Miles Gibson

"I have written fiction in an attempt to create a world I could inhabit. I have tried to shape order from chaos. There are stories everywhere but for me the language is everything." Towards an understanding: "I think I became a writer because I was bad at school games. When you're never picked for the football team you are left with time to read the wrong books and take long flights of imagination. After school, and with no prospects of getting to university, I served my time in advertising, the artist's equivalent of joining the army - where I wrote for several years in praise of dog biscuits, cough drops and women's underwear. I taught myself to write fiction by trying to emulate my heroes and, following Nietzche's advice that: "Art is the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere" it was important that my first novel should not be a thinly disguised autobiography. The Sandman, the journal of a serial killer, written in the spirit of a pitch-dark "Kind Hearts and Coronets", seemed the perfect challenge. No-one would accuse me of writing myself into the story. But I'm not a crime writer and I'd spent my childhood in the draughty English seaside town of Christchurch, Dorset, so seaside childhoods featured in The Sandman and my second novel Dancing With Mermaids. Fiction, perhaps, is merely the opportunity to rewrite life and try to fashion some sense from it. A struggle for order from chaos. My own brief travels in West Africa and a passion for old-fashioned English cooking were the inspiration for Gilbert Firestone, hero of Vinegar Soup (aka Hotel Plenti). Fat Gilbert is a romantic, a dreamer, a man who wants to eat the world and suck on the bones. He dreams of travel and adventure while tied by his apron strings to the kitchen stove of a greasy-spoon cafe. It was received as black comedy but that isn't my purpose - I've always felt that comedy is just tragedy turned inside out. Gilbert's own tragedy occurs when he catches up with his dream. The secret life of the family has been a favourite theme in my work. A family is a closed society, with its own strange rules and regulations, a private madhouse where even ghouls wear carpet slippers. This is true in Kingdom Swann and it's also true in Fascinated, Einstein, and The Prisoner of Meadow Bank. The circumstances change but the obsessions are constant. Mr Romance is the perfect example. The narrator's father spends his evenings locked in the cellar, working on brilliant yet doomed inventions, trying to build his own world of the future, blissfully unaware that the outside world has run far ahead of him. His vain attempt at fame and glory is echoed by Franklin in the attic who, persuaded that he's destined to compose a masterpiece, remains too frightened to write a word. And while the young narrator wrestles with born-again Dorothy's army of angels, Mr Marvel, the fugitive restaurant critic, is fighting his own battle with London's celebrity chefs. 'Never put anything into your mouth that you can't pronounce or spell for a doctor,' he warns Skipper when he finally makes his escape. These are tragic characters disguised as clowns because, despite our best endeavours, the world is hostile and our lives absurd. We can only hope to make sense of it through our dreams and fantasies. Themes and dreams take shape and slowly the writer is revealed. Eight novels, a couple of children's books and three collections of poetry on the shelves. But "literature is the question minus the answer" as Roland Barthes observed. These days I like to write as I've always written, slowly and in pen, draft after draft, half a page at a time, until I'm ready to transfer the work to computer. Language is everything. And whenever I lose my sense of purpose I turn to the perfect, polished prose of writers like Updike and Bruno Schulz. I'll stop when I've mastered it." MG