Cynan Jones Meet the Author

Now its time for Meet the Author.

A man is adrift after a storm at sea.

Lost, convinced it's the end of him.

We don't know who he is, how exactly he came to be

there, and nor, for much of the time, does he.

That's the story of Cove, the latest short novel

from the pen of Cynan Jones, who's developed a highly distinctive

style in books like The Dig, that lets him turn his

characters inside out.

Like this man, drifting alone in his kayak, looking

for land and safety, who says that his memory is now

like a dropped pack of cards.

Welcome.

In a way, Cynan, this book is a simple description

of absolute terror, isn't it?

It is.

It's a man blinded by a flash of light, if you want to call it

that, and in the thrall of that with an underlying idea

that there is much more than his own encapsulation in that

sudden moment, sort of thing.

It's a really difficult thing to try and transmit in writing.

He loses everything.

He thinks he's going to lose his life.

He loses his mind in some ways, but there's a wonderful moment

where he sees the label on a bag in the kayak.

And he says, with his name on it, and he says it's

like looking into an empty cup.

It's all gone.

How difficult was it to imagine what that feeling is like?

I think a lot of what I do comes from the process that I have

of building a story in my mind before going near the desk.

So I like to start writing after I can see something,

and I write as if I'm remembering.

I don't want to discuss what we learn at the beginning

of the book too much, because it might spoil it

a little bit for people who are going to read it.

But I think what we can say is that it's a picture of someone

who is utterly alone for the whole story, in practice.

That's a very difficult thing for most of us to imagine, isn't it?

It's difficult for people to imagine.

It's a very difficult thing to write, which I realised as soon

as I started trying to write it.

Why?

Because there's no reference points.

Previously my books have been about people with very solid

ground under their feet.

And what I wanted to do, because I believe you should always

be learning when you write, was to take that ground away,

take the relationships away, take the location people had

in previous novels away, and write about a character who was,

as you say, utterly alone.

At that point, how do you bring the otherness into a narrative?

It does ask the question, I think, are we ever alone?

Which sounds slightly cliched, but is it possible,

with the consciousness that we have, to ever really be alone?

And the book really asks that.

And his contact, for example, with a sunfish that comes along

and is about as big as his boat.

It turns out not to want to attack him but to be with him,

and possibly steers the thing in a helpful direction.

Now, is that an example of what we all do when we do think

we're alone, we create patterns in a random universe to try

and make sense of it?

Absolutely.

And I think it's also a result of growing up where I grew up,

when you're constantly surrounded by the natural environment

and the things in nature.

And you do, regardless of how cynical you always sound about not

having a spirituality, you simply create

narratives through them.

You see a lot of the world play out, a lot of human conditions play out,

in cameo, in small ways, in the world around you.

And I think something like the sunfish device, yes,

you'd give it meaning, wouldn't you?

And the other thing that you get from these natural descriptions,

which are wonderful in the book, is that sense of unchannelled power

that is just going to have its way with you, whatever you do?

You're much smaller than it.

That's something which you recognise as soon as you're out on the water.

There's a sort of safe zone where you feel quite comfortable,

quite connected, but there's a distance from land when that

platform of the kayak, which is the only land

under your feet, becomes very obviously frail.

Have you ever had, at sea, a moment of terror that

touches on this story?

I mean, have you felt that moment of being, as it were, adrift?

Yes, and it's very sudden.

You can be entirely calm, but at the next moment there's just

a lurch in the boat, a tip in the boat.

Your line catches on something, and the boat sort of halts.

The only reaction is an animal one.

I've had a long time growing up being on the sea in different ways.

The experience that he goes through with the dolphins happened

when I was 16, night fishing.

A friend of mine essentially passed out with the cold,

and they came and they played around the boat.

I've been in the boat when it has hailed, and you hear

the hailstones hissing around you.

I've been tipped out of the kayak in a very sudden squall.

You amalgamate these experiences.

They last for a very long time.

They simmer for a very long time before they find fruit

into a novel, I think.

It sounds from what you say, about the way you come to a story

through memory after you've been through the idea in your own head

meticulously, that you paired it down almost like a sculptor starting

with a bit of stone and getting down to its essence.

Is that how you see it?

Yes, to throw away any what I call "passenger writing".

And I think that's driven by a great trust in the reader.

I write because I love to read, it's a side effect of that.

So trusting the reader to have that creative ability themselves to build

the rest of the picture means I then pair it back to a point where you're

just triggering the mind.

One of the things you've done as a writer, long before

you got to this book, is to dispense with quotation

marks in the normal way in which people speak.

And you represent the man here from the third person -

he is he, but it's quite often you.

He becomes somebody who is out there, but is also inside of us.

I mean, you find that mechanism useful?

I think it's a great myth of narrative that you have

to pick one or the other.

We don't live like that.

We're constantly panning and closing up to ourselves, I think.

Shifting perspective?

Shifting perspective constantly.

And what I wanted to do, with the tense changes,

those devices you talked about, was to create a sense of ebb

and flow, of left and right paddle, of peak and trough.

I needed the whole...

I needed the surface, the narrative layer,

to be shifting like the water.

And if you want the reader to be inside the kayak,

not to say inside the man, then that all helps,

because it declared as the way you tell the story.

I think so.

I mean, I think, having written it, the way I feel

about it is quite filmic.

I see it visually.

I can see the camera spilling out from the boat,

I can see the close-up of the hands.

But not necessarily through the eyes of the character,

if that makes sense.

No, indeed.

Sometimes you are, but in the way that the camera can do that.

It's a shifting focus.

Read us a little bit, including that full description.

Maybe the moment which is a crisis in the book.

And this is not giving anything away, I mean,

he's clearly somebody who believes he's going to come to grief

as a result of a storm, an amazing flash of lightning.

Just read that passage to us?

The first lightning strikes out somewhere past the horizon.

At first, he thinks it's some sudden glint.

The thunder happens moments later, and he feels sick in his guts.

A metallic sheen comes to the water, like cutlery,

like metal much touched.

And you've seen that yourself?

I've been there, and not gladly, not hit by lightning.

But I've certainly been on the water when the electricity

about you changes.

And it's this extraordinary collective process -

you go beyond thought, in some respects.

The hairs on your arms go up.

You feel that you are, as you said earlier,

in the thrall of something far bigger than you.

Do you think that what we should feel, as we get to the end

of the story, is relief at the strength of,

you know, the human spirit, whatever we call it?

Or is it one of, I don't know, terror at the forces that we're

never going to be able to tame?

What I was trying to do, because there is never just one

ending, you always choose the one that's strongest after

you've written several.

What I was trying to do was to put those questions to the reader,

for them to answer, depending on the characters or the state

of mind after the book or the general state of mind.

So I think there is very much room for both, and that was hard

fought for in the writing.

Cynan Jones, thank you very much.

Thank you.