Peter Hitchens on 'The Valley of Unknowing'

The distinguished author and journalist, Peter Hitchens, was once a correspondent in Moscow, and is old enough to have some experience of what life was like in the now-vanished Soviet Bloc (it remains to be seen if Mr Putin will succeed in re-inventing it...) Last Sunday, in his regular blog for the Daily Mail's on-line edition, Peter wrote about The Valley of Unknowing, which is set in the former East Germany. Coincidentally he bought his copy from a small shop near Gloucester Road tube station, close to where I lived for many years before moving to the burbs. I have a feeling I know which shop it was too (most likely The Slightly Foxed Bookshop). Anyway, he has some very nice things to say about the novel, and some thoughtful comments on the place and time that inspired it. You can read the piece here.

Casting call

I'm definitely not one of those writers who think much about how their work might unfold on screen - not unless I'm actually writing a screenplay (in which case, it's pretty much all I think about). Novels and movies both tell stories, and both usually contain dialogue, but that's where the overlap starts to run out. It is not the ultimate accolade of a novel that it be adapted for the screen, let alone that it be adapted successfully. For a novelist the undertaking can be fascinating and lucrative, but its success or failure usually has very little to do with the original material - and therefore very little to do with its creator.

Nonetheless, when the My Book, the Movie came calling, I couldn't resist the temptation to play producer for twenty minutes. The popular blog, which has been running for more than five years, asks novelists to 'dreamcast' the leading roles for a fantasy adaptation of their latest book, in this case The Valley of Unknowing.

As most real producers do, I started with the director, fixing on the rather in-demand Alexander Payne, whose recent credits include Sideways, About Schmidt and The Descendants. Well, I reckon if you are going to fantasize a perfect world, you might as make it as perfect as possible.

Who is my ideal Bruno Krug? The truth is, I don't have one. The character already exists in my head, and I doubt that any perfect embodiment could ever exist outside it. On the other hand, there are some very talented actors out there whom I'd love to see having a go. Actors, especially great actors, always bring something all their own to a character. It's that sense of an extra dimension that makes the exercise thrilling for the original author, provided he has an open mind.

The whole fantastic exercise is here. 

Krushchev's footwear

Uta aged 8 (third row, right) in the uniform of the Thälmann Pioneers. (Click to enlarge)

I've just written a piece for the Vintage Books blog on how I came to write The Valley of Unknowing, and why. Needless to say, if I hadn't met and married a former resident (see above), it never would have happened. The piece begins:

I was a child of the Cold War. To be more precise, I was a child of a nasty cold snap during the Cold War. I was born the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when exploding cigars were a serious hazard, and when feisty Russian leaders waved their shoes at the UN General Assembly to demonstrate the superiority of Soviet cobbling. 

Now read on...

http://www.vintage-books.co.uk/blog/from-the-author/PhilipSington/?revision#.T7TGaTVvEyM.twitter

Two views of The Valley

Hot from the design department at Vintage Books, comes some new concept artwork for The Valley of Unknowing. It makes for quite a contrast from the previous attempt (see below), and I've given it the thumbs up.Something like this will go on the bound proofs, and doubtless there will be more tweaks before the final version appears on the first edition.

I don't think the designers had an easy time with this one. 1980s East Germany was a place of many arresting images, but the fashions were atrocious and the backdrops either soulless or decaying. I like to think The Valley of Unknowing is quite a vibrant story (love, sex, death and plumbing - all play a part), and that's hard to convey in such an apparently gloomy setting. I sent over a disk crammed with 'inspirational' images, but I was never confident they would help. All-in-all, I think this is a good solution: the general feel of the image strikes me as Middle European (or at least European), and there is plenty of blood pumping through the deep red of the title.

As for the shout line, that too is up-for-grabs. In the end, we may not use one, relying instead on a past review or an endorsement. That would be my preference, because it would effectively kill two birds with one stone.

An (almost) exclusive preview...

This is the first cut of the video trailer for The Valley of Unknowing. The cover shown at the end is not the one Harvill Secker are actually planning to use. So we'll put the final artwork in as soon as it's ready. That aside, this is pretty much the finished product, bar the odd bit of enhancing and tweaking on some of the stills.

This video took very little time to make, unlike the last one. I am getting quite adept at splicing music, and this time there was no live footage to shoot.The edit was done on an Apple Mac using iMovie software - which, I have to say, is far from ideal, being a "time-based" system, rather than a "linear" one (like Final Cut or Adobe's Premier). This really makes a difference when you're trying to cut precisely to music. On the other hand iMovie has some very nice bells and whistles, exports with ease, and usually comes free with the computer, as opposed to costing hundreds of pounds. So you can't really complain.

By the way, if you happen to be in Germany, you may have to download this video from the TrailerSpy web site. The download takes slightly longer, but at least there are no annoying pop-up ads to contend with.

http://www.trailerspy.com/trailer/15837/THE-VALLEY-OF-UNKNOWING

PS - I owe a big thank you to Derya, our multi-talented German au pair, who supplied the computer and the skills to work it.

Put out the flags...?

On Friday I finished the first draft of the new book, which is set in the GDR, where my wife grew up. I originally intended to get to this stage at around the end of last October, but unforeseen family commitments put paid to that schedule, along with the fact that the draft itself came out a little longer than I'd thought. Still, three months isn't much slippage, and at no point did the writing dry up, get stuck or go off on any unhelpful tangents. Overall the drafting went better, and with fewer days in the creative wilderness than any book I've done before.

I'm now at the point I like most. I have all the material I need in front of me; now I get to cut, trim and polish it. I did a huge amount of editing in my journalism days, and I still enjoy working on a text, especially if I think I'm improving it. I even get a certain masochistic pleasure in cutting my own material. There's something bracing about slicing off unnecessary fat.

After this I shall have to start showing my work to other people - quite a lot of other people - and hoping they like it. But I won't dwell on that for now. The new draft is complete and I think it has come out pretty much as I'd hoped. I'll let that thought light up the night for now. 

Turning Greene

My plan to start drafting the new book next month is starting to look tenuous. As often happens when I get into the depths of research, I find there is more and more I want to know – more and more I ought to know. As if preparing for a long journey, I want to make sure I have an adequate mental map and all the necessary paperwork before I set out.

My setting is the former GDR. My wife grew up there (she was sixteen when the wall came down) and I myself made several trips behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ during the 1980s, when there still was one. So it’s a world that’s been part of my world, in one way or another, for some time. But that’s not enough. Reality is made up of small details, but so much has changed in East Germany over the past twenty years, it’s quite a business rebuilding it, little piece by little piece.

And then there’s the issue of what it actually felt like to live there. East Germany was a police state like no other in European history. The State Security Service (Stasi) had 97,000 employees, the bulk of which were involved with keeping tabs on East Germany’s 17 million citizens. In addition, it received regular information from a network of informers known as Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter – literally, ‘unofficial collaborators’. These informers numbered some 173,000. In all, one in every sixty-three people worked for or reported regularly to the Stasi. Probably hundreds of thousands more informed on their fellow citizens part-time. Wire-taps, bugging and mail intercepts kept a secret army of bureaucrats busy up and down the country. Citizens who were judged unreliable or disloyal could expect to suffer, although most often the damage was done without explanation or acknowledgement: education curtailed, career paths blocked, travel permits denied. Even the secrecy was secret.

Yet people lived, or tried to live, normal lives: to maintain friendships, to harbour ambitions, to raise children. How easy was that? What kind of psychological adaptations (or contortions) were necessary? Or was it possible – indeed easy – to ignore the nature of the system, or to accept it?

After the Wall came down, the Germany government granted people the right to discover whether the Stasi had kept a file on them, and to see that file. My father-in-law was one of the many who exercised that right. As he’d suspected, he found he had been the subject of a Stasi Operative Personenkontrolle over a number of years. In his file were the names of close colleagues and acquaintances who had regularly informed on him. Fortunately, as the son of an active Liberal party activist, he had been brought up to expect surveillance; and had been careful. Even so, it is highly unlikely that my wife, despite finishing top of her class at school, would have been permitted a university education had not the Wall come down just in time.

Once I was content to know all this only in outline. But now it's too valuable a resource to ignore. All the same, I’m not sure how I feel about turning up in Germany next time with a tape recorder and a note book in my pocket. Graham Greene said: “Every novelist has something in common with a spy: he watches, he overhears, he seeks motives and analyses character, and in his attempt to serve literature he is unscrupulous.”