Introduction to 'Midlands'

Today I'm self-publishing a novel

Some big career news today.

My novel ‘Midlands’ is now available from Amazon for purchase.

In addition to the text, a 451-page comic novel about the lives of stand-up comedians, it’s been given some beautiful illustrations by the Chinese graphic artist Ke Zuo.

Buying a copy of this book is a great way to support this newsletter and you get a gorgeously-written novel for your trouble too.

The book is available here for Kindle for just £2.50 and as a paperback for £10.26.

Am I not worth £10.26?

To give you a flavour of what it’s about, I’m going to give over this edition of the newsletter to the preface to the book; an illustration by Ke follows the text.

One final note: If anyone has any podcasts, magazines or other media where I might be able to promote the book, please let me know. I am an excellent guest and always take off my shoes.

If anyone would like to write a review, I would also be very happy to send you a free copy. And of course Customer Reviews of any kind are gold dust.

And if you become a paid subscriber of ‘Stiff Upper Quip’, you will of course be getting a copy for free. It’s just £45 a year, and there will be further additional content for paid subscribers soon.

Preface

My youth was not a miserable one. Indeed, I was acutely aware even at the time that I should try and maximize the amount of revelry and pleasure while I was still in my best physical shape. And so, in the mid-2000s, I went to Berlin.

The other thing I was aware of early – and still am, to be fair – is that I wanted to write for a living. I have certainly been able to write. Yet this fully-formed desire, this clear sense of vocation and purpose, served to slightly isolate me as a young man, as I wanted to both have my experience and attempt to record it. From the age of 17, I would say I was seriously committed to the business of refracting my experiences through fiction, and perhaps that always put me at a slight remove from events, meaning I was both engaged in passing my most passionate and volatile years, while also trying to catch them via a developing fictional voice.

Then in my late-20s, a very strange thing began to happen: I began to have success in another artistic form. From the age of 17, I had been performing stand-up comedy, and in Germany ten years later my act began to unexpectedly blossom. I had about seventy minutes of comedy on expatriate life, a couple of wonky songs, and a secret weapon: I spoke fluent, idiomatic, and apparently Russian-accented German. This was a weapon my generally German audiences were not expecting, and hilarity often ensured. Over several years, I bounced all around Germany and Europe with my ‘international act’, often to enthused crowds – a fate I share with the protagonist of much of this novel, Stuart, although his life is different from mine in crucial respects.

Living the life of a performer while also being engaged in the project of writing realist fiction seemed to me, and still seems, a unique and productive combination. Developing this book, I wanted to give a reader a realistic experience of what it is like to be a working comedian – not, as is usual, ‘a comedian who gets involved with a crime syndicate’, or ‘a comedian who finds a portal to another world’, but a comedian who writes material and goes and does comedy gigs. That might mean passages of this novel seem lacking in incident, or are overly repetitive, but that’s what the life of a road comic is like. And the reader should by no means feel that, for the people depicted in the story, it’s an unhappy life. I don’t look down for an instant on the showbusiness dreams of Stuart and Dougie, the main characters here; I share their excitement in getting to share their comedy, and I don’t think performances have to be happening on a grand scale to be exciting and worthwhile. Dougie and Stuart are out there doing it, exactly where they should be and, to the extent they’re doing it in a foreign country, they’re serving as pioneers.

But the crucial difference between Stuart and I is that I came home. This I share with Dave, the protagonist of the second story of this volume, although his fate his unresolved. For my part, I came to London, where I wrote about my experiences in Germany, and continue to address them and examine more recent ones on my weekly newsletter ‘Stiff Upper Quip’. With this book, I am in part imagining what it would have been like if I would have stayed abroad and into a second decade in Germany.

In returning, I had hoped to place the novel with traditional publishing, but after nearly a hundred send-outs, received only the barest feedback; that which I did receive was admiring but confused. It seems to me that UK publishing is, by and large, currently in some sort of rebellion against the comic tradition – which, in my studied view, the English novel primarily is. There seems no home for ‘Midlands’, which is by and large a comic novel, although, like any decent comic novel, it has its sad bits. Rather than compromising it further to try and get attention for it, I’d rather just put it out there, exactly as itself. Ten years working on it is long enough.

Besides, the book now benefits from beautiful illustrations from the Chinese illustrator Ke Zuo. Whatever your verdict on the following novel, you can enjoy the pictures, which break up the action wonderfully in my view.

So, without further ado: ‘Midlands’, a story in two parts, with a prologue and intermission. For good or ill, this is what I did with my youth.

While the book often touches on its character’s regrets, I am pleased to report that the person who wrote it has, at time of writing, none.

London, May 2022