Interview: Jari Moate

Bristol writer and founder of Bristol Festival of Literature, Jari Moate, has been an insurance salesman, folk musician, soldier in Finland and, in his own words, “always a writer”. Ahead of the publication of his new novel, Dragonfly, he spoke to Joe Melia about the book and his writing.

Why do you write?

To be rich and famous and live on a yacht. Yeah, right. The real answer is “I have to”. Blessing or curse, the necessity of writing I think comes from this:

I have a passion for the meaningfulness of life – of all our lives. The world itself has meaning. But most ways of saying this just add to the problem in even knowing that meaning, so a pressure builds. And ideas still have to see daylight. Fiction has always given me a way to play with getting there – with unlimited budgets of imagination to spend on scenes, actors, special effects and move them around. I can take my time and use settings, emotions, a cast of players and their voices like a musical chord, in several notes played at once – it’s a rich way to speak and make something that didn’t exist before. When it’s going well and the words are unfolding, this poor-man’s version of sense then suddenly feels like freedom.

It is somewhat Romantic in the Coleridge-Wordsworth sense, where the imagination carries power, like an act of faith. I can’t change much, but in fiction I can at least signify the possibility of it. It’s why I use poetic language in Dragonfly. When I was younger I’d say that if one reader changed things for the better, my job would be done. Now, I love the questions we ask, in the blazing noonday or the dead of night, about who, what, how, and life’s big “why?”. If I create a space where the reader can play with imagery, and view the world and themselves with fresh eyes, then I’ve done ok. In Dragonfly, a character states that his mortal enemies are: Ignorance, Repetitiousness, and Gravity. I write because it defeats meaningless gravity and lets us fly.

Bristol writer Jari Moate’s latest thought-provoking thriller, Dragonfly is out now

What impact did your time in the Finnish military have on you?

Indelible, but no heroics. I was a Grenadier in the Newland Jaeger Battalion when Russia, ‘the bear next door’, was again in turmoil. We patrolled border areas where my grandfather’s generation halted Stalin, with me lugging the platoon radio which had also been his job and bizarrely, under my winter camouflage, wearing boxers made in 1944! It taught me the strangeness of military camaraderie, of pain and effort, the sound of guns and to ask: What would you do? I wrote bad poetry and kept a copy of War & Peace in my locker under my helmet! And got in trouble a lot.

Is the protagonist, Marine ‘P’ based on anyone in particular?

Well… if I told you, I’d have to… Only kidding. Like all the characters in Dragonfly, Marine P became his own person – I think that’s called character development! – but his inspiration came from the homeless ex-soldiers I wrote with in Bristol, an ex-army uncle whose banter is priceless, the real Andy McNab, and ‘Marine A’ who was tried in court a few years ago for a crime in Helmand, inspiring plot points, reactions, and the anonymising of Marine P, who’s clearly hiding something. Frankly, I don’t want to meet Marine P down a dark alley. Unless he’s leading me out, in which case I’d follow him to the ends of the Earth.

Dragonfly is being promoted as ‘overlaid with British Gothic and the New Weird’. What does ‘New Weird’ mean to you?

Ha! My fellow Tangent author Mike Manson called it that – so I took it. It feels like a coat I’ve been wearing suddenly has pockets where I need them. New Weird examples are China Mieville’s City And The City, dramatized on TV this year, or David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. Some describe it as alt-reality or even horror-related, eschewing happy or moral endings, but Mieville, for one, has more purpose than that. For me it’s about the freedom to express ideas. So if I say that a derelict building looks alive, then hey, I want you to tingle with the thought that I really mean it, those bricks have swallowed you, or if parrots fly out of the ground, follow them, because trust me, this is done for a purpose in the story where you, and I, have joined forces.

Dragonfly at times seems to hover close to a kind of dystopian vision of where we are now. Do you think writers can play a significant role in shaping how we live?

Dragonfly tries, I hope, to reflect on the world. There is suffering both out there and within us, and a lot of beauty. A friend once said that to describe a bird hugging its chicks is one thing, but to see that bird now clinging to a cliff, and how that cliff is in a storm, is greater. The dystopian bit simply starts with the storm.

Some say that writers no longer have the shaping role they once did, except under regimes that jail them or issue fatwas. But this is not true on screens. A recent BBC drama broke audience records and yet opinions fell heavily on the side of “it wasn’t good enough”. It wasn’t the implausible ending that dissatisfied so many people – it was the fact that after all the bluster and addictive structuring, it had nothing to say. It felt like an Act of Twitter, not a twisting of the world. So the role of writers to shape how we live is alive and kicking. It is notable when it is absent.

What influence has Bristol had on your writing?

Loads! The derelict chocolate factory in Dragonfly is based on the one I walked through by torchlight in Greenbank, and the coloured terrace houses and tower blocks feature. But above all it’s the people. There’s a radical edge to so many here that allows for diverse thinking and supportiveness, and a lit fest. I just don’t think I’d be the writer I am, without this city.

Jari Moate’s latest novel, Dragonfly, is published by Tangent Books. For more information, visit www.tangentbooks.co.uk/pre-order-dragonfly.html 

The book will be launched at Waterstones, Bristol Galleries on October 20 at 7.30pm as part of Bristol Festival of Literature, when Jari will be in conversation with author Christopher Wakling. For more information, visit www.eventbrite.com/e/dragonfly-book-launch-with-tangent-books-tickets-48404826138

Read more: Interview with Mike Manson

Main photo credit: Paul Bullivant