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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
For one of Britain's cultural centers -- and now 2008's European Capital of Culture -- Liverpool hasn't inspired much fiction, or at least not as much as, say, Manchester.
No, it has not. I was asked recently in Holland what I had to say about the new subculture of "Mersey lit" -- in Europe, especially in Holland and Germany, they have a very romantic idea of there being a hub of Liverpool-based writers. We call the whole of Liverpool Merseyside; you know, we have the river of Mersey which runs through. I think it's taken from the Beatles and the whole music phenomenon which was called "Mersey beat." And there are some great Liverpool writers. But the thing is, we have writers who start off here, they write about Liverpool, they write from Liverpool, and then they move on. People tend to have a love-hate relationship with the city. It's all or nothing, and I'm as guilty as anyone for doing that. But it would be nice for people who make a success in the city to stay in the city. There's always that temptation to move to London or to America or somewhere bigger.
You've been most readily compared to Irvine Welsh -- did it occur to you that you were writing a female, Scouse version of "Trainspotting"?
Not at all. I was a teenager when "Trainspotting" first came out. And although it mainly dealt with the depressed heroin subculture of Edinburgh, and most of the U.K. youth population had no idea that was going on, his writing, his voice spoke to a whole generation. It was massive. Me, too. I was caught up in the magic of Uncle Irvine when I was a teenager. So it's flattering to be compared with that book. But no, I think "Brass" was very pure and honest, and I say that because I didn't have an agent, I didn't have a publisher or any expectations. I wasn't thinking what would these people think about it or what will the critics think about it. I just kind of wrote from the heart. But there were writers more than Irvine who influenced me. American writers from [Charles] Bukowski to John Fante, and even going back to Steinbeck and Hemingway and Hubert Selby in particular -- they were the writers I fell in love with as a teenager.
Most of the press on "Brass" has focused on the drugs and explicit sex, and that's understandable. The sex between Millie and women and Millie and men is raw and rough -- certainly erotic, but also pretty discomfiting. Oral sex on a tombstone, fucking a prostitute with a bottle, lubeless anal sex in the back of a car ...
I think it's impossible in 2004 -- it was 2002 when I wrote the book -- but it's impossible to write about sex from the point of view of a 19-year-old, whether it's a girl or a boy, that has been brought up in the city, any city, without bringing the pornographic into it. Millie's take on women, it's very objectifying, and it almost flirts with misogyny, but it's earthy and pornographic.
When it came to editing it, there are a whole lot of grammatical mistakes, overwriting and repetition of the same words, and my editor wanted to take those out and hone and polish it, but those were the only scenes in the book that I refused to touch, just on the grounds that I think that's how sex is. I think it's flawed and it's halting and it's earthy, certainly from the perspective of a 19-year-old university kid. That's how the sex scenes came to be. They were so easy to write, but now, when I was just in the States and had to give readings, a couple of people turned up and asked for those specific scenes, and I find it difficult now even reading them to myself. So there's just no way I could possibly read that to a room of people.
Speaking of porn, that's the thing that's shocking about Millie. She discovers her lust for women through porn magazines, which, she says, gave her the idea that "all girls are gagging for it, that they crave to be treated like filthy indefatigable whores as much as they crave to be pampered like princesses." Yet she herself is a girl.
She has a very skewed and, in a sense, morally reprehensible attitude toward sex and women. It's only through Jamie that we get a glimpse of her not getting away with it. Jamie is scathing about Millie's attitudes toward women and young girls; he doesn't agree with it. But Millie on her own -- she does have those moments the next morning of self-loathing and regret, but her sexuality again is very representative of young men's sexuality in the modern age.
Think of 13- and 14-year-old boys, 15 or 20 years ago. Their initiation into sexuality was maybe a few not-too-hardcore pornographic magazines. It was mainly behind the bike sheds and fumbling encounters with girls at school. In this day and age, you have 13- and 14-year-olds with access to the Internet, and there are such brutal and crude and dangerous perceptions of sex and women and what women want. There are a lot of boys who manage to padlock that to fantasy, but it's a bit much to ask young boys to separate completely the boundaries between fantasy and reality. It's quite dangerous, the accessibility and the pervasiveness of pornography. And Millie's sexuality has been nurtured in a way that a young boy's has. She's very much a typical predatory, animalistic male.
At the same time, there's a lot of sadness in the book. Take away the sex and pill popping and, at heart, it's a story of a young girl who is lost and sick of herself and looking for redemption from all the bad choices she has made.
When I wrote the story, that was the heart and soul of the narrative. And it was shocking to see that the first wave of press hadn't picked up on it. It was kind of overwhelmed by Millie's sexuality. But I think as the shock waves begin to settle, a lot of people have begun to pick up on that. There have been some nice reviews that haven't really mentioned the sex or the drugs. They've picked up on Millie's relationship with her mother and her father, but, more than that, on how difficult it is for a girl and a boy to negotiate a friendship.
Bad history and redemption are also part of the story of Liverpool -- which was built on the back of the slave trade -- and your own personal history.
My moment of redemption came when I first moved to Liverpool from Barcelona and decided to go to university and do something good for my mum rather than myself. In terms of what happens to Millie, I just like happy endings.
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