Shaun Wilson

Shaun Wilson’s debut novel Malc’s Boy – which launched Conduit Books earlier this year – follows Shaun, son of publican Malc, circumventing the expectations of his local community while cultivating his artistic sensibilities. Wilson’s novel tracks Shaun from birth to the completion of his novel, the inner workings and development of which are discussed by father and son throughout. Shaun’s life story is rendered through a series of elliptical chapters across a range of forms and modes. Closer to a collage than a traditional narrative, Malc’s Boy is a singular work, notable for its approach to autofiction and its experimentation, both structural and linguistic.

I talked to Shaun recently about his novel, the tendency to misunderstand autofiction, and Manuel Puig, amongst other things.

Colm Mckenna: The Cumbrian dialect is central to Malc’s Boy. Were you apprehensive about its inclusion limiting the book’s possibilities in an increasingly safe publishing climate?

Shaun Wilson: That was a big consideration while writing the novel; how far do I take this into the phonetics, where do I pull back? The excerpt of the novel I submitted to Granta used quite thick dialect and that was accepted. That was the seal of approval I needed to continue like that throughout the whole book. I asked my publisher, Jude Cook, if I should tone the dialect down to make it more commercially viable and accessible, but he told me not to change any of it, which I was very grateful for. I live in a village about a forty minutes drive from where the book is set, and a lot of the folk here are unfamiliar with the Wigton dialect, and have been struggling to read it. But I wanted to preserve the unique dialect of the town that seems as though it’s dying out. I suppose it’s a question of finding a balance between authenticity, aesthetics and accessibility.

Shaun stops rendering the speech of Thai characters in phonetic dialect towards the end of the novel. The resulting standard English feels stunted and slightly awkward. I wonder if that anticipates an issue with any possible translation; the north of England is singular in terms of the variety of regional dialects. I’m not sure if an equivalent to the Cumbrian dialect and its tonalities exists in another language.

I wanted a sense that the author is growing alongside the book. One of my PhD supervisors, Tony Williams, suggested that using pidgin English for Thai people could be seen as culturally insensitive. I thought I could address that with the switch to standard English later on, to reflect a sense of growth on the authorial level too, as well as with the protagonist Shauns. I wanted a sense that all of the authorial avatars on their respective ontological levels are evolving throughout.

It’s my dream to see the novel translated into French because it was written in the French style of autofiction. I traced autofiction back to Doubrovsky’s original definition, so it’s inherently a French book, but with a Cumbrian setting. It’d be good to keep that dialect in if they could do an equivalent in French, because it’s reflective of the class complications and disruptions of cultural hierarchies that are at the heart of the book. So I think it would benefit from maintaining that range of registers in terms of language and speech. I could easily turn down the phonetics in order to pass it on to a translator, and just leave the rhythms of speech and certain words that signpost the dialect, if that would make translation more achievable.

Malc’s Boy is a meta-fictional novel that explains most of its inner workings. Does that make it hard to talk about the book at all? In a sense, you’ve already addressed a lot of the talking points.

There’s a lot that’s not explained in the book. For the critical component of my PhD I actually wrote a reflective commentary, explaining what’s going on behind the scenes. There are chapters on Booth’s implied author, links between new-narrative and autofiction, Bakhtin’s dialogism and how the planes of discourse in the novel are relativised between the implied author Shauns and the protagonist Shauns. It also addresses my interpretation of metamodernism – which Akker and Vermeulen characterise as a sense of oscillation between modernist and postmodernist modes – which constantly shifts in an attempt to break new ground while satirising various styles and approaches. I’ve also discussed my memory of certain events in the novel, which are always fictionalised to some level; like in the novel itself, Malc and Shaun would discuss them, disagreeing and misremembering certain details to point towards a wider sense of truth, towards any truth that might emerge in the gaps.

Women are largely omitted in the novel, but they wield subtle power. Shaun’s partner, Martine, is responsible for the novel’s penultimate chapter, while Tak, Malc’s ex-wife, offers a different account of a violent episode that forces the reader to reassess the validity of the novel’s firsthand male accounts.

The acknowledgements start with me thanking my partner, who is fictionalised in the character of Martine. It states that the book wouldn’t have been possible with her support, financially and otherwise; it’s supported and developed alongside women on an inherent level. I decided to omit women because I knew my mam wouldn’t want to be represented in the novel. That led to me focusing tightly on Shaun’s relationship with his dad, and thus thematise the lack of female representation in male dominated societies. I considered omitting women entirely beyond their objectification by men, but I realised I needed at least some mention of the mother. Otherwise the reader would be thinking, “Well, does he have a mother? Where is she?” I gave Martine the chance to rebuke Shaun on his attitudes, many of which are positioned to provoke the readers’ engagement. I never emerge as the real-life author throughout the course of the book. There’s always the sense of an implied author, projecting through one or other of the protagonists in a way that either develops the novel’s themes or puts a question in the readers’ mind. I didn’t want to come across like I was asserting my own beliefs, as if I were writing a memoir, offering a straightforward commentary, saying “this is the truth, this is me, this is my voice, this is what I believe.” The avatars of Shaun throughout the novel are often vocalising, or otherwise embodying problematic representations of masculinity, in the aim that the reader will be provoked into dialogue with the questions it raises. By the time the reader gets to the Martine section I intended it to offer some kind of catharsis, or at least deepen and complicate the readers’ dialogue with the material.

Despite the terms being relatively clear, autofiction is frequently misunderstood. There seems to be an expectation that it offers straight, autobiographical material.

There’s a lot of confusion around it. That’s why I went back to Doubrovsky’s vision because that offers something concrete to build on (based on real events, use of author’s real name, literary style, psychoanalytical element). Otherwise it just becomes this nebulous term that people use without specificity, and it becomes almost meaningless. A lot of the time it’s used to refer to an autobiographical novel, or a novel like Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park, where the author inserted an avatar of himself into a horror book. I wanted it to have the sense of the real, to be based on real life, but that doesn’t make it some kind of game where you’ve got to guess what’s true and what’s not. That everything’s true and nothing’s true is the paradox at the heart of the autofictional pact. Rather than approaching the novel on a simplistic level – is this true, is this not true? – it’s more about the reading experience, getting something deeper from the novel than a simple record of my experience. You’re lying as soon as you say you’re telling the truth about the history of your life, because you’re not accounting for the limitations of memory. I wanted to convey that there’s no overall truth, but that the reader might uncover some underlying sense of truth between the novel’s different fictional avatars, and so every reader’s impression of truth will be different.

Despite offering revelatory truths, often unexpectedly, like when Malc casually references a payout he received following abuse by prison guards, Malc’s Boy is more concerned with the nature of truth itself rather than uncovering truth.

The book’s an attempt at communicating my experience of reality, so it won’t always be consistent. My reality has at times been confounding, confusing and inconsistent, and I wanted that to come across in the novel’s structure too. There are truths in there, like the payout you just mentioned. You can Google that and see it’s true, but it’s not the point of autofiction to play a guessing game. I’ve read so-called autofiction books where the author suggests that maybe 50% is true, but you have to guess what that 50% is, and that approach seems a bit simplistic and childish – it feels like they’re missing the point.

The novel’s synopsis belies the manner in which its events actually unfold. There is, of course, a violent act against Shaun’s father that he goes on to avenge, but that makes the novel sound like it’s going to follow a traditional narrative structure, whereas the reality is closer to a collage relating a life story across a range of forms and modes. Do you find that manner of storytelling matches up better to lived experience than more common narrative forms?

I wanted to wrong foot the reader at every turn, to leave the reader feeling as if they didn’t know what they’d encounter next, very much as life goes on and you don’t know what each new day might bring. When the reader turns the page, they’re unsure whether they’ll encounter a scene of shocking brutality, something they’ll fundamentally disagree with, or a description of a scene of beauty, something that makes them happy. I approached the novel as a work of art – that might offer a new lens through which to consider reality. The problem is that a painting or a collage can be digested in a couple of minutes, but a novel asks for, say, ten hours of the readers’ time, and you have to keep them engaged throughout. There’s a sense of having to serve the reader, but just as they might be getting comfortable with the novel’s fragmented forms and it jumping back and forth with little snippets of stories, I started to introduce longer, more traditional narrative structures, like the Thailand scene and the revenge arc. The traditional methods of storytelling have held readers’ attention for hundreds of years, so I wanted to tap into that as well as bring something new into the mix structurally.

Malc’s Boy’s present is virtually exhausted by scenes of Shaun and Malc together on the sofa, while the only fixed social hubs in the novel’s past are the string of pubs Malc owned. The pub as a cultural institution is integral to Malc’s Boy, and seems to be in decline later on.

It was central to me personally, if I’m speaking as myself now. I grew up in pubs, my coming of age happened in that environment. My dad did own a few pubs in the town, so that was central to my development as an adolescent and my entry into adulthood. There used to be about thirteen pubs in Wigton, and it was a big part of the town’s identity, but now there are only three left. All the others are boarded up and closed down, and that probably is reflected in the fact that Shaun and Malc are now just drinking round each other’s homes. The pub scene has largely disappeared, but that’s just what happens in deprived northern areas in a culture of rising inequality. You go down to London and people are still piled out of the pubs and onto the street. It’s still shocking for me to see that disparity between North and South.

You recently shared a list of influences, and Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman was amongst them. How does that novel feed into Malc’s Boy?

I’d already had the idea of a novel composed of memories, sections of prose interspersed with conversations between Shaun and Malc. Katherine Baxter, one of my PhD supervisors, suggested reading Kiss of the Spider Woman, and it was striking to see something structurally similar to what I’d been thinking about. It helped me develop the Shaun and Malc scenes insofar as their conversations allow for new stories to develop within an already scripted scene, a kind of Russian doll effect of stories within stories.

It’s a method of storytelling that allows for the sorts of seamless tangents that would feel unnatural in straight prose.

It definitely gives more possibilities for things like that. It adds a sense of realism too. I wanted the novel to be hyperreal and at the same time overtly fictional, with certain banal details that make you question their inclusion if they’re not real. Dialogue was also a means to incorporate violence matter-of-factly, without any retrospective commentary or value-based judgement, to intensify it in its every day-ness.

You recently disclosed that you were involved in a scuffle after one of your launch events. Can you tell us more about this?

I’m not sure how much I should say here. It wasn’t at the event itself, it was afterwards, at a busy bar around midnight. I’d gone outside on my own for a quiet vape and some lads were giving folk grief. They started picking on a lad stood near me, which was already pissing me off. Then one of them said something abusive to me. Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m normally very patient and easy-going, but after a few drinks I can become a lot less tolerant of arseholes – let’s just say that.

Colm McKenna is a writer from Norfolk, England.