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© Alex Ivey
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Our guest blogger is Tom Benn. In 2009, he was the recipient of the Malcolm
Bradbury bursary. His debut novel The Doll Princess was long listed for the CWA John
Creasey New Blood Dagger and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and Portico
Prize.
The
Doll Princess introduced
readers to the absorbing narrator, Henry Bane, a conflicted man caught up in a morass
of evil.
Chamber Music is the first sequel to The Doll Princess but can be read on its
own. Once again, it is narrated by Henry
Bane, a mid-level cog in a ‘90s Manchester underworld. An ex-girlfriend in danger comes back into
his life just as an outlandish gangster returns to Manchester to settle scores
and steal turfs.
Chamber Music was written quickly and compulsively. In twelve weeks. I worked part time six days a week, but wrote
for nine hours a day, seven days a week, redrafting as I went. Despite how effortless this all sounds, I’m
actually quite a slow, unintuitive writer.
My prose doesn’t come instinctively.
A paragraph can take me up to four hours to flesh. Only the dialogue comes quicker. My pages tend to grow from sparest to spare –
I always add more than I cut. I’m also overly
occupied with how my stuff sounds, rhythmically – and with Chamber Music, I was trying for something percussive and
elliptical, to the point where I was counting syllables.
There is a lot of use of dialect in Chamber Music (from Caribbean patois, to
the Manc featured in The Doll Princess)
and they are all stylised for my own ends.
I want them to sound a certain way.
I want them to look a certain way.
(I talk a bit more about the patois in a recent interview here.) I also wanted to push the language harder and
go for something unfamiliar. Vernacular
fiction is something I enjoy reading, and it also feels like the most natural
way of depicting my characters’ speech. These
voices carry my novel, and do so with urgency.
It’s dangerously easy to denote race and class with dialect. You often know how poor or educated a
character is in a Victorian novel by the decipherability of their dialogue. Think of Joseph in Wuthering Heights, or Jabez Clegg’s adoptive father in Isabella
Banks’ The Manchester Man. Nevertheless, stereotypes can be played with,
subverted and recontextualised. I know there
are readers out there who are wary of dialect and find all this off-putting. However, Bane’s narration is regionally
inflected but presented in Standard English; only my dialogue is written this
way. Hopefully, readers will find it doesn’t
slow things down, that it heightens and accelerates the action. But that’s enough about how things are said.
As a reader, I tend to care more about what
characters aren’t saying to each other than what they are: all that tragedy,
insight, and dramatic irony that might be lurking between the words. While I enjoy and admire the density of high
modernism as much as the next reader, when it comes to my own work I like a lot
of clean white space. In addition, I
like how what’s unsaid looks on the page, typographically, just as much as
what’s said, so it’s an aesthetic concern, too.
With Chamber
Music, I wanted to write a crime story that explores a distinctive place
and time but avoids some of the usual trappings of Manchester lore (the
Hacienda, ‘Madchester’ etc.). Instead, I
tried to address this mythologised history peripherally, and weave fictions
around it.
I wanted to return to the crescents and
deck access flats of Hulme (a district close to Manchester city centre) in the
early ‘90s, which was a remarkable place I remember visiting regularly in my
childhood and has since been regenerated.
Bane’s underworld status gives him more
freedom to do what he wants and to go where he likes, but he still frequently
finds himself an outgunned interloper in his own city. Bane’s ‘90s Manchester is
fiercely tribal. It’s also a changing
city, much like the real one, and is slowly being redeveloped post-IRA bombing,
sometimes uprooting or burying the marginalised, pushing them further into
their own orbits.
Manchester is a city very much in its own
shadow with spectacular historical contributions to industry, arts and beyond. Manchester’s past is also spectacularly
violent - from Peterloo, to the Moors Murders, to the 1996 IRA bombing. And if Manchester finds its own past
inescapable, so does Bane. I wanted the structure
of Chamber Music to reflect this with
two parallel plot strands that inform and infect one another. These moments of juxtaposition and
synchronicity of past and present gather momentum until characters are outpaced
by their history and destroyed by it. I
hope readers will find Chamber Music
fast and claustrophobic.
I stole this fatalism from classic film
noir, as well as the unsentimental vision offered in early American detective
fiction, particularly by Dashiell Hammett.
Hammett’s prose is stylish, spare and deadpan funny. His characters, like the Continental Op, are
politically astute and seem already jaded by modernity. But just as he’s mired in avarice and
thuggery and complicity from back alleys up to corridors of power, he’s also somehow
separate from it, although never above it.
He’s psychologically autonomous. Hammett’s
best mysteries are about pride and human weakness, the
stuff that makes affecting drama. This
is also true of some of my favourite crime films like Rififi, The Big Heat, Kiss Me Deadly and The Asphalt Jungle. There is
so much conflict. There is clarity vs.
Chaos; the visceral vs. the existential; stylisation vs. objective realism;
propulsive storytelling vs. disorientating complexity; the tenacity of the
protagonist vs. the futility of their actions.
Noir may be at its best tragic, titillating, cathartic and illuminating,
and at its worst nihilistic, reactionary and overwrought, but is never neat. Closure is unattainable. And in this way, it’s quite honest about
crime.
Chamber Music is probably more honest about
noir than it is about crime. And Bane
Books Three and Four might be more honest still, but possibly more honest about
crime as well.
Music is very important to me and to Chamber Music in particular. I love Southern soul music. I love hip-hop. So does Bane.
I also love The Smiths. Bane
doesn’t. There is not much else you need
to know about Chamber Music – except that
there is a Komodo dragon in my Manchester.
I kid you not.
Dean, whose previous designs include the covers of Ian McEwan's Atonement and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, said the book's title was her starting point.
The audiobook edition of the novel, published in September, will be narrated by actor Dominic West.
