>>PREVIEW
SIMON INGS
Tuesday, October 10
Rozsa Centre (University of Calgary)
Rolston Recital Hall (The Banff Centre)
British author Simon Ings’s powerful new novel The Weight of Numbers (HarperCollins, 432 pp.) moves across space and time, from Florida to London to Mozambique, from 1965 to 1999 and everywhere in-between.
Fast Forward: The Weight of Numbers has garnered a lot of great praise.
Simon Ings: It’s good, isn’t it? And it’s frightened dull people, which is always pleasing. It’s angered dull people – hurrah! – which is what we like. We need to anger some people as well as please others. So, it’s gone really well. I’m very happy with it.
FFWD: There’s a great deal of interesting perspectives in the book. The way you play with time and reality: Jim Lovell, Ewan McGregor, all of these people make appearances.
Ings: Yeah. It’s quite funny, actually, because I came across a book review (that) talked about the "disturbed" astronaut Jim Lovell, and I was like, "but he’s not disturbed! He just knows how the book’s constructed. Jim Lovell’s the only not-disturbed character in the entire thing!" But of course, his thought processes pretty much reflect the way the book’s constructed, which is according to the way memory works, which is by association rather than by chronology. And I was rather daunted that I had made this entirely admirable chap – who’s also living – out to be some kind of lunatic. I hope that’s not the general impression of him. But the book is about coincidences. And about how the world is bigger than you are, and you can try and model the world if you like, but you’re going to fail. So everything came together very, very happily – partly by accident – and now I’ve got to try and follow it. Which seems a bit daunting.
FFWD: There are a lot of characters who have very strong ideologies.
Ings: There’s a woman called Abigail Nussbaum. She’s a fiction critic, and she came up with a line which I thought was lovely. She said, "the thing that unites all these characters is certainty." That’s fantastic. Each one of the characters, at least for a minute or two, is absolutely certain that their model is the way that the world ticks, and that they can rely on the model.
FFWD: There are these great patterns that evolve in the book, and one of the characters has the line, "people are the patterns that they make." It’s an idea that doesn’t become clear to the characters themselves.
Ings: Of course, for the characters, it’s a nightmare for them, because they have no idea that they are essentially all related, one way or another, usually by blood. I suppose that makes for quite a bleak view of the world, but it’s only a bleak view of the world if you’re very much wedded to the fiction of personal realization, which I’m not wildly interested in, because it seems that personal realization only comes by the by if you’re lucky. And it’s no good writing fiction in which the world is there for your benefit, and I get rather tired of fiction that suggests that it is. So when people say, "Well, it’s very bleak and people don’t know what’s going on," I reply, "Well, wake up and smell the coffee, that’s kind of what life is like." |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.