Q: Why the esoteric emphasis?
I’m interested in comparative religion and, of course, what interests you comes through in your work.
Q: Your first thriller, The Fourth Eye, is extremely dark and your second, The Godgame, quite disturbing.
So is the evening news — which the networks have reduced to the level of distraction, entertainment. However life’s often brutal. Should we ignore that? For instance, they’ve tried to attribute Titus Andronicus to everyone but Shakespeare, but there’s good evidence he wrote it and academics are stuck with that. The Fourth Eye was mostly social commentary. But The Godgame was a romp — described by the publisher at Hazard Press as ‘a romance for men’ and I agree with him. I love its cosy, sunny little world of terror. And every so often I have to peek into it and join that world.
Q: You speak as if someone else wrote your books.
You know you wrote them because they take enormous effort. But later you wonder where they came from.
Q: How do you work?
Patricia Highsmith said that a book is a process that should be interrupted only by sleep. Now I have a life organised for minimum distraction. Wife gone, children flown, pets dead. Freedom. Writing is rewriting and I endlessly rework.
Q: What are you writing now?
I’ve just finished the next book, Deep Six. It’s partly a forecast about the future of war. The Fourth Eye screenplay’s finished. A book of short stories is ready too — called Songs of a Second World.
Q: What’s it like adapting your own book to the screen?
Demanding — a distillation. I thought it would be a doddle but there’s been a lot to learn. For instance, a feature won’t work unless you stick strictly to the three-act structure. And you have to throw away your novel, reinvent, start again. Bit of a wrench, but you get over it.
Q: Why do you write?
It’s a character flaw. Writers are compulsive and their excretions are their daydreams.
Q: Are you being sardonic?
No. I mean it. Of course, there are kinder ways to put it. You write for the joy of constructing an imagined world that’s concrete, meaningful, real.
Q: What advice do you have for would-be writers?
Find something sensible to do. It took me forty years to get a book up. I dumped three in the garbage one day. If you can be discouraged, you won’t make it. If you can’t, you won’t either. And if you get published — equivalent to the chance of being struck by lightning — your book sits on a shelf for a few weeks, then it’s pulped.
Q: But you kept going…
Because it’s a compulsion. And I’ve lived my life. It’s playtime now.
Q: EXIT ALPHA isn’t your typical airport paperback — it implies a world view. What would you say is your take on the world?
It’s in chaos. Obvious enough. The population explosion’s made us locusts — stripping, denuding the planet. But we’re so egocentric, we still see ourselves as separate from nature. We agree that the problems we have — destruction of biodiversity, global warming and so on — are unsustainable. That means we’re unsustainable, that we’re becoming the only resource. Soon we’ll be farmed like cattle. You can see the indications now. Entrenched conglomerates disseminating misinformation to protect their franchises. The subversion of education by business. Drugs and the corporatisation of crime. The corruption of professions, institutions, governments. We’re victims of our own violence, inertia, mental slavery and greed. I’m not making anything up. These are hardly new ideas.
Q: And you’re trying to highlight these problems in your fiction?
I’m not trying to ignore them. It’s interesting that factual books are now becoming partly fiction. You recall the biography of Reagan that interposed a purely fictional narrator? And fiction is promoting fact — sometimes even posing as fact. Some forms of bastardry are too dangerous to tackle directly and fiction, being at one remove, can lift these into awareness. There are brilliant examples through the years. For instance 1984 is with us. The only mistake Orwell made was imagining it would be overt rather than covert. Popular fiction’s often predicted the future correctly. And it probably has a better strike-rate than most economists, futurists, historians. It can also have a devastating critical punch. For instance, The Good Soldier Schweick.
Q: But surely we’ve had it good in the last hundred years? The general standard of living in western democracies is —
Democracy’s had a grand run. Despite its twin foes, communism and capitalism, it’s still being kept afloat by advances in science and technology — but notice how each new solution spawns a dozen new problems? Progress is a myth. We’re moving in circles. Everything becomes its own opposite.
Q: Can you give an illustration of that?
Which century would you like? The religion of love spawning the inquisition and the crusades? The war to end all wars? Communism reverting to hierarchy and decimating the masses? There are examples on all scales. Antibiotics cause more resistant bugs. Claims exploitation makes the cost of insurance prohibitive. Cane toads. But people cling to this notion of progress — because the alternative is despair.
Q: Are you saying there are no solutions?
No. I’m saying direct means don’t work. Violence is generally ignorance — and provokes the equal and opposite reaction. We think we can do something, but we’re symptoms not the cause. Real doing is self-change. But that’s almost impossible. Real change isn’t on the level of general life at all.
Q: Can you explain that more clearly?
We need to transform our values. Nothing less will make any difference. That begins with a new kind of wish and a new direction and refinement of attention. But we’re so unbalanced, ignorant, destructive, that we’ve no inkling of our inner potential. We’re atomised, in pieces — hearts, bodies, minds disconnected. If we could move towards an inner unity, the inner would transform the outer. And that would be real action. Not reaction but response.
Q: And this kind of thinking is part of the Smith thriller formula?
If you have a formula, you’re defeated. It has to be your kind of book and you have to enjoy it. The old saw that ‘style is the man’ may be mental shorthand but the sentiment is right. What you are is what happens to you. And it’s also what you write, if you’re honest. If it interests you, there’s a chance it could interest others. But that’s far from guaranteed. The first joy of craft or art is personal. And if others think it worthwhile, that’s a bonus.
Q: So what kind of experience do you hope readers of EXIT ALPHA will have?
I hope they’ll enter another world that will constantly surprise them. That they’ll be involved in a fast-paced adventure that never dulls the mind because mindless action is juvenile and boring. That they’ll meet characters they care about and can learn something from as well. That this world will be sheer enjoyment — will delight, amuse, convince, engage, intrigue. There have been many attempts to combine the pace of the thriller with the depth of a novel. But, generally, pace suffers. I don’t believe it should. With luck, EXIT ALPHA combines drive and entertainment with depth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Clinton Smith, born in Sydney, Australia, began trying to write as a schoolboy. After a lurch into the media as a radio announcer, he worked for years in a TV studio, writing short stories in off-hours, some of which he sold. When he became an advertising copywriter working on world brands, the demands of the job, plus marriage and children, made scribbling fiction difficult. He finished several book-length manuscripts in following years but none sold, although some of his stories won literary contests.