Hello sequelites, as I promised last time, I’m back to getting on with writing my sequel. I’ve been back at work for a fortnight since my recent holiday, and I’ve written the first draft of chapter 7 in that time (about 2500 words).
I had two main objectives for chapter 7 going in: firstly to set up chapter 8, where the two main characters (who have had parallel but separate stories up to this point) will meet; and secondly to move forward with the relationship between Kit and his flatmate, which there won’t be space for in later chapters as the plot heats up.
I write almost entirely in “scenes”: something happens between particular characters in a particular place. I don’t always describe the place in detail, but still I like to have a clear picture of it in my head, which seems to help me make the scene real (and as I’ve written about before, I do enjoy place writing and psychogeography). I didn’t have a clear idea of setting before I started writing chapter 7, but it seemed obvious the flatmate section should happen in the flat. The other two scenes ended up being set at Newcastle uni, where the flatmate is a postgraduate, which was easy to write because I’ve spent so much time there myself (six years of postgraduate study including full and part time).
Writing it reminded me that at one stage, I was thinking about writing a “campus novel” entirely or mostly set there. The campus novel is a genre in its own right, which the Wikipedia article notes often “exploit the fictional possibilities created by a closed environment of the university, with idiosyncratic characters” Humour can often be drawn from the idiosyncratic characters, as in the novels of Bradbury and Lodge. But my subject was Computing Science, and I’ve never heard of a campus novel centring on that, especially in the pre-internet days of mainframes and tenure.
The time when I was a research postgraduate, 1989-93, was in the middle of a turning point for research universities. Mrs. Thatcher had abolished tenure, but departments were still full of idiosyncratic academics, many of whom had been there all their adult lives; junior academics were just starting to be hired on short-term contracts as money became available; and the research councils were just reaching the point of being squeezed so far that for the first time, even “alpha” rated research proposals couldn’t be funded. For undergraduates, grants were being squeezed to breaking point too, and the Student Loan Company started the transition from grants to loans in the 1990/91 academic year.
So it was “interesting times” in every sense. But I couldn’t think of a compelling plot to drive a novel through this landscape. In academia, everything was all going one way, and we know how it turned out: badly. It’s hard to satirize something so genuinely depressing. Perhaps this is why there aren’t any campus novels set at that moment. I’m a great admirer of David Lodge, who expanded my ideas about what a novel narrative can be, but I notice he skipped that era in his own novels. He went from Nice Work set in the mid 1980s, which brilliantly shows industrial and academic decline paralleling each other, to Thinks… set in the late 1990s, well into the “new university” era and being a mostly character-driven novel, delving into Lodge’s own obsessions (chiefly sex and the ageing academic).
I had the idea of a campus novel in the back of my mind when finishing my debut novel Parallel Lines, positioning one of the characters for a possible career change into academia. But I can’t think of any way I could produce a character-driven campus novel better than the likes of David Lodge. I enjoy writing satire, too, but it would be depressing to satirize those on a sinking ship (even the ones in denial about it) and again, I can’t do it better than the likes of Lars Iyer (a recent Newcastle lecturer who’s one of the ones who knows the ship is sinking).
So my tentative plan – I like to allow plans to change if they seem to want to – is to leave the campus of 1991 as a backdrop where the characters meet or pass through. But if there’s one core idea at the heart of the book I’m writing, it’s the idea of marginalised people and places. (The working title, in case I haven’t mentioned it before, is Marginal Beats, though I’m not happy with it and it will change if I can think of something better.) Academia, which was thought of as being at the heart of the British establishment until at least the 1960s, was by 1990 just in the process of being booted out by the Thatcherites (like all institutions with a predominance of what she perceived as commies). Perhaps there will be room in the novel for an ageing academic who started their career as a pillar of the establishment and now finds themself being shunned for dangerous ideas like the belief that all universities ought to have a department of philosophy (Newcastle’s closed in about 1988).
But if it happens, it will be in the second half of the novel, and for now I must concentrate on the mystery of Warehouse no. 3 and Kit’s descent before redemption. In a fortnight I’ll be back to report on chapter 8, and in the meantime, I will be showing chapter 2 to my writing group (they’ve already seen most of chapter 1). And I promised myself I’d get back to trying to find an agent after I came back from my holiday, so there’s that too. I’ll let you know how it all goes…