Jon Courtenay Grimwood Interview
01/08/2004 . Source: Jane Palmer 

Jon Courtenay Grimwood belongs to the special group of SFF novelists who write compelling Science Fiction that keeps the reader's interest without employing the short cuts of cliché, formulae or fantasy. Jane Palmer chats with one of the rapidly rising stars of Brit-Lit SF.

Jon Courtenay Grimwood belongs to the special group of novelists who write compelling Science Fiction that keeps the reader's interest without employing the short cuts of cliché, formulae or fantasy.

His plots have continuity and invention grounded in plausibility, no doubt helped by his discipline as a journalist.

His novels published by Earthlight:-

- reMix 1999

- redRobe 2000

- Pashazade 2001

- Effendi 2002

- Felaheen 2003

SFCrowsnest: The young man, Raf (Ashraf Bey) is the lead character in ‘Pashazade’, ‘Effendi’ and ‘Felaheen’. He has a background filled with more incident than most people would experience in a lifetime. To what degree was he coloured by your own experience?

Jon Courtenay Grimwood: I was born in Malta and grew up in the UK, Malta again, the Far East and Scandinavia. My childhood was, in many ways, pretty traditional for someone from my background growing up in the 1960s. We moved a lot, I flew back to boarding schools in England and, in part at least, I was brought up by nannies and amahs. Obviously this effects how I see the world and what I regard as normal.

My nanny in Malta taught me the Lord's Prayer in Malti, a form of western Arabic. An amah in Jahore taught me the rudiments of Islam. I got to visit Buddhist shrines and Hindu temples and met a fakir on a beach in Penang who turned a stick into a snake and back again (and I'm still not sure if it really happened and, if it did, how it was done).

I also went to Spain, where I had a small house in the mountains. All my family get restless most years. So yes, lots of things from my childhood and life made it into Raf's story!

SFC: Although the ‘Arabesk Trilogy’ is set in an alternative North Africa where the Ottoman Empire is still powerful, your descriptions, especially of architecture, are striking. Would it be possible for the present day tourist in North Africa to recognise these locations?

JCG: Definitely. Someone was telling me the other day that reading ‘Felaheen’ had made them decide to go to Tunis and they'd been slightly shocked at how close to the book the reality was (although, obviously, it's really the other way round).

Where possible, I spend time in my locations, so yes, I went to Tunis for ‘Felaheen’ and to Marrakech for the book I'm writing at the moment. And I should actually be in Beijing researching a section of that book but my trip was cancelled because of the SARS virus so I'll probably have to try to fix it up again for the end of the year.

I construct my cities by buying old maps, blowing them up on a photocopier and deciding what would and wouldn't have changed if history had been different. So for El Iskandryia (Alexandria), I changed most street names back to the old Ottoman ones but removed some of Victorian buildings and replaced these with bad Soviet-inspired architecture. I also installed an oil refinery to the West of the city, where the city joins the desert.

SFC: Hani, the nine (to eleven) year-old cousin of Raf, having been isolated from the outside world until his arrival, has lived long enough in her own thoughts to develop some remarkable abilities, especially in the use of her computer.

She lacks a sense of danger and despite her age is not one of life's victims. If anything, she is a supreme manipulator, the sort of precocious child that makes many adults feel inadequate. Even Harry Potter can do little about his monstrous guardians. Have you considered writing a similar role model for a younger market where children are all too often depicted as victims?

JCG: To be honest, no. I love children's fiction and have an enormous respect for the people who can write it. The pressures and responsibilities it brings are far greater than for adult fiction. (I have some idea because my partner was the editor who relaunched ‘Just Seventeen’ magazine as J-17 in the UK and some of the help-me letters she used to get from girls in their young teens were heartbreaking.)

I'm not sure I have the skills needed to write for children and I've turned down approaches from publishers wanting me to try.

SFC: Hitler had a traumatic influence on my generation's way of thinking and the general perception of recent history. There was no such catalyst in the ‘Arabesk Trilogy’ to generate reform and the ills of your world result from unchallenged decadence. How difficult was it to create an alternative reality without substituting a pernicious influence similar to Hitler's?

JCG: What we see in the Ashraf Bey novels is a mid-21st century North Africa where peace between London and Berlin was brokered in 1915 by the American President and World War One remained the third Balkan conflict... Because of this, the Ottoman empire limped along until the discovery/exploitation of oil under Arabia gave the empire the money, power and political will to reform.

Because we live in the West we see WW1 and WW2 as the defining events of the last century and of our world. This ignores the fact that the influenza epidemic after the first war killed far more than ever died in the trenches. In Raf's world, the big 20th century crises were not wars but epidemics.

(And, of course, endless small wars fought by the great powers through proxies still happened and still killed as many men, women and children as in our world.)

It wasn't really difficult to create a world in which Hitler had not come to power, as all I really had to do was continue the world which existed before 1915... To a very large extent the world created after the Treaty of Versailles was a shock to everyone. Read a paper from 1914 and there's no sense that five years later empires would be falling.

SFC: Your observations of killing and mutilation border on the clinical. Does the idea of mortality worry you?

JCG: I'm not sure that how I write death and violence has anything to do with my ideas of mortality. In fact, I suspect it has far more to do with my politics.

That said, death happens and we all have a responsibility to live as well as we can in the time we have. I'm lucky enough to have a job I want (writing), live where I want (Winchester) and be able to go to New York, Marrakech or wherever pretty much as I want. It's a good life and, no, of course I don't want to leave it but that's not going to stop it happening.

SFC: Don't go thinking that everyone gets off lightly in the ‘Arabesk’ series though. Grimwood's scenes of violence always exhibit a stark emotional intensity, often with a thread of cruelty.

JCG: I hate sanitised violence. It's morally and intellectually dishonest to have somebody stand back up after getting coshed or shot. Violence hurts, it breaks things and it wrecks families and destroys communities. That's as true of violence from the mugger on the corner as it is of terrorist atrocities, politically motivated or government inspired violence.

Violence is a stone thrown into water and the ripples spread. I think a writer has a duty to show this. The clinical nature of my description is just a convenient if stark way of dealing with what violence does; tear muscle, shatter bone, suck out soft tissue in the passing of a bullet. The actual act is clinical, the emotional fallout anything but...

SFC: ‘The Arabesk Trilogy’ could easily take its place in mainstream literary fiction. You are also an author of satirical novels as well as an established journalist. Do you have leanings to any other genre?

JCG: One of the interesting things about the marketing of the Ashraf Bey novels is that they've being sold in the big chains as crime fiction as well as SF, so they feature on two tables. Most of the reviews in the nationals have also treated the books as crime fiction, despite the mid 21st century/alternate world/post-cyberpunk setting.

(Although the Guardian ran their review in the literary section.)

I'm quite happy writing what I write and leaving it up to the publishers and book shops to decide where they want to display the novels!

SFC: I believe it was John Mortimer who said he wrote the story first and worried about research afterwards. How much can you put down from your own personal experience before referring to specialist knowledge?

JCG: I live in a constant state of research and often can't remember what I actually knew and what I've just leant. I always research before I start. This usually involves going to the location to get a handle on the way of life, smells in the air, feel on the streets. I also buy music, old maps and cook books.

For ‘redRobe’, I listened to Tibetan music and Dutch trance, cooked some very weird soups and read the ‘Book Of The Dead’. For the ‘Ashraf Bey’ novels, I went to Tunis and used bit of Tangiers and Palermo, bought endless old maps of Alexandria and leant to cook Middle Eastern/North African food. I also bought a fair number of Rai and North African dance CDs.

For ‘Stamping Butterflies’, the novel I'm working on at the moment, I went to Marrakech and took a couple classes in Moroccan cookery, trawled the souks where some of the book is set and went up into the High Atlas, because one of the scenes is set there... A lot of this stuff I already know from my childhood but the world changes and information dates.

SFC: What attracted you to writing Science Fiction?

JCG: You get to screw with reality! All SF is about now, what we feel and fear, want or suspect might happen. Gibson gave a really good description of his novels as now with the knobs turned up and I think that applies to the work of almost everyone I respect.

Literary fiction is as much a ghetto as any genre. In fact, literary fiction is genre, the current term in the UK being 'premium middle-brow'. I don't want to write novels that sell ten copies and I don't want to be in an area where critics say, but that couldn't happen...

The real beauty of SF is that anything can happen provided one plays fair with the reader and keep events coherent within the world one's created. And that's brings me to the real attraction, making up the worlds. Any half-decent SF novel should have a world at least as real as the characters (and that doesn't mean one can skimp on the characters either).

SFC: Was it difficult to get your first Science Fiction novel published?

JCG: No, I got fantastically lucky. My marriage had broken up and as a single father I needed to be able to cover my share of school holidays, half-terms and weekends so I went freelance, working as an consultant editor and writing for magazines and newspapers. One of the consultancy jobs came to an end and I spent the summer writing ‘neoAddix’.

Having sat on the desk of one editor for the best part of a ten months, ‘neoA’ came back and went out again, the next person to see it bought the book on condition there was a sequel, this turned into a four book contract with Hodder, who did the first two books (‘neoAddix’ and ‘Lucifer's Dragon’). At which point, John Jarrold, then starting up Earthlight for Simon & Schuster UK, bought out my contract with Hodder and did a fantastic job of publishing ‘reMix’ and ‘redRobe’.

SFC: Although you were already an experienced writer before being published by Earthlight, can you offer any useful suggestions to someone aspiring to break into the genre?

JCG: Get in print. It doesn't even have to be in the SF area. Write film reviews, computer game reviews, CD reviews, human interest stories, whatever. Prove you can write. And while you're doing that read carefully the work of people you like.

Read it once for sense, then again to look at how the plot is constructed, break things down, look at paragraph construction, sentence construction, how dialogue is handled, is it first person or third, work out which one makes you feel most comfortable when you write.

I feel, fairly strongly, that it's not possible to teach someone to write fiction but it is perfectly possible for that someone to learn. In fact, I think that's why writers write, because they want to keep learning.

SFC: Thank you.

Interviewer: Jane Palmer

Interviewee: Jon Courtenay Grimwood

(c) all rights reserved between SFCrowsnest & Jon Courtenay Grimwood 2003