NOTE: I have managed to make this post almost entirely free of spoilers. Nonetheless, I'd suggest you read it twice: once before reading the book, and once after. It will make most sense that way. You ARE going to read the book, aren't you? And leave a five-star review on Amazon? Good. Thank you.
So here it is.....
In a few short weeks, this little beauty is going to be out there in the public domain. The Middle Book. The second in the trilogy. Anybody love Middle Books? Well, yes, actually. For my money, The Two Towers is, by some margin, the best of the Lord of the Rings books (and movies); The White Mountain is the pick of David Wingrove's awesome Chung Kuo series*, and Goblet of Fire is comfortably the high point of the Harry Potter canon. We'll not mention Gormenghast.
Then again, second novels are notoriously difficult; and this one was no exception. This is the book that caused The Shattered Land to take fully eight years to write. What happened was this: I started The Last Five Days in 2007. That took about a year. Then I pitched in, and started the sequel. And, about half-way through (somewhere around the hospital scenes in the middle of the book)...I totally lost confidence in the whole thing. And in myself as a writer. And, pretty much, that was it. I struggled on for another three or four thousand words, and then....nothing.
The whole thing sat there on Hannah's Medion laptop (the one her Dad bought her from Aldi) for seven years. And I wrote nothing.
I hate this book.
I dipped my toe back in the water in 2012, beginning a series of Young Adult novels which eventually ran to seven books (five published under the pen-name MJ Kingston, the other two carefully buried in a lead-lined box under three feet of concrete). And then I metamorphosed into Michael Tyne and began work on The Shattered Land again.
Good job Hannah's laptop was still working, after all that time.
The curious thing was, that when I came back to it, this book suddenly became easy. I roared through the second half in about eight weeks. It was almost as though I'd abandoned it just at the point at which it was all coming together; and, had I had just an ounce more resolution, the whole thing could have been done a lot earlier. On the other hand, maybe I needed to be eight years older in order to do it right. I don't think it would have been half as good if I'd finished it back in 2008.
I still managed to nearly f*** it up, though.
The whole book was conceived around Ackerman and Olivie's storyline; and the climactic elements of that storyline - Olivie's confrontation with the Security Man, and Ackerman's walk through the flame - were the defining images I had in my mind when I started it, eight years ago. So wrapped up was I in these ideas that I completely neglected the other characters. The climax of Alison and Given's storyline, in particular, was so perfunctory that it completely blew any tension there may have been at the end of the book. I had to hastily bolt on an entirely new sequence in that thread at re-write time, whereupon it immediately became better, if anything, than Ackerman and Olivie's stuff.
The cover is a story all on its own. I'd got to the point where I was going to write the final scenes. I got home from work that night, fired up (no pun intended) and ready. I logged into Facebook....
Early that morning, my good friend Derek "Dez" Courtenay had been driving his elderly van across the North Yorkshire Moors, where he was witness to the most spectacular sunrise he had ever seen. He whipped out his phone and, from the cab of his van, took three hasty, blurred photos of it. Then he posted them on Facebook. I saw them immediately before writing the climactic scenes of this book: and, in a way, they were the climactic scenes of this book. I immediately messaged him, begging his permission to use one of them for the cover. He said yes, of course. Then I wrote the description of the Fire, based on his photo.
I haven't told him that bit yet.
This book also marked a change in my ideas about what I was trying to achieve with the series, particularly in respect of the characters. The Last Five Days begins with a series of characters who are - in the words of one reader - possibly human, possibly superhuman; they started as archetypes: The Security Man; The Identity Man; The Assassin; The Lady. I thought I was writing about extraordinary people in an ordinary world. Over time, and particularly in writing The Falling Fire, I came to realise that, actually, I was writing about very ordinary characters in an extraordinary world. There is, after all, nothing more ordinary than a barmaid from Oldham. This is why the characters become markedly more human toward the end of Five Days; and this is a process which continues in Falling Fire. By the end of this book, even Given has, well, a given name.
At the same time, I began to think about Alison. Most people who've read the first book marked her as their favourite character. I think she's flawed, as a personality. She's angry, aggressive, combative - like so many people of her generation - even when she doesn't have to be. Ordinary. The Falling Fire marks the beginning of a profound change in her; she learns empathy. And, having been so ordinary, she begins to become, again, extraordinary. She is from fine stock, after all. She's a working-class girl from the North of England; her forefathers (and mothers) were the men and women that made this country what it is. It wasn't dashing cavaliers from the playing-fields of Eton who won two world wars; it was ordinary working lads from Oldham, Pittsburgh, Delhi, Melbourne, Christchurch and a dozen other places besides. In this book, Alison, in her own way, begins to realise that. She becomes, like many of the other characters, profoundly human.
And that becomes the point of the story. What makes us human? What stands us apart from, for instance, Aliens? What qualities of grace, courage, empathy distinguish us in this universe?
There is an answer at the end; and that answer informs the final book in the series, Jerusalem.
I love this book.
I hope you do too.
* What do you mean, you've never heard of David Wingrove's Chung Kuo series? Google it. Then buy all eight books. Then read them. It makes Dune look like Biff and Chip. Oh, all right. The last one is completely bonkers, but; really....