Q&A with Shaun Wilson - Author of Malc's Boy

1. Could you introduce our readers to your debut novel, Malc’s Boy?

Malc’s Boy is an experimental novel in the vein of French autofiction with a Cumbrian setting. More specifically, it is a collagist, polyphonic study of violence through the lens of a father son relationship, written in line with Doubrovsky’s original definition of autofiction: it would be based on the author’s life, it would have a literary style, and the protagonist would share a name with the author.

2. Malc’s Boy is set in Wigton, where you grew up. What inspired the novel, and how did autofiction allow you to explore and shape those experiences?

It was inspired by my own life events and my home town, literary theory and the experimental approaches of writers such as Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Dave Eggers and Sheila Heti. I didn’t want to write a non-fiction memoir about toxic masculinity saying ‘Look, I’m ashamed of where I came from, it was awful, but this is where I am now’, and claiming to tell the ‘truth’ of my redemption to the reader. I wanted it to be more abstract, so that the reader might arrive at their own sense of truth. So the natural choice was autofiction, which I view as painting one’s life, unlike memoir, which would be more like taking a photograph.

Gail Scott’s phrase ‘language art’ really inspired my approach. I wanted to interrogate the nature of truth and the limitation of memory through juxtaposing ‘true’ apparently recorded scenes with scenes that could be fictionalised to serve the themes and introduce elements of plot alongside the fragmented aesthetic.

It was inspired by drugs and shifting states of mind — autofiction allowed me to create many different Shauns, as narrators and protagonists, which would evolve and shift as they grew and processed substances and alcohol. Then I read The Rhetoric of Fiction and Booth’s concept of the implied author inspired me to add another layer of Shauns, that of the implied authors, who would also shift and evolve as they were writing the various parts of the book.

The goal became not to fragment the self, but to atomise it, so that its true essence might be inferred by the reader from the mist, and the finer the mist, the more the reader might fine-tune their impression. This would be done through projecting the voices of implied authors through a range of protagonists, all avatars of Shaun, their planes of discourse refracted through one another in a way that suggests endless variation.

Low’s album Double Negative was also an influence, the way the sounds were degraded until breaking point. I liked the idea of testing the limits of language through purposefully degrading it, and using this to add texture to the collage, colouring it with levels of clarity and register, that could be attributed to the various authorial avatars and their voices and writerly capabilities.

3. Malc is described as brutal but central to Shaun’s struggle. Could you tell us more about their relationship and how it drives the themes of the book?

I wanted to invert the structural expectations of the bildungsroman, in that instead of having a protagonist heading on a journey of self improvement, the journey becomes one of corruption and degradation.

In order to move out of his father’s shadow and realise his own identity, Shaun ironically becomes like his father. In many ways he doesn’t want to, but circumstances force him to act out of a sense of duty and loyalty, or at least that’s how he sees it — he feels he has no choice, though the reader may think otherwise. The difference between the characters maintains the central conflict — Shaun is academic and sensitive, whereas Malc is illiterate and primal. This conflict brings tension, humour, and the dynamic naturally lends itself to exploring the central theme of class and its relation to power. Shaun’s power lies in his education and use of language, as he drifts between coarse dialect and a range of literary registers, whereas Malc lacks cultural capital, and obtains power instead from making money and using violence.

4. Your path to publication differed from the traditional agent-to-publisher route. Could you tell us more about that journey? (Your PhD for example)

Yes, I was very fortunate to get four years’ worth of PhD funding from the Northern Bridge Consortium which enabled me to write the book full time.

I did have an agent for my previous book, which didn’t sell. We kept getting positive rejections that were generally variations on ‘It’s good, but I didn’t quite fall in love with it enough to take it on’. Malc’s Boy was in many ways a reaction to that, in that I thought I’d attempt to write something that they definitely wouldn’t fall in love with, but that would be so original and ambitious that it wouldn’t matter if they personally liked it or not. But this time I couldn’t even get an agent — for whatever reason agents didn’t think they could sell it to a mainstream publisher, so in that way it was always destined to be published by an independent. This time people were saying things like ‘This deserves to be published, but you should try someone else.’

It was pure coincidence that Conduit Books emerged just at the time I was starting to look at independent publishers. They seemed to be seeking something exactly like Malc’s Boy — their description of what they were looking for sounded like they were describing the book: formally ambitious, stories of fathers and sons, and with a regional flavour. So I submitted and it was picked first out of 1500 entries. Just like that.

5. What is the one thing you hope readers take away from Malc’s Boy?

I want the reader to bring the book to life. I believe that only through reading will the book be brought into existence — as an object it merely holds its potential. In this sense each reader will complete the book differently, and I’d like each reader to take something different from it — to experience a new reflection of their own sense of reality, I suppose. But if I’m being totally honest, if I had to choose one thing for them to take away, it would be the urge to tell all of their friends to buy a copy.

6. Why do you think it’s important now, more than ever, to publish books about toxic masculinity, violence and the legacy that it leaves behind?

I didn’t set out to write a novel of this particular time — I tried to make it as timeless as possible. I didn’t want to project the prevalent attitudes and trends of this particular time, or the book would quickly become dated as the tides of mass culture changed. The role of art, I feel, is to provoke people into seeing things anew, at least in some small way, outside of such normalities. The book is inspired by events of my life, so in terms of content it would hypothetically be the same if it had been written fifty years ago or in fifty years’ time.

Saying that, there is much talk of crises relating to masculinity at the present time, such as the crisis of declining male readership. The fact that my book was written now, at the time of these crises, is a happy accident. I would love to think that Malc’s Boy could play some small part in getting more males reading again, or encouraging healthy debate around masculinity.

7. Are you working on anything new at the moment? If so, can you share a small teaser with us?

Yes, I have an idea that I’m working on, for a novel inspired by my childhood, in particular my experience of school life, which included a brief and profoundly unhappy spell at the posh boarding school of St Bees — the school where Rowan Atkinson went. It’s just at the first draft stage at present, so I probably shouldn’t share any of the content as there’s a good chance it won’t be in the final book.

Thanks very much for featuring Malc’s Boy in the Debut Digest!