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Toby Litt |
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Toby Litt is the author of the alphabetically arranged Adventures in Capitalism, Beatniks, Corpsing, deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism, Finding Myself, Ghost Story, Hospital, I Play the Drums in a Band Called okay and Journey into Space. In 2003, he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. He was the winner of the 2009 Manchester Fiction Prize. He is a regular on Radio 3’s The Verb. You can visit Toby Litt's own website at www.tobylitt.com.
A film adaptation of King Death, co-written by Toby Litt, is being produced by Alexandra Stone (Young Adam, Kidulthood). It will be directed and co-written by Gerald McMorrow (Franklyn).
Is this Hospital or is this Hell? Toby Litt gives us a guided tour...
NEUROLOGY
I had the idea for Hospital back in 2001. It arrived in the form of an image: of a gurney being wheeled into an A&E department. I jotted down an opening paragraph, and then put it aside for a long time. But I knew that I wanted to write a big novel set in a hospital, just as I knew – at another time – that I wanted to write a ghost story. What wasn't so clear was how the idea should be developed. Slowly, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to map the whole of the building – twenty-six floors above ground and six below. And that I wanted the reader to know what was going on with lots of different people in lots of different places. Also, I knew that the inter-cutting between scenes had to be as fast as possible.
INTENSIVE CARE
The writing of the book came in two definite stages. First was what you might call a splurge, where it all came out in a huge vomit of stuff; second was – to continue that metaphor beyond the point of tastefulness – the clean-up. This involved using a large noticeboard to keep track of the hundreds of different scenes. There's a picture of it here.
ACCIDENT & EMERGENCY
I am very reluctant to do research. Usually, if I know too much about something, I completely lose interest in writing about it. But I am quite patient and, in the end, things have a tendency to come to me. The main person who helped me with medical details in Hospital was Dr Ian McCrea, who I met by accident at a wedding reception.
Another accident was the character Melanie Angel. I wouldn't have dared use such a thematically useful name. But there are these Immortality Auctions, where people can bid to be included in a writer's next book. Because I had so many characters in Hospital, I put myself up twice. And on the second occasion, the top bidder was Melanie Angel's husband. He is a football agent, and had just been involved in a bit of a controversy, so we decided between us that it was better if I used her name – otherwise, football fans would recognise him as a real person. The top bidder in the other auction was Peter Dixon. I decided to put the two of them together and, so they couldn't reproach me for making them disreputable, I made them both police officers. Hence PC Dixon and WPC Angel, who are fairly major characters.
CARDIOLOGY
This book is very close to my heart. And brain. And spinal column. It's an attempt to go all the way into a great subject, and everything that involves. The subtitle of the book is 'A Dream-Vision'. I did want it to belong to that very old genre, obey those rules, but also to have that quality of phantasmagoria.
OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH
I don't have a routine any more. I've become a father twice over in the past three years, so I now have to fit my work around childcare. To begin with, I worked whilst my first son slept. But that was on another book. I only got back to Hospital seriously after he was about six months old.
OUTPATIENTS
There were a vast number of influences on Hospital, because, culturally, hospitals are everywhere. I tried to make a list. It's here.
SPEECH AND LANGUAGE THERAPY
I've ended up doing quite a lot of creative writing teaching. Since the autumn, I've been teaching undergraduates at the University of Westminster. It's good to see people develop over a longer period – previously, with residential courses and one-day events – I've mostly taught in short bursts. I'm still in touch with some of the students on these courses. I hope they'll end up being published.
There's a quote from me stuck on the spine of Steven Hall's novel The Raw Shark Texts. ('Fast, sexy, intriguing, intelligent – The Raw Shark Texts is all these and more: a cult waiting to happen, a blockbuster begging to be made. Steven Hall is a truly fantastic storyteller. Investigate, now!') I met him after I did an event in Hull about Cult Books, on which I write a regular column for this website
We kept in touch and, eventually, Ali Smith and I included a very short story by him in the New Writing 13 anthology. Then, when he was looking for a publisher for The Raw Shark Texts, he sent it to me, and I thought it was brilliant. I gave him the quote to help make publishers take notice – and Canongate certainly did.
As part of the Hospital Visits tour I'm doing, going to about ten British universities, I am inviting creative writing students to give me some of their work. In return for buying a copy of Hospital (seems only fair they read something of mine, after all), I'll read their story or novel excerpt or whatever, and get back to them with some constructive criticism. At the end of the tour, and when I've managed to read all the pieces, I'll choose whoever I think is best and their work will go up on the Hamish Hamilton website. Also, I'll introduce them to my agent and publisher. I'm hoping to find another Steven.
ANTENATAL
I'm almost finished with the book to follow Hospital. Which, alphabetically, is I – and is titled I Play the Drums in a Band Called okay. For those who have been paying close attention, okay appeared in two stories in Exhibitionism. I Play the Drums in a Band Called okay is a novel in short stories, following the band as they try to grow up in public.
EXIT
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Toby Litt, 'one of the foremost young lions of British hip-lit' (Guardian) takes us to the black, brutal heart of childhood in deadkidsongs. Equally exciting and terrifying, this is a journey into casual, youthful violence and gang mentality. In an exclusive interview, we asked Toby his thoughts on childhood nastiness.First of all, the book's title, the very, very evocative deadkidsongs. Can you tell us where the inspiration for this came from?
There is a German word 'kindertotenlieder' which is usually translated as 'songs on the deaths of children'. This is the title of a group of poems by Friedrich Rückert. Gustav Mahler wrote a song cycle using five of those poems.
But as an English word, it has a kind of tabloid brutality about it. It seems to me that this is what the tabloids do a lot of the time: when there's no other news, they sing dead-kid-songs.
It's quite a brutal book with lots of nasty, violent things being done by children, which doesn't accord with some peoples' view of childhood being a time of innocence. Do you think that children are less innocent and perhaps more accountable than we frequently think them to be?
I think a simple definition of children as innocent is wrong. But I think there is also a problem in defining young people - people of 10, 11, 12 - as children; and allowing that to become a line that separates them from responsibility. They can be conveniently moved from one side of this line to the other, depending on how you want to view them. In a way, I would prefer just to see everyone from zero to when they die as a person and not to give then any moral 'out'.
That's not to say that I think children are fully developed moral beings, but I don't think that you could say that there are a lot of adults around who are fully developed moral beings. The problem is that you have to make individual judgements on the actions of each individual. The simple idea of childhood innocence, which is a distortion of what children are, is an idea I find quite dangerous. I think if most people remember what childhood was like, it was quite a brutal experience, full of ignorance and full of doubt, and fury that the world wasn't taking notice of what you were feeling.
Are there any aspects of Gang that you do recognise from your childhood self or peers?
Definitely, yes. The gang which I was in was not formalised or militarised in the same way as the gang in the book is, nor was it limited in that the way the gang of four people in the book is. I was in a gang, and we did fight wars, but we did the other things that I have excluded from the book: we played Stars Wars-influenced games, and we played football and cricket. But I narrowed down the book to just this pursuit of fighting and killing Germans and Russians.
Do you think it's attractive for the individual to sublimate personal morals to the larger pack mentality of gangs?
Well, I think that the group is something that is almost always more powerful than the individual, and will overtake the individual's personality and shape it. The feeling I wanted to convey was that the four boys quite voluntarily fit their ranks. There's a demand for this structure. They want to be as strong as possible; and if you want to be as strong as possible then you form a group.
At various points in the novel the narrative voice switches, was that a particular challenge to write?
The challenge for me was that the structure of the book was very complicated. But the difficultly wasn't just in going between the different voices, because the boys swap voices some of the time. There are different strains within their voices; they have phrases that come out of the adult world, or the military world, and go straight into what they are saying.
The voices came from the positions the boys had in gang: the one who was in control, Andrew, he spoke in that very confident, very cocky way; the one who was the most subordinate, Peter, he spoke in that other way. Their being roughly 11-years-old, and not fully developed as individuals, they almost manage to think each others' thoughts. In a sense it was more of an attempt to make sure there was enough inter-penetration between them, between their thoughts, rather an attempt to keep them nicely separate - which is what you'd normally be doing in a multi-voiced novel.
Deadkidsongs felt like a twisted take on traditional boy's own stories, was this intentional?
Yes, I did consciously feel that I was trying to write a book that was 'anti boy's own' in some ways. I was trying to write something that took unquestioned goods, like the innocence of childhood and the beneficence of nature, things like that, and satirised them.
When I was on the writing course at U.E.A. (University of East Anglia) and we were trying to think of the name of the anthology we were collectively trying to put together, I came up with The Bumper Book of Adventure Stories for Boys and Girls. That didn't go down very well, but it resurfaced with Adventures in Capitalism; the adventure survived. This is another stage in that it that takes on these ideas of heroism and glory, which seem so totally discredited outside the book, and gives them to a group of boys and then puts them against the world. It's slightly more real.
Can you tell us what you are working on at the moment?
I'm writing a book of short stories called Exhibitionism, it's going to be in two parts: Sex and Other Subjects.
Is there any one existing book which you wish you'd written?
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Laclos.
