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How does it feel to be an asylum seeker?

Author Q&A: Christian Vassie

Christian Vassie is a name you've might've seen already, especially if you're a regular visitor to the BBC North Yorkshire site. Christian's been writing his ecoDepot blog since December 2005. And now, he's written a book too. We caught up with Christian to get inside the mind of the author! But first, here's the blurb for Beneath the Bittercrest...

Beneath the Bittercrest

Hidden in thick snow, on a wasteland, near two gas towers, lies a body dressed in summer clothes.

Eliot Balkan, frustrated drummer, pays the bills developing encryption software for anyone with secrets to protect. This month it’s Bittercrest Imports, a going nowhere company on a dull, anonymous industrial estate in Swindon.

Sod’s Law that Eliot should trip over the body and find himself arrested as a suspect. Who is protecting Bittercrest? What country did the dead man come from? What lies within the low building on the edge of the wasteland?

His life unravelling around him, Eliot is forced on the run. For company he has Roxanne Lepage. Has he found her, or did she find him? The Bondembe family, refugees from the Cameroons, provide a safe house, but for how long?

Enter the dark and vulnerable world of illegal aliens. No rules. No safety net.

A compelling conspiracy that gets darker with every staircase the hero descends.

Is Beneath the Bittercrest your first novel?

It is the first novel I have written to get published. I have written three others.

Curiously enough, it may well be followed very soon by a second novel as I have just signed with a literary agent for my fourth novel, ‘Making Plans for Michael’, a humorous book about a city council and the excesses of reality TV.

What's the premise of the book?

What would it feel like to suddenly find yourself as vulnerable and unprotected as an asylum seeker or an illegal alien?

How did the idea for Beneath the Bittercrest come about?

I love reading thrillers but have a problem with the fact that so many of them are right wing in tone and so black and white in their depiction of people and life. Foreigners are always nasty or dodgy or lazy, heroes are expert shots, handsome or beautiful, speak fifty languages, etc. etc.

I wanted to write a novel where the hero was an amateur, not a professional, a story where the hero was dragged unwittingly into the action and was transformed by it. 

We hear a great deal about the people who try to sneak into the country. We hear less of their motivations or of the motivations of those who smuggle them into the country. We hear next to nothing about what it is like being in a foreign country illegally, without papers, without language skills and without protection from the state. In fact we only hear of such people when they die on beaches picking cockles, or on level crossings on their way to pick summer fruits for a pound a day, or in the backs of lorries crossing the channel. The rest of the time they are invisible.

The central character in the book, Eliot Balkan, is a musician. When you’re not writing you also compose music. Are there any other similarities between you and Eliot?

Like Eliot, I am creative and tenacious and speak my mind! I would like to think I would rise to the occasion if lives depended on it, but we all wish we would be a hero if the situation demanded, don’t we? That said, Eliot Balkan is not me.

My first Eliot Balkan had to be scrapped. I had started with the idea of writing a thriller based around a man who is lazy and selfish. My aim was to find out what it takes to force such a person into action. I discovered that it was quite impossible to get my character to do anything, no matter what I threw at him!

So I totally transformed Eliot. He is not a saint or a natural man of action but neither is he unsympathetic, and he is no longer lazy. Eliot earns his living as a software designer rather than as a professional musician but I do very much identify with his taking time out to play his drums, and work out his frustrations by losing himself in music.

Up and coming businesses, such as the software company that Eliot works for, who operate on a ‘take the money now – ask questions later’ basis are not unusual anywhere. To grow a business you need customers. Who those customers are and what they do, and whether to take the money or walk away, is a situation many growing businesses face. I have certainly seen such companies operations at close hand when I lived in London.

How long have you spent working on the book, taking into account research?

Beneath the Bittercrest has taken almost seven years to write and has been through ten rewrites.

Do you have a particular method or approach to writing?

I like to have an idea of how the story will end but not to have too fixed an idea of how it will get there. For me the fun of writing is similar to the fun of reading, it’s about finding out what happens next. Of course, writing is a great deal slower than reading!

I try to write every day for at least an hour. It is not always easy, with two other, demanding, jobs and a young family, but it is great to be able to sit quietly and work. As a composer of music for film & television I have many years experience of having to create to deadlines, so ideas flow fairly freely most of the time.

Going the gym, one of the most boring activities on the planet, is a great way of making time to think. While you’re running pointlessly on a treadmill or cycling to nowhere or skiing on non existent snow you have all the time in the world to think up plots and story lines. I ‘enjoy’ doing that three times a week.

With Making Plans for Michael, I took a three month break from writing, after writing about 14,000 words, in order to allow my subconscious time to get on with making sense of the story.

Whose writing do you admire, or enjoy reading?

In terms of thrillers/crime novels I hugely enjoy Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander books. Mankell has a great humanity that I connect with.

One of my favourite books is the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. It is his only book where, in my view, he successfully combines his fantastic intellectual understanding of history and language with a really great story.

Having the good fortune of being bilingual I enjoy reading French Crime novels, including books by Jules Grasse and Maurice G. Dantec. I am also a big fan of the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and have recently enjoyed Strangers, a great ghost story by Taichi Yamada.

I read a huge number of authors as research while writing beneath the bittercrest, including: Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson, Minette Walters, Paul Eddy, and a large number of north American thrillers and crime novels, by writers such as Patricia Cornwell, Jonathan Kellerman and Dan Brown. On the whole I find north american writers less engaging than European or Japanese writers because they tend to be so permeated with the desire for revenge and execution. That said, I enjoyed Live Bait by P.J. Tracy, and No Beast So Fierce by Edward Bunker.

Would it be rude to say that I found the characterisation in Dan Brown’s books totally ridiculous? Chisel jawed heroes who speak fifteen languages, who are too humble to notice that everybody loves them, thrash all-comers on the squash court then graciously buy them a beer? Heroines who ‘smell of Johnson’s baby powder’, have legs so long they attach at the shoulder, and IQs higher than the gross national product of a medium sized nation? I’ll grudgingly admit that the Da Vinci Code is OK as a page turner, however.

Do you have any handy tips for aspiring writers?

FINISH IT.
Stephen King advises writers not to get bogged down in research and technical detail but to make sure they finish their story. You can add the technical stuff when you rewrite. I think that is good advice though if your story depends on a particular technical detail you obviously need to know your facts.

REWRITE IT.
Someone said about writing that it is not about the writing but the rewriting. I agree with that. The challenge is to have the courage to delete passages that felt good when they were being written but don’t actually advance the plot. The same principles apply in all the arts: music, writing, dance, painting – you have to be able to sacrifice elements of what you have created in order to refine the whole.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO WAIT ABOUT FOR INSPIRATION.
The stories of artists having to wait about for inspiration are just that – stories. Whether it's composing, or writing, or painting, or directing films, most professionals just get on with it. Charles Dickens had to write so many words a month. J.S. Bach had to produce a cantata every other week. Spielberg has to deliver a finished film…

Don’t sit staring at a blank piece of paper, go for a walk and a think. Force yourself to create.

I heard a writer a couple of weeks ago say that when her subconscious isn’t coming up with any ideas she grabs her coat and her dog and leaves the house, heading south. She promises herself that she won’t turn back until she has the idea she needs. She said she has always arrived home before dark.