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The Alchemy of Chance - Author Interview

An Interview with Peter S. Brooks, by Dan Holloway

DH: Can you explain what synchronicity means to you? The word makes me think of the hippy teacher in ‘Heathers’. And the introduction to the film ‘Magnolia’.

PB: I haven’t seen ‘Heathers’ but yes, I suppose ‘Magnolia’ is dealing in that currency, though in a very particular Hollywood style. The opening of the film has a lot in common with one of those bathroom booklets, which I’m not averse to reading now and then. Lots of little anecdotes founded on a single notion: ‘… at the precise moment that…’ One of my favourites is the true story about the guy whose life was a bit of a mess and he threw himself off the roof of the Empire State Building shortly after it opened. He hadn’t gone far when some kind of updraught sucked him through an open window on the RCA Radio floor while a live news programme was going out. So the newsreader stuck a mike in his face. You can imagine it: ‘Tell me, what’s it like…’

I simply take synchronicity at its root, ‘same time’, and apply it to the broader weave of my storytelling. Most would agree it’s an inherently compelling topic and capable of being treated in many different ways. My own version in The Alchemy of Chance is built on the thesis that apparently random cosmic urges do in fact have a pulse, although I consider it my job merely to try and describe them, no more. I make a point of resisting any sense of predetermination, or a label. I mean fate, or destiny or god forbid, God. As Aurélie says: ‘Things just are.’

DH: It's a fascinating concept. But as an author how did you avoid falling into contrivance? Were you conscious of this as a potential danger?

PB: In one sense, all plot-design is contrivance, but I guess you’re refering to that moment when it creeps up to the edge of artifice. I was aware of the dangers and I became pretty obsessed with avoiding implausibility. In order to do that, I had to distinguish between the implausible and the unlikely. Unless you’re writing sci-fi or fantasy, where perhaps anything goes, it’s an incredibly important aspect of our craft, even down to small matters of ‘staging’, narrating a character’s progress from A to B without unwittingly breaking a limb of theirs in the process. You don’t want an expert witness coming at you post-print with: ‘That simply could not have happened.’

On another level, I wanted to make sure that each encounter, each coincidence in time and space generated an echo of collective experience, an affirmative connection. ‘Yes. That’s just what happened to me.’ Or my cousin. Whoever. On their own, these kinds of coincidence are of limited utility, a part of the stock of material that we refer to for our stories. But I am drawn to the more complex notion of massed synchronicity and this is what the book is about. In my preface, I take a pretty serious mathematical stance on this and use the example of roulette. Forgetting the House, first time, there’s a 50:50 chance of throwing a red. Second time, there’s a 50:50 chance of throwing another red. And another, ad infinitum. All that we can say about the chances of throwing ten reds in a row is that it’s 50:50 each time (which is an axiom) and highly unlikely (which is an anecdote, though equally true). I happen to believe the universe works in the same way. I even thought about calling the book ‘Ten Consecutive Reds’.

DH: Does having a large ensemble cast make writing harder (keeping tabs of narrative arcs and the like) or easier (because you have to give up on graphs and trajectories and just get on with It)? To be filmic again, I can't help thinking of Robert Altman's The Player.

PB: That’s interesting. I loved ‘The Player’, but the film that influenced me the most as I was coughing up this tale, was ‘Short Cuts’, where Altman uses originally unconnected Carver short stories as a springboard for a number of overlapping vignettes which all share a dénouement, a minor earthquake in Southern California.

As for the design, I thoroughly enjoyed that part of the process; so I guess it was easy. But I certainly couldn’t abandon ‘narrative arcs … graphs and trajectories’, as you put it. It’s essential to keep a handle on both the separate and the interlinked elements or else you never gain full control. Film-makers use storyboards of course, but this is writing as choreography, moving your main players around in relation to each other and to the broader scene. My way was to get myself a poster-sized artists’ sketchpad and a few pencils, and plot everything with boxes and bubbles, lines and arrows, dots and dashes. The result – to anyone else – was a mess, but I had to do that before I typed a word. Even then, I also had to set up a timeline spreadsheet, covering the main characters over the six months of the story, to the day, even down to the (real for that year) phases of the moon. Again, it’s down to plausibility. Perhaps I’m unnecessarily obsessed with it, but if I’m going to enter the world of Aurélie’s lunar cycles, for example, then I really should get it right. I can’t have her ovulating when she should be menstruating.

DH: How easy was it to write a blind character? Did you find yourself editing as you went, did you get into character before you started then stay there? Or did you let yourself get it all out and then edit for consistency? Did you find yourself "looking" at the world in different ways?

PN: Well I had to do some homework, that’s for sure. I interviewed a few blind people (though very informally, I must add), just to get a take on their take on their world. That was fascinating and instructive, but once I started, I was navigating by my own imagination, with the odd tip and anecdote thrown in subliminally.

One of the great things about writing a non-linear narrative with a multi-character cast is that when you’ve finished writing you can shift your chapters around with ease. I wrote all the Aurélie chapters in one sequence; so yes, I got fired up in character and let it all flow. Editing came later, when I’d completed the whole work. However, like many a writer before me, I allowed myself to get smitten by one of my characters. I think it shows; many have commented on it anyway. Aurélie would come to me, often in the car, usually late at night, and I’d look across at the empty seat and she’d be there with me as I drove through France. Many scenes came out of those moments, especially the ones where she sets off with Dafydd. It’s a form of madness, of course, but at least it’s only temporary.

Writing from the PoV of a blind person, with only non-visual predicates to hand, was a joy. It really stretched me and my outlook too. I found myself totally immersed in the senses for a while. And I’ll never go back. Whatever my next work is about – and it almost certainly won’t feature a blind person – I’ll be giving the non-visual senses much more say in the narration. I’m sure it was responsible for reinvigorating my lifelong love of food. And, looking back now, it corresponded to a point in my life when I took on new interests in horticulture and floriculture. I’d still hate to be blind though, that much I know. The other transformational thing for me was a reaffirmation of my attraction to people with handicaps. So often, their combination of vulnerability and openness seems to sum up the best of the human spirit.

DH: For someone of, er, my age, the 70s is a fascinating time, right at the edge of what I can remember. Do you see any aspects of historical fiction in the book, or is it just literary fiction set in the past?

Absolutely not. Rightly or wrongly, for me the term ‘historical fiction’ me doesn’t kick in until, say, World War 2. I regard the 70s as a while ago. I decided to set the book in that decade for two reasons: firstly, it was a time of great change for me, the arrival of adulthood I suppose. Above all, I was happy. I first went to France when I was 14 and I wanted to capture that intensely aromatic moment of being in another quite alien land. I decided to situate my wide-eyed innocence in the character of Hannah. I found I was able to plunder my memory bank with ease.

The second reason is to do with the modernisation of France. By setting this piece in the 70s, I found I’d created something of a requiem for a fast-dying culture, one whose time-distance co-ordinates would soon be ripped apart by TGVs, miles more autoroutes and cheap flights; whose metropolitan drains would finally be fixed, and – above all – whose momentary personal isolations would be removed, almost at a stroke, by the advent of the mobile phone and the internet. None of these stories could be the same today. Imagine Aurélie standing alone on that station platform. She’d have her mobie out like a shot

DH: Having grown up near the Mapa Mundi, mapmaking has always fascinated me, but did you ever feel you were treading a fine line between a great central metaphor for a "web of synchronicity" and hitting the reader over the head with the authorial preachy stick?

PB: When I started out on this, Aurélie came to me almost all in one go. She was blind of course, slightly eccentric and adventurous, a crazy astrologer with an odd byline in twinning. But the mapmaking came later. It just slipped in through the back door. And I think that’s because it’s one of my own ‘trainspotting’ quirks, which I’m a little hesitant to admit to. By including it as Aurélie’s original trade, her reason for getting up in the morning, it struck me as yet another loss from which I could have her recover.

There’s a clue in the story, when she’s playing tactile Scrabble with Dafydd, and she refers to the ancient power of graphic representation and analogues. I love them! They’re so quintessentially human. No animal could invent the clock or make a map.

Although, as I have said, the structure of the piece was carefully plotted, any idea of mapmaking as ‘a great central metaphor’ must have been subconcious. I simply didn’t plan it that way. It’s interesting that you posit this, because shortly after arriving on Authonomy, Radek – one of the finest reviewers up there – said about Alchemy:

‘This novel, about map making, is also a map in itself, a complex intricately drawn map. That chance has a design to it is of course the premise of pretty much every novel ever written.You though are drawing up a map of the map so to speak which is a fascinating and exciting idea.’

So it’s a meta-map. Which I like. But I honestly didn’t realise until it was pointed out.

Dan Holloway is author of Songs from the Other Side of the Wall; a spoken word performer, a founder member of Year Zero Writers; and curator of eight cuts gallery.
http://danholloway.wordpress.com/work-in-progress/songs-from-the-other-side-of-the-wall/
http://yearzerowriters.wordpress.com
http://eightcuts.wordpress.com

Lost - The Alchemy of Chance with Technology

Lost

You put my postcode
Into your Sat Nav
So you can find me.

But how we get
From where we are now
To where we want to be
Is a mystery.


Lost was written by Libby, at Poems4people and has been quoted with permission.

The Alchemy of Chance - Proof Copy

In the really exciting news department, the proof copy of The Alchemy of Chance arrived today, with Marianne Pfeiffer's glorious enamel zodiac signs glowing on the front cover, and Peter's story just waiting for the turn of a page. Our first real, actual book. It will go into production later this week. I apologise for the terrible pictures. The only available light was a stark overhead.

The Alchemy of Chance - Didier's Jerusalem Artichoke Soup

A guest post from our intrepid chef. In lieu of an eating tour of France, Janet is cooking her way through The Alchemy of Chance. We'll feature her recipes here on the blog and they'll be included in the enhanced digital version of the book.

"This meal, Sunday lunch, was a celebration of nothing more or less than the end of winter. All morning, Didier had been preparing the last of the season’s fare. His Jerusalem artichoke soup was kicked into life by the gratings of an earthy black truffle sent up from Périgord."

Besides a great read “The Alchemy of Chance” is a foodie’s dream of eating his or her way through France. I love the descriptions of the meals; everything is as it should be - wonderful food made simply with local, seasonal food. When I decided to attempt the recipes in the book I was committed to following Peter’s notion of using whatever ingredients were freshest and at hand so sometimes I have had to change a recipe because the ingredients he describes are not in season. Such was the case with the Jerusalem artichoke soup. He describes a wonderful soup resplendent with earthy black truffles; unfortunately truffles are not in season for another month here so I opted to use truffle butter instead. For a garnish I sautéed some wonderful small yellow foot chanterelles that are in season. The flavours were incredible. I think the idea is to change one’s recipes to suit the season so making changes to a recipe to suit what is available locally makes great sense. Of course if fresh truffles are available and you want to splurge the soup will be all the better for it, but this soup still has a wonderful truffle flavour and it won't hurt your pocket book.

Jerusalem artichoke Soup with truffles

4 Tablespoons butter (2 for the garlic and onions and 2 for the mushrooms)

1 clove of garlic chopped

1 small onion chopped

Approximately 1 pound of Jerusalem artichokes washed and cut into 1 inch pieces

2 1/2 cups of good chicken stock (homemade is best)

1/2 cup cream or use more chicken stock

Salt and pepper to taste

½ teaspoon truffle butter

½ cup of fresh wild mushrooms (whatever is in season) or ½ cup dried wild mushrooms such as chanterelles or small morels reconstituted in hot water

¼ cup sour cream

2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley or chives

Melt the butter in a pan and sauté the garlic and onion until translucent. Add them to a medium pot with the Jerusalem artichokes and chicken stock and cook until the Jerusalem artichokes are soft (about 10 minutes).

While the soup is cooking add the 2 remaining tablespoons of butter to the pan and sauté the mushrooms.

When Jerusalem artichokes are tender, pour mixture into blender and process until smooth. Be careful when processing the hot liquid. When mixture is smooth strain it back into the pot to remove any lumps. Reheat soup adding cream if you are using it or additional stock. Add salt and pepper to taste and the truffle butter. Stir to combine.

To serve ladle soup into bowls. Add a tablespoon of sour cream to each bowl, and then place the mushrooms around the cream. Sprinkle bowl with finely chopped parsley or chives.

Bon Appétit
Janet

The Alchemy of Chance - Aurelie and Oliver Sacks

“There’s one other possibility: visual conversion disorder. Used to be called hysterical blindness. This is where the brain, confronted by an overwhelming trauma, unconsciously disables optical functioning. If a victim witnesses events that she cannot process psychologically, the ensuing attacks of acute anxiety can trigger the brain into converting intolerable stress into a real physical state, effectively eliminating the stressor: sight.”
...“It’s a bit like amnesia then?”
“Think of it this way. Her eyes are in a coma.”

I ordered Oliver Sacks’ new book, “The Mind’s Eye” today, and was struck, while I was reading about it, by the neurological complications and challenges Aurelie faced in coming to terms with her blindness. In his book, Dr Sacks raises many questions about the nature of both seeing and not seeing. He discusses things directly relevant to Aurelie’s condition, and her coping methods - visual imagery and memory, the relationship between direct visual experience and remembered visual experience, the incredible enhancement of touch and the mental landscapes of blindness. I thought of Aurelie, lying in the grass with her eyes closed, listening to the world –
“Big birds squawked and flapped around in the trees; small mammals and birds stirred the undergrowth and fishes plopped the surface of the water, all against an orchestral backdrop of clicking insects. She wondered what it would be like to be on a mountain top. Would she hear the snow melt, the ice crack, the glaciers slide, the wind caress her face? Is wind noisy or does it make other things noisy? Is there a place on earth that’s truly silent? Not unless you’re dead. All that breathing and pumping and cellular movement, even when you think you’re still. “

In an interview with Steve Silberman, Sacks gives the example of a man who had lost his sight as a young adult, who said that when he read Braille, he didn’t feel it in his fingers, he saw it, reminding me of the game of scrabble Aurelie plays with Dafydd, on a tactile board. – Her fingers skipped lightly over the board, processing tactile information while her mind reached out to another tongue.
“It’s a bit like map-reading,” she said. “Graphic representation. It’s more than a quarter of a million years old. We’re hard-wired for it, for analogue information. With one of my hands on the hands of a clock, I can tell the time quicker than you can read one of those silly new digital things. And beat you at Scrabble while I’m doing it.”

I’ve been conducting an experiment since I first read The Alchemy of Chance, closing my eyes and trying to feel the Braille on the outside of hotel room doors, or on ATM machines, or trying to figure out what denomination the bill in my hand was. American and Canadian paper currency is all the same size but a customs officer pointed out that the numerals on the bills are raised, at least if the bill hasn’t been worn smooth. Try it. I wasn’t able to figure out the simplest arrangement of dots by touch, or tell a five from a twenty. The brain, it turns out, rewires itself to cope.


Sacks also talks about the way blind people deal with their disabilities, mentally, not practically, and mentions a religion professor who describes his blindness as “an authentic, autonomous world, one of the concentrated human conditions,” a close approximation of what Aurelie describes when asked if she thinks differently -
“Yes, I do have an expanded abstract realm and, if I’m not careful, I end up living in it much of the time... It’s cool and clear, a bit like I imagine outer space to be. But I’m not on my own. I guess some heavy-duty philosophers live out there most of the time.”
“Isn’t it depressing?”
“Not at all. It just is.”

Of course, a reader has no real need to know the scientific implications behind Aurelie’s condition, but the confluence of fiction and neurology does add another layer of interest and I look forward to learning more about it.

An interview with Oliver Sacks - http://www.berfrois.com/2010/09/oliver-sacks-if-i-smoke-a-little-pot-my-hallucinations-sometimes-become-words/

Tactile Map 2

A/N: This was copied from my blog, thus the lack of appropriate punctuation. My personal grammatical ideologies and or failings are in no way representative of the views or practices of Tangerine Tree Press.


people are complaining that my last posts on the alchemy map didn't really demonstrate where i'm going with it. which is fair enough. it probably has something to do with the fact that i'm all little fuzzy on the point myself.

i have these fabulous period zodiac symbols that marianne and andrew pfeiffer are kindly allowing us to use and which i'm hoping to incorporate into a decorative border for the map. they're very vividly coloured and very vibrant and i'm hoping to bring a lot of that visual energy to the map, although i've no hope of doing anything half as nice as the pfeiffer's cloisonne (which is just mind-blowingly gorgeous as you can see).

beyond that my inspiration is coming from the braille/tactile maps used by aurelie in the alchemy of chance and from those lovely but hideously inaccurate historical maps like the munster map. see, history was good for something.

so while the tactile element is most relevant to the story and most interesting to me (i'm really fascinated with multi-sensory experiences) i'm trying to make this map as visually exciting as possible too (mostly because i expect to use a photo of it more than the original, sadface).

and here's one of the zodiac signs, leo of course. image © marianne and andrew pfeiffer, photograph © pearse saines.

The Alchemy Of Chance - Reader's Reviews

“As clever as a soufflé, as satisfying as a cassoulet and as characterful as a just-so Roquefort. Délicieux! (May I propose that the publisher packages it with a postprandial cigar?)”

Caroline Scott - SW France


"Lives, feeling their way around a screen which hides as it reveals, passing with pinpoint tenderness from blinkeredness to double vision to seeing and looking both ways."

Nigel Watson - Swansea, Wales

Tactile/Collage Map of France

The beginnings of a tactile collage map to go along with Peter S. Brooks' The Alchemy of Chance. With tea. I'm just beginning to map out the lay of the land, coastlines and the like. France won't know what happened to it. The little coloured squares you can see on it now just denote what goes in each grid square. Ultimately... it will look really cool, that's the plan. What the precise mechanism I'll use to achieve that end I'm not sure. But it will be colourful and touchy-feely. I went to DeSerres yesterday to look at supplies but I'm wobbling between a variety of different ideas. I'll keep you posted.

The Alchemy of Chance - Introducing Dafydd Williams

A navy and cream Citroën DS flashed down the outside lane of the M4, the outskirts of Cardiff through the rear windscreen, Portsmouth and the night-ferry to St. Malo over the bonnet. Dafydd Williams had covered this stretch of road a thousand times before, growing up in Cardiff, studying in Newport, working in London. Now he had a month off and he was going to France for most of it. But that was about the only reference point he had for this journey, apart from a ten year-old postcard from Nantes and three recent ones from places he’d barely heard of.

Two weekends previously, he’d been summoned from London by his father Emlyn to the parental home up on Caerphilly Mountain, just beyond the northern outskirts of Cardiff. Father wanted to ‘have a chat’. And he got straight down to it, standing in the kitchen over a whisky on the Friday night as soon as Mother had gone to bed.

“I want you to go to France and find Sean.”
“Dad. It’s been more than ten years. He could be anywhere.”
“He sent us three more postcards. Last Summer.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I’m telling you now. It’s not as if you come and see us much. Or call. You didn’t even come home for Christmas.”
“It’s not home any more. Anyway, I’ve been busy… Why now?”
“Your mother needs to know he’s all right.”
“She’s not my mother.”
“You know what I mean. And she’s certainly his mother. I’ll pay your expenses.”
“I’m really not up for this. Can’t you hire someone?”
“For goodness sake, he’s your brother.”
“Half brother. And that’s the last time I let you know I’ve got a couple of months off. I’m thirty six. Too old for emotional blackmail.”
“Well I’m disappointed in you, is all I can say.”

Dafydd was in-between projects, the last one wrapped, the next one – a new move into drama - tightly planned. A moderately successful film-maker, with a reputation for quirky TV documentaries on arcane connections between the Celtic lands of Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and Galicia, all he intended to do, during this his favourite time of the year, was read in the garden and maybe spend a few days on the coast.

He pulled a chair from under the kitchen table.

“OK. What have we got to go on? This is not a yes, by the way.”

The Alchemy Of Chance

One
Northern France March 1975

Legs astride, long skirt tucked into her knickers, Aurélie Pêguissoux spat on her hands and swung an old Gilpin axe. It struck the waiting log dead centre. As the two halves fell aside, and the blade embedded itself in the supporting roundel, a satisfying clonk echoed across the woods and the quiet wintry meadows of the lower Seine valley.

Minutes later, she emerged from a woodshed with her arms full of splits and walked towards the terrace of a riverside cottage where her parents sat playing Scrabble.

The Alchemy of Chance

This has been a banner day. We have a signed contract from our first author and a manuscript ready to go to the copy editor. The Alchemy of Chance, by Peter S. Brooks, is a wonderful tale, a literary and culinary mystery of the heart, starring a blind map-maker at the centre of a web of synchronicity.

In the Spring of 1977, 28 year-old Aurélie Pêguissoux sets off on the train from Paris to Brittany, with her braille books, tactile Scrabble kit and cello, to rediscover the places and loved-ones of her childhood summers, and come to terms with her recent loss of sight.

Starting out in Brest, she visits her extended family in towns dotted along the North Brittany coast. She terminates her journey in Dinard, unaware that her lifelong fascinations with twins and the stars are about to come to an unlikely climax, tangled up with a group of strangers converging on Newquay, Dinard's twin town.

Dafydd, a Welsh film-maker sent to France by his father to find his brother Sean, who went missing there ten years before, is also in Dinard, his only lead, a trail of cryptic postcards.

Aurélie and Dafydd bump into each other, and set out together on the search for Sean. By cracking the clues on the cards they manage to find his house, but not him. On the way back to Paris something in the stars prompts Aurélie to suggest a change of direction.

The Alchemy of Chance is a Romance - in the literary sense of a quest story - about the beautiful, messy, impossible coincidences that shape our lives and make the results of even our simplest actions and decisions unknowable. We're thrilled to be a part of its journey from Peter's imagination to yours.