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Here are some word clouds from my upcoming novel. One cloud for each of the 3 main characters


Creatrix
Crone
Mother

Mother



Creatrix

Crone

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Published by����26/07/2018Available from and all good book shops in the UK

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The siege that turned the tables on the besiegers. Stalingrad was of little military or strategic value, yet Hitler was hellbent on obliterating it from the map, probably because it bore the name of his arch foe Stalin. The Russians forces were surrounded, but managed to keep sending in troops through the river Volga’s access into the city, just long enough to hold out until winter. The Russians then launched a counter-attack in November, punching through the Romanian and Hungarian allied forces of the Germans and were able to complete an encircling movement so that it was now the Germans pressed back into the city.��
The same bitter fighting continued as before, but now the Germans were unable to supply their forces, nor could the airforce be brought into play with the zero visibility of snow storms. Despite constant petitions for the army to fight their way out of the siege, Hitler refused his troops from leaving the city. They were left to rot there, suffering from the twin assaults of the cold and starvation in addition to Russian attacks. Stories of troops eating their own dead supply horses abound.��
After five months General Von Paulus negotiated a surrender with the Red Army and the tide of the war had turned against the Nazis. At Stalingrad, they had lost an entire battle group, one of their three in the whole of Russia and never fully recovered their strength, while further weakening the Western Front defences to bolster the Eastern campaign. In all up to two million lives were lost at Stalingrad, including civilians trapped there.
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"Three Dreams In The Key Of G" has three female voices in a state of siege. One a young mother in sectarian Northern Ireland, just after the Good Friday Peace Agreement has returned paramilitary fighters from both sides back into the domestic realm for an uneasy peace there. The second a Waco-like siege in Florida, as the FBI, DEA and ATF surround a compound full of women, which they see as a threat to all of mankind. The third is in laboratories all over the globe, the Human Genome is being besieged by scientists as they try and uncover its code for life.��
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Published by����Available from��and all good book shops in the UK


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A chain of stone castles running from Cyprus through the Middle East and southern Turkey, built on steep hillside slopes or even mountains, making assault and (under-)mining very hard for the superior numbers of the Muslim armies. The Christian knights were able to hold out for years, until gradually their number shrunk and they were unable to devote sufficient manpower to garrison them effectively.��
Several of these 12th and13th century fortifications are still standing in full order today. One of the castles the Crac des Chevaliers which had been deemed impregnable and resisted even the mighty Saladin himself, only fell in a 1291 siege after what seems to be a bit of a running theme in this series about sieges, a bit of deception; a letter was forged purporting to come from a Christian authority in Libya urging the surrender of the castle’s inhabitants.��

In the current Syrian conflict, when Assad's government forces attacked the local village to Crac des Chevaliers, once again some 900 years later the villagers sought refuge in the castle, but they were attacked there as well and finally the castle has suffered some material damage.��
Another castle Kerak held out against various assaults from Saladin for five years. In this age of chivalry, Saladin received word that a royal wedding was taking place inside the castle and ordered his catapults not to aim for the wedding pavilion and thereafter to avoid the new marriage quarters. In return he was sent some of the wedding feast.
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"Three Dreams In The Key Of G" has three female voices in a state of siege. One a young mother in sectarian Northern Ireland, just after the Good Friday Peace Agreement has returned paramilitary fighters from both sides back into the domestic realm for an uneasy peace there. The second a Waco-like siege in Florida, as the FBI, DEA and ATF surround a compound full of women, which they see as a threat to all of mankind. The third is in laboratories all over the globe, the Human Genome is being besieged by scientists as they try and uncover its code for life.��
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Published by����Available from��and all good book shops in the UK
Lift The Siege #1 - The Siege Of Troyp.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 14.0px; font: 12.0px Times; color: #0000ee; -webkit-text-stroke: #0000ee} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 14.0px; font: 12.0px Times; color: #0000ff; -webkit-text-stroke: #0000ff} span.s1 {text-decoration: underline ; font-kerning: none}

Perhaps parchment was relatively expensive to come by, or just too much of a labour to prepare to receive ink, so it was often 'recycled'. Rubbed clean of the former writing and written over again to present the new text. But there would remain a trace through the impression of the nib or stylus. And in time this hidden text could be revealed, much as when you take a pencil and shade the top page in a notepad to show what was written on the preceding page now since torn out. This is a fairly regular scene in detective and spy fictions or dramas on TV.

The written palimpsest is similar to pentimento in oil painting. Artists frequently recycled their canvases, much for the same reasons of economy as scribes and writers. Though often the buried versions beneath the paint reveal the artist's sketches and drafts of the same image that gets its final rendering in the finished product. With palimpsests, the aim is to purge the original content in order to put across the new message. This functions in much the same way that Christianity annexed pagan festival days to plant its own celebrations on, in full knowledge that populations were used to marking such holy days. They merely changed the narrative.��

Whatever the economic drive for overwriting previous words, the mechanism does have an element of colonialism about it. Of banishing, or censoring the previous voice. This can be most clearly seen in the ��(yes, he of "eureka" in the bath renown), where an ancient Greek treatise on Mathematics and Geography��was overwritten by Christian monks with their own liturgical text and the original work thought lost to mankind forever, until new technology brought it back into light. Think of it as one of the banned books locked away in the secret library from Umberto Eco's "The Name Of The Rose".��

However with our technological abilities allowing us access to the words underneath, we can also see elements of rebellion in the palimpsest. In the the same writer is responsible for countless texts written over one another, in which he conceals some fairly heretical interpretation of the Gospels buried deep within. But they're there, embedded and preserved.��

And how do we bring these hidden texts to light? Through use of wavelengths of light not accessible to the naked human eye; ultraviolet; infrared and X-Ray. (see my blog post on the limitations of the human senses to come). The man charged with deciphering the Novgorod Codex is pursuing a methodology rather similar to that employed by scientists decoding the human genome. He has to ignore and move on from chunks of text that remain indecipherable because they are so degraded and diffused into the wood, or so closely packed together (the original scribe eschewed spaces between words), so he is reconstructing possible words only by dismissing other permissible letter combinations as 'meaningless jumble'. The scientists trying to nail down the human genome are having to sift through some 3 billion genes to just isolate the active genes responsible for programming life, (currently pegged at around 20,000), therefore they are dismissing the rest as junk or pseudo DNA, posited to be without function. Yet as with the letters that can't be read in the Codex, they're there for a reason. They may not be junk, they could feasibly contain the dead ends of genetic mutation which therefore can reveal to us own own evolutionary history. Or they could track how our bodies changed on a genetic level to defeat diseases that we are now unaware even existed. Or they can act discreetly, as spacers for those genes that do have a function. There are endless possible explanations lying way beyond our grasp.

So thus the palimpsest. A fascinating phenomenon, usually emerging from humble housekeeping calculations of economy. But it offers a powerful metaphor, that of overwriting, of burying what comes before, of rebellion and revelation between the cracks. Now imagine that in human terms. Not one, not two, but three voices - each unknown to one another - yet each overwriting and influencing the behaviour and fate of the others. And that is one of the essences of my new novel "Three Dreams In The Key Of G".��


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In Peace Agreement Ulster a mother rears her two daughters as her husband is decommissioned from his violent paramilitary past.
In Florida a septuagenarian runs a community refuge for women- only the authorities have surrounded it as a threat to national security.

In laboratories all over the world the human genome is being dissected and decoded.
Mother, Crone and Creatrix, all under siege, unknowingly inform and influence one another.��

�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� ����

��The writing will be revealed 26/07/2018p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; line-height: 22.0px; font: 18.0px Times; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} span.s2 {text-decoration: underline ; font-kerning: none; color: #0000ee; -webkit-text-stroke: 0px #0000ee} Published by����Available from��and all good book shops in the UK

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In 1974-75 the IRA brought their campaign to mainland Britain and at age 10, this was probably the first time I became aware of the issues in Northern Ireland. An IRA Active Service Unit had been responsible for a series of bombings and shootings in London and the Metropolitan Police responded by flooding the streets of London to catch them in the act. Two policemen got on their trail and hailing a taxi gave pursuit of the getaway car. The four IRA men took refuge in a flat in Marylebone, seizing the two occupants as hostages. A standoff took place for six days before the planted threat of the SAS storming the flat led to a peaceful end of the siege. All four were jailed for life and suggested most strongly that bombings in Woolwich and Guildford were down to them, rather than the men who were currently serving sentences for these attacks. However, nothing was done about their claims, so that 11 other men were still held in prison for another 15 years until their guilty verdicts were overturned as unsafe.��
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"Three Dreams In The Key Of G" has three female voices in a state of siege. One a young mother in sectarian Northern Ireland, just after the Good Friday Peace Agreement has returned paramilitary fighters from both sides back into the domestic realm for an uneasy peace there. The second a Waco-like siege in Florida, as the FBI, DEA and ATF surround a compound full of women, which they see as a threat to all of mankind. The third is in laboratories all over the globe, the Human Genome is being besieged by scientists as they try and uncover its code for life.��
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Published by����Available from��and all good book shops in the UK


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With publication of Adam Steiner's debut novel�� "Politics Of The Asylum" (my review here), I was very struck by his stylistic and linguistic approach as well as the fact that the novel is that most rare beast in UK fiction, a political novel. So we got together to talk all things writerly and compare and contrast our approaches to language and politics in fiction.��

MN: The novel is called “Politics Of The Asylum��- How political do you regard your novel?

AS: Good question �� it's hard to say how political any novel is under the skin. We can all make declarations of intent, expose horrors and strike out a short sharp j'accuse but it doesn't mean we're actually saying something [new] about a given state of affairs that hasn't already been expressed �� although, the flip side of this would be Orwell's 1984 and Margaret Atwood with The Handmaid's Tale. For me, I don't think I've said anything particularly controversial, but I certainly took the extremities of the current situation and drew them into wild and sometimes illogical conclusions [as I say, it's fiction] but what is odd, as opposed to it being purely prescient which is what most people say about the above titles, the book exists in something of timequake �� I started writing it in 2011/12 �� so it has kind of stretched and warped according to contemporary context. What gets me is that the book expresses so much paranoia, alienation and self-loathing [personal, public and political] that it is slightly smothered under a fair swathe of negativity, hate you could call it, such that the saving of lives is undermined and undervalued �� as I keep saying �� Ballard's Death of Affect �� what else can you feel when people are living through bludgeoned times of near-PTSD. I think you nailed this in your review, I don't think the book is miserable or depressing per se, but it is a challenge and a confrontation, hopefully that sparks meaningful arguments.

MN: Is there a danger with political or even contemporary writing that it gets out of date and becomes a historical snapshot?

AS: Yes �� absolutely �� there is the absolute danger that people can have well-meaning terms applied to them, which for some spark a death-knell, of being "relevant/timely/urgent" �� I appreciate that angle, but lots of my kindest reviewers have said those kinds of things because they are very true. It is utterly bizarre that PoTA makes more sense now than when it was first written years ago, and in the intervening period the events and themes of the book have become more real, or if you like, calcified.

I guess the risk is that in writing a book [novel] which is too much about current events or trying too hard to fix/save the world you risk your own obsolescence and it does betray some lack of imagination. Equally, people don't seem to change too much, within the lessons of Greek tragedy especially [hubris �� trump] so much of which holds and we are still re-making these scenarios. But even then, the historical snapshot has value, because looking back we can see that people did care, did speak out in their own small way, ideally these books would evoke that time. People still refer to Dickens or less sensationally George Eliot and Thomas Hardy [none of whom I really like] as being of their time, and I do admire that striving to be contemporaneous not escapist. What gives their work credence in that sense is that they provided analysis, they had an angle, they evoke and draw upon their times to make something new, this is why pure soc-realism falls flat on the heart and the ears.

By way of a positive example, I saw that Nikesh Shula who has been pushing greater diversity of stories and publishing pros for ages, before most big publishers bothered to notice, has written a real-time novel in relation to riots. The England riots happened in 2011, ages ago in modern terms, but, I get the sense that he saw there was something socially significant in this which had not been fully explored beyond the media �� so I think it's great he has stepped-up and used the riots to how us something about our society which we are still experiencing the repercussions of, without fully-knowing why.

MN: Just what political impact can fiction have?

AS: I think as above, we all have feelings, inclinations and leanings about how things should be in the world, but because we are ultimately human, feeling beings [most of us] these exist quite outside of and in incompatibility to political systems, much of which is essentially a game, for and by politicians, quite rarely are they real people, they tend not be particularly qualified in anything that counts in real life �� I think that makes us all pawns, de facto, just look at the royal family �� you wave a flag for them and kiss their feet �� they are strangers �� they do not know you or care what happens to you - they just want your money [and to be adored] �� books are great to spark ideas �� but it only takes a few pitchforks, a few matches...

MN: What do you see as the current landscape in the UK for political fiction writing?

AS: Hard one to answer. I'm not one for examinations of capitalism - over my head �� but in terms of fiction, I do think that creative non-fiction can play a stronger hand. People build a human narrative into real events [twist and tweak the events slightly] and this gives insight, drives empathy and helps people to see how and why things matter. This is perhaps a better "in" for letting people appreciate the human impact of politics, when democracy in action is often third-hand to most of us. It is so hard in the UK, a country riven and driven by class to attempt to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to feel their own struggle. It's all very well checking your privilege, but it doesn't bring us together; the prince and the pauper were both alien to the other, and think that's important, because you either strike off a whole swathe of people, who will then never vote for you or seek to align their views, or you try and force them into a homogeneity, we are anarchic beings, political divides should not be able to constrain us.

MN: ”people build a human narrative" - is not the problem that every narrative can be neutralised by a counter-narrative and that all government has to do is react to narratives that cause them problems and counter them, often by blowing enough smoke in our eyes? The Big Society idea of David Cameron to restructure the nature of charitable giving in this country was abandoned very quickly (and quietly), yet Charities rely absolutely on the human narrative of the the people they seek to help, save a child's life/sight/give her clean water in order to get us to put our hand in our pocket, set against the political narrative of constantly wanting to cut the foreign aid budget. And then charities are blighted by compassion fatigue?

AS: Indeed! That' a comprehensive overview! Ironically, narrative display our personal drives; our paths betray us. Saying is no replacement for doing, and on that note, giving money is rarely doing, clicking as an action �� it just doesn't translate. The right wing view off charities is that they self-perpetuate, thrive on myth-making �� they kind of have a point. By being perpetually under-funded, always needing more, it is continual war, a la the NHS, as in Orwell's 1984. So then what? I do think that humans have a disposition towards the right/left and within that selfishness abides, so we have to struggle with the better angles of our nature. I would like to go Buddhist on this and say be better, everyday, where you can. Change is life and little things make a big difference. charity begins at home, meaning helping yourself enough to be able to help others; to do small acts of kindness, without reward or virtue signalling. there doesn't have to be a metaphysic to this; it is the form of work that is engendered by hospital staff, anyone can wrap a bandage, take blood, try to break the worst kind of news �� it is the way in which these repetitive acts are performed that define your disposition, as a thinking, feeling [human] being.

And yes, the foreign aid budget is vital. We already pay our taxes but we are rarely given the option or transparency to know and decide where they are dispersed �� potholes, street lighting and bin collections are not the same thing as creating wells for water, sexual health programs and creating sustainable micro-economies. We have a collective colonial responsibility, still �� so may of us choose to ignore. There are no borders, no citizens of the world, only human beings.

MN: With novels that have challenging language, is there is a risk of being too exclusive for a general readership and therefore undermine any political designs for the fiction?

AS: Definitely. But I go back to me earlier mutterings and attest that it is really important to use the voices at your disposal, and to remark upon your prejudices and misunderstandings; to show yourself tripping. I wanted to write as an orator, not a speech-writer or a marketing consultant �� see Jonathan Meades on Jargon [BBC doc]. I always loved the line in Alan Bennett's The History Boys: "etcetera is what the Nazis would have said." I think he has historical accuracy slightly off, but it speaks of a tyranny of reductionism, crushing depth and expression. Libraries gave us [GIVE US] power �� I see so many writers at the moment, especially the financially struggling of London [who don't have a spare room/desk/office space] using libraries as a stronghold to write/read/learn/resist �� in the days of internet access [information overkill/spin/troll anger/alternative facts/post-truth] books offer you an escape from noise and bullshit �� its an impressive show of solidarity that they fight the government from a desk in books that will sold and read by the underground and in indie bookshops across the world.

MN: Could you elaborate more on writer as orator? I've not conceived of it in those terms before (and yes the Meades' programme was wonderful, how jargon is used to shut down conversation and communication).

AS: I guess the writer has an obligation to do the police in as many ways as they can find or create. You establish voices for your characters, and your narrative and style, and you throw them as best you can. Let the blind man see and the ignorant show their vulnerability. One problem of the UKIP crowd and the Britain first lads is they feel disenfranchised and neglected, ignore the ignorant �� I agree �� but it'll only get you so far. This iwhere all but the most exploitative and populist politicians fail, if you cannot bring people on side, instead of existing in an echo chamber, what is your use, what are you for?

I didn't want to establish a platform for particular views necessarily, but I did want to show how good people can easily become "bad" and how bad people are not rotten to the core, there is capacity for change, quit on that and you quit on hope.

I think the one thing I can say for myself and the book, is that it is honest, within its own confines.

MN: Also, speaking of a tyranny of reduction, how do you view social media, in how its algorithms channel users into echo chambers of people with the same views, plus the shouting down and hectoring of those with different views?

As to artistic resistance, I think this is a myth. If resistance art sells, it will be absorbed by the authorities and corporates and defanged as with punk. After the Grenfell fire, lots of writers put up their wares for an auction to raise funds for the victims which was laudable, but none of those authors were what you would call activists or political, being writers of romance or fantasy, so there will be no sustained outcome of their campaign beyond the money raised? For me this is little different to the equivalent of performers snorting cocaine backstage at Live Aid, a well-meaning giving of their time but of limited duration as they then slide back to their normal writing lives with no more interaction with the political.

AS: Interesting. Social media is damn tricky. So many voices, so many flare-ups, policing the internet begets trolling and the marshalling of arguments - minefield. for me, it's a great way to share knowledge and connect with other people, who I can then have a proper human conversation with, ideally. I mean, look at trump, he just rants and accuses, he states opinions as fact and the rest is just follow mein leader. Into the abyss...

I think people might find cause to change from getting involved in activist causes. And I think people can write out their own truth, similar to what I was talking about earlier, people can find and offer solidarity, and so many amazing things are sparked or started by revolutions in the head, people arm themselves with the knowledge or passion gleaned from books �� that's encouraging.

and - surely the artist has a right to cocaine - give the anarchist a cigarette..

What this means is that an angry generation are making a stand [by] writing their works, and the offer of the library, or just reading and expanding your mind is to empower yourself. My point here is, like Russell Brand who has a silly authentic-ish accent but is very articulate, we should allow for difficult writing, challenge, extremity. I wanted to write in my own way, not just to sell books, not within the pre-conceived notion of the novel as entertainment, music and films can give you exactly the same level of brute sophistication, it's too easy to tune out, drop out, browse with no appetite or hunger, just to be entertained.

A book like mine might exclude some people and that's ok. Not because it is so high minded or too brilliant for them, more likely they choose not to put the effort in, or they want twists and turns and a knowing surprise at the end �� fuck off �� go to McDonalds, put your head in the trough, ignore the storm �� get thee to a library, learn your language[s] as a tool, learn how to spell, get inspired, go read a fucking book instead of just consuming.

I'm starting to sound like my character now...


MN: The language is very lyrical/poetic, what are your thoughts on the poetic novel?

AS: It can go either way. I was keen to experiment, this was the first book I ever wrote [finished writing] so let's have fun, play and learn. I read up on purple prose and meddled with bathos, so easy to slip into this, trying to make someone feel X or Y rather than feeling it yourself in the work of your writing [ this is very difficult, not sure if I achieved it 100%]. I think prose-poems are specific and valuable thing, like poetry, a bit precious, it can spark the fire against the everyday. There's value in reading widely, stretching your brain.

MN: Is language the highest value for you in a novel?

AS: I wonder...it was definitely playtime for me, but I put effort into making archetypal characters, almost cut-outs that suited the pop-art scenes that jump out at you throughout the book. I worked towards a plot, but I'm happy to have some failure, a healthy dose of crash and burn. The language is perfect, but I think I spent the most time on it, I wanted to make every sentence ring [impossible] and not have to say ordinary things, I wanted it all to be pointed, I think like PiL it perhaps came out too spiky �� but I'm cool with that. As much as I tried to take the brilliant in the banal dull and mundane, I wanted to luxuriate in language a bit, rather than just drag the reader from character A to B, through door C and then have them talk about an affair, death in the family - I wanted those things to bleed off the page.

MN: The language IS perfect and the sentences do ring - just a comment, not an actual question.
There is a lot of both word play and visual manipulation of the type such as words stretched out by the spacing. What effect do you see these as having for the reader? How do you decide when and where to employ them?

AS: I think [know] I was slightly crazy at the time [ another luxury ] and as such I could push the form, the artwork in the book is not pictures of the characters, like in Sherlock Holmes, it wasn't an illustrated guide; equally the physical madness of the text was stretching new muscles within the form, if yes, then why not? I love beautifully weighted prose, but I also want rough edges, hard angles, thwarted landscapes; you can do all of this with words and the breakdown of their structures �� equally �� you can't just take the piss.

I think it served to alienate the reader, bore them a little, keep a safer distance �� all the headfuck that was Nathan [Finewax, the protaganist] I thought the book could be filmic, the way impressionistic shots will blur a murder through a doorway, you get the sense of what's happening, even though your sense are impaired, you're living their dream-nightmare along with the character. To be taken out of the ego of our own headspace is the most liberating things about art �� like getting drunk.



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MN: I think that's a really interesting thing to aim for, but it does risk alienating the reader, or perhaps demand that the reader be guided how to read this book, not in the sense of its meaning, but in its language, typography and how its sentences work (which is also a high risk writing strategy). Did you have that in the back of your mind as you were writing it?

AS: I don't feel I respect my reader. That's about it. I don't necessarily value them like I should. But, I had the armour of newness, striving, trying, enge-nuity - fresh genius. If everything was for and of the reader, then I would be Lee Child �� brilliantly done, but I'm not sure why I would be writing then, apart from money...

The reader deserves to be pushed and pulled, come along for the ride, this is the way step inside. I broke no boundaries, but if I'm bored then the reader must be also. On that note - boredom is sometimes underrated. Nathan's boredom is a pain we can all share, it is the gripe and grit of work, and we are increasingly deadened by administration, what could be more relatable than that?

MN: It’s clear what the role of sound is in poetry, but does it have a role across the length of a novel?

AS: I was conscious to show zings and zips, and the sharpness of too many sips. Sounds that seem to evade the listener but exist as non-music, non-functional performances of crashes and fractures, all very real. Hospital is a great example of this, noisy, then extremely quiet �� it comes back to the war analogy, all quiet until it kicks off - which can be any time, its an unhealthy headspace, sounds, like an illness, can creep up on you like a darkness. I also went quite lyrical at times, I wanted to chain together a run of ideas, what might seem like a dirge for some was a sprint for me. Over the course of the novel, the voices recede, become muted noises, incidental. I think more like a breath, you get the sense of withdrawal, closing in and closing down.

MN: Oh to have scratch and sniff versions of novels!
It’s not surprising that a book about a hospital devotes so much writing to the human body and its failings. But does all your work start from the body?

AS: I’m really drawn to the influx/reflex of the body; how sense impressions can be an overload where and when you indulge them. This can be internal stimulus, brooding, overthinking things, but also external influence and alterations to a settled state. Within the the novel, I allowed myself to get lost in every inflection, the creep of skin that is always shedding but attached to you, it is and is not your own. You can easily go too far in this; they said Eliot's main failing was that he was the kind of fella who could hear the grass grow �� that is nice to indulge but it can be overwhelming. I guess bodies just have so much to teach us, but listening can be deafening, like we lack capacity as beings to hear ourselves, easier to deny.

MN: There’s so much more to say on that last point, perhaps the starting point for a future novel?

AS: Who can say? It might be that the body-reflex is a perpetual concern for me, and I never knew it except in writing. Willing to take that most domestic of chances! I just think that in showing so much ugliness you can sharpen the appetite for something better, to that nature cannot be all bad, and to recognise those worse off [as we might see it] than ourselves.


Trailer

Waco, the game changing siege in the US. With its long tradition of non-conformist communities, and the protected rights of both religion and gun ownership together with a less palatable tradition for cults and apocalyptic beliefs, all of these came together in the Branch Davidian community in Texas who lived in an armed compound over 77 acres in Waco.��

Trying to execute a warrant to search for illegal guns, a gunfight broke out with fatalities on both sides. The authorities retreated and thus began a 51 day siege. Finally the FBI decided to end the siege by moving in, which saw 76 cult members die and the compound go up in flames, the cause of which is still disputed. The besieged garnered a lot of sympathy in the face of perceived unjustifiable lethal Federal Government intervention and Waco was one of the causes cited by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.��
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Waco was the reference point for the siege in my novel, while cults of course are also not unique to the US and the Om Shinrikyo cult in Japan that carried out deadly poison attacks on the Tokyo metro also forms a section in my book.��
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"Three Dreams In The Key Of G" has three female voices in a state of siege. One a young mother in sectarian Northern Ireland, just after the Good Friday Peace Agreement has returned paramilitary fighters from both sides back into the domestic realm for an uneasy peace there. The second a Waco-like siege in Florida, as the FBI, DEA and ATF surround a compound full of women, which they see as a threat to all of mankind. The third is in laboratories all over the globe, the Human Genome is being besieged by scientists as they try and uncover its code for life.��
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Published by����Available from��and all good book shops in the UK

Possibly the most famous siege of all, one that gave rise to perhaps the apotheosis of epic poetry in the form of Homer’s “Iliad�� and the lasting image of the Trojan Horse which finally secured victory for the Greek besiegers after ten years of stalemate. Trojan Horse, Achilles' heel, the face that launched a thousand ships, Greek gift and Cassandra, have all passed down into our modern usage, as well as ones drawn from "The Odyssey" such as siren's voice, between Scylla and Charybdis and lotus eaters.��


Heroic figures such as Ajax, Achilles, Hector, the quixotic passions of the Gods, the perfidious women such as Helen and their noble antithesis such as Hecuba and Andromache making impassioned pleas to save their children from sacrifice by the victors. All of this has passed down and still resonates over a score of centuries later.��
The historical and archeological record is fairly minimal, so we have our knowledge of events passed down to us largely through art, in the form of Homer's epic poem. We have drama rather than reportage. We have developed characters rather than historical agents. And we have meter and rhyme.��
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"Three Dreams In The Key Of G" has three female voices in a state of siege. One a young mother in sectarian Northern Ireland, just after the Good Friday Peace Agreement has returned paramilitary fighters from both sides back into the domestic realm for an uneasy peace there. The second a Waco-like siege in Florida, as the FBI, DEA and ATF surround a compound full of women, which they see as a threat to all of mankind. The third is in laboratories all over the globe, the Human Genome is being besieged by scientists as they try and uncover its code for life.��
The siege will be lifted 26/07/2018
Published by ��Available from and all good book shops in the UK
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J. Randy Taraborelli - "Michael Jackson"
I was never a fan of Jackson, so I can’t honestly say I’ve read this, but he does make an appearance in my upcoming novel in the form of someone wanting to change their skin pigmentation.��That is, to deny and defy their genetic fate.
Now here’s a strange thing, Michael Jackson has not one, but two connections to English football (soccer for American readers). Firstly he had a statue erected to him outside the ground of Fulham Football Club in London. Not quite as random as you might think, the then Chairman of the club was a good friend of his. Now that the chairman has moved on from football, the fans couldn’t wait for the statue to be removed as it caused them a lot of ragging from rival supporters. I’m kind of curious where that statue is now, or whether it’s been melted down.��
The second connection is a bit looser, or what we writers call ‘poetic licence��. Michael Jackson had a pet chimp called Bubbles and another London football club West Ham United’s song is called “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles��, which also caused much hilarity when the lewd spin was put on it by some wag or other.��


Cass Pennant - “Cass”��
West Ham United were one of the clubs with the worst reputation for hooligan violence. They turned it into an art form, literally since as they aged disgracefully and gradually left the field of conflict, they turned their experiences into books and films. One of the most notorious was Cass Pennant, who has both a film and production company to his name to promote his stories. Not a bad business empire for a football hooligan, but I wonder what his next magnum opus is going to be.��




Italo Calvino - “Our Ancestors����
There were so many movies made about English football hooligans, that they generated their own spoof movie en homage. It was called "The Hooligan Factory" and featured a leader of one of the football gangs called 'The Baron'.��
Calvino was a marvellous writer as this collection of three stories based on Italian folk tales demonstrates. Three stories about knights in the dying days of the chivalric code. One is a story about an empty suit of armour who behaves and acts as though it is still occupied by its former knight owner. "The Baron In the Trees" is about a young aristocrat who rejects his inherited Baronetcy by going to live up a tree. The third is about a Viscount who is cloven in half by a Turkish cannonball on the battlefield in Bohemia and becomes two people, one unerringly misanthropic, the other altruistic, yet both make the recipients of their respective actions uneasy.



Mathias Enard - “Zone”��
I only read this last Christmas but what a fantastic read. Basically the relentless history of conflict in the Mediterranean of Europe, the Balkans and North Africa. All told in one unending sentence that mimics this repeated, remorseless history of grudges and bloodshed.




Steven Galloway - “The Cellist of Sarajevo”��
One of the more recent conflicts in the area of Enard’s “Zone�� was the terrible conflict in Bosnia and this book is a portrayal of both the desperation and the soaring nature of the human spirit. After 22 people die in a bomb blast, a cellist sits at the spot and plays an adagio every day for 22 days in their memory, in full sight of the snipers who could kill him with one bullet. Haunting stuff.




Michel Faber - “The Courage Consort����
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A small novel, but so beautifully drawn by a master craftsman. A vocal ensemble are rehearsing a really hard modern composition for voice and the book very simply dissects the relationships of the ensemble in such a precise, laser-like way, yet still retains the warmth of humanity behind all the tensions and petty squabbles.



So a strange journey from the Prince of Pop, through the king of football hooliganism, through Italian folk tales updated for the modern reader, the history of conflict in Mediterranean Europe, classical music in a warzone as an act of defiance and finally the petty conflicts of a vocal quintet.��

So, 6 months into the year, 42 books read, of which 36 are fiction, with works from Iraq, Chile, Brazil and France among the UK & USA titles.

Here's my video from Booktube summarising the 6 months to date.




Other videos Mentioned
Philip Roth "The Great American Novel & Rana Dasgupta "Solo"
Jaroslave Kulfar "The Spaceman Of Bohemia"

Ali Smith "Autumn"

Nicola Barker "Happy"
Franz Kafka "Amerika"
Will Self
Why I won't watch film adaptations of novels
Book Covers

28 More Random Questions
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