Interview with Steven Hall: Part 2

We continue on with our interview with Steven Hall, author of The Raw Shark Texts. If you missed it, read Part 1 here.

BGB: A San Francisco Chronicle review/interview says that you’ve “engineered three complete readings of the book and worked very hard with [your] editor to make each function on plot and character levels”. It goes on to mention that you provided your editors with a supplemental 200 pages of notes to ensure that your text was faithful to each of the readings. How did you keep three separate readings of the novel clear in your mind while writing and revising the text? Did you have a difficult time preventing one possible reading from stepping on the proverbial toes of an alternate reading?

SH: This was one of the reasons Raw Shark took so long to write. I wanted the book to be open to different readings and, even more than that, I wanted the nature of the book itself to be up for grabs. I wondered if I could write a book that one person could pick up and see as a literary novel on the nature of grief, identity and memory, or on books, language and storytelling but that the next person would read as a genre adventure thriller, or romance, sci-fi or horror story. Could one book do all those things? So yeah, it was a big balancing act.

Keeping everything up in the air as I wrote didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time. It’s only afterwards, when I think back to it that I realise just how much stuff I was carrying around in my head. I didn’t really make any notes before Raw Shark but for the next one I’m already into pages of spider diagrams and flow charts to work out exactly what goes where and how. After the last year, my brain doesn’t seem to have as much space in it as it did.

BGB: I’m interested in finding out whether you’re willing to shed some light on some of your more offbeat characters. The first character I’d like to ask about is the sinister Mycroft Ward. In just about every review that I’ve read that mentions the character, a reference is made that the name is very similar to a certain popular computer word processing program. That interpretation would seem to be in keeping with some of the themes of the novel. Then, in an essay that Joyce Carol Oates wrote about “amnesia lit” (in which she called your novel “ingratiatingly literary”) she says, “Hall would seem to be alluding to Mycroft Holmes, the elder, obese genius-brother of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.” That assumption would also seem to be in keeping with the novel’s themes. While writing, did you have one or both of these ideas in mind (others?)?

SH: This is where I start having to be very careful. I made a promise to myself very early on not to say too much about my readings of the book, because I wanted to make it as open as possible for readers to find whatever they find. But I think I can say that yes, both interpretations were intentional (and I’m keeping whether there are others to myself!). Like Mycroft’s name, most of the book is set up to do two or three jobs at once and hopefully what you see depends on where you’re looking from.

I should go on the record and say that one of the things I’m most pleased with about Mycoft is that, like Gavin, he never shows up personally in the story. The main characters never have a direct confrontation with him. There’s a couple of big reason for this, both of which can go some way to unlocking different readings of the book. Some critics saw his no-show as some sort of absent-minded plot hole – I have to say made me spit out my coffee in surprise. When you’ve spent a day counting every instance of the word ‘blue’ in a book for stupidly complicated multi-plot reasons, it’s quite something to read that you must have forgotten to include your main villain!

BGB: The second character that I’d like to ask about is Ian the cat. Ian provides comic relief in the novel, and the descriptions of his expressions are some of my favorite pieces of writing in the book – if you don’t mind my saying so. In my reading of the book, Ian seems to also serve the role of Eric Sanderson’s conscious or “conscious mind” – as though Ian was Eric looking at himself from outside of himself. The unexplained loss of the other cat, Gavin, also seems to mirror the loss of Clio. What can you tell me about the cats? And do you have a cat that served as a model for Ian’s expressions?

SH: Thank you. That’s a nice reading. I couldn’t/shouldn’t comment further

Ian certainly has a lot of jobs to do, maybe even more than the shark. He’s central in a lot of ways. As you say he works as comic relief and also to ground the book in some sort of reality. But he’s a slippery customer too. If you look carefully you’ll see that he does have a habit of walking through closed doors… There’s more to Ian than meets the eyes and more on him still to come.

Oh yeah, I grew up with huge grumpy tomcats so I’ve always had a love for that sort of feline bad attitude. I don’t have a cat at the moment because we live in an apartment but my folks do have a cat called Dave. He’s quite a piece of work.

BGB: Thanks for the insights on the characters. I won’t push my luck by asking you to reveal more…

I came across this statement in a review of the book in Paste Magazine: “Hall is clearly having the time of his life with this book. He’s jazzed about the concepts of memory and death and self that he’s exploring, and he carries us in a headlong rush to test the very edge of what a novel actually is.” Would you describe the process of writing this book as “having the time of your life” and being “jazzed”? On your MySpace page you recount the story of writing a complete novel prior to this one that you attempted to publish, but that you ultimately scrapped. You mention that the book served the purpose of teaching you how to write a novel. How did the writing experiences differ between the two novels? And will we ever see that first novel?

SH: Would I describe writing Raw Shark as ‘having the time of my life’? You know, that’s such a tricky question. On the one hand, it was a lot of hard work – as any writer will tell you, writing novel is a tiring, scary, stressful, frustrating process. On top of that Raw Shark is also a pretty complex book and there were some specific challenges associated with that that we’ve already chatted about. There was also the small problem of me rapidly running out of cash as I tried to finish the book. I had just one month’s rent left (from a maxed-out credit card) when I sold Raw Shark Texts, so there were a lot of sleepless am-I-going-to-get-evicted nights. But, on the other hand, I really was so excited about what I was doing, the concepts I was playing around with and the things I was trying to achieve. I loved Raw Shark and I still do, I’m proud of it. Hmmm. Worryingly I seem to talk about it as if it’s a child. I guess in a way it is.

That first novel was ambitious and exciting to write in its own way. Problem was that I didn’t really know what I was doing and the book didn’t work out. No, no one will be seeing that book although there’s a chance a character or two will crop up somewhere else in the future.

Come back tomorrow for Part 3.

Interview Part 1

Interview Part 3 

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1. Baby Got Books » Interview With Steven Hall: Part 3 — August 19, 2007 @ 9:57 pm