Sean Burke, Ron Butlin, Joel Lane and Henry Sutton
Ouroboros Rules OK!
Friday 10th October
Ouroboros for the Greek philosophers was the snake that is locked in a deadly circle eating its own tail; the declaration that Ouroboros Rules was a nod to the fact that the evening's four novelists share a publisher: Serpent's Tail.
The panel was chaired by John Williams, an editor at Serpent's Tail, who explained that, despite its radical credentials, Serpent's Tail was a publishing house of the old style in its expression of the tastes of one person, in this case its founder Peter Ayrton, not a multinational conglomerate. He introduced the four authors in alphabetical order:
Ron Butlin
Sean Burke is a lecturer in the English Department of the University of Durham. He read from his debut novel, Deadwater, based on an actual crime committed in his home city of Cardiff, and set in the docklands area of Bluetown - the "first multicultural area in the country". He read two extracts chosen not to give away any of the plot, which may have done his book less than justice: the somewhat abstract reveries of the protagonist as he paced the night-time city might have showed to better advantage if balanced by some indication of character or narrative.
Ron Butlin read from his novel Night Visits. He described the central character, Fiona, as a woman living in the house in Edinburgh in which she had grown up, which was now a nursing home, a woman having a complex relationship with her mother and strong Calvinist views. This did not seem likely to result in a likeable character yet the extract he read engaged the sympathies of the audience. He followed that with the beginning of a short story, Vivaldi, The Jumping Cardinal, God, Clint and The Number Three, not yet published on paper, but available on the web. He abandoned it on a cliff-hanger, but you can read the full story here.
Joel Lane
Joel Lane said that the theme of all his novels could be summarised as "Boy meets boy. Boy loses boy. Boy loses his mind." He opted for a high-risk strategy in selecting a passage from his latest novel The Blue Mask, chosing a passage in which the central character, like some classical guide to the lower circle of hell, leads his boyfriend into the seediest gay clubs of Paris.
Henry Sutton's novel Kid's Stuff is set in an unnamed city in East Anglia (Norwich, he explained helpfully). The central character is again not exactly likeable: an unintellectual and emotionally illiterate man with a history of violence towards his wives. The challenge for the novelist is to make the reader care about such a character, and, as Henry Sutton described Mark, bewildered in the Christmas shopping rush in Boots with a sulky adolescent and an escaped toddler, unpleasant though his character was, you couldn't help feeling sorry for him.
