Keeping it surreal
The parodies written by Adam Roberts – aka the Robertski Brothers, A.R.R.R. Roberts, A3R Roberts (there's just no stopping some people) – have made his publisher (Gollancz) quite a bit of money. They're also quite popular: so far they've sold around a million copies.
But then, with titles like The Soddit, The Sellamillion and The McAtrix Derided, how can you fail? So I (student, washer-upper and newspaper minion) spent a full five minutes trying to think up Serious and Original Questions to ask the Sunday Times Bestselling author, critic, reviewer and academic – then gave up and asked him where he gets his ideas from. Unoriginal Question No. 1 even got a reply; came as a bit of a surprise, that.
“My editor suggests which titles to take on: texts (films, books) that are very successful and in the public eye. I then, as a parodist, work out the angle I want to take, pick the most ‘parodiable' moments, string a story together, sprinkle on jokes, and write the parody. Voilà.” Okay, I feel like I'm warming up nicely.
On to Unoriginal Question No. 2: Why does he think they have become so popular? “Take your pick: because they are comic masterpieces, guaranteed not only to give the reader episodes of prolonged hilarity but to expand their consciousnesses and give meaning to their hollow existences; or because some people will buy anything at all even vaguely associated with Tolkien or Harry Potter; or because the cultural logic of the age in which we live – ‘postmodernism' as it is sometimes called – is inherently parodic, an intertextual collage of pastiche and ironic humour, and these parodies best capture that cultural mode; or because they're quite funny, and quite clever, and make quite a good read – plus they don't cost too much and they have nice pictures in them.” So, what are they like to write and work on? “Fun.
It was only at this point (once I'd reduced the interviewee to monosyllables) that I thought of A Decent Question (the first of many, obviously): How does he view the relationship between parody and the original book or film? “If a parodist hates the original work, then the parody he or she produces will certainly be snide, resentful, snippy, denigrating, sour, belittling and rather unpleasant to read. You need to love a book to parody it well. So, for example, I love Tolkien.
Lord of the Rings is one of my sacred books (no, really). I re-read it every year, and have done since I was 11. I love it enough not to take a blindly put-iton- a-pedestal, don't-blasphemeby- doubting-it-even-a-little attitude towards it. When I write parodies my aim is not to bring Tolkien down, but to provide a different, comic perspective on the issues he addresses rather seriously.” Commercially, parodies have been a huge hit.
They've also been almost totally ignored by the media and critics. What does Roberts make of that? “It gnaws at me. It gnaws like a gnawing thing. A rat, say. Or a mole. Assuming moles gnaw. Which, come to think of it, they don't. They're more burrowing, aren't they, moles. Great big claws, and little tiny mouths. Let's plump for a rat then.
What about the place parodies have within the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) genre? Some bookshops have taken to shelving Tolkien, Pullman and ‘Manga' (bizarrely popular Japanese graphic novels) with modern fiction. Where should parody go? “The first rule of parodies is: make it funny. So they should be shelved with comedy. Of course, a good parody will also have a plot, characters, an SFF premise – but the humour is the first thing.
But how does anyone choose a target for parody? Surely, if it's too obscure people won't understand the jokes. Oh, and is he working on anything new? “We look for what is at the eye of the popular-cultural hurricane – books and films that people are passionate about, that they care about. The next parody in the pipeline is Star Warped, out in May. I hope I don't need to tell you which texts they are parodying. Who thinks up the titles? The author, in consultation with his or her editor.
For the Star Wars parody my editor and I spent a whole lunch doing nothing more than going ‘ummm … how about Sitar Wars? Could be an Indian Music theme? Or what about Star Whores? Prostitution in outer space?' Really, a whole hour of that. And in the end the best we could come up with was ‘Star Warped'. Makes you fret, doesn't it?” Not only is Roberts an author, he is also a reviewer, critic and academic – a Reader of English at Royal Holloway, London University.
He's been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and is the author of academic works on science fiction and 19th-century poetry. And no, I don't know how that works either. I did ask him though. Well, I asked him how comfortably teaching classic texts sits with parodying them. ”Very comfortably, thank you. Oh, alright, if you insist … maybe just one more cushion. The little brown one, not the big paisley one. Thanks.
With a glimmer of understanding as to how it might all work, I decided to finish with my Last and Greatest Question. The One to Remember Me By. Do his own parodies make him laugh? “Like ‘Fight Club', comedy has a first rule. Unlike Fight Club it has lots of other rules as well. But the first rule is: ‘Never laugh at your own jokes'. That's the first rule of comedy, obviously. Not the first rule of Fight Club. But you already knew that. Anyway, the point is sometimes I do break that rule.
It depends on how much coffee I've had, and how funny the gag I've just written is. It's embarrassing: in The Soddit I wrote this one bit, just two short sentences: ‘Night fell. It was a fell night.' Well, the more I looked at that, the funnier it seemed to me, until I was laughing, laughing, laughing, and my wife had to throw a tarpaulin over me to stop me frightening the children. That was a grim day, all in all.”
24th Feb 2005