The Interview: Bookbag Talks To Guy Booth

The Interview: Bookbag Talks To Guy Booth

Summary: Sue realised that The Arthur Moreau Story by Guy Booth could be read on two levels - and that both were terrifying. When Guy popped in to Bookbag Towers there were questions to which we needed answers!

Date: 31 December 2012

Interviewer: Sue Magee

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Sue realised that The Arthur Moreau Story by Guy Booth could be read on two levels - and that both were terrifying. When Guy popped in to Bookbag Towers there were questions to which we needed answers!

• Bookbag: When you close your eyes and imagine your readers, who do you see?

Guy Booth: It's a neat question: I actually never close my eyes as an artist. I set-out, as a student of Architecture, in that great city, Liverpool - I was 19 - to open my eyes and 'look' at Life from 'A to Z'. I learnt all about people (as well as the environment and Nature): I learnt to see how we are. And I'm still learning!

My readers are you; I target no specific readership group. You can be 16 (I wouldn't give The Arthur Moreau Story to anyone younger) to 106. I want you to enjoy my story as I see myself as a Storyteller, as of ancient times. I come into town, you all get to know about it, and you assemble in a hall or a field and sit round in a big semi-circle: and I tell you a story.

My aim is to lead you gently into the depths of my imagination. I aim to astonish you, to thrill you, to put the fear of God into you, to delight you ... and so on. I lead you by the hand into a palace of Dreams ... a forest of Fears. But a good story includes the daily round that we all understand, the silly mistakes we make and laugh about, the humour of our lives. I know that life is not ordinary and I want to entertain you with the extraordinary side of the business.

• BB: What was the inspiration for The Arthur Moreau Story?

GB: A wedding France in 1998. Actually, it was the journey, by car, to the wedding that took place in Bordeaux (the lunchtime guests had drunk the place dry), when we stopped for the night at a hotel in the town of La Roche-sur-Yon, Napoleon's military headquarters in that region of France to prevent the bolshie locals from upsetting his plans for Social reform. We returned from the wedding and I though nothing more of the venture.

I was at a loss by the end of 1998: two years on, my attempt to become a writer was not doing well, the television direction was at a low ebb Tide ... but I was reading an amazing book by Alan Bullock (the late Lord Bullock), Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. The book gave me a horrible understanding of just how hideous those men actually were. I looked at the biographies of other dictators. I didn't get hooked: I wanted to understand something of why. Nobody, of course will ever know exactly why such people succeed.

About a month after the French wedding trip I had a clear idea for a full length story: an innocent man is invited to an ordinary funeral and turns up like we all turn up at funerals. The deceased appears in a glass coffin. That was the idea: but the French wedding trip, especially La Roche-sur-Yon, glimmered in the background.

I set off writing, there was no point in delay.

The first working title for The Arthur Moreau Story was The Glass Casket. But I soon found that an object in itself presents problems for a storyline. You need the object (in this case a class casket) to get the characters to perform the action of the story. The innocent man invited to the funeral came into focus as Johnny Debrett, and because I am interested in second hand books, he was an Antiquarian book dealer. Who had asked Johnny to go to the funeral, and why? Sir Frederick Appleby.

What was going-on? Johnny's question: my question: the reader's question.

That is how it all began. Can you link a wedding in France with the sinking of The Eocratic in the Atlantic at 17-30hrs, July 18th, 1994? ... there is a link.

In summary, I didn't wake up one morning and say, Today, I will start writing The Arthur Moreau Story. If the idea works: start writing the story.

• BB: I sensed a real delight in the glories of architecture and design, along with a dig at how uncomfortable rooms designed by architects can be, which made me laugh! There's a lot of knowledge that goes well beyond research. What's behind this?

GB: I come from a family of architects, a great grandfather was an inventor and designer. We never 'talked-shop' at home, my father considered the architectural profession - apart from a few greatly respected fellow architects - rather tedious. We were always interested in every aspect of creative design. Building styles and periods, interiors, furnishings, the History of Architecture, fashion, engineering (in my case, Letterpress printing and graphic design).

I am as compelled by a dress shop as I am by a 1930s concert hall, as I am by a seaside bungalow, by a gothic cathedral, by the tat you find in the department stores ... a violin, a rock boulder, a country lane with its hedgerows awash with wild flowers, a limousine, up-to-the-minute modern Architecture. I know about the Modern Movement that peaked in the late 1920s when it was a crime to be comfortable in your modern home. You need a sense of humour when it comes to design: less than one percent of what we design is really amazing, most is average, and the rest is interesting until it's ripped down and replaced. In list order take: St. Paul's Cathedral, Buckingham Palace (the Mall Front]), The 'Gherkin' in the City of London.

In my stories ambience and architecture, what people are wearing and how well they are wearing it, even the ridiculously uncomfortable, hyper expensive penthouse suite of Peter Tyndale in the opening section of the novel: it all matters, because this is what we see, live in, experience. When I walk down a city street I read it like a conductor reads an Orchestral Score, and I want my descriptions to enable you, my readers, to do the same.

• BB: Arthur Moreau is loathsome AND criminally insane. Is he inspired by anyone you know? How do you create your characters?

GB: Arthur is a very creepy commodity: of all the characters in the story, Arthur Moreau is the man I know least! He is the essence of evil and corruption. When the story first took shape, the character was not the central inspiration, that is, I didn't start-out with the idea of portraying a genocidal maniac. Arthur came gradually into focus - he was created after Johnny Debrett, Thomas and Sir Frederick, and he had that weird aspect of being covert.

A wonderful 'Old Queen' ... yes, Arthur was. And I have known some wonderful 'Old Queens': the case of a party in Hong Kong (pre-1997) when a very senior person 'at Law' arrived sluiced in 1920s ladies' underwear and wearing a Bowler hat ... and the morning after the same person had his Chinese chauffeur stop a huge official Rolls to wind the window down and wave convivially, saying merrily - he was now wearing Morning Dress with the Bowler hat and I had just come out of a bookshop - Hello there! Wasn't it a marvellous party last night?, and I agreed, and the Rolls slid-on towards the Hong Kong Central Courts.

Arthur Moreau had to be more than a wonderful 'Old Queen'. He developed into the Hitler/Stalin/Mao model; monsters that controlled our lives.

How did they do it? How do their successors do it? ... A central theme of my novel.

Moreau is not inspired by anyone I know. He is a collage of horror, a collage of gold brocade, of bloodied bandages, of slime that lines every sewer.

My task, having made Moreau seem harmless, was to convey the horror of his personality to the reader. There comes a point in the story when the reader must be brought to understand just how horrible Arthur Moreau is. This had to be done so bluntly and brutally, that you rock back in your chair with revulsion. I had a number of ideas before the 'hand-written notes' idea was tried.

These notes, that Johnny discovers by accident in Joe Debrett's library, require you to read them, as Johnny reads them. What Moreau writes is shocking, revolting, hideous. But it does the trick: for the rest of the story you know, as Johnny Debrett knows, that we are dealing with an extremely dangerous madman.

It took over twenty re-writes to get Arthur's notes exactly as I want them to be. As a matter of technical interest, conveying the act of sexual intercourse or the deed of murder, demands the most skilful writing technique. So too does the evocation in prose of kindness, mercy and Love.

How do I create my characters? In four ways:

1. Principal characters (usually the principals but not always) that emerge with the central idea for a story at the outset. These characters, e.g. Johnny Debrett, come into focus pretty much complete in their general personality and appearance. Johnny is the good-hearted, well intentioned, refined, arty, cosmopolitan Upper Class individual (his father was a German aristocrat, an academic that had to get out of Germany before the Second World War, his mother was a Yorkshire born opera singer) but by no means snobbish, that will constantly tell friends and colleagues that Arthur Moreau is a perfectly innocent 'Antiquarian Book Dealer' until, with horror and revulsion, he - Johnny - discovers that Moreau is a monster. It may be interesting to know that Johnny has a 'root' character that stems from a living person (this is rare with me, normally I like to 'create' my characters from my imagination): the root for Johnny Debrett is based upon a performance of an English actor portraying the principal character of a novel by an English author, as that novel was adapted as a movie by an English film director. Note, I say, the performance, not the actor himself. I leave you to guess what the root of Johnny Debrett is, though Johnny was moulded by events in the story and has a unique personality.

1. Characters that the storyline demands, as I write. The Kadets are the best example for The Arthur Moreau Story. When I began the story with its working title, The Glass Casket, I had absolutely no idea, not even the faintest notion of an artificial race, of the Friedemann Five Year Progenic Cycle, or of Friedemann, though Von Stotz had been created along with Nina and Jeff Burdet (see point 4 below.) The storyline began to sag and I realised that a glass casket in an ancient cliff-top church on the coast of Normandy (the church is just down from Dieppe: worth a visit) was not going to blow my readers' minds! The idea simply didn't carry enough 'power of fascination'. The big, ugly, eerie basilica of La Roche-sur-Yon got my imagination going. OK, change the location to the west of France, make La Roche-sur-Yon Yonroche and locate the funeral in the ugly basilica. Fine! but who would Johnny find in that basilica? It would be packed with identical people ... nearly all men, all young, all 'film-star' handsome, all identical, and the few women amongst these young men would be blokes in drag. And the casket would be out of this world, and the priests would be Drag Queens, and ... Johnny starts thinking, What the heck's going-on! ... Exactly what I was thinking. So I stopped the story, sat down, and invented the Friedemann Five Year Progenic Cycle, designed the Kadet Precincts, dreamt-up the Château of St. Christophe, and got back to the keyboard. By now, I could sense that the story had the potential to be allegorical: the kadets are a Society that has been leeched of all individuality, controlled by governments and the ubiquitous Personal Computer, to conform unquestioningly to a Politically Correct lifestyle, and nobody can see any of this going-on: we cannot see the tyrannous pyramids of State Control right in our midst: the Kadet Precincts are vast systems of State run hypocrisy warping the minds and souls of billions. Guy! people often exclaim, What an imagination you have! ... I reply, Look out of the window!.

1. Characters that 'walk into the room' as I write. When the storyline is powered-up at full steam, my mind works on two or three levels at once. Situations will demand characters 'on tap'. Jock, the steward on the Eocratic is a good example (the ship is based upon the White Star liner Britannic of the 1930s, interiors of the Grand Saloon are inspired by Cunard's Campania, launched in 1892, and interiors of an 18th Century French palace). Johnny meets Jock in the First Class Main Entrance of the Eocratic (based upon the Aquitania, gobbed with crippling kitsch by Moreau's interior designers). Jock is typical of old time stewards that I remember on trains and ships up until the late 1960s. Jock could appear in more stories. Stanley Casper is another character that literally walks into Jo Debrett's library to meet Johnny. I needed three heroes because Johnny and Thomas as a duo began to put limitations on the action. Like Batman and Robin, you cannot have them separated. With a third hero you can chuck one of the trio into a dungeon, leaving the other two to sort it all out. Dumas was no fool with The Three Musketeers. Stanley also gives me a chance to inject another decent, good-hearted, healthy-minded personality into a story seething with sick, warped villains. Stanley's triplet daughters get to marry Thomas, Panno and Kyla, and they all appear in the sequel with bairns. There is one problem with characters that walk into the room as you write; the story can get too crowded. A crowded story is unmanageable.

1. Characters closely based or wholly modelled upon actual people, living or dead. Rare with me, but Nina and Jeff Burdet are two friends alive today in Minneapolis. I know Minneapolis-St. Paul and have set Gracewood in this beautiful city. You need to be very careful when basing characters on real people, alive or dead (the dead can have legal Estates): libel. Even with the usual legal disclaimer on the verso of a Title page, blatantly derogatory descriptions must not apply to living person, or to a deceased person that enjoyed a benign public reputation. If a person should recognise the description as applying to him/her, or the descendents of a person no longer living should recognise their ancestor, you could find yourself in court. However: if what you say can be demonstrated as the truth, this is not libel.

Characters, once I have created them live, breath, think, have wills and minds of their own. They get up and do things as you watch them. Far more interesting things than you planned for them. When this happens, and it happens all the time, I follow them round with a notebook and a camera (so to speak). Who, then, writes the story? I sometimes wonder.

• BB: Why do you think it is that the criminally insane can rise to positions of such power? We either elect them or allow them to flourish in their chosen professions. Why do we never learn?

GB: We never learn because Tyranny is part of the way we are; the Nature of the Human Beast. Human beings love to be bullied, threatened, belittled, having their homes, towns, cities destroyed in wars ... and there are born all the time individuals that - somehow get themselves into positions of supreme power and tyrannise millions.

It is the higher levels of petty tyranny that fascinate me; for example, civil servants with great powers that can change our lives, the 'System' of State that so artfully conceals their actions and decisions from ordinary people. Worse, those employed to cook-up the hideous Propaganda we tend to believe: lies and deception painted as Truth and Sincerity.

A central theme of The Arthur Moreau Story is the insidious nature of 'Control'. We never know what is really happening to us, we are told we are Free, in fact we are ensnared. All through my story nobody, not even Sir Frederick, who is something like God, really knows what is going-on: a bizarre, apparently Surreal situation is happening! Friedemann's serum is silently destroying millions, the Kadets infiltrate the highest realms of State and Society. Nobody knows! Or if they suspect they are told that they are imagining things, treated with suspicion as if they were insane.

Everything is being orchestrated from a hidden control zone. Is this the stuff of Science Fiction, of Fantasy? Joseph Stalin was real! The misery, suffering, genocide that one man caused by his Will alone can never be quantified. Yet people on the way to their deaths said, If only you will let me speak with our leader, if only I can speak with Joseph Stalin. He will understand me, he will know I am innocent. It was Stalin that had sent the poor wretch to Siberia.

• BB: The Arthur Moreau Story can, of course, be read as a horror story with a mystery at its centre. It can't have been easy to combine the two levels effectively. How long did it take you to write the book?

GB: In simple time-span terms, a year. But this included stopping to invent the Kadets and other activities, and you should take into account that I had not written a full length piece of fiction - i.e. a story - before. So there was a 'learning curve' and that included finding out how I write best, for example, do I get up at five in the morning and start by six? Do I set a target of so many words a day? Do I edit each input before continuing with the new piece?

As for combining two levels, a horror story and a mystery, I did not find this difficult. Perhaps this is due to my training as an architect and the process of designing buildings when the designer has to think on many different levels simultaneously.

What I found very difficult was my first attempts to edit the completed typescript in early 2000 when the story came to rest at 183,000 words. That is a BIG story. In fact it was three stories in one, and two stories had to be ripped out of it. (They can be used so nothing wasted.) When I thought I had done quite well at editing I then discovered the jungle we call The Publishing Industry. After many rejections from Literary Agencies, I put the typescript in a drawer for five years. I wrote television synopses: good training in the skill of editing.

I took the typescript out of its drawer mid 2005 and, with a machete, slashed away the two extra stories, burnt-off the choking gorse of sequences that made me curl-up, dredged the slurry that clogs good action, streamlined the characters: then did it all again, this time on hard copy rather than the screen. Amazing to experience the difference between screen prose and printed prose. Finally, I did it all again to land with 99,500 words: what you read.

I now am very experienced, so the sequel isn't taking the same 'roller-coaster' route.

• BB: A great deal of research must have been required, not least because the story is spread across three continents and several 'worlds'. Did you enjoy the research? Are you a seasoned traveller?

GB: I love travel: it inspires me. Even small trips inspire. I take the car out after my morning writing and each journey inspires and relaxes me. I enjoy to walk, hopefully about three miles a day, in the country, on the fells, in towns, cities: all inspirational. Watching people living their lives goes with looking at the billion details of buildings and in urban spaces. I enjoy long journeys. If I'm not driving (Europe) I will be looking out of the window.

I find that I am excellent at research. It is like being a police inspector, a scientist and a pathologist (of Historical events rather than corpses) rolled into one. I discovered as a student that I am good at research - a methodical process that involves in-depth analysis. My biggest research programme so far was undertaken when writing the biography of the Victorian architect, Sir Charles Barry (that's another story!).

The Arthur Moreau Story contains much 'static' research, that is information readily to hand, from my own library, or locally. This can be scenery, pictures in books, photographs of previous travels, rather than setting off on a specifically aimed GBWT (GB Writing Tour). The amount of research a story demands depends upon genre. Historical novels require big research programmes. If your main character is Elizabeth the First (of England) you need to get into her mind as well as to know exactly what she liked, hated, wore, said, did ... at a personal level and at State level.

• BB: Where and how do you write? With or without music?

GB: I write in my studio, here at Silverdale (a village in north Lancashire). I have always been used to a studio, rather than a study. So the room is full of tables and photographic lamps, objects of inspiration, hung with my drawings and designs, and items that always interest me. There are two old bookshelves that contain works of reference, and books that my eye catches: my library is in another part of the house. I keep records of all I write, and all inspirational material, in wire filing trays, always visible and always ready to riffle-through or to sort out. There are cupboards full of objects of interest: Venetian glasses bought from a young artist in Venice in 1981 ... maps ... the ancient 78 rpm gramophone record playing Only a Rose and Love Me Tonight, sung by Winnie Melville and Derek Oldham (WMDO) so important in The Arthur Moreau Story ... prehistoric flint tools from France ... a collection of old post cards ... and so it goes on. If I move, my studio will evolve where I go. A studio is nomadic, a study is not.

I write on a PC, using Windows 7 at the moment: Windows Word, a simple, internationally recognised electronic writing tool. I write from around 8-30 a.m. to - usually - 1 p.m. I aim to create, each session between 800 and 1,800 good words. When I say 'good' I mean publishable words, subject to my editing of the complete typescript and the eye of a professional editor. For the next story I will engage the services of a professional editor before I submit the typescript to a publisher.

800 - 1,800 good words does not sound much, but you have to remember that these demand full creative power, nothing less. An average of four hours a day at top whack is the equivalent of a full working day in an office and more. You get fatigued, so every month, maybe twice a month, I take a full day off. Usually I will go to the Lake District because not everybody has a world class beauty spot on their doorstep. I write seven days a week. I don't take lunch, but walk in the afternoons, then have a good dinner and - as often as not - will go to bed by nine p.m.

It's not everybody's cup of tea! Writing involves relentless discipline. Parties and socialising don't go with the business. This is why I like dropping-in at a pub, or going to a restaurant after my working morning: you keep in touch with folk. Very easy to become a recluse, especially when my imagination does not need people to feed it. I never write with music, or any distraction. It's me, my creative energy, the desire to tell a story, never failing staying power and the puritanical integrity of a true artist.

• BB: You've got one wish: what's it to be?

GB: To live on Capri and write superb stories that are enjoyed all over the world.

• BB: What's next for Guy Booth?

GB: People, having enjoyed The Arthur Moreau Story, kept asking me where Moreau came from. I said, Does it matter? Apparently, it does. I find myself writing a sequel to the story - the angle came to me on a walk and I was fascinated: a good sign. I'm not telling anyone about the sequel because you will have to read it. An acceptable commercial length at present is around 100,00 words. The sequel will be about that. At the moment the story is 98% complete and stands at 106,000 words. There will need to be a 'burning-off' ... probably of the opening sequences.

I was, up until May of 2012, commencing January 2012, writing a much more complex novel: Epic in scale. Four years of notes went into the foundation of the story that is set in the not too distant future when there has been mayhem ... but the results for Humanity are not as we would predict. Two characters provide the opposing poles of the plot. I shall resume this project when the sequel to The Arthur Moreau Story is wrapped and 'in the can'. And beyond that ...

Exciting, Life, isn't it?

• BB: It sounds very appealing, Guy. Thank you for chatting to us.

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