“What’s the price, Tel?”
Nige looks pleased with himself. This may be because it’s Friday; the Farmers is open late; there’s a pleasant mix of hoary locals and slightly slumming it young folks, and Alex who’s been asleep or dead every night here for the past many years, pewter tankard always half full. Despite the buzz, there is no one behind the bar on account of Jackie is on one of her many fag breaks out back; but out back with the door open to keep an eye out for customers, which means cigarette smoke wafts up our nostrils making us nostalgic for the days when pubs smelt of fags and not an unsettling mixture of disinfectant and damp wood.
We are sitting at a table for once, since Nige dropped a hammer on his foot a few days back. We had been talking about the utter patheticness of shooting parties, since Nige had encountered one of them on a job in a big house in Sevenoaks recently. But I thought we’d switched to fantasy writing and I had a few ideas I wanted to put past him.
“Well, I suppose it’s whatever the fantasy novel costs,” I say.
He shakes his head sadly. “I don’t mean that kind of price. It’s like those shooting idiots: the cost to each of ’em is several thousand quid for a bleedin’ gun, then a couple of grand for a day’s shooting on Madonna’s estate or wherever, just so they can bag a few birds what they could have bought for a tenner in Sainsbury’s and not busted their teeth on shot when they troughed them. I mean what’s the price for becoming one of said twats?”
I sense a trap. Saying ‘They give up their souls’ is too obvious.
“That you become a killer whether or not you think you are,” I say.
“Well, I was going to say ‘twat’ but the principle’s the same. Thing is, everyone becomes what they do, not what they think they are.”
“So, instead of a working class sage, you’re really a brush full of Wickes’ magenta soaking in a pint of Foster’s.”
“And you’re a set of suspiciously soft fingers tap-dancing across a keyboard stained with sweat, whisky and Pic’s peanut butter.”
“I do like a nice dollop of Pic’s on toast.”
“No, what’s the price for a fantasy reader, Tel? Someone who spends hours every day dunking his noodle into a bucket of dragons, knights and implausibly well-bosomed princesses?”
“I know what you want me to say. That if he spends all that time fantasising about fantasy then that’s what he’ll become.”
“Not exactly. I said what’s the ‘price’, not what’s the obvious danger.”
One of the reasons I like these conversations with Nige is that his thoughts don’t feel obliged to run along the usual channels. When I’m with other writers, while we all believe we’re being original with our comments, in fact we tend to follow whatever’s the latest genre thinking. Maybe that’s our price.
I look at Alex, hair and beard entirely silver now; a long way from the rich auburn I remember from when I first saw him in here. His eyes are half closed, head bowed. I don’t know if he’s listening to the conversations around him or dreaming of Before. Whatever it is, it’s the price he’s paid and he’s now determined by it; will die by it.
It’s not reading fantasy, exactly, that’s the price. After all, any form of fiction is fantasy after a fashion. But perhaps the price is that you’re reading someone else’s story; not your own.
“You know,” I say, “I’ve never wanted to do crosswords and now I think I know why. It’s because it means putting myself in thrall to someone else’s brain. I can only write exactly the words he wants me to write; and can only follow the clues he’s given me.”
Nige is nodding knowingly, looking something like a young hippy Don Juan. Perhaps I should offer to buy him some mescal-flavoured crisps.
“The price is mental slavery,” he says, “because it’s not your fantasy you’re submerging yourself into. You can’t help but become the story-teller’s whore.”
“Which says it’s better to be a fantasy writer than a fantasy reader?”
“I’m not so sure,” he says. “I read one of them rare bad reviews of the new Star Wars movie the other day. It said something like, ‘This film gives us exactly what we want instead of showing us something we didn’t know we wanted until we saw it’. And in that scenario it’s difficult to see who’s the whore and who’s the paying banger.”
“So, with most fantasy, both the writer and the reader are simply switching positions, screwing each other for mutual needs?”
“Well, I always thought Star Wars was bleedin’ crap anyway. The first film is like watching a bunch of pantomime actors let loose on a movie set, imagining that they’re saying something worthwhile but doing nothing much more than staring at the scenery meaningfully and pretending to believe you could ever get such a thing as an autistic robot what can’t walk straight.”
“The price is creativity,” I say. “Not just the author’s but the reader’s too. I mean, if we were to listen to any of the conversations in this place, they’d all be ritualistic, kind of comforting, rather than creative. And if you look for more of that in your fiction, well . . . ”
“In that case, Tel,” he says, “creativity is the last thing that’s going to sell.”
I feel I’ve been in this trap many times. The fundamental driving force behind my need to tell stories is – at least I’ve always told myself it is – to be original, thought-provoking, different. But how often am I like that in my day-to-day life? And if the answer is not very much then how can I turn on creativity only when it suits me, when writing fiction?
“I know that expression,” says Nige, standing, having spotted that the draft from the open back door has stopped and with it the fag fume gusts. He points to my glass in such a way that isn’t a question but a confirmation. “You’re now worrying that you’re nothing but a phoney.”
“Something like that.”
He taps the side of his nose.
“Cocaine-flavour crisps?” I say. “Why not?”
When he returns, he puts down our pints and says, “Are you a good writer?”
“No, I’m a very good writer.”
“Do you sell in Potteresque quantities?”
“Not even Bunteresque quantities – and now, not then.”
He shrugs. “There’s your answer. You’re a creative writer.”
“Hang on; that’s far too simple.”
“Not really. If a writer ain’t selling much it means either they’re crap or they’re too creative.”
“Or they’ve got no idea how to promote themselves.”
There’s something of the expanse of the New Mexico desert in his gaze, which somehow makes the non-creative yakking around us fade temporarily into so much verbal tumbleweed.
“Most people’s tastes are stupid,” he says, “wilfully so. They can’t be bothered to think; can’t be arsed to put together a creative scenario in their heads; to take a punt on meaning. It didn’t always used to be like that. I remember ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. That was a film that didn’t lay it on a plate for the audience. I still ain’t got a clue what it means but I also can’t forget it. It wasn’t too many years later, though, that space movies became cowboy yarns where the effeminate city slicker is replaced by a gay robot and the bad guys wear black helmets instead of black hats. And the really sad thing is there are blokes in their forties out there what believe that such tossed-off tosh has meaning for their lives.”
“But stupid’s where the money is,” I say.
“Pity you ain’t stupid then, Tel.”
I think about Match of the Day for some reason then. Which I will watch when I get back to our street, feeling somewhat smug that I’ve managed not to learn the scores. But just how stupid is football?
“The point is,” I say, “that we’re all stupid most of the time. But until recently, a lot of people read books or watched movies because they weren’t stupid; because escape for them was to be inside a created work where they could think and expand their imaginations. But ever since writers realised that stupid pays, those fantasy worlds are really the same as the so-called real world, just dressed up in fancy costumes.”
“Exactly,” he says, “when did you last hear Dr Who say anything more profound than ‘Quantum blah blah, here’s my sonic soddin’ screwdriver which is the answer to everything, including why all these gorgeous young chicks want to have sex with me which I would if it weren’t for the bleedin’ fact it’s supposed to be a kids’ programme’?”
I drink my beer and wonder if Chelsea will have finally got their act together for this season.
“Here’s to stupid,” I say, raising my glass.
He raises his. “Here’s to hoping the other side of stupid will pay again some day.”