The Melior Trilogy

The Today Programme on Radio 4 is running a series on books that have ignited (or reignited after an absence) a love of reading.  This morning, David Nicholls spoke about ‘Great Expectations’ and how it inspired him – well worth a listen on iPlayer.  The BBC invited listeners to write in.

Here’s mine: ‘The Circle’ by Dave Eggers.

When I was about 7, my parents were told by Mrs Reed, my form teacher at the local primary school, that I was ‘dull’.  Aghast, they pulled me out of that school and scrimped and saved to put me through private education.  The result, growing up, was very little spare money but plenty of books, my father being an academic and my mother a teacher – and, until my adolescence, I read voraciously.  I remember, when I was around 11 or 12 my English teacher using the term ‘suspension of disbelief’.  For me, it was the perfect description of my experience of climbing into a book, or being completely absorbed in an alternative world born of someone else’s imagination, often to the exclusion of all else.  By the time I was 13 I had read all the dystopian classics (‘1984’, ‘Brave New World’, ‘Farenheit 451’, ‘A Clockwork Orange’) and their effect was lasting.

Come my teenage years and real life – rather than the imagined life in books – got in the way.  Sport.  Girls.  Music.  Exams.  Not necessarily in that order – but the usual stuff.  I continued to read, of course, but not with the same intensity I had enjoyed, my suspension of disbelief now only partial.  I studied English literature and French at university so the reading continued, but still in the background and, as work hit (management consultancy), it receded further, largely confined to holidays.

I was lucky enough to be able to retire from the world of business a few years ago, and retire in time to spend time with my children before they fled the nest.  Now that I had time, I decided I would fulfil an ambition I had always had – to write.  I had plenty of ideas and a very definite set of themes I wanted to write about, influenced by my time in business and my early reading, but I had no idea whether I would have the discipline to finish a novel.  It turned out that writing was the easy part!  Finding an agent and trying to get published was much much harder and, ironically, briefly spoiled my love of reading.

Why?  To appeal to an agent, you need to grab their attention.  You might look at who they represent already and try to find parallels (cue a lot of reading) or you might try the formula ‘my novel is x meets y meets z’ where x y and z are of the moment and likely to resonate.  Cue, again, a lot of reading to find out what’s hot.  I resorted to AI for this last task – ‘dear ChatGPT, give me some good comparators for my book’ – which was soul-destroying a) because I ended up reading a lot that didn’t appeal to me and b) because the comparisons could be bizarre or even depressing…  Until I came across the ‘The Circle’.

If you have watched the film, put it out of your mind!  It does not do it justice (even though it stars Tom Hanks).

‘The Circle’ is wonderful satire.  Close enough to home to be able to climb into and lose yourself in the book, but always with enough clues to remind you that it is sending up the Techbros world – and doing so with purpose, making you pause to think.  It is funny and packed full of clever observations and ideas which you know could be possible and, whilst amusing, are properly worrying.  The plot and characters have depth.  This is no two-dimensional satire: it invites you into the characters’ world so that you are involved in their lives and rooting for them – or asking them to wake up.  It is of the moment and, I think consequential.  The sequel, ‘The Every’ is also very good.

‘The Circle’ gave me back the pleasure of reading: it re-ignited my love of it.  My dearest wish is that I might do the same for others.  I have published ‘The Orange Man’ and am hoping to generate sufficient  interest to be able to publish the rest of the Melior Trilogy.  It deals very much with same themes that pre-occupy Dave Eggers.  Generally, given what I write about, I worry hugely about AI making us redundant, but in this instance, hypocritically, I am grateful for the introduction!