Why I Wrote a Book
I wrote a book. As I am writing this the Amazon is on fire, being burnt on purpose and with the approval of the Brazilian president. Boris Johnson is promising to deliver a comprehensive and satisfying deal that will soothe the savage breasts both the European Union and the fizzing rage of the Brexiteers that he helped to create. He has thirty days and reckons it will be easy, despite nobody being able to come up exactly the deal described in the last three years. The president of the USA has declared himself "The Chosen One" and is sabre rattling at the Chinese. Right wing activism is being normalised the world over, or so it seems. You can't be certain of anything through the prism of modern media. I may be a bot. I may be a bot with an agenda.
I may be a bot who has written a book. I'm pretty sure I'm not a bot but I am the only person who can be reasonably sure of this.
I'm just a bot standing in front of an audience asking it to love him.
So I decided to write a book. Scientists claim that there is a very real possibility that humanity may scorch itself out of existence by 2050. And my response is to write a comic novel about a middle-aged white heterosexual man. Read the room, John. We're the bad guys now. And when I say "now" I mean we always have been the bad guys but previously we were better able to frame the story. We've been rather rumbled of late.
And yet I have written a book about a lonely, middle-aged man. A man with a job he hates, a paunch he can't shift and too much time invested in drinking and listening to records to really do anything else with his life. As the story moves on we realise he harbours racist impulses and is strangled by guilt about it. He gets caught wanking because he can't be bothered closing his curtains. He walks the streets at night looking up at bedroom windows. He is saved from being beaten up at a bus stop by a seventy year old woman, whom he then falls out with because she tells him he's shit at fighting. Why would anyone want to spend time with this loser? He is what Robert Musil might call "the man without qualities".
Because that's not the full story. Paul is deep, complicated and sad. He fights a constant war against his lizard brain, constantly trying to improve, continually failing. He knows better and sometimes he does better, but mostly he doesn't and when he doesn't he tries harder. Paul is a shit hero, a rotten Romeo, an indefatigable romantic who is tired all the time. He looks around at his pink faced, bald headed peers, the resentful and angry Brexiteers, spoiled and spoiling for a fight, and he has something to rise above. Though far from perfect he has a go. As pathetic and Pyrrhic as his attempts are, he will not allow himself to fall into complacency, into lazy bigotry, into blame. Paul, at the very least, owns his mistakes. They are all he has and he guards them like treasure.
The book is funny, timely and sad. Paul Reverb is a modern, past it man. He's somewhere in a pub right now, refusing craft beer and putting something loud and obscure on the Jukebox. And waiting to be thanked for it. It is applause that will never come.
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| Sally Geeson has the measure of ye... |
I may be a bot who has written a book. I'm pretty sure I'm not a bot but I am the only person who can be reasonably sure of this.
I'm just a bot standing in front of an audience asking it to love him.
So I decided to write a book. Scientists claim that there is a very real possibility that humanity may scorch itself out of existence by 2050. And my response is to write a comic novel about a middle-aged white heterosexual man. Read the room, John. We're the bad guys now. And when I say "now" I mean we always have been the bad guys but previously we were better able to frame the story. We've been rather rumbled of late.
And yet I have written a book about a lonely, middle-aged man. A man with a job he hates, a paunch he can't shift and too much time invested in drinking and listening to records to really do anything else with his life. As the story moves on we realise he harbours racist impulses and is strangled by guilt about it. He gets caught wanking because he can't be bothered closing his curtains. He walks the streets at night looking up at bedroom windows. He is saved from being beaten up at a bus stop by a seventy year old woman, whom he then falls out with because she tells him he's shit at fighting. Why would anyone want to spend time with this loser? He is what Robert Musil might call "the man without qualities".
Because that's not the full story. Paul is deep, complicated and sad. He fights a constant war against his lizard brain, constantly trying to improve, continually failing. He knows better and sometimes he does better, but mostly he doesn't and when he doesn't he tries harder. Paul is a shit hero, a rotten Romeo, an indefatigable romantic who is tired all the time. He looks around at his pink faced, bald headed peers, the resentful and angry Brexiteers, spoiled and spoiling for a fight, and he has something to rise above. Though far from perfect he has a go. As pathetic and Pyrrhic as his attempts are, he will not allow himself to fall into complacency, into lazy bigotry, into blame. Paul, at the very least, owns his mistakes. They are all he has and he guards them like treasure.
The book is funny, timely and sad. Paul Reverb is a modern, past it man. He's somewhere in a pub right now, refusing craft beer and putting something loud and obscure on the Jukebox. And waiting to be thanked for it. It is applause that will never come.
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