Osaka

During the course of my endeavours in writing, one quote on the subject has come back to me more often than any other. It’s one I’ve used before in this very blog, and it comes from the author’s foreword to the novel Puckoon by Spike Milligan. It is this:

This damn book nearly killed me.

The man Milligan. He told us he was ill.

In fact, to be fair, the only books which didn’t damn near kill me were The Last Great Radio Show, which I wrote in about seven weeks and was a joy from start to finish, and The Final Resort, much of which came to me during a four-day weekend in Blackpool. For other examples of near-death experiences, go back through the earlier posts in this blog. The one about Jerusalem is still quite funny. You can find it here.

This book, though, has a lot of firsts. It’s my longest, for a start, at around 113,000 words (23k longer than Sharkey). It’s the first book I’ve written which isn’t set entirely, or almost entirely, in Britain. It isn’t the longest in the writing: that honour probably goes to The Last Five Days which, in various forms, has existed since 1997, or The Falling Fire, which caused me a seven-year case of Writers’ Block. It’s also the first book for which the blurb was the first thing I actually wrote.

I was on holiday in Turkey. I was mildly drunk (which is when all the best ideas happen, right?). I was sitting by the hotel pool, when a song came on the speaker system: Tokyo, by White Lies. At the time, I was working on the sequel to The Final Resort (which may still happen) – but I was chafing. I wanted to do something bigger. The song – whose chorus is basically a sequence of capital cities – struck a chord. I wasn’t going to write about Tokyo – everybody does. Osaka always seemed to me to be more interesting. Like the choice between writing about London or Manchester. That night, I sat on the balcony of our hotel room, listening to that song again and – from somewhere – came the words:

Something momentous is happening in Osaka....

An hour later, I had the beginnings of a book.

I’d visited Japan a couple of times, back in the nineties, so I at least had a little bit of memory to draw on. I remembered being taken to a Brazilian bar in Roppongi, which was how I knew about the Nikkei Burajiro-jin (they are lovely). I’d visited Germany too, as an exchange student, and Beate and her group were created from my memories of the friends I made there. As for the story elements themselves, I watched Sky TV’s brilliant drama about Chernobyl; at around the same time, I read Michael Lang’s hugely-entertaining The Road to Woodstock and, perhaps best of all, Richard Bassett’s memoir Last Days in Old Europe, which deals with – among other things – the fall of the Berlin Wall and is one of the oddest – and loveliest – books I’ve read in years. Those were the elements with which I started.

It was inevitable, given the ideas I had, that I would re-use the structure I employed in Sharkey – that of alternating flashback and present-day (or near future) scenes. But I adopted a completely different approach this time. In writing Sharkey, I wrote the book pretty much in the sequence in which it appears in its final form: that is to say, I wrote a flashback, then a present day scene, and so on. The two stories developed in parallel, as it were. It was brilliant, organic – and insanely difficult to control. This time, I decided to make things easier for myself. I wrote the book in chronological order: that is, I started in 1969 at Woodstock (the prologue was added later) and worked my way through the years to the near future. It’s likely that I’ll be asked which way is better – the answer is I have no idea. One way worked for one book, another for this one. It allowed the story to develop in a completely different way; and the great advantage was that I knew my characters and their history very well, by the time I actually got to Osaka.

Very few authors waste anything. Many of us have a sort of archive – Terry Pratchett called his The Pit – into which unused ideas, characters, settings and situations find their way, hoping for their moment in the sunlight. Nancy, Vinnie and Tony Barton and Arthur Wells came from the archive, as did the redoubtable A.B. Bhatterjee. The Bartons will seem to some like cliches – lovable East End gangsters – but they are actually based on fact. There really was a club in the West End, for instance, which was a sort of neutral zone for criminals, and many of the stories from the old East End (I read a few of those too) mention characters like Vinnie, Arthur and Nancy; people who existed on the fringes of the criminal world but who – by luck or judgment – were never quite sucked into it.

Most of the other characters came out of the story. I’ve written elsewhere about the phenomenon of secondary or even bit-part characters who come to life in a way one doesn’t expect and force their way into the story. This book’s full of the buggers. Floyd, Martha, Lucy, Dennis, Mr Nakamura, Mr Suzuki, Katya, Bryce…none of these were in the original plan. They just happened, either because they were needed in the story or because they started as bit-parts and I realised I had a place for them – or (particularly in the case of Lucy and Dennis) because they were just so much fun to write that I couldn’t lose them. Of all of these, my favourites (don’t tell the rest) have to be Martha and Floyd. In some ways, even more than the four main characters, their story is the emotional heart of the book.

Which brings us to the four main characters. In a way, given the order in which I wrote the book, it’s odd to consider Hope and Masako as major characters at all, since they didn’t even come into it until I was at least half-way through. Hope came purely from the relationship which developed between Floyd and Martha and took on their mantle of being one of the central emotional forces in the story. Masako is a bit of a favourite: the quiet person who changes the world. She was one of the first characters I conceived and, unlike Hope, or Martha or Floyd, she didn’t explode into life. She just grew, quietly, and (for me, at least) deepened.

I’m not sure Peter Marriott ever did. Frustrating, at first – until I realised that Peter’s very shallowness is rather the point about him. Having come to terms with it during the course of writing the book, I made it his defining characteristic. As for Daniel Firdaus, well, regular readers will know that I’m not much interested in the bad guys. Both he and Beth, I think, started out more interesting than they became, because they chose to be, well, bad guys. At the end, the opposition between Marriott and Firdaus gave me the resolution I needed – these two shallow men locked in a dance of mutual destruction in which one, finally, makes a decent and good choice: to sacrifice himself for the greater good. Beth became a husk; a shadow of a person, whose final ending is horribly appropriate.

There’s always a sense of fear in publishing a book. You’re putting something out there which is (often) very personal and which (always) is marked with the stains of long effort, emotional investment and too many nights sitting typing in the spare room when you could be watching My Brilliant Friend, or the last two Harry Potter movies, or Bake Off or something. In this case, what you’re reading is eighteen months of my spare room time and a big part of me – as all my books are. I can’t imagine what you will think of it, but I hope that you will like it or that it will at least make you think.

Right now, I can’t even imagine doing another. But I probably will.

Thanks for listening. I’m going to bed now. It’s late.