My mate Jethro does some writing in his spare time. Jethro now has his own website, but he still wants some of his writing up here. So now I will hand over to Jethro to describe his work
My "middle class novella" written in the winter after I finished 'Hope'. 'Hope' had taken five years, so it was nice to do something short. Unlike most of my stuff, the characters in this one have half-decent jobs and are relatively well-off. They don't do anything extreme. The story examines different notions of love and the baffled frustration some people experience when they don't really get what they want. There are also hints in here of my increasing obsession with errant human behaviour: it was in this story that I first looked at the sort of people who can't accept any other point of view. I wrote this mostly to keep my eye in during a very busy year of study, but I'm very fond of it for its low-key, undramatic style.
I wrote this in response to a diary I read of a Palestinian woman's life during the Ramallah seige. Ordinary life tends to get lost in the TV and newspaper reportage of international events; they tend to focus on the soldiers, the bombers or the abstract political game of who said what about whatever situation. One side or other tends to get demonised, but most people on either side still have to sit down and eat, go to sleep at nights, and worry about their kids or relatives or parents. If there's any hope in this world it should be through those basic universal traits we all share, not the bullshit differences whipped up by political or religious demagogues of whatever persuasion. I found the diary very revealing in that respect. I wasn't trying to write a story politically skewed towards one side or the other in the Palestinian conflict, but I was interested in the gulf in communication between the two peoples that war and conflict has opened up. There are issues about how legitimate it is for someone like me to try to write about something like this, and any thoughts from anyone about it are welcome. It's not a line of storytelling I intend to continue. I translated my fears and worries about the treatment of people in war by both sides, the legitimacy or otherwise of armed struggle, and the rather impotent experience of watching all these horrific events on TV, to a science fiction world - where it could be more safely dealt with - in my latest novel, 'Morning Star'.
This was my first bit of sci-fi fantasy in years, and I thoroughly enjoyed writing it. It's a full-on romance involving all manner of cultural inversions, linguistic barriers and a spot of Chaucer. I went through agonies over whether to keep the title in its original Hindi - 'ek dil ke liye ek phool hai' - as a paen to the Hindi film epics of the 50s and 60s that inspired the story, but in the end it just seemed too esoteric. This is a personal favourite of mine.
My epic novel about love, religion, class/cultural identity and London. Most of it is written about an Elephant and Castle that is just about to be demolished, and although it is set in a world that has disappeared (1998-1999 - remember how optimistic things felt?), there are weird hints of how the future would turn out to be. It took me five years to write and nearly killed me in the process. It contains by far and away my most evocative writing, and was a real labour of love. The first four parts are here; if you want the remaining six, please email me and I'll get them sent off.
This was originally intended as three linked short stories, but part 2 sprawled to such an extent that I ended up with a novel instead. I turned to sci-fi in order to further examine the notions that underlie 'The Blossom Filled Streets', but as always other things got sucked in as well. Two particularly important issues that arose were the boundaries of freedom of action - both on a personal and a state level - and the justifications people make for their distortion of events or narratives. I got the whole thing written in just over a year, which makes it the fastest novel I've written since I was 19.