Influences on TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER

Influences

Comments by Hugh Cook
        The daily newspaper had a big influence on the writing of the novel TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER. While I was writing it, the civilized world entered the era of shoot to kill. That old reality we used to inhabit? It got blown to pieces.
        This novel is about terrorism, and it is written, chiefly, from the viewpoint of a member of the minority community which is blamed for terrorist acts.
        I guess one thing that feeds into this is my own experience of being (inevitably, conspicuously) a foreigner in Japan, always identifiable as a member of a minority group any time I step outside the door.
        In terms of literary inspriation, a book that kept coming to mind was Puckoon, a novel set by Spike Miligan set in Ireland. I kept thinking of the ending, in which (if memory serves) a character complains that he has been left stuck up in a tree, and that Spike can't leave him like this. To which Spike replies that, hey, he's the author, and he can do exactly what he wants.
         I kept that example firmly in my mind, and, if some notion came to me, then I embodied it in the text.
         If, for example, it occurred to me that it would be possible for seven of the sisters of Toralina Soubliette, perfume goddess and pleaser of men, to turn up at the Adventuring Salt Building, then I wrote them in. Never mind about the fact that they don't have valid entry documents for this particular city state.
         Another influence was the film Brazil (1985), directed by Terry Gillam, a kind of ultra-modern spin on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. For my money, Brazil is one of the best movies ever made. The first time I saw it, the ending left me stunned, open-mouthed. What I hope I managed to borrow from the movie is the panache of its extravagance. A kind of Puckoonish panache.
         I was very conscious of having Brazil in mind as I wrote, as a kind of touchstone, but one other influence was unsuspected for a long time.
         There is, in TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, a place called the Infinite Pinnacle. You go on a long journey and, if you get there, you find something (or someone) which is engaged in controling the universe.
         For the longest time, it did not occur to me that this idea had an antecedent. Then, one day, I found myself thinking about what is perhaps the strangest book ever written, a book that I read at least twice when I was young -- age eleven or younger -- and which I remember as being difficult. Particularly the ending. I couldn't quite get the hang of the ending.
         The book is The Water Babies (1863) by Victorian writer Charles Kingsley.
         This book is the story of a chimney sweep, Tom, who is about as underclass as underclass gets. And, in the final stages of the book, he ends up at some place which is kind of at the end of the universe where there is some old woman who is responsible, sort of, for running the universe.
         The one bit of this that I remember, over a gulf of more than forty years, is that she doesn't create things. Rather, the secret of her cunning is that she allows them to create themselves.
         One of my new year's for the upcoming year of 2006 resolutions is to see if I can find the text of The Water Babies somewhere online. If not, I'll try to find the text someplace and put it on my own website.
         My memory of The Water Babies is that it's a kind of no holds barred book, not imprisoned by any kind of narrative rigidity. Literature on a trampoline.
        It was a really major surprise to realize that this book, The Water Babies, had been kicking around in my imagination for over forty years, so thoroughly absorbed that I didn't realize its influence until I was almost at the end of the writing of TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER.