Afrika Reich: the audio book

Not every novel is recorded as an audio book, so I was thrilled when I learnt the audio rights to Afrika Reich had been sold. A year later that excitement turned to curiosity and trepidation when the finished package arrived. What if I didn’t like the reader? What if his interpretation of the book was at odds with mine? Thirteen CDs and over sixteen hours later any concerns I might have had were assuaged.

Richard Burnip’s reading of The Afrika Reich is brilliant. Thoughtful and textured, it captures a tone that is by turns brutal, wry and moving. His pacing is impeccable. Perhaps most exciting of all are the dramatic array of voices he uses. During my first listen through I keenly anticipated the arrival of each character to hear what new accent he had chosen. If you enjoyed the novel, I recommend you listen to a copy [it’s published by Oakhill and should be available at your library].

In the meantime, here’s brief interview I did with Richard about the recording of the book:

GS: How did you first become involved with the audio version of The Afrika Reich?

RB: Douglas Kean, the producer, brought me in as I’ve read other audio books set in world war two. I’ve also spent time in Germany so was familiar with the language.

GS: How much preparation did you do?

RB: I treated the book the same way I would do a script. I read it from beginning to end before going back over it more thoroughly marking up the characters and any details that helped me understand them. Next I noted anything in the text that puzzled me or I felt needed stressing. Some things that work on the printed page don’t translate when you’re reading aloud – the repetition of ‘Peace for Empire’ is an example, or flashbacks – so you need to nudge them up when you read to make sure the listener is aware of them. I also had to research the pronunciation of the African and Portuguese words.

GS: How long did it take to do the recording?

We recorded it in November 2011. It took four days, recording about four and half hours of finished material each day. I read it straight through, as if it were a live performance, stopping only if I made a mistake or if there was a noisy page turn.

GS: You use an extraordinary array of different voices for the characters; I particularly liked Hochburg and Patrick. How did you go about choosing them?

RB: As part of my preparation I drew up a table of all the characters and scoured the text for clues as to how they might talk, seizing on any description of accents. With your book I was grateful to have so many different voices. The main team alone has a British accent, American, Welsh, Rhodesian and Polish, so it was easy to make each member sound distinctive. I like to be bold with accents. With Patrick the line, ‘his voice was Boston-Irish churned with two decades of French Sahara’ gave me everything I needed. I listened to recordings of Massachusetts accents and that gave me the basis to which I added a rough, gravelly quality to capture the dryness of the desert.

The Hochburg influence: Christopher Lee in Ill met by Moonlight

GS: To my ear Hochburg sounds like a young Christopher Lee, was that intentional?

RB: You heard correctly, though I didn’t want to do a direct impression: he was more of an influence. While I was preparing for the book I saw the film Ill Met by Moonlight [1957]. There’s a scene near the beginning where Christopher Lee plays a German officer and it put his voice in my head. Hochburg is such a weighty character, not a brute or a stereotypical villain, and I felt that matched the powerful intellect of Christopher Lee’s performances. They both take their time to talk, are always so in control.

GS: Did you have a particular listener in mind when you were recording?

RB: My main aim, and I suspect this is true of most actors recording a book, is to serve the writer’s intentions, so you’re recording for the author. Clarity is the most important element. Beyond that, it’s important not to superimpose anything that’s not in the text. The book should tell you everything you need to know.

*

Richard Burnip has appeared with many theatres companies in Britain, Germany and the Middle East. His audio work ranges from computer games and synthetic speech to recordings for historic sites in Old and Middle English.  He has provided voices for characters as diverse as Napoleon and Gustav Mahler, and has narrated many documentaries.  He has recorded more than 80 audio books covering many genres from children’s stories and detective fiction to major political texts.

K is for the ‘K’ in Afrika

My original title for the book was The Afrika Reich with a K. However, when I came to submit it to publishers, and experience teaching me they are a conservative bunch, I decided to change to the anglicised spelling – Africa Reich – for fear of putting them off at the very first page.

I’ve written elsewhere about the travails of finding a publisher for the book. You can read a fuller account here (complete with dodgy photo!), but to summarise: My agent submitted the book on a wave of enthusiasm; he felt sure we would find a publisher quickly. However, no sooner had it been submitted than the rejections started coming in. The general gist was that although editors liked the book, they didn’t think it would have much commercial appeal. The marketing departments scratched their heads at how they would sell it. The fact that Fatherland had sold several million copies failed to persuade them.

In total fifteen publishers rejected Afrika Reich, leaving me waiting on the last two. I could see no reason why their response would be different, so I resigned myself to the fact that the book would not get commissioned.

Then, within forty-eight hours, those final two publishers said yes and the book went to auction! Hodder & Stoughton eventually won and after the contracts had been signed, one of the first things my editor asked was whether we could change the title. I assumed he’d opt for something like SS-Africa, but actually all he wanted was a minor tweak. Would I consider changing the C to a K?

I knew I had found the right publisher.

K is also for Kepplar

Several readers have pointed out that in Chapter 37, when Hochburg’s helicopter takes off, there’s no sign of Kepplar’s pyre or body. They wonder if it’s a mistake. Some people have framed it with a question: is Kepplar actually dead? That’s perceptive, though you’ll have to wait till Book 2 to find out...

D is for DIVERGENCE POINT (part 2)

By coincidence, in the past week two readers* have emailed me questioning whether Britain’s defeat at Dunkirk really is the DIVERGENCE POINT of the book. (As a quick reminder the divergence point in a work of alternative history is the moment where events take a different path to our own version of reality.) Those two emails were actually very astute, and follow on from similar messages I’ve had over the years. So although I planned not to reveal this until a later date (if ever), today I’ve decided to confess all.

Robert Frost would approve...

Dunkirk is not the true divergence point of the book. It is a symptom of an earlier cause. It is the place where geopolitical history changes but the real shift – a minuscule fissure in the past – predates it. If, thus far, I have promoted a slight falsehood it is because I have been playing to an audience; fulfilling the marketing needs of the book (though in my defence all the clues as to what’s really going on are in the text). As regular readers of this blog will know by now, nothing is ever quite what it appears with Afrika Reich!

So what is the true divergence point?

I’m not going to tell you for two reasons: 1) better you work it out yourself 2) rather unfairly, it’s more fully explored in Book 2. However, I believe world events are not decided at the macro level but micro. History is determined not when Caesar crosses the Rubicon – but earlier, in the accretion of childhood experiences that motivate the crossing in the first place.

Whilst you’re puzzling all this out (or heading back to Facebook, which is probably more entertaining anyway) I’ll leave you with a clue:

*One in Iowa, America; one in Venezuela – hello/hola if you’re reading!

F is for FANTASTIC REALISM

I’ve written about intent before. As this A-Z enters its twilight I thought I’d address the subject again. Those who prefer to think of Afrika Reich as a ‘straight’ thriller might want to look away now...

Prior to Afrika Reich, I wrote four unpublished novels on subjects as diverse as Barbary pirates and literary forgery. The one common thread was the mode of writing: FANTASTIC REALISM, something I continued in my tale of Nazi Africa.

So what is fantastic realism? It’s a rather amorphous term and unlike its better known cousin – magic realism – evades definition. Personally, I feel it employs realistic conventions but mixes them with elements of the fantastic, grotesque, comic and horrific. Perhaps it’s easier to explain with an example and so once again I reach for Sergio Leone, a great practitioner of fantastic realism. Here’s an image from his film, Giù la Testa:

It shows Sean, an IRA terrorist, having dinner with Juan, a bandit (off screen), in the Mexican desert. This combination of unexpected characters meeting in a realistic setting is already taking us into the realms of fantastic realism but the clincher is the details. They are sitting down to eat in the wilderness but are dining off porcelain plates with all the finery (the wingback chairs, the decanters of vinegar and oil) of a lord’s banqueting hall. I particularly like the crêpe suzette pan. It is a combination of unlikely elements – though crucially there is nothing supernatural about the scene.

My book begins its fusion of reality with the fantastical on page one with opening epigraphs that combine the real (Hitler’s quote) and the imagined/fantastic (Hochburg’s). Elsewhere we see two arch enemies overlooking a square paved with human skulls discussing Himmler’s constitution. Or Patrick tortured within a cement factory where the main production material is not mineral-based but a trough of human bodies. Sometimes it’s simply in the small details – the SS guards with their pink ladies parasols (a direct reference to Leone). Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? No.

Alternative history has always struck me as something of a fantastic genre – it posits an unknowable reality – so I felt it was an ideal match for fantastic realism. However, due to the success of books like Fatherland, and more recently Dominion, a naturalism seems to be creeping into the genre: the idea that a writer can accurately describe a speculative world that never existed. It certainly seems the mindset some people have tried to read my book in – no wonder they’ve been confused! But that is to miss the point. It’s not my book wasn’t thoroughly researched or employs real, historical details – it’s that I’m not a slave to verisimilitude. Indeed the notion of verisimilitude in alternative history must, by definition, be a contradiction.

What interests me most, what excites me enough to want to spend several years writing a book, is the point where reality and the fantastic meet – and the friction the two generate. That is what Afrika Reich is about: something a little more subversive than reality. 

BOOK 2: Update

Three years ago today, at 9:12am, I sat down with a fresh notebook and started the follow-up to The Afrika Reich. I already had the overarching plot of both Books 2 and 3 but this was the beginning of the detailed work: the official start date.

Publishers like ‘product’, something they can release on a regular basis. My initial contract stipulated I submit the second book in 9 months. That was too fast for me so I asked for it to be extended to 15. My schedule was to be this: 3 months to plan the sequel, 9 to write it, a final 3 to edit. Clearly I have missed this deadline! Even 15 months meant I would have to work more briskly than I’m used to. As readers of this blog will know my preference is to spend 9-12 months preparing a book, then a year to write it. Nevertheless, with an advance to earn out I felt obliged to deliver the book faster than I would have liked. That need for speed ultimately slowed me down.

I never had enough time to plan the book – which meant I started the writing not knowing where I was going. Some writers thrive on this type of spontaneity; I am not one of them. I prefer to have as much as possible pre-planned before I begin. A good analogy would be making a trip from London to Land’s End. My preference would be to work out a detailed route before starting, then having an easy journey. Instead I’ve set out with a notion I needed to travel along the A30, then continue south-west... and not much more. I got lost. Of course, once you’re lost you can get even more lost trying to find your way back to the correct route.

Another difference from the first book is that I did a lot of research up front. This overburdened me with detail. I have a lot of fabulous material but for a while I was bending the narrative to include it, rather than focusing on the plot and using research/details merely to gild the action.

The above is not the only reason for my delay. The last three years have been cruel: punctuated with death and chronic illness. This has not only played havoc with my writing schedule (my literal ability to sit at a desk and concentrate) it has also changed me as a person, made me more aware of the fragility of life. Given the abundance of death in my imagined Nazi Africa, this has impacted on the writing.

The upshot of all this is that I wrote 250 000 words of an initial version of Book 2 before concluding it was a mess. That was my staring-into-the-abyss moment. I recently saw From the Sky Down and there was a line in it that perfectly expresses how I felt at this juncture: ‘You have to reject one expression of yourself first before you get to the next expression. In between you have nothing’.

So I made the decision to put aside what I had written, plan more assiduously and start afresh. Since then things have been easier.

Although the plot of this new version is similar to its earlier incarnation, it has been pieced together differently. Imagine a constellation: the stars are in the same place but the lines linking them have altered drastically. Those expecting a re-hash of the first book may be disappointed. Book 2 is less frenetic than the original, darker, more political and character driven with some truly unexpected scenes... though still with a generous dollop of action and intrigue! I hope it will prove to be the better novel.

I intend to submit the first half to my editor in the coming weeks. Assuming he approves, and I suffer no more calamities, I hope to have the book finished by the end of the year, with a publication date in 2014. 

U is for UHRIG

There were three aspects of the Nazis’ vision for Africa that I wanted to represent – the messianic, technocratic and sadistic – so planned a villain for each. Hochburg is clearly the messianic, Kepplar the technocrat (keen readers will notice how he never raises his hand, merely gives the orders), while UHRIG was the violent thug.

The inspiration for Uhrig’s character came from a line in Orwell’s 1984. I can’t recall the exact quote but it’s something like ‘all that hate is sex gone wrong’. I knew Uhrig was going to be the most vicious character of the book, but I also wanted to know why.

What if he had a proclivity for black women? Given the Nuremberg Laws this would be as impossible as it was illegal, and it was the repression of his desire that had twisted him so much. Some readers have seen Uhrig as little more than a rent-a-villain, which always disappointed me because he is actually one of the most subversive characters: a member of the Einsatzgruppen who is also a miscegenist.

If Uhrig was in the Union army...

I also saw him coming from the Mario Bregga school of thuggery: big and bawdy, vaguely comic. Again, playing with types, I liked the idea of such a brutal character not only being funny but also an object of derision for the reader and other Nazis: both Hochburg and Kepplar make jokes at his expense.

[With the American publication due in a few weeks, there maybe people looking at this who haven’t read the book, so spoiler warning for the next paragraph.]

As I approached the end of the writing I was undecided what do with Uhrig. To satisfy the narrative I knew he had to die at Neliah’s hands but wasn’t sure of the exact circumstances. Then I made the connection between him and monsters – and knowing how in a horror movie the monster always comes back one last time, realised he had to ‘rise’ from the dead, which leads me to...

U is also for Underworld

There are many theories of story. One of the most influential on me is Joseph Campbell’s ‘monomyth’ (before it got hijacked by the Vogler school... but that’s another blog altogether!). Campbell’s writing posits the idea that all stories are actually journeys to the underworld: a task the hero must undertake to discover the elixir of life. You can certainly interpret Afrika Reich this way.

The prologue shows the ordinary, upper world of a farm in Suffolk: a summer’s dawn, orchards. The rest of the book is set in the ‘underworld’ of Africa: hot, dark (often literally), with regular bouts of fire and torture, and it is in this crucible that Burton must learn the true value of home. It’s practically The Wizard of Oz with swastikas!

Q is for QUIMBUNDO

Did you travel to Africa to research the book? This is one of the most common questions I get asked about The Afrika Reich. Although I have lived on the continent (Cairo used to be home) it may surprise you to learn I’ve never been to sub-Saharan Africa.

For the sake of veracity, and in a spirit of reckless adventure Burton would approve of, I did consider travelling to Congo but it soon became apparent this would be extremely foolhardy. With its shifting wars, eastern Congo is one of the most dangerous places on the planet. Kisangani (Stanleystadt in the book) has a force of over 15 000 thousand UN troops to protect it and they rarely venture beyond their compound without armoured support; civilian deaths in the area are rife. When I contacted the Foreign Office about the prospect of going there I was met with an incredulous laugh.

I had a similar problem with Angola. Although its civil war is over and it now has a GDP that is the envy of the West (7.9% last year), outside the capital, Luanda*, it remains a lawless and dangerous place to visit. This is especially true of Lunda Norte – the north-east region where I based Neliah and the Angolan Resistance. Today it is bandit-country, the ground choked with unexploded mines; for some reason you can’t book a trip there on Expedia.

Deep in this region is a real village called QUIMBUNDO, which I made the station Burton arrives at in Chapter 35. Given its latitude with the capital it made a credible spot for the railway to run through. It is the most obscure location I have ever written about. Indeed while working on Afrika Reich, I could only find one photograph of the place:

This lack of on-the-ground research, however, proved less problematic than I initially feared. I acquired a decent collection of contemporary accounts of Congo and Angola as well as drawing on my own peregrinations. I have worked in the Amazon and it was easy to transplant my experiences there – the perma-sweat, clouds of insects, murky forests and broiling concrete cities – to Africa. I must have got something right because, along with the question that began today’s entry, something else people often say to me is: You must know Africa well.

*NB – in case you’re wondering why the spelling is different to the novel Loanda (the colonial name) was changed to Luanda in 1975.

'And so the sky falls...'

For the second time this year I’ve been to the cinema, on this occasion to see the latest James Bond film, Skyfall. Normally I wouldn’t comment on it but so many people have compared Afrika Reich with Bond – comparisons that usually leave me scratching my head – that I thought it deserved a blog.

I’ve never been much of a 007 fan. I used to like the Roger Moore films as a kid but by my teens the allure was fading. This is the first time I’ve been to the cinema to see a Bond film since 1989s Licence to Kill. So what did I think of the new movie?

Beyond the galling amount of product placement, the casting was impeccable, photography sumptuous, editing bombastic but suitably explosive. There was enough intrigue to keep me engaged (though I felt the plot was a bit thin and the whole hard drive strand seemed to be forgotten half way through), along with plenty of action and some extraordinary stunts... even if some of the visual effects – the blowing up of Vauxhall Cross, the komodo dragons – were a bit dodgy. Despite all this, I was left cold. The film didn’t engage me on any emotional level.

The principle reasons for this explain why I don’t recognise the link some readers have made between my book and Bond. Firstly, there’s the glamour: Daniel Craig’s sculpted body and tailored suits, the women who are perfect from their eye lashes to their heels, the cocktails, fast cars and glittering cities. This type of glamour doesn’t do much for me. It’s one of the reasons I like Leone’s films so much: half the time his characters are filthy and dressed in rotting clothes. There’s very little glamour in the world of Afrika Reich: I can’t ever imagine Burton wearing a dinner jacket. Indeed, returning to the previous blog (‘E is for…’), Madeleine was initially a plainer woman and I was asked to make her more attractive.

For me, Bond also lacks a ‘mythic’ quality. There’s no primordial conflict between good and evil. Each film is just another mission and even in the case of Skyfall, where the revenge strand has a parallel with my story, it’s dealt with in a much more grounded way. Guns, gadgets and quips will suffice rather than that irrepressible desire to triumph no matter how battered the soul is. I’m sure plenty of people will disagree with me!

Two final points: 1) One of the carps I get about Afrika Reich is that Burton couldn’t endure all he does. It was therefore with a certain irony that I watched Bond survive a lot worse, starting with his spectacular fall from the bridge in the opening sequence. 

Burton isn't the only one who fights on train tops

2) There’s a line of dialogue I’ve written in Book 2, and long before Bond 23 had a title, that may have to be changed. It comes when Hochburg surveys a cataclysmic scene and responds by saying, ‘And so the sky falls.’ It was meant as a reference to Hans Christian Anderson though I suspect now people will think it is a nod to James Bond. Readers of this blog will know different.

E is for EDITOR

If you’ve trawled the bestseller charts in the past twenty years, chances are you’ve read a book my editor was behind. He’s worked with thriller veterans Len Deighton and Gerald Seymour; launched new writers like Conn Iggulden and Philipa Gregory; and most recently guided David Nicholls to a mega-hit with One Day. I was also delighted to discover he used to be Flashman’s editor! His name is Nick Sayers and as another publisher once told me, ‘he’s the best in the business’.

Nick & I at Clays where TAR was printed

1) Nick wanted the structure of the book tweaked, so that the reader would get to the alternative history sections more quickly. There are two extended passages of them (one explaining Britain’s peace with Nazi Germany, the other about the Casablanca Conference). In my edit these appeared, respectively, in chapters 8 and 12. Ultimately this became 3 and 8. I have to say that although I found my original structure more elegant, I can understand why getting some explanation in early was beneficial.

2) He also suggested that further context be added: details about Nazi Africa. I had already included plenty, but Nick insisted on more, everything from agricultural policies in Kongo to the ethnic mix of the conquerors. This had an implication on the text which I’ll come back to in ‘F is for...’

3) The use of the word ‘nigger’. I realised this was a contentious and sensitive subject so had employed it sparingly despite the virulent racism of the characters; originally it appeared 42 times (in a 120 000 word book) Nick felt this was too much, so I trimmed it to 26. Any more and the Nazis would start sounding a bit too PC, something one could never accuse Hochburg of!

4) Finally, and perhaps this was the point Nick was most adamant about, he wanted Burton to be more morally upstanding. My original vision of him was in the Leone mould. He was utterly amoral, disinterested in what the Nazis were doing, a man who killed for money with little principle. His assassination of Hochburg had nothing to do with right or wrong, simply a desire to avenge. The only chink in this was Madeleine: I liked the juxtaposition of his amorality with love. Patrick was similarly unscrupulous. Nick said he struggled to work out who was good and who bad and that the ‘heroes’ had to be more clearly defined as good guys. I tried to argue my case but was advised it would be commercially risky, so I relented and made Burton the more morally buoyant character who appears in the novel (though hopefully as I’ve shown there remains a certain ambiguity to his character). In retrospect this is the one change I have some regret over. My original plan for the trilogy was to have Burton begin as amoral and gradually change till the final showdown at the end of Book 3. By then, and influenced by his experiences, he would be attached to a more Manichean code.

Once implemented, the above changes amounted to less than 2% of the book. I think they were the right ones for the time (remember I was struggling to get my first publishing deal!) and in retrospect I don’t think they harmed the book, they simply made it different from my original. Whether readers would have reacted differently to that vision is something I’ll never know...

E is also for EL REICH AFRICANO

Once the book had been commissioned in the UK the next question was whether it could be sold abroad. To date four territories have bought the translation rights, not bad given that many big book markets such as Germany, Russia, Poland etc had understandable issues with the Nazi content. I’m reliably informed that one German publisher blanched when they got to the Schädelplatz!

The first to buy it was Spain where the book went to a three-way auction. Whether it was because of this… the superb trailer my Spanish publisher (Ediciones B) made for it… the publicity tour I went on to Madrid and Barcelona… or just because the cover matched my original design, EL REICH AFRICANO has a special place on my bookshelf.

L is for LAYERS

So far I’ve described some of my inspirations for the book and the plotting choices I made. I’ve not said much about the writing process itself. Today’s blog is longer than usual and for the first time I’m going to discuss publicly how I write.

I have a very idiosyncratic and time consuming method. I write my books in LAYERS – which seems like a good excuse for a picture of an Opera Cake! What follows is the general method by which I turn empty pages into a published book, though in the case of Africa Reich there were some specific things I also did.

I started with a detailed, chapter-by-chapter synopsis which took nine months to write and was 15 000 words long. Then I wrote what I called ‘Draft 0’. By no stretch of the imagination was this a literate document, in fact I’m not sure it would make much sense to anyone but me written as it was partly in shorthand, partly in notes, some of it even in code. Essentially it was an orientation plan, making sure I knew where the characters were in each scene and how they interacted with each other. I also got down spontaneous lines of dialogue and things such as setting, climate and any unusual details that occurred to me.

Armed with this, and the synopsis, I then wrote three entirely different ‘interpretations’ of the book, experimenting with alternative, even conflicting, ideas and possibilities. I told you it was a time consuming process! When I say ‘entirely different’ I mean it. I started each version from scratch. For example, here are the opening lines of Chapter 12:

(Draft 1):

‘No blacks allowed.’

A guard had stepped in front of the door, barring Neliah’s path. He was new, like so many whites joining the resistance movement. He had the course accent of the Belunga docks.

(Draft 2):

‘No niggers,’ said the guard looking down at her as she climbed the stairs to the octogono.

Neliah Tavares continued her ascent. She was tall, athletic, with skin the colour of molasses, so much darker than her sister’s.

(Draft 3):

The iniquities of the Versailles have been righted, announced Hitler after negotiating the territory he wanted, our colonies, our honour restored. The rest is Einzelheiten. Details.

(Out of interest, this is how it appeared in the final book):

On the second evening of the Casablanca Conference – as bureaucrats continued to re-draw the map – President Salazar of Portugal requested an audience with the Führer. He was passed off to Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister.

*

For me writing a novel is a process of discovery: as much as I plan I also learn what the book is about by working on it, so writing these different versions allowed plenty of time for reflection and finding unexpected connections. Once I had the three versions I then synthesised the strongest elements of each into the first proper working draft (number four). One point worth noting: this version was only 90 000 words long, i.e. almost 30 000 shorter than the version you will have read.

I have to confess I found the above process painful, sometimes debilitating. I often struggle with the writing side of a book, the getting words down on paper each day: it’s drudgery. My great passion is for editing, indeed I believe it’s the most creative part of the process. Books are made in the editing not writing. This stage began with the fourth draft and involved a layering process (cue another gratuitous photo:)

I swept through the book concentrating on one aspect at a time. First, structure and point of view. Next, and perhaps most importantly, came characterisation; then dialogue, descriptions, sentence structure (you’d be amazed how much you can alter the pace of a passage just by putting the words in a different order), and so on. Each new layer gave the book more depth. The writing matured – in every sense of the word.

One of the specific layers for Afrika Reich was the alternative history: making sure all these passages appeared in a coherent and logical order, and adding additional sentences and paragraphs where necessary. After that, I made sure the writing itself was half decent (no clichés, trying to find unexpected ways to say things, deleting words/turns of phrase I overuse) and finally I did a polish. Six drafts in total, two years of work – and then it was ready to submit to publishers.

Except that wasn’t quite the end of it as you’ll discover in the next blog entry. For once I’ll tell you what it is: ‘E is for Editor’.

L is also for LITERAL

Of all the reactions to Afrika Reich, the one that took me most by surprise was how literally some readers interpreted the book. More than once people have told me, there’s no way Burton could take such physical punishment. Well obviously! Perhaps naively, it never crossed my mind anyone would take the action in a LITERAL sense. Putting aside the issue of suspending one’s disbelief, the battering Burton et al endure is meant as a metaphor: the penalty for not letting the past lie. As the film director John James Todd once wrote: ‘I was looking for an emotional realism, not pedantic verisimilitude’. Hopefully this will make more sense when we get to ‘F is for...’