{"id":4921,"date":"2022-09-08T08:00:02","date_gmt":"2022-09-08T07:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writersrebel.com\/?p=4921"},"modified":"2022-09-08T08:47:09","modified_gmt":"2022-09-08T07:47:09","slug":"qa-with-ned-beauman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writersrebel.com\/qa-with-ned-beauman\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A with Ned Beauman<\/span>Liz Jensen<\/span>"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

Ned Beauman\u00a0is a journalist, screenwriter, and the author of five novels. In 2013 he was selected as one of the\u00a0<\/span><\/i>Best of Young British <\/span><\/i>Novelists<\/span><\/i>\u00a0by\u00a0Granta magazine. Here he discusses some of the themes of his new novel, <\/span><\/i>Venomous<\/span> Lumpsucker<\/span>, with Writers Rebel\u2019s Liz Jensen.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Liz Jensen: <\/i>Venomous Lumpsucker<\/i><\/b>\u00a0is a fierce, funny, angry book that posits a terrifyingly plausible future. Wildlife extinction is an industry run on credits paid by corporations that endanger or wipe out threatened ecosystems. But like any industry, it can be gamed and shorted. What led you to write about the more-than-human world, and the humans who are either destroying it or trying to save it?<\/b><\/p>\n

Ned Beauman:<\/strong> One of the criticisms of my previous book <\/span>Madness is Better than Defeat<\/span><\/i> was that it ultimately wasn\u2019t really about anything. Although I don\u2019t wholly agree, I do understand the complaint, and as I was getting ready to write another novel I thought to myself, this time I\u2019ll make absolutely sure that it\u2019s about something. I don\u2019t have strong feelings about that many things, but one thing I do have strong feelings about is the climate crisis. The fact that we all know it\u2019s going to tear our world apart and yet somehow we aren\u2019t really doing that much about it \u2013 what I suppose is now best known in popular culture as the <\/span>Don\u2019t Look Up <\/span><\/i>problem \u2013 is so bizarre and fascinating to me. The first angle on it that I considered was the Volkswagen emissions scandal but then I realised animals would be a lot more fun.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also, I\u2019d noticed that there was a real want of rigour in our discussions about species extinction. Everyone agrees that species extinction is bad \u2013 but why is it bad, and how bad is it? These are deep questions about values \u2013 in other words, philosophical questions \u2013 but I just never see that philosophical debate playing out anywhere except in academic writing. And it shouldn\u2019t be confined to academic writing, because the answers to those questions might have enormous effects on the decisions we make about the future. Apparently over the last 25 years it has cost about $3.5 million to save Lear\u2019s macaw, a large blue parrot found in eastern Brazil, from extinction. Is that a good use of $3.5 million? What is the maximum we should be willing to spend? We cannot even begin to offer answers until we make up our minds about what these things mean to us. When I wrote this novel, it wasn\u2019t because I wanted to argue for one side or the other, but because I wanted to encourage everyone to think about this stuff with a bit more precision.<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LJ: You\u2019ve<\/strong> written a book that is serious but also funny. A lot of humour has its roots in rage. Does yours?<\/b><\/p>\n

NB:<\/strong> Well, I recently wrote an essay about having a dog, and I tried to make that funny as well, and it wasn\u2019t because I feel rage about my Havanese. So no \u2013 rather, I would say my humour has its roots in the fact that a piece of writing that is funny is better than a piece of writing that is not funny, and I actually find it baffling that most other authors are so earnest all the time. All that said, I do find climate breakdown to be fertile ground in the same way that I found the Holocaust to be fertile ground in my first two books, because somebody living through some unthinkable horror and not really paying attention strikes me as a classic comic situation \u2013 it\u2019s like a scene in a film where in the foreground a guy is cleaning a mustard stain off his lapel and in the background a plane is crashing.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LJ: Your central character, Karin Resaint, morphs from being a cool-headed researcher of the Baltic venemous lumpsucker fish to passionate anti-genocide advocate, resorting to radical measures to protect a single species from extinction, and paying a heavy price. She thinks \u00ab\u00a0each of the hundred thousand wealthiest individuals on earth should each be assigned randomly assigned a vulnerable species and then informed that if the same species were ever to go extinct they would be executed by hanging.\u201d Do you see violence as a possible next step for some branches of activism?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

NB: <\/strong>Unfortunately I haven\u2019t got round to reading <\/span>How to Blow up a Pipeline <\/span><\/i>yet and I wish I had because then I would probably be better equipped to answer this question. I suppose actually it can be sliced up into two types of violence and two questions. There\u2019s violence against people and violence against property; and there\u2019s the ethical question of whether violence is fundamentally impermissible, outrageous, a line that must be not be crossed etc., along with the tactical question of whether violence will effectively advance our goals.<\/span><\/p>\n

To offer a not-very-hot take, I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything morally wrong with blowing up a pipeline. But whether it would be tactically astute: that\u2019s an incredibly complicated question that I don\u2019t know the answer to, any more than I would know the answer to a question about union organising or naval strategy or something like that \u2013 plus it would be laughable for me to pontificate as a nervous man who has never so much as broken a window. Still, someone should probably try it at least once and then we can get some better data!<\/span><\/p>\n

As to the question of violence against people\u2026 Do I think the fossil fuel executives and political lobbyists with the most direct personal responsibility for our current hell should be put on trial? Yes. Do I think they should be assassinated or torn apart by a mob? No. Do I think it would have positive consequences if they started waking up every morning with just a tiny niggling fear at the back of their minds that amidst mounting worldwide anger there was at least a remote chance of things getting hairy for them personally, in the same way that the Russian Revolution spooked the upper classes of a lot of other countries into letting their own proletariat have a slightly better deal? I cannot deny that the thought has occurred to me!<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

LJ: Like much of Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s work, the novel distils a huge amount of research about the interconnection of science, technology and societal structures, and as a result it has been described as a \u201csystems novel\u201d. What does that term mean to you, and in\u00a0 what other ways do you see literature meeting \u2013 or failing to meet \u2013 the occasion of our times?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

NB:<\/strong> The financial crisis taught us that sometimes our lives are affected in tangible ways by events so complex and diffuse you simply cannot understand them unless you make quite a lot of effort. I realise some people just don\u2019t have any patience for the boring details, but that mindset is alien to me. I would feel like some kind of medieval peasant: \u2018Why do I need to understand why God made the days longer in the summer than in the winter? Not for the likes of me to grasp the systems that structure my every waking moment!\u2019 By the same token, I would have zero interest in any novel about the financial crisis where the novelist had decided, \u2018It is not the place of literary fiction to mire itself in technical guff \u2013 our subject is the inner mysteries of the human heart, not credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations!\u2019 If that\u2019s your attitude, you are missing half the story! Probably more than half!<\/span><\/p>\n

Obviously I don\u2019t expect everyone to feel the same way. Different people want different things from fiction. A lot of people really do just want to hear about someone\u2019s divorce or whatever. Which is fine \u2013 I just know they\u2019re just not going to like what I write, because I want my novels to reflect how, as the world gets ever more interconnected and chaotic, the forces that control our lives become ever more abstract and intricate and jargon-y and absurd. Yes, that is going to entail a lot of exposition. But the actual twenty-first century also entails a lot of exposition, unless you are determined to remain completely oblivious.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the way, I\u2019m well aware that people were saying the same thing forty years ago, which is funny when you consider how comparatively straightforward previous eras feel next to our current one. As more than one review of <\/span>Venomous Lumpsucker <\/span><\/i>has noted, the systems novel is very out of fashion today, which is a shame not only because I would like my work to be cool but even more so because I would like to read other people\u2019s systems novels.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

CALL TO ACTION:<\/strong><\/p>\n

A donation to the Coalition for Rainforest Nations <\/a><\/span>may be the single most cost-effective way you can help preserve biodiversity and reduce carbon emissions.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Ned Beauman\u00a0is a journalist, screenwriter, and the author of five novels. In 2013 he was selected as one of the\u00a0Best of Young British Novelists\u00a0by\u00a0Granta magazine. Here he discusses some of the themes of his new novel, Venomous Lumpsucker, with Writers Rebel\u2019s Liz Jensen.\u00a0   Liz Jensen: Venomous Lumpsucker\u00a0is a fierce, funny, angry book that […]<\/p>\n

Read More… from Q&A with Ned Beauman<\/span>Liz Jensen<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":4922,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,1],"tags":[241,540,804],"yoast_head":"\nQ&A with Ned Beauman - Writers Rebel<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/writersrebel.com\/qa-with-ned-beauman\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Q&A with Ned Beauman - Writers Rebel\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"  Ned Beauman\u00a0is a journalist, screenwriter, and the author of five novels. In 2013 he was selected as one of the\u00a0Best of Young British Novelists\u00a0by\u00a0Granta magazine. 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