I’m at that point with THE NOVEL where I know I’ll be finished
with it one day — we’re talking months, not days, not years — and I can afford to
open the waiting room in my brain and let some new ideas take up residence.
All
ideas are welcome, but some arrive with greater urgency than others, begging for an immediate audience with the physician.
Some arrive alone, enter the waiting room sheepishly, prefer to
stand rather than take a vacant seat next to another idea. Some of these loners
turn around and walk out after a time, never to return. Others remain standing, refuse to engage with the others. Some relent, take a seat and are drawn into conversation: turns out they have
something in common with their neighbour. Other ideas listen in, thinking, ‘Maybe
I’m not so alone.’
Some ideas do not arrive alone but with a posse. The leader
saying, ‘There’s enough of us here to keep you occupied for the next two years.’
This explains why I read the Guardian article, but simply being reminded of
my fascination with the derelict is not an idea. To return to the waiting room
metaphor, I've actually opened up several waiting rooms. One of them
has ‘Short Stories’ written on the door. Another ‘Narrative non-fiction’. Today I
might have opened a ‘Ruins and abandonment’-themed waiting room and begun to siphon all my interests and ideas around this topic into the one space and
let them mingle, hook up and fall out while I went about other things.
But there was a particular passage of Dillion’s article that
grabbed me.
Reviewing Leopold von Ranke's History of the Popes in the
Edinburgh Review, [Thomas Babington] Macaulay speculates that in the distant
future Catholicism "may still exist in undiminished vigour when some
traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his
stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul's".
Macaulay's New Zealander, gazing at the wreckage of the metropolis (and by
extension on the fall of the British empire), was for decades a popular image
of London's future ruin – its most notable avatar is Gustave Doré's engraving The New Zealander.
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| Doré, Gustave and Blanchard Jerrold (1872) in London. A Pilgrimage.
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Having read these words, a posse of
ideas stormed the waiting room with ‘My next novel’ painted on the door.
I’m not saying it will be my next
novel, or if these ideas are any good, but I’m noting the process down here to illustrate, in some small way, how inspiration might arrive and how I handle it, plan for it,
plan with it, and get things done. Or how I fool myself about these things.
This idea of a New Zealander
travelling to ruined civilisations is rich with possibilities.
My first thought
was that this is what New Zealanders do on their OEs already.
Macaulay’s comment seems doubly prescient as it was made in 1840, the year the Treaty of Waitangi was
signed. While it might not have been the birth of the nation (that would ignore a
lot of feuding and plundering and some 'we're getting along just fine thanks'), but the events of that year were undoubtedly a catalyst for many of the things that make New Zealand unique today.
Then there’s the idea of ‘the New
Zealander’ just being a throwaway line of Macaulay’s, an example of someone
from far away, and presumably from a less civilised place. It brought to mind Dominic Corry's piece in the NZ Herald Online last week, 'When movies mention New Zealand.' There are tons of examples from film, TV, books and even video games where New Zealand is shorthand for 'very far away'. It's interesting that this dates from at least as far back as 1840.
I can’t tell from
the Macauley quote or Doré's engraving whether 'New Zealander' in this context
means 'Maori', as the two terms could be synonymous around this time. But there’s
another interesting idea that could be dug into further.
If we’re to take Macauley’s idea literally, a story would have to have a New
Zealander look upon a ruined London. It could perhaps take place duringthe city's bombardment during WWII, but I’m not so keen on doing something historical
next. The future seems a much more interesting place. The post-apocalyptic section of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas comes to mind. In fact, a lot of examples come to mind.
Post-apocalyptic fiction seems to have been done to death. But the challenge of
taking up a tired genre and introducing new life has its own appeal.
As you can see, there are novelish
ideas here, not all of them complementary. It could be a contemporary story of
a New Zealander (or a number of them) travelling around Europe and addressing the EU
financial crisis and a bunch of other 'fall of a civilisation c.2012' topics. It could be an historical
novel set in the 1940s. It could be something set in the future, post London’s
own apocalypse (or a worldwide apocalypse). And there may be less literal, less
blindingly obvious interpretations of this idea which have yet to enter the
waiting room.
The above summarises my first 30 to 60 seconds of head-time after reading the Macauley quotation and clicking the link to see Doré's engraving. But to end the story here
would be incomplete and unhelpful. What happens next when an idea sticks up it's hand and says, 'Consider Me!'?
Well, after thinking to myself that ‘The New
Zealander’ could be one of several types of novel, I finished reading Dillon’s
article. In truth, I started to skim as it held little remaining interest.
Then I googled to see if there were
other images of the New Zealander looking upon a ruined London online. I got a
whole lot of Doré's engraving, but nothing else after scrolling through the first few dozen results.
I did, however, open up two pages that
promised to address Macauley’s quotation in more detail. The first was ‘WhenThe New Zealander Comes’ by Prof. Blyde Muddersnook, P.O.Z.A.S. from The Strand
Magazine, September 1911 (via forgottenfutures.com)
Let us take a moment to admire the
author’s name.
Okay.
This second one looked to be less
about Thomas Babington Macaulay than his first cousin twice removed, so I
tackled it first (being inherently lazy and impatient; if I was an insect I’d
be one of those ones that spend most of their time zipping around on the surface of
ponds).
An interesting tidbit worth noting:
“So prevalent did this idea of the
inquisitive and judgmental New Zealander become that by 1865 Punch placed
it on their list of ruined rhetoric, literary devices judged to be “used up,
exhausted, threadbare, stale and hackneyed.”
Let us take a moment to admire the
pun in ‘ruined rhetoric.’
Okay.
The article notes that Doré's New
Zealander is a “racial and political outsider, wandering from the
periphery of things to visit the fallen core of an empire now past” (my
emphasis). Okay, duly noted.
If I decide to pursue this ‘The New
Zealander’ idea further, I guess I’ll have to tackle Rose Macauley’s ‘Pleasure
of Ruins’, but for now I was happy just to skim the rest of the article.
I then turned to Prof. Blyde
Muddersnook’s 1911 article.
I quickly realised this
was a piece of satire (man, I wish there was a real Prof. Muddersnook). It's the future, baby, and New
Zealand is the height of civilisation (and now just called Zealand). Lun-dun is
being excavated. A team of archaeologists from Auckland arrive at “the
ancient village of Suthuk, which is on the edge of the river-bed of the Thames,
most of which is now reclaimed land planted with cabbages, the export of which
forms the principal staple of the country.”
The appeal and the limitations of the piece are
evident in the following two sentences, midway through:
“Indeed, it is no wonder that this island became
gradually depopulated in the course of centuries, when its inhabitants had to
endure such climatic hardships. Indeed, to one accustomed to the climates of
old Zealand, Australis, Krugerland, Mapleland, Dai-Nippon, and other parts of
the world, not to mention Mars and the moon, it is hard to realize how any
intelligent race of men would consent to continue existence in such a bleak
island.”
You can’t start two sentences with ‘indeed’. But it is
funny, in a trying-slightly-too-hard way.
I’ll admit, again, that I reverted to my skimming ways not long
after this passage.
I think there’s only so long you can explore a new
idea immediately following its entrance into the waiting room.
It did occur to me that, as I was sitting at my computer and distracted by ideas that aren't anything to do with THE NOVEL, I could write the last hour up as a blog post. Et voila!
It’s best now
that I walk away. Play hard to get with 'The New Zealander(s)'. If the posse is still there when I’m ready
for them, then I’ll come back here and click on these next few links (which I haven't read and can't vouch for their relevance):
Stay tuned. One day I may post about what happens when an idea sticks up its hand and says 'Reconsider Me!'
