Novels

It’s every hack journo’s secret fantasy to pen a novel.

Given that it can only be a matter of months until some upper-management genius develops a business model for the ailing print media industry that involves we human content providers being replaced with 100 monkeys (uncomplaining langurs based in a Mumbai cubicle farm, no doubt) sat in front of 100 typewriters, I’ve decided to start work on a book that will generate me some J.K. Rowlingesque coin.

It’s going to be what we literary types call “allohistory” (aka alternative history). In this genre it’s traditional to write about how things would have turned out if the Nazis won WWII but that particular mule has been whipped to death, so I’m spinning a yarn about would have happened if Sweden, following the economic shocks and stagnation of the ’70s, had lurched to the Left.

Continue reading "Life will be Swede when I pen my allegorical bestseller" »

The latest in the endless string of novels about Jesus has just been published in the UK (due out here in May). It comes from the pen of Philip Pullman, the author of the fantasy series His Dark Materials (a film was made of the first novel in the series, The Golden Compass, starring Nicole Kidman alongside a polar bear).

Pullman has already stated that it’s a novel, and needs to be kept in the category of imaginative retelling. But I recall that Dan Brown said the same thing about The Da Vinci Code, and it didn’t stop millions of people revising their view of Christian history as a result of its wildly entertaining (and historically ridiculous) reconstructions of the life of Jesus.

I feel it is fair to speculate that Pullman likely hopes people will revise their view of Jesus as a result of reading his novel.

Continue reading "Pulling the other one on the life of Jesus" »