Carl Shuker has been shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for his novel A Mistake. Shuker caught up with Kiran to answer a few questions ahead of the awards.
Kia ora, Carl! Congratulations on being shortlisted for the Jan Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction! A Mistake is slim and concise, it’s neatly written and tightly wound. Stylistically, it’s a bit of a departure for you! It’s more clipped which suits the narrative. Did you enjoy writing in a different style?
Kia ora Kiran! Thank you! And thank you for the brilliant review you wrote. (You can read Kiran’s review of A Mistake here.)
Oh, I was so ready for a new way. The previous book (still in a drawer, still getting chipped away at) was all about multiclaused sentences and abstruse references, I suppose intellectual play, but geekery, really - it's set among a group of copy editors at a London medical journal after all, so it's about words and geeks who care about words.
This one, I wanted limits, I suppose because my life has new limits, but also because limits are fun and I've always wanted to do a short, brutally minimal book. There was a different story here and I wanted to be different. No more Pynchon, Wallace, Gaddis, Powers. That time for me - and I think for reading - is over. Also it's about New Zealand and so much of New Zealand is awkward, not quite socialised. So I realised awkwardness, the beauty behind the monosyllables, was the aesthetic.
Tell us about the character Elizabeth? Is she based on a real person and why did you call her Elizabeth Taylor?!
She's partially inspired by a real woman I know in healthcare who is brilliant but has no filters or time for politics. So she makes life hard for herself, almost on purpose. If she doesn't believe someone knows about something she has no trouble letting them know. It doesn't matter what that person is president of, or who they might know. This is obviously to her credit but also her detriment.
Of course what I see in this woman reflects myself to a great deal and I freely own Elizabeth has a lot of me in her too, the good and the less so. I wanted to create a character I could look to in life and say, what would Elizabeth do?
In regard to her name, it's both significant and not. I made a cover for the book early in the piece (as you may do when building up its world) and it was a heavily pixellated (real) Elizabeth Taylor. So there's both something about the transmutation of a "real" person in their complexity by media attention in its need for neat narrative.
But there's also that thing that characters' names don't mean anything. People's names don't. We imbue them with meaning after the fact. Most of my books have stuck to this rule - "Michael Edwards" for example (from The Method Actors). The more boring the better. However, there is the matter of the sculpture of words on a page, of which proper names are a part, and "Elizabeth Taylor" is a truly beautiful collection of syllables. But I also have secret resonances which I don't and won't let on. Lebanese names carry codes about religion that are very significant in that environment. So I know I'm contradicting myself.
You were a copy editor at the British Medical Journal in London and work as a Principal Publications Advisor to the Health Quality & Safety Commission - was there anything from your day job that inspired or informed your writing of A Mistake?
Yes - I was in the UK editing at the BMJ when they began publishing the individual outcomes of surgeons. It was a huge thing. It began happening here and we took quite a strong lead in this work and I basically had to read everything. And at the end of that reading I still wasn't sure of the right answer.
So part of this book was working out some of the issues for myself. An original drive was to have a chapter that was just a graph - a funnel plot - and it would by this point be for the reader so understood and laden with significance she might just see the graph and gasp. Also, in both jobs I am constantly surrounded by these brilliant, awe-inspiring people, predominantly women. A lot of my previous stuff has been about masculinity because I am a man, but I wanted to write about women.
Carl Shuker’s lockdown bookstack.
What has been in your lockdown bookstack?
I'm reading David Coventry's new novel in manuscript (Dance Prone, forthcoming from Picador UK and VUP) - and it's like mid-period Don DeLillo writes the early 80s US punk scene. You would LOVE it. It's nasty and transcendental and right and wonderful. I'm reading Middlemarch for the first time. I'm reading the same ton of graphs we all are. I love dipping into M. John Harrison's Viroconium before sleep to enrich my dreams.
What book is your comfort read/re-read and why?
My comfort re-read is Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. I know parts of it almost by heart. I don't know - it's funny, it's mean, it's exquisitely beautiful, it's both utterly silly and completely serious. It contains everything and it reminds me of years of connections - studying it in university, deciding it would guide and be central to what for me was a huge book, so I was intimate with it for years on end, finishing that book and it going into the world, and now my daughter, age eight, reading it, getting the jokes. She transmuted the characters of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch into "Hollowcheeks" and "Burp", which, you can't get any better transmuting than that. It's always been enriching to me, good luck, anchor and balloon.
What was the last book that really moved you, and why?
Aspiring by Damien Wilkins. Male adolescence is such a dangerous time I'm surprised we're not more organised about it as a society. I only say male because I am one and my own is quite personal to me, and the facts, dangers and failures of masculinity in New Zealand still concern me.
Also the consequences of failed male adolescence always affect others so much. The suicides and car crashes, all the physical acts and acting out. It's incredible to see people lose their way. It happens less and less as we get older and our bubbles shrink. We see people die. In high school we see all their changes up close - the deaths, the accidents, but also the triumphs, the transformations, the willed personality changes where people become other people sometimes over the space of months. The awful, rapid, rapid declines. It's a terrifying time and Damien captured it so well.
What are you working on next, Carl?
I'm working on work at the moment, gotta pay the bills, but I have a manuscript in a drawer I love to tinker on, one I love and may one day be ready for the world.
More information about the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards can be found here.