Dry Bones
Introduction
Dry Bones is also indebted to the practise and playfulness of the OuLiPo (see previous BOOKS). However, it involves a more selective use of constraints, which this time play an explicit role in the development of the novel’s story.
Whereas THE CARTOONIST is largely concerned with notions of place, in Dry Bones I wanted to look more closely at character. Personally, I’m not much of a rounded character. I change and act up (or down) depending on all sorts of things. I’m also easily riled by reviews of novels praising the construction of consistent character above all else.
In Dry Bones, James Mason is systematically inconsistent. A deacon in the Church of England (imagine that!), he’s sent to Geneva to help with the closure of the city’s Anglican church. While trying to off-load Thomas a Becket’s toe-bone, the church’s only treasure, he discovers that relics have a life of their own. As professed in the Middle Ages, they impose the characteristics of their original owner on whoever approaches too closely.
In the spirit of self-improvement, James Mason can’t help but notice that Switzerland’s cemeteries contain the world’s most impressive collection of dead famous people.
In contact with a selection of the celebrity dead unearthed from Swiss cemeteries, from Charlie Chaplin through James Joyce to John Calvin, James Mason is soon forced to decide what kind of person he really is. And how best, in the modern world, to live.
Reviews
A device with huge comic potential, and one that Richard Beard exploits with ferocious intelligence and considerable wit . . . a rollercoaster philosophical journey of Stoppard-like brilliance.’
Glasgow Herald
‘Beard is a hugely playful novelist who thrives when making things most difficult for himself. Dry Bones is scabrous and profane, but also very human in a good way, and probably a little bit profound too.’
Independent on Sunday
The playful, witty English novel is not dead: Richard Beard’s story of a young vicar who digs for the bones of famous people in the graveyards of Geneva is lively, imaginative and entertaining.
Beard covers a lot of ground in his novel: the blandness of today’s Church; the lives of Thomas à Becket, Richard Burton, Charlie Chaplin and Elizabeth Taylor’s dogs; and the gullibility – or otherwise – of people who believe in the power of relics to intercede in their lives. Farce is never far from the surface of the writing, but farce is often employed as a cover for essential truths, and Beard knows it.
Booktrust
Switzerland’s cemeteries are bursting with celebrity bones – Jung’s knee, Chaplin’s shoulder and Calvin’s hip. Richard Burton’s leg is worth almost as much as Thomas à Becket’s toe. What is most refreshing about this crisp farce is its suave lakeside setting and cast of ingratiating Euro-clerics.
The Independent
Some gimmickry of form or plot is a great alleviator too – as in Richard Beard’s Dry Bones, about the hunt for profitable relics in present-day Genevan churches and graveyards (Thomas-à-Becket’s toe, Calvin’s bones, Richard Burton’s skull, and such) – a compellingly zany engagement in a sort of secular resurrectionism in the face of profound religious decline.
Valentine Cunningham, British Council Literature Matters magazine
Muddied Oafs
Introduction
While writing my novels, I was also playing rugby.
I started off in Scotland, and then joined the nearest club wherever I ended up living. This means that I’ve played in Paris and in Geneva, in Tokyo and also at several clubs in England, most recently with the legends of Midsomer Norton in central Somerset.
This book is basically my gesture of gratitude and enduring love to the sport of rugby union, the greatest outdoor team game on earth.
Reviews
The book rugby has been waiting for … a likeable, literate and landmark tour-de-force.
Frank Keating
‘Richard Beard’s journey to the heart of rugby captures the soul of the game. Hugely enjoyable.’
John Inverdale
‘A rich and pointed and yet loving trawl through the heroic undercard of rugby.’
Stephen Jones
‘An elegiac, fascinating and insightful book.’
Guardian
‘Nobody who enjoys both rugby and reading can fail to like this book.’
Scotland on Sunday
‘One of the year’s funniest books.’
The Independent
‘His is an enviable journey of camaraderie and sporting dreams that will resonate with all team players.’
The Economist
‘Muddied Oafs, The Last Days of Rugger, will evoke a surging response from anyone over the age of 25 . . . this is rugger in the blood, that blind love that sometimes knows no reason save that it is there and there is nothing to do about it.’
The Times
The Cartoonist
Introduction
A common objection to OuLiPian methods of construction (see X 20 and DAMASCUS), is that the constraints used to generate text are essentially arbitrary, and therefore somehow irrelevant.
Searching for an elegant means to challenge this rather dim assumption, I became interested in social constraints which determine the nature of the world in which we live. In particular, for the purposes of The Cartoonist, the way that freedom of expression is increasingly constrained by copyright and libel law.
I decided to set the story of a novel in EuroDisney©™. Daniel Travers, a young, right-minded Englander, sets out to visit the park with his firebrand social activist of a teen-age cousin, Daphne. Daphne is full of inventive ideas for sabotage.
The first version of the novel, the original story which I wanted to tell, I set entirely in the real, true-to-life theme-park, the Disneyland Paris which at that time 70 million Europeans had already visited.
For publication, I then re-wrote the novel, adhering strictly to copyright and libel laws, genuine constraints. I discovered it’s not legally possible, in the sense of freedom of expression, to set a novel (a made-up and perhaps fanciful story) in EuroDisney, even though that gated space outside Paris with its outsized characters is a location very much relevant to the way we live now.
There are therefore two versions of The Cartoonist. There’s the original, unpublishable version. And then there’s the second, published novel, as generated by the legal limitations I was constrained to observe.
This begs the question, I think, of which of the two novels is the more legitimate.
Reviews
‘The Cartoonist is a rare and wonderful thing: a storming good read, more subtle than Fight Club and packing a far harder punch.’
Big Issue
‘There’s something timeless and touching about Daniel’s longing for a real experience in a fake world.’
Guardian
‘The Cartoonist is a wonderful book – hilariously upsetting from beginning to end.’
Harry Mathews
‘Beard should be applauded for so thoroughly biting the Disney hand; at his best he is very vicious.’
List
‘The Cartoonist hones in on the dark, corporate side of Disney’s magical kingdom … high-quality, light-handed satire.’
Later
 
 
Introduction
Damascus, like X 20, is a constraint-based novel. True to OuLiPian optimism, the constraint generates the text.
In Damascus, every noun in the novel (with twelve exceptions) must come from the Times newspaper (London) of 1 November 1993. There are many excellent reasons for this.
It makes the book, by definition, a novel of its times. In Damascus there can be no noun, or basic linguistic building-block, which was not current and authentic to the day and time the novel describes.
True to experience, Hazel Burns and Spencer Kelly have to take life as they find it, meaning in this case the restricted possibilities offered by the nouns in one specific newspaper. All they can then do (all any of us can do) is construct a life by re-arranging the arbitrary ingredients we encounter.
The events that background their lives, at every age, are always taken from the one source newspaper. This also allows an exploration of how memories can be affected by the day on which we remember them. I also like this constraint because it seems democratic, and somehow universal. Anyone can take the same idea, even the same newspaper, but come up with a completely different story.
As for the exact date, 1 November 1993, this was the day on which the Maastricht treaty on European Union came into effect. From this date, all Britons officially became citizens of Europe.
The events described in the newspaper of 1 November are actually what happened the day before. I therefore had the idea that a book sourced entirely from these events could somehow qualify as the last British novel.
Finally, it’s worth saying that true to Perec’s vision of the OuLiPo, the originating constraints should, as far as possible, remain concealed. The novel should therefore read in an entirely conventional way.
Reviews
‘Damascus is utterly, optimistically charming.’
Los Angeles Times
‘A deft and charming novel … we credit Beard’s characters with their wisdom, and feel at the novel’s end that some strange mystery has been enacted for us.’
New York Times Book Review
‘A life-affirming, hope-giving profundity.’
Glasgow Herald
‘A book with a real difference, which dramatically poses, and answers, the question ‘How much can a life change in an instant?’
Irish Times
‘Damascus is an extraordinary and wonderful novel from one of the most exciting new writers in Britain.’
Spike
‘Mr Beard’s wackiness has a shrewd precision that makes it infectious’
New York Times
‘Magical realism meets the Maastricht Treaty: an unlikely scenario, but with ease and ingenuity this young British novelist builds from it a charming fiction.’
Boston Globe
X20
 
Introduction
I used to love cigarettes. Really love them. Lived for them. It wasn’t so much the tar and the nicotine; it was the addiction which was killing me.
Desire, risk, repression, denial. A story about a man giving up smoking offered access to all this and more. Influenced by the ideas of the OuLiPo, I wanted the novel to share the same patterns as the inside of a smoker’s mind. Even stranger, the mind of a smoker in the process of kicking the habit.
To achieve this, I devised an OuLiPian system of structural constraints which determine both the mood and the plot of the story.
The novel follows the first 20 days of Gregory Simpson’s attempt to give up cigarettes after smoking 20- a- day for ten years. Every time he craves a cigarette, he occupies his hands by writing something down instead. The first chapter, the first day, has twenty separate sections of writing.
As Gregory’s cravings decrease, so do the number of times he needs to write something down. On the second day, the second chapter, he only thinks of smoking nineteen times, and writes nineteen sections. On the third day, eighteen, and so on. By the twentieth day, the final chapter of the novel, Gregory only craves a cigarette once in the day, and has only one final section to write to complete his story of (not) smoking.
Because he only writes when he wants a cigarette, everything Gregory writes down has something to do with smoking. The novel therefore recounts the story of his smoking life, and cigarettes turn out to have featured centrally at every significant moment.
Throughout the book there’s also a number plot, designed around the fetish number 20.
The various structural constraints generate the text and form the novel, just as the constraint of nicotine addiction determines the life of a smoker (those snatched moments outside the office, the dilemma of time spent with children).
Oh, I should probably also mention that the story which emerges is full of love, intrigue, and excitement.
Reviews
‘A great idea, and almost flawlessly executed … beautifully achieved. One thinks, fancifully, of the construction of a cigarette itself, a unity composed of thousands of different strands.’
Guardian
‘Loaded with encyclopaedic detail on the history and iconography of smoking, this comic novel nevertheless aims at deep seriousness, and Beard’s writing can be breathtaking.’
Daily Telegraph
‘A play of wit and pain, a novel of ideas as a succession of comic and touching skits … contemplates the nature of human frontiers and the boundaries between ego and intimacy.’
Los Angeles Times
‘Delightful and strange, on one level a sardonic detective piece, on other levels an inquiry into the addictions and obsessions of love and life.’
Australia Bulletin
‘Unusually intelligent, funny and readable’
Sunday Times
‘Wonderful … an intelligent look at a prevalent dilemma and an engrossing story of the classic search for truth and meaning.’
San Diego Tribune
|
About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and Director of The National Academy of Writing in London. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed above. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below. I'll get back to you.
|
