Thanks for your kind post. I'm pleased you liked the Shield of Hope - that was a high point for me too!
You mention the agrammatical style of the novel, and I wanted to respond to that. First of all, I should say that I didn't invent the technique of not using punctuation. I learned it from the wonderful "True History of the Kelly Gang" by Peter Carey, and I don't know where he got it from. All I did was to apply the technique to an East London setting, where I think it works well. I was amazed at how effective the trick was in allowing me to step outside my own personality in order to write the character. I don't think most people - including me - use grammatical sentences in their speech, and so the free-flowing nature of sentences without commas and clauses felt authentic. It was certainly fun to write like that.
You ask two direct questions, and here are my answers:
- Do you feel that the government clamped down on British civil liberties after the attacks of July 7th such as they did in Incendiary?
Clearly the extreme martial powers invoked in my novel did not come into play following 7th July 2005, although certainly there are sections of my narrative that have found echoes in reality. My novel predicted a hardening of attitudes towards Muslims (for example when nurse Mina is suspended from duty because of her religion), and I think it is true - and deeply regrettable - that the Muslim community has come under general suspicion since 7/7. To give one concrete example, on 20th September 2006 the British Home Secretary, John Reid, gave a speech to British Muslims in which he instructed Muslim parents to keep a close eye on their children and to act if they suspected their children were being radicalised by extremists. This of course is outrageous behaviour by a serving Home Secretary. At best it is deeply patronising, and at worst it plays to the gallery of fools who imagine that the 7th July bombers are somehow representative of a homogenous British Muslim community.
As to a general clamping down on civil liberties, I haven't detected that. As of now (4th April 2007) our parliament has been quite robust in resisting the excesses of the current Government as it tried, for example, to extend the time during which terrorist suspects could be held without charge. And in terms of freedom of speech, one can still say and write whatever one likes in Britain. When writing provocative material, one is likely to encounter commercial resistance rather than governmental censorship. One claim that is frequently made is that Britain is becoming a "surveillance society" - at the time of writing, for example, there are an estimated 4 million CCTV cameras in Britain - and while this is perhaps true and worrying, I would suggest that the rationale commonly given for the increase in surveillance is as much to do with everyday crime prevention as it is with terrorism.
- Is Petra’s character based on some of the cutthroat people you have met in the newspaper business?
Actually most of the newspaper folk I know are rather nice people. They are mostly quite principled, and if they occasionally show poor judgement it is usually because they have to meet a deadline to submit copy about a subject they honestly don't know that much about. The system forces them to pretend that they know more than they do, but they are not evil people. I don't really know where Petra comes from. Hell, perhaps...