MY SHIT LIFE SO FAR

by Frankie Boyle

304 pages, Harper Collins

Review by Pat Black

“I’m so old, my pussy is haunted” – Frankie Boyle, in a section entitled “Things you’d never hear the Queen say”, Mock The Week.

There are all kinds of comics, and all kinds of jokes. Some of them cause a bit of a stir, some outright anger. If we imagine public acceptability of gags as a diagram of a penis, comedian Frankie Boyle isn’t located on it anywhere – not even under the helmet. He’s a pungent stain on the edge of the sheet. You think it’s tea, but it’s not. Then you drop the sheet and back away, aghast.

Frankie prefaces My Sh*t Life So Far, his autobiography, by explaining how much he hates celebrity autobiography culture. He went even further in an article in The Guardian in which he said: “There aren’t any publishers I think you’d confuse with leading philosophical thinkers of the day.” This was uttered during an interview ahead of the publication of this book, in late 2009.  

Frankie always seems to be in trouble. As a stand-up comedian, this helps keep him in the headlines. The trouble is, well, that he’s in a little bit too much trouble now. He made a few jokes about the Paralympics opening ceremony the other night, and these seem to have triggered a massive backlash that had him, uncharacteristically, going on the defensive on Twitter.

These gags included: “The Saudi team must all be thieves,” and: “That athlete’s personal best was al-Qaeda assisted,” and: “So. F*cking. Horny”.

It seems that even Channel 4, his spiritual home since he left the BBC’s current affairs panel show Mock The Week, where he became a household name, might be about to pull the chain on dear Frankie.

Boyle was born in Glasgow in 1972. A south sider, he was brought up in Pollokshields and attended Holyrood Secondary School – a state school, but far from the worst in the city, as he admits. This book traces his journey from a working class catholic upbringing in Scotland’s biggest, dirtiest city to stand-up comedy, TV work and national fame/notoriety.

His formative years are gone into in some detail: he was born in a tank, a sentient pair of spleebs and ginger fuzz with a protein coating. A bit like the pink stuff you find at the bottom of the bin. Imagine it twitching, just as you apply the bleach. That’s him.

Just kiddin’ Frankie. It’s a joke. All of it.

To get the embarrassing stuff out of the way early doors: I’m a big fan of Boyle. The book provides ample evidence of his talents. If you have a robust sense of humour – and by that I mean, if you’re a bit of a sick bastard - he is very witty, and very funny. I have one of those ball-aching “I saw Frankie Boyle before he was famous” stories, too, being a fellow product of his home city - like bicycles, tarmacadam, alcoholism, sectarianism and domestic violence.

He was compering a Saturday night stint before a packed crowd at Jongleurs comedy club in Glasgow city centre. Even then, he was an edgy presence. A giggling specky imp sucking from a can of Diet Coke, his act as a link man mainly consisted of singling out the luckless people who sat at the front rows or got up to go to the toilet, and slaughtering them. One man who was on a work’s night out with six women is probably still cringing from the slagging he got that night. Boyle was very, very funny, and dealt with hecklers with a style and ease I’ve never seen since. Everyone was terrified of getting out of their seats when he came on; a tsunami of people headed for the loos whenever he turned away from the mic. That’s a rare power to have.

The line of humour and sociopathy in his material was not so much blurred as smudged into one pulpy mass, as if by grubby fingers on a third-hand scuddie magazine. This event would have been in late February 2003; the reason I remember this, apart from the debauched night out that followed the gig, is because it was the night of the second Space Shuttle disaster.

Frankie Boyle makes a joke about Space Shuttle disasters in this book.

The shock factor of his style of comedy and the fact he does not appear to give a f*ck about anything are borne out from the very first page. Frankie’s greatest hits include comparing the Olympic swimming champion Rebecca Adlington – a lovely young woman who does not appear to have done anyone any harm, and is very pretty – to someone looking at themselves in the back of a spoon.

Most famously, he had a go at Katie Price, the former glamour model turned… whatever she is. On Tramadol Nights, Boyle’s 50% shite sketch show, he wondered if Ms Price had taken in with a mixed martial arts fighter in order to have someone on hand who could fight off her blind, disabled son when he grows big enough to try to rape her.

Now bear in mind that Katie Price, while being inexplicably popular among people whom society would not miss if they were quickly and cleanly executed, is hardly Britain’s most beloved woman. But the outrage that joke created still continues to reverberate whenever Boyle’s name is mentioned, like a fart in a crematorium.

Someone who could be described as one of Britain’s most beloved women is her majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and that takes us back to the joke at the top.

Frankie gallops through his early life, sparing few details… well, he does spare a lot of details about his family life, in fact, other than that his brother was quite anxious as child. Curious.

His secondary school days are well-covered, and they remind me of my own, spent in a place I loved but which was not topping any European affluence leagues at the time, or since. Frankie describes teachers walking out of the school gates to head-butt teenage gang leaders, “like Dirty Harry”, and one boy being taken out of school after having had his head put through a wall by a gang for having “looked the wrong way” at someone. Chillingly, Frankie recounts one teacher’s reaction to the decision taken by the poor lad’s mother – incredulity that a parent would do this in response to extreme violence, as if there’s something shameful in it. As if the fault lay with the victim.

This chimed with me. How many similar experiences could I recount? There’s one lad’s terrifying ordeal, hanging by his fingertips from a wall above a 30ft drop onto unfinished tarmac and broken glass, while some older kids attempted to stamp on him; there’s the “Crocodile Dundee” knife fight in the yard where one lad pulled out a bread knife, only for the other to pull out what may have been a Gurkha kukri… something impressively big and shiny, anyway. There are times that I think to myself, “everyone reckons they went to a mental school – everyone talks up their crazy school antics”. Perhaps. But perhaps someone actually did go to the most mental school. Mine wasn’t the worst in the scheme, I can tell you; the protestant schools were far worse, obviously.

It's a joke, folks. Not to be taken seriously.

Frankie Boyle at least still lives in Glasgow, so he must love it – whereas I f*cked off about a year ago, so Frankie Boyle wins. Glasgow runs through Frankie’s comedy DNA the way syphilis rampages through the synapses of a street jakey bellowing from his street furniture pulpit. There’s a raw psychopathy to a lot of the humour in that city. In some ways it’s a reaction against grim life, a generation or two on from the time when there was a genuine working class at the shipyards and foundries, which in itself was one of the first generations of that place to enjoy running water. If life is hard, you have to either learn to laugh at it, or let it consume you. Put it this way, if your father is attempting to drown you in dirty dishwater, you need to think fast to get a chuckle out of him.  

This type of male humour, endemic in the shipyards, factories, foundries and industrial units, amounts to bullying, with every weakness torn to pieces. Billy Connolly’s work was part homage, part reaction to the humour of such workplaces, massive yards where the men poured in early in the morning and poured out into the pubs at night.

The Big Yin’s early stuff was an affectionate, even psychedelic, look at working class life as he strove to break the bonds of society and convention. He’s a lot nastier in his golden years, but it’s the meanness of a crumbly grandfather, sitting in a soiled floral print armchair with his wallies in a glass and a face like a slapped arse. Though I will tell anyone who will listen that Billy Connolly is the greatest comedian of all time; no laughing matter, there.

In contrast, fellow Glaswegian Boyle’s nastiness is a straight-faced, ingrained reaction to grim life. Boyle won’t sing any funny wee songs about wellies and night buses any time soon, though I would like to hear any poetry he feels compelled to compose on the subject of divorce.

Basically, you have to learn to laugh at some life conditions, especially if you come from a poor background, with drink, sectarianism and violence surrounding you.

In fact, Boyle’s Glasgow reminiscences remind me of the death of my father. I was lucky enough to hear his last words: “I pulled every one of those punches ya POOF.”

But there’s a hidden side to Frankie, one that he’s shy of showing us. He mentions being in a debating society at his school, and that it did well in national competitions. He also took part in the drama club, and was talented enough to appear in TV productions as a young teenager. He uses the time-worn excuse of “it’s because I wanted to get off with girls there”, but possibly glosses over the fact that he got involved with these things because he liked performance and debate.  

I didn’t go to any drama clubs or debating societies. No such things existed at my school. There was a guitar class held at lunchtimes by the school chaplain and a nun - an alternative dimension Sonny and Cher - in a sexually charged atmosphere so dense that even haggard 14-year-old onanists fled in tears. It was beyond humour, like something out of the f*cking Thorn Birds. Or so I like to imagine. And you know what? There’s a part of me hopes they did it.

Anyway, you get a feel for the bookish, geeky guy Boyle undoubtedly was. His more fantastical comedy sketches (some good, and some kitten-mincingly poor, are reprinted in the book) are full of references to aliens, mad professors, giant crabs and other pulp sci-fi tropes. He lists Gene Wolfe as his favourite writer, is effusive about his love for comic books, and drops many references to Michael Moorcock. I can imagine Frankie getting these books out of the library and having his mind opened by them, as much as the political books he also favoured. Somewhere, in the city’s budget-squeezed shibboleths of literature, Frankie’s finger-prints and perhaps a flake or two of his old spunk can still be found on some of the PVC book jackets.

I wanted to know more about Frankie’s means of escape; because if you live in a grim eight-in-a-block, with your chief source of nutrition being fungal spores inhaled directly from the cracked lintel, then you can bet you need to escape every now and again. And if you can’t take an external journey, you’ll happily take an internal one. It’s no surprise that a lot of Glaswegians turn to drink and drugs, frankly.

I can well remember staring into the spaces between the woodchip wallpaper in my room when I was a child, and allowing my mind to drift, to far-off places, stories and fantastical adventures. I get the impression the author was the same.

What also tickled me is the fact that Boyle counts himself lucky because he didn’t experience the real, deep, near third-world poverty which his parents and grandparents would have encountered in Glasgow. I feel some of that shame myself. If I got new clothes or toys at Christmas, or when I got a tape-loading home computer one year (as Frankie and his brother did), then by Christ I was made to feel bad about it. An Amstrad CPC 464 becomes a formidable weapon if your older brother should so desire to utilise its 8k ram capacity in such a way. They didn’t half make computers chunky in those days, eh?

But Frankie’s comparatively comfortable upbringing would still have been a million miles away from that of more affluent kids in the same era. As he says about the poor teenagers he taught in Edinburgh, some people have no chance – they’re not in the reckoning when it comes to life. “They were never even invited to the party.”

University life for him in Birmingham and Sussex was a blur of alcoholism, drug experimentation and not having much sex, so that’s another area where Frankie’s history and mine intertwine uncomfortably, like two scouts in the same sleeping bag. At least Frankie got to see places as exotic as Aston in his student days; I stayed in Glasgow, attending one of the universities which is not Glasgow University. Way to go, Doogie Howser.

Anyway, Boyle also had stints working for the civil service, then at a psychiatric hospital, and then a short-lived gig as a teacher at a tough school, all of which helped his evolution from a person of use to society to a blabbermouth comedy c*nt.

Boyle is loyal to the friends he’s made on the circuit – indeed, I recognised the laconic North American guy who guested on his Boyle Variety Performance TV special less than two weeks ago as one of the men who appeared on that Jongleurs bill all those years ago.

Boyle’s done alright for himself; it emerged during the confected storm-in-a-teacup tax stramash earlier this year that he’s earned millions off DVDs, tours, TV shows, appearances and writing. Comedy worked out for him, although it seems the drinking and drug-taking nearly killed him in the process. His former appetite for excess is one of the main areas Frankie is totally up-front about his difficulties in life.

The book can either be viewed as a collection of jokes with a life story threaded through it, or vice versa. Both are equally compelling and there is a belly laugh to be had on every page, and sometimes every sentence. If Frankie never reappears on television then I’d be quite happy to buy more of his books. God knows, we all need a laugh.

But there’s also a philosophical bent to a lot of his writing, and some deep political convictions which he can’t altogether disguise. One tract on how we worship money and will go to any lengths to monetise every experience in order to give it legitimacy seriously disturbed me, long after the laughter had subsided.

Latterly, he’s also talked about how having children has led to true love for the first time in his life – no sniggering, please! – with children providing the tender feelings which you were always told love with a partner were meant to engender. These sentiments are lovely, but they probably aren’t why you’ll watch a Frankie Boyle show.

What I will say about Frankie’s controversial jokes is that we all have a threshold. I didn’t like his material about Rebecca Adlington. I could probably list about five more swimmers who deserve abuse before she does, never mind sportspeople or women in general.

When it comes to unwarranted trolling, I take a very dim view – it’s just bullying, nastiness, people with big, big issues looking to feel better about themselves by mocking the weak and the innocent. When people defend internet trolls, I find it bizarre that such nasty wee c*nts are somehow held up as being guardians of the freedom of speech. There’s a moral component being missed out there. It’s a bit like halfwits from the United States who say that every gun massacre is a necessary sacrifice in the name of Americans’ freedom to bear arms. Which I am sure would be precisely what goes through your mind if some lunatic points a high-calibre firearm at you in a shopping mall, before a bullet does.

But when it comes to what is obviously a joke, well… censuring it is a very slippery slope to take indeed. It’s a tricky one.

Frankie’s in trouble over some Twitter gags about the Paralympics, which I repeated above – and I did laugh at them. To me, they weren’t as potentially offensive as his comment about the late film director Tony Scott: “Credit to him for doing his own stunts.” But that seems to have passed notice.

I can’t be a hypocrite, here. I’ll let you in on some gags I’ve made to my friends on email since the Paralympics started. One on Stephen Hawking: “He urged us to look to the stars, not at our feet. Understandable, because Hawking’s feet must look like someone mashed two jobbies together.”

And one on an attractive Paralympic runner with prosthetic limbs: “You wouldn’t fish slice her out of bed.”

I wouldn’t dare vocalise these jokes at work, or just about anywhere else, in fact. But I did make them. No matter that it was to friends in a closed environment; they came from my mind. Context is key, if you can’t keep a civil tongue in your head.

Granted, you may not be as warped as me. But to criticise Frankie Boyle for humour that you use yourself is rank hypocrisy. And to put things in context; being outraged over a comedian making a quick gag, when we tolerate things like benefit cuts for disabled people during the Paralympic Games – well, that really is a joke.  

But I should stop here. This has gone on long enough. In the course of his book Frankie Boyle has a description for all critics of comedy. As this description must include me, then I’ll leave it with you and take a bow.

“C*nts.”

** Author’s note: I’ve edited this piece to remove some terms of abuse and one or two other references which went over the score. In case it needs pointing out, the thrust of this article is satirical; it’s a parody of the author, and his jet black, often cruel comedy. Even so, I couldn’t countenance one or two things being left on this site, even written in jest. If anyone read these in the original and were offended, I am sorry.

WHEN THE LION FEEDS

by Wilbur Smith
544 pages, Pan Books

Review by Pat Black

Throughout my book-addicted life, Wilbur Smith was one of those writers whom I’d pass by on the shelves without giving a second glance. Sometimes it was hard to guess what Smith’s books were actually about. They were sagas, rather than stories – perhaps there’s something in this that put me off.

Reading an article the other day about his publisher, the legendary Charles Pick, triggered a memory of the one Wilbur Smith book I have read. According to Pick’s unpublished memoirs, a treasure trove of encounters with the 20^th century’s most famous authors, Smith was quite the looker in his salad days. He caused many a female member of staff at his publisher to fall over in a faint as he passed them on the stairs. Big sexy bugger!

An unexpected couple of days in the Excelsior Suite in my local NHS hospital, and a common room with few books, gave me the time and opportunity to try the South African author out. When The Lion Feeds is his first novel, an instant success, a gigantic bestseller, the kind of literary opening innings for which you might seek an evaluation on your grandmother.

First published in 1966, When The Lion Feeds is a family saga and historical adventure, looking at the travails of the Courtney clan from the 1860s-1890s in South Africa. The first thing to tell you is that it is an awesome page-turner. It gripped me from the very first, and didn’t let go. Great action, memorable characters, snappy dialogue, wonderful plotting, loads of sex… it’s got the lot. That’s the banner quote, should Smith ever need one. 

Sometimes books can just whoosh past you – in one ear, and out the other. When The Lion Feeds is not one of these books. Going on for four years since I first read it, a lot of the detail in Smith’s debut is still burned into my mind. That could have been to do with the memorable context in which I read it, but I don’t think so. It’s a testament to Smith’s superb storytelling. No wonder they were tripping over themselves to sign the handsome South African up.  

What also becomes quickly apparent is that there’s something badly wrong with this book. At a fundamental level.

Sean Courtney, the hero, is blond and handsome and athletic. Leonine, almost, you might say. He inherits his father’s cattle farming business in Natal in the late 1800s. But he also has a brother, Garrick. Garrick could have been all the things that Sean was, except that Garrick is disabled. This is thanks to a childhood incident involving a gun which Sean is largely responsible for. Sean doesn’t actually seem to be crushed by guilt over this act – a characteristic we will see more of. He does look out for Garrick after divesting him of a leg, although sometimes it seems as if he’s being manipulated by his craven, workshy younger brother. Indeed, there’s a suggestion that Garrick was the weaker of the two, anyway - bookish, thin and a bit of a sissy. You might be inclined to wonder if it wasn’t perfectly natural, how things worked out. As if the dominant one had established who’s boss.

So Sean inherits the business, and Garrick gimps along in his wake. Primacy is established. You can bet Garrick’s bitter about that. That’s no problem. Life is life, we take the hand we are dealt. There are winners and losers. We can’t help how we feel. It’s only natural. Someone’s got to be the boss, and it makes sense for Sean to be the head bummer in an active, outdoors, rough and ready occupation. It happens.

So before long, we’ve got a one-legged evil gnome on our hands. Garrick goes from being Sean’s lesser sibling to a rival, and then a full-on nemesis. As if these problems weren’t enough, we’re shown that Garrick is also sexually impotent, unable to satisfy his wife. Meanwhile, Sean rides away like billy-o, even more firmly establishing his status as the alpha male. We get that.

Garrick practically bites his own dead useless dick off in frustration, and plots revenge on the whole world.  

And that’s not a problem, either. It is possible for disabled people to have unpleasant characteristics. It’s also possible that, owing to a lifetime of setbacks and low confidence, or simply by being physically incapable, they might suffer problems in the bedroom. It’s also possible for siblings to fall out. I concede all that.

Sean’s journey takes him from losing his father’s estate – thanks in no small part to Garrick – to Rorke’s Drift, where he kills a whole load of noble black people, then to the gold rush in Witwatersrand, with lots of shagging in between. It’s the hero’s journey all the way. Fortunes are won and lost, loyalties forged and destroyed, and women are taken and then cast aside. In odd echoes of Star Wars, part of this journey involves Sean taking on and defeating his father, a legendary hardnut, in a fistfight. “What a son I was given!” Courtney Senior muses, as he comes back to consciousness after Sean gives him a banjoing.  

Again, primacy is established. The lion takes the lion’s share. It’s only natural.

Sean’s quite a virtuous guy, honest as the day is long, blah de blah, but has a bad temper on him. He loves the hunting, the drinking and the fighting. This makes him irresistible to women, notwithstanding his, some might say, Aryan good looks. And I guess that’s alright, too. Sometimes successful people can be good looking and white. And they are successful with women too. It follows suit. It’s only natural. It does happen.

Every epic story needs a villain, and When The Lion Feeds gets one in Hradsky. Hradsky craves gold. Goldfinger is Goldstub compared to this guy. Sean and his best mate, the dapper if stupidly-named Englishman Duff Charleywood, are forced into an uneasy partnership with Hradsky as they earn a fortune in gold mining.

Hradsky is Jewish, greedy and treacherous. The story reminds you constantly that he is Jewish. It does not make much of the fact that Sean and Duff are white men making lots of money in Africa, too. It prefers to linger on Hradsky’s Jewishness, tying this in with an ugly nature - and also an ugly appearance. Hey, it happens in real life – it is possible that Jewish people can be ugly as well as perfidious and parsimonious. Bound to happen at some point. Law of averages, and all that.

I understand it is something of a trademark of Smith’s to set scenes in the African bush, with daring hunting exploits and exotic wildlife. Smith really lets rip, here, with beautiful descriptions of the land, the skies, the weather, the foliage, the danger and the great beasts. The heart of Africa has long been a fertile hunting ground for authors throughout history, but I’d be surprised if anyone ever captured it as well as Wilbur Smith.          

I’ve got no problem with hunting, so long as you eat what you kill. As Smith points out – many times - it can be a tough life, and only the strong survive. And I eat meat, so it’s silly to get upset over animals being shot. You’re hungry, you eat. It’s only natural. And big game hunting still goes on in Africa, of course. I don’t think you get to shoot lions any more – and what greater thrill for a big, strapping, virile, rich, successful white man than to shoot a lion? – but back in the day, you could blast away as you pleased. And there were good, loyal, decent, subservient black men to run around after you while you did it, and to be flogged if they stepped out of line. That’s all true. It did happen. 

Annoyingly, I didn’t get the chance to finish this novel, being about 50 pages shy of the end when I had to check out of my NHS Excelsior Suite. I’m not quite so immoral as to steal books from hospitals. Perhaps that’s a weakness on my part.

When The Lion Feeds is a true oddity. It’s not quite a guilty pleasure, nor is it a straight up-and-down outrage. I can’t recommend it, nor can I deny the awesome talent at the author’s disposal.

This book set my imagination aflame and had such a compelling narrative that, nearly four years later, most of the details are fresh in the mind. It is also utterly repellent on just about every human level. The two states do not quite cancel each other out.

The book’s title refers to an old African proverb – “When the lion feeds, something always has to die. But there is meat for those who follow it.”

There are piles of lion shit, too.

WAYLANDER

by David Gemmell
320 pages, Del Rey

Review by Hereward L.M. Proops

We've all got one. If you're a regular visitor to this website, chances are you're as much of a book geek as the rest of us and you're bound to have one book that first turned you on to the joys of reading. For some, the revelation might come at a young age in the form of a book by Enid Blyton or Julia Donaldson. For others, it might be a novel by Terry Pratchett or Roald Dahl which blows their young minds. Some unlucky souls out there might even find J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels to be their gateway drug. However you get there, once you find that one magical book there's no looking back. The first step on the slippery slope to fully-fledged literacy has been taken and it's only a matter of time before you are spending every available moment with your face between the sweet smelling pages of a crisp new paperback.

The moment came for me at the tender age of thirteen. Although I was a capable reader when I was younger, no book had really grabbed me up to that point. I can't remember what I was grounded for but it must have been something pretty bad because my stereo, television and video games had been taken away. My pal Reuben had recommended a book to keep me going through my weekend-long incarceration. The cover had a moody looking guy dressed in black leather holding a crossbow and squaring off against a pair of big freaky monsters. Reuben's dog-eared copy had clearly been read more than a few times before. “What the hell,” I thought as I turned to the first page, “it'll beat staring at the walls.”

Holy shit. That weekend was one of the best 48 hours of my life.

David Gemmell's “Waylander” will always be one of my favourite fantasy novels. The storyline might not have the depth of Tolkien, and Gemmell's style might be somewhat  basic and pedestrian when compared to the other greats of the genre but I've returned to the book time and time again. Why? That's simple. It is so damn fun. I know that when I pick up my time-worn copy of the novel that I'm in for a good time.

The plot is typical Gemmell, a world-weary anti-hero is given the chance for redemption but must face great dangers and overwhelming odds to save the day. The world-weary hero in this instance is the titular Waylander. A dour, leather-clad assassin armed with a nifty double crossbow and a truly ludicrous array of knives, Waylander is not a man you want to mess with. Gemmell takes a great deal of time highlighting this fact to his readers. By the third or fourth chapter, Waylander has already dispatched a large quantity of adversaries and managed to look consistently cool whilst doing so. Cynical readers might gripe that Gemmell spends far more time making his protagonist look cool than actually developing the character, and they might well be right. Unnecessary posturing or not, the fact remains that the image of Waylander silhouetted against the sunset, the breeze lifting his cloak to reveal his deadly crossbow, is indelibly etched in my memory.

Waylander's not a happy chap. Since avenging the murder of his family years ago, he's been a bit of a lost soul and has drifted from place to place, plying his deadly trade to the highest bidder. His last victim happened to be the King of the Drenai, and now the country is thrown into turmoil as the deeply unpleasant Vagrian army has invaded and are raping and pillaging their way across the countryside. Waylander is given an opportunity to redeem himself by finding the mythical Armour of Bronze and turning the tide of battle in favour of the Drenai. Easy, right? Wrong. The Vagrian General Kaem has put a price on Waylander's head that has attracted a rival assassin called Cadoras the Chaos Blade, and he's also being hunted by a group of sadistic psychic warrior priests known as the Dark Brotherhood. Oh, and the Armour of Bronze is situated smack bang in the middle of the barbaric Nadir lands and is guarded by werebeasts.

Accompanying Waylander on this near-impossible quest is a pacifistic vegetarian priest called Dardalion, a pair of psychic twin girls and an attractive young woman called Danyal. Waylander's hard demeanour is softened somewhat by his new companions and he becomes a more sympathetic character. In a nice bit of mirroring, Waylander's warlike ways rub off on the priest Dardalion as he becomes a steak-chewing arse-kicking holy man who uses astral projection to beat seven shades of shit out of the Dark Brotherhood. Danyal, rather predictably, becomes the novel's love interest, but she is also given quite a pivotal role towards the end of the story, enabling her to show a bit more backbone than the traditional fantasy damsel in distress.

One of David Gemmell's strengths as a novelist was his ability to write convincing action. Whether a sword fight, a tavern brawl or a full-scale epic battle, Gemmell was able to bring the action to life in a way that many writers struggle to achieve. I know there are folks out there who look down upon action and adventure books – to them I recommend that they try their hand at writing a believable and exciting fight or chase before they pass judgement on the genre. Gemmell's works might not be the most emotionally mature stories, but they are breathlessly exciting and never fail to get the adrenalin pumping. Best of all, the novel is perfectly paced. We aren't exhausted by Gemmell overloading the action and he allows enough downtime between each battle for the reader to get their bearings and reconnect with the characters. Cleverly, the novel is structured so that each action sequence is a little bigger, a little more bombastic than the last. The book starts with small skirmishes and builds to a suitably epic climax as the keep of Dros Purdol comes under siege from the Vagrian army.

“Waylander” is a special book to me. It not only turned me on to fantasy but it also fired up my passion for reading. It has been nearly twenty years since I first read it and in that time I've encountered many better books. There are more mature, cerebral works of fantasy out there and many more complex tales of adventure. However, I'm hard pushed to think of many books that I enjoy quite as much as this tale of heroic fantasy.

Hereward L.M. Proops

THE COMPLETE CHRONICLES OF CONAN

Robert E. Howard (Victor Gollancz)

by Pat Black

“What are you reading at the moment?”

It’s a question I never hide from. I have no shame about my reading habits, even when I probably should. Pseudy philosophy guides, sci-fi with disco laser guns, brain-splattery horror, fantasy and adventure with a variety of gnomic short-arses and pointy-eared elves, heaving-bosomed period romances, the classics, modernism and its bastard child. I couldn’t care less what people think. I like what I like, and I like a lot of stuff.

Certainly, I thought, I have no shame in letting my friend know that I’m reading this handsome, and you might say brawny, hardback collection of all of Conan The Cimmerian’s sword-swinging, monster-bashing fantasy adventures. The ones set down by his original creator, Robert E Howard, in the great pulp magazines such as Weird Tales. The stuff I loved to read when I was younger; the adventures of the indomitable, indefatigable Conan of the surprisingly faithful movie adaptation, the one that gave us Arnold the Great, such a titanic figure in my generation’s youth.

“Bit homoerotic, that stuff,” my friend smirked. “All those details of his mighty muscles. All oily.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “He’s just strong. It’s all about strength.”

“He fights a lot of snakes, does Conan,” my friend – he’s a psychologist, by the way –added. “Big glistening snakes. You should think about that.”

It did get me thinking. Conan does fight a hell of a lot of big shiny snakes. He usually stabs them to death with his very long sword. And it’s easy to make the same kind of reading as my mischievous friend, these days. The stories are dictionary-definition homoerotic, a quality the type of person who watched 300 without once raising an eyebrow might miss. Howard’s eye lingers over his great pulp hero’s Chippendale-ripped body, far moreso than it does on those of the quivering females who flesh out his stories. Conan has tigerish muscles - always tigerish, never leopardish or bobcattish. Conan has bronzed skin – through exposure to the sun, of course, and not because he’s got anything other than white genes. Conan has burning blue eyes. Conan has a coal-black square-cut mane (which for some reason makes me think of Courtney Cox in Scream 3). There’s not a woman he can’t ravish – willingly, on her part, of course – and there isn’t a man he can’t defeat in combat. Come to think of it, there aren’t too many super-men, evil wizards or monsters that don’t end up on the floor either. Not one, in all those hundreds of pages.

And ignoring shit-faced post-modernist interpretations of a beloved character, herein lies the appeal for boys of all ages. Ironically (don’t shoot!), he’s a precursor to The Terminator; the unkillable, physically formidable male, unperturbed by people, delicate feelings, the more complex moving parts of our natures, arguably a uniquely male fantasy. He has nothing to rely on but brute strength, feral cunning and the headwinds of his own desires. He blanches somewhat at supernatural elements, things not of flesh and blood, but he has absolutely no fear of anything else. He knows what he wants and how to get it, and he goes about his business with lethal intent. He is the ultimate existential hero, refreshingly untroubled by any issues outside his own predicament. He is honest. If we were to play a game of literary Top Trumps, Conan’s score for Guile would be 0. You would beat him on this category with a Bugs Bunny card.

He is at once incredibly silly and utterly compulsive. If there’s a problem, Conan has a solution that tends to work for him every time; he clobbers it over the head with a whacking great sword. There’s no intrigue, plotting or black magic he can’t silence with one blue-sheened swing of that mighty member. He quite simply takes no shit. Ever.

It’s ridiculous, laughable on occasion to a reader outside their teens, and yet somehow refreshing and uncluttered. It makes me think of the sigh of relief some grizzled critics uttered when Russell Crowe scowled and twitched his way through Gladiator, almost 10 years ago now; championing an increasingly lost cause, the alpha male, the simple man who follows his own path, the man who will not be derailed, the man who... well... it bears repeating... takes no shit. Ever.

But, gaah! I gnash my teeth, I wrinkle my brow; things aren’t as simple as all that, are they? Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.

Throughout the course of the stories there is a detailed history of Conan’s world, the races that inhabit it, the wars they fought and the kingdoms that rose and fell. It made me think of a TV show I once saw about a savant who could draw entire cities fashioned from his own imagination. Every building, square and alleyway penned in excruciating detail, a tale attached to every street corner, everything that had ever happened in this dreamscape fully-formed in the artist’s mind. The skill and the imaginative power involved in that enterprise are similar to what Howard displays here, and it’s worth mentioning that this was long before works of fantasy as densely detailed as Lord of the Rings saw print. Howard envisaged his universe, every minaret and brick of it, every empire and every great battle. This attention to detail in particular illuminates those stories which depict the young Conan as a thief, breaking into tombs and castles and defusing traps like an archaic Indiana Jones.

For there’s a Conan to suit every occasion: brigand, pirate, thief, fighting man, gladiator, soldier, and ultimately, king. This perhaps owes something to the pulp milieu, where Howard could swap the odd name and scenario his characters inhabit in order to recycle basic templates and increase sales. Some of the great siege and battle stories could easily have featured his Pictish creation, Brann Mak Morn, and indeed some of his sea-faring adventures began life as pirate tales, reforged as Conan stories as his hero’s popularity grew in Weird Tales in the 1930s. It was a tough market for writers to crack, and it’s half-pleasing, half-tragic to think of Howard as this Conan-esque human writing machine back in the golden age of the pulps, battering out his stories day after day in 10,000-word piles of print to scrape a living. Like his friend and fellow pulp pathfinder HP Lovecraft, Howard was owed money by Weird Tales when he died.

The stories are told out of chronological order and there’s a pleasing variety in this; one minute you have a teenaged Conan breaking into an ancient fortress riddled with boobytraps to steal jewels, lopping the heads off lions standing guard, and in the next you have an older, wiser Conan, fighting off those in his kingdom plotting to kill him. This out-of-synch timeline gives us a bit of necessary variety as much of the storylines bleed into each other, with many elements repeated (another nod to the production-line manner of writing these guys employed... you get the feeling nothing was wasted, and in terms of story mechanics if it wasn’t broke, you were a fool to fix it). There are Lovecraftian menaces disturbed by men’s greed, ancient gods and monsters rearing up to rend and destroy. The sorcerer villains seem to be pretty much the same character in each story – crooked, robed figures, Machiavellian and wicked. There are – I’m sorry to return to this – a hell of a lot of giant snakes. You can count them off every second or third story, and it gets so that you find yourself pleasantly surprised when a giant spider or dragon is thrown in here and there as a monster break. In trying to explain this serpentine obsession (eschewing my friend’s cocktastic Freudian insinuations), I can only imagine Howard as the small-town little boy he was in Cross Plains, Texas, wandering the countryside alone except for his dreams of swords and battle and clanging armour. And I picture him perhaps being frightened back to reality by the sudden appearance of one of these nightmare beasts’ junior cousins, rattling its dread percussion at him, coiled to strike.

More controversially, the stories are worryingly preoccupied with race, bloodlines and racially-inherited characteristics. There are “negroes”, and no shade in between. The non-white races are never described pejoratively, but they are closely defined and demarcated. To be fair, Conan is never prejudiced against anyone who isn’t white, and happily joins forces with the black slaves aboard a pirate ship when he takes command for himself. But still, the focus is there.

And that’s separate from the always black-skinned monsters and demons that crop up, other-worldly creatures which almost – but not quite, of course – defeat Conan. Creatures who rise from the grave, demonic beings summoned by shamans and wizards. I thought a lot about this, how some of the pulp literature of the 1920s and 1930s had this sort of theme, that of the alien with non-white skin intent on harm; I’m thinking of lads like Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless in particular. With Conan there are racial divides, character types defined by skin colour and biological bases for history. A sense of purity, and nature travelling in a way it never does; in straight lines. It could have been an obsession of the age, and I can’t help but think of another mighty-whitey pulp hero who’s a little troubling to consider in this light: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan. The Second World War and the Nazis were a decade away when these tales first appeared. We can perhaps be guilty of examining these things too closely, but they are there. It’s less troubling to focus on fighting monsters and getting off with frequently-naked females.

Conan’s relationship with this latter bunch is unsurprisingly straightforward. They fall into two distinct types: vampish temptresses and virginal princesses. Either way works for Conan; all of them turn into a panting, quivering heap upon the sight of this proto-gym whore and his tigerish muscles, without fail. He’s forever crushing these ladies to his chest at the end of stories. A rather strange expression; it’s as if the schoolyard sex education the young barbarian got from his friends set his imagination off on a biologically flawed path.

In one of the stories, the Queen of the Black Coast, the pirate mistress of a ship suddenly decides to take Conan for a mate after she witnesses him slaughter wave after wave of her crew. As one would. There’s no complexity involved in these feelings, no fall-out from the wild lusts and rages, no guilt, and, God forbid, no love. There’s one difference in the novella Red Nails when Conan encounters Valeria. She’s an equal, a freebooting adventurer and thief just like him, and he respects her for it. She’s not someone he lusts after immediately… at least, not the same way as he does with other female characters. We know from Howard’s correspondence with the female poet Novalyne Price Ellis that he intended to explore new directions with Valeria (the dirty devil flirted with an archaic kind of lipstick lesbianism with this character), and we can sense that perhaps Conan the great adventurer would find a soulmate in her. Certainly the character was a great choice for screenwriter Oliver Stone to use as Conan’s love interest in the John Milius movie adaptation; although, disappointingly, even she gets a touch of the screaming hab-dabs when faced with a dragon and black magic-wielding priests in the story, requiring our boy to get his big old sword out again to save the day.

But, much like James Bond would never ignore ladies in trouble despite him having about as much respect for them as a furball from Blofeld’s cat, Conan never takes an unfair advantage of any of the women in his care. Indeed, there’s something comforting about this lumbering presence, standing guard over his girls whatever the situation, chivalric in his own unique way, brave, tough and as faithful as King Kong is to Fay Wray. Our barbarian’s pillaging and brawling skills are second nature, but rapine is something this ancient-world titan seems to shy away from, when such a thing would have been commonplace among men of arms in primitive, lawless times. It could be that underneath the flinty shell of the man, there’s a delicate soul hidden somewhere.

Indeed, for all the brawling and monsterage he depicts, Howard the artist sometimes allows himself to creep into proceedings. In The Phoenix On The Sword, King Conan of Aquilonia hesitates to kill Rinaldo the minstrel, a chief conspirator in a regicidal plot against him, on the basis that the man is a gifted and renowned poet. It’s hard to see this barely-reconstructed savage and great fighting man savouring the fine arts, but it hints at the writer’s respect for his own vocation and (though fans would argue of course) a yearning for some deeper aesthetic impulse that tales of bloodletting couldn’t fulfil. While Howard’s poetry isn’t great, the stories are often opened and closed with examples of the author’s surprisingly gloomy verse, a far cry from the cookie-cutter nature of many of these simple tales of military victory. Taking Conan’s philosophy on life as an existential treatise, there’s pleasure to be found in his stripped-down, robust world-view. Here, in Queen Of The Black Coast, Conan describes his spiritual beliefs with regard to his god, Crom:

“He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you. He will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man’s soul. What else shall men ask of the gods?”

It’s tempting to imagine Conan as simply a sublimated fantasy version of Robert E Howard, and this brings us to a fascinating paradox. Apparently a very physically tough young man who was a more than adequate boxer and body-builder, we can easily discern Conan’s single-mindedness and somewhat brutal self-confidence in his creator. The machismo on show here from Howard can be flat-out farcical. In Shadows In The Moonlight, Conan reassures a typical heroine, Olivia, that she may sleep soundly at the same time as Conan when they take rest in an ancient ruin on a demon-plagued island. “I sleep like the wolf,” he tells her. “Nothing can enter this chamber without awakening me.” And at the start of The Pool Of The Black One, Conan simply appears on the deck of a pirate ship, dripping wet, from the open sea. When his astonished hosts ask him how he got there, he mentions that he took to the waves with naught but his swimming abilities to propel him after his boat began taking on water, “the better to make time”. When informed that sharks patrol these waters, the big guy simply shrugs those tigerish shoulders. Why bother about such things as drowning, traversing impossible distances or man-eating creatures when you have unlimited physical strength and Brontosaurian balls?

But looking at a picture of the author at the back of this book gives me a different impression of him. Despite the Al Capone hat he favours, Howard looks almost baby-faced in this shot, the features rounded and cuddly rather than hard and square-jawed. He might be a favourite uncle, not a hard-headed, honed, lusty adventurer.

Robert E Howard killed himself at the age of 30. Apparently an advocate of suicide as an acceptable, even noble means of ending one’s life in some of his correspondence, he took himself out with a bullet to the head when it became apparent that his beloved mother was dying in 1936. Howard’s father was thusly bereft of his wife and only child in the space of 24 hours. All the teeth-gritted determination associated with Howard’s wonderful tales doesn’t square well with the fact that he appears to have simply given in when faced with one of life’s unpleasant inevitabilities.

Perhaps such a way out represents a means of choice and control for some, a method of cheating a fate or destiny laid down for us. But I just can’t imagine Conan having favoured this solution. I think the big guy would have taken up arms however dire the situation and met his enemies with that grim smile and a flash of those eyes. He would have done what he was born to do, rather than succumbing.

But that’s not the real world. What the conclusion of Howard’s personal story shows – and as Conan realises on more than one occasion – is that muscles and swords are useless against some foes. Some demons just can’t be defeated.

But away from that chilly outcome, what the Conan stories do for me – and what the best of them might do for you – is to help me rediscover a fairly innocent pleasure in reading, the reason I fell in love with books in the first place. This is the type of title that might cause your sniffy teacher to frown at you, if you told them you were reading it. Going through the tales again rekindled some of that feeling I had when my older brother introduced me to the sword-swinging berserker in the first place; me on a school holiday, him on a day off work, my parents both out, the battered VHS copy of Conan the Barbarian from the video shop, both of us cheering Arnie on. There was a sort of magic in discovering these worlds, and I feel glad that I can still experience something of that. A delight at the blood and boobs, the monsters and heroes, the villains and wild women; a curiously guilt-free pleasure.

BOOKSQUAWK'S MOST TREASURED:

The books we simply won’t allow you to borrow.

The Dark Knight Returns
by Frank Miller with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley
Titan Books, 224 pages

Big Meanie: Pat Black

We know this Dark Knight well enough, now. Film director Christopher Nolan’s gritty take on the comic book hero Batman has proven a huge hit, with two films racking up literally billions in box office as well as critical acclaim – with a third being filmed now. I’m even willing to argue that The Dark Knight is the best Hollywood blockbuster since Jaws.

But Nolan’s Batman owes a big debt to The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller’s seminal take on the character. Penned in the mid-1980s, this depiction of the end of the Batman legend was a stunning publishing event in its time, and is probably fighting it out with Alan Moore’s Watchmen for the title of greatest graphic novel ever created. If I’m forced to choose a winner out of those two, then Miller’s masterpiece edges it.

I caught it at exactly the right age – 13 – when, as a reader, I began to hunger for more realistic fare. I’d had my first experience of being underwhelmed by a movie and falling for hype when I watched Tim Burton’s Batman the previous summer. So, while I had always loved Batman as a young boy (see my review of Batman: Year One), I wasn’t sure what to expect when I borrowed The Dark Knight Returns from a friend.

After reading it, I was never quite the same again. It was an electric shock from which I suspect I’ve never quite recovered.

Spread over four parts, TDKR details a dystopian future, with Bruce Wayne in his fifties and getting his kicks from stock car racing rather than pummelling criminals while dressed as a rodent. His right-hand man, Commissioner Jim Gordon, is reluctantly heading for retirement from Gotham Police Department, frustrated by rising crime levels sparked by a street gang known as the Mutants.

Taunted by old demons, in the middle of a pathetically fallacious thunderstorm, Wayne listens to the beast within and comes out of retirement to don the cape and cowl once more, and to do to bad people what he does best.

Kick the ever-lovin’ shit right out of them.

Bats is “reborn” in an electrifying sequence where street punks, robbers, would-be rapists, gang members and general low-lives are pounded by an unseen monster, an avenging angel who strikes with the lightning. With Batman having been gone for 10 years, the public are goggle-eyed at this beast who annihilates the violent and causes fear in the fearful.

For a story which derives its power from pictures, it boasts some masterful writing, from the tough guy interior monologues moving from character-to-character to the future-slang of Gotham’s villains and tech noir teenagers.

The first part sees the caped crusader take on Harvey Dent, aka Two-Face, after he is controversially freed from Arkham Asylum. Later, Batman clashes with the Mutant Leader in a bone-shattering contest that would make a superb Bat-movie on its own. Here, Bruce Wayne the man is made to face the inevitabilities of increasing age and decreasing strength in some of the harshest ways imaginable after a brutal battle with his younger, fitter nemesis. He also picks up a new Robin along the way – a girl, no less, a streetwise computer whiz who attaches herself to the Batman - and he drives a Batmobile that is less a showy babe magnet than a full-on battle tank. This is almost certainly where the designers of the Nolan Batman films took their inspiration for the Tumbler from.

Our old friend the Joker appears in the third part, and his homicidal tendencies and distinct lack of lounge-act puns also reminds us of the Nolan Joker, so unforgettably portrayed by the late Heath Ledger. In the midst of this, there’s political and social commentary; talking heads-style soundbite news is brilliantly essayed (a similar style later appeared in Robocop), while then-president Reagan is portrayed as a doddering fool held up in power by another DC stable hero - the one in red and blue from Metropolis. Other ageing DC heroes and villains appear throughout, with Green Arrow in particular enjoying a crazy cameo near the end. We also have the spectre of nuclear war on these pages, which chimes well with the contemporaneous concerns of Watchmen.

On top of that – if you’ve ever wondered what would happen if Batman and Superman had a fight, then buy this book, and wonder no more.

I can scarcely do it justice here. Even the colouring is inspired, and ably supports Miller’s own pencil work, with his heroes and villains sketched out in hard lines and sometimes grotesque expressions. It’s as realistic as a man dressed as an animal panelling villains could ever be.

I cringe a little in remembering this, but I was so impressed by Batman’s strength and single-mindedness in this book. He is as tough as they come, but he never wavers from his mission statement: to protect the innocent, and to punish horrible people. I loved the righteousness, and I am forced to admit part of me still does.

But that self-same celebration of brawn and mental strength troubles me a little, more than 20 years later. Anyone who foamed at the mouth and demanded things like CS gas, water cannon, plastic bullets or even lead ones in response to the English riots this past while will find lots to enjoy in TDKR. Batman’s policy is that might is right - and if you don’t like that, you’d best get out of the way.

To be fair, just about everyone Batman beats up in this book deserves it. An equal opportunities psychotic, he even batters a few coppers when they get in his way. But real life, as most of us will hopefully realise as we get past the age of 13, isn’t quite as black and white as Batman’s world, no matter how realistic those punches look. No-one really boils down to the purely good, the purely evil, the purely noble or the purely craven. And anyone who truly believes that they can exercise good judgment by clenching a fist and putting it in someone’s face is, frankly, an arsehole.

A more positive message comes from Batman’s stoic response to setbacks. He suffers terribly in this book, whether that’s from the ongoing mental trauma of his parents’ murder before his eyes as a boy, or from the physical punishment his opponents deal him. In this book you’ll see Batman shot, stabbed in the guts and beaten to within an inch of his life. But always, he takes it, he learns from it, he gets stronger, and he comes back. To a young and fairly naive boy who wasn’t too far away from some harsh life lessons when he read this masterpiece, it proved to be an inspiration.

And that’s why I cannot allow you to borrow it.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

Booksquawk interviews Stephen Volk – author of “Whitstable” and writer of BBC's “Ghostwatch.” Interview by Hereward L. M. Proops

Booksquawk: Tell us a little bit about your novella “Whitstable”.

Stephen Volk: It’s set in the Kent coastal town of its title in 1971, and is a fiction about probably its most famous resident, the horror actor Peter Cushing. It takes place at the absolute nadir of Cushing’s life, just after he lost his wife and soul-mate, Helen. As he is sitting looking out to sea one day he is approached by a young boy who mistakenly thinks he is the great vampire hunter of the Hammer Dracula films, Dr Van Helsing. He is desperate for the man’s help and, initially at least, Cushing feels sorely inadequate to rise to the challenge and be the kind of hero the boy wants in real life. Facing monsters when you have a screenplay, he finds, is much easier than facing one in real life. But he cannot ignore the pleas of an innocent child. 

Booksquawk: Peter Cushing is such an iconic figure. Was it a challenge capturing his personality and voice when writing the book?

Stephen Volk: Perhaps arrogantly, I felt at the outset I could do that fairly well. I’m a massive fan of his films and as a fan, it’s not difficult to hear his voice, see his mannerisms or even imagine his reaction to things in a story. That didn’t worry me – in fact, that was exactly what excited me. I would have been foolish not to be concerned about accuracy, however and I went to great pains to get as much factual input as possible: I did a lot of research from books and I got notes on the manuscript from acclaimed Cushing experts, film critics and those who had met him. I was thrilled that, to a man, when they read it, they thought I’d captured him perfectly.

But I hasten to say – this is only a piece of fiction. This is my Peter in my story and another Cushing in another story would be different. You only have to look at the two “Hitchcock” films out there at the moment – vastly differing portrayals of the same man. You cannot really aim for “truth” of any kind, just to be convincing – or convincing enough, hopefully.

Booksquawk: The book makes reference to a number of classic movies starring Cushing. Do you have a particular favourite?

Stephen Volk: I do like “The Vampire Lovers”, which I use in the book, though Peter doesn’t have a huge part in it. I remembered the thrill of watching it in the cinema when it came out and the beheading in the opening sequence was the most graphic violence I’d ever seen. And terribly shocking, at the time. You forget that. 

It’s hard to watch it now, mind. Peter was going through a terrible time with Helen’s deteriorating health and when you know that, you can see it. Consummate actor though he was, it really shows in his features.

But to be truthful, I love all Cushing’s Hammer and Amicus films, but my favourite two Hammers are actually ones without him in them – “Quatermass and the Pit” and “The Devil Rides Out”. Although, in my head, I must say, he would have been a perfect lead in either of those, too! 

Booksquawk: The novella pits Cushing against a very different type of monster than those he faced in his films. What made you decide to take the character on this particular journey?

Stephen Volk: It began with the idea of a child needing help and the only way the child can deal with the harm inflicted and threatened is through the prism of horror films. I’m very interested in this idea of trauma in relation to horror and vice versa. I think horror gives the vulnerable and the frightened a vocabulary to discuss things that are unspoken and in some ways unsayable. Maybe that’s even what it’s there for. I don’t know. So that was the start point.

But in terms of the arc of what Peter undergoes in my story – well, I knew it must start with his at his lowest ebb and I knew that initially after Helen’s death he turned down all offers of work point blank. Then, in time, he changed his mind and decided to throw himself whole-heartedly back into acting. And I thought: what if that is the arc here? What if my story enables him to go on? Once I had that notion it was logical to start with him rejecting the God he believed in, and at the end feeling that God looks after him after all. A feeling that, yes, he could cope because his love for Helen would give him strength. That developed and probably became the most important thematic strand in the book, in the end.

Booksquawk: You have made a career out of scaring people. What scares you?

Stephen Volk: Apparently that question was asked of Hitchcock and he said “Everything!” That’s a brilliant answer because it’s true of me and it’s true of most horror writers I know. We are not tough people. We are neurotic and scared of our own shadow. We see fear and terror everywhere. That’s where we get our stories. If we looked around and saw fun and jollity we would be comedy writers. Hang on – that’s not true because comedy writers are far more miserable than horror writers! Meet a bunch of them in the pub and you’ll see what I mean. They never laugh at anybody else’s jokes! But horror writers are the nicest, most supportive and generous people imaginable. They really are!

I don’t have any phobias or specific things that creep me out. I don’t like loud noises or that ghost train “things jumping out at you” crap. I get claustrophobic underground – that’s just physical discomfort. I get scared in the middle of the night sometimes, but that’s usually because I think the cat has brought in a dead bird or something. Or my imagination. Not anything supernatural. I don’t believe in ghosts or anything. I’m a complete sceptic when it comes to all things paranormal – even though I love writing about it.

 

Booksquawk: What is your favourite horror novel / movie?

Stephen Volk: My favourite film, I always say, is “Don’t Look Now”. It’s a masterful work – the first film I saw that conveyed everything exciting about a supernatural thriller with really good, multi-layered characters you completely believed in, but with this whole metaphysical/philosophical layer that was pure cinema. Every detail and cutaway questioned the meaning of the story, or life almost. I was blown away by it. To me it was the first film that conveyed the mystification of life and our utter inability to make sense of it until it is too late.

My favourite book, in that it’s one that has stayed with me and influenced me most, is Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. The fact that there have been so many versions – from “The Munsters” to Danny Boyle’s National Theatre production – just shows what an absolute icon of popular culture it is. It’s a brilliant allegory and really emotional storytelling. OK, the language is a bit stale – but get over it! For God’s sake, it was written 200 years ago! It’s staggering - in terms of its narrative scope, the scene changing, the ideas - and at its centre this perverse father-son relationship, almost. I simply never tire of it. And, of course, my first produced screenplay was “Gothic” (1986, directed by Ken Russell) – which was my re-telling of the famous night at Villa Diodati when “Frankenstein” was “born” in young Mary.

Booksquawk: Do you have a routine for writing?

Stephen Volk: I try to keep office hours. Would probably get more done if I worked through the night and slept during the day, but my wife wouldn’t be too delighted. I’m not very productive in the morning unless I’m on a strict deadline. But I try not to beat myself up if a day doesn’t bear too much fruit. You can often have a productive hour which makes up for a day of sludge. Sometimes you have to just go through the sludge and quite often you look back and it wasn’t sludge after all.

Booksquawk: Are you working on another book at the moment?

Stephen Volk: I’m thinking about a few ideas, but I’m also thinking about earning some money, and the independent press is not the best place to do that!

Besides, I like alternating between fiction and TV and film work because the latter takes so damn long in development and hardly anybody reads it. The good thing about getting short stories and novellas published is, they get to readers. And I like to get stories out there – otherwise what is the point?

Booksquawk: “Ghostwatch” managed to terrify my entire generation. Did you anticipate it having such an impact?

Stephen Volk: No. I thought people might twig what we were doing ten minutes in, but honestly I had no idea some people would believe the whole thing was real from beginning to end. I wasn’t delighted that people thought they’d been hoodwinked in some way – that wasn’t the intention at all. The intention was to create a good old fashioned ghost story for television (with a bit of well-aimed satire thrown in).

None of us could have expected it would be getting packed out screenings twenty years later, and even have a documentary made about it (“Ghostwatch: Behind The Curtains”) – which is excellent, by the way, and I recommend it to all the programme’s fans. It interviews all the key players – Sir Parky, the lot. The director, Richard Lawden, did a fantastic job. He really did. It told me things even I didn’t know about “Ghostwatch” – and I thought I knew everything!

Booksquawk: Do you think “Ghostwatch” has influenced other “found footage” movies such as “The Blair Witch Project” and “Paranormal Activity”?

Stephen Volk: I think we were the first scary movie to use that hand-held camera technique: (we used infra-red because the technique was being used in news footage in Iraq at the time so I thought it was perfect to see in the dark in a ghost story). But Oren Peli who directed “Paranormal Activity” was quoted in Time Out as saying that “Ghostwatch” was an “undiscovered gem” – which definitely means he was aware of it! As for the Blair Witch people – I have no idea. I think they deny it. (Or rather, when asked they said: “What’s that?”)

Booksquawk: Was it a challenge to bring something as innovative as “Ghostwatch” to television?

Stephen Volk: Of course. Nobody fell over themselves to say yes. They never do. In fact they said no almost every step of the way – right up to the day before! They didn’t want real presenters. They didn’t know why it wasn’t shot on Super-16. Everything. Luckily I had a strong producer in Ruth Baumgarten and a smart director in Lesley Manning and they knew what it needed to be and they “got it”, thank God.

Needless to say, nowadays it would never get through the BBC Editorial Policy Unit. It simply would never happen in a million years. It would never get within a stone’s throw of development because everything is mainstream and everything is designed to make granny feel happy. Meanwhile youngsters download movies and don’t watch terrestrial TV at all. Most broadcasters are way behind the curve because the writing’s been on the wall for years, with cable channels and the internet, yet still they’re obsessed with “ye olde” overnight ratings. I don’t know why.

Booksquawk: How did you react to the furore surrounding the show after it was aired? Do you think it will ever be shown on television again?

Stephen Volk: It won’t be shown on the BBC, I doubt that very much. It would be opening an old wound to them and I think possibly they know they didn’t shower themselves with distinction in the way they over-reacted. Then again, perhaps they did the right thing. I’m only the writer. The documentary shows very clearly that there was a lot of arse-covering going on when the shit hit the fan. I was rather protected from that because I wasn’t a BBC employee – it was the producer and exec who had to front those negativities. I just had to sit back. I couldn’t really understand the uproar. It wasn’t so much that people had been scared – which they were, in many cases – but they felt that they’d been made a mug of – by the BBC! And that wasn’t on! So the anger of the public was directed more at the BBC than at the programme itself. So my reaction was one of detached bemusement, because nobody asked my opinion at the time about any of it!

It was only after the ten year anniversary of “Ghostwatch” in 2002 when the DVD came out from the BFI (and the director, producer and I managed to record a commentary about our influences and intentions) that people came out of the woodwork and it became apparent that there were hundreds if not thousands of genuine fans of the programme all this time! Here were all these young people suddenly telling me it was the best programme the BBC had ever made, that it had put them on the road to becoming film-makers themselves, and such like – which was extremely gratifying, I can tell you.

But I don’t regret that “Ghostwatch” shook people up – I think that’s what drama has to do. Rattle cages, offend a little bit if necessary. Otherwise there’s no difference between it and the commercials.

I would hate all TV drama to become cosy and heart-warming. In fact, I told a producer once the only way I’d write anything “heart-warming” was if said organ was being roasted on a fire!

 

Read the review of Whitstable here.