Killing

November 6th, 2009

This post today is from Alexander McNabb, writer, media and public relations person, blogger and commentator on Middle Eastern life, on food, on technology and on the convoluted moves and counter moves of Etisalat. He’s a writing pal, a funny guy and it has been my pleasure to work on his book Olives with him – a pleasure that only those devoted to the extermination of adverbs would understand.

I’ll Kill Her

I was walking with my extended Irish family along the Thames when I realised. I stopped and cried out, “Golly! I killed a bloke here!”

My 12 year old niece was sardonically (it’s in her job title) unimpressed but for once I was telling the truth. Actually, I was under-doing it. I had killed two people within a hundred yards of that very spot using the same murder weapon, a Russian spy and Mafioso called Ivan Litvanoff. Litvanoff, who tends to spend much of his time with his hand up his rather pneumatic secretary’s skirt, ran a knife across the neck of a ‘tail’ from British Intelligence and then, a while later, shot the head of a shadowy British intelligence agency as they sit together on a park bench. He used a silencer, for no better reason than tradition.

I had a lot of fun writing my first book, ‘Space’. It made me laugh tears and I killed loads of people in a number of highly inventive ways. My favourite was having a sex worker called Kylie shot, vomiting her last gasp in a stream of blood down her boyfriend’s shirt, dying with his name on her bubbling, carmine lips in front of the other woman he’s sleeping with. I invested a huge amount of effort in making her a funny, earthy character that the reader would strongly identify with before setting up her unpleasant death. That made me giggle and still does. Come to think of it, I killed a fat old pub dog, a Labrador, in ‘Space’ too. Better out than in, I suppose. If I wasn’t writing books, who knows what I’d be getting up to.

However, rather more seriously, I killed a girl I really like today. My second book isn’t funny, so there’s a little more emotional connection going on around here. Killing her was a conscious and painstaking decision that I’ve reached after years of thinking about her.

February Sea

She’s the very reason the book exists. I was listening to George Winston’s February Sea one night before going to sleep and it made me think of a girl dancing in the rain. That dance in a sudden downpour is the pivotal point of ‘Olives’, the dead centre of the book (not in the plot, but in the timeline). I woke up with a book in my head and dashed it down in four weeks. Four years later, I’ve been learning how to write books and so, unlike Space, Olives is (IMHO) a viable and publishable book. I want to say that Phillipa has played a significant role in that development process – she has been editing the book with me and I have learned a great deal from her. Pip is a surprisingly disciplined writer. I am a literary slob with a number of revolting personal habits (not least of which is my habit of killing people).

In all that time, with all that writing, editing, rewriting, replotting, changing, tightening up, cutting, slashing, tweaking and tuning, Aisha has been with me. She has always been the same person in my head, although she has only been taking shape in the book as I have been learning the difference between writing stuff and writing fiction. After all that, I have come to realise that killing her makes perfect sense and is the only course realistically open to me.

So today I decided to do it. To kill her. Not a word changes in the part of the book that describes her death. It was intended to be left somewhat unresolved, but her death is intertwined with TE Lawrence’s dedication of Seven Pillars, a ‘device’ that actually happened naturally and wasn’t ever intended as a ‘device’. The last line of that piece is:

Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near and saw you waiting, when you smiled
And in sorrowful envy he outran me and took you apart into his quietness

Today I realised that this is how she is, in fact, going to end. Incredibly, it has made me terribly sad and I drove home listening to Secret Garden and thinking of a lonely girl crying as she walks through the rain on the eternal road to heaven.

Sleep Song

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Categories: culture, on writing | Tags: creativity, culture, writing