Real Monsters Read online

  As for Real Monsters, the seed for the idea came from a Nietzsche quote I read on a t-shirt or a beer mat or something (which as far as I can tell is the only place anyone reads Nietzsche these days.) It was along the lines of: ‘Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.’ The idea seemed to resonate with the geo-political car crash that we, the West, have been involved in ever since September 11. I was keen to explore the de-humanising effect that war and violence have on the individual and so, rather than writing about any specific conflict I thought it might be interesting to write about literal monsters. From there I just sort of ran with it...

  How do you feel modern warfare is portrayed in fiction? And did this directly impact your writing?

  I have to be honest and say that, with very few exceptions, I don’t like books about modern warfare. With no disrespect towards Andy McNab or Tom Clancy or any of those guys (and it is almost exclusively guys), I feel there’s an unfortunate tendency to fetishise certain aspects of militaria; the weapons, the vehicles, the protocol and stuff. I’m not interested in that at all. As a kid I never played with guns. I hate those creepy shoot-a-terrorist-save-the-nation video games that seem to have rendered the plumbers and hedgehogs of the world redundant. In fact I deplore violence full stop – which probably makes writing Real Monsters an odd choice!

  The other problem with most fictional books on this subject is that they make war seem glamorous and exciting, without capturing how mundane and detached the reality of modern warfare is. Throughout my novel, Danny repeatedly moans about the fact he’s had all this training but hasn’t even seen the enemy – let alone had a chance to fight them. There’s no opportunity for him to live out these mythological acts of heroism he’s been raised on because so much of war is technology driven these days. I guess it goes back to video games again; guys in offices on the other side of the world with a joystick and a shoot button. At least it does for those nations lucky enough to have a multi-trillion-pound defence budget at their disposal.

  Real Monsters portrays the impact of war on people both home and abroad. How important was it to you to portray this accurately?

  In some ways it’s easy to forget that Britain has been involved in a near continuous cycle of foreign conflict for the last three decades. The Falklands, the Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now the current military intervention against ISIS. That’s my whole life. My kids are nine and four and they’ve literally never known peace. Yet the literary response – particularly in Britain – has been slow to explore this trend towards violence. Whereas World War II and Vietnam provoked iconic literary, cinematic and musical responses, reactions to recent military conflicts have been more muted. Perhaps this is due to the fact these wars have taken place on foreign soil, with only the media and occasional acts of terrorism to remind us they are taking place at all? Perhaps it’s too easy to close our eyes and pretend they’re not happening?

  As an eighteen-year-old during the 2003 Stop the War protests in London, I experienced first-hand the public enthusiasm for a peaceful resolution to the imminent Iraq war. I also experienced the subsequent disappointment, confusion and political disengagement in the decade that followed the march – a feeling compounded by revelations that further blurred the ethical lines dividing us and the bad guys. The failure to find WMDs, the torture at Abu Ghraib, the leaks by whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. For me, the failure of the Stop the War protests was the turning point in recent British history. It was the moment that all of the optimism and energy of those early Blair years finally dissipated and an entire generation realised that the version of democracy we’re presented with is little more than a hollow promise, a sleight of hand. I mean, if a million people mobilising and saying ‘No!’ didn’t make any difference, how can we trust this system to value our opinion on anything?

  Of course the real tragedy is that rather than getting angry we lost hope. We collectively rolled over and buried our heads in booze and reality TV and just let them get on with it – which was easy to do because bombs weren’t being dropped on our nurseries and hospitals. And just so long as it wasn’t your child, or sibling, or parent, being sent over to be blown apart by an IED, then it was as easy to forget it was happening as switching over the channel, or flipping a page in the newspaper. But these conflicts don’t happen in a vacuum. You can’t intensively train people to kill, send them into incredibly stressful situations and then expect them to come home and carry on where they left off – the surge in veterans suffering from mental health issues is testament to that. Ultimately, I guess I’m keen to draw attention to the corrosive effect that war has on us as a global community, and to show that all of us are ultimately poorer when we advocate violence over diplomacy.

  Your narrative gives equal weight to both the female and male narrators. Did you feel it was important to show the impact of warfare on both genders? Was this challenging?

  War is usually portrayed as a predominantly masculine pursuit. In fact, if you look at some of our culture’s most famous narratives about military conflict they tend to either sideline women in the story, or exclude them altogether. With Real Monsters I felt it was important to show the impact of conflict on both genders, exploring the transformative effects of war not just on the soldiers, but also on their relationships; how in many ways the burden is just as great for the soldier’s partner, not just while they’re away fighting overseas, but once they’ve returned home too. For some people the conflict never really ends.

  While there were aspects of writing from a woman’s perspective I found challenging, in some senses it was actually easier than writing Danny’s parts. It was certainly less emotionally draining. For one thing, I’m actually far more aligned with Lorna’s worldview and therefore I found I could get into her head more easily than Danny’s – though I’m sure my wife grew sick of me constantly asking, ‘But would a woman say/think that?’ I was also determined to present her as a strong, independent character rather than yet another token female victim – despite the fact she is ultimately a victim of male brutality.

  Danny’s voice on the other hand came to me in a white-hot fever. I wrote his parts first, and very quickly. At times it felt more like performing an exorcism than writing. I used a variety of techniques to try and capture his brutal, disaffected voice. Some parts I dictated to tape or hammered out on an old keyboard, which ensured I wasn’t hijacked by auto-correct. The lack of a backspace key also helped me not look backwards and just plough on until I’d got it all out. I found a lot of Danny’s story incredibly uncomfortable to write – the misogyny, the homophobia, the casual racism – and I knew I had to get it down before self-doubt got the better of me. While the language Danny uses is authentic of the stories of soldiers I know who’ve returned from duty, as well as a certain strand of Angry White Men I’ve been around most of my life, it didn’t make it any easier to see scratched out in ink and paper. Still, I guess that’s what happens when you set out to write a book about monsters.

  Why did you choose to leave the locations in the novel ambiguous?

  Despite the political and cultural complexities of the type of international conflicts described in Real Monsters, large portions of the media are nevertheless content to impose propagandistically simple narratives when reporting them, reducing them to ‘goodies and baddies’, ‘heroes and villains’, ‘us and them’. Often they read more like fairy stories, with an eternal struggle between good and evil at their heart – though which side is which depends on who’s telling the story. What’s more, it’s always the same narrative. An interesting exercise is to take a news story covering an overseas conflict and remove all of the proper nouns. Try it. It doesn’t matter who’s being blown up or shot at or where it’s happening – the story is always the same. The language and the tone are identical. It’s tragic, actually, the cyclical nature of war. The same old atrocities occur again and again across generations – it’s just the names
that change.

  With Real Monsters, I made a conscious decision to reflect the broad brushstrokes adopted by the popular press. I imagined it as a sort of shadow play, with the narrative stripped right down to its base elements. Man lost in desert hunts faceless enemy. He could be a knight hunting dragons or an American G.I. fighting the Taliban. The important thing for me was capturing the universal human element at the heart of a conflict, with the focus on individuals rather than nations. I felt placing the action anywhere too specific would hinder that aim. You’ll notice it’s not just Danny’s story that has a stock ‘desert’ background. Lorna too lives in a non-specific ‘Western city.’ It could be London, but it could equally be New York or Sydney or even Paris or Berlin. That amorphous approach to place extends to Danny’s accent. He could be a Texan or a Cockney, or even Brummie – I guess it just depends who’s reading it.

  Describe your average writing day.

  Like most writers, I don’t have the luxury of writing fiction full time. Living in a house is an expensive pursuit, and as a result I spend most daylight hours in an office, writing copy. The majority of my writing is done in the cracks between my work and family life. Before breakfast and on my lunch break. In condensation in the shower and in the dirt on my windscreen. I guess sleep is the biggest sacrifice, as I’m often up until the early hours, rattling away.

  Mostly this is fine, as I tend to feel a bit lost when I’m not busy. With Real Monsters, though, I think I came pretty close to losing my mind on a number of occasions. Danny’s head was a pretty horrendous place to spend any amount of time. Several times my wife woke up to find me crouched in the bottom of a wardrobe, muttering obscenities into a tape recorder. Or else I’d wake the kids up by screaming or shouting at the screen. It was a difficult time for everyone. I’ve made a promise to them that I’ll try and get less emotionally involved in the next thing I write. Having said that, I’ve already made plans to spend a few nights sleeping rough in the local park, so I’ll guess we’ll just have to see what happens.

  What are you working on next?

  I’m writing another novel at the moment, called Wild Life. It tells the story of a troubled advertising salesman who abandons his family and takes to sleeping rough in a local park, where he’s befriended by a secret fraternity of homeless men who are living out a utopian rural fantasy. They grow their own food, hunt squirrels and foxes, that sort of thing – until of course the real world intervenes and it all falls to pieces. I suppose it’s sort of like The Beach transposed to an inner-city park, or Lord of the Flies played out by middle-aged men.

  Although stylistically it’s far more conventional than Real Monsters, it still touches on a number of the same themes: bullying, greed, violence. I guess at it’s core is the idea that humanity is just a veneer, that beneath the suit and tie, we’re all really just animals, capable of acts of immeasurable cruelty. While I realise that all makes it sound pretty heavy, it’s actually a lot of fun. It’s certainly less exhausting to write than Real Monsters, though I have to admit I’m nervous about being in the park at night. Or rather, I’m nervous about the things that might be in the park with me...

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Neither I nor this novel would be here without the encouragement and support of the following people: Dad, Mum, Aidan Gorbanzo, Ciara Smyth, Lauren Smith, the Browns, Laidlaws, O’Raffertys, Smyths, McGowan-Smyths, Barbers, Oakleys, Carrolls, Flynns and my family in Cebu, Freelance Mourners, Injured Party, Red Shirt, Adelle Stripe, Ben Myers, James Hawes, Michael Langan, Nina Rapi, Sam Mills, the Lynchs, Mov Jones, Colin Hammer, Team SAM, Riz Khan @ RK Animation, Gem Sidnell @ Moo Moo Art & Photgraphy, Writing West Midlands & all at Room 204, the de Rohan family, the Bitmead family and all at Legend Press.

  Finally, special thanks go to Elliot, Felix and Simone for their unconditional love and endless patience. I’m sorry about the cat.

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