City of Masks

The last of the four interview videos. I’ve uploaded this one at higher resolution (“broadband” instead of “ISDN”). I may go back and do the same for the second and third (the first is at about the same resolution as this one).

Transcript:

Q: You dedicated your book to your late father, who taught you to be an honest man, you say. Are you the Innocent Man?

A: I wish I was, in a way. I’m not. My blog – or one of my blogs – is called the Innocent Man, but it’s an aspiration rather than an attainment. And I think that you can become, if not innocent, at least simple-hearted, and that in a way that’s the goal of a lot of spiritual practice, a lot of spiritual teaching, that you once again gain the straightforwardness that Bass is displaying. So I would like to be.

Q: Going on to what is happening outside of your story – like the Narnia series and Tolkien’s trilogy, is this story a spiritual metaphor wrapped in Renaissance narrative?

A: It’s… like Narnia and like Tolkien, it’s not intended as an allegory. It has aspects of metaphor, as I’ve already talked about with the masks being a metaphor for the way that we portray ourselves as people that we’re not, or as people that we are. I think it’s kind of its own thing, it is what it is, but inevitably that reflects on questions like identity and intent and how we present ourselves to other people.

Q: So if, boiling it down further, if your book were to be studied by 7th-form English classes in the future, what would students study as themes?

A: Definitely identity, the masks are all about identity. And roles, roles that people play.

Q: And when it came to answering in their school exams “What was the author trying to say in writing this novel”, what would a good answer be?

A: Ooh. They say if you want to send a message, call Western Union, but I suppose what I was saying is… a lot of it’s encapsulated in Tamas’s sermon, actually, that very hypocritical sermon which he preaches about being who you appear to be while he’s being somebody else. Yes, it’s saying we all have the ability to be authentic and we should strive towards that. And that when you’re at your most authentic that is when you’re at your best, in a way.

Q: Linguistically, you do some language tricks in there. Where would you say you learned to work with language like that?

A: Well, my degree is in English. I studied a lot of 16th and 17th-century literature, also Middle English and Old English, but most of what I studied was language. So that kind of gave me a feel for language and a feel for manipulating it. And the language of City of Masks isn’t actually late-medieval or early-Renaissance English, though it gives the flavour of being. It’s closer to 18th-century really, for more accessibility as much as any other reason, and because it’s easier to write. But I was setting out for a tone of antiquity and formality – there’s a lot of formality in the City of Masks.

Q: There are no contractions, are there?

A: No. Actually, I did find one when I was podcasting it, when I was reading it aloud. I found one “don’t”, I think.

Q: Who says it?

A: Bass. But that was a mistake on my part.

Q: It was a slip.

A: It was a slip, yes. And I tried also to give each of the characters a distinctive voice. That came out much more when I was doing the podcast, obviously, when I could speak in a different voice. But Corius is the only one who says “yea” and “nay”, for example. Everyone else says “yes” and “no”. And that sets Corius off as being, despite his education, a member of a different social class, with perhaps a little bit of a dialect.

Q: And what of Corius? Is he the only male self-possessed enough in the story to deny the Countess’s advances, and does this explain his mysterious disappearance?

A: Well, sometimes you just have to not explain things, and I deliberately didn’t explain why Corius got into the trouble that he got into, because the story stands without knowing that. It tells us about the Countess, is its function, rather than necessarily needing to be a mystery that we have the answer to.

Q: We can only imagine what it was like. Well, any final comments?

A: Well, I have to say it’s been tremendous fun writing the book and also semi-dramatizing it, reading it aloud, doing the various voices. I really regretted when I was doing it that I hadn’t given the Countess more lines, because her voice is wonderful to do.

Q: Can you give us a demo?

A: “I am hinting to you, Bass.” She has that rich, honeyed voice that is full of threat and possibilities.

Q: Which he instantly picks up on when she comes by his ear at the beginning. There’s definitely – that scene has weight, that she’s someone to look out for.

A: Yes, the Countess stands out in any company. She’s always at the centre. She’s the spider at the centre of the web. And one of the people who read it said, “I wanted to hear more about the Countess, I wanted to see more of her.”

Q: You have to get out the psychology books, don’t you, to understand her, given her family happenings.

A: Yes, she’s definitely a bit of a mess.

Q: A psychotherapist’s dream. Especially with the havoc she wreaked.

A: Yes. But Bass was tremendously fun as well to do, the ponderousness and the… I’m sure a lot of my listeners think I’m much larger than I am, and will be surprised if they watch these videos to see that I’m actually quite slightly built.

Q: And very tall.

A: Yes.

Here’s video interview 3 of 4. Evelyn and I discuss: Is Juliana really virtuous? And what might the Characterists and Personalists represent in our real world?

Here’s the transcript (the video also has subtitles, but I’ve just played it and realized that the compression makes them unreadable anyway):

Q: Juliana does an excellent job delivering deadpan innuendo. Is she really so virtuous?

A: Well, she says herself she’s not necessarily virtuous entirely by her own choice. She considers herself unattractive, and so her lack of involvement, as it were, is not necessarily her own idea. But she appreciate’s Bass’s… attention, and his low-pressure approach, his own sense of what’s right and proper.

Q: But her comments do suggest that she’s certainly not naive.

A: No, no. She’s definitely not naive, she’s probably the smartest character in the book, in fact.

Q: And there’s her having a title at the end, gaining a title at the end. Which she does, I imagine, gain?

A: Yes.

Q: Beyond the last page.

A: Yes. Yes, she kind of makes up for Bass’s innocence. She’s the counterbalance.

Q: Would you say that there are non-fictional equivalents to the Personalists and the Characterists in your story?

A: I’ve been thinking about that. They were – in terms of the politics, they were based on the factions which were at war in Renaissance Italy, the Guelphs and the Ghibbelines, I’m not sure if that’s the correct pronunciation, who had… the supposed reason was different views on how bishops should be appointed and the power of the Holy See, but in practice they were political. Or on Catholics versus Protestants through most of the Reformation. But the more I think about it the more I think it’s my metaphor for modernists and postmodernists on the one hand and whatever it is that I am on the other hand. Which… I’ve been using the term “transmodern” for lack of a better one.

Basically I see modernism and postmodernism as emptying, deliberately emptying out a lot of meaning out of life, out of things in general, and particularly modernism is saying, if you can’t measure it, if it’s not scientific, it has no meaning, out with it! And then postmodernism comes along and says, “Look! Everything’s empty!” Whereas transmodernism says, “Well, actually, it’s empty because it’s been emptied. And you should maybe examine your assumption that there is nothing but the mask, that there is nothing but the superficial, that there is nothing but what you can see and touch, and that there might actually be something behind that that’s real.”

Q: It sounds a lot like the shadows on the wall of the cave.

A: Yes, yes, I suppose. And one of the reasons I think that I chose a late-Medieval/early-Renaissance setting is that I quite like the thinking of that time in terms of the reality that they saw underlying the external and the superficial, and that was lost in the subsequent “enlightenment”, so called.

But obviously we’ve been through the Enlightenment, we’ve been through the 19th century, we’ve been through the 20th century, we can’t go back. We can’t suddenly become medievals again. And nor would we necessarily want to. So I suppose I’m saying, “Let’s look at some of the things that were emptied out about culture and see if we can put some of them back again.” In a transformed form, because you can’t just go backwards.

Q: No. And can you think of an example of one of those things that you’d like to see put back in?

A: Well, one thing that the 20th century notoriously emptied out was the value of the human person. And you only have to look at 50 million people killed in World War II, at the atrocities in places like Cambodia, Uganda, to see that. And Bass is speaking for me when he says, it doesn’t matter if the High Priest is a good man or a bad man, if you like him or don’t like him, he’s a human being. You need to protect his life because he’s a human being. It’s wrong to kill him.

Q: So in that way does Bardo represent what is to come in your hopes, in your wishes after postmodernism? Is Bardo taking us into the next movement, so to speak?

A: Ooh. Ah. Bardo’s rather ruthless, and as Corius says I don’t think he necessarily considers the value of a human life to be inherent. No, I don’t think Bardo’s taking us forward.

Q: No? Even though he presents a whole lot of hope for the City of Masks?

A: He does, he does, but the hope that he presents is a hope that goes backwards. He’s a hard-line, old-style monarch turning back the clock, and I don’t think that’s the way forward for us.

My friend Evelyn came round on Saturday and we recorded four short interview segments about City of Masks – this is the first, and I’ll be releasing the others over the next few weeks. Evelyn was one of my original pre-publication critique group, so she knows the story well. We tried to stay clear of outright spoilers, but some of our references won’t make complete sense until you’ve read the novel.

I have to apologize for the sound. My best microphone, which I’ve been using for the podcast, is a clip-on and only works for one person at a time. It was a rainy day, and we had two laptops running, so lots of fan noise. I filtered out the noise from a second copy that Evelyn recorded on her Mac, but inevitably some of the signal went as well, so in the end I’ve combined that with the original track recorded by my camera’s mic – reinforcing the signal but leaving the noise on one of the two versions.

Here’s a transcript to partially make up for the sound quality:

Q: Is this your first novel, or have you been published before?
A: Yes and no. It is my first published novel. It’s not the first novel I’ve written, and it’s not the first book that I’ve had published, although I’ve never had my name on the cover before. It was always projects – work for hire, basically.
Q: You’ve obviously read a lot of books and maybe even books about how to write. Would that be the case?
A: Yes, yes, pretty much. I’ve read some writing advice books, which all seem to boil down to one major piece of advice, which is “keep writing”. Read a lot, write a lot, toss out what doesn’t work, and eventually you’ll have written something that does work if you have any ability at all, just through sheer perseverance. And that seems to be the major piece of writing advice that there is. But what perhaps City of Masks arose from is a lot of reading of mostly fantasy and science fiction, even though it’s not fantasy or science fiction by strict definitions.
Q: What is its strict definition?
A: You could call it “slipstream” – that’s a fiction designation that’s around, that most people haven’t heard of, which makes it a bit less useful. But it’s somewhere in between mainstream fiction and the fantasy-science fiction sort of thing, in that it has elements of the fantastic or the counterfactual – as City of Masks does, it’s a city where everyone is required by law to wear masks – it’s a what-if, and yet there’s no magic, there’s no advanced technology, it’s not an alternate history in any strict sense. It’s not an alternate Venice, for example – no canals in the City of Masks.
Q: That’s true. Just highways.
A: Just highways, highways and low ways.
Q: That’s right. That’s intriguing. It creates a nice picture, as well, it creates a picture of there being lots of levels to the whole city.
A: And the city is very class-stratified, as well. The lowest people are on the lowest roads, and the highest people are on the highest roads, and they only mix in the middle. It’s the same thing with the houses. The poor live in the bottom of the houses and the rich live in the top of the houses.
Q: Unless they fall from the top to the bottom. How long did it take you to write the novel?
A: Well, from start to finish, ten years. But the last part was done very quickly. I sat down over a period of about a week and wrote – I’m not sure how much – the last 10 or 15 thousand words, anyway, and the problem was that I got stuck after I’d got the main character to the location. It was, “And now what happens?” I didn’t know. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I knew that there was going to be a chase across the rooftops, probably with the shooting of arrows, and a sword fight. I didn’t know who was chasing whom or why, but I knew that that was in there. And what I ended up doing was I charted out all the characters and their relationship to each other and what they wanted on a big piece of paper like a mind map, and the plot really fell out of that. Once I had it down in that format I could see, this person wants this thing, that’s going to lead to certain events, this other person wants this other thing, there’s conflict there… it just seemed to develop out of that. But unfortunately I didn’t have that idea for quite a while.
Q: The idea of joining everything together?
A: The idea of mapping it all out like that.
Q: So you didn’t start with a grand map and then join it all up in words?
A: No. No, I started with an idea about “what would it be like if everybody had to wear masks that told people who they were?” That was my base idea. And from that, which is kind of a metaphor or satire on our society, where we do go around wearing masks that tell other people who we are, and pretending to be people that we aren’t, or pretending to be people that we are, sometimes. And I just wanted to explore that. But it ended up as an adventure story and a mystery.
Q: You did intend to write a novel, though, didn’t you?
A: I did intend to write a novel, not an essay.
Q: And you just said, we go round wearing masks pretending to be who we are. Is that possible, to pretend to be who you are?
A: Yes. There’s actually a book which I came across after I’d finished – or as I was finishing writing City of Masks, called The Woman who Pretended to Be Who She Was. It’s a non-fiction book. And I quite like that idea, that if you’re true to yourself, if you’re authentic and genuine in expressing yourself, that you end up with a mask of your own face, and there is no difference between what you’re presenting and what’s actually inside.