Fantastic Metropolis

But there’s more to Calder’s alien’s eye view than a lack of fit in the City and country in which he grew up. Nearly all his key characters share their creator’s status as outsider—being either exiles seeking homelands not at odds with their nature, or rebels trying to transform the societies in which they live. I wonder to what extent his experience of life in Thailand and the Philippines informed the representation of ‘otherness’ and alienation in his stories.

“The Far East has certainly offered up a powerful metaphor—an alien landscape for alienated anti-heroes. Of course, the ‘outsider’ nature of my characters is something I (like they) have brought to the Far East, and not really something discovered there. The experience of living outside your own country, and particularly, outside its culture, has an obviously transformative effect on a writer’s work. For good or ill, you become more aware of your culture, both its importance and shortcomings. You become more aware of its contingency.

“You also become aware—when you manage to lose some of the liberal presuppositions that travel with you as part of your psychological baggage—of just how truly different an alien culture can be, and how Westerners ‘Orientalise’ and falsify alien cultures to justify their own worldview. For instance, there’s what the writer Chandra Mohanty has identified as the ‘colonial gaze’ of western feminists: the defining of ‘third world women’ as religious (read ‘not progressive’), family oriented (read ‘traditional’), legal minors (read ‘they-are-still-not-conscious-of-their-rights’), illiterate (read ‘ignorant’), and domestic (read ‘backward’). But travel, unfortunately, can narrow the mind, as well as broaden it. A reassessment of one’s beliefs can lead to an uncomfortable process of disillusionment that ends in cynicism. There is a bitter edge to some of the Thailand scenes in Cythera. I hope I redressed the balance in Malignos and its evocation of the Philippines.”

Myth, Art, Dream

Calder’s books reveal a fascination with the malleability of identity and consciousness. And the complexity and flux of the human psyche is captured perfectly by the dense poetics of his language, high-energy baroque plotting and opulent layers of symbolism—religious, mythic, historical and technological. But which myths have personal significance for Calder?

“The Orphic sect in ancient Greece represented Eros as a god who brings worlds into existence. And it’s always seemed to me that the erotic impulse lies at the root of all mythmaking and world creation. My fiction seems haunted by a certain kind of muse figure, a succubus, or handmaiden of the Dark Mother, Lilith (which makes me sound like a character out of a Tim Powers’ novel, I suppose!) who celebrates the myths and symbols of the ‘Dark Eros.’ She’s the companion, or tutelary goddess, of outsiders and outlaws, and she appears, one way or another, in different guises, throughout my work.”

Calder’s most recent book, Lord Soho, is a series of linked novellas, each based around a narrative at the heart of a popular opera. I ask what led him to rummage for new meaning in the frayed glamour of these familiar tales.

“I wrote Lord Soho in Castillejos, a small town on the Zambales coast in the Philippines. The idea for the book grew out of a longstanding desire to construct a novel from a series of interconnected novellas—I’m a big fan of Keith Roberts’ work, and had always been impressed by the structure of Pavane, The Chalk Giants and Kiteworld. I’d also entertained a similarly longstanding idea of writing a version of The Beggar’s Opera and/or The Threepenny Opera. After a while, the two projects simply came together. I like opera—I like its huge artificiality, hyper-emotionalism and campiness—and so it seemed natural to base the subsequent novellas in Lord Soho on The Marriage of Figaro, La Traviata, Patience, and Turandot. ‘Punch and Judy’ inspired the last novella in the series, but Harrison Birtwistle has written an opera of the same name. Angela Carter, of course, had, in The Bloody Chamber, re-written Perrault, and the idea of writing a collection of stories underpinned by the ‘fairy tale’—the kind of fairy tale world to be found in opera—was another powerful influence.”

But there’s more to Calder’s work than a fascination with traditional forms of storytelling. Time after time, his narratives invade the territory in which myth and history collide to transform consciousness—collective and individual. What draws him to this theme, and how does he feel these symbolic forces influence the way we live and think?