Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Daniel James and I'm here to share
Speaker 1: another episode I've Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast,
Speaker 1: hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features
Speaker 1: conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia
Speaker 1: and around the world. On this episode, Michael sits down
Speaker 1: with Irish born Australian based writer Chris Flynn. As always,
Speaker 1: Michael is here to tell us a little bit more
Speaker 1: about the episode.
Speaker 2: Hello, Michael, Daniel James. What a pleasure.
Speaker 1: So in this week's episode of Read This, you've got
Speaker 1: another Irish author on the show. But Chris Flinn has
Speaker 1: actually been calling Australia home for quite some time now,
Speaker 1: and he began his literary career here. How did you
Speaker 1: first come across his work?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Chris Flynn's writing first came on to my radar
Speaker 2: in a past life. I was working in publishing as
Speaker 2: a kind of junior editorial assistant, reading manuscripts and trying
Speaker 2: to translate having an opinion about what I read into
Speaker 2: some kind of career path. Crazy, I know. But one
Speaker 2: of those manuscripts was one that came in from a
Speaker 2: first time writer and it was about a young guy
Speaker 2: from Belfast on the run who finds himself in Thailand.
Speaker 2: And it was a kind of raucous, crazy, comedic kaper thing,
Speaker 2: and it was unmistakably talented. It was one of those
Speaker 2: ones where you read the manuscript and you think, oh,
Speaker 2: this person is a natural writer. The writer, of course,
Speaker 2: was Chris Flynn, and the manuscript did go on to
Speaker 2: eventually become his first book, A Tiger and Eden. He's
Speaker 2: written a few books now, probably most notably A twenty
Speaker 2: twenty's Mammoth. But he's a writer who is known for
Speaker 2: slightly outlandish, slightly unpredictable, kind of twisty turning stuff. He
Speaker 2: had another book of short stories called He'd be Leviathan's
Speaker 2: and his books are always very funny, kind of slightly dark,
Speaker 2: maybe genre adjacent. He's a really talented voice.
Speaker 3: Michael's it writer.
Speaker 1: You actually wrote about Christ's latest novel, Orpheus nine for
Speaker 1: one of your many secret side hustles. What was it
Speaker 1: the Cornus mag Tell me about that experience on one
Speaker 1: of the book's premise might scare off son read but shouldn't.
Speaker 2: Yes, being opinionated about what I read continues to be
Speaker 2: the through line of what I do, Daniel, And one
Speaker 2: of those side hustles is, as you say, writing for
Speaker 2: the Quantus in Flight magazine, which is a strange thing,
Speaker 2: but I get to recommend books that I've read, and
Speaker 2: for the first time since I've been doing that job,
Speaker 2: I sent in a review of Chris Flynn's new book,
Speaker 2: Orvius nine, and the editor came back and very politely said,
Speaker 2: could you choose a different book? This one sounds too
Speaker 2: scary for the people who are going to be on
Speaker 2: our flights. In the end, I just rewrote the review
Speaker 2: in a way that she was kind of happy with.
Speaker 2: But I thought about that a lot, because the premise
Speaker 2: of Chris's new book is pretty horrifying. On a day
Speaker 2: during an under twelves football match, every nine year old
Speaker 2: in the field suddenly starts chanting a line from King
Speaker 2: Lear in Latin, and then they die horribly and gruesomely.
Speaker 2: And it's a global phenomenon. Every nine year old around
Speaker 2: the planet has died suddenly in the same sterious circumstances,
Speaker 2: and almost worse than that, after that, any day another
Speaker 2: kid turns nine, that kid dies at the age of
Speaker 2: nine in the same gruesome way. This is a kind
Speaker 2: of Stephen King esque setup. It's horrifying but kind of
Speaker 2: very compelling and part of what I love so much
Speaker 2: about this book, and you'll hear in this conversation is
Speaker 2: that Chris focuses at this global, even supernatural phenomenon, focuses
Speaker 2: it on a small town in Australia and on three
Speaker 2: former school friends, each of whom are hit by the
Speaker 2: phenomenon in different ways.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment, Chris Flynn's new book
Speaker 1: arrived in a dream.
Speaker 2: My own questions, you seems self evident. Who hurt you,
Speaker 2: Chris Flynn.
Speaker 3: On, No one hurt me.
Speaker 2: Were you bullied as a nine year old?
Speaker 3: I was relentlessly bullied as a child because I was skinny,
Speaker 3: milinky long legs, as my mum used to call me.
Speaker 3: She said, I've seen better legs hanging out of a
Speaker 3: bird's nest.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 3: That's a hard one to come back from. And my
Speaker 3: dad was a former bodybuilder, so I was the weakling
Speaker 3: who's constantly abused for not being able to lift huge
Speaker 3: fence posts that he could lift with one hand. But
Speaker 3: I have nothing against kids personally. I grew up in
Speaker 3: a foster family in that my mom and Dad were
Speaker 3: foster parents when I was in my early teens and
Speaker 3: my sister was four years younger than me, and so
Speaker 3: throughout my teenage years we had kids in the house,
Speaker 3: over one hundred little kids, all young. They're all seized
Speaker 3: by the social services for various reasons, sometimes for a
Speaker 3: few weeks, sometimes months, and a couple of cases we
Speaker 3: had them for years. So I had all these little
Speaker 3: brothers and sisters, and my sister and I were pseudo parents.
Speaker 3: In fact, we'd often walk around the housing estate in
Speaker 3: Belfast pushing the buggy and people would assume we were
Speaker 3: the mum and dad because of so many teenage pregnancies
Speaker 3: of these kids, and we were horrified, or we would
Speaker 3: sometimes say no, no, we're brother and sister, which would freak
Speaker 3: people out them.
Speaker 2: That's very reassuring, that's what you want to hear about
Speaker 2: those teen parents.
Speaker 3: That's right, we're brother and sister. On top of that,
Speaker 3: So I sort of grew up being a parent to
Speaker 3: absolutely loads of little brothers and sisters. But I mean,
Speaker 3: the beautiful thing about fostering is that you're giving them stability,
Speaker 3: and then the kids move on. They either would go
Speaker 3: back to their natural parents who sometimes would have dependency issues,
Speaker 3: and we're sorting them some things ourselves out so they'd
Speaker 3: get the kids back, or they'd move on to an
Speaker 3: adoptive family. And the thing was you were never allowed
Speaker 3: to see them ever again, or have any contact with
Speaker 3: them whatsoever. If you saw them in the shopping center,
Speaker 3: you were told. My mom and dad were told walk
Speaker 3: the other way. And partly it's for the good of
Speaker 3: the kids, because they don't want to introduce confusion into
Speaker 3: their lives, like who who are you? Why do you
Speaker 3: know me? You know, you assume that they'll just forget you.
Speaker 3: But there's a sadness to that too, and I had
Speaker 3: never really processed that. I don't think very well. And
Speaker 3: I think part of the reason behind this book was that,
Speaker 3: for some reason it just came up. My sister and
Speaker 3: I never had kids of our own, and we always wonder,
Speaker 3: is it because some sort of paternal instinct or maternal
Speaker 3: instinct was satisfied in us, something some switch was flipped
Speaker 3: and we never felt compelled.
Speaker 2: To or you associated it with an impermanence as well,
Speaker 2: like that you know that you invest in it, it's
Speaker 2: an important thing in your life, but it's not something
Speaker 2: that you then hold on to It's not an ongoing thing.
Speaker 3: Could be. Yeah, yeah, and we obviously obviously all those
Speaker 3: kids are now in their forties. I don't know what
Speaker 3: happened to them. Some of them will be alive, some
Speaker 3: not probably, But they don't know me, Yeah, they don't.
Speaker 3: They probably don't remember that I was a figure in
Speaker 3: their lives. But I wonder if maybe one of the
Speaker 3: reasons behind this book subconsciously was me trying to sort
Speaker 3: of because all those kids, they might as well be
Speaker 3: dead to me, you know, and this this book my
Speaker 3: way of sort of coping with that. I don't know.
Speaker 2: If it's a coping mechanism, it's a deeply unhealthy one.
Speaker 2: And I suggest you get some therapy, That's all I'll say.
Speaker 2: I mean, the reason I start there is that when
Speaker 2: the advanced reading copy of this book arrived, the publisher
Speaker 2: basically sold it in the advanced reading copy as Chris
Speaker 2: Flynn was standing at a kid's football game and basically
Speaker 2: had a vision.
Speaker 3: Yes, So what happened to me was I drove myself
Speaker 3: seven thousand kilometers around Australia, staying in murder motels, visiting
Speaker 3: over one hundred book shops and I wanted to do
Speaker 3: it because it was twenty twenty two and I hadn't
Speaker 3: got to do that with Mammoth, which is twenty twenty
Speaker 3: because everything was locked down and it was an adventure.
Speaker 3: But when I got back, the last thing I wanted
Speaker 3: to think about was books are writing. I got home, Okay,
Speaker 3: I don't want to be bothered with this, and I
Speaker 3: had a dream like a few days later in which
Speaker 3: that opening scene of the book is exactly what happened.
Speaker 3: In my dream. I was standing there alongside these parents
Speaker 3: I live in a small original time, and I was
Speaker 3: there on the footy ground watching it all happen. And
Speaker 3: when I got up the next morning, I brought it
Speaker 3: down and it's the opening scene in the book almost
Speaker 3: forbid him as like as it happened in my dream.
Speaker 3: And then over the next hour, the rest of it
Speaker 3: all just appeared. And so the whole book was there,
Speaker 3: right to the ending, right from the beginning, and I thought,
Speaker 3: oh bloody hell, now I'm going to have to write
Speaker 3: the freaking thing, you know. And it was the start
Speaker 3: of the summer. I was intending to take some time off,
Speaker 3: and I ended up just giving up my summer to
Speaker 3: set on my computer, it down watches. This thing appeared
Speaker 3: before my eyes, so who knows where that came from.
Speaker 2: You do something that I particularly love, and I think
Speaker 2: it's what makes the book work as well as it does,
Speaker 2: which is you take this kind of speculative, fantastical premise
Speaker 2: that has global ramifications, but then you write about it
Speaker 2: in an intensely local way rather than canvas and here's
Speaker 2: how it's rolling out in Paris and Tokyo and New
Speaker 2: York and whatever. You bring it right in and you
Speaker 2: go very small and very intimate, kind of essentially with
Speaker 2: three protagonists who are all relating to this global tragedy
Speaker 2: in their own different ways, and a town called Gatton,
Speaker 2: which is kind of seven and a half thousand people
Speaker 2: small population was the town? I mean, are you just
Speaker 2: writing about where you live? And it's thinly veiled and
Speaker 2: every nasty person in the book is one of your
Speaker 2: neighbors A little bit.
Speaker 3: I have to be careful so I don't get hung
Speaker 3: drawn and quartered. I tend to not reveal the time
Speaker 3: that I live in so that.
Speaker 2: I nearly said it that and be nice mikel Vernon.
Speaker 3: But obviously if I'm speaking to anyone local, no, no, No,
Speaker 3: it's clearly somewhere else, some horrible place in Queensland that's
Speaker 3: got nothing to do with where I live, but the
Speaker 3: general framework of the town is very similar to where
Speaker 3: I live. Yeah, the local thing I think is important
Speaker 3: for this kind of story. I'm not a big fan
Speaker 3: of those sort of part glyps books where it's like
Speaker 3: we've got to get on the cargo plane and fly
Speaker 3: to Paris next and to talk to a scientist and
Speaker 3: then he sends us to you know, Cape time like boring,
Speaker 3: Like how on earth can a person relate to that?
Speaker 3: And it just seemed a very relatable story from the beginning,
Speaker 3: a very intimate story from the beginning. And although the
Speaker 3: premise it's a premise heavy book, but the premises, as
Speaker 3: you say, has got o of the way at the beginning,
Speaker 3: and then it's very focused on a local level on
Speaker 3: how people respond to your disaster because it all happened
Speaker 3: to us, all right, you know, there was a global
Speaker 3: disaster and we all had to deal with it in
Speaker 3: our own very localized way because we were actually trapped
Speaker 3: in our own homes. To that sort of degree, in
Speaker 3: your neighbors, the street you were in, you became very
Speaker 3: intimate with that, so it made sense to approach it
Speaker 3: in those terms.
Speaker 2: Thinking in particular as a Melbourne based person who went
Speaker 2: through the COVID lockdowns here in many ways as the
Speaker 2: beats of a pandemic novel that actually, if you take
Speaker 2: away the more fantastical elements and you take away some
Speaker 2: of the more kind of overt body horror stuff, what
Speaker 2: you have at the heart is a society that's assumptions
Speaker 2: about itself and how it operates irretrievably fractured and trying
Speaker 2: to find some version of normalcy after that. And in particular,
Speaker 2: the relationship with Salt is very reminiscent of many of
Speaker 2: the responses to COVID and the anti vaxx crowd and
Speaker 2: that kind of thing. Were you aware of it as
Speaker 2: a kind of COVID allegory or is that just something
Speaker 2: that's easy to impose on it afterwards?
Speaker 3: It was imposed a little bit as I went along.
Speaker 3: I'm not so interested in COVID as I am in
Speaker 3: Hope people's opinions. Everyone's got an opinion about everything. Now
Speaker 3: we're expected to be experts on all matters, matters of science,
Speaker 3: matters of medicine, everything, And I don't know if that's
Speaker 3: a bit of a layover from COVID, where suddenly we
Speaker 3: all become very opinionated and experts, but of course none
Speaker 3: of us are experts in anything, and so I think
Speaker 3: that's what frustated in me more about the COVID thing
Speaker 3: was all of a sudden, everyone's a scientist. All of
Speaker 3: a sudden, everyone's choosing to believe certain things they read
Speaker 3: on the Internet whilst ignoring other things because it suits
Speaker 3: their personal narrative, or it's they're a coping mechanism. And
Speaker 3: that became the focus of the book was how you
Speaker 3: can have neighbors, friends who know each other, who are
Speaker 3: suddenly because of something that happens, all sent in various
Speaker 3: different directions, all believe certain things, and all believe they're correct,
Speaker 3: whereas they're probably all partially correct but also partially wrong,
Speaker 3: but not wanting to listen to what the other person's
Speaker 3: point of view might be.
Speaker 2: Part of how that rolls out, then, in the context of
Speaker 2: Olpheus nine, is that the overlay of those neighborly disagreements
Speaker 2: in the face of something bigger than themselves is all
Speaker 2: the history and baggage and stories that are not bigger
Speaker 2: than themselves. That are the ways in which they have
Speaker 2: come up together in this town. They have had romances
Speaker 2: and let each other down, and secrets and betrayals and
Speaker 2: all that kind of stuff. How do you get the
Speaker 2: stakes right in a book like this where you know
Speaker 2: you're open with a cataclysmic thing. How do you find
Speaker 2: the space for character staff for comedy, even when you're
Speaker 2: killing off kids on page three?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, well, the killing of kids thing will probably
Speaker 3: put people off, but you sort of get past that,
Speaker 3: and it probably will be a bit of an issue
Speaker 3: for some people. They'll be put off by the idea
Speaker 3: of it. And I certainly have parents of nine yearls
Speaker 3: particularly who've said to me, I'm not reading this, whereas
Speaker 3: other parents of nine yearls said, I'm definitely reading this
Speaker 3: because my kid does my head in. But yeah, how
Speaker 3: do you sort of get away from that? It's unavoidable
Speaker 3: that I have to bring up the premise at the
Speaker 3: beginning and set it up. Once people are past those
Speaker 3: initial pages, I think they'll find something very different unfolding,
Speaker 3: because I don't dwell on that. In fact, it's not
Speaker 3: really mentioned at all after the initial incident. But yeah,
Speaker 3: how do you develop those characters. The characters were standing
Speaker 3: next to me on the sideline, and it's sort of
Speaker 3: you get this creepy feeling in the back of your
Speaker 3: neck as an author whenever this happens, because you're like,
Speaker 3: that seems like quite a complete person there. Where did
Speaker 3: they come from? Is that an aspect of my personality?
Speaker 3: Is that sort of an amalgamation of people? I know?
Speaker 3: Who is this this woman standing next to me that
Speaker 3: suddenly I know everything about, including you know, her life
Speaker 3: as a teenager. It's hard to pin down where that
Speaker 3: comes from, but I guess that's kind of the juice
Speaker 3: for me, is being presented with these characters wherever they're
Speaker 3: coming from, and exploring them and not really knowing whether
Speaker 3: anyone will care, but hoping that they do. But also
Speaker 3: I love the idea of the premise sends people's lives
Speaker 3: in a very specific direction. But no one is all
Speaker 3: bad and no one is all good in this world,
Speaker 3: And too often in fiction things are written in those
Speaker 3: black and white terms, those binary terms, and that doesn't
Speaker 3: please me, And so I saw an opportunity here. As
Speaker 3: like these characters. You will like them at certain points
Speaker 3: in the book, and other times you will not like them,
Speaker 3: and then maybe you'll like them again because you will
Speaker 3: understand whether made the choices that they've made. And so
Speaker 3: it is basically a character study of these three characters
Speaker 3: in the book. And that's probably going to also disappoint
Speaker 3: some people because they'll think it's a sort of wombbamb
Speaker 3: some pandemic book about there's been a disaster. You know,
Speaker 3: when's the SWAT team coming in to sort all this out?
Speaker 2: When we return, Chris explains why a sense of mystery
Speaker 2: is so important to this book, and he shares the
Speaker 2: Holy Trinity of books he grew up. We'll be right
Speaker 2: back amongst the many mysteries in Orpheus nine. The reciting
Speaker 2: of the passage from King Lear gives it an element
Speaker 2: of the supernatural or the other worldly that takes it
Speaker 2: from h oh, this could be a viral contagion, this
Speaker 2: could be whatever to something truly freaky. Did you did
Speaker 2: you have ideas about what that freakinness was?
Speaker 3: So right from the beginning, I knew exactly what this was,
Speaker 3: and I know how this happened, but I have not
Speaker 3: revealed that in the book, and some might find that frustrating,
Speaker 3: but really, early on, I'm not going to reveal why
Speaker 3: this is happening, although I know why it's happening, partly
Speaker 3: because you can only really disappoint by having a resolution
Speaker 3: of people say oh it's aliens. Okay, Oh that's that's
Speaker 3: a disappointment. You're only going to disappoint people, So I
Speaker 3: chose to avoid the reveal. But you're right, there's also
Speaker 3: that mysterious supernatural thing with the kids. Before they swell
Speaker 3: up full of salt, they recite a passage from King
Speaker 3: Lear in Latin, which introduces that creepiness to it where
Speaker 3: you're like, there's no way they could know that, why
Speaker 3: is that happening? So it gives that tension to the
Speaker 3: narrow right from the beginning, where you're reminded periodically, Okay,
Speaker 3: so we're dealing with people in a small town her
Speaker 3: living with the aftermath of a disaster. They've got their
Speaker 3: own problems to solve, but also there's this other thing
Speaker 3: looming over them the whole time that no one's ever
Speaker 3: really resolving either. And I think that just it gives
Speaker 3: you a through line of the books that you don't
Speaker 3: forget and you don't get bogged down in domestic politics.
Speaker 3: You have this constant reminder that sort of eeriness that
Speaker 3: casts a shadow over the whole book, And so that
Speaker 3: was all done on purpose.
Speaker 2: And I think it's very effective because it means that
Speaker 2: the dual impulses of the book pull in different directions.
Speaker 2: It's a very grounded, very realistic book if you let
Speaker 2: yourself forget what's led the characters to where they are.
Speaker 2: Everything else about it is society in disarray, small town
Speaker 2: worrying about kind of who's in charge.
Speaker 3: You know, they're getting top aware from big w you know, yeah.
Speaker 2: Very domestic, very kind of grounded. Do you read a
Speaker 2: lot of speculative fiction? Do you read a lot of
Speaker 2: that kind of more fantastical stuff.
Speaker 3: I sure do. In fact, I always did as a
Speaker 3: young reader, and I moved away from it a little
Speaker 3: bit and got into more literary world, you know, in
Speaker 3: my sort of twenties and thirties. But I've gone back
Speaker 3: to it, and I find a lot more satisfaction in
Speaker 3: sort of speculative and sci fi light, fantasy light. I
Speaker 3: love that sort of black mirror. Twilight Zone. I've seen
Speaker 3: so many episodes of the Twilight Zone growing up, and
Speaker 3: I think that probably influenced me more than I care
Speaker 3: to acknowledge that idea that this is a very recognizable
Speaker 3: world in this story, but there's something off and we
Speaker 3: can't quite put our finger on what it is. But
Speaker 3: we all know there's something off, and you know, you
Speaker 3: could argue that that is our reality. You know, we
Speaker 3: all live in a world where we think we have certitude,
Speaker 3: but we don't really don't really know what's around the corner.
Speaker 3: As we all learned a harsh lesson with COVID. We
Speaker 3: never saw it coming and suddenly it affected us dramatically,
Speaker 3: and none of us really know what lies around the
Speaker 3: corner or where things. We live in an age of uncertainty,
Speaker 3: but we desperately yearned for certainty. So I think there's
Speaker 3: there's a really interesting tension.
Speaker 2: There having an answer to what's happening in Orpheus nine,
Speaker 2: and withholding that answer from your readers. Does that mean
Speaker 2: it's conceivable there's a scenario where this is a world,
Speaker 2: or a context or a premise that you would return to,
Speaker 2: Because it does seem to me that pick a different town,
Speaker 2: pick a major city, pick a different context in which
Speaker 2: they're responding to the same thing, and there's endless stories
Speaker 2: that may come out of that.
Speaker 3: What you're talking about is what I call the flu
Speaker 3: the Flint literary universe. You know, good magic, where the
Speaker 3: TV show comes out and then there's an offshoot show
Speaker 3: set in another country from a different point of view.
Speaker 2: I've got the branded drinking mug, but otherwise I haven't
Speaker 2: followed all the rest of it.
Speaker 3: So because I know what happens, I have had a
Speaker 3: completely bonker's, totally left field idea for a continuation of
Speaker 3: the story that would drive people up the wall. But
Speaker 3: I'll be tempted if this book does well. I mean,
Speaker 3: I've got a lot of few other things in the pipeline,
Speaker 3: but if this book does well, then I would consider
Speaker 3: tackling that. It wouldn't be easy to do, and there'd
Speaker 3: be a bit of a leap of faith people would
Speaker 3: have to take with me, and people would probably be like,
Speaker 3: what the hell, what's happening now?
Speaker 2: I can see in your eyes though, not only is
Speaker 2: that not off putting to you, but I suspect that's
Speaker 2: what gets you up out of bed and writing in
Speaker 2: the morning is not easy. Confounding readers and making them
Speaker 2: come and meet you halfway, and a sense of play.
Speaker 2: They the things that get you going.
Speaker 3: It totally is, and I've started to get into a
Speaker 3: bit of a flaw state now whenever I'm writing, and
Speaker 3: then I'm like, okay, so I'm obviously onto something. I'm
Speaker 3: not going to question this too much. My favorite part
Speaker 3: of the whole writing process. I love it all, even
Speaker 3: the promotion stuff, which a lot of people hate. I
Speaker 3: love that. I guess I'm a former stage actor when
Speaker 3: I was young, and I'm a bit of a natural
Speaker 3: showman maybe, but I really love the moments when the
Speaker 3: thing is being created and I am laughing at myself,
Speaker 3: thinking what's wrong with me? Where is this coming from?
Speaker 3: Because it's a mystery to me every time it comes
Speaker 3: to writing a book, I feel like I'm starting from scratch,
Speaker 3: and because the ideas are often unusual and the execution
Speaker 3: of them is very different each time. But that's the
Speaker 3: joy in it for.
Speaker 2: Me, you know, apart from your own childhood and that
Speaker 2: kind of presence of lots of kids in your life,
Speaker 2: such an important thread through this book is about parental grief,
Speaker 2: parental sense of responsibility, that kind of bond you workshop
Speaker 2: this with friends with kids? Did you like pick up
Speaker 2: the scab of How would you respond to this? How
Speaker 2: would you deal with it or is it entirely inactive
Speaker 2: imaginative empathy.
Speaker 3: No, I did not. I don't let anyone read my
Speaker 3: work at all whilst I'm working on it. I sort
Speaker 3: of have a horror of that workshopping of things, maybe incorrectly,
Speaker 3: maybe I should, but I'm not from an academic background,
Speaker 3: so i just have no history of that in me.
Speaker 3: So I've always sort of been a loner, a solitary
Speaker 3: writer who just does his own thing. And for years
Speaker 3: I was writing books in my twenties and thirties that
Speaker 3: sometimes I would send it to publishers and you'd get
Speaker 3: pretty form rejections. To give you credit, you're one of
Speaker 3: the first people to ever throw me a bone in
Speaker 3: the literary world, because my first book, Tiger Needen, which
Speaker 3: came out in twenty twelve. You read a really early
Speaker 3: draft of that, whichs very different to the finished book,
Speaker 3: and then you met up with me for a coffee,
Speaker 3: and you didn't really know me and gave me some
Speaker 3: very pointed, kind but also firm advice about what worked
Speaker 3: and what didn't work. And I was very grateful for that.
Speaker 3: And then when I you know, over the following months,
Speaker 3: I just thought about it, and I think one of
Speaker 3: the things you said to me was about the voice,
Speaker 3: because you had heard me speak, and you said, I
Speaker 3: just don't see you in this. And it made me think, oh,
Speaker 3: is it okay to put me into it, not as
Speaker 3: a character, but as to channel a voice that comes
Speaker 3: from my head. And I ended up going away months
Speaker 3: later writing that book in the voice of a character
Speaker 3: who was a very similar to the guys I grew
Speaker 3: up with, but not me, and laughing whilst I was
Speaker 3: doing it. Playing but for an autodidact, you know, someone
Speaker 3: who doesn't have, you know, a formal education, really, and
Speaker 3: there was no books in our house growing up. We
Speaker 3: only had three books in our house growing up, because
Speaker 3: my parents are functionally illiterate, you know. The three books
Speaker 3: were and it sort of says a lot about me.
Speaker 3: The illustrated Bible the house would put Corner by A.
Speaker 3: Milton and William Peter Blood is the.
Speaker 2: Exorcist, excellent.
Speaker 3: So those are the first three bits of three. That's
Speaker 3: the Holy Trinity, but it probably explains a lot of
Speaker 3: my work.
Speaker 2: The main characters in all three were a top but
Speaker 2: no pants at some point. Probably it's a little lonely,
Speaker 2: but there you go.
Speaker 3: There, you go, you go. But for someone from that background,
Speaker 3: I sort of dope be working class Irish kid. You know,
Speaker 3: it meant a lot to me that you did that
Speaker 3: because it's set me on a path that I had
Speaker 3: never considered before. And isn't that the beauty about being
Speaker 3: in the arts and taking a risk sometimes and you know,
Speaker 3: having a feeling and sometimes it's those things that make
Speaker 3: all the difference.
Speaker 2: Well, it's yeah, it's the most satisfying part of working
Speaker 2: book adjacent and look, Auvius nine is magnificent. It deserves
Speaker 2: to do terribly well, and I hope it does. I
Speaker 2: hope people don't get scared away by the concept and
Speaker 2: they get lured in for your chit, cannery and trickery
Speaker 2: which is there on every page. But it's been great
Speaker 2: to chat to you today, Thanks for coming in.
Speaker 3: Lovely to see you, Michael.
Speaker 2: Orpheus nine. But Chris Flynn is available at all good bookstores.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to another episode of Read This.
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