In this interview Mark discusses his new work, Primitive.
Read another interview with Mark about the book Search Angel.
What prompted you to write Primitive?
Initially, I was intrigued by the question of who would abduct a middle-age model who worked far from the epicenter of the fashion world. The question came up at a time when I’d become fascinated with people who were serious about acquiring Stone Age skills. Add to that my ongoing environmental interests, particularly regarding global warming, and the threads started to weave themselves. But I don’t mean to suggest that the story came together quickly, much less at once, because it didn’t. I wrote each chapter, polished it, and then grew a bit anxious as I wondered where the next one would take me. By the time I was getting ready to write the last few chapters, I had more than forty characters and many subplots to wrap up. It was a bit daunting. After finishing the first draft of each of those final chapters, I gave a private thanks because before I'd put pen to paper I'd had no idea how all those elements were going to resolve themselves.
“Pen to paper?” Are you being metaphorical, or is that how you work?
Not metaphorical at all. My first drafts are always by hand, second drafts on the computer. Back and forth with each subsequent draft. And there are many of them. Long ago I found that each medium affected me differently as a writer. I found drafting by hand more given to story telling, and that the crispness of the computer screen made editing easier. Only recently did I read that each medium activates different parts of the brain.
Okay, now that we got that out of the way, Primitive looks with a wary eye upon the U.S. military. Even the few cops who come up in the book are not exactly paragons of virtue. Are you putting them in your crosshairs?
Talk about metaphors. No, of course not, but I think contemporary fiction writers in the States have largely abdicated their responsibility to look at their country’s actions in a critical light. Personally, I’m sick of the hero-worshipping that takes place around cops and private eyes and the military in the contemporary thriller. Yes, there are great cops out there, and as a reporter I had the privilege of working with any number of them. Yes, there are great private eyes. Do I need to go on? But the problem is that there are bad cops, rotten Pis, and military units that commit grievous grimes in all U.S. wars. After upwards of a million dead in Iraq, and soaring numbers in Afghanistan, merely the latest installments of the horrors, it seemed appropriate to write a story from the point of view of those who are crushed by the force of weaponry and ideology.
Now I didn’t set out in any conscious way to do this, but the characters who emerged had the ability to show their desperation over contemporary events. Primitive is not a preachy novel at all, but much of what happens has strong allegorical overtones.
Do you feel that you shaded the characters?
Not all of them. There are, in fact, good people out there and bad people out there. But to chew an old bone, most of us have both. And in Primitive we find a mix in the various factions we come across.
What about among the Ten Tribes of the New Apocalypse?
Well, they’re mostly stoned, aren’t they? But I know those people. I knew them forty years ago, caroused with them, crashed with them, and I still run across them today. It depends on your politics, I suppose, as to whether you see them as good, bad, or something in-between. The character Wide Eyes certainly won’t countenance any questions from Darcy about an act of violence that she and the other members of the tribe might know about. Yet Wide Eyes also has some wise, in my view, counsel to offer Darcy about guns shortly after she joins them.
Speaking of Wide Eyes, weapons, and violence, at one point she says “We all war resisters but that don’t mean we’re pacifists. Not the same thing.” What’s she saying?
I love that response of hers. She’s basically saying that war is the institutionalization of violence. It’s violence on an industrial scale. You can resist that, and she clearly sees herself in that light, but still refuse to accept the more personal forms of violence that are directed against you. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The most immediate example that comes to mind is the war resister woman who finds herself in a physically abusive relationship with her partner. She might try to leave him, she might even do so, but he might stalk her and hurt her. To be imprisoned by an ethic of not striking back, especially if you have the means to defend yourself or your children, is wrong in Wide Eyes’ view. She’s saying that you can strike back and still resist the mandates of war. All too often our values are expected to possess an either/or quality that we don’t often see in our best fictional characters.
Once again, you’ve written a book with female protagonists. Why?
I find women more interesting than men. That’s my answer in a nutshell. The men I’ve chosen to be close to tend to be articulate about their feelings. But the vast majority of my friends have been women, and that remains so. I’m drawn to them for conversation. I like to hear what they have to say. Frankly, I think they’re better conversationalists than men. I always find myself brightening around smart women. Did I just say “brightening?” Maybe I mean that in more than one way.
Are you at all concerned that readers will feel you’re justifying serious crimes in Primitive?
Not in the least. I’d be much more concerned if they didn’t find themselves wondering if serious crimes are justified after reading the book. I’ve already seen examples of this in reader response, the “I don’t blame them for doing it” emails. And how many of us wouldn’t commit a serious crime if we had honest evidence that by committing the act we could stop a serious threat to the entire planet? Primitive poses that question. Only readers can answer it, and only for themselves.
There’s a deeply troubled relationship between the mother, Sonya, and her daughter, Darcy. What does that represent to you?
I’d have to say, first off, that nothing in a story “represents” anything to me as I’m writing it. It’s only after the fact that I begin to see things. In that sense, we become our own anthropologists. So with that caveat in mind, I’d say that at the outset, Sonya represents the staid, seemingly innocuous consumerism that finds security and comfort in its banal ubiquity. Everything in its place everywhere. Darcy, on the other hand, represents an angry disengagement from the norms her mother embodies, an aching tumultuous rejection of them. But clearly she’s also damaged goods. That kind of anger always has a deep well, as we learn.
Do you think mother and daughter changed fundamentally by the events of Primitive?
Absolutely. Think of Sonya in chapter one, and then think about the woman who pens the blog that forms the afterward. And we certainly see changes in Darcy. Some are subtle. I’m thinking of her desire for a tattoo of the Garden of Eden in chapter one, and her reaction to Kali’s desire to get a star tattoo later in the book. Some of the changes are clearly wrought by the intense threats to her and her mother’s lives. A lot comes out of that young woman, and both of them begin to see each other very differently. Each of them is transported into a world they couldn’t have imagined, and you bet they’re changed.
Read the chapters one through three of Primitive here.
Read another interview with Mark about the book Search Angel.
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