M.R. CAREY
The novelist and scriptwriter tells us why SFF isn’t escapism
That’s Mister Carey to the likes of you! Mister MR Carey, in fact. Show some damn respect.
one of the ideas that people have about genre fiction is that it’s essentially about escapism. Not true, according to MR Carey. “Ursula Le Guin said it best,” he says, “people who don’t read science fiction think that science fiction stories are excursions and they’re not, they’re incursions, they’re digging into the real world.” This is a statement you could also apply to Carey’s latest, Someone Like Me, a novel that plays games with readers’ expectations as it finds new ways to tackle that hoary old psychological thriller plot of someone with multiple personalities – dissociative identity disorder in current parlance.
“It’s a genre staple and I think it’s been handled badly far more often than it’s been handled well,” says Carey. “There’s a lot of cod psychology that goes into these stories, bearing in mind there’s huge disagreement within the psychiatric profession as to whether dissociative identity disorder even exists, or if it’s just a misnomer for some other condition, or something iatrogenic, something that’s been created by the relationship between the patient and the therapist.”
It’s an idea Carey explores through the eyes of Liz, “a woman who seems to be having some kind of psychotic break with extreme personality shifts, which she experiences as something else taking her over and acting through her”. Deepening the theme of mental illness, and the way that treatment and condition interact in ways that are culturally as well as scientifically determined, another character is also key to the story. Fran is a teenager suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after being kidnapped and “really too young to process what was happening”, but now wants to know what really happened.
urban decay
As for the book’s setting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this also plays in here. Not only is the USA the place where most diagnoses of dissociative identity disorder are made, but it’s located in the country’s so-called Rust Belt, an area that’s long been suffering the effects of deindustrialisation – social breakdown, drug abuse, depopulation. “I wanted to set the story in a blasted urban environment and some of the inner city areas of Pittsburgh are among the most deprived neighbourhoods in America, and possibly in the developed world,” says Carey.
The 2008 global crisis only made things worse for the poorest, so that city dwellers of whatever class are more than ever aware of the invisible borders that separate well-to-do neighbourhoods from those where you think twice about exploring even in the daytime. “My wife works in an archive and she’s shown me [a map of London] designed for the use of out-of-towners to stop them getting into serious trouble, so it was a map of affluent areas versus thieves’ nests and rookeries, places where you shouldn’t go,” he says. “What was striking was that all the safe and affluent areas were along main thoroughfares, so you would only have to step away for a couple of blocks, take the wrong turning into an alley, and suddenly you’re in a very different world. And it sort of feels like that’s happening again, that in a sense our urban geography is going back in time.”
fantasy narrative
No wonder, perhaps, that we all look for ways to explain what’s happening. As we discuss the way that regression therapies may actually make people remember things that didn’t happen, Carey moves on to the idea of how narratives impact on our lives. “I tend to think narratives aren’t just the most important determinant of our reality, narratives are our reality,” he says. “We think we live in the real world, that is very seldom the case. You can visit the real world for short periods of time, if you take special equipment, most of the time we live in stories that we tell ourselves, the Brexit narrative, for example, Trump’s Make America Great Again.
“The great thing about those narratives is once you get people invested in them, they have a massive inertia. All of these things coming out about Trump’s past, all of his own appalling behaviour, do nothing to shift those who have bought into his narrative, there’s too much of their own social identity now locked into the narrative.”
Not that a novelist is ever likely to shift public opinion to that great an extent, but Carey’s growing success – and he’s now in demand as a screenwriter in the wake of adapting his own novel The Girl With All The Gifts for cinema, while he also continues his work in comics with Barbarella and The Highest House – means his take on reality, his incursions, now have a wider audience than ever.
Carey remembers going to see David Simon, creator of The Wire who also wrote Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets, give a talk at the BFI. “Someone asked him what was the difference between writing The Wire and writing as a journalist for the Baltimore Sun, where he used to be on staff,” remembers Carey. “And he said, ‘Oh it’s so much easier to tell the truth when you’re writing TV drama than it is as a journalist.’ And there’s something profound about that. I think genre fiction allows you to get under the skin of the real world in some really, really useful ways.”