FESTIVAL BOOKS MILWARD & SINCLAIR
GREGORY’S GORE Niki Boyle speaks to John Gordon Sinclair about taking the plunge into crime fi ction
On approaching your i rst novel after decades spent working in another industry, it stands to reason that your job will inl uence the writing. It makes sense then that John Gordon Sinclair’s debut, Seventy Times Seven, has a cinematic quality to it, given the actor’s 32 years in the business. ‘The idea was originally to write it
as a movie,’ says Sinclair, ‘but I quite quickly decided that I could spend a couple of years doing that, and it would sit around on someone’s desk without being read; or I could write it as a book, and then there was always the possibility of it being turned into a i lm later.’ The novel would certainly lend itself
to adaptation. It’s two protagonists are Danny McGuire, a hitman in the pay of the IRA, and Finn O’Hanlon, a target who can shed some light on the murder of Danny’s brother eight years earlier. If it did get optioned off, chances are it’d be an 18; one scene in particular, involving a kettle of boiling water, is not for the faint- hearted. ‘I’ve read loads and loads of books about the Troubles, and nearly every single one always has a point where people say there was a kind of madness, an absolute madness that seemed to take hold. So I was trying to capture a bit of that, where you just think, “this is insane.”’ So did Sinclair have any particular
actors in mind when writing these characters? ‘No, I deliberately tried not to make it specii c. I wanted the reader to make up their own mind about who they thought the characters were.’ He pauses a beat. ‘Obviously, Angelina Jolie would have whichever part she wanted, that would be i ne.’ ■ John Gordon Sinclair, Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 26 Aug, 7pm, £10 (£8).
GRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Richard Milward talks to Stewart Smith about kindness, karma and a girl called Kimberly
‘O ne of the best books I’ve ever read about being young, working class and British,’ said Irvine Welsh of Richard Milward’s 2007 debut, Apples. The 27-year-old followed it with Ten Storey Love Song (2009), a riotous tale of tower-block living written in a single, virtuosic paragraph. His latest, Kimberly’s Capital Punishment, moves the action from his hometown of Middlesbrough to London. ‘The surrealistic, claustrophobic episodes seem strangely feasible, I reckon, in a city as marvellous and monstrous as our island’s capital,’ Milward explains.
The novel follows the efforts of Milward’s eponymous anti-heroine to redeem herself after the suicide of her long-suffering boyfriend. Her foray into ‘unadulterated altruism’, however, leads to further disaster. ‘Ultimately I wanted to write a black comedy that contained all sorts of weird wordplay, obscure literary devices and the odd red herring, while also being a kind of morality tale about kindness and karma. A lot of so-called taboos get twisted throughout the novel, in an attempt to poke fun at the absurdity of violence or pornography, both of which seem much more present in our world now the internet’s i rmly taken hold.’
In a bold gambit, Milward gives the novel six different endings. A Choose Your Own Adventure for adults, perhaps? ‘I try to make sure these experiments with structure and form are conceptually sound. Without giving too much away, I dispose of the main character halfway through the novel, and the reader is invited to roll a dice to see what happens to her in the afterlife: she either goes to heaven, hell, is reincarnated or resurrected, turns into a ghost or rests in peace. No one knows for sure what happens after our last gasp, so I wanted to give six options. I give the reader a lot of power in this novel.’ In addition to appearing alongside Anthony Cartwright, Milward will be reading at the Faber Social Unbound event (25 Aug, 9pm). His approach is gleefully unconventional. ‘I love putting on a performance when I read, whether it means sticking a cardboard tower block on my bonce, or a blonde wig and skeleton gloves. Many readings can be stuffy, long-winded affairs; I’m much more inl uenced by stand-up, or someone like John Cooper Clarke, where more bizarre elements can sit alongside the spoken words.’
Richard Milward (with Anthony Cartwright), Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 27 Aug, 3pm, £7 (£5).
102 THE LIST 16–23 Aug 2012