The Origins Of My New Novel

The novel developed from the idea of 'misprints'. 

When DNA divides in order to reproduce, that is when errors can creep in. Such transcription errors can lead to mutations, both serendipitous (evolution) and of course pernicious (hereditary diseases). These misprints are in the strings of letters representing the four chemical bases that make up the DNA molecule, A (adenine), G (guanine), C (cytosine) and T (thymine). A single one of these letters being changed for one of the other 3 anywhere along the chain may lead to a genetic mutation.

Before mass printing, books were produced by scribes working writing with quilled ink. For those scribes reproducing the Old and New Testaments, they could not afford a single wrong transcription or the whole volume would be junked. Since the Holy Writ had to be flawlessly reproduced in print, being the word of God. 

Perfection was the sole value for the human scribes, erratum was the driving force of genetic evolution.

Our development as infants takes place in a fairly fixed order. One of the first things babies have to learn to do is support their own heads. Then it will be sitting up, then crawling and finally walking. Babies start life only able to consume milk, but when they start taking in solid food, their throat undergoes an anatomical change (sparked by genetic programming) and it is this change in the throat that also allows them to begin the path of acquiring language. Such developments always have to occur in these sequences. 

I was interested in the concept of fixed sequences and the novel both portrays them and undermines them as that sequence becomes out of order in the narrative. Just why the narrative is out of order you'll have to find out by reading the novel! 

Published by Dead Ink Books 26/07/2018

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

Shortlisted for the Not The Booker prize

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Palimpsests

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 Archimedes Palimpsest (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 Novgorod Codex 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". 

                           

 

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 26/07/2018

Published by Dead Ink Books 

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

A Literation - Flash Story

Children carbon copied their creators. While the physical outcomes of the genetic wheel of fortune retained a whisper of protean unpredictability, speech and acculturation remained utterly undifferentiated from that of their parents. Glossal guardians, stagnant syntactical statuary. Consummate chips off the old blocks, kids were cultivated colloquial clones.

Initially imbibing milky morphology mutely with teat-stuffed mouths at the mammary, while mum suckles safe words for them. Sat at her knee, bottled blather iterated, infused and introjected. Mounted in the high-chair of babble, being spoon-fed more solid sonant syllables minced and mashed into building brick morphemes. Until the child evidenced an incipient ability to word string sentences for himself. From there on in, the parlance predisposed, perpetually prefigured and impervious to independent importation.

Scions were unable to shuck themselves from their die cast speech stamp. They artlessly echoed the same means of articulation as their extraction. Whatever their emotional bent, which like their physical features could lie anywhere on the continuum provided by the DNA chemical crap shoot, they were devoid of the vocal means for varying its expressive pitch.

The theories of Sigmund Freud darted back for favoured diagnosis, as Oedipal dissonances were played out in the most derisory fashion, since none had the diction to defy the discourse. Juvenile abstractions might fleetingly seem unregimented, but they were soon shunted along tramlines once terminology was brought to bear to transliterate them into tangible thought. 

Bilinguals were to some extent immune. For they could slip in and out of their twin vocabularies in any manner of their choosing. Thus was their language uniquely minted beyond predictability. So radical educationalists swept aside the Sciences and even English, in order to place primacy on second languages. But the rote inculcation by lifeless textbooks proffering limp assimilations of Jean-Paul’s first day at school, or Otto writing to his pen-pal, were no less arid than the way adolescents had acceded to their own mother tongues. Fluctuating between two stuttering fluencies furnished them neither felicity nor facility. 

Yet a few whippersnappers managed to strike out on discoveries of their own that enabled them to snap their linguistic shackles. They didn’t enter such a course knowingly in a spirit of seeking to expand their verbal palettes, but merely ventured into the neglected libraries- (there were no bookshops anymore) and picked up novels to read. They were swept along the unadulterated imaginations of authors and buoyed by exposure to the words therein which cast them free of their own constricted palates. They envisioned new horizons, disinterred wonderment and evolved the means to encapsulate it in voiced reactions of their own. Then they set to work writing books to liberate the next generations that would come after them.