Another Day, Another Riot, another world: Julian Gough on Toasted Heretic 30 years on

Toasted HEretic stand in the snow, on Aengus McMahon’s roof, some time in the early 1990s. Aengus (the beardy one) took the photo; I can’t remember if he used a timer, or a release cord. Left to right: Neil, Declan, Aengus, Barry, Julian

How Ireland has changed since we made our cult – and newly rereleased – third album

(This piece first appeared in the Irish Times, on May 20th, 2021.)

May 18th was the 300th anniversary of the burning at the stake, by the Spanish Inquisition, of the oldest heretic in Europe (Maria Barbara Carillo, age 95; burnt in Madrid).

On that date, to celebrate her memory, and the memory of old heretics everywhere, my former band, Toasted Heretic, rereleased our cult third album, Another Day, Another Riot.

To release the same album, twice, 30 years apart, is to perform a most peculiar A/B test.

What did those songs mean, pressed into the black, aromatic, hydrocarbon grooves of a vinyl LP, at the start of the 1990s?

What do they mean, wirelessly and weightlessly streamed as digital bits to my bluetooth headphones, in 2021?

Who was I then?

Who am I now?

(And who, indeed, are you?)

The results of the experiment are occasionally unsettling.

In the great Borges story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, an early 20th-century writer and polymath, Pierre Menard, writes Don Quixote again, word for word: and, though every word is the same as Cervantes’ original, it is an utterly different book. The effect those words have on the reader has been completely transformed by the passage of time between the two Quixotes. And so, now, I find myself both Cervantes and Menard, one foot either side of this 30-year-wide abyss. As Heraclitus would undoubtedly have put it, had he had the music streaming service Spotify on his iPhone; “You cannot listen to the same stream twice; for you are not the same person, and it is not the same stream.”

On the launch date, I log into the Spotify for Artists app (where musicians have private access to the streaming statistics for their works), and I can see Another Day, Another Riot begin to roll out around the world, timezone by timezone: “Released in 19 out of 178 countries…”

I check in throughout the day.

“…55 out of 178 countries…”

“…98…”

“…173…”

“Released.”

The delightful new sleeve of Toasted Heretic’s Another Day, Another Riot album features a detail from a great photo by Spenser H, on Unsplash

Then I log into Apple Music for Artists.

The songs are there, too. Released.

Amazon Music for Artists.

They are there.

To understand how that feels, you must understand that it has been impossible to buy these songs new, to hear these songs on demand (however intense your desire), for over 20 years. The last time I saw a second-hand CD of the album for sale on Amazon, it was priced at an absurd $902. By the time our drummer and producer, Neil Farrell, tracked down the original dusty reels of magnetic tape, to remaster the album for rerelease, even I no longer had a CD or vinyl copy. These complicated, multilayered sounds, into which we had all poured so much of our young selves, had come perilously close to ceasing to exist.

But now the great global corporations have silently switched my youth back on. And rushing back with the songs come memories; memories that came just as close to getting lost forever.

These days, I write novels (like Connect), and children’s books (like the Rabbit & Bear books, illustrated by Jim Field), and oddities like the End Poem (the peculiar narrative that ends the computer game Minecraft).

But I learned how to write over 30 years ago, as the singer with Toasted Heretic.

By day, I studied English literature and philosophy in UCG (since rebranded as NUI Galway). By night, I wrote lyrics saturated in that literature, and that philosophy (name-checking Isherwood, Aristotle, Nabokov, Yeats…) And also saturated in the hormones of youth. Listening back, it’s startling how obsessed with sex the songs are. With fame; with beauty; but mostly with sex. Was I really that horny? Oh wait, yes, I was. Let us go back…

Toasted Heretic started out recording cassette albums in our drummer Neil’s parents’ living room in the late 1980s, as teenagers. It was joyously DIY. We didn’t even have a bass guitar, we just tuned down a regular one till it sounded like one. Our drum machine was made by a toy company. (The snare drum sound was once described as “a shoelace furiously lashing an empty crisp packet.”) When we finished an album, we would send the Dave Fanning Show a copy of the master tape – Dave would play us that night on RTÉ Radio 2 (since rebranded as 2FM), and read out our address. Hundreds of people posted a fiver to Neil’s parents’ house, and we sent them a cassette, and a packet of Tayto Cheese & Onion crisps. Because so many of our songs name-checked writers, we started off by selling the albums through bookshops. We were almost completely disconnected from the “real” music industry. We were just making it up. It was fun.

But by the time we recorded Another Day, Another Riot, we’d sold thousands of our home-made albums, we’d played London and New York, we’d signed a record deal, we were in a real studio, and we had a top ten hit in Ireland. We were packing out lively little venues like the Baggot Inn on consecutive nights, we were Single of the Week in Melody Maker in the UK, we were getting national airplay in France…

This was what I had always wanted, and yet I found myself slowly drifting from hoping we would get famous, to worried we would get famous; worried what that might do to me, and us. I had noticed a common factor in many of the famous people I was now meeting: at the point they got famous, they stopped growing up. (A middle-aged teenager can be a tragic figure.) And I hadn’t grown up yet; but I knew that I desperately needed to. So, I didn’t feel ready for the fame I was chasing; I didn’t feel stable enough to handle it.

The songs came out of that ambiguity. Just after signing our deal, as I left RTÉ after doing an interview, I bumped into Sinéad O’Connor, coming in to do one. Newly famous, shaven headed, she had just had a number one hit around the world; she had everything I wanted; and she looked totally overwhelmed by what was happening to her. I put the moment into a song. (It became our hit, Galway and Los Angeles.)

I wrote a song, too, about Kate Bush (An Enormous Request). Back then, she had, famously, toured just once. Appalled and overwhelmed by the crude response from the young men in the audience to her very personal, delicately choreographed shows, she had retreated from the hungry, consuming gaze of the crowd, to the safety, the privacy, of studio and family.

I wrote a song about Freddie Mercury (Another Day, Another Riot); about the Sun newspaper sending a wreath to his funeral, with a microphone hidden in it, then printing the overheard grief of his friends as exclusive interviews.

Songs about all the ways sudden fame could fuck you up.

Listening to them now, though, they read rather differently. Menard’s Another Day, Another Riot is not Cervantes’ Another Day, Another Riot. That fear of becoming famous, or infamous, overnight, seemed pretty esoteric back then. An incredibly niche problem for unstable, insecure, want-to-be rock stars like me.

But the terror of overnight, destabilising fame is now everybody’s terror. All of us risk uncontrollable worldwide fame, and condemnation, every time we post anything of ourselves online. A single tweet, or a shaky snippet of video taken on a phone, taken completely out of context, can get you reviled around the world. In that sense, the album feels startlingly contemporary.

My other thoughts are more personal. I wish I could speak to the young man singing these songs. Give him advice. Because he doesn’t quite know how to live yet. He doesn’t yet know how to treat other people. He fights with men, particularly authority figures, when he doesn’t need to. He sees the surface of women very clearly, but he can’t yet see their depths. He often treats them badly, and doesn’t even notice he has done so. He is a product of his times, who has not yet got a perspective on those times, and thus himself. (He thinks he has; but he hasn’t.)

Well, at least he’s trying. There are songs (ForgottenGoing Public) where he glimpses, and even tries to explore, the character flaws which he will spend the next three decades fixing.

Toasted Heretic, early 1990s. Photo by Steven Sweet.

And, of course, to see his flaws is to see the flaws of the time, and society, that moulded him. When Toasted Heretic formed, the Catholic Church still ruled Ireland. Abortion was illegal, gay marriage was illegal, divorce was illegal. The first time I bought condoms, as a teenager in Galway, I (being unmarried) was breaking the law. I had to knock on the door of the Galway Family Planning Clinic – back then hidden away on the largely derelict Merchants Road – and be checked out first through a spy hole (in case I was a Catholic protester, or the Guards) before they would open the door.

Even a few years later, in 1992, when Another Day Another Riot was first released, homosexual acts between men were still illegal in Ireland. (Homosexual acts between women were so unthinkable, no one had even thought to pass a law against them.) In the years that followed, the battle against the Church for intellectual and physical freedom led to the legalisation of contraception, divorce, gay sex, gay marriage and abortion; but not to the post-religious Utopia many in my generation had vaguely hoped for.

The delayed arrival of easily available contraception in Ireland meant we had the 1960s in the 1980s; and so we threw off the shackles of the Catholic Church, only to immediately clamp ourselves into the fluffy Ann Summers handcuffs of a half-arsed sexual revolution whose casualties were, again, mostly women. Éamon de Valera and Padre Pio may no longer have been male role models in Ireland by the 1980s and 1990s, but their replacement by Clint Eastwood and James Bond created a whole new set of problems. (And James Bond’s replacement, more recently, by rappers, porn actors, and the terrified woman-haters of YouTube, Reddit and 4chan, hasn’t exactly moved us closer to Utopia either.)

It’s true that this new world is, in many ways, much much better than the old one. There is less overt sexism, less blatant racism, less casual homophobia, less grinding poverty. The definition of what it is to be Irish has expanded enormously; overall, we have far more individual freedom to explore a far bigger possibility space.

But in parallel with these improvements, the post-religious world – the secular, technological world – has also created new forms of heresy, as Ireland’s old, unfashionable religious taboos have been replaced by new, improved, and far more fashionable secular taboos. Taboos often quite as irrational and unscientific as the ones they’ve replaced. As an old heretic, it is reassuring to know that there is now a modest, but growing, collection of brand new things you can say – often perfectly true and unremarkable things! – that can get you excommunicated from society.

So we live, once more, in an exciting time of witch hunts and heresies. But at least it is a time of marvellous equality, where anyone, regardless of sex, age, nationality, skin colour, or sexual orientation, can be attacked from both left and right for thinking the wrong thoughts out loud.

What better time for Toasted Heretic to emerge, blinking, from their long sleep?

Final thoughts, as I listen to the album…

In the almost 30 years since that album was released, I have become a very different kind of writer, and person; less caught up in myself; less obsessed with freedom, less afraid of commitment. Less grandiose. Less brittle. I have married, twice, and – very slowly; too slowly – improved in that incredibly difficult, and rewarding, role over time. I have had children, and been, to the best of my ability, a father to them; by far the best thing I have done. The most satisfying, the most interesting. (Also the most exhausting, and occasionally the most boring – well, life is unavoidably complicated.)

I’m pleased the young man standing on the far side of the abyss, who sings these songs (and, somewhat improbably, shares my name) is slightly less of an arse now. I’m glad he avoided the catastrophe of fame. I’m happy he got a chance to grow up.

Another Day, Another Riot, by Toasted Heretic, is now available on all streaming platforms, as is their new single, Satellite Dishes

I Stopped Blogging. Time To Start Again.

I stopped blogging after discovering Twitter. Oh, not completely… but pretty close.

Twitter, for many years, gave me a similar kick to the one I got from blogging; it performed the same psychological functions, but with a little sprinkle of cocaine on top.

I got addicted to Twitter; but over time the world changed, and Twitter changed, and I changed, and it wasn’t fun any more.

So I am going back to blogging. (And going forward to podcasting, and maybe even video making.)

Basically, I want to explore sometimes quite complicated and nuanced ideas, without instant, constant, interruption. Twitter makes this impossible, because it is set up to encourage a perpetual cascade of premature judgements based on hasty misreadings of a couple of random lines taken out of context. Worse, it is algorithmically optimised to ensure that decontextualised fragments of your thoughts are globally distributed into the faces of the specific people who are most likely to misunderstand them, be upset, and lash out. Twitter has become a gigantic machine for punishing intelligent, thoughtful expression.

I’ll probably ease myself back into blogging by reposting here some of the pieces I’ve written for publications like the Irish Times and the Guardian over the past few years.

And I might experiment with posting some of my rough-draft, early-stage thoughts on interesting issues, as I develop them each morning in Roam. (Roam is a superb software tool for organising your thoughts; it is ideal for utterly chaotic thinkers like me, and I now use it every day as a kind of hybrid notebook/diary/mindmap/to-do list/morning pages/commonplace book . In fact, Roam really deserves its own blog post… Hmmm, yes. OK, if I do that, I’ll link to it here.)

Enough for now. This is just a note as much to myself as to anyone else: Less Twitter, Jules. More blogging. (And start that podcast you’ve been quietly faffing about with offline for so long.)

LEAKED: Full Text of President Donald Trump's First Foreign Speech

OK, legally I can't tell you how I got my hands on this... but below is the full, leaked, text of Donald Trump's first foreign speech, written by him in the toilet of Air Force One, on his way to Saudi Arabia...

I've typed it up in full beneath the photo, because his handwriting is terrible.

Enjoy,

 

-Julian Gough

 

 Photo of President Donald Trump's first foreign speech

 

 

FROM: President Donald Trump

TO: The speach guy

RE: My trip to Saudi Arabia, Isreal, and the Vatican. (That’s in Belgum, right?)

 

I know I’m supposed to write a different speach for each country, but I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, no politician in history has ever had as much on their plate as me, I write so many speaches, great speaches, very Presidential, the best speaches, a lot of people are saying. So, you get one speach.

Here is my speach.

Tell McMaster not to mess with it.

 

My Foriegn Speach

 

It is a pleasure, and an honour, for you to stand here today. It seems so recently that I won the biggest electoral college victory ever, and humiliated Crooked Hilary, AND WHERE ARE THOSE EMAILS, HEY? (Leave a little pause here on the teleprompter, for cheers.) And now, here I stand, the winner, in

Saudi Arabia

Isreal

the Vatican

(Just knock off the ones I’m not in.)

 

And you’re probably asking, what is a winner like me doing in a place like this? Because let’s face it, you guys are great, great guys, but you haven’t done a lot lately. Some people might say you’ve been a little pussy-whipped by all the feminism, hey guys? I’m not saying it, but some people say that. Well, I’m here on the tour, biggest tour ever, because I love the Islam, and Jewish people, and the Catholics, they’re all the same to me. Great guys. At least you’re not rapists, like the Mexicans. (NOTE: Ivanka just told me Mexicans ARE Catholics. Can you be both? Check this. May have to change line to, “At least you’re not rapists like the Mexicans. Except the Catholics. You’re rapists.”)

 

People say I’m a racist, but that is totally not true. I don’t see colour. I see money. Money is very fair, very not racist. Even some black people are allowed to have money, and I don’t have any problem with that. Bill Cosby. OJ. Great guys, personal friends of mine. So I’m not a racist. And when I look around

the Mecca

Jerusalem

the Vatican

 

with the gold roofs and the gold, what are them towers called, and the gold ceilings, I see a lot of money. You are good people. Great taste!

 

The Islam

Catholisissm

Jewness

 

Is a great brand! And believe me, I know a great brand with great taste and a global reach when I see it. We should work closer together. Amazing branding opportunities, for both of us. For instance, a golf course. This place could do with a golf course. People can’t pray all day, they need to relax after a hard day’s praying. It’s, you know, humanitarian. Talk to my kids later, they’ll be around. Trump and God, you can see it right? Together at last. Beautiful. A lot of gold. Tasteful. Great branding. They call it sinnergy now. Sinnergy! Hard word. A lot of people don’t know that word. But I do.

 

And you’re standing there wondering, do I love you? Really love you? Because people say I don’t love the foriegn. Liars say it. The press, fake media. Not true. Not true. I love the foreign! I love foreign golf courses, Scotland, Alaska, Hawaii, Rhode Island. I love foreign money, with the little faces on it. I love foreign burgers. A Royale with cheese! I love that. Love that. I love foreign ice cream. I love foreign pussy. Bring me some later. Ha ha! Just joking. The media never know when I’m joking. Crazy. (NOTE: Not joking. Can you arrange that? Also, the ice cream. Extra scoop. Later. Off camera. That’s important. NO CAMERAS FOR THE SECOND SCOOP.)

 

And the Islam! The Islam. What can I say about the Islam. (Someone put something nice in here about the Islam. But not too nice. Don’t let Steve write it, I’m gonna be in the Mecca, very hot there, touchy people, and they have those swords. Do research, go on the Wikipedia. Miller knows how.)

 

Goddamn it, now Ivanka tells me Belgum isn’t in the Vatican. It’s another country, a different one. Four countries! You guys are killing me. People don’t know Belgum is a country, they should write it in their name, Belgum (A Country), it’s causing confusion, they could get into trouble.

 

Does Belgum really need its own piece of speach? I could reuse the Islam piece, there’s a lot of the Islam in Belgum now, right? OK, OK, Ivanka says no, fine, fine, I’ll write some more.

 

Belgum… that’s the waffles, right?

 

Belgum…

 

Uh, had a little nap.

 

Belgum…

 

Had another nap.

 

Got to go, golf.

 

I’ll wing it.

 

OK, that’s my speech.

 

#MANGA!

 

(See, I even made that foriegn, for the Japs.)

 

 

-PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP

We Need To Talk About China

Ah, China. And Chinese economics... I have been obsessed with China, and in particular its uniquely lunatic economy, for the past few years. Why? Because Chinese economic policy has been the biggest elephant in the global economic livingroom since 1989, lumbering around breaking things while the West says "Elephant? I don't see any elephant. Owch, my foot."

A charming and self-explanatory graph, courtesy of The Daily Reckoning, Australia

I’ve come up with, and abandoned, half a dozen plots for satirical stories about the Chinese economy, I’ve written draft after draft of a satirical BBC radio play about the Chinese economy, I’ve read and researched obsessively on the subject. And, every year or so, for the past five years, I have opened up a new file in Scrivener, and started, with furious energy, to write an over-long and over-complicated blog post about China, and how its mysteriously placid economic surface masks a series of catastrophic Communist Party decisions, over the past thirty years, which will lead at some point to China’s implosion, economically and socially… Each time, the post becomes book-length, and I abandon it… Well, here we go again.

Here’s my take on China, boiled down.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; democratic protests swept China; and the Party panicked. They murdered unarmed protesters across the country (including the students in Tiananmen Square), arrested four million people across the country in the following weeks, and then tried to pretend nothing had happened.

Party leaders were determined that China would not collapse like Soviet Russia. So they abandoned Soviet-style economics, and built a gigantic new national financial system, modelled loosely on the Western financial system; but with the state performing every function. As Carl E. Walter and Fraser J. T. Howie put it (in their excellent book Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise), “The state is involved at every stage of the market as the regulator, the policymaker, the investor, the parent company, the listed company, the broker, the bank and the banker.”

And the state decided that 8% economic growth was the target; and the entire economy was configured to hit this target… Well, if you only look at the GDP figures, the Party succeeded. Western free-market economies go up and down like yo-yos, but China has not had a recession since 1976. Even more ridiculous, it's not had so much as a single year of low growth since 1990.

But those reassuring figures mask the roaring balls-up the Communist Party has made of the real economy, particularly in the past decade. Pre-2005, although growth was horribly lop-sided and manipulated, much of it was at least real: the cities that needed connecting were being connected by road and rail; ports and airports were being built in places that needed them; financial reforms were being pushed through; etc, etc.

In 2005, the financial reform program ended, when the leading reformers were ousted (like Zhu Rongji) or died (Vice Premier Huang Ju)– China’s GDP growth figures have been, increasingly, bullshit, driven by terrible lending by the state banks to state industries, massive malinvestment in ever-more-useless infrastructure, and a huge property bubble that has built entire cities and airports in the wrong places.

China’s banks have gone bust once every decade since the seventies, but each time the government managed to recapitalise them, or roll over the bad loans, without writing down the debts. It can’t write them down, because it owes itself the money; to cut the value of the non-performing loans is to say the state can’t pay its debts. It’s trapped. Every bank collapse is a sovereign debt default: and so there can be no bank collapses. But at this point, in my opinion, they’ve finally run out of road. Total debt in China has exploded to unprecedented levels in the past five years.

China, now, is essentially a multi-trillion dollar Lehman Brothers, circa 2007, but with a billion employees. It looks OK, but it is totally hollow; it’s massively leveraged, it’s out of capital, a shit-ton of the assets on its books are in fact worth nothing, and people are starting to believe it’s not good for its promises.

And so China isn’t going to collapse like Soviet Russia; it’s going to collapse like Lehman Brothers.

A giant, weird, slow-motion Lehmans, because it owes the money to itself. So, it will take some time for the collapse to take place. It can print money, roll over debt, do all the things it’s been doing for decades. But, in propping up the fake economy of 8% growth forever, they’ve broken the real economy.

When China finally gets its recession, it's going to be so godawful that it will almost certainly destroy the legitimacy of the Communist Party, which, after 70 years in power, is essentially an incompetent, wildly corrupt, third-generation mafia. Sure, there are some good people in there, but the system itself is totally corrupt, and corrupting, with no mechanism to reform it; and all the alternatives to the Communist Party have been annihilated. Plus, the concentration of power, wealth and influence at the top of the Party has made the leadership of China essentially hereditary, with all the incompetence that entails. (For western examples, think King George III and IV of England, or Presidents George W. Bush I and II, of the former colonies.)

OK, a prediction isn’t a prediction if it isn’t specific. A vague “bad things will happen… somewhere… sometime…” doesn’t count. So here goes.

 

  • The recession will come within the next three years, and will be extremely deep: the Chinese economy will shrink, for the first time in nearly 40 years (and that’ll feel horrendous, from 8% growth to negative growth).
  • Many State Owned Enterprises will go bust; the Chinese banking system will collapse; the enormous shadow banking system will collapse; the Chinese stock market will collapse (well, that’s been happening while I wrote and edited this, over the past week or two, so no credit for that prediction).
  • How this collapse of the financial system plays out is hard to predict, as it’s all the Chinese state owing itself money, and printing money to pay itself. But that pressure should break the renminbi, which is a joke currency anyway. And pretending to fix the banks won’t work, if nobody believes in them as a safe place to store assets any more.
  • In the real world there will be massive unemployment across China (over 15% officially but far more in reality).
  • Social unrest will get out of control, with huge street protests and riots in the cities and in the countryside; uncontrolled population movement (something the Party has always feared and tried to control through the hukou residency permit system, which will break down); and anger expressed through violence against anything associated with the Party. (You’ll see a lot of police stations on fire.)
  • I believe the Party will lose legitimacy; will lose control of the country; and that, within the next decade, China will break up: Neither Tibet nor the Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighur territories in Western China can be held without a functioning Party and Army to enforce their occupation.

 

That’ll do for now.

So why didn't I finish writing and editing all my previous China blog posts, and put them up? Well, the story was so big, and I kept trying to say everything in a single post. But you can't. (And there was always fresh information, new knowledge.) And it was always so much easier to just post a link, or make a sarcastic remark, on Twitter. Sigh. Twitter has ruined my ability to blog. And, five years ago, I felt that if I said "China will collapse", it was probably too soon. I figured China's leadership would be able put it off for another few years.

But now I don't think they can put it off much longer. They will try; but this time I think it's over. I suspect the shadow banking system has already begun to collapse (along with the housing market and the stock market), and with it the Party leadership's control over events.

Anyway, my greatest regret, as a (former) blogger, is in not posting my thoughts about China. (Every few weeks, for about three or four years now, I’ve woken in the night groaning, why didn’t I blog about China six months ago?) So, over the next few months, I'm going to try and put down a few years' worth of thoughts. It's too late for me to get credit for the prediction, but it's not too late to be part of the conversation. And we're going to be talking a lot about China over the next 5 years.

Where The Hell Was I?

Hi! How is everybody? Good? It's been a while...

Jeeeeez, look at the state of this website. It’s covered in MOULD. I need to spring clean. Fumigate. Pour petrol on it, torch it, and start again. Also, I need to transition the whole site to the new Squarespace architecture. I’ve been meaning to do that for the last two years. Goddamn. (You can tell I’m listening to a lot of Marc Maron lately, can’t you? It’s a seductive voice. SEDUCTIVE.)

Julian doing something mysterious, somewhere tasteless. Photo by Solana Joy.

Why have I neglected my website?

1.) Twitter. (Hypocrite Twitter! My blog’s tongue-tied brother, my blog’s tiny, deformed twin!)

2.) I’ve been writing a novel called Infinite Ammo (more on that in a second).

3.) My Kickstarter last August, set up to fund the completion of that novel, blew up, and raised nearly six times what I’d asked for, and took over my life for a while (the parts of my life that weren’t already obsessively writing a novel). And one of the best things about Kickstarter (I’ve backed a few projects there, as well as launching my own) is that, as a backer, you get regular updates. So I’ve been updating my lovely backers since August; but writing an update satisfies the blogging urge. Thus, no blog posts here.

So if you want to catch up on the last six months of my life (Las Vegas! Singapore! Russia! Guns! Germs! Ice cream!) go read all the updates on my Kickstarter. It’s called The Las Vegas Postcards, and all the public updates are there, just click. (There have also been a few private ones between me and my backers, but a guy has to have some secrets.)

Oh, the novel: It’s finished. I finished it last week. Hmmm? What? Is it a relief? Oh man, it’s like putting down a piano you’ve been carrying everywhere for three years.

So, today (hey, Saint Patrick’s Day! My middle name! Auspicious!), my beloved agent Charlie Campbell started sending it out to the select few publishers out there with the right type of traumatic childhood and subsequent deep-seated personality disorder to fully appreciate it. I think it’s my best book. (Although it’s so radically different from the Jude books, that’s like comparing an iPhone with some bananas.) 

Anyway, the London Book Fair comes up next month, and there may be some hot contractual action by then. We’ll see. Whatever happens, I’ll tell you instantly on Twitter, later on Kickstarter, and eventually here. It is all very exciting.

OK, now go love each other (yeah, enemies and all, you know it makes sense).

 

-Julian

Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008

To celebrate the paperback release this week of Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008, I've reprinted my Irish Times review of the 2012 hardback, below. (That original review has now vanished into the Irish Times archive, behind the paywall.) For those too busy to read the whole review: basically,Extreme Metaphors was my book of the year. I read it with delight, frequently chortling. An extraordinary alternate history of the 20th century, packed with prescient ideas which help explain the 21st.

- Julian

A photo of my copy of Extreme Metaphors, taken five minutes ago. The image links to more information, from the website of one of the editors, Simon Sellars.

 

Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008

Edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara

Fourth Estate

503pp, price £stg25


J.G. Ballard might be the greatest English writer of the 20th century. He was certainly, for much of the second half of that century, the least understood, and most misread, when he was read at all. In 1970, when Nelson Doubleday Jr, a senior executive at Ballard’s American publishing house, finally got round to reading a finished copy of The Atrocity Exhibition, he was so horrified he ordered all copies pulped. In the UK, the reader’s report for Ballard’s 1972 novel Crash famously said “This writer is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.”


But live long enough, and respectability eventually covers you, like jungle vegetation claiming a wartime runway. In 1984, his most nakedly autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Martin Amis says on the back of this handsome hardback collection of interviews, “Ballard will be remembered as the most original English writer of the last century.” Will Self concurs; “Ballard issued a series of bulletins on the modern world of almost unerring prescience. Other writers describe; Ballard anticipated.”


Ballard most certainly did. The chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition which so disgusted Ballard's own publisher was titled “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan”. In it, Ballard portrayed the former Hollywood actor, who’d co-starred with a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo, as President of the United States. It would be over a decade before reality caught up with Ballard’s imagination.


Indeed, some of the interviews here are almost comically prescient; Ballard predicted Facebook before the internet even existed. In 1979, dismissing the BBC and ITV news as “that irrelevant mixture of information about a largely fictional external world”, he describes a future in which we video everything, and


“…the real news of course will be a computer-selected and computer-edited version of the day’s rushes. ‘My God, there’s Jenny having her first ice cream!’ or ‘There’s Candy coming home from school with her new friend.’ Now all that may seem madly mundane, but, as I said, it will be the real news of the day, and how it affects every individual.” (And yes, he goes on to predict Youporn…)


He predicts the future; but he also questions the present. And many of the questions he raises here have not yet been answered. The real issue, behind all the fake issues, in this year's American election [2012], was summed up succinctly by Ballard in 1984, talking to Thomas Frick:


“Marxism is a social philosophy for the poor, and what we need badly is a social philosophy for the rich.”


As with a number of the more interesting American SF writers of his era (Philip K. Dick, Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek), Ballard became a science fiction writer by default. The SF market was the only available outlet for fiction this odd. But he is not a science fiction writer. He is not, indeed, a writer, in the normal sense of the term. Ballard is a visual artist. He makes the point again and again here; the greatest influences on his works are not other literary works; they are the paintings of the surrealists. As he said in an interview with James Goddard and David Pringle in 1975,“They’re all paintings, really, my novels and stories.”


And it is true. You read his spare, functional prose, and the most astonishing images erect themselves in your mind. The beauty of the sentence itself didn’t interest him. (This makes him hard to quote: reading Ballard, you drift into a dreamstate which can’t be evoked in a couple of lines.) Certainly he set much of his work in the future. But there isn't a space ship to be found. (Well, OK, one, in an early story.) As mainstream SF explored outer space, J.G. Ballard explored what he came to call inner space. He wasn't similar to SF writers like Heinlein and Asimov and Arthur C. Clark, he was their opposite, a point he makes in an interview from 1975:


“You can’t have a Space Age until you’ve got a lot of people in space. This is where I disagree, and I’ve often argued the point when I’ve met him, with Arthur C. Clarke. He believes that the future of fiction is in space, that this is the only subject. But I’m certain you can’t have a serious fiction based on experience from which the vast body of readers and writers is excluded.”


I get the feeling J.G. Ballard passed Ireland by. He was seldom piled high on the front tables in Easons. Seen, perhaps, as too English for our tastes? But of course, he wasn’t English at all. His sensibility was formed in Shanghai, where he was born to English parents in 1930; and in particular in the vast civilian internment camp of Lunghua, where he was interned by the Japanese (at the age of 11), along with his family. In this book he frequently talks of never getting used to the England he first encountered aged 16, in 1946, as a traumatised child of the tropics.


Exiled from Shanghai, an alien in England, Ballard nonetheless had a spiritual home. No matter where his books were ostensibly set, Ballard always wrote about America; not as a place, but as a state of mind. America as a condition. America as a psychological disorder… He loved America. Though Crash is set in England, on the motorways connecting his quiet home in Shepperton to London, the cars in Crash are American cars. His Shanghai childhood — in an Americanized Asia — was a century ahead of its time. He grew up in the future. As a result, these interviews have aged well. It helps that Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara have edited this 500 page book with such love, intelligence, and deep knowledge of the material and its context. Extreme Metaphors presents, in chronological order, 44 interviews from the many hundreds he gave. (The editors estimate the total wordage of the novels as 1,100,000; short stories, 500,000 words; non-fiction, 300,000… and interviews, 650,000.) The interviews they’ve chosen have a very low fluff content. Many of the best originally appeared in long-vanished, never-digitised, photocopied fanzines, and are genuine, deeply engaged and engaging conversations about important subjects. Nobody is trying to sell you anything (it’s often impossible to tell what book Ballard is supposed to be promoting).


The wide range of interviewers adds to the pleasure of the book. Ballard attracted intense, usually male, interviewers, who had a deep engagement with his work. There is a pleasantly kaleidoscopic effect, as each sees Ballard through the lens of their obsession. Fellow novelists Toby Litt, Will Self and Hari Kunzru take a literary approach. John Gray is philosophical. The Russian Zinovy Zinik gets Ballard to talk about Soviet utopias and dystopias. With Iain Sinclair, Ballard discusses the design of 1970s multi-story carparks in Watford. (Ballard; “They covered them in strange trellises. It was a bizarre time.”)


And he is very open. When Joan Bakewell says of Crash, “Now, this is a deeply disturbing book. Were you very disturbed when you wrote it?” he replies “I think I was. I think in a way the novel is the record of a sort of mental crash that I had in the mid-sixties after the death of my wife…”


Ah, death. Yes, it’s everywhere in his work. Ballard’s fiction is largely set in the dead spaces of the modern world. Underpasses, flyovers; abandoned and disintegrating runways; nuclear test sites; blockhouses; drained swimmingpools. The tide of humanity has gone out. What is left is returning to the natural world. The atmosphere is that of Max Ernst’s Europe After The Rain. The organic and the inorganic are inextricably linked. Things grow, and things crumble. The work of man is absorbed by the jungle.


It’s hard, reading this book, not to think of contemporary, Americanised Ireland, with its motorways and drive-thru McDonalds. Of Dublin, with its low corporate tax rate, reckless financial zone, and Euro-HQs of American corporations; with its expat communities of British, German and US workers in gated dockside settlements, surrounded by grinding native poverty; an open city, in a state too weak to defend itself. Dublin was, for a decade there, the closest thing Europe had to the booming, buckaneering Shanghai of the 1930s.


Now, in neglected Dublin back gardens, the outdoor hot tubs fill with dead leaves. Beyond the M50, the ghost estates are reclaimed by the whitethorn bushes. Ireland has become a Ballardian landscape. Given the extraordinary relevance of his work to Ireland’s psychological condition, it might be time for more Irish people to start reading J.G. Ballard. And this lovingly curated book of interviews is a fine place to start.


I will be very surprised if any novel this year gives me as much pleasure as this book. And I can guarantee (now that Ballard is dead) that no novel will contain so many provocative, intriguing, and visionary ideas.



Julian Gough is an Irish writer, living in Berlin, whose work was shortlisted this year for both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and the BBC International Short Story Award. His latest novel, Jude in London, is out now in paperback from Old Street Publishing.


ENDS.


Ireland After The Bailout - A Few Thoughts


My mum voting in the recent referenda, in our local national school, in Nenagh, Co.Tipperary

 

Ireland is about to emerge from the bailout process that she was forced to enter when her banking system and economy collapsed in 2008. Will Ireland emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis, or poop from a butt? We shall see...

Anyway, that fine and thoughtful journalist Conor Pope of the Irish Times asked me a few questions last week for a long piece he was writing on the subject.

I haven't read the article yet (I'll link to it here when and if it goes online), but I'm familiar with the way that quotes in an article can become unmoored from what you actually said (no matter how good the journalist, or the paper). That's just the nature of a daily newspaper's high-pressure, high-speed editorial process. Qualifiers get left out; the first half of a balanced argument makes the cut because you said it in a sexy way, the second half doesn't 'cause you didn't; a subeditor in a hurry can accidentally trim the punchline from a joke, or, in tightening up a saggy sentence, accidentally flip its meaning on its head. (Yes, all these things have happened to me. No, I'm not looking at you, New York Times, or Prospect, or Financial Times, or GREY Magazine, or The Times, or The Believer, or any of the little literary magazines. YES, I'M LOOKING AT YOU, GUARDIAN.)

Also, I miss the good old days, pre-Twitter, when I frequently blogged about economics from a novelist's perspective; I thought posting this might jolt me back into that habit. Plus, I gave myself a headache thinking about all this, and I know that, at best, only a couple of lines will make the finished article. (Conor has talked to a lot of people.) So, if anyone is interested, here's what he asked me, and here are my answers in full...

 

How would you explain the madness that gripped Ireland during the boom and why did so few people see the calamity coming down the tracks in 2006? 

I wouldn't give us a hard time over this. We were part of something much bigger than Ireland; the structural problems with the Euro blew up all the peripheral economies. Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain; the way the Euro was set up almost forced them into classic, credit-driven bubbles, in their national flavour. The bubble just came down the easiest credit channel. In Greece, it expressed itself through state patronage; in Ireland, it expressed itself through property & mortgages, etc. If the founders of the Euro refused to see the coming problem, even thought they were warned by several grumpy economists at the time, then we can hardly be blamed for not spotting it.

Also, we were drunk at the time. And high. Not all of us, but a startling number. I’m going to guess that our consumption of alcohol, cocaine and credit all mapped onto each other fairly exactly in the bubble years. Again, I don’t blame us. We were coming out of centuries of relentless, grinding national poverty. And when you’re poor, you don't need to cultivate a habit of restraint. You spend till you run out of money; you drink till you run out of drink. Poverty stops you killing yourself drinking, and lack of credit stops you killing yourself with debt. But give a poor society unlimited drink, or unlimited credit, and it's likely to end badly. I stopped going out in those years, because my friends were putting three or four €70 bottles of champagne on their credit cards and saying, sure we’ll split the bill at the end of the night. And I’d be nursing a single glass of fizzy water for five hours. Socialising became impossible; being frugal was seen as being disapproving, or difficult. We were drunk on credit, and everything looked more and more beautiful the drunker we got. Until we ran out of drink, and had to deal with the hangover. Countries that have been wealthy for a long time have to develop internal habits of control. You won't see the Swiss drinking their wages, because that would kill them.

 

What impact did the scale of the banking crisis have on Irish people? 

What about the bailout? What impact did that have? 

 ((Yeah, I'm in Ireland a lot, but I live in Berlin now. I didn't feel qualified to answer these two questions, so I skipped them.))

 

Repeated studies have shown that in spite of the horror show, Irish people have remained happier than in previous recessions - why do you think that is? 

 

The recession removed the unpleasant, highly competitive status anxiety that was the least attractive aspect of the bubble years. We are much more respectful of our friends’ feelings now, of their situation. Much more sensitive to the fact that they might not be able to afford to keep up. I was so pleased when I started to see party invitations that say, no presents. Strip away the material things from a relationship, and, if the relationship survives, it strengthens the relationship, it doesn’t weaken it. We see each other to see each other, now, not to show off. Also, this is a recession, not a famine. It's only a recession relative to the boom. It's a very painful adjustment, but we still have colour TV and the internet. And the suffering has been spread relatively evenly, across the classes, which gives a sense of solidarity. We’re in the shit, but we’re in the shit together.

 

We seem to have accepted all the austerity - imposed first by our own masters and subsequently by the Troika without so much as a murmur. What, do you think, does that say about us as a nation. 

 

I know there’s a lot of bemoaning this, but I think it reflects well on us as a nation. It’s only money; it’s only stuff. Fuckit, we still have each other, and nobody died. That’s a good attitude. If we took to the streets and had a revolution because our investments went badly… No, that’s not us. What’s tragic is that some people have been destroyed psychologically by their losses. But what is marvellous is that most people have not been. Their identity was not tied up with their property, their self esteem did not collapse along with their bank balance.

 

What impact - both psychologically and practically - do you think the bailout exit will have?

 

Not a lot. It’s a shaky exit. The Eurozone still has enormous problems, we haven’t really fixed a lot of what went wrong. The European financial system is still under horrendous strain. I don’t think the story of the Eurozone crisis is over yet, and through no fault of our own we may yet be dragged back into it.

 

And do you think we have learned from our mistakes? Property prices are rising in Dublin - and to a lesser degree in other urban centres - could we possibly allow another bubble to inflate or have we learned our lesson?

 

Well, if you don’t fix the fundamental problems; and the ECB and Germany and France have not fixed those problems, just stuck some enormous band-aids over them; then yes, another bubble could well inflate. But that’s not because WE haven’t learned from our mistakes. That’s because Germany, the country on the other side of all these imbalances, and the cause so much of Europe’s structural internal imbalance, still doesn’t believe it has made any mistakes. We've acknowledged our errors. Germany has not. Let’s not give ourselves such a hard time… I think Ireland's behaved well, and with remarkable restraint, under very difficult circumstances.  We've held together as a nation, unlike Greece say, which has been massively divided and embittered by their crisis; and at an individual level I think we've, by and large, looked after each other.

50 Free Copies of “CRASH! How I Lost A Hundred Billion And Found True Love”

So, I’ve been laughing and crying, listening to the Anglo Irish Bank tapes for the past fortnight. How can you satirize this? The line about the bailout figure of €7bn —  “I pulled it out of my arse…” — sounds more like one of my lines than most of my actual lines do.

 

First cover designMore specifically, they sound like they come from the comic novella I’m publishing next week. Which, oddly enough, stars a senior Irish banker, naming no names (and a very broke Irish taxpayer… and a woman awfully like Angela Merkel… and a man awfully like the head of the European Central Bank).

 

It’s called “CRASH! How I Lost A Hundred Billion And Found True Love”, and DailyLit are collaborating with Amazon to publish it as a Kindle Single, on July 11th. On the left there you can see all the cover designs we considered. But let's get down to the meat of the matter...

 

FREE COPIES!

 

I’ve talked to DailyLit, and to Amazon (who are publishing this together worldwide), and they’ve given me 50 free copies, to give away to my long-suffering followers, here and on Twitter. (At last, a reward for putting up with my blog posts about German elephants eating Christmas trees, and my 3am Twitter rants about African toilet design improvements.)

 

Second cover ideaGive me your email address, and whether you use the UK Amazon store or the US store, and I’ll paste the info into our elegantly named DailyLit Amazon Kindle Gifting Spreadsheet, and, on the day of release (July 11th), you will be sent a free code so you can download a copy.

 

Your emails will just be used for this, they won’t be shared in any way. You can mail me personally —  I’m juliangough (easy enough to remember) at gmail dot com — or mail me through the website; or leave it in a comment down below; or tell me by tweet (or DM, if our relationship is already intimate) on Twitter. Disguise it (yourname at something dot com) if you fear spambots, or give it to me straight. Whatever works for you.

 

First 50 I see will get a copy. (I may even be able to give away more copies than that, but I don’t want to over-promise.) 

 

Third cover idea. Funky angle! Funky chicken!Oh, and tell me which cover design you like best, while you’re at it, in the comments below, or on Twitter. We’ll see if our tastes align…

 

OK! I will blog more about this in a few days. And maybe put up an extract. Hey, it’s practically a media strategy!

 

Talk soon,

 

 

-Julian

Fourth cover design. Magnificent chicken, but you can't read CRASH! Take more drugs, drink more coffee, off we go...

 

 

 

 

 

 


Fifth cover design. The winner! Perfectly balanced. Hurray for Michele de la Menardiere and Tiya Tiyasirichokchai!

The Anorexic Bodybuilder (a poem from a long time ago)

The ebook version of my collected poetryI got a fan email last month, from Japan, about a poem I once wrote. This — trust me —  doesn’t happen very often.

I wrote the poem for a nightclub flyer in Galway almost 20 years ago. I found a copy of the flyer in my parents’ attic, while I was assembling my collected poems in 2010, and included it in the book.

She came across probably the only copy in Japan, brought there by Robert, a friend of mine. I would guess that a few hundred people have read it, certainly less than a thousand. It occurred to me that if it meant so much to her, maybe it would mean something to some other strangers too. So I’ve decided to put it on my blog, below. (Poems are just birds that fly in your window; the writer doesn’t own them.)

If it means something to you, no problem; copy it, print it out, put it on a T-shirt, whatever.

For those who like to know the story behind any piece of writing; no, I won’t tell you the details. But yes, it turned out OK for some of the women I knew back then. Not so well for others.

 

-Julian, Berlin, June 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE ANOREXIC BODY-BUILDER

 

If I'm very lucky, once a year

(Maybe twice, if I've been eating fish)

I am dazzled by a bright idea

And here's the one I got this year (I wish

It was a bit more bright, but it's bright-ish)

Anyway, yes, body-building, then.

It's an anorexia for men.

 

All the girls I know hate body-builders,

Find the mass of rippling flesh disgusting

Certainly not sexy. It bewilders

Boys to think their sister could be thrusting

Fingers down her throat like that... No lusting

After bulk for women then. And mannish

Boys have no desire at all to vanish.

 

To blow the self up, and to disappear:

Two expressions of a single urge

To shout the Will and make the body hear

The body-builder wills the flesh to surge

The anorexic wills an ebb, a purge

The Stalin of the mind lets the tanks roll:

The body is a place they can control

 

Each pursues a lunatic ideal

Each is lonely in the mad pursuit

When the vision of oneself's unreal

The vision of all others lacks a root

The muscle-man exploding through his suit

The wisp of girl who frowns at her reflection

They both recede from us toward Perfection.

 

This should end with some kind of conclusion.

Final statement. Answer to the riddle.

If I could, I'd give you the solution

Or at least some figures you could fiddle

But I can't, I'm stuck here in the middle

Seeing men expand and women shrink

I watch them go, and don't know what to think.

 

 

(From The Psychedelian, Issue 3 Volume 1, Thursday Oct. 21st, 1994. Collected in Free Sex Chocolate, Salmon Poetry, 2010.)

Town & Country, edited by Kevin Barry. A mysterious new book of mysterious new stories by mysterious new writers. And some old writers.

I can't say much about this yet, or they will KILL ME AND FEED ME TO THE RATS, in the dungeon beneath the Faber & Faber HQ. (OK, OK, I am exaggerating. The dungeon beneath the Faber & Faber HQ is only used for consensual BDSM sex.)

Town. Not to mention Country. On Amazon. Or in your local bookshop. Wait, no that's a boutique now. Hang on, didn't they go bust? It's an artisan bakery. Feck it, there's always the library... Hey, where's the library?

But I can say, it's the cover of a book that may or may not contain stories by **k* ********k, and *e**** *e***, and good lord, *****n* ****n.

And, wow, *i*í* *í ***i****, and the excellent **i** *i*****, and **ll* ***l*****!

And *a* ***a**, not to be confused with *a** ****a*, who ALSO has a story in it... What's that noise? That squeaking noise, from behind the door? Two kinds of similar, yet distinct, squeaking? Getting louder... The door! It's swinging open... Rats! Rats in bondage gear! Their tiny, rubber-clad thighs rubbing together as they cautiously approach... break suddenly into a run... leap for my throat!

AAaaaaAAAAaaaaaAAaaaaaaaaaAAAääaäàááaAAAaááaááæaaãããæAAAæææååååāaāaāäaääààaa.....

It’s Official; I’m Writing the Biography of Octavia Friedman, CEO of Octo. (See you at Transmediale…)

Well, this is my big news for 2013. (I had to keep quiet till all the contracts were signed.) Where do I start? A traditional biography would probably begin,Octavia Allende Friedman is the CEO of Octo. She plans to transform the world. (And her plan is right on track.) Octavia was born in Venezuela, in 1970, to a mathematician and a dancer, and learned binary before she learned the alphabet…”

 

But if you've been reading the news recently, you will already know all about Octavia. Wall Street Journal: "Octavia Friedman is the next Steve Jobs." (Paywalled). Wired: “Octavia Friedman, and Octo, Build The Internet Of Things.” TechCrunch: "Octavia Sues Samsung and Manolo Blahnik For Patent Infringement." National Enquirer; "Red-Headed Female Billionaire Accused of Pushing Bankers Into Volcano From Helicopter."

 

Many details of Octavia’s life are in the public domain. But the full truth is waaaay stranger. If I get it right, this is going to be one hell of a book.

 

Of course Octo hasn't transformed the world yet, but seasoned veterans of the tech wars, and her celebrity friends, give her a damn good chance of succeeding. (Robert Scoble: "I haven't been this excited by a startup since Friendfeed." Cory Doctorow: "I haven't been this excited by a startup since Github.” George Michael: "I haven't been this excited by a startup since Grindr.”)

 

The story of her extraordinary company is inextricably tangled up with the story of her extraordinary life. A role model for millions; a powerful woman at the top of a male dominated industry; an occasionally controversial figure (though the deaths of her former associates were, eventually, ruled accidental); and the most glamorous CEO of the modern era; it is unsurprising that her biography is predicted to be the number-one non-fiction book, worldwide, this Christmas, even though it hasn't actually been written yet.

 

So, yes, I'm pretty pleased to have been given the gig of writing it. And I’m not just saying that because one of her minders is standing behind me with a gun. (Ha ha! (Just joking. (Honest.)))

 

PHOTO: The view (straight up) from the bottom of the well they threw me down 

 

I can't say much more about this now (even the UK and US publishers want to keep their names under wraps until certain subsidiary rights deals are signed), but I can tell you that the contract to write the book is now firmly in place. The rumour that I was required to sign it in blood is entirely false. (A couple of drops may have got splashed on the contract during negotiations, but it was nothing, really.) The book will be fully illustrated with candid shots and family photos, plus specially commissioned portraits by Katy Grannan and David LaChapelle, and will come out in hardback and e-formats on November 21st this year, in all markets.

 

To be totally honest, I wasn't sure if I had time to do this (I have my own novel, screenplay, and computer game to write), but it turns out Octavia is a big fan of my story "The iHole", which recounts the history of a new technology; and she and her associates were very persuasive. They flew me to Austria last week (very hush-hush: I had to pretend I was going there to give a talk at the University of Vienna), and we talked terms in her little Mittel-European pied-a-terre, Schloss Octo, just outside Vienna.

 

PHOTO: The view (straight down) from the window they dangled me from.

 

 

So, there you go. I'll tell you more as it becomes legally possible. Meanwhile, Octavia will be launching a proof-of-concept of Octo's new product at the transmediale festival in Berlin this week; I'll be there, covering the launch, and interviewing Octavia for the book. If you bump into us, say hello...

 

Here you go. "The Orphan and the Mob": A free, award-winning, and slightly rude story, to celebrate “The iHole” making the shortlist of the BBC International Short Story Award

Gareth Allen's fine drawing (from Jude in London) of a totally different and entirely fictional prize ceremony, at which Jude is borne aloft

 

Woo-hoo! as Blur so eloquently put it.

 

My story, "The iHole", has been shortlisted for this year’s super-special, one-off, BBC International Short Story Award. (This is the literary equivalent of qualifying for the 100 meters final at the Olympics. Only with fifteen grand for the winner instead of a gold medal. And you don’t have to run, thank God.)

 

The ten shortlisted stories, by such splendid writers as Deborah Levy, Lucy Caldwell, and MJ Hyland, are being broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and are (or will be) also available for two weeks as free podcasts from here, and published in this book here.

 

So, to celebrate all that, I'm giving away my best short story that ISN'T "The iHole".

 

“The Orphan and the Mob” is a serious comedy, about an orphan who desperately needs to go to the toilet. (It’s also an allegory of 20th century Irish history, a visual pun on The Wizard of Oz, and quite a few other things, but shush, let’s not frighten the children.) It won the BBC National Short Story Prize in 2007 (at that time, the largest prize in the world for a single short story), and was broadcast twice on BBC Radio 4. It represented Ireland in the Dalkey Archive anthology, Best European Fiction 2010. It also forms the prologue to the novel Jude in Ireland (which the Sunday Tribune chose, in 2010, as their Irish Novel of the Decade).

 

OK, enough of that; you can lash into it online below. If you like it, please do tell me in the comments. And if you REALLY like it, buy the Jude novels and find out what happens next. (My long-suffering publisher, Ben, has, at my request, set the e-book prices particularly low, to entice and seduce you.)

 

Any questions? Ask them in the comments below, or mail me here. In fact mail me anyhow, say hello, and I’ll tell you what I’m up to, and send you the odd free story and poem.

 

Enjoy...

 

-Julian

 

 

 

The Orphan and the Mob

 

-Julian Gough

 

 

         If I had urinated immediately after breakfast, the Mob would never have burnt down the Orphanage. But, as I left the dining hall to relieve myself, the letterbox clattered. I turned in the long corridor. A single white envelope lay on the doormat.

I hesitated, and heard through the door the muffled roar of a motorcycle starting. With a crunching turn on the gravel drive and a splatter of pebbles against the door, it was gone.

Odd, I thought, for the postman has a bicycle. I walked to the large oak door, picked up the envelope, and gazed upon it.

                 

         Jude

The Orphanage

         Tipperary

         Ireland

 

         For me! On this day, of all significant days! I sniffed both sides of the smooth white envelope, in the hope of detecting a woman's perfume, or a man's cologne. It smelt, faintly, of itself.

I pondered. I was unaccustomed to letters, never having received one before, and I did not wish to use this one up in the One Go. As  I stood in silent thought, I could feel the Orphanage Coffee burning relentlessly through my small dark passages. Should I open the letter before, or after, urinating? It was a dilemma. I wished to open it immediately. But a full bladder distorts judgement, and is a great obstacle to understanding. Yet could I do justice to my very dilemma, with a full bladder?

         As I pondered,  both dilemma and letter were removed from my hands by the Master of Orphans, Brother Madrigal.

"You've no time for that now, boy," he said. "Organise the Honour Guard and get them out to the site. You may open your letter this evening, in my presence, after the Visit." He gazed at my letter with its handsome handwriting, and thrust it up the sleeve of his cassock.

I sighed, and went to find the Orphans of the Honour Guard.

 

 

         I found most of the young Orphans hiding under Brother Thomond in the darkness of the hay barn.

         "Excuse me, Sir," I said, lifting his skirts and ushering out the protesting infants.

         "He is Asleep," said a young Orphan, and indeed, as I looked closer, I saw Brother Thomond was at a slight tilt. Supported from behind by a pillar of the hay barn, he was maintained erect only by the stiffness of his ancient joints. Golden straws protruded from the neck and sleeves of his long black cassock, and emerged at all angles from his wild white hair.

         "He said he wished to speak to you, Jude," said another Orphan. I hesitated. We were already late. I decided not to wake him, for Brother Thomond, once he had Stopped, took a great deal of time to warm up and get rightly going again.

         "Where is Agamemnon?" I asked.

         The smallest Orphan removed one thumb from his mouth and jerked it upward, to the loft.

         "Agamemnon!" I called softly.

Old Agamemnon, my dearest companion and the Orphanage Pet, emerged slowly from the shadows of the loft and stepped, with a tread remarkably dainty for a dog of such enormous size, down the wooden ladder to the ground. He shook his great ruff of yellow hair and yawned at me loudly.

         "Walkies," I said, and he stepped to my side. We exited the hay barn into the golden light of a perfect Tipperary summer's day.

         I lined up the Honour Guard and counted them by the front door, in the shadow of the South Tower of the Orphanage. Its yellow brick façade glowed in the morning sun.

         We set out.

 

 

 

         From the gates of the Orphanage to the site of the speeches was several strong miles.

We passed through Town, and out the other side. The smaller Orphans began to wail, afraid they would see Black People, or be savaged by Beasts. Agamemnon stuck closely to my rear. We walked until we ran out of road. Then we followed a track, till we ran out of track.

We hopped over a fence, crossed a field, waded a dyke, cut through a ditch, traversed scrub land, forded a river and entered Nobber Nolan's bog. Spang plumb in the middle of Nobber Nolan's Bog, and therefore spang plumb in the middle of Tipperary, and thus Ireland, was the Nation's most famous Boghole, famed in song and story, in History book and Ballad sheet: the most desolate place in Ireland, and the last place God created.

         I had never seen the famous boghole, for Nobber Nolan had, until his recent death and his bequest of the Bog to the State, guarded it fiercely from locals and tourists alike. Many's the American was winged with birdshot over the years, attempting to make pilgrimage here. I looked about me for the Hole, but it was hid from my view by an enormous Car-Park, a concrete Interpretive Centre of imposing dimensions, and a tall, broad, wooden stage, or platform, bearing Politicians. Beyond Car-Park and Interpretive Centre, an eight-lane motorway of almost excessive straightness stretched clean to the Horizon, in the direction of Dublin.

Facing the stage stood fifty thousand farmers.

We made our way through the farmers to the stage. They parted politely, many raising their hats, and seemed in high good humour. "'Tis better than the Radio Head concert at Punchestown," said a sophisticated farmer from Cloughjordan, pulling on a shop-bought cigarette.

         Once onstage, I counted the smaller Orphans. We had lost only the one, which was good going over such a quantity of rough ground. I reported our arrival to Teddy “Noddy” Nolan, the Fianna Fáil TD for Tipperary Central, and a direct descendent of Neddy "Nobber" Nolan. Nodding vigorously, he waved us to our places, high at the back of the sloping stage. The Guard of Honour lined up in front of an enormous green cloth backdrop and stood to attention, flanked by groups of seated dignitaries. I myself sat where I could unobtrusively supervise, in a vacant seat at the end of a row. When the last of the stragglers had arrived in the crowd below us, Teddy cleared his throat. The crowd fell silent, as though shot. He began his speech.

         "It was in this place..." he said, with a generous gesture which incorporated much of Tipperary, "... that Eamonn DeValera..."

         Everybody removed their hats.

         "... hid heroically from the Entire British Army..."

         Everybody scowled and put their hats back on.

         "... during the War of Independence. It was in this very boghole that Eamonn DeValera..."

         Everybody removed their hats again.

         "...had his Vision: A Vision of Irish Maidens dancing barefoot at the crossroads, and of Irish Manhood dying heroically while refusing to the last breath to buy English shoes..."

         At the word English the crowd put their hats back on, though some took them off again when it turned out only to be Shoes. Others glared at them. They put the hats back on again.

         "We in Tipperary have fought long and hard to get the Government to make Brussels pay for this fine Interpretive Centre and its fine Car-Park, and in Brünhilde DeValera we found the ideal Minister to fight our corner. It is therefore with great pleasure, with great pride, that I invite the great grand-daughter of Eamonn DeValera's cousin... the Minister for Beef, Culture and the Islands... Brünhilde DeValera... to officially reopen... Dev's Hole!"

         The crowd roared and waved their hats in the air, though long experience ensured they kept a firm grip on the peak, for as all the hats were of the same design and entirely indistinguishable, the One from the Other, it was common practice at a Fianna Fáil hat-flinging rally for the less scrupulous farmers to loft an Old Hat, yet pick up a New.

         Brünhilde DeValera took the microphone, tapped it, and cleared her throat.

         "Spit on me, Brünhilde!" cried an excitable farmer down the front. The crowd surged forward, toppling and trampling the feeble-legged and bock-kneed, in expectation of Fiery Rhetoric. She began.

         "Although it is European Money which has paid for this fine Interpretive Centre… Although it is European Money which has paid for this fine new eight-lane Motorway from Dublin and this Car Park, that has Tarmacadamed Toomevara in its Entirety… Although it is European Money which has paid for everything built West of Grafton Street in my Lifetime… And although we are grateful to Europe for its Largesse..."

         She paused to draw a great Breath. The crowd were growing restless, not having a Bull's Notion where she was going with all this, and distressed by the use of a foreign word.

         "It is not for this I brought my Hat," said the Dignitary next to me, and spat on the foot of the Dignitary beside him.

         "Nonetheless," said Brünhilde DeValera, "Grateful as we are to the Europeans...

 

         ...we should never forget...

 

 

                  ...that...

 

 

 

                           ...they..."

 

         Fifty thousand right hands began to drift, with a wonderful easy slowness, up towards the brims of fifty thousand Hats in anticipation of a Climax.

         "...are a shower of Foreign Bastards who would Murder us in our Beds given Half a Chance!"

         A great cheer went up from the massive crowd and the air was filled with Hats till they hid the face of the sun and we cheered in an eerie half-light.

         The minister paused for some minutes while everybody recovered their own Hat and returned it to their own Head.

         "Those foreign bastards in Brussels think they can buy us with their money! They are Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! You cannot buy an Irishman's Heart, an Irishman's Soul, an Irishman's Loyalty! Remember '98!"

         There was a hesitation in the crowd, as the younger farmers tried to recall if we had won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1998.

         "1798!" Brünhilde clarified.

         A great cheer went up  as we recalled the gallant failed rebellion of 1798. "Was It For This That Wolfe Tone Died?" came a wisp of song from the back of the crowd.

         "Remember 1803!"

         We applauded Emmet's great failed rebellion of 1803. A quavering chorus came from the oldest farmers at the rear of the great crowd: “Bold Robert Emmet, the darling of Ireland… "

         "Remember 1916!"

         Grown men wept as they recalled the great failed rebellion of 1916, and so many contradictory songs were started that none got rightly going.

There was a pause.

All held their breath.

         "…Remember 1988!"

         Pride so great it felt like anguish filled our hearts as we recalled the year Ireland finally threw off her shackles and stood proud among the community of nations, with our heroic victory over England in the first match in Group Two of the Group Stage of the European Football Championship Finals. A brief chant went up from the Young Farmers in the Mosh Pit: "Who put the ball in the England net?"

         Older farmers, further back, added bass to the reply of "Houghton! Houghton!"

         I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

         "My great grand-father's cousin did not Fight and Die in bed of old age so that foreign monkey-men could swing from our trees and rape our women! He did not walk out of the Daíl, start a Civil War and kill Michael Collins so a bunch of dirty foreign bastards could..."

         I missed a number of Fiery Words, as excited farmers began to leap up and down roaring at the front, the younger and more nimble mounting each other’s shoulders, then throwing themselves forward to surf toward the stage on a sea of hands, holding their Hats on as they went.

         "Never forget,” roared Brünhilde DeValera, “that a Vision of Ireland came out of Dev's Hole!"

         "Dev's Hole! Dev's Hole! Dev's Hole!" roared the crowd.

         By my side, Agamemnon began to howl, and tried to dig a hole in the stage with his long claws.

Neglecting to empty my bladder after breakfast had been an error the awful significance of which I only now began to grasp. A good Fianna Fáil Ministerial speech to a loyal audience in the heart of a Tipperary bog could go on for up to five hours. I pondered my situation. My only choice seemed to be as to precisely how I would disgrace myself in front of thousands. To rise and walk off the stage during a speech by a semi-descendent of DeValera would be tantamount to treason, and would earn me a series of beatings on my way to the portable toilets. The alternative was to relieve myself into my breeches where I sat.

My waist-band creaked under the terrible pressure.

         With the gravest reluctance, I willed the loosening of my urethral sphincter.

 

 

 

         Nothing happened. My subsequent efforts, over the next few minutes, to void my bladder, resulted only in the vigorous exercising of my superficial abdominal muscles. At length, I realised that there was a fundamental setting in my Subconscious, and it was set firmly against public voidance. To this adamant subconscious setting, my conscious mind had no access.

         Meanwhile, the pressure grew intolerable as the Orphanage Coffee continued to bore through my system.

         I grew desperate. Yet, within the line of sight of fifty thousand farmers, I could not unleash the torrent.

         Then, inspiration. The Velvet Curtain! All I needed was an instant's distraction, and I could step behind the billowing green backdrop beside me, and vanish. There would, no doubt, be an exit off the back of the stage, through which I could pass to relieve myself, before returning, unobserved, to my place.

         A magnificent gust of Nationalist Rhetoric lifted every hat again aloft and, in the moment of eclipse, I stood, took one step sideways, and vanished behind the Curtain.

 

 

 

 

I shuffled along, my face to the Emerald Curtain, my rear to the back wall of the stage, until the wall ceased. I turned, and beheld, to my astonished delight, the solution to all my problems.

Hidden from stage and crowd by the vast Curtain was a magnificent circular long-drop toilet of the type employed in the Orphanage. But where we sat around a splintered circle of rough wooden plank, our buttocks overhanging a fetid pit, here was elegant splendour: a great golden rail encircled a pit of surpassing beauty. Mossy walls ran down to a limpid pool into which a lone frog gently ‘plashed.

         Installed, no doubt, for the private convenience of the Minister, should she be caught short during the long hours of her speech, it was the most beautiful sight I had yet seen in this world. It seemed nearly a shame to urinate into so perfect a pastoral picture, and it was almost with reluctance that I unbuttoned my breeches and allowed my manhood its release.

         I aimed my member so as to inconvenience the Frog as little as possible. At last my Conscious made connection with my Unconscious; the Setting was Reset; Mind and Body were as One; Will became Action: I was Unified. In that transcendent moment all my senses were polished to perfection.

         I could smell the sweet pollen of the Heather and the Whitethorn, and the mingled Colognes of a thousand Bachelor Farmers.

         I could taste the lingering, bitter grounds of the Orphanage Coffee, and feel the grit of them lodged in the joins of my teeth.

         I could hear the murmur and sigh of the crowd like an ocean at my back, and Brünhilde DeValera's mighty voice bounding from rhetorical Peak to rhetorical Peak, ever higher.

And as this moment of Perfection began its slow decay into the past, and as the delicious frozen moment of Anticipation deliquesced into Attainment and the pent-up waters leaped forth, far forward, and fell in their glorious swoon, Brünhilde DeValera's voice rang out as from Olympus

         "I

          hereby

                  officially

                           reopen...

                                    Dev's Hole!"

         A suspicion dreadful beyond words began to dawn on me. I attempted to Arrest the Flow, but I may as well have attempted to block by effort of will the course of the mighty Amazon River.

         Thus the Great Curtain parted, to reveal me Urinating into Dev's Hole: into the very Source of the Sacred Spring of Irish Nationalism: the Headwater, the Holy Well, the Font of our Nation.

 

 

 

         I feel, looking back, that it would not have gone so badly against me, had I not turned at Brünhilde De Valera's shriek and hosed her with urine.

 

 

 

         They pursued me across rough ground for some considerable time.

 

 

 

         Agamemnon held my pursuers at the Gap in the Wall, as I crossed the grounds and gained the House. He had not had such vigorous exercise since running away from Fossetts' Circus and hiding in our hay barn a decade before, as a pup.

Now, undaunted, he slumped in the gap, panting at them.

         Slamming the Orphanage Door behind me, I came upon old Brother Thomond in the Long Corridor, beating a Small Orphan in a desultory manner.

         "Ah, Jude," said Brother Thomond, on seeing me. The brown leather of his face creaked as he smiled, revealing the perfect, white teeth of Brother Jasper.

         "A little lower, Sir, if you please," piped the Small Orphan, and Brother Thomond obliged. The weakness of Brother Thomond's brittle limbs made his beatings popular with the Lads, as a rest and a relief from those of the more supple and youthful Brothers.

         "Yes, Jude..." he began again, "I had something I wanted to... yes... to... yes..." He nodded his head, and was distracted by straw falling past his eyes, from his tangled hair.

         I moved from foot to foot, uncomfortably aware of the shouts of the approaching Mob. Agamemnon, by his roars, was now retreating heroically ahead of them as they crossed the grounds toward the front door.

         "'Tis the Orphanage!" I heard one cry.

         "'Tis full of Orphans!" cried another.

         "From Orphania!" cried a third.

         "As we suspected!" called a fourth. "He is a Foreigner!"

         I had a bad feeling about this. The voices were closer. There was the thud of Agamemnon's retreating buttocks against the door. Agamemnon stood firm at the steps, but no dog, however brave, can hold off a Mob forever.

         "Yes!" said Brother Thomond, and fixed me with a glare. "Very good." He fell asleep briefly, one arm aloft above the Small Orphan.

         The mob continued to discuss me on the far side of the door.

         "You're thinking of Romania, and of the Romanian orphans. You're confusing the two," said a level head, to my relief. I made to tiptoe past Brother Thomond and the Small Orphan.

         "Romanian, by God!"

         "He is Romanian?"

         "That man said so."

         "I did not..."

         "A Gypsy Bastard!"

         "Kill the Gypsy Bastard!"

         The Voice of Reason was lost in the hubbub, and a rock came in through the stained-glass window above the front door. It put a Hole in Jesus and it hit Brother Thomond in the back of the neck.

         Brother Thomond awoke.

         "Dismissed," he said to the Small Orphan sternly.

         "Oh but Sir you hadn't finished!"

         "No backchat from you, young fellow, or I shan't beat you for a week."

         The Small Orphan scampered away into the darkness of the Long Corridor. Brother Thomond sighed deeply, and rubbed his neck.

         "Jude, today is your eighteenth birthday, is it not?"

         I nodded.

         Brother Thomond sighed again. "I have carried a secret this long time, regarding your Birth. I feel it is only right to tell you now..."

He fell briefly asleep.

         The cries of the Mob grew as they assembled, eager to enter, and destroy me. The yelps and whimpers of brave Agamemnon were growing fainter. I had but little time. I poked Brother Thomond in the Clavicle with a Finger. He started awake. “What? WHAT? WHAT?”

         Though to rush Brother Thomond was usually counter-productive, circumstances dictated that I try. I shouted, the better to penetrate both the Yellow Wax and the Fog of Years.

"You were about to tell me the Secret of my Birth, Sir."

         "Ah yes. The secret..." He hesitated. "The secret of your birth... The secret I have held these many years... which was told to me by... by one of the... by Brother Feeny... who was one of the Cloughjordan Feenys... His mother was a Thornton..."

         "If you could Speed It Up, Sir," I suggested, as the Mob forced open the window-catch above us. Brother Thomond obliged.

         "The Secret of Your Birth..."

         Outside, with a last choking yelp, Agamemnon fell silent. There was a tremendous hammering on the old oak door.

         "I'll just get that," said Brother Thomond. "I think there was a knock."

         As he reached it, the door burst open with extraordinary violence, sweeping old Brother Thomond aside with a crackling of many bones in assorted sizes, and throwing him backwards against the wall where he impaled the back of his head on a coathook. Though he continued to speak, the rattle of his last breath rendered the Secret unintelligible. The Mob poured in.

         I ran on, into the dark of the Long Corridor.

 

 

 

         I found the Master of Orphans, Brother Madrigal, in his office in the South Tower, beating an orphan in a desultory manner.

         "Ah, Jude," he said. "Went the day well?"

         Wishing not to burden him with the lengthy Truth, and with both time and breath in short supply, I said "Yes."

         He nodded approvingly.

         "May I have my Letter, Sir?" I said.

         "Yes, yes, of course..." He dismissed the small orphan, who trudged off disconsolate. Brother Madrigal turned from his desk toward the Confiscation Safe, then paused by the open window. "Who are those strange men on the Lawn, waving blazing torches?"

         "I do not precisely know," I said truthfully.

He frowned.

"They followed me home," I felt moved to explain.

         "And who could blame them?" said Brother Madrigal. He smiled and tousled my hair, before moving again toward the Confiscation Safe, tucked into the room’s rear left corner. From the lawn far below could be heard confused cries.

         Unlocking the safe, he took out the letter and turned. Behind him, outside the window, I saw flames race along the dead ivy and creepers, and vanish up into the roof timbers. "Who," he mused, looking at the envelope, "could be writing to you...?" Suddenly he started, and looked up at me. " Of course! " he said. "Jude, it is your eighteenth birthday, is it not?"

         I nodded.

         He sighed, the tantalising letter now held disregarded in his right hand.  "Jude… I have carried a secret this long time, regarding your Birth. It is a secret known only to Brother Thomond and myself, and it has weighed heavy on us. I feel it is only right to tell you now... The secret of your birth..." He hesitated. "Is..."

My heart Clattered in its Cage at this Second Chance.

Brother Madrigal threw up his hands. "But where are my manners? Would you like a cup of tea first? And we must have music. Ah, music."

         He pressed Play on the record player that sat at the left edge of the broad desk. The turntable bearing the Orphanage single began to rotate at forty-five revolutions per minute. The tone-arm lifted, swung out, and dropped onto the broad opening groove of the record, nearly dislodging from the needle a Ball of Dust the size and colour of a small mouse.

         The blunt needle in its fuzzy ball of dust juddered through the scratched groove. Faintly, beneath the roar and crackle of its erratic passage, could be heard traces of an ancient tune.

         Brother Madrigal returned to the safe and switched on the old kettle that sat atop it. Leaving my letter leaning against the kettle, he came back to his desk and sat behind it in his old black leather armchair.

         Unfortunately, the rising roar of the old kettle and the roar and crackle of the record player disguised the rising roar and crackle of the flames in the dry timbers of the old tower roof.

         Brother Madrigal patted the side of the Record Player affectionately. "The sound is so much warmer than from all these new digital dohickeys, don't you find? And of course you can tell it is a good-quality machine from the way, when the needle hops free of the surface of the record, it often falls back into the self-same groove it has just left, with neither loss nor repetition of much music. The Arm..." He tapped his nose and slowly closed one eye. "...Is True."

         He dug out an Italia '90 cup and a USA '94 mug from his desk, and put a teabag in each.

         "Milk?"

         "No, thank you," I said. The ceiling above him had begun to bulge down in a manner alarming to me. The old leaded roof had undoubtedly begun to collapse, and I feared my second and last link to my past would be crushed along with all my hopes.

         "Very wise. Milk is fattening, and thickens the phlegm," said Brother Madrigal. "But you would like your letter, no doubt. And also... the Secret of your Birth." He arose, his head almost brushing the great Bulge in the Plaster, now yellowing from the intense heat of the blazing roof above it.

         "Thirty years old, that record player," said Brother Madrigal proudly, catching my glance at it. "And never had to replace the needle, or the record. It came with a wonderful record, thank God. I really must turn it over one of these days," he said, lifting the gently vibrating letter from alongside the rumbling kettle whose low tones, as it neared boiling, were lost in the bellow of flame above. "Have you any experience of turning records over, Jude?"

         "No sir," I said as he returned to the desk, my letter shining white against the black of his dress. Brother Madrigal extended the letter halfway across the table. I began to reach out for it. The envelope, containing perhaps the secret of my origin, brushed against my fingertips, electric with potential.

At that moment, with a crash, in a bravura finale of crackle, the record came to an end. The lifting mechanism hauled the Tone Arm up off the vinyl, and returned it to its rest position with a sturdy click.

         "Curious," said Brother Madrigal, absentmindedly taking back the letter. "It is most unusual for the Crackling to continue after the Record has stopped." He stood, and moved to the Record Player. The pop and crackle of flames was by now uncommonly loud. Tilting his head from side to side, he nodded slowly. "It is in Stereo," he said. "There are a lot of Mid-Range Frequencies. That is of course where the Human Voice is strongest... I subscribed for a time to the Hi-Fi Gazette."

         Behind Brother Madrigal, the Bulge in the ceiling gave a great Lurch downward. He turned, and looked up.

         "Ah! There's the problem!" he said. "A Flood! Note the bulging ceiling! The water tank must have overflowed in the attic, and the subsequent Damp is causing a Crackling in the Circuits of the Record Player. Damp” (here he touched his temple twice), “is the great Enemy of the Electrical Circuit."

         He was by now required to Shout on account of the great noise of the holocaust in the roofbeams. Smoke entered the room.

         "Do you smell smoke?" he enquired. I replied that I did. He nodded. "The Damp has caused a Short Circuit," he said. "Just as I suspected." He went to the corner of the room, removed a fire-ax from its glass-fronted wooden case, and strode to beneath the Bulge. "Nothing for it but to Pierce it, and relieve the pressure, or it'll have the roof down." He swung the ax up into the heart of the bulge.

         A stream of liquid metal poured over him, as the pool of molten lead from the burning roof found release. Both ax and man were coated in a thick sheet of still-bright lead that swiftly thickened and set as it ran down Brother Madrigal’s upstretched arm and upturned head, encasing his torso before pooling and solidifying in a thick base about his feet on the smoking carpet.

         Entirely covered, he shone under the electric light, ax aloft in his right hand, my letter smouldering and silvered in his left.

         I snatched the last uncovered corner of the letter from his metallic grasp, the heat-brittled triangle snapping cleanly off at the bright leaden boundary.

         In that little corner of envelope nestled a small triangle of yellowed paper.

         My fingers tingled with mingled dread and anticipation as they drew the scrap from its casing. Being the burnt corner of a single sheet, folded twice to form three rectangles of equal size, the scrap comprised a larger triangle of paper folded down the middle from apex to baseline, and a smaller, uncreased triangle of paper of the size and shape of its folded brother.

         I regarded the small triangle.

         Blank.

         I turned it over.

         Blank.

         I unfolded and regarded the larger triangle.

         Blank.

         I turned it over, and read…

 

 

 

gents

anal

cruise.

 

I tilted it obliquely to catch the light, the better to reread it.

 

gents

anal

cruise.

 

         The secret of my origin was not entirely clear from this fragment, and the tower was beginning to collapse around me. I sighed, for I could not help but feel a certain disappointment in how my birthday had turned out.

I left Brother Madrigal's office. Behind me, the floorboards gave way beneath his lead encased mass. I looked back, to see him vanish down through successive floors of the tower.

         I ran down the stairs. A breeze cooled my face as the fires above me sucked air up the stairwell. Chaos was by now general and Orphans and Brothers sprang from every door, laughing, and speculating that Brother McGee must have once again lost control of his Woodwork Class.

         The first members of the Mob began to push their way up the first flight of stairs, and, Our Lads not recognising the newcomers, fisticuffs ensued. I hesitated on the first-floor landing.

         One member of the Mob broke free of the mêlée and, seeing me, exclaimed "There he is, boys!" He threw his Hat at me, and made a leap in my direction. I leapt sideways, through the nearest door, and entered Nurse's quarters.

         Nurse, the most attractive woman in the Orphanage, and on whom we all had a crush, was absent, at her grandson's wedding in Borris-in-Ossary. I felt it prudent to disguise myself from the mob, and slipped into a charming blue gingham dress. Only briefly paralysed by pleasure at the scent of Nurse’s perfume, I soon made my way back out through the battle, as Orphans and Farmers knocked lumps out of each other.

         "Foreigners!" shouted the Farmers at the Orphans.

"Foreigners!" shouted the Orphans back, for some of the Farmers were from as far away as Cloughjordan, Ballylusky, Toomevara, Ardcrony, Lofty Bog, and even far-off South Tipperary itself, as could be told by the unusual sophistication of the stitching on the leather patches at the elbows of their tweed jackets and the richer, darker tones, redolent of the lush grasslands of the Suir valley, of the cowshit on their Wellington Boots.

         "Dirty Foreign Bastards!"

         "Fuck off back to Orphania!"

         "Ardcrony Ballocks!"

         The sophisticated farmer, who had seen The Radio Head at Punchestown, was hurled over the balcony, and his unconscious body looted of its shop-bought cigarettes by the Baby Infants.

         I appeared, in Nurse’s attire. The crowd parted to let me through, the Young Farmers removing their Hats as I passed. Some Orphans shouted "It is Jude in a Dress!" but the unfortunate sexual ambiguity of my name served me well on this occasion and allayed the suspicions of the more doubtful farmers, who took me for an ill-favoured girl who usually wore Slacks.

         At the bottom of the stairs, I found myself once again in the deserted Long Corridor.

         From behind me came the confused sounds of the Mob in fierce combat with the Orphans and the Brothers Of Jesus Christ Almighty. From above me came the crack of expanding brick, a crackle of burning timber, sharp explosions of window-panes in the blazing tower.

The Mob would not rest till they found me.

My actions had led to the destruction of the Orphanage.

I had brought bitter disgrace to my family, whoever they should turn out to be.

         I realised with a jolt that I would have to leave the place of my greatest happiness.

         With a creak and a bang, the South Tower settled a little. Dust and smoke gushed from the ragged hole in the ceiling through which the lead-encased body of Brother Madrigal had earlier plunged. I gazed upon him, standing proudly erect on his thick metal base, holding his axe aloft, the whole of him shining like a freshly washed baked bean tin in the light of the setting sun that shone in through the open front door at the end of the corridor,. 

         And by the front door, hanging from the coathook in his skull, his posture more alert than his old bones had been able to manage in life, was Brother Thomond. The bright yellow straw that burst up out of the neckhole of his cassock and jutted forth from his black sleeves was stained dark red by his old, slow blood on its slow voyage to the floor.

         And in the doorway itself, hung by his neck from a rope, was my old friend Agamemnon, his thick head of long golden hair fluffed up into a huge ruff by the noose, his mighty claws unsheathed, his tawny fur bristling as his dead tongue rolled from between his black lips to eclipse his fierce, yellow teeth.

         What was left for me here, now?

         With  a splintering crash, a dull movement of air through a long moment of near-silence, and a flat, rumbling, bursting impact, the entire facade of the South Tower detached itself, unpeeled, and fell in a long roll across the lawn and down the driveway, scattering warm bricks the length of the drive.

         Dislodged by the lurch of the tower, the Orphanage Record Player fell, tumbling, three stories, through the holes made by Brother Madrigal himself, and landed rightway up by his side with a smashing of innards.

         The tone arm lurched onto the Record and, with a twang of elastic, the turntable began to rotate. Music sweet and pure filled the air and a sweet voice sang words I had only ever heard dimly.

         "Some...

         Where...

         Oh…

         Werther…

Aon…

         Bó... "

         I filled to brimming with an ineffable emotion. I felt a great... presence? No, it was an absence, an absence of? Of... I could not name it. I wished I had someone to say goodbye to, to say goodbye to me.

It is a sad song, I think.

         The record ground to a slow halt with a crunching of broken gear-teeth. I felt a soft touch on my cheek, then on the back of my hand.

         I looked down to see the great ball of Dust, dislodged from the Record Player's needle during the long fall, drifting the last few inches to the ground.

I looked around me for the last time and sighed.

         "There is no place like home," I said quietly to nobody, and walked out the door onto the warm bricks in my blue dress. The heat came up through the soles of my shoes, so that I skipped nimbly along the warm yellow bricks, till they ended.

         I looked back once, to see the broken wall, the burning roof and tower.

         And Agamemnon dead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

                  END        

 

 

 

 

 

Jude's continuing adventures, on Amazon...



The Elegant President: A Poem for Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney - The Elegant President

I was fascinated by Mitt Romney's honest and thoughtful words in the recent video filmed at a $50,000-a-plate dinner for his donors. And I was sad to hear him say yesterday that he thought he could have expressed himself in a more elegant way.

 

There is nothing more elegant than verse, and so I have taken the liberty of converting Mitt's thoughts into a poem. Feel free to set it to music; perhaps a simple, honest, country tune. (Now that I think about it, the last verse sounds like a chorus to me.) In fact do, what you like with it; I'm giving it as my gift to the world.

 

I know Mitt would disapprove of my failure to make a profit from this; but really, the glory lies in the thoughts he expressed, not in the way I have reworked them.

 

-Julian Gough

 

The Elegant President: A Poem for Mitt Romney

 

It's hard to be rich, ‘cause then poor people bitch ‘bout

Our houses, our cars, and our cruisers.

When I’m king, I won’t do a thing for the whiners

In diners; I don't work for losers.

 

I love you because you just paid fifty grand for a plate

I wish there were more of you great guys to love in each state

Don't worry, I won't do a thing for the folk serving dinner

I'll talk like they're not even here, ‘cause I just talk to winners.

 

No representation without some taxation

That's what the first tea party meant.

I'm the best man that money can buy for this nation;

The poor can't afford presidents.

 

What we need is an elegant country for elegant folk.

Not fuckups in pickups with hiccups from drinking and dope

Who can't afford healthcare, who can't afford dinners like this

Those people aren't drowning, they're waving their communist fists.

 

The president’s not there to help forty seven percent.

I don't care if they starve, I don't care if they can't pay their rent

It's their own fault for borrowing money from people like us.

Trying to own cars, when God meant them to travel by bus.

 

I'll be an elegant president, there for the elegant few.

I'll do what you pay me to do, because I'm one of you.

If Jesus had just paid some taxes, I'd represent him

But he didn't, so fuck him, the loser can learn how to swim.

 

 

Jude in Waterstones - a new and exciting adventure for Jude, with an unfortunate ending

Two copies of Jude in London

Waterstones are the biggest book chain in the UK, with 296 shops. They sold five hundred million pounds worth of books last year. I’m very happy about that, because I write books. In fact, Jude in London, my most recent novel, came out in paperback this month. The Observer just named it their Paperback of the Week.

The paperback is the cheaper, mass market edition. It’s the one covered in great reviews of the more expensive trade paperback, or hardback, from a year earlier. The paperback is how you reach a mass audience.

I’d had a busy year since Jude in London first came out. The kind of busy year retailers like; one that raises your public profile, and brings new people to your work. My second BBC radio play starring Jude — The Great Squanderland Roof — had picked up roughly a million listeners. My stageplay starring Jude (The Great Goat Bubble), had sold out its run, every ticket, every night. The novel itself had been shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize (former winners: Will Self, Ian McEwan, Howard Jacobson…) It was even shortlisted for the Guardian's anarchic anti-award, the Not The Booker Prize. And, since Jude in London first came out, I’d written the long narrative at the end of Minecraft. (Winning every award going, Minecraft was Time Magazine's Computer Game of the Year for 2011). Given that Minecraft had by now sold nine million copies, my work had quite possibly had more readers than that of any other quirky literary novelist this year.

One of the exciting things about being a writer is when your publisher tells you how many copies Waterstones have ordered. It is exciting partly because they completely dominate the retail market for literary fiction in the UK. (If they don’t stock you, your book is dead.) But it is also exciting because I love Waterstones. Theirs are the shops in which I browse, and buy, when I’m in England. Their staff are terrific; friendly and knowledgeable. It’s a special pleasure to ask someone in the fiction section to recommend something odd and interesting. (Last time, in their flagship Picadilly branch — which has eight and a half miles of shelves — I was lovingly introduced to Daniil Kharms.) Their Oxford Street branch is a delight, and its witty Twitter account is a must-follow. Of course, those staff and managers are no longer allowed to order anything. It all has to come from head office. But that means head office can put in a huge order. (Waterstones ordered 12,000 copies of the paperback of my first novel, back when I was even more obscure than I am now.) My hopes were, cautiously, high.

So, how many copies did Waterstones order of the paperback? Two. Two copies. Not two copies per shop. Two copies to share between all 296 stores. That's less than 1% of a copy per shop. That’s… (Does the maths on a napkin)… exactly three pages for each manager. (Hmm. That reminds me of something… It’ll come to me.)

Now, I have no problem with this. I understand that nobody wants to read highly praised novels that have been shortlisted for well-known awards, especially when they’ve been written by award-winning cult writers whose writing gets millions of listeners and readers in other media.

What’s been puzzling me is…  why did Waterstones order two copies? Why not no copies? I mean obviously they don’t like the book. Fair enough. My stuff has a strong flavour that is not to everyone’s taste. Ordering no copies would make sense. But a head office order that comes to only three pages for every shop? Why would they want… wait a minute. (Googles feverishly. Returns a couple of minutes later…)

Hey, did you know that, in the UK, the average person uses three sheets of paper to wipe their backside after a crap? Obviously, some use less, and some use more, but the UK average is three.

So, Waterstones have ordered two copies of Jude in London.

Just enough to give every manager of every shop in the Waterstones chain exactly three pages each…

Hmmm.

They REALLY don’t like my book.

An Open Letter To Jonathan Ive (and Apple)

Yes my short story, the iHole, was here. No, it's not there now...

Yes, there was an open letter to Jonathan Ive (and Apple) here. No, there isn't now.

Sorry about that. (If you are REALLY disappointed, here's a different free story instead, as a consolation prize. It's a comedy about a financial catastrophe involving goats. You might even like it more than The iHole.)

Back to the missing iHole.... For background, I'll just quote briefly from the original open letter:

 

"Dear Jonathan,

My name is Julian Gough. I write fiction. And I have a problem that only you can solve.

I recently wrote a short story called The iHole, and I think it’s the best I’ve ever written. It’s about the design of an imaginary product, and it’s set inside a fictional version of Apple, at some time in the near future. A fictional version of you is mentioned, by name, a couple of times, though he stays offstage as a character.

A major media player wants the story. Their editorial people love the story. The potential audience is a million plus. So far, so good. But now their lawyers have asked me to change the name of the fictional company from Apple, and change the name of the character I’ve called Jonathan Ive..."

 

 

OK, I put that letter, and the story, online three days ago. This morning, we've all come to a satisfactory resolution.  I'm really sorry if you came here to read The iHole and are disappointed. It will be available (legally) again later this year, honest. 

First, I want to say thanks to everyone - Minecraft fans, fiction fans - on Twitter and elsewhere, for their support, encouragement (and even editorial suggestions), over the past three days.

And second, I want to say that THERE ARE NO VILLAINS in what's just happened. Apple behaved perfectly, and the media organisation wanting to use The iHole behaved perfectly, as did their lawyers. I'm not mad at anyone and I don't want you to be mad at anyone. if there was a problem here, it was with archaic laws that make it hard for writers to write about the modern world.

In fact, I particularly want to defend the media organisation involved. There are precious few media outlets for short stories already, so the last thing these guys deserve is to be kicked for having the courage to take on an unusually tricky modern story like mine. They have behaved impeccably throughout, attempting to keep the story intact while still obeying the law.

My attempts to sort this out directly, by going over their heads, have almost certainly made their lives more difficult, for which I apologize. There's always a healthy creative tension between the artist and the industry, but I realize I generate a lot more tension than most. Sorry, everyone...

Finally, I'm happy that we seem to have sorted out a compromise that doesn't damage the story artistically. And I'm very happy to discover that such large numbers of people can still get excited, and passionate, over a short story.

Fond regards,

 

-Julian Gough

 

 Photo courtesy Sophie Gough Fives (age 7)

Irish Writer Pardoned For Stealing Pig

 "The pig is rightfully MINE, Sir Terence!" (Photo by Sophie Gough Fives.) Actually, to contradict the caption, (which, on reflection, I realise is more Sherlock Holmes than Bertie Wooster) - I hope Sir Terry Pratchett wins. THIS time...

Well, well, well. My new novel, Jude in London, has been shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. Older readers will understand why I am so surprised (as well as, of course, delighted); younger readers will have it explained to them shortly. It involves dark literary doings, and the theft of livestock. Stick around.

The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction is the one where they give you the prize at the Hay Festival, name a pig after your book, and take your photo with the pig. A great, idiosyncratic prize, with a good track record. The Wodehouse judges discovered
Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, they chose Vernon God Little before it won the Booker, and last year they gave the prize to Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story.

This year, it's a very strong shortlist: the other four are Terry Pratchett (for Snuff), Sue Townsend (of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole fame, for The Woman Who Went To Bed For A Year), John O'Farrell (for The Man Who Forgot His Wife), and John Lanchester (for his sprawling financial comedy of London life, Capital). Normally, natural humility would cause any author surprise at being on such a splendid shortlist. However, as regular readers of my work will know, I do not suffer from humility. My surprise at being on the shortlist comes from the fact that, last time I was on it, I disgraced myself so thoroughly that I'd assumed the judges were more likely to put me on a blacklist than a second shortlist.

Back in 2008, the first novel in my Jude trilogy - Jude in Ireland - was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, alongside Alan Bennett, Will Self, Garrison Keillor (of Lake Wobegon Days fame), and Joe Dunthorne. I swelled with pride, chiefly in the region of the head. I blogged about my joy. But... well, at this point I may as well quote from a slightly later blog entry:

"You can imagine then my dismay when I discovered, shortly afterwards, buried in the small print of the Hay-on-Wye festival programme, the odd phrase "Will Self, winner of the 2008  Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize." Winner? WINNER?!?!?!

As the festival program had gone to print before the shortlist was announced, this meant that the prize committee had picked the winner before they had announced, or perhaps even picked, the shortlist. It was a stitch-up. But worse, I had been denied my rightful month of anticipation, tingling, hiccups and giddy excitement.

Also I'd put serious money on Alan Bennett to win. His The Uncommon Reader is a little masterpiece. Something had to be done.

I thought long and hard. The prize is named after that comic god, P. G. Wodehouse, inventor of Jeeves and Wooster. What, I thought would Wodehouse have done, faced with such provocation? Sat in his room and written another comic novel, probably. That's how he reacted to everything, including World War 2. As I was already sitting in a room writing a comic novel this wasn't much help. Action was called for, dash it. So I asked myself, what would P. G. Wodehouse's greatest creation Bertie Wooster do, nobly backed by the genius of his manservant Jeeves?

 

And the answer came to me as in a vision - as though the ghost of Wodehouse himself whispered in my ear - he would steal the pig.

For if there is one constant in the work of P. G. Wodehouse, from Pigs Have Wings to Pig Hooey, it is that God put pigs on this good green earth to be kidnapped. Not a chapter goes by without somebody chloroforming Lord Emsworth's favourite sow, The Empress of Blandings.

And thus I made my way to the Welsh borders and, with the assistant of my trusty gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves (not his real name, but he would like to remain anonymous for some reason), I stole Will Self's pig.

I sent the organisers this, ah, pignapping video, containing my ransom demands. Tense negotiations continued up until the last minute. They, understandably, did not wish to give the prize to the man who had stolen their pig. I offered, as a very reasonable compromise, to deliver the pig to Alan Bennett's door in London if they would re-award the prize to him. They baulked - Will Self was in the program - his angry fans, denied, might rampage, torching tents, incinerating Gore Vidal in his invalid chair... The intervention of a bishop almost led to a compromise candidate (Joe Dunthorne), but we ran out of time..."

The full story is here. And in this story in The Mail. And in various pieces by Hugo Rifkind, now stuck behind The Times paywall... And The New York Times' arts blog... And in India's Sunday Tribune... I know, I know. And not a thought for my long-suffering mother.


OK, basically, I got a bit carried away. It's always a bad idea for comic writers to leave their padded cells and attempt to do things in a real world for which they are so ill prepared. Still, one learns valuable lessons, which can be fed back into the fiction. I learnt that stealing pigs, for instance, is considerably harder and more complicated in real life than in books. The paperwork for the transfer of livestock across EU borders is shockingly complex. I strongly suspect that PG Wodehouse never stole a pig in his life...

Anyway, it all turned out OK; Will Self kept the title, but I made my point, and I got a pig out of it, which, once converted into wurst and salty bacon, got me through the long Berlin winter.

The only downside, I thought, was that I'd thoroughly burnt all my bridges to the only prize in these islands for comic fiction - pretty much the prize I most wanted.

And thus my surprise at being shortlisted again this week. I think it reflects very well on the people who run the Prize. They have shown true Christian - or Wodehousian - charity. Moral of the story (if there is one): There is greater rejoicing in the literary world over the pig thief who repents, than over the author who never steals a pig at all.


 

(For those not put off Jude in London by the moral depravity of its author... the free Trust Edition is available from Ben, my publisher, here. You may download it and read it for nothing. If you like it, you can pay whatever you think it was worth. More orthodox editions of the book are available here...)

An old scratchy photo of Malcolm McLaren, Suzie Shorten, Michael D. Higgins, and me.

I've been so FLIPPING busy that my blog has been left unfed since October. (Also, I will admit, the crack cocaine of tweeting has weaned me off the long opium dream of blog posting.)

But my old friend Suzie Shorten just sent me this photo, so feck it, I'll slap it up for your amusement.

Major flashback... Galway, 1997... Town Hall Theatre bar. Left to right: Former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, Suzie (who's at MCD now), future president of Ireland Michael D. Higgins, and me (with blond hair).

Some cowboys, in the Wild West, 1997: Malcolm McLaren, Suzie Shorten, Michael D. Higgins, and me.

By golly, a night out in Galway was a NIGHT OUT in those days. Malcolm had finished his talk, and was about to be taken away by the Arts Festival organisers, to the respectable and venerable festival club in the Warwick, in Salthill. They'd almost got him safely into the taxi when he escaped from his minders, trotted up to me and my beloved (we were sheltering for a last few minutes in the theatre doorway from the inevitable Galway rain) and, under the entirely mistaken impression that we knew where the cool clubs were, asked us where he should go. (I was a milk-drinking, hot-water-bottle-using homeboy who went out about once every three years, and my beloved was worse, but he wasn't to know that. It was the hair, man. Blondes DO have more fun.)

I had heard of an illegal wine bar, in a cellar under a solicitors on Abbeygate Street - passwords! secret knocks! - but I'd never tried to get in. It turned out that "er, yeah, that's Malcolm McLaren" was a secret password. And so Malcolm held court, enthroned in a very comfortable old leather armchair, in the Galway underworld, till pretty close to dawn. Stories, theories, stern lectures, good advice (which I never took), even better anecdotes, and his complicated, multiple, silly, brilliant future plans. (He was most excited by his Chinese, satirical/situationist, pop group, The Rice Girls... I don't think he ever did get a record company to fund that one...) A highly entertaining man. (Oh, if any tabloid journalists are reading this; the future president retired early - long before the illegal wine bar - don't worry.)

For a more detailed account of the night... er, email me.

The Jude in London, Not The Booker Prize, Flashmob Book Club

OK, if you want something meaningful and life-changing to do this weekend (and who doesn't?), you can join this one-off, high-speed, hold-onto-your-hats, Jude in London/Not The Booker Prize, flashmob bookclub. Will the life you change be yours, or mine, or both? We won't know till Monday.

 

A totally gratuitous topless shot of the author. Wearing a David Shrigley temporary tattoo. Long story.Here's the deal: my publisher and I will let you download my brand new book, for free, here. (It's usually £12.99 in trade paperback, or £4.99 on Kindle). You read it over the weekend, throwing in comments and arguing with each other (and me) in the comments section below. And if you love the book - and only if you love it - you can vote for it to win the Guardian's (in)famous Not The Booker Prize, anytime before midnight London time, this Monday (17th of October, 2011).

 

If you choose to vote for Jude in London to win the Not The Booker Prize, you'll need to vote in the comments on this page, and write a very short review here to prove you've read it. Also, bear in mind there's several other excellent books on the shortlist for the prize (I'm thinking in particular of Spurious, by Lars Iyer, and King Crow by Michael Stewart), so feel free to check those out, or read and discuss them instead.

 

And yes, when it's all over, you can pay as much (or as little) as you think the book was worth, directly to me & my publisher Ben. (We'll split it equally between us.) But if you're really poor, forget it, the book is on me & Ben. (I was on the dole for ten years, learning to write. I know what it's like to be too broke to join in the fun.)

 

So, it's an experiment - we're going to try and assemble a virtual flashmob book club. If you have any friends who might be interested, tell them. And I'll see you in the comments section down below, later.

 

Just click to go to the download page for the Jude in London Trust Edition

Oh, if you're wondering will Jude in London be to your taste, here's some recent reviews from The Guardian, The Irish Times, and The Cadaverine. (And if you want to go straight to the source and judge for yourself, here's an instant extract you don't have to download, about goats and financial bubbles: The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble...)

 

If you've any problems downloading the book free from here, just email me at JulianGoughsSecretEmailAddress@gmail.com, or tell me on Twitter (I'm @juliangough), and I'll email you a copy directly.

 

Have fun, be nice. Enjoy the weekend.

 

(EDIT: As soon as I posted this, and tweeted about it, the responses began - on Twitter. D'oh! I hadn't thought this through... So yes, we can talk about the book here; but also on Twitter (where I am @juliangough), using the hashtag #judeinlondon. I'll mosey back and forth. Talk soon...)

Help save civilization by reading a funny book

It's not every day you get a chance to help an award-winning impoverished author (er, that's me) solve a major dilemma, while simultaneously helping to humanise Capitalism, revolutionise Publishing, and save Civilization. But today is that day.

 

Jude in London - soon to be a major bookHere's the background (the dilemma will follow): my new novel, Jude in London, has just been longlisted for the Guardian's Not The Booker Prize. Now, The Not The Booker Prize is the most entertaining prize in the literary calendar; an annual online flame-war-slash-literary-debate that can be very helpful in drawing attention to unusual books. (The prize itself is a mug, worth about £1.50. But the glory is incalculable!)

 

BUT: For a long-listed novel to make the shortlist, readers have to nominate the book, and post a very short review on the Guardian website (to prove they've read it). The process is explained in detail here.

 

Here's the dilemma: Jude in London is officially published on September 6th. But the shortlist votes (and reviews) have to be in by this coming Wednesday. As my novel isn't in the shops for another fortnight, I don't have any readers yet to nominate it.

 

So, if any of you would like to read Jude in London, for free, I can send you a pdf of the entire finished book, nicely laid out and readable, today. And if you like it a lot, I'd be extremely pleased if you would post a 150 word review, and nominate it for the shortlist by Wednesday. You're under no pressure to review it or vote for it: only do that if you genuinely like it a lot and think it's worthy of going through to the next round.

 

There you go. Anyone who wants a free pdf of Jude in London, just ask in the comments below, or on Twitter (I'm @juliangough), or email me at juliangoughssecretemailaddress@gmail.com...

 

Now, here's the bit where we revolutionise Capitalism. My beloved publisher Ben, who runs Old Street, has conniptions at the thought of a professional-quality pdf of the entire book escaping into the wild before publication. Understandably so - he's sunk a lot of time and money into making a beautiful book out of Jude in London. But I think the future for peculiar writers like me has to be a kind of love-based mutant version of capitalism where you trust your readers, and in return your readers help to keep you alive. Because the free market isn't going to. Bear in mind, I've gone bust and been evicted while writing this book. I've wandered Europe homeless, relying on the kindness of friends (and the occasional stranger) to get it finished. So I, too, would like to see it, somehow, earn me enough to keep going and finish the next one.

 

So here's the deal: I give you the book for free. You don't have to review it or nominate it. But if you really like the book, if you read all the way to the end and have a good time... I'd love you to buy a copy for a friend. Does that seem fair?

 

And if you do like it, and buy a copy for a friend, tell me, and I'll tell my publisher, and maybe this trust-based model (where a book is always a present, and yet small publishers stay in business and weird writers get to eat) could take off.