My current writing project is called The House
of Writers, a novel set in a likely future where literature is as
welcome as sheep droppings in a cup of Horlicks. Forced to work for
the expanding ScotCall empire, most writers have packed it in for
safe desk jobs answering queries about anything and everything for a
population of ill-educated bozos, while only a handful remain in a
raggedy office block on the outskirts of a small rural province where
Scotland’s writers turn out work for a narrow audience of unhinged freaks who still like to read. The protagonist, Cal, is an
idealistic and ambitious youngster who believes he can make a name
for himself in the House, while his family are assimilated into the
ScotCall encroach.
Each chapter finds Cal moving up the nine floors
of the building—from High Quality Literary Fiction all the way up
to Bestsellers up top, each populated by various eccentrics whose
works have been warped and exaggerated at the whims of their
paymasters. The experimental writers lurk in the basement, breaking
out occasionally to cause mischief on the higher floors, steal food,
and plan ways to strangle ScotCall with their own phone lines. As Cal
advances, ScotCall steals office space with the assistance of his
poisonous sister Kirsty, who delights in the systematic destruction
of all pointless scribblers.
The House of Writers is an anarchic comedy,
with no pretensions to subtlety or mainstream acceptance. The idea is
to indulge in wordplay, bouncy and playful language with a funky
rhythm, and sheer stylistic exuberance as a celebration of
what is brilliant about literature and the reading of, and why books
should take precedence over everything else, especially food and
procreation. I also want to posit an alternative to the book-burning
visions of Bradbury et al
and suggest literature will always exist, but will simply get
marginalised into obsolescence, or buried under a mound of trash, and
people’s standards will sink so low, Everyman’s Dan Brown
editions will be released by 2070.
This is a sketch of the novel. So far the surreal comedy is leading me into
other areas of (unwelcome?) strangeness. By imposing a structure on the book,
hopefully my “freewheeling” tendencies with regard to plot and
character won’t lead to the sort of tedium that awaited readers of
my last comedy, A Postmodern Belch.
We shall see. And once again, methinks I am writing essentially for
niches too small to be niches, but so be it. Long live my beloved niches.
