Metre, but also the strict rhymes, mean that, as much as you might like to, you can’t really produce a story written in the vernacular that might be more fitting to the setting. I think these things aren’t necessarily too deliberate, and I tend to write everything very formally anyway, despite myself. But the central character is a self-consciously ‘cultured’ chap who really couldn’t talk in any other way. I think I like generally the idea of things being ‘inappropriate’ in terms of style vs. situation — it makes things more fun. And, besides, why should one perpetuate the idea of grotty South London in fiction?
Lander Hawes interviews Ben Borek.
I read Adrian Mole when I was really young. I enjoyed it but it wasn’t one of my influences for Submarine. In my book, the main character, Oliver, gets teased and called Adrian, because he writes a diary. I don’t think Adrian and Oliver are similar characters though. I think my influences were probably people like Kurt Vonnegut, Dave Eggers and Don De Lillo. They are the writers I was reading, anyway.
For King, the post-war era has yielded an overwhelming degree of change within British society. One senses, even before he begins discussing this fully, that these changes aren’t necessarily welcomed by him; he speaks nostalgically about pre-war writers in Britain – the kind of writers now published by his own publishing imprint, London Books. “I just started getting interested in those books because, having read them, I found them very modern, actually; very imaginative, very political. Very honest books; more modern, in a lot of ways, than a lot of stuff that’s published today.”
Being something of a klutz myself, always prone to dropping things — both of a physical and verbal clanger nature — I guess I sympathise with life’s losers. I share their pain and that makes it all the more piquant and funny for me. I also hope I show they often have some kind of dignity in defeat. And that there’s a much finer line between spectacular success and humiliation than is often supposed.
Even starting out, Milward appears to have been relentless in his ambition. “I was constantly sending stuff out,” he reveals. “I’ve got stacks of rejection letters, but when people have faith they’re like, ‘Just carry on.’ I knew how hard it was to get a book published, but I kind of always knew I was going to stick to it, and carry on and not give up after the first one, and for every book, finish one. I like to just start them straight away. I’ve never really had writer’s block in my life,”
I would never have a knife go into a character’s eye. Too brutal. I wouldn’t even write “A knife went into Joe’s eye,” or “Joe is blind in one eye because a knife went into it when he was a boy.” I leave that to J.C. Oates and Stephen King. They don’t seem to have—in almost back-to-back stories in the New Yorker a number of years ago, trouble writing about knives or needles in eyes. But yes, sometimes things did happen that I last wrote about.
Anyone who’s been in central London on the weekend at night, knows this is just how Leicester Square and Piccadilly look, cruelly ravaged after Sebastian Horsley’s had his way with them. The music is sensitive enough, sometimes, to carry off this Hogarth rudeness of piss-stained steps, winking night stars and tramps.
Were it not for the internet, I don’t think I would ever have published. I had no degree, no connections… but the internet doesn’t give a fuck if you have an MFA, or can procure a blurb from George Saunders or Rick Moody. The internet just wants to be entertained in a thousand words or less.
One of the issues raised by Kieran in the book is the tendency to accept everything we are told by the media; perhaps, after everything we read in newspapers, we need someone like Kieran to be basic, as well as objective. It’s obvious, as he talks about the book, that he believes firmly in questioning everything he hears in the news, and in finding his own answers. He remains dismissive of certain things which, relatively speaking, simply aren’t likely to affect us. Statistically, as Kieran tells us in I Fought the Law, you are more at risk from a flight of stairs than a terrorist.
There’s a lot in The Red Men about living in a way that is completely unbounded by the laws of reality – and yet still coping with the fact that you’ll never be able to fly. Because as a kid it’s quite upsetting to realise that at no point in your life are you going to sprout wings.
