Title:
Lone Britannia
Word count:
110,700
Written:
October 2005 to April 2006
Story
Here’s the basis of Lone
Britannia as summed up in a letter I wrote to an agent back when I was
submitting it...
The novel
is basically a piece of speculative fiction-cum-dystopian future, the central
idea of which is that sometime in the very near future, Britain wakes up one
morning to find that it is completely alone in the world. No other islands or
landmasses, no Ireland or other parts of the British Isles, just the one main
island of Britain sitting alone in a globe of empty ocean, all other life and
land completely vanished. I know that this sounds like a bit of a
science-fiction idea, but the important thing is not why or how this happened –
this is never explored in the book, above the speculations of those left behind
in Britain as to what may possibly have caused it. It’s a way of isolating the
country and finding out what might happen to it after that.
Lone
Britannia does a similar thing to HG Wells in The War of the Worlds – uses an
extraordinary event to turn life in Britain completely upside-down and examine
what might happen to us as a country and a culture if everything that we knew
was taken away and the country had an entirely new reality to cope with. It is,
if you like, a sort of ‘Britain in a test tube’ story, the nation taken out of
its place in the world and left to be self-contained and self-supporting –
would it sink or swim? In my more pretentious moments I like to think of it as
a kind of Lord of the Flies writ large, where instead of a planeload of boys
trapped on a desert island, you expand it to sixty million people trapped on a
slightly larger lump of rock, but still with the same sense of desperation and
struggle for survival.
Opening:
The dying
embers of the November afternoon sun shone low through the tall bedroom window,
a rectangle of deep orange light falling across the bed through the side of the
glass not covered by the half-closed curtains. He watched her long, shapely
legs shift slightly as she moved, the glow of the light playing on the skin
where it fell across them, the top of the rectangle stopping just before it
reached his own legs. They both lay there, naked, comfortable and happy on top
of the blue bed sheets, the warmth of the central heating making it easy to do
so even with the cold weather outside. The curtain covering the other half of
the window was light red and not thick enough to prevent all light coming
through, so it had the effect of creating a red filter, suffusing the room with
a warmth and cosiness that matched that provided by the radiator.
He could
have happily stayed there forever. He enjoyed the feeling of having Imogen
there beside him, dozing happily, her head on his shoulder, long dark hair
pressing softly against the skin of his neck and face. The feel of his arm
around her shoulders, of the two of them snuggled up together, simply enjoying
the feeling of being in one another’s presence and the pleasure of existing on
a day such as this.
It was
she who stirred first, stretching like a cat and then smiling up at him,
planting a soft kiss on his cheek as she rose from the bed and walked casually
over to the window, looking out into the road. He smiled at her, shaking his
head as he did so.
“You’ll
give somebody as coronary standing at the window like that.”
Background:
I first had the idea for Lone Britannia back in 2004, and wrote some bits of it – including what
was probably a better opening section than the one above, featuring a ship
ploughing through the Channel at night and not finding France where it was
supposed to be, only an endless expanse of water.
For whatever reason, I don’t recall exactly why, I never
got on with a proper draft of it then, but the following year – after I had
finished writing 1963, and was
submitting it to agents – I decided to have at go at my “Britain alone” idea.
I thought, and still think, it’s a decent idea for a
story. Britain wakes up one morning to find it’s the only landmass left in a
globe of water. A couple of the people I showed it to or explained the
storyline to had problems with this, wanting to know the hows and whys of this
coming about, but I never felt that was important – I hate to use the phrase “magical
realism”, but I suppose it does verge on being in that realm of literature.
I referenced The
War of the Worlds in the above summary of the story for agents. It’s long
been one of my all-time favourite novels, and I would love to write something a
tenth as good. I love that feel of... this sounds like a criticism, it’s not
mean to be – almost a “cosy apocalypse”. Perhaps “claustrophobic apocalypse”
would be better.
Lone Britannia
is a lot longer than The War of the
Worlds, and lacks any of Wells’s sense of focus. I think the beginning and
some of the middle is all right, but the final third of the novel just falls
apart really.
Looking back:
I wasn’t terribly happy with life while I was writing Lone Britannia. I’d finished university,
and stayed in Norwich for want of anything else to do with life. In November
2005 I started a very boring job with Norfolk County Council, for whom I would
work for the following two-and-a-bit years, and hadn’t yet started volunteering
at the BBC, so I felt quite bleak about my future and what my life had in
store. It was very much “Is this it? Refilling photocopiers on the sixth floor
at County Hall forever more...?”
Fortunately it wasn’t, but I think some of that sense of
bleakness infuses Lone Britannia. It
also suffers from the same problem as all of my novels up to about 2009 – a lack
of patience, and a lack of appreciation of the wonders that can be worked in
redrafting and rewriting. I tended to always finish first drafts and decide
that was the best I could do, rather than go back and carefully try and
proof-read and improve things.
The final third also suffers from a messy train crash of
different ideas – including the beginnings of a still-unwritten novel I intend
to sit down and do properly one day called Son
of Albion, about a post-apocalyptic King of the United Kingdom. Who knows if
that will end up being any good? If it is, perhaps something decent may have
come out of Lone Britannia.
Submissions:
I don’t recall how many agents or publishers I tried Lone Britannia on. I definitely
submitted it to Laura Morris, the agent who had engaged me in correspondence
about 1963, although she turned it
down. I am sure I must have submitted it to others, but my diaries of the time
are curiously silent on the matter, and I can’t find any submission letters at
all in my old document back-ups, although the synopsis and sample chapters are
there.
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