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Sputnik Caledonia

This novel offers a creative response to two on-going research questions in my fiction:

1. How can a novel be constructed 'musically'?

2. What is the ontological status of possible worlds?

In my fiction as a whole, the first question has been approached (in relation to the Western classical music tradition) via the following creative methodologies:

1. Multi-layering of narrative texture (akin to musical polyphony);

2. Use of large-scale narrative blocks (akin to musical 'movements') or smaller alternating blocks (akin to 'variations' or 'episodes');

3. Use of time-space to create variations of speed (akin to tempo variation between movements or episodes).

The second question has been approached from the following theoretical contexts:

1. The 'multiverse' of contemporary theoretical physics;

2. Classical ideas of plurality, plenitude and recurrence (Democritus, Leibniz, Nietzsche etc)

3. Materialism versus idealism.

In the content of my novels this has played out through a recurring theme of an alternative universe in which Britain experienced Communist rule following World War Two, followed by a reversion to capitalism. In technique it has manifested as a concern with narrative framing and layering.

In Sputnik Caledonia the musical structuring is three-movement, the central being slow. I achieved this slowness through the use of a closed space-time (the Installation), conceptualised as analogous to the closed worlds of Kafka or Goethe (referenced within the novel). Analogous within contemporary British fiction would be the country-house setting of the first part of Ian McEwan’s Atonement

The novel poses a distinction between Communist materialism and capitalist idealism which is left unresolved. The figure of Kaupff is partly influenced by Walter Benjamin: his crime is to produce a miscellany of quotations which he believes upholds Marxist-Leninist materialism, but which is interpreted as idealist.

This book generated a particularly complex thesis (the incorporation of scientific material and political ideology in artistic form, in order to investigate their inter-dependency), contingent upon a research process drawing on eclectic sources including Engels, Lenin, Hawking, Penrose and Sakharov. The novel makes extensive use of closed spaces (i.e. the Installation), multi-part structure, and Bildungsroman, for which key sources were Goethe and Kafka. This required an extensive period of practice. The earliest material was written before 2000; parts received awards for work-in-progress in 2000 (Arts Council Writer's Award) and 2006 (Northern Rock Foundation Award), before publication in 2008.