Saturday, June 21, 2014

Oscar was wrong

As Oscar Wilde once said, “In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.” 

I’ve made several attempts at some sort of long-form fiction over the past 20 or so years, although to be honest they’ve all been pretty much the same story, albeit with different names and locations. To protect the innocent, you understand. And in every version the hero has been the author as the result of a drunken shag between Morrissey and Adrian Mole. Which could say something about the way the cultural canon has shifted since Oscar’s day, or maybe it just means that I’m never going to finish this novel.

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