Claire north
A new novel counts the cost of losing our shared human values…
what makes Claire North’s novels so distinctive? It’s a question that, among other people, puzzles her publisher and North herself. “It’s one of those awkward things where we know what it’s not,” she sighs, “but what it is is high concept, yet I don’t really know what that means either.” Luckily, when North sits down to write, she knows exactly what’s required, as new novel 84K again proves. Her novels are built on strong central ideas that anyone can grasp. Having previously offered us, for instance, a character reborn remembering his previous iterations in The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August and a body-hopping killer in Touch, this time around her novel rests on a deceptively simple question: “What if everything can be bought?”
Enter Theo Miller of the Criminal Audit Office, whose job is to assess the cost of doing wrong. Imagine, says North, that someone has murdered her. Erm, if you really insist, but under protest. It would be Miller’s job to make a reckoning of the worth of her life: more money would need to be paid in recompense for lost charitable giving, but “she’s asthmatic so we’ll knock a bit of money off because she might have been a burden on the state in the future”.
If you can pay this bill, no problem, you’re free to carry on killing. If you can’t, it’s off to a privatised prison where you have to work. “It’s this society,” she says, “where so long as you can pay for it, you can do anything you want.”
dark horizons
Although North has Miller rebel against his bureaucratic role in life, it’s nonetheless a bleak vision, keyed off at least in part by seeing the “physical consequence of being scared to go to your doctor because of the cost” on a trip to the USA. “I’ve never been in a developed country where you see so much obvious physical injury on the streets,” she says, “homeless people with weeping abscesses and crutches and clearly lasting physical injury”.
When SFX suggests that constantly putting a monetary value on things inevitably has an effect on the wider culture, North concurs: “People say, ‘We have to shoulder the cost of homelessness, don’t we, why should we pay for other people’s kids?’ And that language is so pervasive in our society. It’s not other people’s kids, it’s paying for kids. How have we managed to so diminish the humanity of people that they are obsessed by their burden on the exchequer? How has that become the normal in our language?”
That’s not to say North is necessarily a pessimist – at least not every day. At root, SF writers, she says, tend either to posit Mad Max-influenced visions or follow the Gene Roddenberry line of idealistic optimism, and she oscillates between the two. “You sort of feel Mad Max is the future we’re walking towards when we forget that it takes people working together to organise the Enlightenment and the building of the Taj Mahal,” she says. “And it’s Star Trek you walk towards when you say, ‘You know what? I could choose to make money, but I choose to help little children.’”
And then she laughs. On a more practical level, this engagement with Big Issues isn’t just a pose. North is standing as a candidate for the Green Party in the May local elections. Her optimistic side thinks the next generation are being told “better stories” than previous generations, stories where (deep breath) “everybody can be whatever sexual orientation they want and diversity is great and people are people and social justice and maybe not money and maybe not consumerism”. There’s a deep human need, she adds, “to make things better”, something you notice time and time again once you get beyond the echo chamber of social media and “actually engage with humans” who have different views to your own.
on writing
Again, there’s that practical view of the world, but then North isn’t a stay-at-home writer. She also works in the theatre and at live venues as a lighting designer. Sometimes, these two professions collide in curious ways, notably when she’s doing promotional work. “Every time I turn up, the technician in my soul is like, ‘You have invited me here, I must work 12 hours a day, very hard, without a break in order to justify my existence,’” she says. “They’re like, ‘No, have some food, sit down, talk for an hour about yourself.’ I’m like, ‘This is surreal, you guys are okay with this, you don’t want me to put out chairs or anything?’ It’s incredible and weird and seductive, and freaks the technician in my soul out a bit, but the writer is having a great time.”
And has been for some years considering she previously published under the names Catherine Webb as a children’s author and, writing urban fantasy, Kate Griffin, and her career now encompasses 20 novels. It’s a bit embarrassing, she says, that she looks so young – “seven” – because people often assume she’s a new writer. This makes her especially happy when it tips into sexism: “Fewer people, I think, go up to young men and go, ‘Well done,’ when what they mean is, ‘Ah, you are a professional doing a job.’” And doing it, we might add, brilliantly.
84K is out now from Orbit.