London Bridge

"I chose London Bridge because I love the idea of a totally non-Anglicised consciousness looking at our city as a construct. Because Céline is a deeply French writer, in a totally different tradition, he sees London mythologised as a fictional entity – and he treats it with a dynamism and an energy that I don’t find in English writing. Also, he makes these wonderful, crazy trajectories across the city, from Willesden down to the docks and so on, as a way of trying to configure how he would escape from the incredible density and multitude and magnificence of this mad place in which he finds himself. For me, that’s a wonderfully inspiring way to look at London, as compared to the account of a local writer, who might tend to stratify society and deal with its movements in the classic sense that you find in Thackeray or Dickens or Trollope. Céline came here at the time of World War One, with shrapnel wounds in his head, recovering from the madness of the conflict and looking at the city as a post-traumatic city – in a way, it’s similar to what TS Eliot does in The Wasteland . That sort of London is the London of the imagination: the dream city. I really think that this is the biggest battleground London has seen since the age of the railways. When the railways were first put in, there was devastation, because there were so many competing companies who just ripped up houses right, left, and centre. In the name of catching the spirit of the age and indulging in this technological process (and the idea of progress through science), London was savagely remade. It took a long time to absorb, recover and discover itself through that. At the moment, we’re in this sort of management age – an age of the virtual – in which you can change reality by looking at digitised, computer-generated images and projecting a fantastic city of the future, like a science fiction. People have come to believe that this is reality, even though they are contradicted by observation, which shows you devastated fields, radioactive materials buried in the ground that have been ripped up fast, and absolute destruction. I mean, I just walked round our local Victoria Park this morning – it looks like a war zone! The lake has been drained and the wild habitat of the island has been stripped bare, all in the name of this sort of cosmeticised version of the future. So it is a devastating moment for the city, which I don’t think has ever been under such a prolonged form of invasion by the virtual. To deal with all this, you have to come up with different forms of writing. That’s what I’ve tried to do, to some extent, in Ghost Milk – by using things that would almost be essay material, plus dialogue, fictionalised elements, images (I’ve got thousands of photographs – not that they’re in the book, but I’ve used them as a reference), old films and so on. You have to make a complex construction that really deals with the city, to counteract this smooth, moony-like visual world of the computer-generated project."