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Holt Right There
Fantasy author Tom Holt on whether it's really possible to write
a SFF novel about office life, his first job as a porter in an auction-house,
and the funniest thing he's ever heard.
Tom Holt's latest hilarious work of comic fiction, The Portable Door, described as 'a real joy' by MyShelf (and we absolutely would not disagree), is published this month by Orbit. The book is based - though in a Tom Holt kind of way - on office life, so we thought we'd ask the author to dig over his own working past ... Can you remember your first interview experience?
Was it the worst, or were there there others to eclipse it? The absolute worst, on which Paul's experiences are tangentially based, was with a really high-class firm of London solicitors. It was a huge office - two buildings linked by an underground passage - and I was interviewed by a panel of five grim-faced, stiletto-eyed Very Senior Lawyers. What passes for my brain turned to glue, and I did a very passable imitation of a seven-year-old child. On that occasion, however, the result was exactly what I wanted; I didn't get the job. What was your first job? I was a porter in an auction-house. On my first day, I was sent with another seventeen-year-old to carry a massive steel safe up five flights of winding spiral stairs. A few days later, while taking down the paintings from that day's sale and putting up the next days' exhibits, I poked the corner of a picture-frame through the canvas of an Old Master worth six figures. I enjoyed the trolley-races we used to have when we took the Oriental Porcelain from the saleroom to Packing, but otherwise it wasn't much fun. Was your first full-time job as horrible, mundane, baffling and staggeringly bureaucratic as Paul's initially appears to be? By sheer and baffling coincidence, Paul's experiences are remarkably similar to my first few weeks in the legal profession, except that I've left out a lot of the weird stuff. Several year ago, I started to write a novel set in a solicitors' office. I was still in the trade at the time, and it was fly-on-wall, I-am-a-hidden-microphone stuff, basically just the conversations I heard going on around me, with a sparse and impersonal linking narrative. My agent, who at the time was editing Shaun Hutson, told me he couldn't bear to finish reading the first couple of chapters I sent him, because he couldn't stand the oppressive atmosphere of pure and unleavened evil, unrelieved by even the faintest spark of vestigial humanity Did you always plan to escape into full-time writing? Not really. I'd always been given to understand that you had to be brilliant and talented to earn a living at it. And is the grass greener now you are on the other side? You betcha. Your writing embraces many genres but if you were forced to categorise it for filing purposes at JW Wells & Co, which pigeon-hole would you choose? Gritty social realism, obviously. What's the funniest thing you've heard today? During a debate about the top-up fees issue, a speaker pointed out that the purpose of a university education is to teach you how to ask the right questions. For instance; a science graduate will ask, "How do we know that?"; an engineering graduate will ask, "How can we do that?"; and an arts graduate will ask, "Do you want fries with that?" What are you working on now? I've just finished taking Paul's career at JWW to its inevitable conclusion. He dies, he gets the girl, he loses the girl, he gets promoted, his best friend kills him. But not necessarily in that order. Tom Holt's Portable Door is available now in signed hardback and paperback editions from the Orbit website. The sequel, In Your Dreams, is scheduled for publication in June. Thanks to Orbit Books (and Ben Sharpe) for permission to post this interview. For more details of their SFF authors and books, visit Orbit at www.orbitbooks.co.uk
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OTHER CONTENT - April 2004
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Vividly.
All I have to do is close my eyes after eating cheese last thing
at night and I'm right back there. The consequences were pretty
awful, too. I got the job
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