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King Death

King Death is – on the surface at least – a contemporary London crime novel in which a couple, Kumiko and Skelton, whilst travelling on a train over the roofs of Borough Market, spot what looks to them like a human heart. Almost immediately, they split up as a couple; but, seperately, they both investigate where the heart came from.

In literary terms, King Death is a critique of certain commonly held ideas about minimalism. Many of my students on the Creative Writing MA become obsessed with (and oppressed by) the American minimalism of Raymond Carver. And ‘Show don’t tell’ and ‘Less is more’ are familiar maxims passed on within Creative Writing departments. This version of minimalism originated both in Gertrude Stein (as interpreted by Ernest Hemingway) and in American crime fiction, particularly that labelled ‘hardboiled’.

King Death is an attempt to have two strong first person narrators, both of whom are writing extremely minimalistically, but neither of whom are in the least Carveresque. On starting the novel, I wanted to see if I could write both minimally and expansively. Skelton’s minimalism is that of English understatement (his predecessors would include Christopher Isherwood and Graham Greene); Kumiko’s is that of recent Japanese fiction, and of writing in English by non-native speakers. The main referents here are the fictions of Banana Yoshimoto, particularly Hardboiled & Hard Luck (1999), and Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995). Within the narrative, the writings of John Keats become important. And his desire, in his poetry, to ‘load every rift with ore’ is used as an implicit contrast with the deliberate impoverishment of much contemporary prose.

By writing these two different but equally minimalistic narrators, I hope I have demonstrated that minimalism is neither exclusively American nor exclusively about one easily teachable brand of exclusion.