Demanding the Impossible - An Interview With Andrew Blackman

Andrew Blackman's second novel A Virtual Love is an inventive discussion of online identity and the modern protest movement. Released on April 1, it has received strong reviews from the likes of The Independent. Andrew's first book, On The Holloway Road, won the Luke Bitmead Bursary in 2009, and he is a former staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Here, he discusses the political inspirations for his new novel, the changing nature of protest, and the influence of blogs.

A Virtual Love is dedicated to 'all those who demand the impossible', a reference to the Situationist slogan. Is Situationism something you were thinking of while writing the novel?

Yes, it was a part of my thinking. The novel is mainly about identity in the age of social media, but it also touches on the commodification of human beings and society. The online profiles that the characters create are like advertisements for themselves, and they are marketing themselves like brands. A lot of these ideas were anticipated by the Situationists in the 1960s, so I thought it would be interesting to use that quote. I also meant the dedication as a genuine ‘thank you’ to all the people who are still demanding the impossible in all parts of the world, a task which seems particularly important now.

The novel is centred around the climate protest movement. As someone who has been involved in protests yourself, how do you think the protest movement has changed over the past ten years, and has social networking made a big difference? 

There have been significant changes, largely due to social networking. In some ways, the changes are positive. When I was in New York protesting against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ten years ago, it was all about getting coverage from the big newspapers and TV stations. If you didn’t get that, which most of the protests didn’t, then it was almost as if the event had never happened; the only people you could reach were the relatively small number of passers-by. Now, you can take photos and post them on Facebook or Twitter and reach people all around the world very quickly. Mainstream media are still very influential, but there are ways of bypassing them and building movements more easily. Social media can also be great for circumventing censorship in oppressive regimes.

The downside is that people’s involvement can become quite superficial. It’s nice to get a few thousand people liking your Facebook group or signing your online petition, but often it doesn’t achieve much. The targets of your action know how easy it is to click a “Like” button, and it doesn’t demonstrate any real commitment or strength of feeling. But if a much smaller number of people take the trouble to leave their houses and protest outside Downing Street or chain themselves to railings, I think that will be taken more seriously. Easy actions are useful as a supplement to more difficult ones, but it’s dangerous if they become a substitute, and I worry that clicking a button will take over from doing something more risky.

There's a contrast in your book between the younger, more internet-savvy characters and Jeff's grandfather, a retired journalist. Do you think there is anything that internet bloggers / commentators could learn from old-fashioned journalism?

Yes, absolutely. Again it goes back to easy, instant actions versus difficult but more meaningful ones. The internet makes a lot of things incredibly quick and easy, which is great, but the danger is that we always take the easy option. There are loads of bloggers who don’t do any original reporting at all – they just latch onto something that’s already been written by a traditional journalist, and put their own spin on it. What’s much more powerful is when bloggers report on real-life events, or make phone calls and interview people and present us with something new.

It goes both ways, though. Old-fashioned journalists have learned a lot from bloggers about things like engaging their audience and having a personal voice. You can even see that the designs of newspapers and magazines have changed in the past ten years to reflect what people are used to seeing online.

As a regular blogger yourself, do you find it a distraction from your writing, or is it a way of keeping engaged?

I like blogging, and I’m surprised that more writers don’t do it. I think traditionally writers have enjoyed, and often tried to cultivate, an aura of genius, a sense of being special and other-worldly. Writing a blog, assuming that you’re honest in what you write, immediately punctures that image and exposes you as just another frail, uncertain, vulnerable human being, stumbling through life and making flawed attempts to make sense of it all. But I think it’s time for the elitist notion of the writer as reclusive genius to be retired anyway, and for a more genuine, honest relationship between reader and writer to take its place. To me, if you want to write about the world, you need to understand it, and that means participating in it.

However, it’s important to put limits on the time I spend on blogging and social media. I always make sure that I focus on my writing for three or four hours each morning, before I switch on the internet. Writing fiction does require a withdrawal from the world, so that you can inhabit the world of your characters and see things through their eyes. I also need a clear head, free of other people’s words. Sometimes I see people on Twitter posting minute-by-minute updates on their writing, and I just can’t understand that at all. For me, it’s important to keep creation and consumption strictly separate.

What would you like readers to take away from A Virtual Love? 

When I did readings and talks about my first novel On the Holloway Road, I was always amazed and delighted by the number of different ways in which people could read the same book. I’m sure it’ll be the same with A Virtual Love, and so I don’t want to prescribe one particular interpretation. But I would like readers to be provoked into thinking about identity in the social media world, and to be aware of the ways in which we as human beings are constantly being shaped by the technologies we create.

Do you think that internet culture is becoming so widespread now that writers are forced to engage with it in their books? 

It’s actually quite difficult to write about the internet in an interesting way. Vivid writing usually relies on stimulating the reader’s senses, and that’s hard to do when your characters are tweeting at each other. There’s a coldness and an impersonal nature to it, which means that writers who enjoy producing lush descriptive passages will probably want to set their novels in the past, or in other countries or worlds.

But if you want to write about contemporary Britain, I do think it’s becoming hard to do that without engaging with the internet in some way. It doesn’t have to be central to the book as it is in A Virtual Love, of course, but I do think it has to be present. With other technologies like TV, even though people spent hours a day watching TV, it wasn’t necessary to include that because it was an essentially passive activity. But the internet is now the medium through which many people, particularly younger people, engage with the world and relate to each other, and so I think it will have to start playing a larger part in contemporary novels.

What are you working on next?

I’m working on my third novel, which is also set in contemporary Britain and involves a man whose family is disintegrating because of a choice he made early on in his life, so long ago that he’s forgotten about it. Then he stumbles on the story of an ancestor who was involved in a civil war in nineteenth-century Spain, and in learning about his ancestor he learns to see his own life in a new way and to understand the choices he made and the effect of those choices on himself and those around him. So it’s a continuation of one of the themes of my first two books: the attempt to live authentically, to chart your own course rather than living according to what other people think of you. But in each of my books I treat the subject in very different ways.

Visit Andrew's website here for more details on A Virtual Love, alongside book reviews, interviews and giveaways.