Interview by David Kendall (1997)

Nicholas Royle is probably best known for anthologies. Sometimes his stories are included (In Dreams, Little Deaths), and sometimes he edits them. His published novels, 1993's Counterparts and the recent Saxophone Dreams, deal with complex, criss-crossing themes. Both are claustrophobic and 'heavy' in tone and texture. Both deal with lines drawn across the landscape, across the body. Lines are precise: tram lines, tight lines, lines drawn bloody through flesh, across territory poignant with meaning.

In Saxophone Dreams, the Czech jazz musicians escape the country's grey, repressive atmosphere through their music and enter the surreal world of Paul Delvaux's paintings, desolate dream images which blend perfectly into Royle's prose. Characters are single-purpose somnambulists following lines they barely understand except on some instinctive, back-brain level, seemingly only half conscious of the larger world around them.

We meet in one of the glass cage offices of the Time Out building. He slumps charmingly to doodle sharp arrows over a notepad he seems to have brought along purely for that purpose, and so speaks directly into the dictaphone, giving me a lovely clear recording for which I am later grateful.

You seem to have been influenced by the Iain Sinclair/M John Harrison streak of high literary weirdness.
Yes. Strongly influenced. I think I'm less influenced by Sinclair now, or maybe the influence is less obvious. Because it's not present in your earlier work? So when did it come in? Just in recent months really. I suppose since I started working on a new book, a novel I started at the beginning of last year. Starting to write that coincided with reading Iain Sinclair for the first time. That was Radon's Daughters, because someone gave it to me to review. And I was so astonished I started reading his other stuff as well. I don't think, if I am influenced by him, it's reflected in my style. I don't think I write like him but I've always been interested in the same things that he's interested in. I suppose it was seeing someone else writing about these things that made me realise it was all right to write about them too. I think before I'd just lacked the confidence to write about them, and then I saw someone else was doing it, and doing it so well, and with such confidence.

What sort of things?
Particularly London, and the way that you can... However I say this it's going to sound pretentious. The way you can map a character's emotion into London locations. For example, you can narrate a love story between two people who meet in different parts of London, according to where they meet, and where they see each other, and the distances they travel to meet each other.

Are there boundaries to this use of London? As you go further out, do places become less distinct?
It could be anywhere. It doesn't need to be London.

But isn't London the most evocative?You imagine Soho and the reader immediately picks up on the attachments embedded in that name, but other places, like Edgware, must be harder.
Yes, it gets more difficult. I suppose if somewhere is already imbued with a sense of history and myth, I think that's what's most important, then it's easier to write about those places, and for those resonances to exist because they're set up by the myths already there.

Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock are also obsessed with London and myth. M John Harrison not so much, but he uses similar themes. It seems to be a streak of peculiarly English literary weirdness.
Mother London is one of my all time favourite books. It's astonishing. It's odd, really, that I'm trying to do this as well because I'm from Manchester, and though I love London, Manchester will always be my home. But now London also feels like home. I've lived here fourteen years now and yes, it's like a second home, London, and probably always will be. But most of the stuff that I'm writing around that subject hasn't yet appeared. The story you mentioned was written a couple of years ago, and served as the starting point for the novel I'm writing at the moment [The Matter of the Heart], which is partly based in London but also in New Orleans and Australia, mainly in Australia, so if people think at the beginning of the book: 'Oh, this is very Iain Sinclair, God, can't he come up with his own ideas' - soon I will take them off to other places.

And there is, in Sinclair's Downriver, that idea about time being held still by ritual. It's written so well that you can wander through even modern day Whitechapel and imagine that room to be there.
He's done a story for A Book of Two Halves. It's amazing, the best thing of his I've read, it is so good. Eastern Europe appears in your novels, especially the latest. Did you spend much time there? Yes. I spent two summers, which added up to about five months in total, travelling round Eastern Europe.

Teaching?
No. Just travelling. I did a spell of teaching in France, which Iwrote about in Counterparts. But I wanted to go to Eastern Europe because I was so fascinated by it. When I was a child, I just couldn't get my head round the idea that there was the world, and then there was a small part of it that people couldn't leave. It was such a bizarre idea. And it all boiled down to one city, Berlin, that was divided. You could have people standing at one side of this thirteen foot high wall, not allowed to go to the other side. Maybe it should have made sense but it was such a ridiculous idea. Whenever I tried to imagine Russia or one of the other Eastern European countries I just couldn't do it. I just thought of prison landscapes. So I always wanted to go and see if it really was like that. And so I did go to most, I still haven't been to Russia or any part of the former Soviet Union, but I went to lots of the satellite countries. This is 1987-88, before the wall came down, and it was amazing to see those places, some of them were very depressing. Rumania was a heartbreaking place, it really was. Possibly the most depressing place I've been to apart from Elephant and Castle. It's probably quite different now, but then it was very grim.

The most beautiful place I went to was Albania. People lived in poverty and there was all sorts of repression and corruption, but the place itself, the country and the landscape, was very beautiful. Which is why so much of Saxophone Dreams is set there. Mainly because I found it the most interesting; it was the most isolated, and it had nothing to do with the so-called Eastern Bloc. In fact it wanted to have nothing to do with anybody, which I found interesting.

Like a rather cold Cuba?
Yes. The Albanians distrusted the Americans every bit as much as they did the Russians. I thought at the time, romantically, that was quite a sound approach to foreign policy. Obviously they were completely fucked up in many ways but they had some good ideas.

So how did you get into writing? You're not going to tell me you've always written, from the age of five...
No. I started writing at the age of twenty, when I was a student in London. I just started writing stories. I wanted to write horror stories because I loved reading them, so my ambition was to write one. I wrote several pretty crap sub-Roald Dahl efforts and submitted them to various magazines and got the usual rejection slips. But then I sold one to the Pan Books of Horror series, which was nice because that was a series I'd always collected and enjoyed. Then I sold a story to an anthology called Cutting Edge. After that I just kept on selling stories, and started to broaden what I was doing so I was no longer just writing horror stories. They were attempting to be more ambitious than most of what gets published in that genre. Then I started work on Counterparts, which I wrote from 1986 to '87. Saxophone Dreams I wrote from '87 to '89 with a bit of revision after '89 when everything in Eastern Europe changed.

So that means your latest novel is about eight years back. So in that intervening period, you've been working on short stories and the new novel?
No, there are two novels after Saxophone Dreams, which my agent and I are trying to decide what to do with. We don't know what to put out next. My agent thinks it should be the one I'm doing now. Because she's read a bit of it, and thinks it's so much better than the first two books and the two in hand that we should wait for me to finish this one, sell it, and then we can always come back to those other two. In the interim I was doing lots of stories and the anthologies I edited. It was Barrington Books that picked up Counterparts initially.

Which was Chris Kenworthy?
Yeah, without him I could still be banging my head against a brick wall. He courageously published Counterparts. He approached me out of the blue for an anthology called The Sun Rises Red. I sent him something for that and we ended up corresponding, I told him I'd written a novel, and he said he'd be interested in seeing it. Although he really liked it he said he just couldn't publish it for one reason or another, mainly financial reasons. A few months later I got another letter from him saying: 'Now I can. I've got the means to publish it.' So he did, and he did a really good job. He did a better job of it, as a one man operation, than many of the big publishers do with huge teams.

So many people said, 'Both these books are too complex, we can't take a risk on something that difficult. Go away and write something simpler.' So I wrote two 'simpler' books and then, of course, sold Counterparts and Saxophone Dreams. The Barrington Counterparts did well in the reviews, and got picked up by Penguin, who bought Saxophone Dreams at the same time. So I managed to sell my two complex and difficult books.

Did Barrington sell many?
They sold all they printed, which was five hundred copies. Which, as I said before, for a one man operation is impressive.

So many authors hate the covers publishers put on genre novels. Did you get one you liked from Barrington?
I loved the cover. I was very grateful for that. I did suggest that Penguin hang on to it for their reprint but they wanted to come up with their own. It's a shame that Barrington Books is no more although Chris has spoken about starting it up once more. I hope he does. He closed it down mainly, I think, because he had no time for his own writing. Since he closed it and concentrated on his writing he's produced much better stuff of his own. In fact he has a collection coming out in the Autumn and some of the stuff in that is very, very good.

So what's with this miserablist tag?
Miserabilism? [Laughs] I've been credited with starting it. I wrote an article about it for The Idler, a sort of self-mocking piece about the so-called miserabilists. Originally I think it was Chris Fowler who first used the phrase, and I could never work out whether it was praise or he was taking the piss. I think it was a bit of both, but probably more taking the piss. And then a few other people started using it, and those who were being called miserabilists bristled slightly and reacted against it until we thought, hang on, we can get some mileage out of this, and it's a bit of a laugh actually.

What actually defines it?
Well, you see, those people who were calling us miserabilists would maintain that everything we did was miserable, was about miserable characters, who were always in a state of despair. It was always raining in the stories, and things went from bad to worse.

And what's wrong with that?
[Laughs] Exactly. It's realist fiction as far as I'm concerned.

You used your own life as material, then?
Of course! But what would be puzzling for anyone else who came across the term, and knew us, would be how such a group of smiling, laughing, happy-go-lucky individuals be called miserabilists. And that question still stands.

Is there an age similarity between you?
The miserabilists? I suppose, well, me and Chris Kenworthy, and Michael Marshall Smith and Mark Morris, Conrad Williams and Joel Lane, are all engaged in similar territory but we do all write differently, we do all have a distinct style. I think we're all completely different but maybe from the outside looking in we're all doing pretty much the same thing, or maybe we were a year or two back. Whereas now, no one... I mean, Michael Marshall Smith has gone off to do much more clearly defined commercial stuff, and he's doing it really well. Mark Morris is doing more traditional horror fiction. Joel Lane and Chris Kenworthy are still doing the same sort of stuff. Conrad Williams, the way that he writes, his particular style sets him apart from anyone else to begin with. I don't know. If we wrote in a similar way a year or two back then we do much less now. And in a year or two's time I think there'll be very little in common between our work.

It seems a thematic similarity more than anything. And if you're of a similar age -
I think so. A similar age, all writers at a similar point in their careers, all trying to break out of some perceived ghetto and achieve a wider recognition. It's not unlikely that they'll all start to sound the same.

What is it with you and abandoned hospitals? Seems to be a bit of a recurring theme.
[Laughs] I don't know. I've always been obsessed with abandoned institutions, particularly abandoned hospitals and one hospital in particular, the one at Hyde Park Corner which used to be St George's Hospital. I wrote about that in Counterparts. I haven't written about it in Saxophone Dreams but it's in The Matter of the Heart, and it's heavily featured in the new novel. That's just personal experience. Much like the character in the story, I used to work in a restaurant that backed onto the hospital when it was empty, and so I broke in a couple of times and wandered round. Just because that's the sort of thing I wanted to do. And that filled me with ideas and enthusiasm. I just felt that there had been so much life in that hospital, so much going on there. It still seemed to be teeming with ideas, for me anyway. And for some reason it became a very important point in my personal development. Just being at that place. Just spending some time there. Partly the thrill of knowing I shouldn't be there. Partly it was the thrill of it being an abandoned hospital, which appeals to me for some reason on some level.

Whenever possible I like to take things that have happened to me and use them, so I'm not writing autobiography, but I am using the material of my own life and making stories out of that. I found out some very weird things about that building. Since I worked at that restaurant; I worked at Pizza on the Park in 1984-5, and so that's when I was hanging around in the hospital. In 1994, ten years later, I met a girl called Kate, my girlfriend. She's a doctor, and it transpired that she'd been a medical student at St George's.

I'm obsessed by coincidences, or things that appear to be coincidences, which may be other things, a pattern of some kind. Synchronicity. I love all that stuff, I'm fascinated by all of that. I used to have an enormous map of London on my wall in my old flat and I worked out with a pin and a length of thread that it's exactly the same distance, and I mean exactly to two decimal places, from that abandoned hospital where I broke in and came up with a number of starting points and ideas; it was exactly the same distance from there to where Kate was working when I met her, which is Central Middlesex Hospital [North Acton], as it was to the new site of St George's in Tooting, which is, of course, where Kate finished her training. When she was a student she was trained at St Georges. Most of the time she was at the new site in Tooting but the old site was still operational, small parts of it were still functioning, and she went there for some lectures, so I'm just drawn to the fact that I was wandering around the corridors of this hospital a couple of years after she'd been there wandering around the same corridors as a medical student, and then years later we meet and discover this bizarre thing, that it's exactly the same distance, this [the old St George's] is a mid point between the hospital where she's now working, and the one where she ended up training.

And you discovered this after you'd written Counterparts, which is obsessed with lines drawn between places. As is Saxophone Dreams where you give the tramlines the same symbolic value.
Yes, years after.

But the logical extension of that would be to get a huge, large scale map of London and plot every significant event of your life on to it, and then to search for patterns.
Well, I've thought about that.

But it would be a lifetime's work. And you might become a rather sad fuck doing it.
[Laughs] Yes, but because I did this with a pin and a thread I was able to describe a circle and see what else lay on the perimeter and there wasn't, in fact, anything spectacular. But there was a curious thing of there being ten railway stations on another perimeter, another one that I came up with, I can't remember why. And the distance from St George's to this particular point, I can't remember what it was, lay on the same perimeter as ten railway stations, which is not useful or anything.

Your own mini-Hawksmoor?
Yes. And the new novel is called Omphalos [It was when this interview was conducted]. Which means the very centre of something. So in the novel this is the very centre of London, which might upset the psycho-geographers who might claim it's down in the Isle of Dogs, I think. And it's all to do with the heart, the human heart, and there's all sorts of stuff going on with hearts in this old hospital.

Chris Fowler is also very much a London writer, though he has a very different style to the writers we mentioned earlier.
I can't comment. I haven't read any of Chris's novels, just his short stories. There was one in the Time Out Book of London Short Stories. ['Mother of the City', collected in Flesh Wounds]. It was very much about London, so I can see he shares these interests. I think some of his stories are brilliant.

How do you feel about the way short stories are treated by publishers at the moment?
Well, as has been the case for years, there are precious few decent outlets for them. I end up giving stories away or selling them for very little, just because I don't feel there's any point in writing them and not publishing them. I wish short stories were considered a more vital part of our culture, because they are a vital part of our culture.

Yeah, it doesn't make sense in a world where people supposedly have less time for reading to be producing those huge doorstop novels, rather than short, intense stories.
Yes. The weekend papers and the Sunday papers generally are so thick and full of shit. You can see someone spinning out an idea to fill five hundred words when you can see it could have been said in ten, if it was worth saying at all. That's space that could have been used for decent imaginative work.

You've also edited a book of writers' dreams?
Yes. A collection of writers dreams called The Tiger Garden, published by Serpent's Tail. There are 212 contributions in it, most of them original to the book. A few are from dead writers who are sufficiently notable. Writers that left a record of their dreams, Kafka, Graham Greene, etc. It was a fascinating project to do.

But I was wondering if as soon as you tell someone a dream or you write it down, it's altered from the actual experience, you lose and gain little bits as you put words to the dream images.
Yes.

Doesn't it become a book of dream-like short stories?
Well, I did stress to all the writers that I didn't want them to turn them into short stories. Some have been unable to resist that temptation and have rather gilded the lily. That's the wrong phrase, but they have overwritten a little.

It's very difficult not to, I suppose.
Possibly. But then the vast majority of them are so sparse and they read pretty much like my dreams or like each other. They follow the same illogical pattern and they're not dressed up in a flowery language.

Are some dreams more important than others?
Yeah. Some of mine are just banal and others... I remember last night, drifting towards being awake, and as I was still dreaming about someone being dead, and I didn't know who it was but I knew it was important, and I wanted to hang on to it so I could write it down. And then it went. It's a bit like a thread stretching thinner and thinner and then it just snaps. Now that's lost to me, which I think is a shame, whilst if I can remember it and write it down, I might have reduced it in its written down format but at least I've still got a record.

Do you have lucid dreams?
No, I can't. I've tried to do that and I just can't. I've had Graham Joyce try to talk me through it, because his first novel Dreamside was all about that.

And writers such as Robert Louis Stephenson have taken a back seat in their dreams, and let their 'brownies' write their short stories for them. Just lie down and let 'em go. You're very into the surrealists, judging by Saxophone Dreams especially.
Yes. I've always loved the surrealists. Particularly Paul Delvaux, the Belgian, who probably wasn't a surrealist in the strict sense but I love that world he created. Just the look and feel of it, the atmosphere.

There is that connection between dreams and surrealism, the desire to make a 'superreality'.
Yeah. I don't know if I can explain what it is about surrealism that I find attractive but I'm forever coming across... If I can't explain it, I can at least find little instances in my life... For instance, there's a Magritte picture called 'The Empire of Lights'. Which is a blue sky and then a dark tree. Down in the foreground there's a street lamp glowing, and there's a pond, and it's obviously night and yet day at the same time. When I first saw that picture I was intrigued by it, but I couldn't work out what was going on. And then a few years, many years later, I had an experience out on Hampstead Heath. I saw this particular combination of a glowing light, just at that time of dusk when it was no longer day and not quite night. This is not making any sense at all. It was as if I'd seen the picture and suddenly I really appreciated it, and maybe it was plugging into some awareness that had always been there under the surface.

Something that is not quite reality, not quite dream?
Yeah, that might be it.

But I can never understand whether that's a crack between two worlds or a world by itself.
I don't know, but the way you put it is a nice way to put it. And again, that's a sort of retrospective way in which I could justify why I've always liked surrealism. Because I've been writing for years now, about a vision of reality that is ever so slightly to one side of what most people would think of as consensus reality. So yeah, maybe that's why I'm so into surrealism. Particularly Delvaux and Magritte.

What about the female surrealists, Leonara Carrington, etc?
Yes, I like Carrington. I was interested in whether more mainstream publishers will look at the independents to break new ground. They won't take a chance on everything, so, like the music industry, will they wait for an independent to sell two or five hundred copies and then they'll pick it up? Yeah, there's something of that but I'm not sure. Some big publishers would like it to work that way, I reckon, because it's obviously easier for them, they don't have to do anything. But then they're a bit stuck because they've got a mass market deal on possibly a really weird book, which is the position Penguin were in with Counterparts. And they don't know what to do with it.

But 'weirdness' has become a bit of a selling point by itself. The two novels are complex compared with most horror novels but not compared with that strand of fiction we've been talking about. They have several themes, which is perhaps unusual for genre novels.
I don't remember who it was, but someone said that 99% of any genre or category is crap. [SF writer Ted Sturgeon - Sturgeon's Law is '90% of anything is crap.'] And they're probably right.

Nicholas Royle's most recent novel, The Matter of the Heart, has just been reissued as a mass market paperback.