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Steve
Norris - A Very English Revolution
Steve Norris
has written a new novel that will change your views on the
political stability of Britain forever.
Already
attracting a number of rave reviews, the book is available on
Amazon (as a paperback and on Kindle - at £2) where you can also see the great reviews. A review
by Digger will be added shortly:
A
Very English Revolution, by Steve Norris
Buy
at Amazon
Digger talked
to Steve about his motivations for the book and about
Englishness and Britishness, as well as his thoughts on the
current and recent shenanigans that have been going on in the
world of politics and the press...
Steve Norris
Digger: Can
you please tell us a little bit about your background?
Steve:
I was
born in north Manchester, obvious to anyone who meets me. Much
of the early parts of the book cover the streets I walked as I
grew up. I went to college, got a job and ended up living and
working in Yorkshire. My professional life started working in
HR in the NHS but progressed into the IT Consulting arena and
for the last 15 years I have been travelling the UK and the
world working on HR and Payroll projects for major
corporations. I was never a natural writer, it is something I
have had to learn along the way. I think my English teacher
would spill his coffee if he picked this up. However the
amount of travel I have done over the years has given me free
time to improve and work on storylines.
Digger:
What was the inspiration for this book?
Steve:
The inspiration for this book is trying to balance what I
like to read and what I have seen in my experience. A few
points stand out though:
-
I
love reading great thrillers, whose characters you can buy
into and want to go along with for the ride. In my books,
I don’t want supermen. I want to write about real people
such as you and me, confronting them with extraordinary
situations. The north is full of diverse characters and
locations which are little explored in the literary world.
Finally on characters, I wanted to add strong female
characters who change the dynamic in predictable thriller
scenarios. A Very English Revolution sounds like a man’s book, politics, dead
people etc. Actually much of the drivers in the book are
around female motivations and it probably contains more
for women than you might expect. (note all the reviews on
Amazon are written by women)
-
I
was never inspired to write a political book, I simply
wanted to write about people, what drives and motivates
them but use the thriller format to tell a story that
draws people in. Politics just fell out of some of the
thought processes that put the story together.
-
I
feel religion and politics portrayed through the media are
tools for mass exploitation of people and the architects
of social division. I was brought up a Catholic and I know
how priests used that to position us as a race above
others. I never understood that. When deciding what to
write about, these things seemed to provide so much scope.
Digger:
And please tell us more about A Very English Revolution.
Steve:
It is framed around the timeline of a fictional Leeds
bi-election in 2009. The vacuum of leadership in government
meant minor parties were growing in strength and the book
picks up in Leeds where an opportunity emerges for a new style
nationalist politician who can present arguments, usually
formed in male drinking clubs, in a sexy media-friendly
format. The other side of the story is an old fashioned
mystery whodunit from the 1980‘s where a journalist stumbles
on a cover up of child abuse in the Catholic Church. You think
the story is going one way, but wonder where the bi-election
fits in. The story draws the reader into a world where
questions and connections keep coming, and where coincidence
starts to turn into conspiracy. Before the characters realise
what they know, they are at the centre of a very dangerous
storm.
I
can’t deny the story is controversial, there are some very
striking events and views in it, but I would like to say that
although there are some definite bad guys in it (every
thriller needs bad guys) every argument is played out
naturally from various viewpoints. They all get their day in
the sun. The real moral of the book is not that one view or
another is right, but simply our inability to talk openly
about what concerns us creates a negative environment which
those with darker motives can exploit.
Digger:
What does Englishness, or Britishness, mean to you and how
much has it changed in your lifetime?
Steve:
Englishness and Britishness have always been difficult
concepts to pin down. Strangely or maybe not, I’ve never
gone out of my way to feel English or British. I am British, I
refer to it in my passport etc. but not in terms of identity.
It’s not that I am not proud of my nationality, I’m just
neutral about it. My identity is much more defined by where I
come from. As I grew up, concepts of nation and country were
not important. I was much more defined by the estate I lived
in and the fact that I liked rock music. As I travelled, I
compared myself with others who defined themselves very much
by their nation, Dutch, French, American, all waving flags. It
never would have crossed my mind to bring out a Union Jack or
St George's cross to represent me. The reason why becomes
clearer when we think about it. We are such a diverse nation
and our media seeks increasingly to separate us, even our
geography is consistently used to define us, yet we are such a
small island. Perhaps we should unite under one flag, black,
white, Mancunian or Londoner, male or female, but our media is
very good at portraying what separates us and not what we have
in common. The other comment about this is that
Britishness/Englishness is more important abroad than it is in
the UK. Maybe that is due the need to identify your origins in
a foreign environment, rather like foreign communities gather
in the UK.
Digger: The
book is gaining some very positive reviews. This must be
encouraging - how important is this sort of feedback to
you?
Steve:
One thing I have learnt about writers and artists in general
is that we all love good reviews. I don’t believe I set out
on writing the book to get good reviews, more because I wanted
to challenge myself to see if I could do it, but once done,
you want people to like it. This gives you confidence, not
only to invest in marketing to stores, but also to want to do
it again. The problem for new writers is getting exposure, it
is a competitive business and most new writers have to do all
the work themselves, big publishing agreements are few and far
between. Proof-reading, design, and marketing are all part of
the author’s work, the easy bit is the writing. I am pleased
to say I have had no bad reviews, of course people are polite
one to one, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t point
out the odd flaw in it. In particular the first edition had
some production errors, one of the problems of doing it all
yourself, but now the second edition is done and out there,
the only thing holding the book back is exposure to the
market. I am confident that were it to be on the shelves of
every book store in the country it would sell as well as
anything else.
My publisher
Mirador has helped where they can, but they are small company
investing in new writing talent without a big infrastructure
and marketing budget. So rather like the music industry in the
twentieth-first century, it is a very much a do-it-yourself
world.
Digger: Financial crises, MP scandals, phone tapping scandals
- do you think that a lot of the bigger and more long-term
issues in this country tend to get overlooked by these
'distractions'?
Steve:
Indeed, the government must be loving this national
distraction. That anyone is surprised by the behaviour of our
media is more surprising. Given where I have now placed myself
in terms of political observation, then this is all material
for the future. I won’t give anything away on the new book,
but you can assume some of this will be taken to new heights.
I think it is worth noting that writing books is not just
about a great idea. Something like phone-hacking sounds like a
great idea, but just writing a book about the behaviour of
Murdoch’s Newspapers wouldn’t interest me. That is more
like journalism or biography. The joy for me is taking the
premise and attaching it to another unrelated story or stories
and weaving them together and coming up with an original idea.
The fact that it happened in real life, means it has been done
before, so there is nothing original to write about and it’s
predictable. The writer’s challenge is to turn it all on its
head, use it by all means, but don’t just rehash old
stories.
Digger:
What are the best things about writing?
Steve:
The best thing is that you can create a whole world on your
terms. Forget about fantasy games such as second life, within
a story I can create numerous versions of myself and take them
on an adventure I could never do. Also I can reap a literary
revenge on everyone who ever crossed my path. Working full-time I don’t have endless hours to research detailed facts
or police procedures, which concerned me when I first set out
writing. However I realised that I never question writer’s
facts or how much is really true. A writer simply has to
convince the reader that their premise holds water, either
through endless detail or just a clever scenario the reader is
able to buy into. A Very English Revolution has little in the way of true facts, it
is all completely made up and no research supports it, but
readers still felt the story and characters real.
Digger:
I understand you're planning further novels? Can you please
let us know more?
Steve:
I am working on a second book which is an escalation of A Very English Revolution
but
across a different landscape, plus there is some unfinished
business. It wouldn’t be interesting to do the same story
again, so I have reworked the context and the timescales to
create what should be a heart stopping spectacular British
thriller. The challenge for me is to write a book that fits
the brilliant plan I have on paper. Ideally it will be ready
early next year. I have written a number of short stories and
run an internet writing group called Writers Cave (www.writerscave.co.uk).
Story lines and characters are everywhere. Sadly the only
thing I lack is the time to write it down.
July 2011
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