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Diran Abelbayo
Diran Adebayo is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. He talks fetishes, literary loves and Harry Potter with Gini Sharvill.
Posted 3rd June 2009 | Author: Gini Sharvill
(Views: 140)
So let’s start with the basics - my favourite novel is Jude the Obscure, probably because I first read it when I was applying to Oxford, aka “Christminster”. What is your favourite novel and, more importantly, why?
The Catcher in the Rye. First loves are always the strongest. It was the first ‘adult’ novel that I read (aged 13) and it just felt very modern, after all the Dickensian type classics that one had been pointed to. It had real flow, a strong voice, particularity, a style to fall in love with. It shone with what I find most attractive in art: voice, humour, attitude, a kind of cool, and transgressiveness. And Holden Caulfield! An adolescent, frustrated and alone in a phoney world! Here, in these pages, is the great promise of art - someone who feels what you feel. Real life will almost certainly disappoint with the imperfections, over time, of human connections, but in music, books or films – your relationships can be ideal. I find comforting anything bruised that speaks to the absurdity of life... Give me losers hurt enough to know better, but who get sucked in one last time, to their doom.
You mention JD Salinger’s style as being one ‘to fall in love with’ – are there any other authors who have similarly seduced you?
I really admire the style of the Samuel Beckett of the trilogy, particularly the voice of his tramp protagonist in Malone Dies and the one long paragraph that forms the first half of Molloy. Great rhythm and cadences, and a mordant humour. I’m all about rhythm and flow. Also, Sam Selvon’s and Zora Neale’s direct, great use of vernacular, and PG Wodehouse’s wonderful use of language. Someone else who also had a big effect on me was the journalist and Village Voice writer Greg Tate. His collection of essays, The Flyboy in the Buttermilk managed to find a natural voice that accommodated both black slang and the Queen’s English to discuss everything from post-modern theory to Fela Kuti.
Moving on from artistic style, have you fallen head-over-heels with any fictional characters?
Many many. I’m quite clothes-oriented - it’s the fetishist in me – I have to like what I imagine them wearing, and the general fashion of the time. I always wanted to have a sword as part of my everyday wear, so being the third of Dumas’s Musketeers would have suited me fine, or Zorro in Mexico. Top clothes, hot women, hot weather! I like hats too, and I always wanted to be - well, not quite a villain, but a hustler, jazz clubs-card games-live on my wits-type guy, so I have more than a soft-spot for the noir characters of Chandler and Hammett, the pulp-fiction of those times and the demimonde of Damon Runyon. Men with monikers and fedoras, dolls, dames and dancers in clubs either ‘high’ or of ill-repute, a big score one week, broke the next, and all smoking! Aah, I missed my time...! Also in Medieval fiction, I would love to have been a knight in the age of chivalry, off to find a Grail, a crusade or two (on Saladin’s side - better swords, apart from anything else) and then back for his lady at her castle window. Yup!
I’m not so sure about the hustlers and the jousters, maybe it’s wizards that I go for. Sirius Black in Harry Potter is definitely my One True Love - how do you rate him?
I haven’t read any Harry Potter, but I do like that British boarding school tradition, my novel after the one in progress will be my own humble addition to that oeuvre. A bit like The History Boys but blacker, and naughtier.
Apart from Harry Potter, I’m personally much better versed in my knowledge of the older, ‘classical’ writers, and unfortunately know comparatively little about the modern day literary scene. How do you, as a contemporary writer, respond to the challenge of whom and what has gone before you?
The wisdom of the ancients can be hard to trump - there’s nothing new about human conduct, motivation, the reasons why we do what we do, what’s under the sun and so forth. However, the world does change in various ways - the kinds of connections between people in our more heterogeneous societies, the consequences of technology, the constant evolution of language, etc. These things need contemporary writers to respond to them. Although I don’t believe, as others do, that the cream always rises to the top in this overpopulated industry, and that is often about “working it”. But my works represent my skew on my world and that’ll do for me.
And it seems to be working! Finally, I’ll pass on HP to you – but do you have any suggestions for Etcetera readers?
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Just a beautiful, moving, readable, romantic novel and not half as well known as it should be.
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