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Name: STEVEN SAVILE
Author of: PARALLEL LINES (2017) On the web: www.stevensavile.com On Twitter: @StevenSavile |
Steven Savile’s latest novel, PARALLEL LINES, is published in the UK on 14th March by Titan Books. To celebrate the launch, Reader Dad is very pleased to welcome the book’s protagonist, Adam Shaw, to talk about heroes.
I find heroes strange beasts. I’ve always had trouble with the square-jawed Dan Dare, Roy Race type. They’re inherently dull. The heroine might shout Flash, I love you but we only have twenty-four hours to save the earth, but no matter the stakes, Flash is always going to win. The same way that the Lone Ranger is always going to ride into town just in time to save widow at the homestead. I always preferred my heroes broken, probably because I’m broken, too. I think most of us are in one way or another. Me, I grew up thinking ‘everybody leaves me’ and that coloured most of my interactions with women probably until deep into my thirties. Letting someone through those self-erected walls ain’t easy when you’ve been building them for the best part of your life.
I guess for that reason Trainspotting’s Mark Renton was always more fascinating when he asked me to Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and all of those other things right up to the notion of choosing to rot away at the end of it all resonated so strongly. Broken people can’t be counted on to do the right thing when the shit hits the fan. And even if they try, there’s so much personal baggage to overcome there’s no guarantee it’ll work out for the best, or even how they intended.
That said, there’s as much room for Don Quixote and his windmill tilting in the world of heroes as there is for the more mysterious Joseph K marching relentlessly towards his own death.
On a personal level, fresh out of university in the 90s I found myself living the rootless life of Generation X’s Andy Palmer, shuffling from meaningless McJob to meaningless McJob and like him trying to make sense of the world I was stumbling into while everything around me was changing fast. And boy, those jobs… burglar alarm salesman, double glazing salesman, fish packer, mortgage rate advisor, classified ad salesman, the one thing they all had in common, I lasted less than a full day at any of them. I had a glorious habit of saying screw this for a game of soldiers and walking away because I wanted to do something else. Be someone else. I wanted to be the hero of my own life, not a bit part player in someone else’s.
Maybe that’s why I’ve never really been that interested in the hero rides into town stories, come to save the day, screw the dame and move on to the next town. I want flaws. I want a hero who’s afraid of heights walking a tightrope between tower blocks. I want Adam Shaw, a guy with a disease that plays havoc with his muscular control, holding a gun in a high stress situation that just exacerbates his condition. I love the tragic inevitability of it. That gun, once it’s been pulled, is always going to go off. Him being a square-jawed hero, that’s not interesting. Him being broken man, battered by life, realising that hope is a bastard but unable to stop hoping, that’s interesting. Plus it’s much more fun torturing damaged heroes…
Adam Shaw is a family man at heart. Yesterday his world consisted of two things, his disabled son Jake and statistical probabilities. Today his body is his worst enemy. His diagnosis? ALS. Now tomorrow holds no surprises. That’s why he walked into the bank with a gun and a plan. To safeguard Jake’s future.
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