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The
grotesque peasants stalk the land
And
deep down inside you know
Everybody wants to like big companies.
'New
Puritan', The Fall, 1983
At just
30, Matt Thorne is already the author of six novels and a children's
book, as well as having co-edited All Hail the New Puritans (2000),
an anthology of new writing with which Thorne and Nicholas Blincoe set
out to revitalise contemporary literature. His latest novel, Cherry,
which was longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, is a sort of
hybrid of sci-fi/fantasy and detective story, driven by an unreliable
narrator, that offers an enigmatic but perceptive take on 21st century
urban life.
The protagonist,
Steve Ellis, tells the story of how he came to meet Cherry, his perfect
woman, after chatting to an old man in a bar, and soon found himself
following more and more bizarre instructions in an effort to hold on
to her, leading to moral confusion, existential doubt and eventual disaster.
Thorne feels that the novel is very contemporary. 'For me as a writer,
it grew out of a period of uncertainty. I spent the end of last year
and the beginning of this year trying to create a character that would
have something of the anxiety that I felt was very prevalent in the
culture at the time.'
While a couple of reviewers have seen the novel as a morality tale about
the dangers of seeking perfection, Thorne is more interested in the
mechanics of his character's moral degeneration. 'For me there is a
moral sense to the novel, but based around the idea of people being
prepared to do things individually, based on very shaky evidence and
weird circumstances, and how that expands to a very collective sense
about what we would do.' Of course national politics at the time he
was writing was dominated by the Hutton Inquiry, and it's not hard to
see a parallel with the 'shaky evidence' for the war in Iraq, but Thorne
has picked up on a more general phenomenon.
'Basically, I want the main character to be seen to be doing things
as a result of patently strange instructions and circumstances, and
he doesn't really question what's going on. That's him being an example
of the society he's in. It's more that question of unthinking following
of people who seem to have knowledge or to be in authority.' What Thorne
is describing is not strictly political conformism, however, but something
much newer. After all, the Hutton Inquiry only underlined popular cynicism
about the government. There seems to be increasing uncertainty about
where authority lies, whether with the media, with 'experts' or whoever.
Thorne's insight is that in such a context, individuals are more rather
than less vulnerable to manipulation (even perhaps by the governments
and big companies they profess to despise). It is all the more significant
and important, then, that he does not absolve his character of moral
responsibility for his actions. However confused and disoriented Steve
might be, he still has choices. 'I think he makes decisions at every
stage. Everything in the novel is down to him in a way, that at every
stage he makes a wrong decision, I think, rather than just being dragged
along.'
Despite this, or actually because of it, for me at least Steve is a
sympathetic narrator, albeit an unreliable one. Whether his decisions
are right or wrong, he at least is recognisable as a human being, capable
of making decisions in pursuit of a recognisably human goal. While the
consequences of his decisions are dire, his obsession with Cherry does
endow him with a resolve and a single-mindedness that contrast favourably
with his previous, slacker disposition, one that is all too familiar
in contemporary culture.
Thorne's interest in character and the psychology of decision-making
is central to Cherry, and sets his approach apart from the more
postmodern current in recent literature, which is apparent in some of
this year's other Booker longlisted titles. 'I think character is really
important. I know a lot of the eighties novelists were saying that character
wasn't important and you get Amis saying things like his characters
could pretty much just have t-shirts saying 'slut' and 'villain' and
things like that. I am very much against that.'
While Thorne want his characters to be real people, however, it doesn't
follow that they should necessarily be likeable. 'In all my novels,
but particularly in Eight Minutes Idle and Child Star,
I've had characters that seem to some people to be very sympathetic,
but some people see to be completely sociopathic or psychopathic, and
I very much wanted to push that further along, so you are forced to
make a choice, and that choice forces your reading of the novel.'
Now I'm starting to worry that I've got Cherry wrong. 'Given
that the whole thing is told by him [Steve], not just that he's an unreliable
narrator,' Thorne goes on helpfully, 'I think that he comes across as
more sympathetic because of the way he's describing himself rather than
because he is a fundamentally sympathetic character.' Right. So I'm
not supposed to admire Steve's romantic resolve, and maybe that's led
me astray. But then what does the author know?
For all the novel's ambiguity, Thorne insists that there is one particular
reading that explains everything 'I try to feed that through the book,
so hopefully it's there,' he says, 'but at the same time I wanted to
have some ambiguity, because I am aware that certain readers would have
a problem with the sci-fi or fantasy elements and I wanted them to be
able to explain it to themselves in such a way that's satisfying.' So,
perhaps my interpretation is not altogether illegitimate, after all.
In allowing the novel to operate on different levels, Thorne has ceded
a degree of authorship to the reader. It sounds like a very contemporary
trick, but arguably he is only formalising something that is always
there in any work of literature, a certain creative gap between the
intention of the author and the response of the reader.
'I see the characters as always basically essentially separate from
me. That's the most important element. I think good novelists can create
characters that are completely independent of their creator, and I think
you need to know what they would say depending on the situation. That
said, I think its difficult - there's a famous Nabokov quote about EM
Forster where he says that Forster says that his characters run away
and start doing things that he hadn't expected, and Nabokov responded
that he always had complete control of his characters and that he knew
exactly what they would do, and that if he was in a EM Forster novel
he would run away too. I suppose it's all about getting the balance
between the two positions.
'I always have an absolutely cast-iron sense of the structure of the
novel and what's going to happen within it, but the characters do have
a slightly independent life and I spend a lot time thinking whether
they would say that, and it's very important that they don't have access
to information that they wouldn't actually have, and there are quite
a few modern novels that fall down for me on that. The minute I start
reading a conversation, and I feel I'm hearing the author through the
characters - it's OK if it's first person narrative, but if it's in
dialogue it's a big weakness for me.'
Thorne also reviews for the Independent, and clearly has a great
critical interest in literary trends beyond his own work. As a novelist
himself, though, he recognises that the difficulties facing writers
are not merely technical. 'I think character is very important, but
equally I think you need to construct characters in different ways in
writing at the moment. Part of what we did with the New Puritans
was defining characters through their choice of culture, I suppose,
their taste in music and films.'
In this sense, Thorne suggests that writers have to adapt to the times,
picking up for example on the importance of consumerism in defining
identity. The challenge of creating characters who are genuinely independent
of their creator is to make them recognisable to the reader, and as
society changes, that becomes complicated. The use of cultural preferences
is an implicit recognition that more traditional markers of character
- to take two very simplified examples, social class and education -
no longer carry the same meaning, but this is a risky strategy. What
might be a telling detail in one context can be as clichéd as
one of Martin Amis' deliberately clichéd t-shirts in another.
Moreover, it is difficult to come up with characterisations of this
kind that are recognisable to all readers, irrespective of their own
backgrounds and knowledge, as Thorne acknowledges. 'I'm also aware that
that can be alienating to some readers. They don't necessarily see the
gradients within that, a character liking a certain type of music. I
think that can become slightly alienating, so I didn't want to do that
in this novel.
'Steve doesn't really have taste - he just goes out and buys whatever
is popular at the moment. I just wanted a kind of general everyman rather
than someone who defines himself through what he reads or listens to
or watches. But at the same time I wanted to have within the narrative
some references for people to pick up that would be outside of his character
and that he would see, but wouldn't really be able to comprehend.'
It is an interesting strategy. In choosing a theme as apparently universal
as love, with such an everyman at the heart of the story, Thorne invites
certain assumptions on the part of the reader, but then proceeds to
pick these apart, unsettling us by abandoning realism, and then offering
clues that root the novel's unreality in the world as we know it. The
result is compelling, though Thorne's desire to make the novel 'satisfying'
on a variety of readings may frustrate as much as it satisfies.
More interesting than the mysteries of the plot, however, is the novel's
ambiguous morality. And indeed, when it comes to making moral judgements
about characters, that gap between the intention of the writer and the
response of the reader is surely all the more important. But it takes
on a particular significance at a time when there is little agreement
on the big moral questions. The sense of anxiety and uncertainty noted
by Thorne affects not only our sense of what makes a person him or herself,
but also our sense of what is right or wrong.
If social
class no longer carries the same meaning, morality is all the more vexed.
While some of Steve's actions in Cherry are undoubtedly wrong,
those reviewers who have seen it as a morality tale are reading the
novel with old-fashioned assumptions. There is little in the novel itself,
nor in the society it describes, to suggest a moral critique of Steve's
determined pursuit of self-fulfilment, at least until he crosses a rather
obvious line. In turn, my sympathy for Steve arises less from any intention
of the author than from my own (sociopathic?) mindset.
Of course, novelists have always had to negotiate a variety of conflicting
expectations and preconceptions in their readers, but the task of creating
characters and situations that are both internally coherent and true
to life is perhaps harder than ever when readers cannot be relied on
even to share a worldview about which they can disagree. This is not
to say that it isn't possible to give the appearance of moral coherence,
but (as the present government is given to demonstrating) too often
this is done by resorting to cliché or the lowest common denominator.
Just as cynicism about politics paradoxically leaves the public open
to manipulation, moral uncertainty invites conformism.
To his credit, though, Thorne prefers to subvert conventional expectations,
for example by giving Steve an unhappy childhood, but with creepily
cheerful parents. 'Usually an unhappy childhood is one where there's
a broken family or divorced parents, and in the end in this novel it
is that fact that the parents are very happy together that causes a
lot of his misery, so I'm trying to reverse the tradition.'
Cherry is loaded with such unsettling plays on contemporary themes,
and Thorne clearly enjoys grappling with the complicated realities of
a post-ideological consumer society, not least with its implications
for character. Steve Ellis may not be a 'fundamentally sympathetic character',
but perhaps such a creature was always an illusion peculiar to less
uncertain times.
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