Ambiguous Embrace
What can you tell us about your new book Ambiguous Embrace?
Ambiguous Embrace is a 21st-century love story driven by character and dialogue that shows how very close the world is to having genetically modified people. Sensuous, gritty, funny in places, it depicts the emotional agony of a gene-transfer specialist who hates having to choose between the love of his life and the limitless potential of his laboratory work.
People free of inherited diseases including breast cancer, Down's syndrome, sickle cell anaemia and quite a few other debilitating conditions: what more altruistic motive can a research scientist have? 'It is so hard, and it is cruel, to have to choose between the person who has filled you with happiness, who has made it a pleasure simply to wake up in the morning, and the lab work with your colleagues that is on the brink of bringing about nothing less than a paradigm shift in human nature...She let loose in me a sensation of euphoria, an elation that made me feel vivid. Sometimes I felt for months on end that I was ablaze. And it was through Sophie also I discovered that disgruntlement, frustration, corrosive jealousy can lie concealed in the very heart of one's happiness, gnawing away silently.' The plot development shows in detail how this serious tension is resolved, if it really is.
Why do people believe that scientists aren't romantic? The narrator, Charlie Venn, is an American molecular biologist working in England to scotch inherited diseases at source and extend youthfulness. When he arrived in England, aged 25, he knew no unattached women and wasn't intimate with anyone for ages. 'It is still imprinted on my brain: the tensions and agonising frustrations of life without sex, without emotional warmth and tenderness, for more than eight months. My libido was distraught, clamouring for relief. I was starving. I caught myself eyeing women as though they were food; I wanted to reach out, grab handfuls and start gobbling. Their lips and breasts and butts were like banquets walking by to which I hadn't been invited. It was anonymous; of course, all that passing flesh, but generically alluring, and my pangs of hunger often pushed me to the brink of despair.'
Ambiguous Embrace is based closely on research in genetics labs around the world. The Beijing Genomics Institute, for example, have been sequencing the equivalent of 2,000 human genomes a day. They've so far sequenced the genomes of at least nine species of plant and 20 species of animal, including the South China tiger, Bengal tiger, African lion and a cloud leopard. Chinese researchers have also discerned the precise genetic makeup of two reciprocal hybrids, a tigon and a liger (tiger/lion blends).
Some religious people are appalled by the 'effrontery' of 21st-century research, insisting that we are 'made in God's image' and therefore unimproveable. But secular people who love the world are heartened by these scientific breakthroughs. We seem to be entering a new stage of evolution following the digital revolution which is still ongoing with tectonic consequences. What are the dangers involved? Will there be penalties for the hubris of 'reaching too high', of 'trying to play God'? Self-replicating mutations, perhaps? Altogether new diseases? Genetic Armageddon? Readers get insights into these important issues so they can decide where they stand in the debate.
A scientist who loses sleep, has nightmares, because his darling isn't sold on the wisdom of his genetic enhancement work. Find out how and why she changes her mind by buying a copy of this mix-breed of a book: science entwined with the arts and the Kennedy assassinations and the epidemic of child rape for years and years on every continent by Church seniors assiduously covering up their vile behaviour.
How much has your degree in social studies helped you in the publishing world?
It's hard to say. I was torn between studying English and studying something that would give me clues as to how the world is run, who owns it, how politics, economics and misery are enmeshed. Then I read in the papers that, in his speech saying farewell to the American people, President Eisenhower warned his nation of the dangers of its military/industrial complex. That swung it: I did an honours degree at Exeter University which combined sociology, British economic history, women's place in society and a course called Logic and Scientific Method. But I've always loved my mother tongue, the English language, alongside music, food and sex. So perhaps my degree helped to the extent that, at the copy-editing level, I had the lingo and, at the macro level, I had some notion of what interested writers, academic or otherwise.
You trained as an editor at Penguin; what was this experience like and how has it informed your self-publishing experience?
My time at Penguin sharpened my eyesight, gave me hawk eyes. I copy-edited many non-fiction books, learned to notice inconsistencies in the spellings of names, dates, geographic details, etc., and how to draw the authors' attention to such clangers without upsetting them. Some of the authors were very senior academics at universities in UK, Europe and elsewhere; their frailties reinforced my understanding that status is no guarantee of quality. And it demonstrated that academic writing is often full of stodge. The Penguin experience affirmed yet again Duke Ellington's profound teaching: 'It doesn’t mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.' Ideally, paragraphs should have rhythm and cadence. All of this has made me appreciate the attention to detail of the people in my self-publishing experience. Matador staff are on the ball, efficient, fast but never sloppy. I'll be coming back to them with other books, I feel sure.
Please tell us about your extensive research into AIDS.
At the time when people were terrified of 'catching' AIDS simply by being near an individual known to be 'positive' for the virus, I went to the flat in West London where Jonathan Grimshaw lived. He was a gay man, a TV producer and a founder member of the organisation Body Positive. He had the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome 'in his blood', as people used to say. Such people would have said I was walking to my doom because there was no vaccine for this modern 'pestilence' and no cure and the epidemic was spreading relentlessly. But it was crunch time: did I accept the scientific view that AIDS could only be contracted by sex with an infected person or by sharing needles with an injecting drug addict? I don't mean to be melodramatic when I say that I opted for science with my life. I shook hands with Jonathan, sat down with him and told him my friend Graham Hancock and I were researching a book that would rebut, refute and disprove the malicious notion that AIDS was a 'gay disease', God's punishment for people whose sexual orientation was 'immoral'. He gave me a lot of inside information.
Booklist in the US described AIDS: the deadly epidemic thus: 'Arguably the most complete and concise overview yet written... essential public affairs reading.' It did so because we funneled a great deal of knowledge about, and experience of, the fatal affliction into the 11 chapters of our 192-page book, based on research in Great Britain, the US, France, Belgium, Germany and several countries of Africa. I won't detain you with too many details, but here are just a few of our sources of expertise. Dr Jay Levy, University of California at San Francisco; Dr Paul Volberding, director of the AIDS ward, San Francisco General Hospital; Dr Rand Stoneburger, Dept. of Public Health, New York; Dr Peter Drotman, Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, Georgia; Professor Luc Montagnier, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France; Dr Tony Pinching, consultant immunologist in charge of the AIDS ward, St Mary's Hospital, London; Dr Richard Tedder, virologist, School of Pathology, Middlesex Hospital, London; Professor Robin Weiss, Institute of Cancer Research, Chester Beatty Laboratories, London; and a host of other senior experts.
The trick was to translate all this technical data into language easily understandable by the man and woman in the street. And to place it alongside the social and political fall-out from the epidemic. The notorious refusal of life insurance for gay people; landlords rejecting them as tenants; employers not taking them on; gay prisoners being beaten up, in Germany quite brutally. During the AIDS epidemic human sympathy and compassion drained away catastrophically, precisely when they seemed to be the only bulwarks left.
When did your interest in the lives of virologists and immunologists begin?
Quite a few of the experts we spoke with casually slipped in details of their children, their wives. I still have on tape somewhere a virologist taking a phone-call in the middle of our chat and discussing his daughter's performance at school. These people came across as eminently human. They're at the cutting edge of hugely important discoveries but are in no way aloof; they don't have their heads in the clouds.
Please tell us about some of your previous publications.
My first published writing was The Golden City, a novel about the infrastructure of oppression in the almost Nazi state that South Africa used to be. In the form of a 'pub crawl' from shebeen to shebeen (illegal drinking joints) and the consequences when the narrator is arrested for drunken rowdiness, it shows vividly the policies in action of a country that has manufactured its own elite and a vicious police power to protect it. I wrote the first half of the book in six weeks at the end of my last term at Exeter University. The final exams were over; I borrowed an old typewriter and got stuck into the story I'd been telling fellow students about. It was rejected and rejected in England, but accepted by Grove Press, Inc. of New York City who produced it beautifully in hardback, then in paperback.
Next came A Dream Deferred, described by the TLS as 'particularly convincing on the corrupting effect of power on sexuality'. It's about the dream of freedom from racial tyranny. Was translated into Dutch and Danish. The Dutch publisher, Van Holkema & Warendorf, called it Het is bijna ochtend - It is nearly morning, i.e. the long night of police brutality is about to end.
As a journalist, I commissioned from contributors worldwide, and edited, and found pictures for, a three-volume work on all aspects of nation-building called Third World Development. The quality of the articles attracted $3.3 million in advertising. I was one of the founding editors of London-based weekly business magazine Africa Economic Digest. It followed the format of the hugely successful Middle East Economic Digest. Never worked so hectically in my life. Come hell or high water, a fresh magazine had to be on subscribers' desks every Monday morning, with no mistakes. (No wonder, as I discovered at the time, the highest rates of divorce and alcoholism were among journalists.)
Can you tell us a bit more about your writing process?
My writing follows no definite plan, but I do my best to write every day. I consider it to be a craft. Sometimes the sentences flow and one wonders where on Earth those paragraphs came from. At other times it can be a slog, grinding out bits of the story, or finding ways to link one part with another. But I love writing. It's when I'm happiest. So perhaps I'm a bit of a masochist, because there is pain sometimes in the joy. I sometimes make notes; I often do a lot of amending; I re-write, re-write, polish my prose, have an ear for bum notes in a sentence. Jazz and the blues are the models that guide me; of course, it's very hard to create on the page the austere sonority of a Lester Young.
What are your favourite books?
My favourite books, fiction or non-fiction, have heart, feeling, controlled passion. I read The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin in my early 20s; it was a landmark in my understanding of where quality could be found. The stuff one wrote needn't be about opulent places and wealthy people's intrigues. Baldwin's book was an essay which foresaw in the early 1960s America burning towards the end of that decade: riots in the ghettoes of the big cities, properties smashed, people saying I've had enough of this racial oppression. The country was shaken by the moral earthquake. But what style, what imagery, what incantations. Baldwin was a preacher in a ghetto church when he was 14. The epigraph says: 'God gave Noah the rainbow sign/ No more water, the fire next time'. To me, his writing is on a par with the singing of Billie Holliday and the poignancy of Edith Piaf.
Which authors do you feel have had an influence on your own work?
James Baldwin, Shakespeare, Elmore Leonard (for the super dialogue that moves the story forward); too many to list, but also (in translation) Simone de Beauvoir and, recently, Jeanette Winterson and Rose Tremain.
What is next for you?
A 'meaningless' murder from inside the head of a psychotic. What are the pressures that impel some individuals to kill people they don't know and have never seen before? It's in final draft. And then a darkly funny story about money and sex and how to get some in a rapidly ageing population when times are tough, cash is hard to come by and women already outnumber men in nearly every age-group. Well advanced. Wish me luck.