#Extract
Picture yourself in front
of a mirror. The mirror is misted from steam from a bath. Most of your bulbs have blown, so the bathroom is gloomy. You've a dull headache caused by arcs of white light bursting before your eyes, the rate of about 2 a second. Different in each eye. To cope with the interference your brain tries to compensate, by producing random polychromatic flecks of light to fill the gaps. Consequently, all you see of your reflection is a dim flickering outline, like the image given by an untuned TV. Welcome to my vision of the world through kaleidoscope eyes.White
So Redmond, it's a thriller.
It's set in a community of rather unlovable city workers and bankers and their partners in Hampstead. I won't give the plot away, but it's based on a scam which is being carried out against them, and it's got its fair share of violence and mayhem. And its hero, has RP, or Retinitis Pigmentosa. Why did you write it? 'Cos he didn't have to be visually impaired, not for the purposes of the plot at all did he?Zsell
He certainly didn't.
but I don't think long descriptions of Hampstead Heath at sunrise are going to be my forte, since it would all be a bit of a blur. So I had to choose what I could write about. And I got rather fed up with reading the identikit portrayal of blind people in fiction, either as stricken victims or as sonically super powered. And I thought, no longer being able to read, that it was probably time to set the record straight and have a plausible blind protagonist.White
Right. But it's tricky
to embed messages isn't it, trying to do them really kind of covertly so nobody'll know they're a message. And in some ways you don't do that 'cos that bit we read is right at the beginning of the book. But there's a danger isn't there that it can get a bit clunky in places?Zsell
There's a danger that you can
load it on in trowelfuls, and certainly my second and third edits, we did oust an awful lot of that. I don't want people to think that