Wash On

Here's a piece I wrote for Flux on Will Ashon. His debut book is here, and it does for England what the best Americans to for the U.S.A. Buy it here

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What do you do when you've already made a name for yourself as the country's foremost hip-hop journalist, then set up one of the genre's most artistically worthwhile record labels? Well, in Will Ashon's case, you write a novel, and one that has nothing to do with hip-hop.

'Clear Water' is a darkly comic critique of Britain, breaking the national convention of class literature and treating the collision of it's central characters in the ambitious, far-ranging manner of the best American writers. Flux caught up with Will near Big Dada's south London HQ.

'I try not to introduce myself at all, I'm not very good at small talk, or big talk either,' he laughs when asked about his schizophrenic career paths. 'My wife gets very annoyed with me because she thinks it's rude, but I was brought up to think it was immodest and wrong to talk about yourself, very un-English!' And the book's introduction? 'It's a book about contemporary England, a bleak but funny book I hope. It's the Da Vinci code of literary fiction!' Queue another laugh. 'If the person was still interested, I'd tell 'em a bit about the characters.' And what characters they are. A lifestyle journalist starting to seriously doubt the impact of his career, a burnt out, addict cricket player, a wartime temptress and a would-be messiah, all of whose lives connect in a dramatic, resonating conclusion.

Having written one novel in the past ("I was into my French avant-garde writers, but I guess there wasn't much room for the avant-garde in the mid 90's") hip-hop writing, even 'the really bad reviews' took up most of the subsequent creative energy. A sense of time running out provided 'Clear Water's' genesis, and it was time, not motivation, that proved the problem. 'The only time I could find was on the tube.' If the story wasn't interesting enough already, it turns out the entire novel was written on a PDA to and from the office!

The most exciting thing about 'Clear Water' is that it's every bit as encompassing and epic as a Don Delillo, or Pynchon novel, but is uniquely concerned with Englishness. 'It's what I know about to some extent, and I didn't want to write the middle-class campus novel or a story about the working class, I wanted it to include those things but not be limited by them.' 'Clear Water' combines all these ambitions, and achieves them in an entirely, extremely compelling book.