“I’m chuffed you like that angle, since it came later on in the development of the story. Floyd, for me, always was a bit of a cynical last-hero-standing, a kind of Charlton Heston type circa Planet of the Apes or The Omega Man.

“But at some point I began to wonder what I would do or act like if I were cast into the same situation as Floyd. At around the same time, from about 2005, I was heavily back into rediscovering noir cinema from the ’40s, and watching a lot of Akira Kurosawa’s post-WWII domestic dramas like Stray Dog and Drunken Angel. Throwing all these things together as part and parcel of Floyd’s character seemed like a good idea at the time, and I still like the depth and layers it brings. It also added to a sense of “otherness” for Floyd, since half his dialogue and his way of thinking is out-of-whack with everyone else—old fashioned and nostalgic, I guess.”

READ MORE HERE: THE VELVET (thanks to Gordon Highland)

“This particular yarn is one that’s bubbled away since it surfaced in a short story I wrote in the late 1980s. That short story was about six hand-written A4 pages in length, and was basically the dream-sequence from the existing novel; in that original tale, however, it was anything but dream-like.

“I can’t remember the title of the short story (possibly ‘Il Desinenza’, which roughly translates as The Termination in Italian) though the current protagonist Floyd was still Floyd then; the weather was just as bad, he still fended off rain with a newspaper, and the joint influences of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out, and my ‘60s/’70s comic book heritage hung pretty obviously onto my coattails.

“Back then, as the story wraps itself up, it’s a Controller—a Seeker’s nemesis already—who does the dirty work and affects termination. “Next time, shoot straight,” I recall penning as Floyd’s cynical quip while he cleans up the mess.

“Somewhere en route along the past twenty-odd years it’s become Floyd whose aim and life is amiss, and we added about 200 pages into the mix.

“I say ‘we’ because my erstwhile collaborator over the past three years of the novel’s gestation has been my editor Kristopher Young – the author of Click – who’s invested so much of his own ideas that the story has definitely shaped up as collusion.

“But I’m getting ahead of myself, which I have a propensity to do; you may also have discovered that I tend to waffle a lot and use semicolons unwisely.

“After the short story was written I shelved it for several years. The ideas continued fermenting somewhere in my coin-locker brain, until 1992 when I resurrected the romp while I was living in Richmond, in Melbourne (Australia), and extended it to a 162-page manuscript. I still have that version in a drawer next to my desk here in Tokyo—it’s all dog-eared and there’re different typefaces within the same tome as I started out on my mum’s electric typewriter, which of course ran out of ink, then graduated to my partner’s dad’s boxy, black-and-white screened Apple Macintosh with a dot matrix printer.

“I remember scratching my head at the time, trying to nut out a half-decent title, and came up with We Are Not Afraid, We Serve. It always was a half-hearted moniker that lacked pizzazz. I was 27 at the time and I do cringe now when I look back at much of this.”

READ MORE OF THIS EXTENSIVE INTERVIEW HERE:
THE NEXT BEST BOOK CLUB INTERVIEW

“The dystopian Melbourne of TSMG, pitched at some distance into the future, has the unique distinction of being the only city left in the world. Unfortunately, things are not going terribly well in terms of civil liberties, the political climate or the environment. In fact, things are comprehensively fucked up on all fronts, and the portrait painted is of an overcrowded, polluted metropolis groaning under the control of a government vested in corporate interests and busy herding non-conformists and misfits into extramural death camps styled as ‘hospitals’…

“Oh, and on a final note, you will thoroughly enjoy the company of the protagonist, Floyd Maquina – he is ruggedly handsome and generally ruined; witty, self destructive and self-effacing with his air of gracious defeat. He has a weary charm that is impossible to resist. If only he were real…”

READ MORE HERE:
http://theflawedmind.com/2011/10/19/tobacco-stained-mountain-goat-a-bleak-but-entertaining-melbourne/

So I’m now back in Tokyo, after a two week sojourn in Melbourne – the more prominent Melbourne in Australia rather than its silly namesake in Florida, which is 32 years younger. I get parochial about this because the Melbourne in Australia is my hometown, and also the setting for my novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat – where, on 10 August, we finally did the book launch thing.

An expatriate Melburnian, Andrez Bergen’s passion for writing has led to his debut novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat. Radhika Chopra spoke with him before his much-anticipated return to Melbourne.

Perhaps the book industry isn’t doing so well, but that hasn’t stopped Andrez Bergen from writing.

The Australian-born expat recently added the title of novelist to his extensive list of achievements. And in true Aussie fashion he says that to be a writer ‘you have to love the written word and the way it interacts with its little mates on the page.’

Living in Tokyo, Japan for the last ten years, this self-described ‘idiosyncratic’ released the book Tobacco Stained Mountain Goat in April, and has achieved what some others may only ever dream.

READ MORE OF THIS EXTENSIVE INTERVIEW HERE:
UPSTART INTERVIEW