When a novel sneakily reveals itself to be inspired by a music album rather than other books...

 In my previous post, "Most Novels Are In Conversation With Novels That Have Preceded Them", I talked about 5 books which either influenced or at least echoed my current novel "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)". But it wasn't just literature which influenced my book. The author character in the final part of my novel in increasing despair as he reviews the book he has just finished for a final time, wonders if it's merely a monograph to his favourite album, "Three Imaginary Boys" by The Cure which was released in 1978. 

Here are my thoughts on the album.

Remember the self-proclaimed lo-fi genre of the late 80s early 90s, bands such as Pavement and Sebadoh? Well Robert Smith and The Cure got there a decade earlier with their album "Three Imaginary Boys". 

What could be more callow than taking the set text from your recently completed school A-Level French syllabus and turning it into a song “Killing An Arab”? Or there you are stuck in the studio needing to come up with a new track, picking up the Tate And Lyle sugar pack as you’re drinking your cup of tea tea and reading the details on the back of the packet, of how to apply for a free icing tool and then setting that to music? The track was called “So What?”, and it didn't even even omit the exact closing date for applying which has stuck in my mind some 38 years later and is of course, an offer that is now 38 years out of date. Did someone say 'timeless art'? 

There’s a cover version of Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” which is unrecognisable from the original as any good cover should be, principally down to Robert Smith’s deep South (England) drawling vowels. It ought to be pointed out that “Foxy Lady” was just a band soundchecking in the studio and never intended to be part of the album, but the record label put it on much to Smith’s chagrin. He was never to surrender artistic control again, which in light of the Cure’s future 'Goth' output was a pity. Apparently the front cover was not Smith’s choice either, which is amazing as it's my favourite album cover of all time. Props to whoever designed it.

The album is offbeat, charming and yes, lo-fi. That’s not to say it doesn’t have some excellent guitar playing, since Smith is a guitar whizz with oodles of reverb and echo, but held in check by a tight rhythm section. Unlike Gang of Four, the Fall or Public Image Limited, this record is readily accessible. It’s non-conformist musically, but it’s not abstruse.

But for me ultimately, it’s the strength of its individual tracks. It starts with “10:15 Saturday Night”, which was the B-Side to their debut single “Killing An Arab”. What band open their debut album with a B-side? And then don’t put the A-Side anywhere on the album at all? Then comes my favourite track “Accuracy”, a song about a couple failing to communicate, with the pleasingly lyric delivered almost pleadingly by Smith, ‘Kill you without trying/ That’s ac-cu-racy’. There is edge in some of Smith’s words, such as in the song “Meathook”, ‘He really stole my heart/ Hung me up on a meathook/ A real piece of/ Slaughterhouse Art’. Ugh and that’s an image that has stayed with me I can tell you. And to cap it off, a hidden bonus track in which The Cure sort of play themselves off stage with a coda. If you have never heard this album and are keen on tracking it down, try and get hold of a version that includes their superlative early singles such as “Killing An Arab”, “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Jumping Someone Else’ Train”.

How does it feature in my novel? 

In part 1 of the novel, the detective character's favourite music genre is Easy Listening, so that the author character in part 3 who created him, has had to subject himself to an unending play list of Easy Listening standards, from Dionne Warwick to Frank Sinatra. By the time he has completed the book, he is desperate to play his actual favourite songs which he has starved himself of for so long and to clean his palate of asinine Easy Listening. He weighs up which should be the first to celebrate the completion of the novel and is inundated by songs from the Cure album. 

Was that the situation I, as the actual author also found myself in, having had to listen to an interminable play list of Easy Listening while writing part 1 of the novel? That would be just be a touch too metafictional wouldn't it? 

The song "Object" with the inimitable lyric "You're just an object in my eyes" points up the eternal philosophical dilemma between mind and matter, which is central to the detective character in part one of my novel as he goes about a murder scene looking for evidence to unlock the identity and mind of the killer. The title of the song "So What" as described above, forms the final words of the novel as the author is in complete despair about his book and his profession. 

"The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" is directly available from the publishers Corona\Samizdat

For more content on the novel visit https://sulcicollective.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-death-of-author-in-triplicate.html

Most Novels Are In Conversation With Novels That Have Preceded Them

 

When a musician is interviewed, very often they take the interviewer through their record collection for the music that inspired and influenced them. Authors are less directly forthcoming, since they tend to prefer to save such quoting for the body of their actual works themselves, burying references in the text to see who will spot them and who won't. 

The author character in my latest novel "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" is having none of this game playing (though me as the 'invisible' author behind him, could conceivably be up to such metafictional games). He is committed to showing his literary workings, though he is also struggling not to reveal too much behind his work and explain it away completely.

So in the spirit of the author character, I thought I'd share some books that either directly fed into my novel, or at least echoed it in some ways. Some of them I'd read before I sat down to type the first words of my novel, others I read during the novel writing process and one I have yet to read but am aware at least of its (non-fictional) argument. 

A man has suffered so traumatic a brain injury, that he has lost all memory and has to be trained to walk again by his physios. We get a forensic treatment of that process of relearning basic everyday functions we take for granted. Into the void of his memory also comes these mental images he can't place. When he's released back into daily living, he has a sizeable compensation settlement and decides to devote it to recreate these visions inside his head in every tiny detail. From the architecture, to people paid to play the roles of the passersby in the street, doing precisely scripted things and the clothes they wear. Again this focus on a a forensic level of detail, which echoes the murder detective's process in my novel. McCarthy raises an interesting distinction, between a scene in a film which can be shot innumerable times until the Director is satisfied that it's right; versus the one-take of live performance and the protagonist of this novel trying to nail his image exactly in his live recreation. A detective is not dissimilar, in that at the start of an investigation, there are unlimited ways in which the crime unfurled and the task is to narrow that down to just one possible way the action of the event could have taken place. 

Georges Perec's final novel, as he raced against time to complete it before his life was claimed by cancer. A novel in three parts; the first being a mystery thriller around a disappeared writer in French colonial Africa, using his abandoned manuscript as a clue to his fate. Part 2 turns to an historical event of betrayal among the French Resistance in World War 2, which completely flips Part 1 on its head, as we see that story was a code for this actual incident that was too incendiary to write directly. Part 3 supposedly is the uncompleted part choked off by Perec's death and is presented as the fragmentary source material and documents that informed the story in Part 2. These were curated by two of Perec's writer friends who were members of the same Oulipo movement as him. HOWEVER, the Spanish author Enrique Villa-Matas in his novel "Mac And His Problem" posits that this too is smoke and mirrors on Perec's part; that in fact Part 3 is exactly as Perec intended and that the legend of his friends completing his book deliberately masks this fact. Through such a disguise, Perec was giving the middle finger to Death, because he DID finish his novel before Death claimed him, but veiled that fact, so it was just between him and the Grim Reaper. And Perec won (or at least went to his grave conceiving that he'd won). I also mirrored this tripartite structure, in that my novel moves from a crime thriller Part 1, through into Part 2's fevered argument over the ownership of the unfinished manuscript that was Part 1 between widow and literary agent and into Part 3, centring around the author who is responsible for penning Parts 1 & 2. 

This is the book I haven't actually read. But my own title clearly pays homage to this and I also touch on the central concept, as my author character muses on how he loses all control of his text once it is out in the world. Readers and critics will remake his text in whatever way they choose to read and interpret it, no matter what his original intentions for the story were. I do have fun with the concept as, per the "In Triplicate" of my book's title, three authors 'die' during the course of the novel, though an author can die, per Barthes, in metaphorical ways as well as in actuality. 

The first remarkable thing about this novel from 1937s, is that it was written by a 19-year old German refugee and yet encapsulates eve of war London and its nascent film industry so expertly and authentically. In a second language to boot! A movie actress is murdered, two different men confess to the crime. A film editor called Cameron McCabe, the nom de plume of the real author, is co-opted by the investigating detective and by two-thirds of the way through the book, we get a successful court prosecution of the murderer having unravelled the labyrinthine truth from all these false confessions and a murderer existing in plain sight. But it's a post-modernist epilogue that turns the novel on its head, in the form of a literary interrogation of the character Cameron McCabe from the first part of the book, which takes the opportunity to discuss the present (1930s) state of detective fiction. It uses real critics' words, only inserting Cameron McCabe for the names of the other crime thriller writers, so that it appears to be critics discussing this book "The Face On the Cutting Room Floor" in the book "The Face On The Cutting Room Floor". In this way, the book was called 'the detective novel to end all detective novels' at the time. I loved how it inserted itself into predicting it's own literary criticism and my author character does similar. 

So for my final book choice, it's one I didn't particularly enjoy as a reading experience. It's another book about a forensic description of the details of which the human eye sees in a city, as a detective is on the top deck of the bus as he follows the wife of a missing person he's ordered to get on the trail of. It's almost mathematical in its precision of describing people and objects interacting with one another, but ultimately one I found a little cold and dry emotionally. I much preferred the early works of Nicholson Baker, such as "The Mezzanine" and "Room Temperature", where he too looks at everyday objects and describes them and their taken-for-granted interior workings in minute detail, but there is greater warmth and humour than with Okotie I feel. Why is this forensic level of detail significant to me and my novel? Because there are presumptions about the material world which entirely lead and shape our thinking about it and the objects contained within, that detectives and forensic scientists have to get to the bottom of as the fundamental part of their work. Yet what happens if the investigative detective queries the very nature of matter and criminal evidence and refuses to accept those presumptions in the first place? 

"The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" is available direct from the publisher Corona\Samizdat.

For more content on the book, including thematic discussions and quote cards.

Where Does Creativity Come From?

The question writers get asked most frequently is ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ We no longer credit that writers are beholden to their muses for literary inspiration, though a higher level answer is probably not possible either, since we remain in the dark on many processes in the brain, including that of creativity. The creative imagination may be built from an incessant curiosity, to ask questions about the world around us and an ability to make connections between things that are not handed down as part of our conceptual templates. But that is about as much as we can say at this point through the understanding afforded by neuroscience. A novelist asks questions and makes associations that are sustained over the length of a two hundred page book. That is an embodiment of the creative process, but not really an explanation of it. The author would prefer that the book speaks for itself and reveals its ideas, rather than have to explain it in interviews and essays.

The act of writing is a prosaic (pun intended) one, banal even. Sat at a desk typing on a keyboard, is no different from the action for an accountant or an actuary going through claims reports. It contains no magic. The accountant has their books of tax tables, the actuary their volumes on statistics and probability, while we authors have dictionaries and thesauruses. Of course, for all three of us now, these are available online in a mere extra window on our browser, thus streamlining and decluttering our desks and workstations further. On the wall of a writer’s study may be further evidence of the mundane; sticky notes, handwritten lists, graphs or diagrams plotting relationships or geographical choreography. Perhaps red twine, held by pins, links characters visually there on the wall as a mnemonic for the writer. Such a display has echoes of a police incident room, only lacking for photos of persons of interest. 

I can trace back the origin ideas for my latest novel. My conscious mind was musing (unintended pun) on the abstract concept of justice, which does not exist in Nature, codified into laws and how those laws are examined in instances of infraction, by recourse to fragments and traces of material evidence. Moving from the abstract to gross matter in such manner, seemed to me a mirroring of phenomenology’s ongoing inquiry into the balance between the materialist and the idealist conceptualisations of the world. My unconscious mind came up with the image of a particular staged crime scene in vivid detail, but no associated notions of how it fitted with anything else, such as a victim or a detective’s inquiry. When I brought the two together, there was the launch pad for the novel. One from curiosity and questioning, the other from heaven knows where, possibly from some remembered dream imagery.

I am an author who likes to show his workings. Not merely as some afterword in the end pages of a novel, but embedded into the structure and form of the novel itself. In this case, I have an author character doing exactly what I talked of above. Having finished the previous sections of the book, including the mystery thriller/ police procedural element and an exploration of why that halted  suddenly and unsolved, this author is taking down his notes from the wall of his study and tidying up his pens. His mind ranges over speculations such as the book’s critical reception, likely interview questions and whether the notes he’s removing should form part of a notional literary archive. There is a tension between him preserving the mystery of the dark arts of writing, versus not over-explaining his novel and taking the artistry out of it by relaying where his ideas for the book came from. It is in this tension, that the process of thriller writing is itself demystified. From the mundane act of sitting typing at a desk, to a book that thrills a reader in their imagination, is no less of a leap as that of the abstract concept of justice is from the material evidence that underpins it. 

My new novel “The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)” 

Available direct from the publisher Corona\Samizdat

For the full extra content on my new novel, more videos and quote cards, go here

The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)

 

My new novel "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate) is out now direct from the publishers Corona\Samizdat.

It's a novel in 3 parts, with a Russian Dolls set of authors responsible for the production of the previous part. Part one is a police procedural/mystery thriller. A Senior Investigations Officer is on the way to a fresh murder and is having a crisis of faith as he questions both the nature of justice and the role material evidence plays in it. Part 2 is a heated dialogue between a widow and a literary agent as they argue over who should own an unfinished manuscript of the widow's late author husband, a battle for the memory and soul of the dead man. Part 3 sees an author having just completed his novel, tidying away all his noted stuck on the wall and clearing up his desk, as his thoughts turn towards the marketing of his book and trying to anticipate the response of critics and interview questions he'll likely be asked. As he determines not to reveal the magic behind being a creative person, the very mundane nature of sitting in a room typing on a keyboard betrays his intention and serves to demystify the mystery of thriller writing. 

I call it a novel of crime scene reconstruction and a literary scene deconstruction. 

Here are 3 short videos discussing some of the key themes. 

Justice is an abstract concept that doesn't exist anywhere else in Nature. It is codified in written laws and cases of infractions of those laws are tried on the basis of material witnesses and material evidence, which represent an entirely different register of language from an abstract concept.

                                         

The relationship of abstract justice to material evidence underpinning it, is resonant of the age old phenomenological inquiry into the nature of reality: the materialist versus idealist debate. Is there a single, verifiable objective reality rooted in matter, or is everything ultimately determined by our language, naming and idea of things? In the novel, the Senior Investigation officer is having a crisis of faith in accepting the rules of evidence as being sufficient to prove anything.

The third and final section of the novel, is through the eyes of a third person author who has just completed writing his book and is thinking about its critical reception and the likely interview questions he will be asked about the process of writing it. Behind his grappling with these questions and revealing his own thoughts, lies the true first person author, that being Marc Nash who wrote part three as well as parts one and two and the tension between the truth of the author in part three with Nash's own personal truth.

Author reading from the opening of the book. 

Here are some quotes from the book.

Part 1: The Senior Detective is having a crisis of faith...

             

"Like the 2011 riots, using Blackberries in order to organise riots for looting Blackberries. Man, we had both our hands and testicles tied behind our backs for that infantifada. Even so, we did secure our dreary, desultory requital sure enough. Months spent scanning faces on surveillance footage from the shops they hadn’t pillaged, plus more numbskullery advertising their ill-gotten gains on social media. Our techies palpating facial recognition software while we, the ones who had formed the anaemic thin blue arterial lines on the night, twiddle our singed fingers, as they swipe right on Match-dot-Con. We took the streets back, sat there behind our desks. The thin end of the fibre optic wedge, where we are adjuncts, mere auxiliaries of technology".

 

“When is a gun not a gun? When it’s a replica. But if a replica is pointed at a human target in a hold-up, then does it not operate with the exact same ramification of a gun? And further, when that replica has been retooled to make it functional, then it’s no longer pseudo, mock, nor a simulacrum, (all words I’ve heard defence QCs {pseudo, mock, or simulacra human beings} use in court), since now it actually fires bullets & can draw blood. Apparently, you can even manufacture one on a 3-D printer. Oh Mercy Mercy Me as Marvin used to sing. And that poor beautiful bastard was shot to death too. On April Fool’s Day, in the year of Orwell’s “1984”. Can there have been a more ill-omened date on which to die?” 

“Forensics, I have come to realise, is phenomenology writ large. Or microscopically small as is more often the case. I do not instinctively know what looks out of place. Any objects in front of me could bear significance. Initially I have to make myself take notice of them all and not filter a single one out as quotidian, neutral and innocent. I have to crowbar into my consciousness, an awareness of everything that populates a scene. A sort of mental cubism, as I plot the lie and locus of everything simultaneously. This is a field through and through, yet with most things remaining unintegrated with one another. This is not a web of connection of objects. 

Part 3: Someone seemingly having a better day is the author who has just completed his novel.

"He reached for the wire mesh bin beneath the desk. It was empty. His wife must have emptied it. How she would have honourably separated out the recyclables, the coke cans and half-measure spirit bottles, from the lolly sticks and cigarette stubs. Anything that basically had made an appearance on the traffic calming roundabout scene, first made their bow in his litter bin. All writers adopted the methods of Kaiser Söze. Whether they cared to admit it or not." 

"Oh god, there was also the prospect of having to get active on his social media accounts once again. Bad enough trying to compose a two hundred word blurb. On Twitter he had just two hundred and eighty characters. With spaces. On Instagram he had to make it so that someone viewing it on their phone, wouldn’t be obliged to scroll down and risk contracting repetitive strain injury. Unlike him, typing away eight hours a day for almost a year to deliver a novel. Wrists of steel. All the fun of the fair, of perpetual swiping right on an app, from shoes, through take-away dishes, to lust at first pixelated sight. How could any work of literature compete?"

He hadn’t experienced much in the way of transference with her, save for the transfer of funds from his bank account into hers. He could console himself that at least he had unsettled her momentarily from her upright (uptight?) poise, when he challenged her to specify how many sessions in her professional experience, it would take to cauterise, suture and heal the gash of a therapist-shaped hole in his life? Turned out to be a poor choice of imagery. Since the imagery of wounds had been invoked, Kafka was inevitably brought up. Which itself allowed her to sweep in with the whole Oedipal thing between Franz and his father and how he himself obviously related to that. By what means had he become embroiled in a literary discussion with his therapist? Since he received fees, (or more accurately expenses), for appearing on literary panels, he should be charging her for his expertise, for that session at least”. 

 

No authors were harmed in the making of this book

an endorsement from Kurt Vonnegut Jnr (puppet)

 

Reviews:

Never Imitate Book Blog "Murder, death and betrayal are mere ingredients around which Nash cooks his literary feast. The starter may appear to be a police procedural but this proves a red herring, an opening to something completely different."

Bob The Bookerer video review (8mins 37 secs in)

Meta-Fiction considered in 1512 words (or 1510 if you don't include the title)

Bertolt Brecht and other playwrights aimed to break down the fourth wall of theatre that was the audience's perspective of events on stage. He didn't want them to suspend their disbelief and get sucked into the drama as 'real'. Rather he wanted them to retain their critical faculties at all time and be fully aware that what they were watching was a representation and to be able to reflect on its issues accordingly, remaining detached and analytical.

Rene Magritte's painting "The Treachery Of Images" depicting a smoker's pipe with the caption "This isn't a pipe" also challenged the viewer's way of seeing. Not only was this not the object we call a pipe, given that it was a painting of it, but the concept of 'pipe' is a lexigraphical unit applied to signify the symbol of what we understand to stand for all pipes (the word itself could also stand for some plumbing or a blow-dart delivery system). For Magritte, any symbolisation be it in paint or word, could neither approach nor appropriate the essence of a material object.

Literature's take on trying to change its audience's way of seeing it, is meta-fiction. Of course like any label, it does not represent a homogeneous group of authors all typing away with the theory tucked into their belts, but more the various and diverse outpourings of writers ploughing their individual furrows, banded together as a group by external commentators.

I think there is great value in exploring the nature of fiction itself, just what it the nature of the interaction between reader and author foisting a made up story them. On a personal level, I'm less struck by books about books, or revealing the process by which authors write those books, or that they appear in them as one of the characters or a commentator, or even writing about someone reading a book. These do not seem to me to get to the heart of the issue of fiction. These are little more than a hall of reflecting (and distorting) mirrors. Rather than stripping the veil of what fiction is doing, they seem to me to add a further level of obfuscation.

To me, an inquiry into fiction much stem from literature's primary tool: language. As with Magritte, the illusional nature of all literature starts with language purporting to be able to carry meaning. Story is structured through words. Character is fleshed out in words. It is these words that more directly should be held up to reflective scrutiny, rather than the secondary armatures of story and character.

Clearly on one level words do convey meaning, else how would an author be able to communicate and be understood by a reader? "That fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude" as Proust describes reading. But words are approximations. As above, the word 'pipe' has several meanings for different material objects lumped together through the single word label. Individual words further have several shades of meaning tincturing the interpretation. "Fast" can have two contradictory readings, being either swiftness, or held fast and therefore immobile. This is exacerbated when you put words together, sometimes in unexpected ways. I recently peer reviewed a piece which had the phrase "leering ugly host of reasons", all the words individually being correctly utilised and yet together, the effect takes an unintended direction, as once you employ 'leering', it pushes the sense of the word 'host' away from a multitude or army and more towards a person acting hospitably.

Words are slippery, imprecise. It amazes me that they ever manage to convey meaning at all, but accounts for why there are a myriad of misreadings and misunderstandings in any conversation between two people, unless they are blessed by a sort of telepathy born from long practice and exposure to one other. (The old married couple). Nor are words neutral, since any reader brings their preconceptions with them to any book. Neither are they random. They have origins, they stem from etymological roots. Some words have stayed true to these origins, others have diverged wildly from them, yet still they may retain a faint echo of their original meaning. "Presently" formerly meant immediately, now it means in a little while or soon. But the undertow still sounds the word 'present' in our heads. This is the resonance I want to tap into in my interrogation of just what fiction is.

To me, as with Brecht, I want the book to interact with the reader. By this I don't just mean for them to trace the plot, or have various emotional responses and even catharsis by the novel's end. I want my book to engage in a dialogue with the reader while they progress through it. I write in a conversational tone, chatty even. However, the words I use may not be conversational themselves. It is merely how direct is the voice of the book in addressing the reader, seeking to engage them as if the narrator was in the room (or more pertinently whispering inside their head). The voice at different stages of the narrative wheedles, browbeats, bats its lashes, apologises, reasons, negotiates in a whole gamut of entreaties. But the conscious choice of language, of heightened metaphor, (which is not how anyone 'speaks' in reality) plunging between high language and low vernacular sometimes within the same sentence, all of this is intended to pull the reader up to the fact that this is fiction. I'm addressing the reader, I may even be telling them a story, but what I'm telling them and how, demands constant reflection and assessment by the reader as to what level it is pitched at. What level of reality is the book operating on? A fictional one of course. Buttressed by words that don't do quite what they claim - they are unable to bear up 'reality' to any decent scrutiny and I aim to show them up in their false claims, within a fiction I openly acknowledge as fictitious. The words may bear my story up in that it communicates itself to the reader, but my story is a self-confessed fiction and tugs on the reader's sleeve constantly to remember this. From such a reflexive position, then the reader may go on to weigh up how my fictional world bears in relationship to the world he takes as 'real'.

In my novel "A,B&E" a woman is sat at various beach bars, spinning tales in return for free drinks from her audience. She is a Scheherazade figure, in that she has opened up with her life being in danger from her gangster husband; telling tales to eke out a subsistence in this hiding place where she has no other means. ("1001 Nights" might even be considered a very early meta-fictional work in its narrative structure of passing on the baton of story-tellers within it). But is this framing fact of her life being under threat even true? What impact does that have on each and every one of her tales? What is fact and what is fantasy, in her mind (and be osmosis in the reader's mind?) Yet this is more than just an issue of whether she is an unreliable narrator or not. This is about how all knowledge is transmitted to us in our contemporary culture, trying to separate out fact from fiction, the culturally produced from the individually experienced. Our personal relationship to the language we employ and how much of that is pre-structured for us. Ultimately it is about how we construct our own identity.

She is ostensibly recounting her life story in pint size gobbets (cocktails actually) and her audience isn't specified, so she is ultimately addressing the reader. She has a highfalutin vocabulary, she is a Classics scholar, she uses Greek myths to allude to her own situation. She uses them archly. She is essaying to manipulate the audience. As much as she uses high end words, she also dives down into the vulgate, especially when remarking on her fellow British tourists around her in this holiday resort on Corfu. But as seemingly confident about language as she appears, she also butchers it and misuses it. Just like Shakespeare's yeoman characters who are mastered by language rather than mastering it, she too is tripped up because language will not be pinned down to exactitude. No matter her proficiencies with words, she too will come a cropper at some unseen juncture. The same could possibly be said about the author who gives her these words? Is he 100% in control of the meaning of his material? I'm going to let the readers adjudge that for themselves, because that is part of the fictional game. Did the author intend that? Is my reading of this correct?

Why am I telling you a tale in the form of a novel? I want to humbly entreat you with some insights on the world. By constantly reminding you that this is fiction, I would hope to also underscore that this is only my opinion on these matters. I'd love to hear yours.