A Blast of Hunters - An Essay

I make no secret whatsoever that like Slag Glass Lachrimæ, A Blast of Hunters sprung from my own climb out of massive depression, but unlike that novella, this book is imbued with a massive rage and a tendency to massacre sacred cows that I will probably never match again.  For several years – too many years – I was in such a dark place that it came close to taking me to suicide.  For a while, I could easily have been Train Man, living the opening scene of this book – but instead I chose to write it down.  To construct this fantasy and, in the process, write myself to somewhere new.  The benefits of this were intense – sometimes one can indeed write what one wants to be, though the process can also be very painful.  Looking back on it now, those days almost seem a different world – and this book also seems a different world.  Now, I see a dark and transgressive exploration of depression and the reality of human instincts – at the time I was just writing down some of what I took completely for granted.  I never write deliberately to shock, I just want to think through things.

I suppose thematically, this book was always going to be a contentious one – examining as it does what happens when concerns for major issues like the environment and nature/animal welfare etc. become extremist – the inevitably political act of examining austerity London through a speculative lens – examining the twisted rot of the mind in isolation and the Nietzschesqu paradoxical comfort of suicidal thoughts – finding a kind of vicious and ambivalent poetry of subversion through a surreal distillation of the 2011 London riots – and worst of all, a sense of utter futility. An utter inability of humanity to ever save itself, heal itself without descending into madness and thus rendering the noblest of causes meaningless. This is a world where the 'adversary' crushing you and society is a blend of the utterly ridiculous and truly evil, and yet something you can never truly fight against.  The faceless horrors of shared ideas and cultural attitudes.  Instead of any way out, the only option is to huddle together in hidden places, exist in spite of the insanity and try and survive through the warmth of human interaction.

Either that or there are plenty of trains to catch ...

That sense of futility is probably the darkest aspect of the book and it is an interesting question whether I still believe in that now.  And the answer is … yes, up to a point.  In some ways, the world has become measurably worse since I wrote this novel. It took shape in the days of Tory Austerity, of Ian Duncan Smith and David Cameron, when cruelty to the most vulnerable was intense, the housing situation in London was deep in the ‘absurd’ levels etc. etc..  Since then, the narrative has been overshadowed rather by Brexit, Trump etc. – or rather by the cultural forces that led to their manifestation.  Now the absurdity is only more blatant, the sense of loss only more excruciating.  And yet in spite of all this, I myself am far mellower.  I am not Train Man, his mind works differently to my own, and yet my own feelings developed very much in parallel – seguing from a total despair to a wild fury against the cruelty of right-wing politics, and again to something more focussed.  Finding my rage and getting it under control was my healing process.  And writing this book played a major role in that.

The other side of this book arose from an increasing horror at seeing the causes of environmental protection and animal welfare – causes that I love – infected by an underbelly of highly toxic ideas, against which there seemed very little fight-back.  I remember browsing round the activist forums totally dumfounded … abuse directed at the disabled (for taking medicines tested on animals), attacks on people practicing regenerative farming (activists storming family farms and releasing animals that then immediately die), the extreme end of veganism (e.g. trying to feed cats meatless diets and arguing about whether figs, honey and even algae are vegan etc.), fantasising about testing medicines on the severely disabled rather than on animals, fantasising about letting carnivores go extinct to ‘engineer’ some kind of impossible peaceable kingdom … not to mention the sheer bloodthirstiness on display.  In all honesty, it was a shock – as if a monster had taken up residence in my own basement when I was used to seeing them clustering around outside the fence.  These areas are to animal welfare what the Agent Orange files and others are to feminism – a dark underbelly that by no means affects the overall vital issues.  They do tarnish them, however – alienating people and corrupting the process of addressing them.  They also feed directly into the hands of those against such causes, for whatever reason, making it all too easy for them to say “This whole thing is absurd”.  This underbelly needs to be more acknowledged and disowned, rather than dismissed as unimportant. A culture of not repudiating absurd and destructive ideas on one’s own ‘side’ is only going to have negative consequences - as we are already seeing in a world where some areas that offer real hope, such as regenerative agriculture, are actively under attack.

I had long wanted to write a work that explored this kind of extremism – looking at what might happen if this kind of underbelly got the upper hand on a cultural level (never impossible).  I knew it would be a somewhat dangerous project to undertake, but when I found Train Man waiting to die on the rails in a rotten and half-mad London, the two themes came together very organically.  The unreality of the extremist mind-set felt right alongside the unreality of the Austerity society mind-set, the two feeding each other. 

Writing Hunters, I did a lot of paraphrasing of actual ideas and rants that I had encountered in various places – a process I am somewhat ambivalent about now since on re-reading the book, they come across as almost cartoonish.  And yet this is a process I have wrestled with many times – on some levels, reality does indeed seem so ridiculous that I am left wondering how on earth one can ever write about it?  Whether it is flat-earthers, rabid proponents of genocide or ethnic cleansing, people trying to tell me sex is fundamentally sinful, or someone arguing that we should indeed let tigers go extinct.  In Hunters, however, reading it now with a certain distance, they seem to take things almost into the level of farce.  And yet, when one faces up to the reality that lies behind the absurdities, somehow a true horror is found – one that is somewhat beyond ‘horror’ fiction. 

I doubt very much that I will ever write a novel like Hunters again.  From the sheer rage to the fact that it is so ideas-driven, this was a one-off from a certain time of my life.  For a while after it was released, I was feeling quite paranoid – all too easy for people to misread it as having a simplistic political agenda.  Yet in a weird way, in spite of everything, it is an a-political book, existing not in a world of left and right but somewhere between them – “not in the centre but at that point where the extremes curve around and come back together again in pools of blood” and where cruelty and absurdity can gain a foothold from either direction and everything is lost in a muddle of delusion.  The reaction has indeed been quite polarised but I am not going to feel uneasy about having written this strange monster.  In spite of the fact that the book is a fantasy, in spite of the fact that my life neither is nor was anything at all like any of these characters, the basic processes behind this book make it personal on a level nothing else I have written ever has.