Smoking poppy
By Graham Joyce
G&S Books
Smoking Poppy.
Copyright © Graham Joyce 2001. All rights reserved. This E-book edition first published 2013
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Foreword © Graham Joyce 2013
Graham Joyce is a multiple award winning author. He grew up in the mining village of Keresley near Coventry. In 1988 he quit his job as a youth officer and decamped to the Greek island of Lesbos, there to live in a beach shack with a colony of scorpions and to concentrate on writing. He sold his first novel while still in Greece and travelled in the Middle East on the proceeds. He is a winner of The World Fantasy Award; is five-times winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel; is twice winner of the French Grand Prix De L'Imaginaire; and was the winner of the American O Henry short story award in 2009. His website is: www.grahamjoyce.net.
Novels by Graham Joyce:
The Year Of The Ladybird
Dreamside
Dark Sister
House Of Lost Dreams
Requiem
The Stormwatcher
Leningrad Nights
Indigo
Smoking Poppy
The Facts Of Life
The Limits Of Enchantment
Memoirs Of A Master Forger by William Heaney/ How To Make Friends With Demons
The Silent Land
Some Kind Of Fairy Tale
Partial Eclipse & Other Short Stories
(Children & Young Adult novels):
Spiderbite
TWOC
Do The Creepy thing
Three ways To Snog An Alien
The Devil’s Ladder
(Non-fiction):
Simple Goalkeeping Made Spectacular
Author’s Foreword
Does having children change the way you write? It’s a question often put to me. The answer is: yes, profoundly.
I wouldn’t make any grand claims about it making you either a better or a worse writer, but it certainly makes you a different writer. The experience of having children is so clearly different for different people. For some people the entire process is obviously about as significant as having a glass of beer. For me, as someone who had originally decided that I never wanted children it is and remains an overwhelming and transformative psychic explosion.
Anyway, Smoking Poppy was written while I was still adjusting to the magnificent emotional derailment called fatherhood. It was like all the coloured jewels had dropped out of the end of a kaleidoscope and there I was trying to assemble a new mosaic out of all these bits. One of the most unexpected jewels that Nature comes up with is the protect-and-nurture instinct to pick up your new-born child and hold it right there in your arms. This is astonishing considering that other people’s new-borns are or were pretty revolting alimentary canals squirting body fluids at either end: something to hand back quickly to the oafishly smiling father or the enraptured mother who thought it was “pleasantly bonding” to let you handle their bundle in the first place.
Ah, but when it’s your own! Nature doesn’t just make you want to pick up and hug your child, it triggers complex hormones and pheromones that actually addict you to the practice of handling your child. A divine scent comes streaming from the soft fontanel of your baby’s crown. You get one whiff of that and you are a gonna. It’s more addictive than crack cocaine, and it never gives you a downer. It’s pure reward. Pick me up in your arms! Get a free hit!
It stays with you all your life, that hit. This natural charge is so strong that next time someone gives you an alimentary canal to hold you don’t run from the room screaming anymore. You surreptitiously pass the baby’s fontanel under your searching nostril to see if you can still reclaim the scent of heaven. Just once again. Please.
This novel, Smoking Poppy, sprang from that single idea. What happens when you are so addicted to the love you have for your children when you have to let them go? Or can you ever really let them go? In fact I open the novel with this idea. I wasn’t going to, initially. The passage that now opens the story was buried deep in the middle of the novel somewhere until my very smart editor Jason Kauffman suggested hauling it to the front. I still think it’s one of the best openings of all my books.
Though the book is much more of an adventure novel than domestic drama. I have a habit (uncomfortable for publishers, though they let me get away with it) of splicing genres. Here was one I hadn’t tried, almost Victorian in character: the pale-faced Englishman plunged into exotic climes and inscrutable Orientals: but breathed upon all the time by the fumes of the supernatural.
Not that there are any hard-core ghosts in Smoking Poppy. If anything, my protagonist Danny is his own ghost. Although his quest is to find his daughter, he has over the years been losing his soul and though it takes him some time to realise it, he is also on a quest to get it back.
One way he thinks he might find it is by sticking his nose in books. In order to get a clue to his daughter’s frame of mind he reads stuff like Thomas De Quincy’s Confessions Of An Opium Eater. Not that he can drag much sense out of the book, though he is impressed by the short section on the mysterious “Dark Interpreter”. Perhaps in that one regard he is a bit too much like me.
I had a lot of fun in writing the characters of Danny, Mick and Phil. Danny is one of those intelligent blue-collar workers who through no fault of his own never got the chance of a university education, though he worked hard to ensure his own children had exactly that. He