I’m delighted that my short novel, Oothangbart, will be published this year by Pillar International Publishing, what makes me even happier about it, is that my publisher, Mark Lloyd, (no relation biologically), feels this novel, and because it is precious to me, to have a publisher for whom the work resonates, is terrific.
I wrote it while I was living in the East End of London, but working in the West End where I think life and ideas were a little different. To get to work, I made a longish journey each day by tube through London, and when it was hot in the summer and the trains were packed and you could scarcely breathe, I escaped into one of two places, an imaginary house I own in Morocco or Zanzibar, or… Oothangbart. Certainly over the time I worked in that particular job, I was writing Oothangbart during my lunch hour, and my workplace was feeding into the book perfectly on so many levels… absurd levels, that is. In a curious way, I feel I have that job to thank for this book, that is to say that the job drew the book out of me. The job wasn’t even an awful one, I had quite a lot of liberty to make decisions as I was developing and running a care project for elderly people. Perhaps I never was cut out to engage in conventional life, and that is one of the positions in Oothangbart. The story is an exploration of ‘self,’ myself, yourself. It recognises time as a valuable resource that all of us should have more of. The philosophical aspects of Oothangbart are threaded through with a love story because, as humans, we long for many things, but the place we recognise what the essence of longing really is all about, is when we are in love.
Of everything I have written, Oothangbart has most of my ‘soul.’ I’m not frightened for the fate of this guileless book; I’d like people to read and comment on it, because if it resonates for other people, then I’ll know that I have a lot of friends, and I’ll feel safe to come out of the forest. Oh, and I forgot to mention everybody in the book is afraid of the dark.
