THE LIST
Scotland's Toni Davidson speaks at the Edinburgh Book Festival 2012 ‘I wrote in huts, by the beach, in hotel lobbies, in train stations’Scotland's Toni Davidson speaks at the Edinburgh Book Festival 2012 ‘I wrote in huts, by the beach, in hotel lobbies, in train stations’Scotland's Toni Davidson speaks at the Edinburgh Book Festival 2012 ‘I wrote in huts, by the beach, in hotel lobbies, in train stations’ Scotland’s Toni Davidson is a self-confessed ‘slow writer’. In 1999, his debut Scar Culture was acclaimed for its innovative and unflinching portrayal of child abuse. And though there was the short story collection The Gradual Gathering of Lust in 2007, his fans have had to wait 13 years for a second novel – My Gun Was as Tall as Me -- which will be released a week after the author’s upcoming festival appearance.
Davidson was born in Ayr but happened upon the idea for My Gun Was as Tall as Me while living in Vietnam. ‘I knew I wanted to write a book about being in two places at once,’ he says. ‘Having come from Scotland to Vietnam, the contrast was very strong and very vivid. I also wanted to go to Burma but I didn’t know much about the country apart from it being quite inaccessible in some ways. And then I discovered more about its politics and as I got into that, the research just took me off in the direction of much of where the novel now is.’
Davidson’s research has been so meticulous, parts of the novel read almost like first-hand accounts from both NGO workers and victims of ethnic violence. The story follows Tuvol, a disillusioned European who, after a botched suicide attempt, travels to South East Asia with the NGO worker who rescued him. There, he meets young twins Lynch and Leer, whose village has been annihilated in an army attack led by a child soldier recruited from the very same village, and with whom they played in childhood.
Ultimately, Tuvol makes a decision that raises solemn ethical implications for conflict management and the protection of children who have been internally displaced. But the solution he chooses isn’t one that the author necessarily advocates. Instead, Davidson says it’s, ‘exactly the kind of moral dilemma and moral decision that I’d leave up to the reader’.
Essentially, the novel is a fictional story that’s suffused with the authenticity of non-fiction. But it’s based entirely on reports and video accounts from NGOs working with internally displaced persons, rather than any first-hand research conducted by Davidson. ‘This was a bit of a dilemma,’ he admits. ‘I spent some time in Thailand, close to Burma, but I made a decision not to go there. At that time, the NLD, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, was asking tourists not to go because they believed, very credibly, that tourist money was going straight to the government, which was then oppressing people. I felt it was a bit disingenuous for me to be interested in Burma and writing about it and then going on some tourist junket there. So, I thought, let research and imagination do the job, and that’s what I did.’
My Gun Was as Tall as Me will be published by Glasgow-based Freight Books, a young publisher whose attitude and dedication Davidson commends. But although both his novels have focused on distressing subjects to date, he promises that his next book, on which he’s currently working, will be a less traumatic read. ‘It’s more like a mystery novel set in the Alps with no killing and no violence,’ he laughs. ‘I want to explore a different side of the human condition; perhaps something lighter, but definitely something different.’
Brian Donaldson (edited for space)
The Sunday Herald
Running hot and cold Toni Davidson was inspired by contrasting climates to write his latest novel, which returns to the theme of child exploitation explored in his sensational debut By Alastair Mabbott
Saturday 1 September 2012 'I just find it very difficult to avert my eyes from things that disturb me," admits Toni Davidson over coffee in Glasgow's Oran Mor.
The 47-year-old Ayrshire-born author created a sensation with his first novel, Scar Culture, about survivors of child abuse who are exploited all over again by an ethically questionable psychotherapist. Since its publication in 1999, Scar Culture has frequently been cited as one of the best Scottish novels of recent years.
Davidson's narrative follows two escapees from a destroyed village, mute twins Lynch and Leer, who are thought by their fellow villagers to have mystical powers. Entwined with their story is that of Tuvol (again, his nationality is left unclear), whose father is revered for starting a chain of orphanages but has little time for his own son. An aimless and lonely rich boy, Tuvol decides to freeze to death on a mountainside. Fittingly, this grand gesture of Western angst is averted by someone who knows what real suffering is: Dominique, an aid worker on holiday in the mountains. Tuvol decides to find himself by volunteering for service in Dominique's displaced person's camp.
"I think the trigger was moving to Asia, Vietnam in particular," says the softly-spoken Davidson of the novel's genesis, confessing that the final result wasn't what he originally planned. "I knew I wanted to write a book about being in an Asian or tropical setting, and I also wanted a cold setting – not necessarily Scotland but just back in the West, in the cold. I was waiting to go to Burma for a holiday, and I looked into it and thought, 'This doesn't sound good', and from then on I starting researching around Burma and the story of Johnny and Luther, two boys in the Karen tribe in Northern Burma who were said to have magic powers. At the beginning, I looked into Congo and the Lord's Resistance Army, things like that, but as the novel developed some of the other characters became more prominent so the child soldier thing became less of a theme and more of a background. Although Lynch and Leer are in a conflict zone, they're much more of the victims rather than the cajoled perpetrators."
"At the beginning I'm just working a little," he says. "At the end I'm totally immersed. I love the immersion of a book. You are cognisant of everything that's going on, you know what's happening with each character. Because I don't see it as a plot that I have to make sure everything's working with, I just have to make sure I know all these characters well enough to make it true. To make their voices true is to make the story true. If they're right, everything else will fall into place. Which is slightly naive, probably, from an editor's point of view, because they sometimes want things to be a little tighter than that. So I kind of give them a messy manuscript that has to be tidied up a bit – but that's people, that's characters, in the way that I write."
The next Davidson book to be published was The Gradual Gathering Of Lust & Other Tales (2007), a book of short stories exploring the complexities of sexuality, and it seems to have been exactly what he needed.
"I loved the stories because they gave me a chance to explore things of myself – ideas, as well as my own mixed-up autobiography. I just felt really free with the short stories. I loved the freedom they gave me. After the rigours of a novel it felt refreshing to just concentrate on one story for a few weeks, finish the first draft and move on to the next. One of the stories was made into a little play in Saigon, and I took a lot of pride in that."
Well aware that he could be pigeonholed as an author who only dwells on the gloomy things in life, Davidson says his next book, a mystery set in the Alps, will avoid the unsettling themes for which he's become known.
"The next thing I write, I'm avoiding thematically any type of horror at all. I'm not saying I'm going to write a happy book, but I think I'm looking forward to moving on to something different again. I feel that I've explored quite a lot of the dark side of things. Having said that, who knows? Because I do find that what I intend to start out writing about doesn't necessarily happen at the end. And I think that's one of the joys of writing these books: the way that it surprises me."
(Alastair Mabbot. Edited for space)
The Scotsman
IT’S GOOD to have Toni Davidson back. He was one of a group of young Scottish authors who emerged around the same time as Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner but never fulfilled their potential.
Davidson has been quiet for far too long, and this second novel comes a full 13 years after his coruscating debut, Scar Culture, an examination of child abuse and psychotherapy that announced the writer’s talent in startling fashion.
Initially, My Gun Was As Tall As Me seems like the product of a different writer, and it is certainly a more mature and considered piece, working on a bigger physical and emotional landscape into the bargain. But then similarities to Davidson’s debut emerge – the horrific subject matter, the meticulous research, the questions of morality in a complex world.
Davidson’s concerns here are twofold. On the one hand the book is about atrocities in Burma and other troubled nations across the globe, specifically the problem of the recruitment and brainwashing of child soldiers. But perhaps even more interesting is the subject of NGO workers trying to help in such circumstances, and the morally compromising situations they often find themselves in.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions in this story or as Dominique, a seasoned NGO worker, was told by her father, another veteran NGO employee: “Good intentions surrender to the horror that inevitably unfolds. What is left is commitment.”
The narrative jumps around a cast of disparate characters, but there are two main focal points. Tuvol is the naïve and spoilt son of a great European humanitarian who travels with Dominique to experience the frontline of humanitarian aid for himself. Meanwhile, Lynch and Leer are 11-year-old mute twin boys living in a jungle village in Burma constantly under threat from corrupt armed forces.
Without giving too much away, events in the jungle mean the villagers have to leave their homes and go on the run. The trauma of this is viscerally portrayed, and Davidson does a great job of describing the chaos and panic that is an everyday occurrence for millions of such people. In NGO jargon they are IDPs, or Internally Displaced People, but Davidson digs under the jargon to the characters underneath.
As he also does with his cast of NGO workers. If the scenes with the Burmese villagers are by necessity more immediate and gripping, the action focussing on Tuvol and Dominique provides the novel’s intellectual meat. How is it possible to function amid such atrocities? How involved should you get with the plight of IDPs? How can you stave off cynicism and breakdown in the face of corruption, violence and cruelty?
Thankfully, like any writer worth their salt, Davidson doesn’t try to answer these questions, merely throwing them out there and exposing the complexity of the situation for the reader to witness.
In the hands of a lesser writer this subject matter could easily have been turned into a tub-thumping moral crusade of a book, but it’s to Davidson’s credit that he treats it with depth, vision and compassion.
Doug Johnstone
The Scottish Review of Books
Edinburgh International Book Festival: Toni Davidson and Madeleine Thien 'South East Asian Concerns' (12/08/12 Aug 14 Posted by Theresa Muñoz in Theresa Muñoz ‘I was the sweaty foreigner’ says Scottish author Toni Davidson about his time spent in South East Asia. Against a bright red wall framed by two glowing ornamental trees, Davidson and Canadian author Madeleine Thien discussed their extensive research and time spent in the countries of Burma and Cambodia. With his contemplative face framed by longish locks, Davidson read from My Gun Was As Tall As Me, his sad but electrifying novel about Burma’s kid soldiers. Thien, hailing from Vancouver and now living in Montreal, promoted her Granta publication Dogs at the Perimeter, an elegant novel about a family torn apart by the Khmer Rouge army. Dressed in light purple, Thien read gently and smoothly from the thrilling opening passages. The two authors, chaired by crime novelist Peter Guttridge, shared an intimate and amenable conversation and somehow never disagreed with the other. Almost in unison, they contended that research into violent topics could be overwhelming, they often felt a sense of dislocation in their visiting countries, and what they aimed to do most in their fact-based novels was to tell the truth. After describing her visits to the Tuol Sleng prison in Cambodia, also known as S-21, Thien said firmly, ‘Telling the truth is very important to me’. A serious evening spent discussing issues that may be far away in location, but universal to the human heart."
Scotland's Toni Davidson speaks at the Edinburgh Book Festival 2012 ‘I wrote in huts, by the beach, in hotel lobbies, in train stations’Scotland's Toni Davidson speaks at the Edinburgh Book Festival 2012 ‘I wrote in huts, by the beach, in hotel lobbies, in train stations’Scotland's Toni Davidson speaks at the Edinburgh Book Festival 2012 ‘I wrote in huts, by the beach, in hotel lobbies, in train stations’ Scotland’s Toni Davidson is a self-confessed ‘slow writer’. In 1999, his debut Scar Culture was acclaimed for its innovative and unflinching portrayal of child abuse. And though there was the short story collection The Gradual Gathering of Lust in 2007, his fans have had to wait 13 years for a second novel – My Gun Was as Tall as Me -- which will be released a week after the author’s upcoming festival appearance.
Davidson was born in Ayr but happened upon the idea for My Gun Was as Tall as Me while living in Vietnam. ‘I knew I wanted to write a book about being in two places at once,’ he says. ‘Having come from Scotland to Vietnam, the contrast was very strong and very vivid. I also wanted to go to Burma but I didn’t know much about the country apart from it being quite inaccessible in some ways. And then I discovered more about its politics and as I got into that, the research just took me off in the direction of much of where the novel now is.’
Davidson’s research has been so meticulous, parts of the novel read almost like first-hand accounts from both NGO workers and victims of ethnic violence. The story follows Tuvol, a disillusioned European who, after a botched suicide attempt, travels to South East Asia with the NGO worker who rescued him. There, he meets young twins Lynch and Leer, whose village has been annihilated in an army attack led by a child soldier recruited from the very same village, and with whom they played in childhood.
Ultimately, Tuvol makes a decision that raises solemn ethical implications for conflict management and the protection of children who have been internally displaced. But the solution he chooses isn’t one that the author necessarily advocates. Instead, Davidson says it’s, ‘exactly the kind of moral dilemma and moral decision that I’d leave up to the reader’.
Essentially, the novel is a fictional story that’s suffused with the authenticity of non-fiction. But it’s based entirely on reports and video accounts from NGOs working with internally displaced persons, rather than any first-hand research conducted by Davidson. ‘This was a bit of a dilemma,’ he admits. ‘I spent some time in Thailand, close to Burma, but I made a decision not to go there. At that time, the NLD, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, was asking tourists not to go because they believed, very credibly, that tourist money was going straight to the government, which was then oppressing people. I felt it was a bit disingenuous for me to be interested in Burma and writing about it and then going on some tourist junket there. So, I thought, let research and imagination do the job, and that’s what I did.’
My Gun Was as Tall as Me will be published by Glasgow-based Freight Books, a young publisher whose attitude and dedication Davidson commends. But although both his novels have focused on distressing subjects to date, he promises that his next book, on which he’s currently working, will be a less traumatic read. ‘It’s more like a mystery novel set in the Alps with no killing and no violence,’ he laughs. ‘I want to explore a different side of the human condition; perhaps something lighter, but definitely something different.’
Brian Donaldson (edited for space)
The Sunday Herald
Running hot and cold Toni Davidson was inspired by contrasting climates to write his latest novel, which returns to the theme of child exploitation explored in his sensational debut By Alastair Mabbott
Saturday 1 September 2012 'I just find it very difficult to avert my eyes from things that disturb me," admits Toni Davidson over coffee in Glasgow's Oran Mor.
The 47-year-old Ayrshire-born author created a sensation with his first novel, Scar Culture, about survivors of child abuse who are exploited all over again by an ethically questionable psychotherapist. Since its publication in 1999, Scar Culture has frequently been cited as one of the best Scottish novels of recent years.
Davidson's narrative follows two escapees from a destroyed village, mute twins Lynch and Leer, who are thought by their fellow villagers to have mystical powers. Entwined with their story is that of Tuvol (again, his nationality is left unclear), whose father is revered for starting a chain of orphanages but has little time for his own son. An aimless and lonely rich boy, Tuvol decides to freeze to death on a mountainside. Fittingly, this grand gesture of Western angst is averted by someone who knows what real suffering is: Dominique, an aid worker on holiday in the mountains. Tuvol decides to find himself by volunteering for service in Dominique's displaced person's camp.
"I think the trigger was moving to Asia, Vietnam in particular," says the softly-spoken Davidson of the novel's genesis, confessing that the final result wasn't what he originally planned. "I knew I wanted to write a book about being in an Asian or tropical setting, and I also wanted a cold setting – not necessarily Scotland but just back in the West, in the cold. I was waiting to go to Burma for a holiday, and I looked into it and thought, 'This doesn't sound good', and from then on I starting researching around Burma and the story of Johnny and Luther, two boys in the Karen tribe in Northern Burma who were said to have magic powers. At the beginning, I looked into Congo and the Lord's Resistance Army, things like that, but as the novel developed some of the other characters became more prominent so the child soldier thing became less of a theme and more of a background. Although Lynch and Leer are in a conflict zone, they're much more of the victims rather than the cajoled perpetrators."
"At the beginning I'm just working a little," he says. "At the end I'm totally immersed. I love the immersion of a book. You are cognisant of everything that's going on, you know what's happening with each character. Because I don't see it as a plot that I have to make sure everything's working with, I just have to make sure I know all these characters well enough to make it true. To make their voices true is to make the story true. If they're right, everything else will fall into place. Which is slightly naive, probably, from an editor's point of view, because they sometimes want things to be a little tighter than that. So I kind of give them a messy manuscript that has to be tidied up a bit – but that's people, that's characters, in the way that I write."
The next Davidson book to be published was The Gradual Gathering Of Lust & Other Tales (2007), a book of short stories exploring the complexities of sexuality, and it seems to have been exactly what he needed.
"I loved the stories because they gave me a chance to explore things of myself – ideas, as well as my own mixed-up autobiography. I just felt really free with the short stories. I loved the freedom they gave me. After the rigours of a novel it felt refreshing to just concentrate on one story for a few weeks, finish the first draft and move on to the next. One of the stories was made into a little play in Saigon, and I took a lot of pride in that."
Well aware that he could be pigeonholed as an author who only dwells on the gloomy things in life, Davidson says his next book, a mystery set in the Alps, will avoid the unsettling themes for which he's become known.
"The next thing I write, I'm avoiding thematically any type of horror at all. I'm not saying I'm going to write a happy book, but I think I'm looking forward to moving on to something different again. I feel that I've explored quite a lot of the dark side of things. Having said that, who knows? Because I do find that what I intend to start out writing about doesn't necessarily happen at the end. And I think that's one of the joys of writing these books: the way that it surprises me."
(Alastair Mabbot. Edited for space)
The Scotsman
IT’S GOOD to have Toni Davidson back. He was one of a group of young Scottish authors who emerged around the same time as Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner but never fulfilled their potential.
Davidson has been quiet for far too long, and this second novel comes a full 13 years after his coruscating debut, Scar Culture, an examination of child abuse and psychotherapy that announced the writer’s talent in startling fashion.
Initially, My Gun Was As Tall As Me seems like the product of a different writer, and it is certainly a more mature and considered piece, working on a bigger physical and emotional landscape into the bargain. But then similarities to Davidson’s debut emerge – the horrific subject matter, the meticulous research, the questions of morality in a complex world.
Davidson’s concerns here are twofold. On the one hand the book is about atrocities in Burma and other troubled nations across the globe, specifically the problem of the recruitment and brainwashing of child soldiers. But perhaps even more interesting is the subject of NGO workers trying to help in such circumstances, and the morally compromising situations they often find themselves in.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions in this story or as Dominique, a seasoned NGO worker, was told by her father, another veteran NGO employee: “Good intentions surrender to the horror that inevitably unfolds. What is left is commitment.”
The narrative jumps around a cast of disparate characters, but there are two main focal points. Tuvol is the naïve and spoilt son of a great European humanitarian who travels with Dominique to experience the frontline of humanitarian aid for himself. Meanwhile, Lynch and Leer are 11-year-old mute twin boys living in a jungle village in Burma constantly under threat from corrupt armed forces.
Without giving too much away, events in the jungle mean the villagers have to leave their homes and go on the run. The trauma of this is viscerally portrayed, and Davidson does a great job of describing the chaos and panic that is an everyday occurrence for millions of such people. In NGO jargon they are IDPs, or Internally Displaced People, but Davidson digs under the jargon to the characters underneath.
As he also does with his cast of NGO workers. If the scenes with the Burmese villagers are by necessity more immediate and gripping, the action focussing on Tuvol and Dominique provides the novel’s intellectual meat. How is it possible to function amid such atrocities? How involved should you get with the plight of IDPs? How can you stave off cynicism and breakdown in the face of corruption, violence and cruelty?
Thankfully, like any writer worth their salt, Davidson doesn’t try to answer these questions, merely throwing them out there and exposing the complexity of the situation for the reader to witness.
In the hands of a lesser writer this subject matter could easily have been turned into a tub-thumping moral crusade of a book, but it’s to Davidson’s credit that he treats it with depth, vision and compassion.
Doug Johnstone
The Scottish Review of Books
Edinburgh International Book Festival: Toni Davidson and Madeleine Thien 'South East Asian Concerns' (12/08/12 Aug 14 Posted by Theresa Muñoz in Theresa Muñoz ‘I was the sweaty foreigner’ says Scottish author Toni Davidson about his time spent in South East Asia. Against a bright red wall framed by two glowing ornamental trees, Davidson and Canadian author Madeleine Thien discussed their extensive research and time spent in the countries of Burma and Cambodia. With his contemplative face framed by longish locks, Davidson read from My Gun Was As Tall As Me, his sad but electrifying novel about Burma’s kid soldiers. Thien, hailing from Vancouver and now living in Montreal, promoted her Granta publication Dogs at the Perimeter, an elegant novel about a family torn apart by the Khmer Rouge army. Dressed in light purple, Thien read gently and smoothly from the thrilling opening passages. The two authors, chaired by crime novelist Peter Guttridge, shared an intimate and amenable conversation and somehow never disagreed with the other. Almost in unison, they contended that research into violent topics could be overwhelming, they often felt a sense of dislocation in their visiting countries, and what they aimed to do most in their fact-based novels was to tell the truth. After describing her visits to the Tuol Sleng prison in Cambodia, also known as S-21, Thien said firmly, ‘Telling the truth is very important to me’. A serious evening spent discussing issues that may be far away in location, but universal to the human heart."
I filled several notebooks of scribbled notes, information about the sub-tropical forest environment, sudden ideas and overheard gems.