[Interview_2] C. Y. Gopinath

C. Y. Gopinath has worked as a journalist, a film director, and a community development worker.

His books include Travels with the Fish (Harper Collins, 1999) and the novel, Book of Answers.

In this email interview, C. Y. Gopinath talks about his new book, Hoyt’s War.

What is your latest book about?

I just finished writing Hoyt’s War. The story is set in USA 2020, after four years of a very Trump-like President called Barry Codbag have made America the most ridiculed and reviled nation on the planet. It’s strange that my main ‘villain’ was every bit as irrational, maverick, and a dangerous loose cannon as Donald Trump.

Campaigning now for four more years in the Oval Office, Codbag needs new and more diabolical distractions to confuse the electorate.

Along comes an ordinary retiring American, Daniel Hoyt, a man who just would rather be left alone in peace. Hoyt knows he’s in trouble when he inherits an ancient but locked book said to contain answers to all of America’s problems.

And Codbag wants it. He knows this book will help him get re-elected.

Hoyt, wanting no part of this, sells the book to a dollar store. But the shop owner quickly realizes what the book could mean, and re-invents himself as a clergyman, claiming that through this book God speaks straight to him. It’s a matter of time before he is working directly with the President.

The President and the pastor make a lethal pair. For every preposterous law Codbag wants to enact, the pastor makes up ‘divine’ evidence that it comes from God’s words in the book. And a gullible nation laps it up.

Codbag wants to turn America into a monarchy with himself as King, in the name of minimum government.

Decriminalize rape.

Legalize cheating in examinations.

Impose a tax on sex.

Create a special Grey Area for people who think too clearly.

Ban the past and future tense.

Now Daniel Hoyt hates a fight; he’s no hero. But against his wishes, he gets dragged closer and closer to a confrontation with Codbag. The government wants the key to the book, and only Hoyt can get it. Suddenly he is the White House’s crosshairs.

Hoyt’s War is the story of an ordinary American who reluctantly takes on the most powerful man on the planet, in a hard-hitting, riotous and all too plausible satire of a dystopian America.

Is it true that Donald Trump was the inspiration for the character of President Barry Codbag?

Codbag undeniably talks, thinks and feels like Trump. But the truth is that I began writing this book in 2012 and finished it in early 2015, long before Trump was even a feature on the election map. So it’s a moot point whether Trump inspired Codbag — or whether Trump could pick up a few more crazy ideas from him.

The rather audacious promotional campaign I am launching actually is based on a series of ‘news stories’ from a certain fictional newspaper called Washington Psst, in which Trump is seen waving a copy of Hoyt’s War and saying it should be banned. It feels completely appropriate to take full advantage of someone as amoral, unethical, unprincipled and self-serving as Trump.

What sets the book apart from other things you've written?

Imagine a story set in the culture and society of one country — being re-written and re-imagined in the socio-political setting of a completely different country. I would go out on a limb and say Hoyt’s War might be the first book in literary history to do that.

In 2011, HarperCollins India published my first novel, The Book of Answers, a sharp political satire along Orwellian lines, set in India. The novel got shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize, though its sales in India were in the hundreds. My literary agent at that time, Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown Limited, mentioned once that the Indian cultural setting made the story harder to sell in the US.

This troubled me — the story was quintessentially about the madness of the extreme right ideologies that are dragging the world towards chaos. India and America had comparable madness. In 2013 I decided to completely re-write the story as an American political thriller. Patros Patranobis, the reluctant protagonist, became Daniel Hoyt. Prime Minister Ishwar Prasad, heading a parliamentary democracy, became Barry Codbag, leading a federal union called the United States of America.

Mumbai became the Tribeca district of New York. The royal palaces of Kerala morphed into the cotton plantations of Shongaloo, Louisiana, and Kerala itself became the Everglades. Miami and the circus town of Gibsonton.

The story could not stay the same either, I soon discovered. America was heading into its own elections, and the extreme right white-supremacist Christian evangelical environment needed serious tweaks in the story itself. Most importantly, I had to master the different dialects and idioms of the parts of America that featured in my story.

Best of all, a certain Mr Donald Trump landed with a crash-boom-bang on the election scene, bringing his own blustering, aggressive brand of unreasonable madness with him — and suddenly my President Codbag began to feel like the right villain at the right time. Codbag was already Trump, no two ways about it.

Which aspects of the work you put into the book did you find most difficult?

Writing intimately about neighborhoods and cities that I had neither seen nor lived in was one of the challenges in writing Hoyt’s War.

The Book of Answers dealt with my country, India, and descriptions were textured and detailed because I had experienced them. To get the same level of familiar detail about American settings, I spent weeks and weeks in Google Street View. It is astonishing how much of the world you can now see in continuous street-level view thanks to Google’s mapping software. Once I had a sense of what a street or neighborhood looked like, my imagination added texture and other details.

I have now walked the streets of Tribeca, down to the metro stations; the sea fronting villas of Little Neck Bay, and where East River widens to become Long Island Sound; I have trolled the evening streets of Miami looking for a bar; and sweated in the humid marshes of the Everglades. Dr Basin’s clinic in New York is authentically sited near a waterfront that bustles with streetwalking sex workers in the evening.

I also had to research local government institutions, hierarchies, ranks, so that my details about police, precincts, and officialdom rang true.

What did you enjoy most?

I most enjoyed tweaking the story politically to align it better to the frightening lunacy of modern-day Trumpian politics in the USA.

India and the USA share frightening similarities in their right wing establishments, but in the USA at the moment, a particularly virulent form is in full expression.

For example, in the years since I began work on Hoyt’s War, rape has been a major issue in India — and the whole world saw how easily the Indian male patriarchy condoned and excused it. But curiously, the US extreme right does not view women’s bodies all that differently from an orthodox Hindu fundamentalist. I have heard ignorant Republicans speaking of how the woman’s body “shuts down” pregnancy after a rape; and the number of insane and nearly barbaric laws to pressure women away from choosing abortion.

In Hoyt’s War, I decided to go out on a limb and have the President decriminalize rape in the USA, partly to protect himself when his connection to a real-life rape in the Oval Office surfaces. Of course, he does this in a very Trump-like way, by referring to some spurious ‘evidence’ that rape makes women stronger in spirit, and better managers of men.

This is probably the most controversial part of the story. A reading club in New York with whom I had a Skype meeting went literally speechless when they heard this detail of the plot. You just don't satirize rape, it’s too serious, they said. Yet the reality of how men discuss women’s bodies in America and India and pass legislation to control it — is shocking, preposterous — and far worse that any satire I could conjure up. I can easily hear Trump say that there’s nothing wrong with rape, that it’s one of life’s trials that makes a woman stronger. I can see him producing some victim of rape at a town hall and saying, Isn't she fantastic? Can you even tell she was once raped?

Another pleasurable part of the writing was the stylistics. When I was young, one of my pleasures used to be in trying to imitate the writing styles of authors I loved — P G Wodehouse; Vladimir Nabokov; Gerald Durrell; Adam Hall. It’s a kind of literary muscle-flexing that actually builds skill.

In transposing Hoyt’s War to the USA, I had to change the way I used English. My voice, which had been the sometimes stiff English of a literate Indian, had to became the easy, slangy and colorful English of the American continent. Except that not all Americans speak and use English the same way. A black American from New Orleans would speak it differently from a Puerto Rican in New York.

One of the joys of writing Hoyt’s War was getting the voice right. I learned a lot, I crafted a lot, and I edited a lot. The narrative, in becoming American, also became tighter.

How did you choose a publisher for the book?

The novel has been published by Amazon’s CreateSpace. I have been doing all the things writers are supposed to do these days — send queries to agents, wait for weeks and weeks and weeks, try not to be too depressed by the inevitable ‘compassionate’ rejection letter. But the days of being at a publisher’s mercy are over. Amazon is actually an empowering option. I know I have a great and timely story, and I see no reason to wait and wait till the American elections are over. So, yes, Hoyt’s War has been available through Amazon since mid- April 2016.

Why Amazon CreateSpace? What advantages and disadvantages has this presented?

In the past, I have been wary of Amazon. I released The Book of Answers on Smashwords and on the Apple Bookstore as an e-book, since HarperCollins only had publishing rights for India. I was put off by Amazon’s requirement that anyone publishing with them had to forgo all other channels. That makes them a monopoly — and I instinctively rebel against those. But the traditional publishing route is slow, completely depressing, and based on randomness and lucky strikes. I am still looking for a publisher, but my story is linked to a fast changing political reality and I want to be out there right now. So I am on Amazon — and I’m seeing that it is a huge and viable option — and could actually play a role in helping me get noticed by a publisher.

What will your next book be about?

I have two books in progress right, one non-fiction, called Letters to a son @ McGill, and one fiction, titled Balman the Matruist.

Letters started as something I wrote to my son who started undergraduate studies in McGill University in August last year, traveling from Bangkok (where we live as expatriate Indians) to Montréal, two oceans away. With his consent, I posted a few of the letters on medium.com, and later on the International McGill Parents Facebook Page.

The response was emotional and heartfelt — and the idea for a book of such letters, called Letters to a son @ McGill grew out of that. One post, on loneliness on the campus, quickly went viral, garnering 22K views. I reposted on the McGill parents Facebook page, and began receiving replies from parents as far afield as California and India. Comments included —

Thank you for sharing your Letters to a son at McGill. They each touch me in a deep and spiritual way. Please continue to be as generous in sharing your (and your son's) experiences. (Fred Cohen)

Thank you. It brought tears to my eyes. (Andree Vezina)

Thank you! This is SO timely given all that is going on in the world, and certainly recently in Quebec and across Canada. Our daughter carries a Canadian passport but has only lived in Canada since beginning her studies at McGill- your writing is touching and relevant to all of us - thank you! (Michelle Rath)

I began working on the book in earnest when I realized that there are so many conversations waiting to happen between fathers my age and their millennial sons and daughters. These kids will live their lives in a world engulfed by crisis. Old rules will not apply. Snowballing technology change, violent politics, climate change, natural disasters and wars will define their world. What can I tell my children to prepare them for this world?

I coined the word maltruist for my next novel, Balman the Maltruist, to signify ‘great harm caused by someone trying to do great good’. The story is set among the Luo tribe of Kenya — where Obama’s father came from, incidentally — and tells of the interaction between an American missionary with dollars, and the Luos of Western Province, and the crafty, charming and amoral Indian who plays the intermediary between the two, translating each for the other, and inserting his own conservative Hindu values and hang-ups into the translation.

The story is written in two voices, the Indian’s, and in every alternate chapter, a young Luo man called King. Through these two we see a culture through two very different eyes. To understand them and their daily hardships, I lived for a month among them, in a hut in a village with no water or electricity, eventually returning to Bangkok with the disease so many Luos die of, malaria.

I will not say more, lest I spoil the story for you.

What would you say has been your most significant achievement as a writer?

Certainly the exercise of recrafting an existing story in a dramatically different cultural setting and voice, as I have done in Hoyt’s War, is certainly an achievement that gives me a great deal of pleasure when I think about it.

I suspect that when I finish Balman the Maltruist, I will get similar joy from having told a story in two gentlemen’s voices, one Indian and one Luo, in alternating chapters.

How many books have you written so far?

My four books so far are:

• Travels with the Fish (HarperCollins India, 1998): A freewheeling and tongue-in-cheek of my globetrotting adventures through places from Chicago to Jerusalem, Turkey to Thailand, and Kerala to Bali; 
• The Book of Answers (HarperCollins India, 2011): An Orwellian satire of a man who inherits a book of answers to India’s problem but doesn’t want to make the world a better place — and the Machiavellian prime minister who uses the closed book to plunge his country into pandemonium, anarchy and chaos, just so he may win an election; 
• Hoyt’s War (Createspace, 2016): One ordinary American’s war to get America back from a lunatic, Trump-like President who has made America the most reviled and ridiculed nation on the planet; and 
• Lonely Planet Guide to Thailand for Indians (Lonely Planet, 2012): A custom made Lonely Planet guide to Thailand for the growing numbers of Indians coming here to vacation.

[Interview] Harry Whitehead

by Nick Edgeworth, The Grassroutes Project*

Harry Whitehead is a novelist, a short story writer and a creative writing lecturer at the University of Leicester. Before that, he worked in the film and TV production industry.

His novel, The Cannibal Spirit (Hamish Hamilton, 2012) is set among the First Peoples of Canada at the turn of the twentieth century, and has been described as "“Unflinching and rigorously unsentimental ... a thought-provoking and impressive read.”

His short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies that include London Lies (Arachne Press, 2012), The Storyteller Magazine and Whimperbang.

In this interview, Harry Whitehead talks about the concerns that inform his work as a novelist and a creative writing lecturer:

To start off, thanks very much for agreeing to be interviewed.

Pleasure.

My first question is: where did the creative writing process begin for you? When and why did you start?

Well, I used to win the prizes at primary school at creative writing exercises and competitions, and I think that started it for me. And I always wrote. I never took it seriously I don't think – but I guess everyone who writes stories sort of does take it seriously, don't they?

I did an undergraduate degree in Anthropology when I was 24 – I had been in the Far East for many years – and I read a story whilst I was there: an anthropological story that stuck with me. I won't explain it immediately because it might go back to a question you ask me later, but that story just played in my mind and I ended up doing a Masters degree in Anthropology to follow the story, and then it wouldn't go away, and I did a Creative Writing MA as well, and got sidetracked and wrote a load of other stuff before I eventually came back and wrote that. So I've always written, and enjoyed storytelling from the earliest days, and I got serious about it in my thirties.

Anthropology is a big part of your début novel The Cannibal Spirit. Do you think you're the sort of writer who looks very widely for ideas in interdisciplinary fields?

Yeah, for sure.

Before I joined this department [UoL's School of English] I had an O Level in English Literature so I haven't come from a focused reading past, in the way that English Literature trains you, at all. I come from a much broader space and have read much more multifariously, shall we say. But living abroad for so many years and then studying Anthropology has made me look all over the place for stories.

My book has been reviewed well and badly, and when it's been reviewed badly it's often in terms of its cultural authenticity and arguments about that. I was treading on some pretty delicate ground writing about First Nations people in Canada and people either loved me or hated me for it. Which is all right – that's fine by me.

What was it that attracted you to that setting at that point in time?

Well, I was 25 and I'd just broken my back, and I read this story, actually in a piece by Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the founders of structuralism – so a pretty unlikely spot to originate. I read this story about a nineteenth-century north-west coast shaman who wanted to become a shaman in order to expose the lies and trickery of shamanism. And he learns all these acts of prestidigitation and fraudulence as he saw them, and then a local chieftain has a dream that only he can save his sick grandson. So very reluctantly the guy performs the ritual, and lo and behold the child is cured.

So, this guy, whose name is Quesalid in the story – Quesalid's dilemma fascinated me. It was about belief; it was about the placebo effect; it was about what healing means; it was about rationality – all these kind of things. And it was that story that just wouldn't go away. So I decided when I did my Masters in Anthropology that I wanted to find out who this shaman actually was. And what I learnt about who he actually was was that he was half white, half Native Canadian; he was an anthropologist's assistant as well as a shaman and a chieftain; he was tried for cannibalism in 1900 – and there I had a great story of a man who exists between worlds, as we all do to one extent or another. How do we fight those conflicts that we have inside ourselves?

So it was that that really kind of stuck for me. And it was 18 years, really, from when I first read that story to when I was published.

Was it quite research-intensive?

Yeah, it was. I wrote a draft of the novel in nine months, so in a flash really. My wife, who you just heard texting me, I had just met and I was doing this Ph.D. and I was trying to write this novel, and I'd been researching for 10 years. Just about everything: into the life and the history of the region, the history of the Canadian First People. And I was sat in the British Library surrounded by books piled high. I'd just met her and I was sitting there going, [mock-sobbing] “I can't write my novel! I can't do it – I don't know what to do!”

And she said, “All these books: send them all back,” like that.

And as soon as I threw them all away and started to make it up, it flowed and came out in a burst. But without all those years of them filling me up and then stepping away and being free to just create, one would not have allowed the other, if that makes sense.

Did you find it difficult to arrive at what you felt was an authentic voice for George Hunt [the shaman], or was it more of a difficult labour to get something that sounded right?

This question has been debated since by people. There have been some critical responses to his voice, and some people loved it, others have hated it. There's about 40 years of his letters – of this anthropologist's – that still exist, but they're very tentative and very polite and rather obsequious, and actually not as interesting as the character I was reading about. They always used to put me off.

And then I read this story by Edward Curtis, this famous American photographer who worked with George Hunt, who said that Hunt was prone to murderous rages: he would lose his mind and come stomping down the beach to kill you sometimes, and he was this terrifying huge man. And as soon as that happened he came alive as a person to me - someone I could use and construct. And then I made up his voice.

There are bits of his speech from his letters; there are bits and pieces from the slang of the time; from other people's writings; and it kind of evolved as I wrote. The first draft I wrote in the third person actually, and it was only the second draft that I turned it into the first person. His voice started to come into being. But it was born of all those bits and pieces, and also the flora and fauna of the place and how I imagined the experience of being a hard old bastard of a man, like he was, who lived in these worlds; it would've made him gruff but articulate, if you like.

You mentioned a minute ago writing in the British Library. How do you think living and working in Leicester has altered your approach to writing, if it has at all?

Well, it means I don't have access to the British Library. [Laughs.] That's a pain, because I loved the silence amid the chaos of the city. My own office up here is not quite the same. But the book I'm writing at the moment is thematically a book about psychogeography, and it's set now, in the present. And it's set in the kind of edgelands: there are many different marchlands, edgelands; the urban countryside; the margins of the town, if you like, of the city; those bits inbetween. Everywhere that's inbetween; the forgotten bits around the back of new retail parks and the nowhere scrublands between one building and another. It's all about that.

Of course, Leicester is packed full of that sort of decaying, half-forgotten, inbetween places, so I've been sniffing out the underbelly a bit, walking along the canals and things like that. So it's been quite useful to me actually here. I mean, I'm a Londoner: I was born in Dean Street, above the Pizza Express, in 1967, so it's been tough moving away from what I know in the city, but actually as well it's been quite liberating because the subject of my novel fits the surroundings at the moment.

Would you like to say anything more about your new work?

Yeah, sure.

Well, it's called Nowhere. It's premise is, it's the story of a location scout in the film business who's set the brief to find Nowhere by a film director. And in the middle of nowhere he meets this lady anthropologist who has been diagnosed as having had a nervous breakdown, but actually hasn't at all – she's just seen through how everything is. And they have this furious love affair whilst searching for Nowhere along the edgelands of society, if you like.

It's all set in a very short period of time: a few days of their affair and this guy's location scout. So there you go: I've told you all about it now.

You recently organised this year's Annual Creative Writing Lecture with Laura Esquivel, the hugely popular Mexican writer. As an author yourself, what do you feel you gain with this dialogue, if you like, with authors from completely different cultures?

My remit in having this lecture take place each year is that Creative Writing as a taught subject here in the academy, the enormously popular subject that it is, grew up in the 1880s in Harvard and other American academic institutions and was born from English Studies, and has as its craft tools critical ways in which we approach literature in English Studies. So, it's somewhat blind to itself, given what its supposed universality is.

So, what I am hoping to gain from these kind of dialogues – we had Ben Okri last year, who is based in the U.K., but has a very broad kind of take on what literature is, and then Laura Esquivel, who I thought was fascinating actually in how revolutionary she saw creativity – I mean, real Latin American stuff – what a revolutionary take she had on it. She said we have to get away from telling the same stories, and when we are looking at archetypes, look in a quantum-mechanical way at the mirror of an archetype, the opposite, the negative charge, the opposite character to the character you're writing and see if that's more interesting. That was really something important and new that she had to say. It was all about what I'm trying to do in making a Creative Writing lecture bring people in from outside the Anglophone tradition. So I felt, even though she went off in all kinds of directions, and I think a few people went, “What is she on about?”, I thought it was great, you know. I thought she was really doing something different to what any British writer would've done if they'd been invited to give this lecture.

What do you think? Do you agree?

I would agree: it was not what I was expecting at all, but I found it a really interesting, a really original take on it.

Yeah it was. She was as mad as fish, bless her, but also fantastic! I got to spend a couple of days with her and talking to her, she was so wonderful and engaged, and she really does absolutely believe in what she was talking about. And flipping things upside-down; inverting them, turning them round; you know, not repeating ourselves and how that's actually an answer to the social condition of supermodernity, of the modern condition, a passive consumerism. And how the creative process of writing stories can actively become part of that.

It's not something we talk about in Creative Writing classes in the Anglophone tradition. We just talk about point of view and doing this and doing that. We don't – I don't as a teacher – I've not been taught to say to you guys, “Let's use this to tell some story that really is about something else.” To really plunder the depths. I'm hesitant to do that: classes I'm teaching tend to be introductory classes and I don't want to scare people off, but then after watching Laura Esquivel a bit of me thinks that actually, yeah, maybe I should be scaring people off and engaging the people who want to be engaged.

You know what I mean? What do you think about that? Interesting to throw that at you, since you're one of my students.

I think the classes so far have been valuable and I think I would've felt a bit out of my depth. But then it's interesting to think – I was about to call them the “basic tools” of creative writing, but is that an objective thing, or is that something ingrained in how we think about it in the Anglophone tradition?

I started on about it a little bit in the class on Monday. With Jamaica Kincaid, everything is kind of like what I've been explaining – until it ain't. But when it still works, it still works.

And Alain Robbe-Grillet's take on the nouveau roman – I don't know if you guys have come across him or not - but he says, “I'm not interested in character or plot, point of view, structure, any of this kind of thing. I'm interested in tone, colour, suggestion,” - all those completely different things.

For someone who comes along to these events, or the Grassroutes exhibition and thinks, “That looks fun – I want to do that”... what advice would you give to an absolute beginner who wants to write?

Be wary of your own ambitions. Be absolutely honest that you're not fooling yourself by your ambitions.

Isak Dinesen said something that I have pasted up in my office. She said, “I write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” And that's it.

I mean, Laura Esquivel says, “What should a writer do? Write.”

If you're an absolute beginner you think, “Oh I'd like to be doing that.”

“Why aren't you?” is an important question. What is it that you want? Because there is a degree – not so much in universities, and I haven't found it so much in reality in my students as I thought I might – but there's a degree of a culture of narcissism at writing schools.

In a secular age, how do we answer our extinction after 4,000 weeks of life? By showing the world how authentic, deep and meaningful we are by writing a Great Novel.

Like Nick Cave says, “We call upon the author to explain.”

My advice for a starting writer is have a good look at what it is you want to do. Don't fantasise it too much too soon.

Don't become a writer before you write.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Don't seek to become a writer: seek to write. And then ask yourself what it is you write: what is your purpose? Why? Do it without hope or despair. [Laughs.] Because God knows it's a long process!

I got lucky. I did an MA from 2004 to 2005 and I got my first novel published in 2011: six years, I mean, that's remarkable. I'm not bigging myself up, I'm just saying it's remarkably fortunate how quick that happened. Also, I'd been writing since I was eight and I've always written stories, hundreds of short stories that are rubbish.

So, it's a long old grind and you've got to enjoy the process.

I met this guy when I was on this book tour in Canada who did a survey of 1,500 novelists, and he asked them how old they were when their first novel was published, and the mean age was 42, which is a real surprise I think.

Thanks very much.

A pleasure.

*Nick Edgeworth is a volunteer at Grassroutes: Contemporary Leicestershire Writing, a project that aims to promote Leicestershire's diverse literary culture.

Related books:

,,

Related articles:

• Harry Whitehead, Writers Gallery, Grassroutes: Contemporary Leicestershire Writing 
• Harry Whitehead on The Process of Writing [Video Interview], CivicLeicester, May 29, 2012
• The Cannibal Spirit taps into mystery: Novel examines the inner life of a shaman moving between cultures [Interview], by John Goodman, North Shore News, February 24, 2012

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