Interview: Simon Lamoon on classical music and the dark side of artificial intelligence and social media in his debut novel, The Gentleman of Bath. Congratulations on the forthcoming publication of The Gentleman of Bath. How is it all going? It seems to be going well, and it’s interesting going through the process. There are lots of bits to do to get to the finishing line of actually getting a book printed. I am very much looking forward to seeing the final product. What did revision look like for this project? How many drafts did you write in total? The first draft was very raw, and I practically rewrote it three times. I needed to get all the little scenarios set up to make a continuous narrative through the differing points of view. They aren’t exactly points of view but effectively the influence of a “mover and shaker” taking the story forward. Getting back to your question I wrote four complete drafts then a number of grammar a spell-checking sessions too numerous to mention. The novel centres on the unlucky protagonist, Richard Hoy, a newly retired banker whose previously monotonous life descends into chaos thanks to the rather diabolical scheming of his wife. The story revolves around the activities of the Bath Sharpe Quartet, the dark side of artificial intelligence and social media. What inspired you to write The Gentleman of Bath? A few years ago I was having lunch with a colleague at a financial institution near Bath when he mentioned to me that he had tickets to a ball at a big country house for himself, his wife and her friend. He was moaning that he couldn’t go as his wife had broken her leg. I replied in my glib manner, “Why don’t you just take her friend?” He calmly responded, “That would be instant divorce.” Walking back to my desk I thought, what if she wants a divorce? And breaking her leg was an excuse to get my colleague caught up in a supposed affair. It wasn’t the case in actuality. The thoughts were just a product of my over active imagination. I put that idea to one side until I was working on internet fraud systems and I realised social media was the perfect place to “stitch someone up.” Are you a classical music fan? Yes, to be honest I am a general music fan, including prog rock (which I know is uncool to admit). My children all joined youth choirs, and my son took piano up to grade eight. His increasing knowledge of music started to rub off on me and I became interested in the structures of classical music, including the different instrumentation. I have always liked the musical complexities of prog rock and the way they take influences from classical. Did you write the novel with a general outline or ending in mind? I knew what I wanted to include about different aspects of social media manipulation and the ability for AI to fake what we can see. I also knew how it was going to end. Instead of the plot being a didactic set of dos and don’ts about serious issues I thought the implied messages would be better illustrated through satirical humour. I needed to dream up ludicrous scenarios focused on certain fraudulent and manipulative activities from the real world. Where is home for you? Hertfordshire, I have lived in a small market town for the past thirty years, which is an easy commute into London where most of my work has been. I live there with my wife, three children, and two mini dachshunds. Where and when do you write? I have a very messy study from which I do a lot of working from home and writing. The writing tends to happen at weekends when I can get a good run at it. It takes me a lot of time to get into the writing zone. I can’t dip in and out for an hour or so like others seem to be able to do. What’s next for you? I am working on a sequel to Gentleman which tackles aspects of fraud that is not specifically internet based. These are to do with social manipulation, organised fraud, and account takeovers. I couldn’t include these in The Gentleman of Bath as it would make the plot unfocused. I have a few other projects I want to start which include a set of slightly uncanny short stories, which I have called “Commutables” and are stories told by a regular group of commuters. There will be someone telling a story going into town and then out. So there will be ten in total The Gentleman of Bath will be published in March by Foreshore Publishing. Photo by Josep Molina Secall on Unsplash ABOUT THE AUTHOR Simon Lamoon is an English novelist and satirist who writes under the pseudonym H. H. Bard. In a long career in the IT and finance industries, he’s worked as a designer of fraud prevention and anti-money laundering systems, among other things.
“The pace of time frightens me”: novelist Phil M. Shirley on heavy rock bands, the heroin- esque music of Bill Evans, the troubled history behind his first novel The Rivers That Run Through Us, his new poetry collection, The Happening of Magic, and his forthcoming novel Love Leads to Madness. Interview Elan Kabisch The author’s current novel is inspired by his love of the River Thames, particularly the stretch of water than runs through East London. He talks about his journey from sportswriter to novelist – and why he misses his home on the Isle of Dogs. “I keep coming back here, well periodically anyway. I hate the place because it reminds me of when I was last settled.” We’re at the Coach & Horses pub in Greenwich market, in the company of a colourful cluster of market stalls and cacophony of tastes and smells. English novelist Phil M. Shirley, visiting his former “thinking ground” for a reading from his latest book, the poetry collection The Happening of Magic – his first foray into the “difficult art”, and his tenth published work. It’s an irresistible read, running the gauntlet from limericks and ballads to free verse and odes and from confessional writing to urban myths and legends. It’s also a deeply personal and thought provoking work largely set in and around the Isle of Dogs, as is his first novel The Rivers That Run Through Us, and full of the author’s trademark darkly comic, and unorthodox style– so the chaotic market hall, a stone’s throw from the River Thames, makes a fittingly immersive interview location. We dart between reviews for The Rivers That Run Through Us, which have been immensely flattering, and the looming “six-zero.” “I sometimes forget just how much writing I’ve done, in terms of actual published books,” he says, “perhaps because most of them are forgettable.” This is far from false modesty, rather the honest observation of a writer driven by a “deep, unrelenting ache” to get better at “the craft.” “I’m not prolific, not in the slightest,” he says. “I envy those writers blessed with high speed and high output. I’ve got half-a-dozen works-in-progress, all novels, but I’m slow and the pace of time frightens me. It’s the big six-zero at the end of this year. It’s become much, much less of a big deal than it used to be. I don’t really care anymore. In fact, in many respects, I’m happier, with myself, than I’ve ever been. One good thing about getting older is the option to divorce the ego. I don’t miss mine and without it life is an easier road to travel, although the passage of time is a relentless bastard. The last thing I remember I was writing The Soul of Boxing in 1998 and thinking a six month deadline was a lifetime. The next minute, someone is asking me to consider publishing an updated 25th anniversary edition.” There was a long break between his last work for HarperCollins, The Soul of Boxing in the autumn of 1999, and his next published work The Rivers That Run Through Us, his debut novel in 2023. It was lockdown that returned Shirley’s imagination and passion to creative writing. “I consider The Soul of Boxing as one of my better works. It was longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year. That and Blood & Thunder, which I more or less wrote at the same time, were good to me, in terms of sales and reviews,” he reflects. “But I was burned out. Eight books in three years, plus a huge amount of writing for magazines and newspapers. I went ‘corporate’ for a while, a cog in a propaganda machine.” In 2019, Shirley was offered a job ghost-writing for an oil company and ended up in East London, by the River Thames with a view of the office, in Canary Wharf, as a daily reminder of “selling out.” And then the oil company went into lockdown after an employee experiencing flu-like symptoms was tested for coronavirus. This was February 2020. “I was grateful for the pandemic,” he says. “I fell in love with the isolation and the river. And I thought: now I can write again. A lot of other stuff, life situations, had happened. Writing The Rivers That Run Through Us was a cathartic release. Greenwich was my thinking ground and a ghost town, although you could still get a pint outside .” The Trafalgar Tavern, a Victorian riverside pub where the Thames laps up at the windows, came up with an order-by-text outdoor bar system. “A handful of rebels drinking on the cobbles watching the river, cold and lonely and devoid of any human activity. Only the Gulls and Cormorants to witness the ritual.” The Rivers That Run Through Us, a wonderfully bizarre and haunting narrative about five tormented brothers who are grappling with love, loss, and existential dread, was initially signed by a well-known New York publisher but the project ran into trouble, some of it Shirley’s own fault and the rest…well that’s another story for another day. “I’m gagged now and was gagged then. But it worked out well, in the end.” Shirley was asked to re-write parts of the novel to make it “less culturally abrasive.” He refused and, after a lengthy tug-of-war with New York lawyers, wrestled back the rights and found a new home for the work. “Some may call it censorship,” he says. “It is what it is.” Now 59, Shirley has spent enough time plying his trade for an indifference to politics to seep beneath his skin. A stint “working for Hollywood” confronted him with the “darker forces” of the craft, as both an author and screenwriter. “It was extraordinary,” he recalls. “Very exciting, but utterly frustrating.” His time as a contracted author for HarperCollins was “the best thing in the world,” he tells me. “It launched my career,” he says. “I was raw and the experience fashioned me into a half-decent writer.” He longed to be a
English writer and adventurer Emily Chance talks to us about her enthralling novel, Hermes. The book is called Hermes. Perhaps we should start by talking about the origin and the significance of the title. Hermes is the herald of the Gods. He is the protector of human heralds and travellers. The title operates on many levels with several messengers in the different epochs and of course, the sea creatures are sacred in Hermes world. Using the turtles in the story came from my love of Scuba Diving and the more general ecological message but they play back into the legend of Hermes and Hermes is also a trickster which resonates in the narrative on two levels. I wanted to start by asking if you had the title before you started writing this one? I did and what is odd about the choice, like so many elements of the book, is the synchronicity of the story and why it is called Hermes became more persuasive. What is the theme of Hermes? Oh dear, there are so many, but the central one is we make our way into the heavens to a place that has always known humanity; intimately. They already have a view of us. In Hermes, you explore the essence of what it is to be human. Do you think human beings are ready psychologically and socially to be led (by a greater intelligence) away from their “dark ending?” As the years go by, I become more and more certain we are not. I wrote this book in 2022 and the reality of it, the type of person who would sponsor a mission and that would set out for another world, humanity’s inability to speak with a single voice, state-sponsored industrial espionage, has only increased, life is imitating art. Are you gloomy or optimistic about the future in terms of the way we’re learning, or not, from past mistakes? Do you think we’re hardwired to self-destruct? Do you think it’s time to pause? Pause and soon Are there any experiences that shaped or informed the writing of this book? In each epoch, there are particular ones. Living In New Zealand and learning about the culture, inspired me to begin the story in a location on the Northwest Coast of the South Island among ancient man and their beliefs so nobly expressed in the Polynesian Tribal leader Nikau. My love of the history of Anglo-Saxon and Tudor England which I studied at GCSE A levels, a long time ago. Living in Abu Dhabi has made me intimately aware of the vision of the Sheiks which is beginning to emerge in a vision for a Cultural District, where I live, and extraordinary museums like the Louvre Abu Dhabi which is a location in my book. The hard-working ex-pat communities particularly the Indian one, which is reflected in the opening pages of Movement Three with the death of Elizabetha Chandrika’s father who hails from Kerala. The empty quarter of the Liwa Desert where Space City is located. Tell us a little about your writing process. I write very fast, the spine of the stories of my books are written in about six weeks. I do all my research first and then dip into it for clarification as I go through it. Once the spine of the story is written I polish and rewrite and polish endlessly. Hermes’s first draft was finished in six weeks, but I have spent two years bringing it to the standard it is at today. During that period, I use a reading group some of whom do line-by-line analysis others more general feedback and one in particular proofreads. My location is very important. All of my books have been written in Abu Dhabi and the polishing in Lombok and The Forest of Bowland. What characterises all three locations is I have no distractions. When it comes to this sort of writing, who are you influenced by? I am a very cinematic writer, indeed my writing emerged out of frustrations with certain films. Hermes was influenced by 2001 A Space Odyssey. I wanted to have that relationship with an enigmatic intelligence but tell the story in fine historical detail. So, when an author said to me it reminded them of 2001 but goes much further, I was very satisfied. I see my books as page-turners, so my love of early Wilbur Smith is in there or Dan Brown. I love Hardy, Haggard, Rooney, Fleming but I am not sure they get into my books. I think the film Lion In Winter gets into Hermes. A real love of music underscores the pages of the book. How is music important to you? What music meant the most to you growing up? Music is the soundtrack to my life it’s with me all the time. When I sit down for supper when I am sat under the stars, I play music throughout the day at home in Abu Dhabi. It is a constant oral embrace. Growing up I was a post-Beatles fan so all the music which embraced Jazz, Classical Folk was important to me. The band that took me from pop music to Bartok, Sibelius, Stravinsky the Guitar work of Bream and the Choral music of Byrd was Yes, the hugely successful progressive rock band of the seventies. I still love Fairport Convention for their storytelling and English Tradition, that flavour of Englishness fascinates me Can you tell us anything about what’s next for Emily Chance? The follow-through novel to Hermes is written, called Angelia. It needs a little bit of proofing, but it was written in 2023 in response to the excitement of Foreshore agreeing to publish Hermes. Like Hermes, it is prescient, horribly so, written before the October 2023 attack on Israel and its tragic aftermath. I am currently writing “Isosceles.” It was inspired by the opening scene of a movie directed by Ridley Scott in 2012, Prometheus. Hermes by Emily Chance is published by Foreshore in February in paperback.
