Debut novelists are rarely this well-travelled. Albert Alla, who has just published his first novel Black Chalk, has lived everywhere from St Tropez to Sydney, England to France, finally settling on the Pacific Island of New Caledonia.
Yet it’s Oxford that provides the setting for his first book. Following in the footsteps of Jennifer Brown’s Hate List, Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes, and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, the story centres on Nate, a 17-year-old who finds that his friend has committed a school shooting. The focus, however, is less on the perpetator than on the effects of the killing on Nate. I ask Alla why he chose to concentrate on the character of the friend, and not the shooter.
He tells me that a teenage shooter is relatively unintresting. “What you have with a shooter is someone who is highly bullied, and the way you would make such a book interesting is by taking an anti-moral stance; you would do something like American Psycho. To make that work you would have to aim for sympathy or empathy towards horror. In books like Ameri- can Psycho, or certain TV shows, there is an anti-hero glamour that I didn’t want. Shows like Dexter or The Wire have some horrible characters, and we develop a lot of sympathy for these characters, even though their actions are des- picable.”
Instead, Black Chalk is a book about moral ambivalence. Alla tells me that this has been a lifelong obsession. “When we were growing up, and watching a movie, my father would say ‘The contrasts are tuned in too strongly’. The standard American movie has a baddie and goodie. This concept was something that was always looked on distastefully in my household. We looked for something greyer.”
But, I argue, Dexter or The Wire are centred in moral ambivalence. You want to reject those characters’ actions, and yet you’re still interested. Alla disagrees.
“The actions in those shows are still clearly wrong. Moral ambivalence exists there because the author is willing to let you understand the characters. It’s important to understand how someone sees themselves. But it is still not morally ambivalent.” In his book, Nate must remain friends with everyone, including both the victims and perpetrator of the shooting, and there is an uneasy sense of complicity in that friendship.
For someone who has evidently had such a global existence, from writing in Paris to ‘running a small telecommunications firm on an island of two thousand people and twice as many pigs’, it is interesting that he chose Oxford as the setting for his story. Alla studied here as an undergraduate and tells me, “It’s a place that grips you and it takes time before it lets go. When I wrote the book I was still in its grip. I’m not anymore, and it’s strange – when I come back I feel like a stranger.” (The TSK where we meet, for example, was, according to Alla, formerly a QI themed cafe. The more you know.) Though he started off doing Engineering and soon switched to Economics, the only thing he enjoyed was writing. “Most teenage books are really bad, and we try to hide them. But I sweated so much over it that after Oxford, there wasn’t much else I was good at. The only thing I had was writing.”
Alla is currently based in New Caledonia, another island in the Pacific, and the setting for his next book. “It’s a captivating place because it went through an independence struggle but stayed part of France simply because there was a majority of people that wanted to remain. But this was on the wave of massive decolonisation. So now it has 40 per cent who are Caracs and favour independence, 40 per cent of Europeans who are mainly against, and the remainder who are Pacific islanders who are against inde- pendence, fearing that if that happened they would get kicked out. The place is fascinating and the dynamics are fascinating. It’s the sort of place you would imagine Graham Greene setting a novel.”
Before we meet, Alla’s publicist sent me the press release for his novel, which emphasises that its themes are ‘current’. Alla isn’t sure about this description. “When does a book about a shooting become relevant? School shootings are relevant, but so are many things. But we haven’t yet become numb about them. What’s interesting about school shootings is that, in our lives, we’ve seen them become a social phenomenon. You can be certain that angry kids are considering it as we speak. But so many things are ‘current’ – to be current is to be cheap.”
Black Chalk is published by Garne Publishing and available here.
