[Phoenix Court 04] - Fancy Man

make it more normal. Looking back, I can catch a glimpse of the kind of thing they might have wanted me to do. Make the romance more orthodox. If it had to be gay, keep it light and vanilla. Put in fewer unicorns and alien replicants. Keep the sex fluffy rather than quite so in your face. Less melodrama, fewer cocks, fewer flights of ludicrous fancy. And maybe don’t make every single character a writer..? (In ‘Fancy Man’ almost every single character is busy writing novels, memoirs or letters, or they are bursting into some kind of ragged verse to express their feelings. But this was just a joke of mine. In any other literary novel (Iris Murdoch, say) no one would turn a hair if all the characters were writers, philosophers or critics. Why shouldn’t that also be true in novels written by me? In novels about hairdressers, shop girls, lottery winners..?

Because it isn’t very realistic or true to life, comes the answer…

But I never started off writing novels in order to be true to life. I wanted to be true to my characters and a fully-imagined world of my own. I wanted to interrogate the myths and lies of realism and break it apart from within. When you come from a working class background the literary world expects you to write gritty realism, so you can look back on squalor and make everyone shudder. Well, fuck that for a game of soldiers, I thought.

The other route you can escape into as a non-posho literary author is horror, sf or fantasy. But they were kind of a boys’ gang then, and mostly still are. What I really wanted to do was to take the outrageous tropes of those bastard genres and put them into literary novels. I wanted to create a wonderfully spicy stew of fictive elements…

Anyhow, somewhere between teaching all those courses that year, fighting to convince people I knew what I was on about, and editorial difficulties and ultimately the cancellation of my fourth novel (did I fall or was I pushed? The book was cancelled either way…) I lost my confidence. Somewhere between the devil and the deep blue sea. I found myself alone with my manuscript and all my confidence suddenly gone. My great new editor had said my book was nonsense and my agent couldn’t help.

The book, as far as I could tell, was ruined.

This felt just like being a tightrope walker, jolted out of his delicate spell of concentration. He looks down, sees the ground, and wobbles. He needs to get his balance back right away or he’s going to plummet to his doom.

So I put Fancy Man away. Up in the attic in the house I’d bought in Norwich. Every copy of the manuscript. The one where I chopped it down to half its length. The one where I excised all the Magical Realist elements. The one where I chopped out all the aliens and cocks. The version where I edited out the long section set in the brothel above the gay sauna on Leith Walk, run by the woman with no legs. The version where I’d hacked each scene into exquisitely arty, poetic fragments… Every single copy I put away out of my sight.

Then I went and did my best to forget all about it. My year with Wendy and Timon, Aunty Anne, Colin, Belinda, Captain Simon, Uncle Pat. I abandoned the freakish lot of them, people who’d been as real to me as anyone I knew in 1998.

I got on with life. I started a whole new novel in 1999 – Modern Love, which was a very dark domestic thriller with no fantasy at all and lots of murders. It came out with a different publisher – my third – in the year 2000, when I was thirty.

Time moved on. Eventually we moved cities and jobs and houses. I chucked out boxes, folders, files, papers, letters and manuscripts. I chucked out, I thought, every remaining version of the doomed ‘Fancy Man.’ My partner Jeremy despairs at me throwing stuff out. I prefer to clear the decks, but he won’t hear of it.

Anyhow – fast forward to 2016.

There’s the marvelous news that Lethe want to republish my first three novels, with new covers, introductions, added extras and contemporaneous short stories. I’m cockahoop. Writing these introductions for them, I still can’t resist grinning at the very thought of these books being made available again.

Then, when I’m racketing about in old boxes in the Beach House at the bottom of our garden (we live in Manchester now, in a leafy enclave down by the railway lines) I find something interesting amongst my old files. Amid the letters and old stories and notes and ideas I find ‘Fancy Man’ again.

I assume at first it’s the tidied-up version. The truncated version. The bowdlerized or bastardized version. But it’s none of these. It turns out to be the four hundred page version. It turns out I hadn’t binned it after all. Not even in a fit of pre-millennial self-loathing and pique.

Here it is. It spent six years in the Norwich attic, then ten years in the Manchester cellar and then a year or two mouldering in the Beach House. It’s damp and blotchy and warped.

I read it all again, very slowly.

And I love it, all over again.

It seems very me. Me as I was at twenty-nine. Not as hampered and crushed down and worried and care-worn as I became a little later on.

It’s like finding a little clone of yourself, or a recording of your voice with your friends, or a set of photographs of a happy time you didn’t even know had been printed.

So.

I feel confident all over again about the Fancy Man phase of my writing career. The novel reads like a missing link in my books and it should rightly slot into 1999 – right between Could it be Magic? and Modern Love. Now the whole story can be told. It’s been restored