The Well Deceived blog tour is visiting today, and I have the pleasure of sharing with you a guest post written by the author Isaac Kuhnberg.
My author inspirations
Children’s Books
I can still remember the thrill of the moment in E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It when the Psammead – a magical creature, part monkey and part snail – emerges from the dirty sandpit and starts to talk. For me E Nesbit was a kind of substitute mother, funny, infinitely understanding, and full of practical wisdom. Magic in children’s books is too often used as a cheat, an easy way of getting out of scrapes. Nesbit’s brand of magic is one you can believe in: the sort that gets you into trouble, rather than out of it. Precisely when her child heroes most need its services, it turns out to be unavailable, forcing them to fall back on such worldly resources as courage, kindness and luck.
My love of children’s fiction did not end with childhood. When my children were small I read to them every night: classics like E. Nesbit and Beatrix Potter and C.S. Lewis and The Hobbit, together with authors I was discovering for the first time like Dr Seuss and Roald Dahl. I also read them Enid Blyton’s Adventure series, which had been my favourite reading before I discovered E Nesbit. The poor reputation of Blyton’s books among teachers doesn’t detract from their immense readability. Watching my children’s reactions to these and others of the books I read them was a profoundly useful lesson in what works, not just in children’s fiction but in writing in general.
Science Fiction
My childhood love of magic steered me as a teenager to the related pleasures of science fiction. The first novel I read in this genre was John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. David Strorm, the narrator of this greatly under-appreciated book, is a telepath, who tells of a childhood in a post-apocalyptic world where mutants are considered blasphemies and either sterilized or sent into exile. The theme and narrative strategy have clear parallels to those of The Well Deceived. David Strorm, I have just realised, is a character who exists somewhere in the background of my own protagonists, and once I started writing novels myself I invariably began them in the first person. This approach rarely fails to grip me – it is, for example, the one used in Kaiso Ishiguro’s heart-breaking dystopian novel Never Let Me Go, another major influence on The Well Deceived.
At some point my father – another science-fiction fan – introduced me to Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World, two opposing but equally seminal visions of the future. Before long I was totally hooked, and because I could never find enough science-fiction in the local public library, my father took me several times to a second-hand bookshop in Portsmouth which specialized in the genre. The shop was presided over by a tall bald silent figure, rather similar in appearance and manner to my father. One day to our enormous disappointment we found it closed. We asked after the bookseller in the shop next door, and a woman told us, with a twirly gesture of the fingers, that he had been ‘taken away.’ The association of science fiction and madness persists to this day.
Puzzles
Many of the books that most appeal to me are in one way or another puzzles: three-dimensional constructs created from different viewpoints, where the reader has to distinguish truth from lies, and reality from illusion. Most readers come across these in the form of the detective story, or spy fictions like the novels of John le Carré, but the best puzzles, like Vladimir Nabokov’s marvelous Pale Fire, have a tragic emotional truth at their heart.
Classics
Favourite authors among the literary classics include Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, E.M. Forster Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen, but these have had very little direct influence on the things I write. What I particularly enjoy is reading accounts of past societies by novelists who lived during the period they write about, and noting their relevance to the social issues that interest me. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James is a particular favourite. There are other books which mainly interest me from a technical point of view, like J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which has taught me a great deal about the possibilities of first person narrative.
Stephen King
I also enjoy a lot of popular fiction: thrillers, crime fiction, horror. Such books are popular for a reason: as well as being immensely readable, they have a direct line to the collective unconscious of contemporary society. The novels and short stories of Stephen King were once regarded as rubbish, but lately critics have woken up to their qualities. In terms of
quality they are incredibly patchy, and the writing is often lurid and lazy, but the best of them – Christine, The Shining, 11/22/63, and the great bulk of the short stories – have a visceral impact that stays with you long after you have laid the book to rest. King is a news buff, which ensures that the ideas he explores are always current; he is also a master at projecting himself into the dark heart of any given situation. After a particularly horrible train crash, I read in a news report that the scene of the accident was punctuated by the unanswered ringing of the victims’ mobiles. My youngest son (also a King fan) pointed out that this was a detail only Stephen King could have dreamed up.
Thank you to author Isaac Kuhnberg for sharing his inspirations with us, and to Faye Rogers for including me in the blog tour for this thought-provoking mystery!
The blog tour will be returning on Monday, when I will share my review of The Well Deceived with you.
Information about the Book
Title: The Well Deceived
Author: Isaac Kuhnberg
Release Date: 15th May 2017
Genre: Dystopian
Publisher: Clink Street Publishing
Format: Paperback
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