Interview: In conversation with author Iain Ryan, about his novel The Spiral (2022)
The Spiral is one of the strangest and most thought-provoking books I’ve read. For many, describing a book as ‘strange’ would associate it with a sort of abstract or high-minded sensibility. That’s not The Spiral. The Spiral is a pulpy crime thriller that just doesn’t really do quite what a pulpy crime thriller is supposed to do. It doesn’t zag when it should zig. It just ditches the map.
It was written by an old friend of mine, Iain Ryan. I met Iain at an Ableton Live workshop in 2008. Since then, he’s been one of my favourite people to read and to listen to on any and every topic he’s interested in at any given moment in time. While I got to know him as a musician and a popular music academic, he’s since secured a reputation as a crime novelist.
The Spiral is the first of his books that I’ve read. It stuck in my brain. And, when I found out that many people didn’t really like it much, I became even more fascinated. So, I got in touch with Iain for a chat about it, which is transcribed below. (The transcription is much abbreviated and edited, because Iain and I are both what could be termed Mouthy Broads.)
Content Warning: This interview contains a brief discussion on the unique grief of losing someone to suicide.
-
MJ O’Neill (MJ):
So. Let’s talk about this book. It’s pretty fucking weird. Were you conscious of it being strange when you wrote it?
Iain Ryan (IR):
Absolutely. The book is tremendously weird. I had to let myself do it, in a way. I tried not to write it for quite a stretch. But, in the end, I wanted to, so I did it. I didn’t even expect it to be published. In retrospect, I can kinda see some of the reasons it was, but, yeah. God. It’s weird. It’s really fucking weird. MJ, it’s a crime novel with a barbarian in it.
MJ:
I was surprised, though. When I was reading it, I decided to check out how people had responded to it and many had described it as something impossibly odd. A half-fantasy, half-thriller book. But, I didn’t think it was divided. I thought the fantasy element was clearly an outgrowth of the character drama, even with the alternating chapters telling different storylines.
IR:
Yeah, I definitely didn’t set out to write a a crime-fantasy mashup. I just followed the character and it seemed to make sense to me. Also, the genres that I was playing with were really just two different pulp traditions. That was my thinking, at the time. I wasn’t trying to mash up Lord of the Rings with Gone Girl. I just thought I was doing a trashy psychological thriller and a low-brow fantasy spin, like Conan The Barbarian.
MJ:
Yeah, it didn’t seem that drastic to me. But, I think I had an advantage, in a way, because I was a big fan of the type of Choose Your Own Adventure books that you were tapping into and that the main character was so obsessed with as a kid. Was that already an area of interest for you?
IR:
Honestly, that’s the very first stuff I got into, in terms of reading. I don’t really remember anything else before that. I remember getting these fighting fantasy books and my mother being really put off by the fact that I was bringing them home. And, before I wrote the book, I had that thing where you get older and you go through that phase of getting nostalgic and re-examining what you were interested in as a kid. I actually ordered some of the old ones off eBay. It was a bit of a mixed bag. Some of it was terrible. But, man. Some of it was magical. The illustrations are so great and so provocative and the whole aesthetic is just really fucking cool. Like, it was all very much in keeping with my general interests in, you know, stoner metal and psychedelia and violence. It’s like you could see my entire psychological profile, right there at age ten.
MJ:
I had three favourites in the Choose Your Own Adventure series. There was one about getting lost in the Amazon jungle, one about the earth being hollow and having a secret kingdom, and then a really creepy one about getting kidnapped by faeries. And, yeah, in retrospect, they all had that same blend of silly and unsettling that echoes through a lot of my work today. This Irish sensibility of playing with and antagonising the audience through ambiguity and absurdity. My music doesn’t feel right to me if there isn’t something that’s a little antagonistic in there.
IR:
This is one of the interesting things of coming to writing through a career in music. I don’t have a huge list of contacts or experiences in the book industry but, in general, I think people tend to have one of two motivations in the writing world. They want to teach people something, or they want to make people happy. Which are both great impulses. But, they’re very different from the space I was in within music of people wanting to antagonise their audience and of audiences specifically seeking out work that antagonised them. People who get pleasure from antagonising and being antagonised. That impulse just doesn’t turn up in fiction as often, in my experience. Some people have been surprised that I’m not upset about people not liking the book. But, in No Anchor [Iain’s former noise-rock/doom-metal band], getting upset at the band was kind of the point!
MJ:
On that note: I actually played some of No Anchor’s punkier work to a friend of mine once and he liked it enough to go to see you play live on your final tour. But, he actually hates heavy metal music and, as such, had a pretty dreadful time!
IR:
[Laughs] I was just talking to someone about that band recently. You know, we weren’t very technical. It wasn’t about being well-crafted. The experience of it was just that it was loud and fun and dumb. And, really, those are a lot of the same sensibilities I still bring to my work as a writer. There’s a lot of Pantera in The Spiral. It’s definitely my heavy metal book.
MJ:
You’ve got a lot of different components at work in the book. I feel like you could have started it from any number of different angles. What was the initial thread?
IR:
It’s a bit unromantic, I’m afraid. I always wish I had better origin stories for my books. This one started in the editing process for [Iain’s previous novel] The Student. In The Student, the main character has to shoot a bikie in a field. He has to take the guy out. But, he doesn’t. He chickens out. But, there was an earlier version of the story where he just violently shoots the guy. Like, it’s not a movie scene death. The guy doesn’t die on the first shot and it’s this horrific, drawn-out messy death. Because, initially, I wanted the trauma of that moment to drive the character. But, my editor rightly pointed out that such a violent and traumatic act would just turn the reader against the main character. They would never be able to tolerate that he committed such a gnarly crime. And, I’m just the sort of dickhead who hears something like that and hears the challenge. Like, well, what kind of character could do something like that? Where the character kills someone and you don’t just feel relief, you feel almost a sense of joy. How would you do that? And, around the same time, my partner was very obsessed with the Josef Fritzl case and I thought — well, that’s my fucking guy. Nobody’s going to feel bad about my character killing this guy. People tried to bring back the death penalty to kill that guy.
MJ:
One of the most interesting things about the book, in that regard, is its approach to gender and gendered violence. My partner said it felt like a very genderqueer book. Was that something you engaged with consciously, in writing it?
IR:
That’s really nice to hear. My first novel was a corrupt cop story, my second was about a horny teenager. And, they were both driven by very dude-y stuff. And, by the time I got to the third, I was just sick of it [laughs]. Like, I just didn’t want to write another novel that was just all about dudes, essentially. But, I was really scared to do it, to be clear. I initially wrote about 10,000 words of it in the third-person, just to keep myself at a remove, and it just sucked. At that point, I had a proven track-record of writing in first-person, present-tense and I realised that, if I was going to do something new and difficult, I needed to rely on what I knew I could do well to help me through it. I really didn’t know how it would land at all. But, at some point, I just decided to trust my people. My editor was a woman, the CEO of the publisher was a woman, nearly all of my line editors were women. I didn’t need to worry about the public. I knew they they would tell me if I was writing fucking bullshit [laughs].
MJ:
In the barbarian sections, you actually make a point of never gendering the character. And, you have a sex scene where the character has a threesome with two different genders. Was it important to thread that queer energy?
IR:
Well, you know my biography. I was in a band for a decade that was predominantly driven by queer musicians [Brisbane 2000s indie-rock band Iron On]. But, some of it was just technical. If you’re writing in those interactive fiction areas, you just have to leave it as open as it can be. I was actually worried about the hot tub scene. I thought people might be excluded, if they didn’t connect with that experience. But, I thought, nah, I have to have a sex scene.
MJ:
At a certain point, you do actually introduce Choose Your Own Adventure mechanics to the novel, which I thought was very bold. Was that always going to be part of it?
IR:
It was just one of those nice happenstances when you’re writing a novel and you arrive at a certain part and just have a good idea. It wasn’t supposed to be a part of it, initially, but I knew I was going to go into an extended part in that section of the narrative and, after writing 50,000 words referencing Choose Your Own Adventure books and mechanics, I just thought I should go all the way with it. I figured the publisher would nix it, anyway, so I just decided to give it a shot. And, yeah, they went for it, for some reason. It took a minute to work out how to do it, to let people have a number of choices but still end up back at the climax of the novel, but, once I figured out how I could do it, I couldn’t see a reason not to.
MJ:
This may be a sensitive subject, but I would like to talk about the book’s relationship with suicide. Because, so much of the book is the main character struggling to figure out the reasoning and logic behind someone’s suicide. And, I know that you’ve had a similar experience, of someone close to you taking their own life and trying to figure it all out.
IR:
This book is definitely about that person. The specific autobiographical aspects of writing are always hard to pin down but I’m always working through some bullshit [laughs]. And, to get really hippy dippy about it, I definitely felt that person was kind of around when I was writing this book. And, I feel like I’ve finally fucking exorcised so much stuff when I finished writing it. When I finished the book, I realised that it was, in some ways, about the end of narrative that happens around suicide. When someone dies like that, it’s an open loop. You’ll never have your answers because you can’t ask the person, there’s no perpetrator, there’s no victim. It’s just this big whole fucking mess. I think the book captures that energy, a bit. It has this wild openness to it. It doesn’t resolve. You don’t really have any idea what the character is going to do at the end. And, yeah. The main character has some of that person’s energy, for sure. I think they were both very aggressive people, in a good way.
MJ:
I often have that realisation with my own work, that I don’t know what it’s about until after it’s done. Were you conscious of going through this stuff as you were writing?
IR:
Not particularly. The books often only really make sense to me after the fact. It’s not even when it’s done, it’s when it’s been published for a year and I’ve done like thirty interviews about it. I think of the things writing does for me is that it connects up these cables that have come unstuck over the years. My partner’s very good about it. She’s very supportive in that capacity. She doesn’t give a shit about how many copies are sold or whether I got a bad review in the Sydney Morning Herald. She’s more interested in the therapeutic aspect of it. That I’m working these things through in my writing. I’m not a complete amateur when it comes to mental health and therapy. I’m a strong advocate for it. And, I don’t believe in any of that tortured artist stuff at all. But, this is what works for me. Meditation works for some people, writing works for me.
MJ:
Given that process, how did you feel when the book got a bit of a negative response? You said it didn’t bother you that people didn’t like the book earlier.
IR:
I mean, the book did fine. It got put out in a traditional publishing deal and it sold more copies than the book before it, so the graph’s going up and all the boxes are ticked. And, I have to be very aware when I talk about this stuff, the fact that it was even published is very fortunate. The book was sold in Big W, MJ, so it got more than a fair shot. But, it was odd. It wasn’t unpleasant, to be completely honest [laughs]. It actually got published in two countries and the publishers did a really good job of getting it out there to people. They had a lot of early reviews come back from bloggers and goodreads that weren’t particularly positive. Two stars, what is this fucking book, you know, blah blah blah. And, I just thought that was fairly hilarious. Then, someone at the Sydney Morning Herald reviewed it badly and the review got circulated to like fifteen other papers. The book has its fans, some of them people I greatly admire, but the bad news got circulated a bit more broadly than the good news, in this case. It didn’t make me dislike the book or question it too much. Nobody said it was bad. Mostly, people just wondered why there were fantasy elements in it or why someone sent them the book in the first place. There’s nothing I can really do about that, as a writer.
MJ:
When I was looking up reviews, I discovered that, on Amazon Australia, you have four reviews, each with a different star rating. One one-star review, one two-star review, one three-star review, and one four-star review. And, I thought, that’s incredible.
IR:
Yeah, it’s kind of what you want, right? You want polarisation. You want to know you did a thing. I suppose it would be nice to do a book that was completely true to you own thing and just really landed well with everyone. But, I don’t know…
