Fantastic Metropolis

Michael Moorcock: I must say I can’t wait. In fact I’m almost inclined to shout ‘Stop wasting your time on this conversation and get back there!’ There aren’t many authors, these days, whose books I ‘eagerly await’ but I must say I’m coming to look forward to yours with more and more eagerness. Let’s talk a bit about your background. You graduated with an MA in English from Oxford. You’ve taught and lectured. You’ve published quite a lot of non-fiction, most of which looks interesting to a reader of modern visionary fiction, but you seem to have come to long fiction fairly late. Any particular reason for this?

Alan Wall: Actually I graduated BA in English from Oxford, then seven years later they automatically gave me my MA in the Oxford manner. This procedure is based on the assumption that if you have a sufficiently respectable first degree from Oxbridge, it’s worth an MA from anywhere else. There’s an intriguing set of assumptions there, but I’d better not get into those now, or we’ll never get out of here alive.

I always wanted to write, but I honestly didn’t feel I had anything to write about. I needed to go off and do some odd, unexpected and downright disreputable things before I reckoned I had a large enough vocabulary of experiences to get myself started. In the meantime I’d been studying how other people arranged words on a page, and I sometimes wrote about some of the people whose arrangements I most admired. The one thing I was determined not to do was to write a novel about an English teacher writing a novel about an English teacher writing a novel… Actually for most of the last quarter-century I’ve been out of academia, even though I’ve recently crept back in, and am finding my return very rewarding.

So I wrote some criticism, some poetry and some songs. Songs are something we both have in common and I feel more and more that they play a crucial part in modern life. I was trying to get at this in China. The only things we most of us learn, in the way people once learnt prayers or passages from scripture, in the way an icon painter learns the liturgy of his trade, are songs. And it’s only by learning something in that way that it becomes engraved inside us, written into our spirits. This makes it enormously important, I believe, important and potent. So much of what we ‘learn’ we learn nothing from—there’s no meaningful trace. It’s water through a drain. But the music stays inside us. Few people could recite a poem these days, but most could sing you a song. Sadly, it might be atrocious, one of those new-fangled efforts written on machines to be performed on machines. The humans involved are merely a pollutant and a form of promotional gimmick.

So I wrote songs, as my preparation for the life that lay ahead. And as you know, I’m still waiting for the first cheque to come through the letterbox.

James MacMillan has spoken recently in The Guardian about a new musical illiteracy—no, this is going to take us too far in another direction. Though it’s a subject that greatly intrigues me.

Let me just say that I believe the old blues songs or the great songs of Dylan are spiritual achievements, and I suppose they might well be the spiritual achievements many of us end up living by. You’ll remember the last verse of that great old song “Moonshiner”:

Give me food when I’m hungry
And a drink when I’m dry
A dollar if I’m hard up
And religion when I die.

Well, we can leave religion till we die, but not spirituality. Without that we try to talk to saints and find ourselves surrounded instead by the atoms of billiard balls, the ersatz art of the shaving brush. Was that worth an elephant’s death?