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A loose trilogy of novels taking place in fictional apparitions of Leicester, UK and Nice, France.
They are about places and the way communities are formed, the way individuals enter new places, build community and observe being and belonging.
They each have a degree of paranoiac experience, which increases in each subsequent book.
None of them have endings that resolve. The characters are left within the spaces.
I wanted to write a couple of posts, exploring a little bit about each of the texts. Or at least the memory of them now.
A Moiré is a book about the city and the manipulation of power within that space.
The novel centers around a part-time private detective named Morris. He is attempting to discover the location of a missing musician. As he follows various leads, he meets a range of characters and glimpses the different organisations influencing the city.
This text developed out of my experience moving to Nice after a stint in London.
It is an unraveling of place.
As happens in the third text Graffiti, the reality of the place experiences specific trauma that if left out completely felt like they would change the meaning of the place too much. In A Moiré it's, Bastille Day, 2016. Initially I intended to finish writing the text about the place it had started out as - but as I continued I think I realised that I had changed too, and there was no way back. So, a similar event happens in A Moiré.
It is also about finding friends, and a place within place.
The conspiracies that seem to run beneath everything were part of a joyful exploration of the reconciliation of the story of a place, its history, its folktales, its celebrity with the reality as experienced within it (by an outsider) as someone who is apart from it. Does the city absorb this person, or spit them out.
Celebrity is another theme within the text. The main case revolves around a famous Auteur, and the glitz of Cannes. It's something that Morris is running from as well. It emerges eventually that he was a photographer for a while. Through a series of coincidences he had become obsessed with a particular celebrity. He had started writing about this. Somehow this writing follows him to Nice, and is used by the forces working against him. This text was actually started before A Moiré but didn't resolve to anything finished. It was exciting to fold different texts together, and something that happens again in Graffiti.