‘And as I sat there brooding on the world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could not fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that obscurity beyond the city, where the fields of the republic rolled on under the night. [read more]
Writing
Themes and cadences of writing
I remember once reading an article arguing that every song-writer made recurrent use of a particular series of chord progressions, individual to the writer. They might not be unique – there is, after all, a finite number of chord progressions – but they were distinctive enough to define each song-writer’s work. [read more]
David Aaronovitch meets Feliks Zhukovski
The Breaking of Eggs was a complicated attempt to answer a simple question: why do we believe what we believe? When, at a February meeting of the Prospect Book Club, I heard David Aaronovitch use exactly the same phrase to describe the issue he was addressing in his new book Party Animals, I was intrigued. In fact, I was already intrigued, which is why I was there. [read more]
How and why I became a novelist
You can decide to become a doctor, or a plumber, but I’m not sure you can decide to become a novelist, or a writer of any sort. It decides to become you. Writing is more a compulsion than a choice. And whether one’s work ever sees the light of day is a separate matter, irrelevant to the issue of whether one writes in the first place. [read more]
Trading futures and the descent of capitalism
Matthew Oxenhay, the protagonist of Trading Futures, couldn’t make sense of it. How had he managed to spend a working life in the City, more or less guessing what would happen to the future prices of commodities, and earn millions of pounds from doing it? And how had he managed to do it while continuing to vote Labour? [read more]
The music that runs through Trading Futures
Sitting at a computer, writing a novel, is quite a monotonous activity. It needs livening up. It would be better if I could listen to music while I wrote. But I don’t like music; I like songs. I like music with words (unless it’s opera). But then I start paying attention to the lyrics, rather than to the words I’m trying to write myself. [read more]
‘Book at Bedtime’: Hearing someone else’s novel
Every evening last week, at 10:45 pm, I was to be found on the sofa at home, listening to Radio 4’s ‘Book at Bedtime’, hearing Trading Futures read back to me by Toby Jones. This was a surreal experience. [read more]
The launch party for Trading Futures
So, anyway, there I was last Thursday evening, several feet up a step ladder, as one is, haranguing a multitude of friends and well-wishers, wondering if this was fantasy or reality, and concluding that it was a mixture of the two. ‘The scene’ – as Matthew Oxenhay might have said, and in fact does say at one point in the novel – ‘was a distillation of life present, of life cumulative to date.’ [Read more]
How I wrote Trading Futures
The problem is that I’m not entirely sure how I wrote it. This is partly a fault of memory, and partly because the novel had no single origin, no notes and no coherent development. [read more]
Background to The Breaking of Eggs
The novel began with the abstract question “What is home?” and with the belief that home is an emotional concept that means very different things to different people. This led me to consider what it might be like to be aged about 60 and to have no concept of home. I tried to visualise such a character. [read more]
Jim Powell 