, with people with disabilities or little money or an abrasive disdain for convention which makes them into outsiders wherever they are. I learned a lot, I hope, by reading the likes of Kelman, Brecht, Kafka, Beckett, Ionesco, Hamsun, Bukowski and Carver. I shall continue to read them and learn from them. Yet there were other writers, very different writers, whom I loved and admired, and they taught me different lessons. The richly eloquent writers, wordy in a good sense, the writers of the specific, the writers of place and time and detail: Nabokov, Bellow, Proust, Dickens, Hardy, Joyce, Melville, Balzac, Zola. For convenience, I’d call the two kinds the tough writers and the rich writers. I knew early on how difficult it was to be under the influence of both kinds. I wrote my first novel, McFarlane Boils The Sea, under the influence of Kelman and Proust, which is like drinking a cocktail of Bowmore and Châteauneuf du Pape.
Looking back, I think I turned the influence of the tough writers too much into a set of rules, and, at worst, an avoidance system which not only limited the scope of my writing but prevented me from seeing the deeper arts which the tough writers and the rich writers had in common. The fact that the tough writers tended to focus the point of view of their narratives on a single character, or refused to allow you access to the thoughts of any characters, whereas the rich writers hopped about in a seemingly casual way between giving the readers access to this or that characters’ innermost thoughts, acting as an omniscient narrator and commenting on the characters’ behaviour, blinded me to the thing which united both – that they all understood how vital point of view was. As I worked my way through the books of writers who were both tough and rich – Dostoyevsky, Calvino, Pynchon, Maupassant, Hrabal, Bulgakov – I came to believe that another thing which united all the writers I liked, regardless of the apparent discrepancy in their styles, was the intimacy with which they knew their characters. I’d confused a difference of approach to the same end with a right way and a wrong way of doing something. The important thing is the end, which is to watch your characters closely, study them, and not to flinch from what it is that you know they must do. I became aware of this when writing passages for a series of short stories published in 2000 in the collection The Museum Of Doubt. I spent days working on a brief encounter between two characters over a table, watching them in my head. At the time, I wondered why I was taking so much trouble. Afterwards, when I read it through, I understood that it was because I had taken so much trouble that I liked it; that I believed it.
AL: One of the things that particularly impressed me with The People’s Act of Love was the fact that you used two elements from history, the castration sect and cannibalism, that could easily have overwhelmed the story, and yet they remain almost peripheral. They are important to the story, but they in themselves are not the story. Would you agree?
JM: It was a hope of mine that this would happen. They are important, but it is always difficult to confront horror full-on. You don’t want to be seen to be avoiding unpleasantness, yet nor do you want to be simply grossing your readers out, or scaring them, for the pure sake of making a stranger’s guts churn. The more extreme an action, the harder you have to work to contain it within a bigger narrative, the more you are likely to gain by subtlety and indirectness. So I did want to describe the act of castration, but simply, without excessive gore, and without toiling through too much biological detail about what it actually does to a man’s body to have his balls cut off, in terms of loss of testosterone. I always admired the scene in Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov murders the pawnbroker and her sister. The actual murders, which are bloody, horrible, terrifying, are described in matter-of-fact terms. Immediately afterwards, with the corpses lying there, Raskolnikov sees that the door to the apartment is open. It is the sight of the open door, not the corpses on the floor, which he describes as ‘a horror such as he had never, never experienced before’. Genius.
AL: A number of critics have picked up on the language used in the book. George Walden, writing in the New Statesman, remarked, ‘Meek has a good ear for that peculiarly ethereal tone that can inflect ordinary Russian speech, so that grand notions can be expressed in unpretentious, sometimes earthy language’. Lesley Chamberlain wrote, in the Independent, ‘one has to admire a British writer who can write convincingly as a Russian. There were linguistically odd moments when I thought I was reading a less than
perfect translation’. How important was setting the linguistic tone in the book?
JM: It was important. There is a degree of presumptuousness involved when a writer whose mother tongue is English writes a book in English in which none of the characters are English speakers. But I do speak and read Russian; I lived in the Russian-language world for eight years, a third of my adult life. Sometimes when I was writing the book, I did hear the Russian words in my head, and I did translate them.
AL: It seems a brave and unconventional choice, to stage the novel in a long-forgotten war, in a part of the world that has rarely figured in English-language literature. Most of the novels longlisted for the Man Booker prize, for example, are set either in completely fictional worlds, or in a setting that has a fairly direct connection with the author. As a writer, are you influenced by prevailing fashions, in the sense of avoiding them?
JM: I don’t believe in the idea of completely fictional worlds. You can never separate made-up milieux from the words you use to describe them, words which will, unavoidably, resonate in the readers’ heads with the not-made up milieux they have experienced. I read a lot of science fiction in my early teens and I recognised all the worlds there, every one. No matter how much alien geography and exotica you put in, you have to be able to describe it in familiar words, otherwise it’s incomprehensible, and there have to be recognisable patterns of behaviour among the characters, otherwise it’s dull. Even Finnegan’s Wake and symbolist poetry don’t create a completely fictional world.
As for fashions – the books on the longlist, on the shortlist for that matter, seem quite diverse to me. The world of English-language literature, encompassing as it does India and North America and Africa and Australasia as well as all the British Isles, is too large, and the generational, ethnic and gender spread of working writers too great, for prevailing fashions. Experimental modernist fiction is out of fashion though, I grant you that.
