The Unreliable Narrator In Unreliable Times: Henry Sutton On Get Me Out Of Here

put the emphasis. How you pronounce monster – with an appalled

grimace or a sly wink. A cheeky grin, even. Whichever, invariably

they're one hell of a lot more fun than the good guys.

For a number of years I'd become increasingly outraged, not to

mention bored, by the preponderance of narrators and leading

characters we're all meant to have searing empathy for, if not fall

hopelessly in love with. It was largely Richard and Judy's fault, by

turning literature into a cosy knitting circle. How many times have I

heard a reader, a student, a friend say - 'The problem with the book

is I didn't like the main character.' -? Not enough actually,

because, Jesus wept, you're not always meant to like/love/lust after

the key character of said book. That really is not the point of fiction.

As I see it, the point of fiction is to stimulate, to intrigue, to

provide insight and pointers perhaps to intellectual discourse; it's

meant to entertain too, of course. But it's not necessarily a comfort

blanket. It's purpose is simply not to make you feel loved-up,

chilled-out or at peace. It's about people – from the very good to

the very bad. If anything, it's about making you feel human. Alive.

Over the years, the decades – and we do have to go back in time a bit

– we encounter numerous disturbing (not to mention bigoted, bullying,

addictive, psychotic and murderous) narrators and leading characters,

from actually Hammett's Sam Spade, to Jim Thompson's brilliantly

lethal Lou Ford. We have Martin Amis' John Self, Bret Easton Ellis'

Patrick Bateman, Tom Wolfe's Sherman McCoy, and again and again, we

had Highsmith's Tom Ripley.

Indeed, stalking one of the greatest novels of the 20th century – a

novel that gracefully ushered in the modern era, with all its

anxieties and neuroses - we have, and let's all doff our caps, Jay

Gatsby. Oh, and then drooled, let's not forget – if we could - dear

old Humbert Humbert.

Fiction ripples with rotten dreams and desires – and I'm talking

about the published stuff. It's the damaged psyche, surely, that

explains a damaged world far more accurately than a passionate do-

gooder, or a loved-one being loved, or is it for the love of being a

loved-one? Who cares? Yadda, yadda, yadda.

And, interesting, isn't it, that when the world, a society, is

going through a particularly brutal and public mauling – be it a

major war or depression – so up pops a nasty piece of work, albeit

wrapped in some exquisitely styled and shaped prose and albeit of a

particularly penetrating nature. Nasty comes in many hues and cries.

And there's another thing – name a great prose stylist who spends

most of his or her time in the heads of the beautiful and the brave,

the unremittingly good and comfy? There's yet another thing also –

humour. Horrible people are invariably funnier than nice people. Bad

situations, and I'm talking man-made, don't simply bring out the best

– more than anything, they evoke, do they not, the eternal

contradictions of the human condition. The terrible flaws and flaying.

I was chewing over all these notions, while numerous people were

highlighting to me the fact that my own books had been getting darker

and more criminally minded, if not psychotically so, when the great

towers of commerce began to collapse (along with any sense of

security in the publishing world) and I thought, quite clearly,

though indeed possibly suicidally, sod it. I want a real monster to

narrate my next novel. I'll make him relevant, of the time (as in as

much a product of), and, hopefully, timelessly funny – humour, to me,

being an essential ingredient to the whole unreliable process,

because darkness still needs light.

I was going to add a serious plot (criminally twisted), what style I

could manage - a thumping howl was soon reverberating on the screen -

and before I knew it the novel had practically written itself; the

first one I'd done specifically, from start to finish, in the first

person too. A voice had certainly emerged. You might not like what

happens (and who would? Or, indeed who does, given the climate?), but

I'm hoping someone – you'll, please – at least listen, for a bit

anyway. Surely, it's more than time for some revaluation. Fat lot of

good all the studio chatting did – the swooning and backslapping, the

fawning and boring. Studious it was not. And neither, frankly, was it

very realistic.

Get Me Out Of Here by Henry Sutton is published by Harvill Secker

Posted at 9:39AM Tuesday 08 Dec 2009