On Writing Generous Enemies
Friday, July 11th, 2008
Influences: Popular Fiction and Non-Fiction.
Generous Enemies comes out at in interesting time (The Beijing Olympics heralds a new period of Chinese confidence and also “May you live in interesting times” is a Chinese curse) and was born out of a single insight many, many years ago when I was a boy, that Australia, and the world, was not always to be safe and peaceful, and that an invading force, could and would arrive one day. It’s not a fear, it’s a mathematical certainty, it happened to Aboriginal Australia, so it will happen again. But predicting conflict and promising doom and gloom is not my game, so over a decade I re-drafted Generous Enemies to evolve with the current geo-political climate, and crafted it into a worst case scenario, partly to antagonise these who refuse to believe that Australia could ever be invaded, and to show those who fear it most, that it won’t be like what they expect. It will be nasty.
The concept of Generous Enemies is not new, but applying it to the South Pacific is. Other countries and writers have enjoyed producing on a mass-market scale, titles and movies about invasions and conflicts, including fictionalised accounts of real events, and pure fictional events. What I found disturbing in Australia was that while the US could have bookshelves laden with titles detailing the invasion of the good ol’ US of A by all your favourite enemies, in Australia there was none – yet the threat is a lot more severe than in the US, disregarding that unusually highly succesful terrorist strike.
But writing a book about your neighbouring country invading was too simple, and while the threat is far fetched, it’s not too improbable when you build a scenario, the elements of which are shaping and brewing with each passing year. I have sewed the vital factors of the next global conflict into Generous Enemies, and more importantly have predicted the role of China, not as some swarm of barbarians, but as a balancing force in the Pacific. China has had a bad PR image lately. Not everyone else in the world can be as good and holy as those in the West.
But, the great test of humanity is to have the maturity of avoid conflict, and though I’m not placing bets on how the global collective will weather food shortages, differences of religion and general we-want-what-you-got disputes (how else can you describe war?) I’m wasn’t going to ignore the issue completely.
I’ve written five books to date. It was easy to write Generous Enemies, in fact, I began writing it when I was fifteen, self-published a first edition in 2003 and then revised the story, and have self-published again in 2008. So, I’ve been at it over half of my life (I’m 33) and it was hard work getting it done, but the story and characters came to me easily. Yes I spent year refining them, but I enjoyed it.
The elements that helped me in writing Generous Enemies throughout the years are numerous, so I’ll try to list as many as possible, because it’s obvious that of what I write about, I was not the first to tread that path. My goal was to write an entertaining story set in a difficult period. I have done that and I’m happy. And it’s available for you to read.
First up, the journey begins with a classic, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s nasty & little novel (that was later upgraded from a Dutch Colonial African Horror Tale into a Post-Vietnam War Hollywood Blockbuster, Apocalypse Now). The journey and the destination struck me so deep that I have to say, this story, before any other, helped guide the story structure of Generous Enemies – it is a journey. And it is dark. Adding more emotion to the journey, and character to the characters, was the conversion of Rudyard Kipling’s short story into the film of the same name: The Man Who Would be King. The two main characters, played by Sean Connery and Michael Caine, gave me role models for the two main characters in Generous Enemies, Colonel Peters and Captain Callaghan. It’s a mix of soldier, larakin, adventurer and entrepreneur. The film and book about Breaker Morant detailed another side of the soldier – that your superiors will double-cross you for political purposes.
Between British and Dutch Empire Building and American Jungle Forays is of course the big W-W-2.
The Thin Red Line by James Jones and The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer influenced me by describing not only jungle combat, but the pyscological impairment of (then) modern warfare on the western kids who have to fight them. The Thin Red Line was also made into an amazing film, true to the book, and will stand the test of time better than most movies will. Other WW2 era novels are For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemmingway is the King. You want to understand how and why a country can tear itself apart, get into this (Note: For Whom the Bell Tolls is about the Spanish Civil War but speaks precisely about fascism) and The Young Lions. There is a great Australian novel set in Papua New Guinea in World War Two, I think it’s called The Thin Blue Line, that was also influential, but I haven’t been able to track it down!
Post-WW2, and for the Korean and Vietnam Wars I found cinema to be a great influencer and observer but I haven’t actually read that much from these conlflicts, just read ‘a lot about them’. I have seen Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and The Odd Angry Shot (probably the best movie about Vietnam) but it was The Killing Fields that rung my alarm bells – not only were the Khmer Rouge up to genocidal tricks and kicks while I was a young lad safe in Australia, but weren’t these activites meant to have been eradicated from history. “Oh well”, it still happens in Africa, the Middle East, and yes, Asia. Why couldn’t it happen in Australia? So I have The Killing Fields to thank for reminding me how fragile humanity is in the age that I live.
Like anyone born in the 1970s, the Cold War tinkered with my mind. A fine 80s flick pitting Yankee School Kids against invading Commies is Red Dawn – This was the first modern big screen foray into toying with an invasion on your home soil. It’s still a great movie and not to be discounted. The Cold War isn’t quite over, it’s just evolved, and Terrorism is just a school yard scuffle, and now I move on to contemporary influences.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Mad Max are set amid anarchy & chaos, these two elements forming themes in Generous Enemies. I love the characters more than the settings!
Jarhead is the only book I’ve read to emerge from Gulf War 1.0. Why aren’t there more or am I not looking in the right places? Are the great literary works about Gulf War 2.0 to be written in blogs and emails? Are we missing out on the TXT action?
1421 – A history piece that reads like (and could be) an airport novel, but worthy of a browse if you want to follow up the theory that the Chinese mapped most of the world in fleets of giant junks long before the white devils ever got there in their tiny little boats.
MetalStorm – Well, their share price keeps on dying a thousand deaths but the technology was great to fictionalise into Generous Enemies as the K-41 rifle.
Tomb Raider, Lara Croft and Angelie Joilie – This creation helped me give life to the main character of Generous Enemies, Major Katherine Krue. In history there are no shortages of femme fatales but their identity in the modern world has been blurred, by, well, um, feminism. I wanted a gutsy female as the hero and sometime anti-hero. The only similiarity I cound find for my creation was the Lara Croft character and Angelie Jolie personas.
Harpoon ANW. I don’t get to play games that much, but this game, Harpoon Advanced Naval Warfare, is quite unique. It’s far from arcade, highly strategic, and very real and extremely addictive. It makes Defcon seem like pinball.
Some will always point out that the greatest influence will have been fear. Australia has always feared invasion from the north, which is surprising because to the south are Armies of Penquins in Antarctica gagging to visit a beach and to the east are New Zealanders, who have already invaded succesfully and are fully integrated into the social security system – just joking! I guess fear is a great influencer, but I don’t fear an invasion of Australia. Strategically it’s a tricky gambit for any would be aggressor because there’s the Sea-Air-Gap and a healthy alliance with the US. But, as history proves, just when you think…
You get the picture.
Have I missed any influencers? Tonnes. Too many. But, read the book, it’s a feast and you’ll love it.
Simon Drake
Indonesia has invaded half of Australia and China is coming to complete the task….
