God The Banana - the how and why.
My previous book, "On The Verge", was a satirical piece in a style that I call a “verse-novel”. Partly influenced by the Magical Realism of Marquez and Rushdie, I attempted to weave together three separate stories into a fantastical narrative, critiquing the neo-liberal world-order for the havoc it wreaks on nature, and for its cruelty to world’s poorest people. The small band of friends who actually read my poetry have been very kind in their comments, but I know what they’re really thinking...
The hitch-hiker’s story and the unicorn story don’t join up properly, and the prose introduction reads like a desperate attempt to weld the two together, audacious as a dodgy used-car salesroom mechanic trying to make a new vehicle out of two write-offs. Furthermore I suspect they surmise that many of the poems were not specifically written for this particular book; that I’ve shoe-horned them into the narrative almost at random.
They’re completely right of course. My new book "God The Banana" is a second attempt at a verse-novel, but it is in a different league to On The Verge. I've learned lessons from the mistakes I made with that earlier book and the most important is: know how a story is going to end before you begin writing! I've dispensed with the wildly contrasting poetic forms that made the previous book look so messy and written the entire story in sonnets following one rhyme pattern, scanning the lines in a flexible near-iambic pentameter. (That's probably too much technical detail for most people so just take my word for this: it means it sounds great when you read it out loud!)
The plot of God The Banana is something I've mulled over for almost twenty-five years. My first great adventure outside of Europe was in 1989 when I spent four months backpacking around India and Thailand. Asia was a complete culture-shock; fascinating, irritating and exhilarating in equal measure. I was appalled to witness the gruelling poverty that's endured by many people even to this day, but also uplifted discovering the exotic bird and animal fauna there, and I reawakened a dormant passion for the natural world that has dragged me across five of the six continents over the past quarter century.
I'd had some very vague notion I might write a book based on my travels when I returned home, but I was a young man and all my notions then were very vague. I was dissuaded from this ambition by meeting so many other young travellers following the by then deeply rutted Hippy Trail, approximately half of whom told me they were going to write a travel book when they returned home. Perhaps a decade later I read Alex Garland's cult classic "The Beach" which must have had its genesis round about the same time, and I screamed, "DAMMIT! That was the book I was going to write!!" I swear that Alex Garland was in Bangkok staying in the same grim Khao San Road backpacker joint as me on exactly the same night, because that French couple kept me awake too...
I brought one useful thing home from my wanderings though: a sense of how well fitted the backpacker world is to the structure of a novel. When I was in India I'd estimate there could have been no more than a few hundred young European, North American and Australasian adventurers bumming around the subcontinent on a similar shoe-string budget to my own, because we kept bumping into one another everywhere. Not so unbelievable really - in the pre-internet era the only reliable source of information for independent travellers was guide books, and there were only two series that were good enough to be useful: the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet. Since we took the word of our preferred book as gospel and always headed for whatever cheap hotel it reassured us to be most habitable, there were two mutually exclusive backpacker tribes working their way around the famous sites.
I was in the LP camp myself, and I would only rarely meet members of the RG clan, in towns where both our books put the same low dive at the top of their Budget Accommodation list. It ceased to surprise me if I woke up in a frosty dormitory high on the blizzard-swept Himalayan ridge of Darjeeling, to see a man or woman asleep in the bed next to mine that I'd had dinner with two months previously, five hundred miles away in the stifling tropical heat of Bombay.
That is the outrageous sort of coincidence that is both the bane and blessing of many a classic novel - if you've read Hardy or Dickens you'll know that feeling of part-excitement, part-disappointment when you realise the stereotypical mad old lady who's arrived in town and could be anybody in theory, within the parameters of a thought-out plot cannot be anybody but the Furmity Woman who saw the protagonist disgrace himself thirty years earlier; that's how novels are fabricated. But here in India I was noticing that such affected fictional coincidences do happen in the real world. The archetypal youth who "finds" him- or herself after an epiphany on a beach in Thailand had already become a figure of fun in British culture by the late '80s, but I had an idea it could still be acceptable to use the scenario facetiously. The seed of a novel was sown in my mind...
It was not until I visited Guatemala with my partner Robbie in 2004 that the idea of Amanga was born. Various aspects of Guatemala reminded me of India fifteen years earlier: the rural people in their traditional costumes; the diversity of local languages; the decaying remnants of majestic European colonial-era buildings; the garishly decorated buses overloaded with people and livestock, but lacking essentials like brakes; and the pantheon of pre-Christian gods and demons that are openly worshipped even within the Catholic churches, which to my mind had a whiff of Hinduism about them.
Over the next few years the pair of us visited Costa Rica, Peru, Chile, and Panama, and I assembled the poems that became "Gringo on the Chickenbus". But at the same time my mind was working on a far grander project, originally conceived as a novel, about a fictitious tropical post-colonial nation, utilising many of the locations I’d visited. I sketched out the full plot of God The Banana in 2008, appropriately enough whilst lying on a top-bunk in a sleeper carriage on a painfully slow 20-hour India Rail journey from Jaisalmer (the desert citadel of Rankoor in the book) to Delhi, during my second visit to India.
I made two false starts at writing the book as a traditional novel, in the more successful attempt getting no further than the point where a bus full of school children crashes off a mountain road, before I accepted that me and prose don’t get along well together. I write very slowly whether it’s poetry or prose, editing and re-editing every sentence until I’m happy with it, then re-reading it the next day and deleting everything. This blog alone has taken me a couple of weeks to write!
An iPhone was responsible for what happened next; a present I'd treated myself to after we returned from Panama when I was completing Gringo on the Chickenbus. It didn't take me long to discover what a great tool it is for writing poems on the move. No longer had I to scuttle back to my van to find a paper and pen whenever inspiration struck me at work. The phone was always on my person and once I'd loaded it with dictionary, rhyming dictionary and thesaurus apps, it became quite easy to rattle off a sonnet in a day without interrupting my normal work flow on the lawns, hedges and borders of Harrogate.
One day, in despair at my failure to get the novel off the ground, I tried a tactic somebody had told me in a writers' workshop one time: try writing in a completely different form to cure your block. Just for experiment, I wrote the first paragraph of my novel as a sonnet. It looked OK, so I did the second paragraph the next day. Within a fortnight I had ten acceptable sonnets and I was finding it easier, so I carried on at rate of about one per day...and three years later I reached the end of the story!
After a trip to South Africa a couple of years ago I wanted to do something to help the beleaguered rhino population of that continent, so I revived the manuscript of On The Verge which I had abandoned ten years earlier, updated it a little and published it as a fund-raising ebook and then as a self-published paperback, donating all profits to a Black Rhino conservation project in Kenya. My acquisitive payback for this altruism was of course gaining experience of the internet self-publication process. God The Banana was proving too revolutionary a piece of literature to tempt any of the reactionary big publishing houses that insist on accepting only contemporary poetry of a sort which is too much of a chore for normal readers to cope with, so it became clear that self-publication was my only option to present it a wider public.
So get yourself a copy - everyone will find something to love in it; many will find things to shock and appall as well! It's available as a 230 page paperback from Amazon, or an independent site called Wordery.com is also selling it if you can't bear to do business with the Amazon behemoth. Kindle and most other ebook retailers have it, sometimes in three parts, the first of which is called "The Prophet Of Amanga" and is usually free.
My previous book, "On The Verge", was a satirical piece in a style that I call a “verse-novel”. Partly influenced by the Magical Realism of Marquez and Rushdie, I attempted to weave together three separate stories into a fantastical narrative, critiquing the neo-liberal world-order for the havoc it wreaks on nature, and for its cruelty to world’s poorest people. The small band of friends who actually read my poetry have been very kind in their comments, but I know what they’re really thinking...
The hitch-hiker’s story and the unicorn story don’t join up properly, and the prose introduction reads like a desperate attempt to weld the two together, audacious as a dodgy used-car salesroom mechanic trying to make a new vehicle out of two write-offs. Furthermore I suspect they surmise that many of the poems were not specifically written for this particular book; that I’ve shoe-horned them into the narrative almost at random.
They’re completely right of course. My new book "God The Banana" is a second attempt at a verse-novel, but it is in a different league to On The Verge. I've learned lessons from the mistakes I made with that earlier book and the most important is: know how a story is going to end before you begin writing! I've dispensed with the wildly contrasting poetic forms that made the previous book look so messy and written the entire story in sonnets following one rhyme pattern, scanning the lines in a flexible near-iambic pentameter. (That's probably too much technical detail for most people so just take my word for this: it means it sounds great when you read it out loud!)
The plot of God The Banana is something I've mulled over for almost twenty-five years. My first great adventure outside of Europe was in 1989 when I spent four months backpacking around India and Thailand. Asia was a complete culture-shock; fascinating, irritating and exhilarating in equal measure. I was appalled to witness the gruelling poverty that's endured by many people even to this day, but also uplifted discovering the exotic bird and animal fauna there, and I reawakened a dormant passion for the natural world that has dragged me across five of the six continents over the past quarter century.
I'd had some very vague notion I might write a book based on my travels when I returned home, but I was a young man and all my notions then were very vague. I was dissuaded from this ambition by meeting so many other young travellers following the by then deeply rutted Hippy Trail, approximately half of whom told me they were going to write a travel book when they returned home. Perhaps a decade later I read Alex Garland's cult classic "The Beach" which must have had its genesis round about the same time, and I screamed, "DAMMIT! That was the book I was going to write!!" I swear that Alex Garland was in Bangkok staying in the same grim Khao San Road backpacker joint as me on exactly the same night, because that French couple kept me awake too...
I brought one useful thing home from my wanderings though: a sense of how well fitted the backpacker world is to the structure of a novel. When I was in India I'd estimate there could have been no more than a few hundred young European, North American and Australasian adventurers bumming around the subcontinent on a similar shoe-string budget to my own, because we kept bumping into one another everywhere. Not so unbelievable really - in the pre-internet era the only reliable source of information for independent travellers was guide books, and there were only two series that were good enough to be useful: the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet. Since we took the word of our preferred book as gospel and always headed for whatever cheap hotel it reassured us to be most habitable, there were two mutually exclusive backpacker tribes working their way around the famous sites.
I was in the LP camp myself, and I would only rarely meet members of the RG clan, in towns where both our books put the same low dive at the top of their Budget Accommodation list. It ceased to surprise me if I woke up in a frosty dormitory high on the blizzard-swept Himalayan ridge of Darjeeling, to see a man or woman asleep in the bed next to mine that I'd had dinner with two months previously, five hundred miles away in the stifling tropical heat of Bombay.
That is the outrageous sort of coincidence that is both the bane and blessing of many a classic novel - if you've read Hardy or Dickens you'll know that feeling of part-excitement, part-disappointment when you realise the stereotypical mad old lady who's arrived in town and could be anybody in theory, within the parameters of a thought-out plot cannot be anybody but the Furmity Woman who saw the protagonist disgrace himself thirty years earlier; that's how novels are fabricated. But here in India I was noticing that such affected fictional coincidences do happen in the real world. The archetypal youth who "finds" him- or herself after an epiphany on a beach in Thailand had already become a figure of fun in British culture by the late '80s, but I had an idea it could still be acceptable to use the scenario facetiously. The seed of a novel was sown in my mind...
It was not until I visited Guatemala with my partner Robbie in 2004 that the idea of Amanga was born. Various aspects of Guatemala reminded me of India fifteen years earlier: the rural people in their traditional costumes; the diversity of local languages; the decaying remnants of majestic European colonial-era buildings; the garishly decorated buses overloaded with people and livestock, but lacking essentials like brakes; and the pantheon of pre-Christian gods and demons that are openly worshipped even within the Catholic churches, which to my mind had a whiff of Hinduism about them.
Over the next few years the pair of us visited Costa Rica, Peru, Chile, and Panama, and I assembled the poems that became "Gringo on the Chickenbus". But at the same time my mind was working on a far grander project, originally conceived as a novel, about a fictitious tropical post-colonial nation, utilising many of the locations I’d visited. I sketched out the full plot of God The Banana in 2008, appropriately enough whilst lying on a top-bunk in a sleeper carriage on a painfully slow 20-hour India Rail journey from Jaisalmer (the desert citadel of Rankoor in the book) to Delhi, during my second visit to India.
I made two false starts at writing the book as a traditional novel, in the more successful attempt getting no further than the point where a bus full of school children crashes off a mountain road, before I accepted that me and prose don’t get along well together. I write very slowly whether it’s poetry or prose, editing and re-editing every sentence until I’m happy with it, then re-reading it the next day and deleting everything. This blog alone has taken me a couple of weeks to write!
An iPhone was responsible for what happened next; a present I'd treated myself to after we returned from Panama when I was completing Gringo on the Chickenbus. It didn't take me long to discover what a great tool it is for writing poems on the move. No longer had I to scuttle back to my van to find a paper and pen whenever inspiration struck me at work. The phone was always on my person and once I'd loaded it with dictionary, rhyming dictionary and thesaurus apps, it became quite easy to rattle off a sonnet in a day without interrupting my normal work flow on the lawns, hedges and borders of Harrogate.
One day, in despair at my failure to get the novel off the ground, I tried a tactic somebody had told me in a writers' workshop one time: try writing in a completely different form to cure your block. Just for experiment, I wrote the first paragraph of my novel as a sonnet. It looked OK, so I did the second paragraph the next day. Within a fortnight I had ten acceptable sonnets and I was finding it easier, so I carried on at rate of about one per day...and three years later I reached the end of the story!
After a trip to South Africa a couple of years ago I wanted to do something to help the beleaguered rhino population of that continent, so I revived the manuscript of On The Verge which I had abandoned ten years earlier, updated it a little and published it as a fund-raising ebook and then as a self-published paperback, donating all profits to a Black Rhino conservation project in Kenya. My acquisitive payback for this altruism was of course gaining experience of the internet self-publication process. God The Banana was proving too revolutionary a piece of literature to tempt any of the reactionary big publishing houses that insist on accepting only contemporary poetry of a sort which is too much of a chore for normal readers to cope with, so it became clear that self-publication was my only option to present it a wider public.
So get yourself a copy - everyone will find something to love in it; many will find things to shock and appall as well! It's available as a 230 page paperback from Amazon, or an independent site called Wordery.com is also selling it if you can't bear to do business with the Amazon behemoth. Kindle and most other ebook retailers have it, sometimes in three parts, the first of which is called "The Prophet Of Amanga" and is usually free.