It’s funny really, when I re-started this blog a few months
ago it was in the wake of attending a sort of writer’s day. The purpose of the
event was to give out a few clues as to how authors should look to the brave
new world of social media to raise their profile and thereby sell a few books.
After ten years of sticking books in envelopes and queuing up at the post
office counter I felt more than ready to embrace the whole Kindle thing.
Somebody wants a book in Sydney Sydney Dayton , Ohio
So what’s funny? Well the funny thing is that in all the
blogs I have churned out in the months following the event I have not so much
as mentioned anything about books and writing. So much for any aspiration to
become a dab hand as an online marketer. There is a ‘My books on Kindle’ button
to be found at the top of the blog page. I wonder how many have clicked it? The
Amazon sales report would suggest not all that many! So much for the online
profile. The process of getting the whole of my backlist up and running in the
Amazon Kindle store is actually going pretty well. At the time of writing any
visitor has the choice of 14 books to download. There are now only four left to
get onto the shelf. Here is where things will get more interesting. Amazon give
you an option to put any title into the ‘Free’ section for five days in every
ninety. Having eighteen books on offer means that I will be able to have one
title on offer for free on a permanent basis. The theory goes that you stand a
decent chance of marketing something when it is free. I tend to go with this
idea. Certainly when I am trawling through the Kindle Store I take little
persuasion to download a book fro free. Then I give it ten or twenty pages and
if it isn’t up to much I hit the delete button.
The good news is that I have not been tempted by the delete
option for about two thirds of the books I have downloaded. And in several
cases once I have finished the book I have immediately taken a look to see if
the writer has anything else on offer. Then I shell out a quid or two and pay
up. It all seems might fine and dandy in theory. I am about to get a feel for
the reality over the coming months when the whole backlist is up, running and
on sale.
Time for a little experiment. I have no idea if Blogspot
allows links to be inserted into blogs. Only one way to find out.
Fancy checking out my books on Amazon? Yeah? Well click
here.
So much for the selling stuff.
Over the last few weeks the germ of a new tale has started
to rattle around my brain. This is always a question that get’s asked when I
attend any sort of bookish event. You know the kind of thing. Book Groups and
Rotary Clubs. How do you come up with a story? What is the process? Talking
process makes the whole thing seem really together and organised and structured,
which in my case it absolutely isn’t. Instead a couple of random ideas emerge
and start to bounce around off each other. In the case of the new story there
are a couple of ideas which have popped into the grey matter.
Obviously you would have to live in a hut on a mountainside
in Borneo not to have noticed the issue of the
top 1% of the world completely shafting the other 99%. Among the ranks of the
99% some get shafted worse than others. The unemployed youngster in Britain Belgravia . Oil Sheiks snap up football clubs. The 1%
congregate in predictable places. They hang out in bars where a bottle of
Kristal sets you back nine grand. They do the Monaco Grand Prix and the men’s
singles final at Wimbledon and the Champions
League Final. They are to be found in the corporate boxes and the six star
hotels. They love nothing more than to flaunt their ridiculous wealth.
They are public.
It has become increasingly clear that our democracies are
quite incapable of reversing the trend where the top 1% drain the rest of us
dry. Politicians make all the right noises but when it comes to actually doing
anything about what is going down they are completely toothless. Almost every
day we are told that the crafty genius of big accountancy firms makes it an
absolute impossibility for us to get the 1% to stump up their share. It has
become an article of faith that they will always be two steps ahead and there
is nothing to be done about it. Well that isn’t quite true of course. Even the
fanciest accountant in the world would find it hard to duck the mansion tax,
but it is always pretty obvious that someone far behind the scenes is greasing
the right palms to make sure such a thing will never happen.
So will this state of affairs last forever? Or will our
patience with this constantly flaunted wealth run out. And if our patience does
indeed run out, then what can we do about it? Are we on the road to St Petersburg Glasgow Glasgow public was happily voting with
its feet and punishing the tax dodger from America
Then came idea number two. This came out of nothing more
dramatic than trawling through the TV channels in the wee small hours of the
morning whilst the throbbing pain from a couple of newly yanked teeth made
going to sleep a complete pipe dream. And there on some obscure channel at 3 am
was ‘Apocalypse Now’.
I am one of a generation who will forever name ‘Apocalypse
Now’ when asked the favourite film question. The forever word is pretty
telling. If I was ever asked what is the best book you will ever read in your
life, I would find it impossible to answer. How long is there left and what
books might come along in those years? Fair enough, right now it is ‘War and
Peace’ and I wouldn’t bet on Comrade Tolstoy getting knocked off top spot
before I breathe my last, but I could never say that is a complete certainty
that he will stay there. ‘Apocalypse Now’ is different. I find it absolutely
inconceivable that there will ever be a film to eclipse it which is pretty
powerful Juju. How many times have I seen it? No idea. I lost count years ago.
And it isn’t just the times I have watched. When I was nineteen I bought the
double album soundtrack and more or less played it to death.
The first time of asking was memorable in a wholly
appropriate way. Back in 1979 there had been a deal of talk about the coming
movie to end movies. I guess when a host of Holywood superstars go collectively
insane in a South East Asian jungle it is bound create something of a buzz. I
went along to watch the film at the Odeon in Preston on a wet Lancashire
weekday afternoon. I paid up and made my way up the stairs. The lights were
already down and the adverts were blaring out. There was no attendant to guide
me in, so I made my own way. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the dark and I scanned
the seats around me. Nobody. I stood up and scanned the rows of seats behind
and at the front. Nobody. Just me. It was the one and only time in my life that
I have sat entirely alone in a cinema built to hold over 500.
This meant that I was fully infused with a sense of other
worldliness before the thing even started. Lights down. British Board of
whatever rates this film suitable for… A misty jungle in the dawn. Shadowy
helicopters with whispering ghost blades. Then a napalm strike in muffled
silence. Jim Morrison. ‘Lost in a Roman Wilderness of pain and all the children
are insane…” Fan on the ceiling. Real helicopters chopping the fetid air. ‘Saigon . Shit. I’m still only in Saigon …’
Hooked then and hooked now.
Why?
The greatest cast there ever was for one. Brando, Martin
Sheen, Harrison Ford, Dennis Hopper, Robert Duval, Laurence Fishbourne… I mean,
come on.
Narrative like there has never been care of Michael Herr
whose ‘Dispatches’ is one of the 20th Century’s must read books.
‘Everyone gets everything they want. I wanted a mission and
for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up like room service. It was a real
choice mission. Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through
the war like a main circuit cable plugged straight into Kurtz.’
I have always felt stone cold certain in the knowledge that
if Shakespeare had ever heard the ‘snaked through the war like a main circuit
cable’ line he would have stood up and punched the air.
The soundtrack. The filming. The acting. The everything.
This was a time when lads of my age were fascinated by Vietnam Vietnam Tonkin ,…
Pictures and sound and a music soundtrack that was as
addictive as smack. And as a nineteen year old back in 79 it was hard not to
harbour feelings of having missed out on the technicolour mayhem of the 60’s.
By accident, the film drew all kind of strands together. A
few months earlier I had sat and read Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ in a wreck
of a bar by the river Congo in Kisangani and now here was the same story
transplanted from the jungles of Victorian Africa to the jungles of Indochina.
On that same trans-African trip I had also read Bernard Fall’s epic description
of the French Foreign Legion’s last stand at Dien Bien Phu
which of course was yet another of those names. I had shared a beer or two with
some Legionaires in Bangui
According to the press, the film was from the anti war
stable. But I walked out of the cinema with a guilty sense of exhilaration. It
wasn’t something I wanted to talk about much. It wasn’t the way you were
supposed to feel. But in the lower depths of his temporary insanity, it was in
my mind exactly what Coppola was aiming at. I get a bit of this in my day job
at First Base when talking with clients of our Veteran’s Project. They show a
similar embarrassment when describing the unique uber-high of combat. That is a
thing I have never known. The nearest I have ever been to the narcotic hyped up
speed rush of a warzone was that afternoon in the Preston Odeon.
For me the legacy of the film has been to watch it over and
over.
And of course I am not alone. There are millions in the same
boat, all of us with our own memories of watching it for the first time. And as
I channel hopped around the wee small hours it occurred to me that among those
millions there must surely have been some who decided there and then to get
themselves a first hand taste of the cranked up chaos of a warzone.
18 in 1979. Early 50’s now. What must have they seen? Where
have they been? And after thirty years of fighting the dark and dirty wars of
Capitalism, how must they feel now. ‘They were going to make me a Major for
this and I wasn’t even in their fucking army anymore….’
And how might they feel about Starbucks and Barclays and the
1%. And it hit me that they probably feel completed used. They have been the
blunt instruments used to allow the 1% to rape and pillage the world. Throw in
the effects of PTSD and you would have some pretty dangerous individuals. And
if one or two decided to go off reservation, then the 1% might have a pretty
serious problem.
‘The army tried one last time to bring him back into the
fold and if he’d pulled over, it all would have been forgotten. But he just
kept on going, kept on winning it his way, and they called me in. They lost
him. He was gone. All they heard were rumours and random intelligence reports,
mostly from captured VC. The VC knew his name by now and they were scared of
it. Kurtz and his men were playing hit and run all the way into Cambodia
… hit and run all the way into Cambodia
So there were the seeds. And with the seeds came the title.
‘…..Your mission is to proceed up the Nung River
The words of
Colonel Lucus spoken by a youthful Harrison Ford in mesmerisingly honeyed tones.
And there is that name thing again. Nu Mung Bha.
And so the title
cometh
‘The Ghosts of Nu
Mung Bha’
All that is
needed now is a book to go with it.
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