Founded by “Mad” Mike Banks and Jeff Mills, Underground Resistance has been highly influential in techno, but it’s much more than a record label. UR is committed to the welfare of the disenfranchised youth of Detroit’s suburbs, as well as drawing much of its talent from these same areas. And the music itself has far more depth than your average electronic dance music; UR claims to “encode” messages into their output and frequently talks of an “assault” on the mass media and major record labels. Looking at their website you might come to the conclusion that you were looking at the webpage of an anti mainstream militia. (www.undergroundresistance.com)

As you read Home Office cryptographers are probably studying this communication from UR label mates Atlantis and DJ Dex for its true meanin…

TTI: Can you tell us a bit about what you are involved in at the moment?

Atlantis: We’ve just finished up several EPs, Lanminds by  DJ Skurge, Tazumal by Nomadico, and Sunshine by Bileebob.  There’s also the Electronic Warfare album which will be coming out on CD soon.  The Galaxy 2 Galaxy band has transformed into the Universe 2 Universe band and debuted at the Montreux Jazz Festival, the official public introduction happening at the TodaysArt Festival in Holland.  There have been some performances and soon a new EP will drop on them as well.  Then there’s the upcoming projects like Abandoned Buildings In Mono by Mad Mike, and later in 2008, Interstellar Fugitives 3 will be released. 

Two members have been doing double duty in Juan Atkins’ Model 500 band as well.  Mad Mike has done some remixes for Paul Randolph’s Lonely Eden CD.  Ray 7 just finished work with blues great Joe L. Carter for the soundtrack of a documentary detailing corruption in a Detroit suburb, and both Nomadico and Ray 7 have done a remix project with New York experimental jazz outfit Nublu Orchestra, and there are more projects in the works.  A lot of activity…

TTI: That UR is a movement committed to the downtrodden of Detroit is clear from your words and much of your history. Do you see UR’s most important contribution as offering hope through a career in music, or as a voice for the community?  Or do you think of it more as a platform to disseminate your ideas from?

Dex: Based on my own experience, I think it depends on the listener. UR and techno music stimulated my imagination and helped me realize there was more to life than short term pay-offs and accepting the reality that was handed to me. If my work serves as a catalyst for change in the mind of somebody listening, then my contribution is complete and the cycle continues.

TTI: It seems to me that music has often been the backdrop to social change, but rarely the cause. Do you agree with that, and what are the changes you can expect to bring about? Or maybe seeing UR as about music is an oversimplification?

Dex: I think we’re failing if we expect music alone to initiate change. The process is more like a feedback loop. Life’s beauty and brutality affects the musician, entering the creative process and through the musician’s inspiration and skill, these things are projected back out to the world in the form of music. I think this is what musician’s mean when they speak of just being a conduit for God or other metaphysical forces. We’re just part of a larger, chaotic process.

TTI: UR often speaks of their messages as “coded”. Why send coded messages, and who are they aimed at? Are you trying to spread confusion, and if so why? Or should we see the whole movement as having double meaning?

Atlantis: Reality itself has a double, triple plus meaning.  Scientists talk about genetic codes, and we talk about codes of behavior, knowing that one action means something very different to different people.  Language itself is a code for interpreting life and culture, which is where the concept of “lost in translation” comes from.  So yes, musical notes themselves are a code and yes, there is going to be confusion, but that’s the nature of chaos and life.

Dex: A coded message can be a track title or something in the track itself, even part of the arrangement. Encoding, encrypting and deciphering information is an art form; the Egyptians, Mayans and other cultures still have codes that we can not decipher. In UR, the act of coding or encoding is an art itself and if a listener chooses to appreciate the process as much as the message, then they are on our same wavelength.

TTI: You often mention your love of technology and its importance to your music. I wonder if you feel an affinity with artists like Autechre and Squarepusher, who have a similar view of the importance of musical technology, although they have a broadly white middle class fanbase.

Atlantis: We haven’t talked with either enough to say whether or not we share viewpoints on this.  But on the real side, the technology has given many producers the ability to create great works that before would’ve been far too costly for the average kid in the city to do otherwise, so a lot of the music you know and love would’ve been previously impossible on a financial level alone, thus technology has helped level the playing field on the musical level, but there is still a technology gap that threatens to move people away from each other culturally as well as economically.

The internet has many advantages for movements like yourselves who want to get a message out without the backing of corporate budgets. Do you think that having a strong identity like yours is important when there is so much “free floating” creativity on the internet?  By “free floating” I mean without context or background.

Dex: Yes, identity still matters. One of the biggest challenges to navigating the Internet is the constant noise that comes from spam, pop-up ads and cutting through the general information overload. The next wave of technology is filtering and customization, making the Internet fit to your likes and dislikes, it will take on your identity. So it is still important to know who UR.

TTI: The idea of big record labels manufacturing hits and controlling tastes is something you’ve spoken about at length. Do you feel the internet might change all that? Will people have to think for themselves more?

Dex: The internet is simply another form of media and there is a great deal of time and money being spent on how to control tastes and feed people junk through the internet.  A “toxic broadcast” isn’t just something that can happen on television or radio.  The benefit is that there are also many voices running contrary to that, working to open people’s eyes to the power they have to make decisions for themselves.  But as for people “having” to think for themselves, unfortunately, anyone who is determined to sabotage their own freedom and be led by another can and will be led.

Atlantis: This issue is an ongoing debate within UR. Although there are many more tools at our disposal to subvert dominant paradigms, not everyone has the time or willingness to learn these tools. So fundamentally our goal is still the same, using tones to stimulate thought and imagination so the youth can think beyond the ordinary.

TTI: Is it necessary to know about the background of UR to “get” your releases? Or do you feel that your music could be appreciated by someone who wasn’t aware of your aesthetic?

Dex: The basic idea is to keep it funky. I want the listener to feel something first and then take interest in the theory behind the sound.

TTI: What do you think of other musicians who have decided not to try and release music under their own terms? Do you think their creativity is inherently limited?

Atlantis: What do you think of other musicians who have decided not to try and release music under their own terms? Do you think their creativity is inherently limited?

Any real musician, whether or not they’re with a major label, creates their own terms for what they do, and how they do it.  Each person has to decide for his or her self what that means.  Anyone who would “decide” to not have any terms for what they do is a fool.  That goes for life in general, not just music.

Interview by Jimmy Tidey

Charles Thomson is a cofounder of the Stuckist art movement (www.stuckism.com) with Billy Childish. Billy has now left the movement, but it continues to grow, with 160 member groups in 40 countries. Both Billy Childish and Charles Thomson were in the “Medway Poets” group, which also included Tracy Emin.

They are famous for their demonstrations outside the Turner Prize ceremony and their actions have prompted an investigation by Charities Commission which led to an official rebuke of the Tate Modern. In another example of Charles’ tireless assault on the art establishment he ran for election against Chris Smith, who was at the time Culture Secretary. We spoke to him about the Stuckists as a movement.

Tracy Emin, Charles Thomson and Billy Childish in 1987,
all of whom were members of the Medway Poets.

TTI: In this issue of the magazine we’re trying to understand why some people start creative movements. Presumably most artists will have some guiding philosophy, but more often than not they’re happy letting that philosophy take a back seat to their work. Other artists, like yourself, feel the need to define their philosophy and invite others to subscribe to it. Was it simply your passion to show the errors of the mainstream art world that drove you to found Stuckism? Did you feel that the public couldn’t view your work without the context of Stuckism, or was there another reason that you founded the movement?

CT: It started for the same reason most art movements in the modern era have started, namely that a bunch of artists with a common ethos and practice thought they had something better to offer than the establishment and set about trying to promote their work and ideas. The dominant mode in the art world now is based on Marcel Duchamp’s idea that anything can be art if the artist says it is. If you subscribe to that, you will be able to fit in with the mainstream network of galleries, dealers, collectors, museums and critics. If you don’t, you will be marginalised. We reject Duchamp’s philosophy of anti-art, which has not invigorated but enervated art; instead we posit values of art.

The career-minded automatically walk the walk and talk the talk, which is transgression for the sake of it, i.e. adolescence. They work within the art code, as Matthew Collings has termed it. He wrote in Art Review in December 2004:
"The drift in the art world for years has been to come up with pseudo-popular forms for formerly (that is, in the 1970s) genuinely elitist or obscure conceptual art contents. But you can’t get it wrong - wrong popular is punished with sneers. (Grayson) Perry is right popular like Tracey Emin; both are victims of abuse, use text, do multi-styles and are willing to be embarrassing in a controlled context where the codes of the conceptual academy are confirmed. (The Stuckists are of course wrong popular: they do the fourth thing but only the first half of it.)”

It’s quite a skilled job to get the nuance just right, but people know when you have and when you haven’t. Matthew seems to think the Stuckists are trying to get it right, but are incompetently getting it wrong, which is remarkably unperceptive of him. In fact we know full well how to get it right, but we don’t want to. We deliberately get it wrong by using the art world as the butt of the joke, instead of letting it in on the joke. This requires a lot more finesse than actually getting it right.

Stuckists demonstrating at the Turner Prize in 2003.

It would not be very difficult to fit into the art world. Billy Childish, the co-founder of Stuckism with me in 1999 (he left in 2001), was offered shows in the Britart arena, but he wasn’t interested. Richard Cork, fomer art critic of The Times and staunch advocate of the current establishment, told me he thought I was something of a conceptualist. In fact I was given a conceptual art award by the Birmingham-based proto-Mu group for the Stuckist demos against the Turner Prize outside Tate Britain, which we’ve now done for seven years. Billy and I used to joke that we should announce the whole of Stuckism was a piece of conceptual art. Then Stuckism would be accepted.

If you look at individual Stuckist artists’ work, a lot of it could sit quite happily in the Sensation exhibition alongside Britart. However, that would bring out a particular aspect of the work which is not the most important aspect. When the work is exhibited alongside other Stuckist work, then it is read in a different, more appropriate and more meaningful, way. So the bottom line is that I found it necessary to set up the right context for my work and for the work of artists I had collaborated with over the years. It was just a question of presentation and the name Stuckism fitted the bill nicely. The most important thing is the work we’re doing, which existed a decade before Britart. Attacking the mainstream art world just happens by default, but is not of itself particularly important, apart from the fact it has brought a lot of attention to bear on Stuckism.

Charles Thomson’s Studio.

TTI: You have a twin role as an artist and a campaigner. Do you see yourself more as one or the other?

CT: I have many roles. Those are two of them. The main one is as a human being. But if you ask me to choose between artist and campaigner, then I would see myself as the former, even though a lot of the time I am doing more of the latter, mainly because there’s no one else to do it otherwise.

TTI: In a way your expert promotional skills and ability to garner attention for the Stuckists are the same skills that made the YBAs so prominent. Is that a tension, or an unfortunate necessity?

You’re right: they are the same skills, and I would rather it didn’t have to be that way, but I didn’t make the rules, although I have familiarised myself with them. I give full credit to Charles Saatchi and Damien Hirst, who changed the rules into what they are now. Before them, there was a more natural progression for an artist and a greater generosity from more established figures genuinely helping younger talent. This is evidenced, for example, by Peter Blake and Alan Jones, both of whom came along to the opening of the Stuckism International Gallery in Shoreditch in 2002. Peter asked me to sign the Stuckists book I gave him, though I said I felt it should be the other way round! Vision shifted with Britart into the competitive and exclusive marketing of a commercial product. Of course there’s always been that element in art, but a balance between that and art for its own sake was broken. You can no longer rely on the worth of your work to see you through. It is the worth of your PR, which can equally well promote a genius or a baked potato. Personally, I don’t want to promote baked potatoes.

There is one major difference in the exposure achieved by the Stuckists and the YBAs (apart from the fact we only get a fraction of what they do), because they were promoted by an advertising multi-millionaire with worldwide connections, and we have had to do the job ourselves with minimal resources. If Stuckism had the same backing, then it would already have easily achieved the aim of replacing Britart in this country and changing art worldwide. Even so, there are now Stuckist groups all round the globe and we are studied in many colleges in this country and abroad. When Saatchi adopted our ideas and paraphrased our manifesto to promote painting – thereby turning into a Stuckist – I wrote to him and suggested a partnership, but I didn’t get a reply, which is a grave loss for him, as it would have ensured the historical recognition he desires. Britart certainly won’t, as he has realised himself now by divesting himself of it, as we recommended some years previously.

The Stuckist Book.

TTI: You make some bold statements about the future of Stuckism, notably that it is as important as the renaissance. One obvious difference between previous phases in art and Stuckism is that no one ever sat down and thought “I should start something called the renaissance”. Is Stuckism going to be the first major cultural shift to be orchestrated?

CT: A lot of people throughout history have been very conscious in their intent to launch a new impetus into the world. The history of modern art is one of people doing exactly that time after time, and it is the same in other fields with figures like Karl Marx, who at one time was a loner in the British Library with an idea or two – and look what happened as a result. Ideas form – and a change in them can therefore transform – our reality.

The Mediaeval period was world-denying in favour of an unseen theological existence, shown in its flat iconic images with no interest in simulating material reality. The Renaissance reacted the other way until it reached a scientic materialism that believed only in material reality. Stuckism, and its projection of a cultural period of Remodernism, proposes a holistic synthesis of these, so material and spiritual achieve integration. That is the big idea. It is one drawn from Kabbalah, amongst other sources, such as Jungian psychology with the notion of conscious and unconscious in a dialogue towards self-knowledge, which Jung termed individuation. New movements are brought about by a cumulation of historic forces, but certain individuals or groups are in a position to understand and articulate them publicly, which probably gives those people a bit more kudos than they really merit.

Seven Years of Stuckism by Paul Harvey.

TTI: Do you think you romanticise the role of art? Money and religious imperatives have been motivations in much art that is considered great. The common thread of your manifestos seems to be art as honesty of expression. Has this ever been prevalent in art?

CT: Romanticism is the polarity of the equal delusion of classicism: it is only when they are brought together that you get resolution. Motivation is different to achievement and not necessarily relevant to it. Great art exists despite the mercenary aspects and religious dogma, not because of it, and has qualities that transcend the purported purpose. That element of honesty is at the core of any art worth having. If it’s not there, you can only have fantasy (aka fashion), which over time fails to engage or fulfil. In addition to financial and religious imperatives, you could list mythological imperatives, vanity, novelty etc., and again great art asserts itself despite all of this. The best model in Western art for today is the Post-Impressionist period. It was a point where certain limitations were removed (e.g. the camera replaced the need for art to depict the outer world realistically) and conflicting forces came into balance, since vision and communication had not yet degenerated into randomness and titillation. An integrity was achieved, to a certain extent by accident. Stuckism takes that on with a conscience intent, having seen, in the subsequent development of Modernism, how disasterous it can be if you don’t. That development has been a kaleidoscope of blind alleys, and the amount of people who have piled into them doesn’t change that reality.

Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision,
2000, painting by Charles Thomson.

TTI: Stuckists are not fans of the “postmodern”. Leaving aside the bullshit that’s written about it, one seemingly undeniable aspect of postmodernism is the death of mass culture. Isn’t this just a technological fact? Can Stuckism turn the clock back on postmodern communication methods such as the internet? Or are you primarily concerned with other aspects of postmodernism?

CT: Postmodernism is the inevitable consequence of the way Modernism developed, which was a series of idealistic extremes. Extremes contain their own inbuilt destruction, while idealism always leads to disillusionment and cynicism, the core of Postmodernism, which has seen too many visionary beliefs fail to be able to have one any more. All that is left is the instantly attainable, which is celebrity and commercial success, with a desperate need to neurotically and ironically recycle the ruins of the past as the only apparent recourse to avert futility. Remodernism sees what can be used positively from history, which Postmodernism doesn’t because it sees only the surface.

Ella Guru.

There is mass culture today in a way that has never existed in the world before. You can find Coca Cola and MacDonald’s everywhere, not to mention satellite TV and the World Cup. However, I don’t see this as Postmodernism. It is Popularism, which is the entertainment of the masses (I don’t intend this derogatively) as it has always existed throughout history. Postmodernism, like Modernist culture, has cut itself off from mainstream society and exists for an elite group. It has bypassed most people because it doesn’t relate to them and they don’t relate to it, except as an oddity and a joke. Their defence mechanisms are firmly and sensibly in place against assessing a rectangle of bricks as anything more significant than bricks in a rectangle, or a shark in a tank as anything other than a tank with a shark in it.

The internet has made the esotericism of Postmodernism even more irrelevant than it was already. Postmodernism’s brief unsavoury moment of minor importance has been outmoded by the democratisation of the popular voice on the world wide web. The internet is part of the Stuckist proposal of Remodernism with its honesty, communication and openness. Stuckism has no interest in turning any clock anywhere, backward or forwards. It has an interest in being now. The first Stuckist activity in 1999 was to set up a web site, thanks to the abilities of Ella Guru. Stuckism has spread, primarily through the web to over 160 groups in 40 countries, and Edward Lucie-Smith has deemed it the first art movement to spread via the internet. Saatchi’s use of the web marks a radical departure from his previous history of showing the backwater of the so-called “cutting edge”. His opening up the Saatchi Gallery web site to all who wish to display their work again follows the example of Stuckism, which has allowed any interested artists to form their own independent group. This is Remodernism, not Postmodernism. That doesn’t mean, by the way, that there can’t be a qualitative assessment of art. Everyone can be an artist, just as everyone can be a brain surgeon, but some people happen to do it better than others.

Punk Victorian Exhibition, Walker Art Gallery, for the 2004 Liverpool Biennial.

TTI: It seems to me that the kind of activity you are engaged in – having a manifesto as a context for your art – will be increasingly important when there is no “mainstream” culture (if you think that’s an important trend). Do you think artists will feel an increasing need to articulate their philosophy?

CT: Our real manifesto is the work. Unfortunately the art establishment has a very limited capacity to see things for what they are any more, having spent so long convincing themselves that things are something which they’re not, so we had to write a manifesto to make it plain to them they we do not agree with what they’re saying. There is no need for such a manifesto for the general public, who are quite capable of seeing things for what they are. We had a major show, The Stuckists Punk Victorian, at the Walker Art Gallery during the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. It was extended from two to five months and described by the museum as “a really, really popular show and very successful”. Good art speaks for itself, addresses human concerns shared by others, and communicates in a way that people can relate to. It also works on different levels, and I’m not saying everyone gets everything about it, although there is an intuitive connection nevertheless. Nor am I saying that everyone will like it or that such popularity is the only thing that counts, as there have been times in history when this has not happened. But I am saying it is a relevant consideration now.

Not only is Matt the author of six novels, his latest, Cherry, being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004, he’s also the co-author of All Hail the New Puritans, a literary compilation aimed at bringing authenticity back to the British literary scene. But despite having released six books in little over seven years, Matt has been quiet of late. We catch up with him and see what’s in the pipeline.

TTI: So, your starter for ten points, and it’s an easy one: tell us about your new book! It’s been three years since your last novel was published, quite a gap for an author who’s managed to average a book a year for most of his career. Do you see your latest novel as a progression of the themes of your earlier books, or have you taken time out to make a clean break with your past work?

MT: OK, my new novel is called Privacy. It’s about a fifty-something child psychotherapist who is invited to Sweden to investigate a phenomenon called ‘apatiska barn.’ This is a true syndrome where two hundred refugee children in the last ten years have entered comas after coming to Sweden. No one knows what causes it—some people say traffic exhaustion, others the normal trials of starting in a new country, the climate, etc. But the experience of investigating this phenomenon brings to the surface all the emotional problems the psychiatrist has been experiencing, primarily his difficult relationship with his depressed daughter and his interest in one of his teenage patients whose father is in prison for assisting the suicide of a teenage student. It’s a very dark book and deals with subjects (suicide, depression, sadomasochism, sexual extremity) that seem to make people very uneasy. It doesn’t really connect with my previous novels at all, but it is a continuation of some of the themes I have addressed in short stories over the years. If all goes to plan, I’d like to follow up the novel with a book of short stories called Paying My Friends For Sex, which is a companion piece to Privacy in a way.

TTI: It seems that you’ve developed a penchant for creating quirky, slightly oddball characters, from romance obsessed film buffs to lonely foreign language teachers. Would you say you’re striving for greater realism in your stories, and creating characters who have more depth than the average character in a novel?

MT: People often attack realist fiction as being boring, or unimaginative, or even suggest that ‘realist fiction’ as a concept doesn’t even make sense. But for me, very few novels or films feel realistic, and I want to find a way of addressing that in my fiction. For me, the challenge of writing novels is to find a way to depict characters and situations that a reader will feel is realistic, but then push it into dramatic areas, without the reader ever feeling that I’ve manipulated them. I find real life endlessly strange, and the most autobiographical scenes I write are always the ones that readers don’t believe actually happened.

TTI: Many of your characters seem to be defective in some way — The extent to which Steve Ellis goes to to secure his love for Cherry is perhaps the most obvious example, but even in Eight Minutes Idle, Dan, the seemingly ordinary narrator, has a conviction for GBH and manages to starve a perfectly innocent cat to death… yet we’re usually invited to symapthise with your characters, particularly when we get inside their heads. Is ‘damage’ a key ingredient in the motivations for your characters, and does it make a difference to how we view them?

MT: I don’t think my characters are damaged, but certainly lots of readers have found the behaviour of some of my characters disturbing. The two you mention, Dan and Steve, are the ones that most people have problems with, and the reactions to both seem to split into two: some people get cross because they’ve identified with someone whose capable of murder (whether of an animal in Eight Minutes Idle, or a person in Cherry), whereas other people just hate them from the beginning. It’s funny, though, even Gerald in Child Star, who is a relatively kind person, was attacked by critics for not having enough sex. I’m interested in how people judge fictional characters. Most novels are like American films are supposed to be: you immediately know who the good guy is, who the villain is, etc. Or there’s a twist where you’re led to like someone who turns out to be evil. But almost all of my characters are capable of both good and evil. When I wrote my children’s books, I tried to carry this idea into genre fiction. In each novel, it becomes harder and harder to know who to trust. And in Eight Minutes Idle, it was strange because some readers were more upset that Dan betrayed his friend Teri than anything else in the book, whether it was killing a cat or being convicted of GBH. I think I must be a bit of a sociopath because sometimes I’m genuinely astonished by readers’ reactions. For example, a reader said to me that the final scene of Pictures of You was the most shocking thing he’d read because the narrator abandons a person with broken arms in a car accident, while for me that was a perfectly reasonable response to the awful experiences he’d been put through in the rest of the book as a result of that person’s previous behaviour.

TTI: Of course, every novel has to be viewed in the context of the time in which it was written, certainly from a critical point of view. It’s rarely possible to separate the concerns of the times from the concerns of the characters in the book. What do you feel your concerns are at the moment, and how have they filtered down into your writing?

MT: It’s interesting, I’ve always argued how important it is for contemporary fiction to be connected to the era in which it’s written, but sometimes the era can change on you while you’re writing a book. The most dramatic case of this for me was 9/11. My novel Pictures of You came out on the 12th September, 2001 and the world had changed irreversibly. So that novel became immediately redundant, even though it’s my favourite of my books.

It makes sense that your concerns as a writer will evolve over time. When the New Puritan manifesto was published, it was never intended to be the sort of statement that would nail anyone’s trousers to the mast in terms of writing in a certain way forever.

TTI: How do you feel your own writing style has developed over the years? Does practice make perfect, or do you feel its that you’re reinventing yourself with each new book?

Well, you’re absolutely right about the New Puritans: the whole point was that it was a one-off experiment. I usually feel my books come in pairs, and then I reinvent myself. So Eight Minutes Idle was a development of the themes and style of Tourist, Pictures of You was an attempt to rewrite Dreaming of Strangers in a darker vein, and Cherry was a response to the criticisms of Child Star. Privacy is the beginning of a new cycle. But I don’t think practice makes perfect, I think sometimes you’re in a good phase and sometimes you’re not.

TTI: We’ve also exchanged words with Charles Thomson of the Stuckist movement in this issue of the magazine. The Stuckists created not one but several manifestos to suit their needs. Have you ever considered laying out your ideas in a manifesto again, or has that idea now served its purpose? Is it important to make bold statements in contemporary British fiction to get the attention of the publishing industry, particularly when so much of its resources are diverted to ‘big name’ authors like Martin Amis or fashionable novels like Malkani’s Londonstani ?

MT: I’m not sure I could go through something like the New Puritans again. I think one manifesto is fine, but if you keep coming up with them it can seem like you’re just publicity-seeking and you can become more well-known for coming up with manifestos than doing your work. I don’t really care about the successes or failures of other people’s books any more. It used to seem obscene to me that critics could go on saying Martin Amis was one of Britain’s greatest authors when he was producing novels like Yellow Dog, but now I think, who cares? It does irritate me that it’s getting harder and harder for quieter novelists to continue their careers, but I can’t get worked up about people paying lots of money for debuts. Londonstani’s a perfectly good book, in its own way.

TTI: Finally, is it important to state your aims — or at least make them highly visible — for every book you write, or are you happy to let the reader make up his own mind? Have you always striven for clarity in your work or is it always going to be the case that you can’t herd cats – or, for that matter, lead your readers?

MT: I always strive for clarity in my book, but only of prose. I like to keep my aims secret. Most of my novels have come into being for completely perverse reasons. I like to experiment with plot and narrative and character, but it’s important for me that the reader is hooked by a straightforward style. But I’ve no interest in trying to make the reader like my characters, or my books, for that matter.